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amorosebeing · 2 years

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Headcanons about Bug Fables Teams

Some of these are borrowed from other people, most are original.

Some of these are related to my crossover AU idea with Hollow Knight, but I’ll try to keep those to a minimum.

There are spoilers below!

Team Slacker (Stratos and Delilah)

Their main role is investigating rumors of monsters and ruins out in the wilderness. Sometimes they get sent out to find ‘giant supplies’ like a tire for rubber, old tools for metal, etc. kinda like oil prospectors. This job is typically seen as highly dangerous due to the issues of long-distance travel, lesser bugs, bandits, etc. and thus is paid extremely well. Team Slacker, however, is so strong that they just do not have to worry about any of that.

Stratos has been divorced at least once, possibly even twice or thrice. He has kids and Delilah is their adopted wine aunt.

Team Celia (Celia and Levi)

They’re the ‘detective’ team, responsible for investigating criminals and handling some of the more court-related paperwork that the association has to handle.

Levi is trying his absolute best to be a hero, both for the sake of it and also to make ladybugs more accepted.

They have a friendly rivalry with Team Slacker. They banter and lightly glare at each other sometimes. This is at least in-part because Team Celia works so hard to professionally investigate things and take notes and then they just see Team Slacker chasing rumors and constantly slacking off.

Celia came from the same colony as Tiso from Hollow Knight.

Team Bookwork (Reeves and the Reading Ant)

If you aren’t familar, it has been officially confirmed that these two formed an explorer team specifically so that they could get access to the Ant Kingdom library.

I think they sneak into explorer meetings for free food. Most of the association straight up forgets that they exist.

Team Maki

They are the de facto leaders of the association. By ‘they’ I mean mostly Maki and also Kina when Maki is away and she yells at the other teams for being dumb idiots.

Many assume that Yin, for whatever reason, is an adult in-body due to her size. This is actually a popular misconception, she is going to get so much larger, and stronger. She’s gonna have like 3 defense.

Team Ant (Gen on the left and Eri on the right)

They do tons of community service and less dangerous missions. Basically everyone in the Ant Kingdom recongizes them as those friendly ladies that found their lost pet or whatever.

Elizant II secretly worries about the association becoming too powerful and distant from both her and the common citizens. Team Ant, being a less imposing team that works alongside everyday bugs a ton, are meant to prevent that.

Maki is aware that they lead his fanclub, he’s not really sure what to do with that information.

Team Snakemouth

Yes, Chompy does count as a member. Leif tried to get Maki to include her on the paperwork.

Vi loves the Termacade. Leif supports her but teases her about it, and Kabbu also encourages her but he’s kinda of a himbo and is very confused by the technology.

Kabbu is incredibly gay, by both definitions. I think we can all agree on this.

Leif is responsible for cooking and paperwork, Vi for managing their berries and schedule, and Kabbu for cleaning and gardening.

Team Mothiva

OH boy I actually have so many headcanons, but most of them relate to the aforementioned AU. Anyways here are some:

Zasp makes dinners and lunches. Mothiva makes teas and desserts. Breakfasts are made together. Zasp is actually a really good cook.

Zasp has no idea that wasps are meant to be carnivores, absolute himbo. She doesn’t know either, if you’re wondering.

Emo rock is their favorite genre of music, pop is a close second.

The developers confirmed that Zasp was planned to have lightning magic, but that was scrapped. I like the idea that he REALLY wishes he had it and if you give him a taser his reaction is somewhere between ‘little kid who just got candy’ and ‘manically laughing cartoon villain.’

All of the explorer moths are some level of cryptid. Yin is biologically, but not in terms of vibes. Leif has always acted like a weirdo even before going into Snakemouth Den. Mothiva was just actually a cryptid at one point. Like there’s just some town outside of Bugaria where the locals will mention some weird moth that people kept having sightings of.

She has an incredibly strange patchwork of knowledge. Before she met Zasp, she did not know how to do taxes, but did know stonecarving and how to bury a body.

He’s trans I’ve decided.

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secret-bug-pain-blog · 3 months

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FEBUWHUMP DAY 3 - BITE DOWN ON THIS

@febuwhump

This is. 4k words long and takes place in a noncanon crossover universe featuring spoilers for a fic we haven't finished yet. Please enjoy.

