Why was it that when Samus Aran and motherhood crossed paths, the Metroids were always involved somehow?

Galactic space’s premier bounty hunter sighed, glancing down at her delectably ripened belly. She felt suddenly, surprisingly full—the sensation unanticipated, distinctly unforeseen, and yet, in its own way, not uncomfortable.

It had all started so innocuously…

After the dustup from the fallout of the B.S.L. station’s destruction (and of course the Federation had blamed her, just because she was responsible for the destruction of Zebes. And Phaaze. And the Bottle Ship. And okay, they were right, but it still seemed rude to jump to conclusions!) Samus had been on the run for a bit until things had gotten settled. Once back, she’d resumed her role as the GF’s favored freelancer, a one-woman black ops team who could handle anything.

A research team had probed into the subterranean caverns of a hitherto uncharted moon on the far rim and discovered what looked like Chozo ruins. What’s more, they claimed, alarmingly, to have found Metroid eggs.

The Metroids were extinct, of course—Samus herself had seen to that, and the lone survivor she had attached herself to had been wiped out in the aftermath of Mother Brain’s last stand. Other than the Federation’s ill-advised cloning efforts, the final legacy of the Metroids was within Samus herself, who carried the genes of the last Metroid encoded in her. (It was a long story, but she was still human. Mostly. Probably? She looked the part at least.)

But if anyone would have had backup plan upon backup plan, it would have been the Chozo—and so Samus had been tapped to venture down below, just in case the Metroids weren’t as gone as expected. She was the natural choice. Not only was she the one individual in all of creation who didn’t get wrecked by the creatures on a regular basis, but her Chozo upbringing would even lend her the ability to help probe and wander through the ruins.

The caverns there were unlike those on Zebes—they were beyond ancient, obviously uninhabited for centuries if not millennia, and with differing architectural styles and eerie statues.

Local wildlife was a potential concern on any new world, but there was nothing too threatening on this new moon, thankfully. Samus encountered little resistance as she pressed deeper into the catacombs.

She saw the glow of the chamber before the chamber itself. The researchers had described a sea of glowing, lime-green eggs, their shells translucent to show off the infant Metroids slumbering within. The clutch, they said, was nestled safely inside a vast chamber of similarly-colored stone. The green light was visible just where they’d said it would be—at first little more than a dot at the end of a long hall, but gradually encompassing more and more as she approached.

Stepping inside, the bounty hunter whistled to herself. Those were Metroid eggs, alright, and the shape of the creatures within could still be seen from her vantage point. She stepped in, cannon at the ready, but the eggs still seemed sedate. Whatever the Chozo had in mind with this chamber, it was clearly still slumbering.

But only partially. There was an ambient thrum of power in the air that she could feel settling on her skin, probing through her armor.

Stepping further in without any response from the creatures, she was satisfied that they were good and lethargic. Lowering her cannon, she opened her suit’s log. “Reached the inner chamber,” she began. “No serious dangers on the way, area largely as the research team described.”

So focused was she on the recording that Samus missed out on the way that the ambient power suddenly began to change. The transient feeling began, imperceptibly yet irreversibly, to zero in on the chamber’s newest visitor. Her orange power suit was no barrier; the power settled in, playing about her body, reacting in invisible ways to the chemistry within her and the new and mysterious changes which her newfound Metroid genetics had gradually introduced to her system.

Still in the midst of her log, Samus paused and cleared her throat. She felt strangely… bloated. Not sick, but oddly full, and her entire body began to feel a bit off—only a little bit, as if she had suddenly stood too fast, inviting wooziness.

Shaking it off, she pressed on.

“The eggs number a little over fifty,” she said, “and are unlike those seen on SR388… of course, it is known the Chozo had varying breeds of Metroids. Tallon’s had a different life cycle entirely and reacted to the introduction of Phazon…”

As she continued, the ambient power of the chamber pressed harder, eventually weaving its way through Samus’s body to nestle inside her womb. Once there, it spurred her body to release a number of chemical signals—ones which her new Metroid chemistry reacted to quite suddenly.

“…the Metroids are in lethargy and it is my recommendation they should remain that way,” Samus was saying. “The urge to weaponize them is as alw—u-ugh, hnnnnnnnnnnnn, h-huh?” There was an immediate change inside of her, one she could no longer ignore. The bloating sensation had intensified,