Back To School

Jan 18, 2011

"Are you sure you're up for it?" Danny asked for the third time. Her grace period was over, and in spite of nothing having been done about her tormentors, due to a lack of evidence, and an absence of eyewitnesses even though she knew the events had been seen, she was headed back to Winslow. They could not afford private schooling, and while Arcadia would have been by far her preferred option, as it was the school the Wards, the junior members of the Protectorate, attended, it had a waiting list that made it a non-option.

If her mother, Annette, had still been alive, then home-schooling might have been an option, but in a one parent family it just was not viable.

"Yes, Dad. I can't give them the satisfaction. I'm sure it will be better now." Her smile was brittle, and she knew he saw through it. She just hoped he would not comment on it. His inability to cause any real change in her situation would just make him angrier, and it would not help anything.

She gave him a quick hug, and headed out the door. Before she was halfway down the street, another bumblebee was taken down by her dragonfly and dumped in her pouch.

"I'll have to make extra-sure the Trio can't catch me today," Taylor sighed mentally, "the last thing I need is to get in trouble for letting bees loose in the school."

She could not pass up the chance to get them, though. Whatever it was the unknown Tinker used in his bees, it had an awesome synergy with her powers and until and unless he showed up and prevented her, she was going to make the most of it. Shelob was awesome, and so cute, and she could not wait until she had an upgraded dragonfly for aerial reconnaissance, and...

She stopped in her tracks, eyes widening, and an uncontrollable grin spreading on her face. She had just taken the step that put the cardboard boxes in their basement out of her range. She had felt all her little black widows wink out, knowing that they were now free to their own devices, with her only able to hope they would stay on task and not consume each other.

That was not what was important, though. She took another step, and then another, her grin broadening. She picked up speed again, walking briskly, as in her basement, Shelob danced a little jig. She could still feel the altered spider, still see through its eyes, still control its movements, even while all the rest were now out of reach.

---

It felt restricting, going in to the school and leaving her swarm behind. There were flies enough about, though, for her to mark the Trio, if she could find them. So she lingered at the end of the hall from the entrance, watching for them to come in. She tagged Emma and was looking for Madison, when she was shoved roughly forward.

"Watch where you're standing." Sophia swept past from behind her, and Taylor suppressed the sudden, violent urge to cover her in biting insects. Sophia had vanished into the crowd before she got control enough to remember that she was supposed to be tagging them.

Realizing that she was running out of time, Taylor headed for her first class, getting lucky and spotting Madison and tagging her on the way.

She was distracted in her classes, her work continuing to suffer. Before, her grades had been falling from the Trio's interference, their destruction of her work, constant distractions, and general sabotage. Now her concentration was divided even more, between watching for interference, monitoring her swarm-sense for Emma and Madison's locations, sorting the swarm around the school for the best insects to bring home with her, and watching over her black widows through Shelob's eyes.

Tagging two of the Trio was enough for her to catch them coming towards the bathroom she had retreated to when lunchtime came, and she slipped out ahead of them, after using her bugs to lock one of the stalls.

She made it out of the school without them managing to corner her again, and even better, she managed to tag Sophia before she left. Insects to use for tagging people went on her list for possible uses of the stones, if it worked when she applied them to other creatures. Being able to tag them and know where they were beyond her limited range would be excellent.

As soon as she was out of sight of the school, a dragonfly flew by and released a bumblebee just in time for it to slip into her pouch as she opened it. Two more such meetings occurred on the way to the park, where she loitered for a while, gathering more. By the time she got home and sat down to do her homework, she had seven more bumblebees to process.

Much as she wanted a remotely viewable tagger, or an aerial reconnaissance drone, she knew her first deliberate conversion, assuming that she had guessed correctly about what caused the first glowing stone, would be a digger.

She plowed through her homework as quickly as she could manage, then slipped downstairs and processed the bumblebees. Shelob crawled up the workbench to watch, and Taylor went to stroke her as soon as she had all the bees in the dis-assembly line. It was hard to tell for sure, since Shelob was a spider and their apparent size was so dependent on their leg position, but she rather thought Shelob might have gotten bigger.

She did not recall having seen anything through Shelob's vision that would indicate a shedding, and poking about did not turn up a large, empty exoskeleton. She did find a tape measure, and made a note on a piece of the construction paper she had brought down to make sandpaper, that Shelob's current body length was three and an eighth inches.