Of all the bugs in the world to turn up after the world split in two, it had to be those three.

Scarlet had taken notice when the world had warped. It would have been difficult not to notice, by his count - the world had shaken with the warping of something threatening to rip itself apart around his antenna, the taste of ozone and the scent of something he struggled to even describe intermingling as the sky practically split in two around his head. The earth had been so unstable that it threatened to break open under his feet and devour him whole, reality itself breaking around his ears. It was immediately, incredibly OBVIOUS that something was wrong, and the deep-seated sense of unease emanating from nothing was just the cherry on top.

He was fairly certain that it had been incredibly obvious even if you weren't sensitive to the feeling of raw magic practically ripping the earth apart.

It had taken a few hours to venture out to explore without worrying about that splintering, shattering, shell-tearing something coming back. The air itself had tasted different. Charged, almost, with magical energy too immaterial to eat - it had taken barely half an hour to determine that the earth had warped, somehow, things twisted subtly out of alignment by some incomprehensibly great force.

Something about the world had been changed - and though he couldn't risk his normal information gathering strategies, with his face plastered on wanted posters halfway across the kingdom, he hadn't forgotten how to seek out a gathering of other bugs to try and listen.

A collision of worlds. A meeting of two versions of the same queen. An alternate timeline, brought side by side with this one by some great, cosmic warping.

It was just his misfortune that the team who had brought him down seemed to be a universal constant.

Scarlet hid in the back of the crevice, his wings trembling frantically. He could still hear the bee and the beetle arguing, somewhere just outside of his sight. He could faintly sense the moth, just out of sight, staring daggers into the stone wall just in front of him.

If he was a religious man, he'd say that the gods were conspiring against him. Unfortunately, he'd met enough gods to know better, and he knew enough about the habits of gods to know that Bugaria's were either dead or simply not watching. This situation, unfortunate as it was, was purely due to his own rotten luck.

"...he's trapped, isn't he? I mean, we have him backed into a corner. Quite literally."

"We had him backed into a corner last time, too, and he still got away. He can teleport, remember?"

"Well, yes, but..."

If he had any other option in the world, he wouldn't have been there. Unfortunately for Scarlet, he was currently very, very low on options.

Problem one: he was low on life force. When your hunting strategies leaned on a need for people to trust you, any development that warned people of your existence tended to end very, very poorly. The fact that this kingdom seemed to regard drones as lesser, regardless of how useful that often was to his ability to lure bugs off-trail, had proved incredibly counterproductive in this one, as it had turned a good chunk of bugs who might otherwise be potential prey into people who would rather turn him in to the queen for a reward. As such, his hunting had been... lean, and he'd had to lean back on lesser bugs to fill the hole in his diet.

It would have been less of an issue if he didn't need so much of it to teleport. Unfortunately. he hadn't been counting on his pursuers catching on so quickly, as he hadn't really planned for the world ripping in two and drawing a truly ridiculous amount of random bugs out of the shadows to sniff around at what had previously been an extremely unremarkable campsite.

Problem two: the world had been split in two, or merged into one, or somehow both, and the chaotic mishmash of geography currently being split between the different timelines meant that some entrances no longer went where they should have gone. Scarlet had first discovered this about five minutes ago, when he had gone into what was previously a perfectly good exit and discovered that it had, apparently, been completely filled with rocks in the minute-and-a-half since he had last used it, and that his nice exit tunnel into the cave he had been using to store his supplies was now a tunnel that lead to a rock wall.

And that, naturally, lead right into problem three: the only exit to the situation he was currently stuck in was now being blocked by the exact same group of adventurers that had defeated him and spread his face halfway across Bugaria.

"We could try and freeze him," the moth offered. "It wouldn't be hard."

"For how long? Five minutes? the bee scoffed. "We have to hold him until someone can arrive to arrest him, not just distract him for a bit."

"We managed it with Ultimax. We could do it again."

"Ultimax was, like, nine-tenths of the way dead! And it only lasted like an hour anyways."

