I had given the kids a verbal version of this before NaNo, but couldn’t quite pull it out to a full day’s writing. As such, I started behind the 8-ball, and I didn’t finish it. In the original, the mosquito gets squished just as she’s fully exulting in her plan to change mosquito nature.
She hungered. Hunger was her world, and she sought blood. If you had asked her, and if she had been able to respond, she would have said that the blood was life to her, but especially to her children. The hunger drove her on, and it had a voice.
The voice did not speak in words. Rather, it throbbed. It throbbed with a deep, slow rhythm, so much slower than the beating of her wings. The throb filled the air around her, and was accompanied by a smell. The smell was, to her, the smell of blood, but she knew that it was not the blood itself. It was, rather, the smell of the place of the blood, the source of the blood.
Her wings carried her on, towards the blood, the throbbing of the voice filling her mind with nothing else. There was a barrier between her and the blood, and she explored it, tentatively. It was not thick, and her piercing, sucking mouth could have penetrated it easily, but it was too far from the blood. She moved on until she found where the curtain ended, and she began to fly around it.
That was when her life began to change. There was something hanging there. It, too, smelled of life. It had all of the smells of the place of blood, but it was cold. She landed on it, and probed. There were tiny crevices in the thing, and in those crevices there was protein. She knew the smell, and she knew the taste. It was not blood, but it was the same smell and taste she had every time she drank blood.
The eggs within her cried out, and she thought she should hurry on, but she waited another moment, lingering over this strangeness. The voice of the hunger told her she needed blood, and for her to drink blood there must be a victim. Now, she wondered. She could easily continue in the way she had always gone. The place of blood was near, and the victim unaware. However, what if there was another way?
The children were waiting. They needed the blood, or did they? What if she could nourish them with the victim’s protein instead? It lay in the crevices of this thing, waiting for her deft mouth to suck it free. There was moisture in plenty to ease it down her throat. What if she stayed here?
She regarded the victim hazily through the distance. Her eyes were not made to focus at those distances, but she could see its naked skin. How she would pierce that skin with her mouth, anesthetising with her saliva so that she could drink unmolested! Soon, her belly would be full, distended with the warm, rich blood. She would not be able to fly far, or fast, then. No, she would have to find a place to sit and digest, feeding the proteins slowly to her developing eggs.
What if there were a different way? she thought again. Her children might be fed by the proteins from this thing she was sitting on. Perhaps they would even be stronger than the children fed by blood. After all, could such a parasitic life be healthier than one of scavenging, or of harvesting the resources left by others?
Perhaps, indeed, (here she permitted herself a flight of fancy) the children might be different than the others of their kind. Perhaps they would learn — here she reminded herself that she would never see the children, knowingly, for they would hatch under water and by the time they emerged into the air again they would be indistinguishable from all others —