That’s what she gets for attempting politeness, she thinks, as the insectile thing coils in unmistakable preparation for a lunge with its matter of fact warning following that oddly satisfactory report. She had let herself be lulled by it, along with the quiet that inhabits her too much, and she regards the Zerg with no coiling of her own. Her arms stay loose at her side, her brow unfurrowed. There is interest; there is no alarm.

It would be easy. It would be so terribly easy, to do nothing. To allow this, to see what might come of it this time.

What tips the scale is nothing more than this: she would still like to see what happens, if only for the next five minutes.

“Is the pathway of behavioural alteration apparent to you?” She asks, with no apparent change to her mild curiosity, even as she works a clump of tissue of her own between her palms. The dying zealot is a boon to her here, but even with that fuel, blood begins to pour from one ear as a dewy green blood sweat forms on her brow.

The bands of cartilage she kneads will expand rapidly in size when she flings them, which she intends to do as soon as her erstwhile (perhaps still) temporary study partner lunges. She won’t kill it, if she doesn’t have to, but an echo of the containment it placed about the hive itself is very much on the table.