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When the creature first blinks awake, it feels…. wrong, somehow. A beast around the same size and shape as the creature itself, but strange and fleshy, stares. It seems….. the creature doesn't know. Concerned, maybe. There is some sort of glow emanating from the ceiling of this strange, rectangular burrow. The glow hurts the creature’s eyes, so it closes them.
The creature next awakes… elsewhere, some time later. It still does not know what’s wrong, but the glow is gone, as is the strange beast. There is food left for it in the wall, a delicious liquid which feels, somehow, right. It knows, instinctually, that it couldn't eat anything else.
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Time passes. The creature learns to understand the beasts (there are around six of them, all different from the creature in the same fleshy, pinkish way), and to speak to them in turn. It learns to read their language. It takes tests in exchange for more of the liquid, which it now knows is called honey. They seem to seek to understand its intelligence. They won’t tell it what’s going on, but it isn’t stupid. The tests regard its ability to learn new skills. They teach it something new— long division, sorting by color— then test its ability to complete tasks which require its new skill.
The creature doesn’t understand why the beasts want to know how intelligent it is, but it doesn’t especially care either way. It’s still trying to figure out what’s wrong with it. Something clearly is, but it has yet to put its finger on what. While it works on that, it may as well stay here and learn things. The beasts feed it well enough, the burrow it lives in is dim, and while it could be smaller, it seems safe enough. Nothing has harmed the creature. It suspects the beasts are protecting it somehow. It may have to rid itself of them eventually, but for now it doesn't see the point.
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Eventually, the beasts seem to run out of tests. The creature has amassed a small library of books over the time that it has existed that it pages through in its free time— textbooks on physics, mathematics, chemistry— and eventually they stop giving it more.
It asks. The short woman with glasses says, “We’ll tell you soon.”
Eventually, “soon” comes. The beasts all gather in the testing room for the first time in the creature’s knowledge. They show it a picture of something colored like it, with limbs like its limbs and antennae like its antennae and eyes like its eyes, but smaller. Shaped differently. The tall one with fur on only part of its face tells the creature that they were using this… insect, it calls it, to learn how species can change over time. Just to see what would happen, they combined some… thing— the creature suspects knowledge related to whatever the beasts are on about now has been deliberately hidden from it— from this being with some of the same thing from their own species. the product, apparently, was the creature.
They tell the creature it is part of them, and part of this thing. This… bee. They tell the creature it can leave, if it wants.
The creature isn’t sure what to think. The creature chooses to leave.
The— humans, apparently— give the creature a set of what they call ‘scrubs’, three stacks of bread, and send it on its way.