Scarlet shuffled uncomfortably within the confines of the stone. He hadn't particularly liked the feeling of the moth's ice magic even during the first go-around - the taste of icy desolation still lingered on his tongue, a mass extinction of freezing cold, the discomforting feeling of picking mycelium out of his spiracles - he had no clue how the moth had even begun to survive a cordyceps infection of that scale, but seeing as he was still alive, there must have been some sort of trick to it. He'd had to drag pieces of fungus out of his ganglia, and even if the Ice in the moth's blood kept it dormant, there was only so far you could go with that sort of infestation rooted into you.

Draining other mages was never pleasant, even if their magic was compatible, and Scarlet had never dealt well with cold, much less taking a swig from a cold front so concentrated that he could feel it actively beginning to lower his body temperature - which was very difficult to even keep stable this far north, let alone to recover when the life force in his stomach was actively rebelling against the very idea of being used to keep him from freezing to death.

He didn't produce heat from his body like some of the mutations that the snow line produced. He especially didn't have the life force to spare recreating the effect. Torpor risked a period of dormancy far longer than he could actually afford, and had no guarantee of him waking up after. If the ice managed to drain his life force past his limits-

"Team! Has he gotten loose? Do you still know where he is?"

"Oh, hey Kabbu. No, he's still in the hole I think. Didja find anything?"

"Ah... yes, actually. Team, you already know Team Slacker, but I don't believe anyone's had the opportunity to meet their counterparts yet-"

"Oh shit, are they actually helping for once?" Scarlet heard the bee's wings buzz, masking the sound of heavy footsteps drawing closer. Heshuffled a bit further forward, trying to get a look at the new arrivals - the scarab beetle, he knew, but that second font of life force-

Scarlet caught a glimpse of a very, very big hercules beetle in the split second before the moth's head turned back to him and he retreated back.

Well. That wasn't good. At the very least, by how the bee had spoken of them, they were probably unlikely to cause problems? Maybe? Considering the shattered reality, the kingdom probably had more to worry about than him, but if he was in the way-

"They said that they wanted to help with our... "drone problem", when I mentioned who we were fighting- though, Delilah, are you quite certain that you want to deal with him yourselves?" The beetle asked. "I don't doubt your skills, but we've handled him once before, and he's a slippery enough opponent that-"

"No, we know how to handle this," a new voice drawled. "We've dealt with him before. We've got expertise."

The scarab said something in response, but he barely heard it as anything but indistinct noise, his mind going blank in blind panic. Fuck. Fuck. Of course someone from their world would have dealt with him, of course they'd bring them in, of course...

Scarlet wedged himself further into the back corner of the crevice, his antenna quivering frantically. There was no way out but through the moth still still staring him down, the distinct feeling of ice magic humming just close enough to the surface that he had no doubt there'd be a spell levelled at him if he so much as poked a whisker out of his hiding place. The Bugnish chatter filtered through his ears almost unheard as he searched the innards of the crack for some way out, any way-

"...I suppose I'll trust your experience in such matters," the beetle concluded. "Now, when you said-"

"Watch the hole to make sure he doesn't get out, and pin him if he does. Try not to deal too much damage to him. We want him alive, not dead. Less reason he has to bolt the better."

"If you say so," the bee said. "We won't deal too much-"

"If you draw blood then you're probably going too far."

"Damn."

Claws snapping. Shuffling across dirt. Scarlet craned his neck, brushing his antenna as close to the entrance as he dared as he tried to catch an idea of how the bugs outside were positioned. Maybe, if he made a break for it, he could get away before-

Ice. Death. Extinction. The moth's life force flared in preparation to cast a spell and Scarlet quickly scuttled back out of range.

Think. Think. He needed to think.

The time passed at an absolutely glacial pace.

Scarlet could hear the aimless chatter on the other side of the crack. The voices faded in and out - the distinct glacial death of the moth's life force stayed steady, trained to attack the moment that he made a wrong move.

His ideas of the outside were loose at best. He knew where the ground was, loosely - he couldn't trust the ground to stay quite the same anymore, couldn't trust the world to stay static as it previously was - the air was all too wrong, reality flowing in disorienting eddies around his antenna. He knew that the bee was close from the taste-scent of her sparkler-fire-fuse life, just barely close enough to detect. He could smell the Ice of the moth, masking practically everything else beneath death-scent - the faint shuffling of dirt was one of the only signs that one of the beetles might have stayed, painfully hard to detect without sticking his antenna right where the moth might be able to get at them.

