SGABBA-FLIES
A lot of folks have messed with my head, using everything from touchy-feely telepathy to torture technology. This time, it was just mosquitos. Well, okay, actually they were called sgabba-flies, but what's in a name? The flies bit me, the bites itched, then an alien took over my mind and tried to make me kill people.
The alien, E'Alet, produced the bugs from within his body. Then he directed them to bite his targets — in this case, me and Aeryn. When the bugs bit us, they inserted a subliminal command into our minds. Once that seed was planted, E'Alet could go into a trance and use his own psychic abilities to stealthily invade our subconscious, amplifying and fine-tuning the original signal until we did what he wanted.
Aeryn and I began having mental flashes that illustrated what E'Alet wanted us to do: kill local tribal leaders. Gradually, the flashes grew into overpowering hallucinations until we could barely stop ourselves from committing the murders.
Still, because we were aliens with no preexisting motive or desire to whack random locals, E'Alet had to use a lot of extra bugs on us. Extra bugs meant extra effort, and he still had trouble forcing me and Aeryn to obey him — especially after we figured out what was happening and began focusing on resisting him. He responded by sending an entire swarm of his brain bugs after us. The effect of the sgabba bites was cumulative, and it gradually degraded our ability to resist E'Alet's commands.
We eventually discovered that killing E'Alet was the only way to stop the hallucinations. Sadly, that's a solution we've become quite accustomed to using.
JOURNEY LOG REFERENCES
A Prefect Murder
STARBURST TO ANY NOTE
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