Four destroyed stones later, and none of the others were glowing at all. Taylor paused, confused, then realized the problem. Shelob was the one glowing, the red had gotten brighter beneath her abdomen, in her eyes, and on measuring, Taylor found her a full four inches in the body. Transferring Shelob across the room, she tried again with the remaining two stones. The last stone still showed no visible glow, but she decided to try it anyway.

The digging insect she had picked up from the park was an odd sort of insect with short rear limbs and fat serrated forelimbs. She put the stone on the insect using the tweezers. "Just grow big and strong," she said, "Come on, grow!"

There was a dimmer flash, and the insect went from one inch long to four and a half. "Yes! You will do just fine, I'm sure." She did not get any sense of vision from it, but then, as a burrowing insect, it might well have had an atrophied sense of vision to begin with. But it definitely looked big and strong, hopefully enough so to get whatever Tinker device was storing or creating or portaling those bees up and out of the ground without risking her fingers.

---

Jan 19, 2011

Taylor bent down briefly, just long enough to let the bug slip from her sleeve and onto the ground, then walked away. She took a seat on a park bench a short distance away, after checking the surface for gum or other junk, and tried to look like she was just enjoying the park. Thankfully, though a little snow had fallen that day, it had not been below freezing all day, and the sun had dried the bench.

Ants swarmed around her digger bug, a mobile warning net to keep the blind bug from accidentally entering the hole from which none of her insects had returned. Worms churned the earth in a path to the bottom of the unknown object at the bottom of the hole, then the enlarged digger set its serrated spade-like appendages into the ground and cut through the grass roots. It quickly vanished into the ground, the surface churning for a minute under the feet of her ants before it settled as it made it deeper.

The bug rose up beneath the object and began pressing against it from below, and she had to suppress a cheer when the object shifted and started to rise. She followed its progress, each tortuous inch, leaning forward unconsciously in her seat, her hands clenching the cool bench. She panicked when the digger felt the object tilting above it, and leapt from her bench before jerking to a halt, her hand outstretched. She could not grab for it, she might lose her hand, but she could just see it tilting, could imagine it vanishing the dirt before it and falling over, then destroying the ground beneath it as it fell endlessly.

"No," she breathed, frantically trying to think of something to do, as her bug tried to balance the object and keep it from tilting any more than it had.

"Miss, are you alright?" She spun in surprise.

"Uh, no, I'm fine," she dissembled, feeling her face flush with frustrated embarrassment as she took in the cute brown-haired boy showing concern for her. Obviously not a Winslow student, or he would have recognized and avoided her, she was sure.

"You sure? You looked like you saw something terrible."

Her digger had recovered the balance on the object, though it was on its side now and probably carving a wide trench through the ground as the digger pushed up. Other insects were rapidly backfilling as the digger struggled upwards, giving it a solid base to ease back and rest against before pushing again.

"I, um, I just remembered something I had forgotten to do. I'm fine, really."

"I'm sorry, I'm being rude. I'm David. I'm pretty sure I've seen you here before."

He paused and as she responded with her name, feeling the flush begin to fade from her face, she wondered. "Is he flirting with me?" She brushed her hair back self-consciously, trying to draw attention to her curls, which she felt were her best feature, and away from her lack of a figure. Unable to resist, she dropped her eyes in a quick scan. Nice, looked like a runner or track athlete, slim, well muscled. Not as built as she would like, but not weak or weedy. Probably already had a girlfriend, she was just imagining he was showing interest in her.

"It was nice to meet you, Taylor," he said with a bright smile. "See you around again some time!" She watched as he jogged off, her eyes falling, and she felt a pang of mild disappointment that he was wearing loose jogging pants instead of tight jeans. She waited for him to pass out of sight before turning around slowly. No-one was paying too much attention.

She moved quickly to the hole, and found her digger holding a large nearly fist size black stone, sharp-faced like a gemstone, but much blacker than the bits she was getting out of the bumblebees. A curious meow drew her attention momentarily to a black cat sitting watching imperiously from the bench where she had been sitting a short time before. Just enjoying where she had warmed the seat, probably.

A flood of ants swirled up and around the stone, but to her surprise, they did not vanish anywhere, even when they crawled over the top of it. "Well, that makes things easier," she mused, and quickly knelt, gathering up the stone and the digger into her pouch, before standing and brushing off her knees. She went and sat beside the cat, noting with a little surprise that it had no fleas, while her worms and smaller diggers churned the earth, erasing the evidence of the hole. Soon it was but a bare patch in the grass.