He really, really didn't want to be frozen again.

From what he could tell, the moth was the closest. The bee was next closest, whatever beetle had stayed far enough to be out of range - though she begun to pace, after a few minutes with no sign of the other two.

If he could evade the moth's magic, he might be able to dash past the beetle if he timed it right - the bee took time to turn around, and if he could manage to get under something before she released that boomerang, he might be able to evade it. With proper cover, he might even be able to temporarily disarm her - though she was fast, and horrifyingly good at aiming it, a boomerang couldn't unstick itself from a bush's branch, and if he was careful, he could get out of range before she could retrieve it.

He just didn't know where the beetle was.

If he were a bit closer, he'd be able to scent them out, but with the moth guarding the entrance, he didn't really have means to try without getting his shell frosted over. He didn't know for sure how long the other party would take to get back, and unless he had a better idea of the kind of threat that they posed-

Voices. The scarab and the bug he didn't know. Coming closer.

He was out of time.

"...are you certain that he's still in this crevice?" the scarab asked, his tone faintly concerned. " I haven't heard anything from him from a while now, and no one's checked the other end-"

"It's blocked off in our universe. Might be blocked off in here. Even if it's not, there's not far he could run, and he left his umbrella out here," the unknown bug said. "He'll be back to get it sooner or later even if he can get loose here."

"How do you know that-?"

"Trust me, it'll work. If he didn't know it was missing already, then he'd know when I mention I have it."

She deliberately raised her voice for the last few words, projecting it out to him. Scarlet ducked down closer to the ground, his muscles tensing. She knew something about it, he could tell- even if she didn't have the full picture, that was a risk. He hated repeat encounters, and when he didn't have any idea what they might know-

"Has he tried to get out yet?" the bug asked. "With how he usually is here, I'd have expected him to-"

Scarlet took off like a shot, claws digging into the earth as he ran for it. He ran between the explorers, eyes fixed on the treeline-

-and made it all of ten feet before a beetle's claws locked around his scruff.

Scarlet thrashed, desperately trying to loosen his scarf enough for him to squirm out and escape. He could feel it beginning to unspool, the bug's grip loosening- and then an arm across his thorax, pinning him to the heavy chest of one of the unknown bugs.

Scarlet snapped at an all-too-sturdy shell, thrashing as his teeth merely glanced off of the beetle's chitin. They were huge, armoured like a tank- unnervingly strong, too, pinning him in place like it was nothing. A frantic attempt at drawing whatever he could through their shell amounted to nothing, their life force all too slow to respond to him. Panic drew tighter around him as he heard a bug begin to draw closer, pulling something from behind their back-!

[break]

"Ah, Venus, it's this again."

Monsieur Scarlet thrashed sporadically in Stratos's hands, his claws scrape-scrape-scraping against her partner's shell. Predictably, this did absolutely nothing - he'd struggled to find purchase on Stratos's shell even when he was in the absolute peak of health, and he wasn't about to get any further with it while he was looking like death warmed over, but it was more than a bit inconvenient, considering it was pretty much the opposite of what they were trying to accomplish with him.

"Calm down," she told him. "You're not dying."

Perhaps even more predictably, this didn't calm him down.

Delilah wasn't quite sure what else she had expected - he had about the same nerves as a particularly high-strung giraffe weevil, even in their universe, and she doubted that getting locked out of his home base helped the issue. What else had she expected?

She knew the answer to that question already. This wasn't exactly a pre-planned trip, after all. Just a quick jaunt over to grab a valued informant.

It was just unfortunate that said valued informant was preoccupied trying to gnaw her partner's throat out.

"Stratos, just hold 'im still. I don't want to deal with his venom again."

The ant gave an undignified squeak as Stratos dedicated a second hand to pinning him. His desperate attempts to scrabble loose intensified for a moment, his body audibly THUNKing against Stratos's shell- Venus, he had a lot of fight in him for someone who looked like he'd halfway starved to death before they'd found him. She had no clue where he found the energy.

