For The Many

Prologue

You humans didn't suspect a thing. Wait, no, some of you did. A minority – one in every million, I'd say, though that is still a fair amount – thought that something at least was going to happen, though they did not anticipate exactly what. We took over from the inside. We are known – as a race – for doing so. Many have traversed the Universe for our services. But this time... It wasn't because someone asked us to. It was because it became a necessity.

The... how can I put this in your tongue? Shaaran, I suppose, invaded our world with weapons that tore through flesh and dissolved what it couldn't rip apart, leaving our kind to burn while our cities remained untouched, partly because we lived underground, partly because it targeted our specific genetic structure. It killed all it touched, and wounded those it left behind in a way we knew not how to fix, chipping away at our very being until we were nothing but vengeful beasts that would do anything – even inflict our own pain upon others – to find some form of... solace. Some form of wholeness.

So, we used the only thing we knew how to. We rearranged ourselves. Ah... Wait, that isn't what you call it. You call it morphing, I believe. Or maybe shape shifting. I'm not sure. Either way, we did it, and made ourselves look like you, made ourselves look human.

There were some... Features, that defined us though. As your blood flow blue through your veins and red through your arteries, ours only runs purple, regardless of what it is carrying or where to. Also, the fur you grow on your heads – Wait, no, sorry, you call it hair, don't you? - we could never match it correctly. The closest we could get were yellow-blonds and bright reds, though some shades of purple could blend in.

Those that would be accepted were then drafted into your High Schools, where you had them, and any other important roles like Governments and Royal families, the latter mainly through marriage. This meant that we had our kind everywhere that was important in taking over, and because you just thought they dyed their hair, no one suspected a thing.

Your biggest mistake, though, was first making, and then using, abnormal hair dye.

Every teen and adult who though it was cool to dye their hair pink, blue, green, purple, or any other non-natural hair colour opened another door for us. Slowly, we introduced more of our people into your everyday lives, and I'd bet that within five years of the first... What is it you call us... Shifter, setting foot on your soil, you probably couldn't walk down the street without seeing one of us. The thing is, you never knew about it. You just thought we were eccentrics, trying to make the most out of life, when in reality, we were taking yours.

It took us about a decade to take over entirely, and that was when I arrived. In the first wave of what we would go on to call Post-Rooters.

For some of us, this method worked. The hole was filled. The deed done. Our wounds healed. Others... However... We felt sorry. So, very sorry, that we had given you humans what we had been given. The worst present in all of existence. The loss of first trust, and then your homes. Not houses – those things are but shells to encase a home - but the family that would live there. Home is where the heart is. That's a human saying, right? We had something similar back on our own world, in our own language. I would tell it to you... But it would mean little to you. Less than what your words meant to me... To begin with anyway.

As I learnt more of your words during my schooling, I found that you had so many more words than us. Words I didn't understand. Love. Hope. Beautiful. Hate. Finality. Grotesque. All of these words felt good on my tongue – the tongue I had stolen from your design - and each and every one of them felt dirty, regardless of their meaning, when I found out what we were doing to you.

Our equivalent of your Doctor's were producing weapons that could destroy every one of you and not harm one of us. They were testing to see which of you were human, which of you were us, by cutting you. Hurting you. Spilling your bright red blood on floors and walls and windows. I still feel sick to my stomach every time I think about it. The worst, though, was that those that they captured were used to produce the weapons that would kill you and not us. Destroy you. Not us. Make you burn and writhe and smoulder while we watched, unaffected, and we were happy about it. Elated, even. That made me feel the most sickened.

That we did that to you, using your own kind, and were then happy about it.