Her Shelob-vision attracted her attention as she walked back home, as it had suddenly become filled with white. When she tried to get Shelob to rise up and look around, she met a curious resistance. Feeling concerned, she reached out to the spider, trying to sense what was going on. "Oh! Oh, ooh, er, that's not good." She picked up the pace, intent on getting home as soon as possible. Shelob must have been bred before Taylor had chosen her to be enhanced, for she was busily laying a clutch of eggs.

It had suddenly become urgent that she find a lair other than her home's basement. In no possible way was she ready for Danny to find an egg sac several inches across. He would panic and probably try to squash it. Or worse, if he was around and she was not when they hatched, what if they weren't under her control at the time? If they matched their mother's scale, even babies might be able to inject a lethal dose of venom. This was her fault, of course. Black widow spiders did not normally breed when it was this cold, she had pushed them to breed to bump up her numbers, and then not checked for whether the one she chose had been bred before trying the stones.

She had not even thought to consider whether her enlarged insects or spiders could have children. If their changes bred true, she might be in trouble with the PRT if they ever found out. According to PHO, the Parahumans Online Forum she trawled in search of information on local heroes and villains, creating independently replicating creations was one of the prohibitions they enforced rather stringently.

The sensation of Shelob laying the eggs had been rather stronger than she had anticipated when she had focused on the spider, and she was a bit perturbed that she now knew what it felt like to squeeze eggs out of her abdomen, but that paled against the idea that she might need to have Shelob eat her own babies.

Snow began to fall again before she reached home, whitening her own vision as well.

---

Jan 20, 2011

Taylor sighed in satisfaction as she patted the dirt into the cracked window potting unit. She had tested this first with buckets in her basement while she was hunting for a lair. She had briefly considered trying to use the large stone her mole cricket had dug up for her to convert an insect, but Shelob's egg sac, now nestled in a broken and patched terrarium, had convinced her it was not a good plan to take a chance on it. Instead, she had played around with it until she figured out that it activated its insect vanishing properties when placed a few inches down in a layer of soil.

A broom with a broken handle worked to make a nice hole, and she dropped her third beehive stone into its new home. Almost immediately a fat little bumblebee buzzed out of the hole in the dirt, only to be snatched by a waiting dragonfly and taken to Shelob for processing. The dragonfly had been her third insect conversion, and it had been a great help in finding her new lair.

She looked around with a proprietary grin at the small, comfortable space, while rubbing her hands together briskly. It had once been a potting and yard management shed, including a small engine repair area. None of the equipment had been left, having been long since scavenged, but the benches were still there, and while it had no windows, it did have a ventilation hat on the roof, a ridgeline vent system that made a perfect entrance and exit for her swarm.

It had needed a little work to bend up the metal on one side to make a capacious enough opening for Lockheed, her eye-in-the-sky dragonfly, but there had been a wooden ladder left behind. It was missing a few rungs, but she had managed to fashion makeshift replacement rungs from pieces of tool handles. There had been several replacement handles left behind, waiting for a tool to need them. The tools they would have gone to were long gone, of course, but she guessed the handles had not been valuable enough. At any rate, she had been grateful that anything had been left, and had done her best to put it to good use, and now Lockheed had a safe way to get in and out, that was still too small for most people to fit through.

There was also a concrete pit, probably a grease pit, she thought, in the center of the floor beneath a drain that opened and would fit a normal man, making it more than big enough to fit her. She supposed it was to let it be cleaned out. More importantly, while the grease pit itself was a disgusting mess, there was a sewer access there, to allow water to run off. It did not help the stagnant water in the pit itself, but she supposed it allowed for run-off when the pit overflowed. It was not near large enough for her to pass through, much less use as an actual access to the sewers, but it gave her insects access, and meant she could bring her swarms home invisibly, as long as she kept close enough to roads where the sewer system passed.

It was a dirty mess of a hovel, but the structure was sound, made of metal walls with wooden supports, and it was hers. Her swarm had slain the rats that had nested there, and they were set to be food for her various clutches. The pit, with its stagnant water and long settled grease, had been an apt breeding ground for mosquitoes, giving her a steady supply of the little blood suckers.