In hindsight, she was glad that she'd met him through his attempts at bargaining. She'd hate to have seen what it would look like if she'd had to wrangle him through the whole Leipephilene mess without securing any kind of agreement first.

Delilah stalked closer, flowerling pinned under her arm. His scent had gone blank, but it did nothing to disguise the raw panic in his eyes. Even sedated, the flowerling was beginning to pick up on the energy in the room, its petals beginning to stir with pollen - she'd have to act fast, before it actually woke up.

"Bite this."

Scarlet's jaws met shell, and teeth locked around the flowerling in an instant.

Delilah winced, watching the seedling practically crumple inwards. Its petals flash-dried, its body going from healthy tan to a dry, shriveled white in an instant - that always looked brutal, especially if you weren't ready for it. He snapped his neck, scraping the dessicated corpse against Stratos's arms with what she was pretty sure was all the force he could muster before abruptly freezing.

Almost three seconds to realize he wasn't biting down on bug flesh. A new record, probably.

"Hand me the next one," she told Kabbu. Dutifully, he handed her the next of the sedated flowerlings, and she shoved it between his jaws before he could fully process that he'd been juked.

Scarlet was a pain to handle even at the best of times. Fortunately for her, he was also very, very predictable.

The second flowerling dropped out of his jaws - just a little bit less desiccated than the last - and Scarlet stopped his thrashing for a moment to stare at her, his antenna twitching frantically.

"Are you done yet?" she asked him.

From the expression on his face, you would've thought that she was trying to make small talk about the weather in the middle of a fiery apocalypse.

It was pretty clear that he wasn't going to respond to her after a few seconds, so she just kept talking. "It'd be a lot more convenient for me 'n my partner if you weren't trying to use him as a grindstone. Are you done?"

"...what?"

And that was the ant she was familiar with. She was surprised that he wasn't trying to open with the whole seductive act, honestly. Maybe she'd just confused him enough that he wasn't even trying. His voice sounded a bit hoarser than she was used to, but the raw confusion came across fine. Couldn't hide a whit of it even when he was squashing his scent.

"Just wanna make sure you're paying attention. Bit hard to talk when you're scratching your claws down to the quick."

And if the way that his antenna moved was any indication, he was paying attention now- though she was surprised that he was still using his antenna over his eyes, with the whole world crossing thing muddling the air. With the level of sensitivity he'd displayed the first time they'd met him, she'd be willing to bet it was messing with him a lot more than her - which, in hindsight, would probably be contributing to his whole giraffe-weevil thing, if he'd suddenly been stuck with a third of the range of scent without any notice.

"...well, you have it," he said- and there was the attempt at the seductive voice, he laid it on so thick that she could practically taste the sugar-coating. "What would such a handsome mosquito want of me?"

Delilah snorted. "I don't know, what would such a handsome ant want from me? I think I'm a bit old for you. You can't flatter your way out of being persecuted."

"Oh, but you were flattered." There was a musical lilt to his voice. "Please, if there's anything you need of me, be upfront about it- I certainly can't remember anything I might've done, but I'm sure I can spare some time for such a fine pair of bugs-"

"I already know about the murder. Kabbu's already told me about you trying to off Levi and Celia. Do you want to try again without lying?"

Scarlet paused, visibly rethinking his response. "I've done nothing that would need to be persecuted."

"You're a terrible liar," Delilah snorted. "Let me put it out better for you. You know about the world crossing. I'd bet you want to know what's going on as much as us. I'm willing to bet you probably want a hot meal and a place to stay, since you're still bumming it in random holes in the ground. You join up with us, and we get you somewhere to stay- unless you're planning on going back to hiding in the Grasslands?"

She could see the gears turning behind his eyes, the weighing of choices running behind his eyes - of course, he'd probably need something extra to tell him on it without the whole sudden-but-inevitable-betrayal part, at least for now. Wouldn't be that hard to come up with, really, but convincing him to take it would probably be an ordeal if he thought it was a trick of any kind.

"...I'd rather not risk my neck in service of a kingdom that clearly wants me dead," he started.

"We could arrest you instead," Delilah offered. His wings flickered in sudden panic.

