Arachnae Jan 21, 2011 The flash was blinding, and a searing pain lanced through her arm as it bent down. All her eyes were affected, Shelob's lidless black orbs burning with pain, Lockheed's thousand images splintered into lancing white agony. Even the nearly blind mole cricket Mac was feeling pain, while Masque was shuddering and twitching. She looked up at herself where had pressed her hands against her eyes, smearing one of them with blood and felt an innocent sadness at her pain. "Better be," she buzzed through her chelicerae, patting herself on the knee, as comfortingly as she could. It was not helping enough. She tilted her head back, gazing up. She was so tall. How to comfort herself when she was so high up? She thought for a moment, her brain fizzing uncomfortably, then her legs flew into motion, as she flowed easily across the spider boxes and other obstacles to the wall, and up the wall, and across the underside of one of the beams. Almost, but not quite enough, the building was a bit too tall. She glued her line to the beam, and eased herself down, ignoring the question of whether a line of spider silk could hold her forty pound body. Of course it could, it was her line, right? She dangled upside down in front of herself, and carefully grasped each of her soft fleshy hands in two of her small but strong chitin clad hands and drew them gently away from her fleshy face. Her winged swooping self, Lockheed, that was his name, brought her sister Shelob's pressed mat and she used it to clean the blood and tears from her now wide-eyed fleshy face. Taylor stared at herself staring at herself, like looking into a pair of bathroom mirrors reflecting each other into a green infinity. Her new spider-self was the size of a pre-teen on the verge of puberty, hanging upside down in front of her from a nearly centimetre thick cable of spider silk that looked like it had been braided. Covered in black and white fur, she had a spider-like abdomen, but instead of a cephalothorax, she had a thorax with her eight legs, rising into a chitinous but human shaped torso with four chitin armored arms ending in perfect little hands - armor covered, but with four fingers and a thumb, perfectly usable. And her face, oh, she was just adorable, with huge solid black eyes, two large ones almost where a human's would be but twice the apparent size, two more smaller ones where a human's temples would be, two at the top where her head sloped back, and two that were fully on the sides of her head. She had no nose nor ears, and chelicerae instead of a mouth, but all her appendages were furred in black and white or silver, instead of sleekly black like Masque or Shelob. Her fine hair was too short for braiding or curls like Taylor's, but it was such pretty shades and patterns it did not seem to matter. She looked like something out of a Japanese anime, or maybe even something from an omake, the little animations that sometimes ran before or after, with super-deformed chibi characters running back and forth. She was like a chibi-Taylor. There was another feeling there, though, something welling up in her beyond the mere fact of her achievement. More than having hands that could work here while she was gone, little Arachnae had something she had thought she had lost long ago. Though the size of a seven or eight year old human if you ignored the abdomen, she felt no more than four or five, and far more importantly, she felt innocent. It was not as though she was a separate person, very much not, she was Taylor just as Taylor was Taylor, but she was Taylor with an innocent mind, with an innocent heart, a Taylor who had never known harsh words or hateful actions, a Taylor she had thought long dead and buried, who believed with all her heart, er, hearts, that Taylor was a good person. She was a Taylor, a good Taylor who found her harder self and her hard decisions a little scary. "Arachnae. Your name will be Arachnae." She stepped forward, hugging her ridiculously cute upside down self, ignoring her own muffled protests, before her other arms folded around her squishy body. Some of her eyes were watering, but most of her eyes were dry. There was a harder hard spot in her chest that was a little uncomfortable against her cheek, and pulling back a bit, she saw that the crystals had formed a single diamond shaped crystal in the center of her torso-plate. She chittered with pride, making it flare with red light, showing off to herself, before she realized the time. Time to head home, and see if she really could manifest her power fully through both of her selves. She stopped her Scary-self from leaving, though, when she had a brilliant idea. She could not quite reach where it was, could not call on it through the stone, but the idea of it was there, the image, and it fit with one of the things she had been hoping to figure out a way to do, so she called Lockheed down to herself, and while her fleshy, Scary-self watched, she tweaked and fiddled, until a new link to the Book appeared in Lockheed, then she sent him at the wall. Lockheed sailed through it, wings droning, passing into the wall as if it were insubstantial, and she urged herself to head through after him. Taylor stepped up to the wall, then reached out, and tentatively stepped forward, and found herself on her street, stepping out of a tall fence, as Lockheed scanned the street from above her. That was not insubstantiality, that was more like teleportation! And awesome! But it was late, and she did not want to be seen. As she hurried to her house where her bed awaited her, she also wove a broader web, a hammock in which she could rest, while at her command, insects for a block around her lair bestirred themselves to do her bidding. --- Jan 22, 2011 Taylor had not set her alarm, since it was Saturday and she did not have to deal with school. Having been out the night before, she slept late. At the same time, Taylor had a different body with differing requirements. Spiders can be quiescent while still monitoring their web for the slightest vibration. While she was based on