Satisfied that her three hives were producing--she had gone hunting once she learned how they could be reactivated, and found and stealthily acquired two more--she went to look at her suit in the making. Shelob by herself could outproduce her entire black widow swarm at the moment, though she took a fair bit more feeding, and she was very happy with the quality and strength of the silk she was getting. Not a body-suit's worth, yet, but she had enough maybe for a head-stocking made, she thought.

She also had three glowing stones waiting. She had not dared to make a new creature after Lockheed and her mole cricket Mac, not until she had gotten out of the house. There was too much of a risk that Danny might find them.

Now, it was time to really push the envelope. If this worked, she might be able to start being a hero ages before she had expected. She thought she had a handle on what the bee-making cape was up to, now. He was obviously using those bees to collect whatever energy it was that made the stones glow and caused such interesting changes, and now his systems were working for her. The only question was whether they had really responded to her words, her intentions, her vision, or if induced gigantism was their only actual effect.

She had a backup plan, if this did not work. She still had the goggles with the dark lenses, and her homemade sandpaper. Seeing what the stones had done, however, had given her a hope. The spider that crawled on to the bench at her approach was tiny, and far from the sleek killing potential of her black widows. It did have the distinction, however, of having a mask already.

It was a spiny-backed orb weaver, a mere centimeter across and harmless to humans, but up close it looked wicked, with a red and black back surrounded by sharp black spines that looked rather like a demon mask, below which its thorax and limbs dangled. She set the first stone next to the spider. "No time like the present," she muttered.

"Test one, no verbalization, visualization only," she said, writing in her notebook, then focused on the spider and the stone, picturing what she wanted in her head, willing the stone to flash, and the spider to change.

Nothing happened.

"Test two, visualization and one word command," she wrote, and focused again. "Change!" she ordered, and blinked as a flash sent spots dancing across her vision.

She grinned as she picked up the demonic red mask and held it to her face, and the spider's legs gripped her head. Its now massive chelicerae dangled directly in front of her mouth, and she played them across her lips, confirming that she would be able to use them to pass food into her mouth without removing her mask. Two legs were clasped just above her ears, two just below behind her jaw. The other four dangled down in front. The placement did mean the mask-spider would be useless for web-spinning while worn, as it could not reach its own spinnerets to manipulate the webbing, and the shield back completely concealed her eyes, rendering her genuinely blind except for a tiny bit of peripheral vision that only showed her the light filtering in from above.

Since she could see through the spider's own eyes, this was not a hardship, and her visualization had worked in curving the spider's abdomen so it cupped her face and gave her nose room to breathe. She had more ideas in that respect, of creating an organic respirator or even a rebreather for swimming, but making a viable and awesomely fantastic mask was enough for one night.

She felt like she was floating on air the whole way home.

---

Jan 21, 2011

Taylor stared in dismay at the computer screen in the library. It had confirmed what she thought about black widow spider silk, and that the best silk was from the Darwin's Bark spider, but that it was from Madagascar, and not at all something she was likely to get her hands on any time soon. That had been expected though, nothing to get overly concerned about.

It had given her a list of interesting bugs to look for, from oil beetles that secreted a fluid that could cause blisters on human skin, to aphids that could effectively convert plant matter into insect food, to the curious looking assassin bugs that could produce a very painful bite to a human without any venom or toxins. Black carpenter ants could both bite, and spray formic acid, while eastern velvet ants had a sting strong enough that it was rumored to kill cattle!

That was not what her last search had been about, however. She had thought her spiders were weaving cloth, she had called it weaving, thought of it as weaving, been ready to start trying to sew it. It was not weaving. They were laying down silk strands in one direction, then coming back in the other with a second layer. As best she could tell, this would actually be called felting, if even that much.

To be woven, the strands in one direction would have to have the strand in the other direction pass alternately above and below them, while the next strand passed below and above those same strands. Looking at the diagrams online, she was hard-pressed to imagine a way to accomplish an actual weave, even with one spider for each of the strands that had to move back and forth. What could the spiders stand on to do the weaving?

She supposed they could have a very short extension beyond the current weft pass, and have half of them climb down onto the fabric being made while the others stayed ahead, let the wefting spider pass, then all crawl to the top and let the other half climb down. It would be something like the manual weaving she had watched her mother do on an apple pie's crust. But they would have to never exchange places, never miss. It was a far more complicated dance than she had imagined when she had set individual spiders each laying down their own mat and bonding intersections with their glue.