"I'm sure it doesn't have to come to that," he offered. "If you let me go-"

"You'll run off into the Wildlands and we'll never see you again?" Delilah asked.

"...no."

Delilah snickered. "Well, if you're going to be so persuasive, let me pitch you a better offer. If you don't turn on us in the first day, you can drain a bit off of my partner."

He looked remarkably conflicted. Delilah could still see the temptation warring in his eyes. Food-motivated, she'd call it. At least it was easy to get a hold on.

"...and he would want to offer something like that?" Scarlet asked. She could see him brush an antenna over Stratos's shell. Probably looking for any sign of dissent in his scent.

"Call it a signing bonus. Or an incentive to stay on the line. You wouldn't turn up a bit of life from a dashing beetle, would you?"

He considered it. She could see the cogs shifting, the new weight on the scales.

"...fine. I don't see why I would refuse."

"Pleasure to have you on the team, then."

Stratos loosened his grip enough for Scarlet to maneuver just the slightest bit more, carefully angling his arm to show the gaps in his chitin as much as he could

Predictably, it took him a few seconds to figure out the exact angle. Scarlet's fangs slid into the flesh of Stratos's arm, looking patently ridiculous with how much he had to strain to fit his mandibles over the beetle's chitin, and she allowed a moment for him to try and actually work his teeth in there before actually looking away.

"Pleasure doin' business with you, then. Now, if you don't mind, I'll need to do some talking with my partners here. Stratos?"

"Doin' fine. He's th' size of a starved mantis nymph, you don't have to worry 'bout me,"

"Right. We'll bring him back to the house, 'less you needed anything with him-" Delilah turned, dusting her paws off, and saw Team Snakemouth staring in utter disbelief.

Kabbu shook himself out of his shock first. "Shouldn't we bring him to-?"

"He's a mimic, not an actual drone," Delilah dismissed. "Elizant won't have much use for him unless she's aiming to recruit parasites."

Vi had moved ever so slightly closer, staring at the bite on Stratos's arm. "Doesn't that hurt?"

Stratos shrugged with his mimic-less arm. "He's not that big, It's just a couple of pinpricks. Might be more for you, since you've got less body for the venom to disperse in."

"He's venomous?" Vi squinted furiously at his fangs. "He doesn't look like..."

"They mentioned that already, Vi," Leif said. "Didn't you listen?"

"Well, yeah, but he doesn't look like he has a stinger-"

"Not the only way to get venom in you. 'sides, he's a mimic. Just looks like an ant. It's not an acid like normal ant venom, anyways. I wouldn't worry too much about it. Worst case scenario, it'll have you feeling like death warmed over for a bit, but you'll be fine after."

Scarlet had gone still against Stratos's shell by now - probably listening in, from what she knew of him. He really wasn't as subtle as he tried to present himself, but if things held true across universes, he would probably get even cagier if she brought it up.

He had been one hell of a useful resource the last time they'd picked him up - even if the interference did mess with his ability to sense other bugs, she'd bet that he'd still have a better grasp on it than her, and having someone around who could sense ant pheromone signage was incredibly useful once she could talk one of the ants into talking about what the markings actually meant.

"If there's anything else you'd like to ask about, ask now. He'll probably fed enough to bring out soon, and then we'll be on our way."

"There is one thing-" Kabbu started, but he was stopped as Leif pulled him back.

"No, we think that'll be all. Good luck with your... whatever you need him for," Leif said.

The mimic made a slight hiss as Stratos slung him over his back, like steam out of a kettle, but didn't fight - just twitched a bit, as if he was already resigned to what was happening. Probably a good thing, all things considered. She didn't want to have to catch him again, and she was willing to bet that he didn't really want to end up on the wrong end of her cannon.

"We'll see you back at the Association if we learn anything new." Delilah said. "Just drop us a line if you find anything. This is the most exciting thing in any of the Kingdoms in years - we're not going to waste it. Good luck with your adventuring!"

Scarlet had been a very, very useful informant the first time around. Delilah just hoped he'd be the same this run.

#whump #febuwhump #febuwhump2024 #febuwhumpday3 #“bite down on this”#we have not beta'd this. we are dying also. there is an omake.#bug fables #monsieur scarlet #stratos #delilah #writing

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