a jumping spider, not an orb weaver or other ambush predator, Good-self, or Arachnae as Scary-self called her, was in all the bugs in her territory, each of which had different degrees of somnolence at different times, and as such, she had possessed some degree of awareness for the entire night. She had let exactly half of the bees that came out of the three hives fly free, capturing all the others and consuming them and the stones within them. Some of the power she fed to Shelob, to make her larger and more capable of jumping--Good-self was a fan of the advantages of leaping for predation--as well as giving her an eye for Lockheed's otherwise unseeable holes. They were not really holes, but folds, she knew, but it was easier to think of them as being holes, just like a nice comfy lair-hole where one might drag a snack back and wrap them up to have later. Her roaming spiders and wasps had found a plentiful harvest of rats and mice which now festooned the lair in a collection of cocoons, at least those that had not already been used to feed her widows. Her wasps and other strong flyers had found an abandoned lot with tall grasses and worked free seeds which they had brought closer and placed in caches here and there in her territory to attract more mice and rats to move in on the largess. Termites and pill-bugs had given a tithe to her larder as well, and she had discovered that she could send hunters out of her range if given strong instructions, and thus gathered a goodly supply of pill-bugs or wood-lice to seed a rotting pile of lumber, there to build a larger population to tithe to her. Water bugs were diving in the grease trap below her, bringing up grease to feed her cockroaches and ants. Other bugs were delving the sewer system, exploring it to the edges of her range, and setting up webbing systems to ensnare passing rats and mice long enough for a lethal sting to be administered. She had noticed that she had much less difficulty seeing and sensing through her insects and bugs now that she shared in their forms. She was a bit saddened that some of what she saw and experienced disturbed the rest of her Scary-self, but she found she was able to somewhat compensate for this by shifting her tiredness around, letting some of her more clever little selves support her Scary-self's processing. During her Good-self's aware periods, between her somnolences, she worked on how to let her widows weave more effectively. She started with a find of one of her wasps at the edge of her range, causing her to move and squeeze into one corner of the building to get close enough. She captured a queen bee and brought her and her entire coterie to the lair. One of the long round sticks was webbed and then hung from the rafters, and the bees built their new nest around it. She had to spend a while uncomfortably pressed against the corner to have the range, but she was able to use wasps, hornets, and the bees, and Lockheed, to detach the beehive and tumble it into one of Lockheed's holes. She was a bit annoyed at that, as the moment Lockheed made his hole, she realized she could feel all the insects for a block around the opening. It had not been obvious the first time, as Scary-Taylor had gone through and then of course she could feel everything on both ends. Now there was no Taylor on the other end, and she could feel it all, which meant she had not needed to wedge herself in the prickly, splintery corner at all. His holes did not last forever, but it was long enough to collect more widows via wasp-air, and bring them through, while the bees were busily rebuilding. They consumed their old nest, to get the wax to build the new one, transferring the honey across. She knew her Scary-self's dimensions, of course, and she soon had a beeswax dressmaker's dummy hanging from the rafter. Where the wood met the floor, termites built a mud mound, anchoring it in place. She thought about having the wasps paper over the dummy, but realized that it would make it unusable to the bees. She had them start another hive, but it would take several weeks to gather enough fresh materials to build another full hive. While the bees were busy, the cockroaches had cleared and cleaned a large square of the floor, and black widows had begun a satin weave upon it, using Taylor's earlier idea of treating it like an apple pie to be topped. Thousands of lines had been laid in a long square, a double-handful of lines at a time, by the spiders, as she had too few to use one spider per line and use the spiders to weave it as they went. Once the entire sheet had been laid, including the consumption of the failed lines where a spider ran out of silk and had to swap out with a fresh one, and go replenish by consuming Taylor's own webbing, a line of glued silk was laid crossways at one end. Shelob stepped in to lay the cross lines, and thousands of ants poured in, dragging every seventh line back across the others, until they touched only at the first cross line. Shelob laid her weft line, and the ants swarmed back across, restoring the seventh lines, and then grabbing the next line over, and dragging it back. In this way, much of the night passed, and a great swath of true satin-weave silk grew on the floor. As morning came, back in the Hebert household, a spider the size of a small cat stepped through into Taylor's room, and dragged a pad of paper and a pen through a fold into the lair, where Good-self daintily made a note for Scary-Taylor to buy and bring them a few jars of honey and some beeswax candles. That would speed things up quite nicely, and not be too expensive. Shelob dragged them back through, returning the items to Taylor's desk even as Taylor was yawning and stretching, waking up to a wash of memories of all she had done the night before. --- Jan 22, 2011 Taylor stumbled downstairs, still groggily going over all the strange images floating through her mind. Danny had clearly been up and about some time before, but he had left a breakfast plate for her to warm up. Adding bread to the toaster was easy, and as she sat down to enjoy her