I am the Swarm

Had a thought today about the different fashions in which a scout for something like the Zerg Swarm would disguise itself (if it were to). The obvious answer is that it would camouflage itself, but then you get to the question of how.

When you think about it, there are two main ways in which an animal will camouflage itself:
*Natural Camouflage: the animal normally looks like something in its natural environment (the Phasmatodea)
*Adaptive Camouflage: the animal can change its skin to take on the look of the environment around it (this is what chameleons do, as well as some species of octopi)

However, for something like the Zerg, neither of these would be very effective, especially in an urban environment, where everything is flat and straight-edged and uniform. Ergo, for a species that naturally adapts, I have a few suggestions for how they would get around this snag and blend in during infiltration missions:

*Photo-refraction: the most obvious choice; the organism develops a way to literally bend light waves around itself, making itself virtually invisible to the naked eye. Basically an upgrade on adaptive camouflage, but instead of trying to appear as part of the wall or floor (which wouldn't really be very effective from more than one angle), it would simply make itself appear more like a mirage or heat wave (which would be).

*Neo-adaptive/Shapechange: Instead of trying to blend in with the environmental background, the organism mixes directly with the social environment it is attempting to infiltrate, by making itself appear as a member of that group. In short, it would go from being the insectile creature it normally appears as to looking like a human, or whatever else. To achieve this, the spy would have to observer the creatures it is attempting to copy (which will be superficially effective) or capture and consume a member of that species to copy its DNA and temporarily re-write its own using that blueprint.

*Psionic Discombobulation: probably the most advanced of them all, this form of camouflage literally makes the organism invisible to other creatures. By generating a psychic disturbance, it confuses and disrupts the minds of the creatures around it, making them unable to comprehend that the spy even exists, so they do not 'notice' the organism making its way about. The only foreseeable issue would be electronic observation devices, which having no minds would not be fooled, and thus someone on the other end of the camera could see the creature, even if no one who went in there could. Then again, that could also be mutated to be dealt with

Really weird idea I had, maybe for a branch of the zerg (hence the post in this topic), but maybe as a different race and different altogether universe

You have a beastial-insectoid species that has a very interesting philosophy- information processing requires size and many appendages in order to connect to more of the swarm and more of the nervous relay centers that connect them over long distances, so their administrators, commanders, and ‘noble’ caste tend to be gigantic and look horribly terrifying, but are on the whole fairly harmless. Conversely, their warrior caste tend to rely on the philosophy of ‘if you want to survive combat, learn to take a hit or don’t get hit at all’ so they tend to be small, wiry, and while scary-looking they appear much less so than, say the commanders, and it is only after they have engaged their enemies that their opponents find that they are horrifyingly fast, unnaturally tough, or both

And that moment when they have kind of developed something similar to love and courtship, and a prince of the noble caste falls in love with a member of the warrior caste. People see the two of them- one tiny and relatively innocuous-looking and the other gigantic and horrible- and don’t figure out until too late that he is a giant, scaly teddy bear, while she is a bloody hurricane of death

Bonus points for some foreigners being picked up by him, finding out he is the prince, and people think this meeting is going to be Disney-style meet-your-prince nonsense. He seems kind of confused at the concept, before going, ‘oh, my apologies, I am afraid I am already betrothed’. They’re all like, ‘wait, to who’, and she crashes through a tree, tearing a war machine to scrap with her bare hands, and he proudly declares, ‘Her’
And everyone collectively shits their pants
Bonus points for her not even being concerned if anyone is hitting on him- not like she doesn’t understand that they are, but more confident in the fact that he’s not going to give her up, because they are too secure in their own relationship

…weird
For someone who has no interest in personally forming an intimate relationship, I seem to take some form of pleasure in inserting them into my stories
Ehhh, my number of stoics and asexuals probably balances it out, so whatever