Once she had a mental image of how it could be done, though, she dove into the texts on weaves. She found a link to knitting, and checked on it to see if it might be an alternative, but found that it would be even more complicated, and basically demanded a rod to run the loops onto. Plain weaves were like the pie, a simple alternating pattern. Twill weaves crossed over two, under one, or a similar uneven pattern, and then ticked over one step in the pattern with each weft line. Satin weaves were like a massively overdone twill, where the weft would float over a big chunk of warp threads before going under one, but otherwise doing the same tick over by one with each step.

She made some quick notes about the patterns and her ideas, to make sure she did not forget them. She already had a list of interesting bugs to look for, along with her ideas for the uses of the stones. She still did not know what the stones were, or what the glow in them was.

She had done a search on PHO for any capes that had been bee focused, and there had been a couple, but they were more stylistically related than actually tied to bees by their powers. Nothing that sounded like it could account for the bumblebees with stones in them.

Gathering her stuff, she headed home. The sun was shining, though it was colder than it had been the day before when it had snowed. While she walked, she considered her ideas for the stones and her suit. One of her mental images had been enlarged wasps grasping her fingers, with their stingers at the tips of her fingers like claws or talons. Except these talons would be able to sting, maybe even to inject something with a particular effect, a knockout mix for example, or something that produced temporary paralyzation.

That idea got scrapped on the walk home, when she pictured actually being in a fight with it. Scratching seemed fine, she could picture stabbing someone with the stinger, but when she envisioned punching someone, well... exploded wasp guts all over her hands seemed the likely outcome there. A gauntlet more like a beetle carapace or a spiny spider abdomen would be better.

Of course, there was no reason she could not create wasps that would have those stings, if that was even something the stones could manage, and have them swarm someone. No reason they had to be in her armor. Self protection was probably a better pattern there anyway.

A way to carry some of her insects in her armor might be good, though, especially if she could produce something in the armor that could feed them, keep them ready to go.

She had to make a decision what to do with her next stone, and she was torn between going ahead and completing more of her costume, as her spiny shield spider helmet had proven she could do, and alternately making something that would be more valuable down the line, like a large beetle that regularly shed its carapace to give her a steady supply of parts for her armor.

Aside from these options, she wanted to try enhancing one of her existing enhanced bugs a second time, to see if she could get more out of them than just an increase in size. She also wanted to see if the stones could be used to combine insects, or more broadly, to combine insects and arachnids. Giving Shelob wings could enhance her usefulness.

She set all of these thoughts aside, though, when she got home.

"Hey, Dad, I'm home," she said as she stood in the doorway to the kitchen.

He smiled at her, but she could see the brittleness in it. "Did you find everything you were looking for at the library? Any trouble walking home?" Finding out that she had been bullied for a year without having told him about it had hurt him, hurt their relationship, and she had no idea what to do to make it better.

"Yeah, it was good," she said shortly. "Uh... I've got to put up my stuff, I'll be right back down for dinner, okay?"

"Sure, go ahead." He watched her go, and she felt like a heel, but what could she say? Keeping secrets from him was going to hurt him more if he ever found out, but it would only make his feelings of helplessness worse if he had to think about her going out and fighting crime, being in danger, with him unable to help.

Powers. That was a thought. Were those stones doing something like causing people to gain powers? Was Shelob basically a cape spider, a super-spider now? More to the point, could she cause cape like powers in her creatures? She thought of the powers in the city she knew of, and which might go well with her critters. A Tinker power would probably be useless, but a Blaster like Purity, the E88 cape, or Legend of the Protectorate could be interesting. She imagined Shelob sending beams of power out of her black eyes and giggled.

---

Jan 21, 2011

When her alarm buzzed, Taylor rose and dressed as quietly as she could, then slipped out of her room. She crept down the stairs close to the wall, where there would be less chance of creaking, then slipped out the door. Her hand drifted to her pocket, feeling the cylindrical form of the pepper spray Danny had given her when she had brought up the idea of going running. She had not started yet, but she had decided it was going to be necessary. Couldn't go out and about caping with a pudgy belly making her look ridiculous.

She had not been able to get to her lair yet that day, due to going to the library after school, and rather than the ideas that had been percolating earlier that day, she was trying to think of ways to avoid having to decide between gathering knowledge and building up her strengths.

Getting a computer installed at the lair would solve part of the problem, but only if she could have internet access installed as well. That would involve someone knowing her new address, which was technically not hers at all. She was just a squatter in an abandoned building at the moment. Not the best situation to be putting in official records.