breakfast, Taylor considered what she wanted to do that day. Going to the lair was not particularly necessary at the moment, though it would be very easy with Lockheed's new power. She had to pause and marvel at that in the middle of adding a bit of salt to her re-warmed eggs. Not only did it turn out that she could give powers, at least some, but she had managed to make Arachnae into someone that could give powers. Probably she could only alter and give powers to insects and arachnids and other bugs, but still, that had so much potential for her swarm! She had to stop and refocus on the here and now when her next bite of eggs tasted like bug guts. It had not been unpleasant though, as the taste had been filtered through a being made to eat them. Still, she preferred eggs to taste like eggs. It did lead her to wonder about a termite egg omelette. A sleek black leg appeared in the middle of the air on the table, pushing out her notebook. She accepted it as Shelob withdrew, and flipped it open. Arachnae's handwriting was angular and precise, reminding her a lot of the twitchy motion of spiders. She wondered if it was actually possible for arthropod muscle patterns to work at human scale, or if something wonky was going on inside Arachnae to make it work. She considered the idea. Honey and candles were certainly much more reachably in-budget than a professionally made cape costume or mask when she had looked at them online. She wondered if there would be a market for her living masks? So, she did not need to worry about her lair, she could see that Arachnae had progress on her costume well in hand. That freed her to worry about herself, which meant starting running to tone her form for cape-work, and the stones. She wanted to find more hive stones, to make sure she had a steady supply for Arachnae and her projects, but she also still wanted to find out more about the Tinker she believed to be behind them. What was he up to? What was his goal, his purpose with Brockton Bay? She felt fairly sure that no-one would have noticed his bees, since from the outside they looked, behaved, and physically were normal bees. Decided, she raided her allowance stash and headed out for a late morning run. She noticed as she ran that she was getting much better reception on the visions from her insects. They made more sense to her, and if she grouped a collection together in the right way, she could see through their eyes a reasonable view of a room. Spiders were the most compatible, and the tiny jumping spiders did not need numbers to give her a view. It was low-resolution, like something seen through a screen door, or in a web image that had been zoomed in too far, but it was enough to get the sense of a scene and movement within it. Dragonflies weren't quite as good. They really needed to be stacked, with the exception of Lockheed with his larger eyes, but multiple dragonflies moving in sync would be terribly obvious. If they landed somewhere, though, she could get actually a better static view, at higher resolution, than she could from the jumping spiders. Not everything was so improved. Ants and termites were visually useless - ants could detect light and movement, but not at any great distance. She could stack them in the hundreds and still only have a very low resolution view of something quite close up. Termites were mostly blind, except for the flying caste, and even they had fairly poor sight. Flies were a good medium, though, especially the smaller ones. They could only see a short distance, but it was more like a yard or two, instead of inches to a foot with the ants, and they had better resolution. They did not focus, but she could sort of focus them by moving them back and forth, and they stacked well in her mental view. Better yet, they could believably fly near people's faces without arousing suspicion, letting her identify people by sight remotely now. She slowed as her breathing grew heavy and her legs tired, and began looking for a grocery store. Finding one and walking in, she realized with a start that she had run far enough to be in the docks area. Several of the young men in the aisles had sleeve art that suggested the Azn Bad Boys to her. She tried to avoid their attention and grabbed a hand basket. She found the honey, putting three jars in her basket, then went looking for the candles. She was just reaching the end of one of the aisles when she heard a sharply worded command. Peeking around the edge, she saw one of the toughs standing at the counter, demanding something from the clerk. She could not see any guns, and she had not understood the words. Was this just a gruff individual being testy? Or was the ABB moving in on the docks, demanding protection money? The toughs were out the door before she made up her mind, and she still did not know if it had been a hold-up, a protection racket, or just a punk being rude. As she walked up to pay for the honey, resigned to having to look elsewhere for actual beeswax candles, she considered the issue. As far as she knew, the Docks were currently claimed by the Merchants, the sleazy drug-pushing gang. If the ABB were trying to move in, there might be a turf-war brewing. Her lair was not in the Docks, but she had a proprietary feeling for the area anyway, because it was where her dad worked, and many of his friends, that she knew and liked, worked or lived. Unable to use Lockheed out in the open during the day, she used local flies to sweep the nearby alley before she slipped into it and stepped through a hole opened by Lockheed from within the lair, handing off her honey bottles to Arachnae and then giving her other self a hug. Though she knew Arachnae was not a separate person, she still felt a distinction there, almost as if this was the Taylor of age four or five she was hugging, as if she were Annette, her mother, hugging her younger self. Lockheed opened another hole, this one to the park she had found the first hive in, and several flies went through to scout for her, bringing home to her the realization she had already had as Arachnae, that