Shelob was excellent, cute and just awesome at letting her keep her black widows from cannibalizing each other while they were out of her range. But Shelob could not work on her projects, aside from weaving. And even weaving, or, well, felting, she could only do solo, she could not manage the other spiders, just scare them back into their boxes.

Lockheed and Shelob gave her two different views on her lair while she was not there, but Lockheed was too large now to effectively grasp the bumblebees in his claws, and Shelob not maneuverable enough, so they were only being caught when they bumbled into the webs Shelob had laid for them. Of course, that was not such a great problem, as she thought the ones that went out and about were bringing back whatever energy made the stones glow, but while that might aid her long-term plans, it did not help her get ready to go out as a hero.

Of all the powers of the Wards and Protectorate and even the villains in the city, the one she most wanted to give to one of her bugs now was her own. If Shelob could use her power, without it taking the spider out of her control, if Taylor could basically use it through her, then she could get so much more accomplished without needing to be there, from getting the weaving going properly, to...

She stopped in her tracks, then pulled closer to one of the buildings, into the shadows. A septet of fast moving cockroaches in perfect synchrony turned out to be the inhabitants of the bed of a truck that took the corner just ahead of her and swept past. "Without needing to go out at night until I'm ready, would be nice," Taylor muttered, wondering if she might not have done better to wait until the next day.

Finding out that all her weaving work had been for naught at the library that day had badly pricked her pride, and stirred her anxieties. She wanted to be a hero, she wanted to prove Emma and Sophia wrong about her. She was not weak, not worthless, but she could not take it out of them with her powers, that would only get her in trouble for using her powers on civilians. If she could get a reputation as a hero, though, that would be something she could hold in her heart when they threw her failings in her face, and maintain her composure, and make sure she never gave Annette a reason not to be proud of her daughter.

She hurried on when the truck was out of sight, Lockheed taking off from the lair and sweeping the streets down towards her, letting her run with more confidence that she was not going to turn a corner and meet a gang.

Slipping in through the regular door - she had not even tried the rolling garage-style door yet, she held the knob turned as she shut it gently behind her. She let out a long slow breath. Safe.

She stayed there for a minute, her breath coming in panting gasps that only highlighted the need for exercise and practice before she started patrolling the streets. Straightening, she moved over to the bench, and looked at the stones there. Sighing, she moved them all aside, then pulled out a batch of seven and smashed all but one, setting the now glowing stone onto a shelf behind the bench, and repeating the process until she had five glowing stones. She poured out of the metal tin the two unused ones from the day before.

Stealing those hives was definitely proving its worth in spades, but did she have enough? Was it even possible to impart actual powers, not just making her insects bigger? She did not really have any legitimate reason to think so, except that Shelob was sort of armored, above and beyond her normal exoskeleton, which matched what she had blurted out at the time, she thought.

At any rate, there was only one way to find out. But what was she going to try for?

"Well," Taylor said, trying to think it out aloud, "what would really be best is if I could be in two places at once. To work with my power, it probably still needs to be a bug somehow, but it needs hands, it needs to share or extend or channel my power, or have its own power to control bugs." She thought a bit more, then breathing hard, her right hand curling into a fist and opening back continually, she separated out five of the stones.

She would have liked to use a tarantula, so as to start larger and have less growing needed, but she had yet to find any, and according to her searches that afternoon, they probably did not come this far north. So the spider that crawled onto the desk instead was tiny, smaller even than her black widows, an unbearably cute, female, black and white furred jumping spider. She had read that the jumping spiders were amongst the cleverest of spiders, the least programmed. They were hunters, not ambush predators, but more than that, they did things like invading other spider's nests and playing the strings like a guitar, emulating a wounded fly or even pretending to be another of the prey species of spider of the opposite gender, to lure them in.

Without warning, not letting herself think twice about it, she slammed her opened right hand down onto the five stones, feeling them dig into her palm, the long spines piercing her through. She shrieked at the pain, but turned her hand over, letting the little spider climb onto it into the middle of the stones, crawling through her blood as it pooled into the center of her hand.

She had not even tried combining insects and arachnids yet, and now she was going for mammal and arachnid, but it would just be so much more helpful if the new creation had hands. She focused through the pain for a minute to get clear in her head the idea that only the blood she had shed would be used - she did not want to end up part spider herself.

The little black spider looked up at her from where it was now floating on a pool of blood, its furry front legs waving at her, as she said "Be remade!"

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