his portals or whatever they were extended her power's range while they were open. Through the flies and the dragonflies that were already in the park, she found a safe spot between some trees and bushes to step out into. Arachnae reached through after her, putting Mac, her mole cricket digger, into her hand. "Thanks," she said softly to herself, having almost forgotten to bring him. She quickly located another one of the bees, but this time, she noticed yet another difference. Arachnae had not really paid attention to them, except to capture and consume half of them. To her, as she was focused on them to find and locate them, there was something new, something different about them. Their minds were no longer opaque to her. They still were not within the realm of her automatic control, but she could sort of feel, well, slots, sort of, and knobs, and sliders. One of the slots gave her the feeling of a location, and she tried to use it to guide her. It led her back to where she had dug up the first hive. Her carefully resettled dirt was disturbed; there was a new hole here. A new hive. She stood stock still, looking all around her through her insect eyes, searching for anyone who might be paying attention. If the Tinker had been here, had discovered the hive missing and replaced it, he might be watching it, watching for her! --- Jan 22, 2011 She saw no-one paying particular attention to her. A couple walking along the path, a kid playing with a dog while a woman, either a mother or older sister, watched from a bench. No-one that seemed to be keeping an eye on the hive, or paying her any mind. She huffed, and dropped Mac to the ground, preparing the way for him as before. If this was a trap, they had no way to guess she had an instant escape hatch, though she would need to reach the trees first. Then again, why wait? She turned and walked slowly away as Mac dug down. "Going to have to make a Tosh for him," she mused as she passed the first stand of trees to lean against a larger pin oak. Two diggers would be better able to maintain the balance on the hive stones. Mac pushed the stone up and through the hole to lay in the grass. A sleek black leg slid into view from nothingness, and scraped the stone out of view before vanishing itself. Mac slid back down below the hive, and Taylor waited. She pulled away from the tree a bit, and settled down to the ground next to it, drawing her feet in under her, then leaned forward, her insects ensuring that there was no-one watching, and reached into nothingness and pulled out her pillow, slipping it behind her head and resting against it. High in the oak above her, bereft of leaves, spiders began weaving on multiple levels, little webs here and there, creating a sunshade for her without making too large a web in any one spot. The sun had melted the snow the day before, so the ground was dry and comfortable, and though the grass in the park was a poorly brown and a bit crackly, here in the trees the ground had been carpeted with leaves that had since rotted away, but had suppressed the grass, and while here and there were growths of mossy ground cover and fungus, there were none where she had chosen to sit. Other insects slipped in as she moved about, and pulled away the small stones and twigs that might bother her if she turned or rolled and landed on them. In spite of her apparent preoccupation, Taylor was fully aware of the insects in her sphere, and was watching closely for any signs of anyone who might either be the Tinker, or someone working for him, either checking on or replacing the stone. --- One of the honey jars had been opened already, and poured out into a potting tray that had been left behind as worthless, where the bees swarmed it, collecting the honey to store in their hive. While she did not have replacement wax for them, Good-self did have wasps and hornets that made paper nests, and plenty of rotting wood in the yard to supply their needs. Wasps and bees swarmed about in thick clouds, as the dressmaking dummy nest was first papered over with three layers, supports built for it from the ground up, and then the inner nest was once again eaten and shifted to the new nesting location. The temperature of the lair had risen many degrees since they moved in, as the massed insects' movements and activity, combined with their own body-heat, and the sealing of all the various gaps with daubed mud, termite mound, wasp paper, and thick layers of silk, depending on which of her bugs got to it first, except of course for the larger roofline opening, had contributed to a hothouse effect. The difference was enough for Good-self to notice that Lockheed's tunnels did not allow air to cross, for some reason. Nor, of course, did light, else they would not be invisible holes, but blocking photons and not matter made more sense than blocking air, which of course, was matter. A selective barrier? It had not been any part of her ideas or intentions, she had just had the idea that there was a distance-stepping method available that she could tie in to him, and she had done it. The large square sheet of spider silk had been finished, and she scuttled over to it, and lifting it from the floor, felt the surface, and examined it. Its feel did not match her memories of satin, but the appearance did, and she supposed the difference might be simply that she felt through fine hairs, not subcutaneous pressure sensors, while her only memory of touching satin was of course from Scary-self. When Scary-self discovered the hive stone had returned, and became worried about the Tinker finding her, Good-self had a little panic attack of her own, and scurried about trying to come up with something to help. She could not be seen, nor could Shelob or Lockheed, unless Scary-self's life was seriously endangered, for to be seen would invite scrutiny that would endanger her children. She glanced at the egg sac that was being jealously guarded by Shelob. Whenever she was not actively moving Shelob to use her, as Scary-self had just begun to do, causing her to reach out through one of Lockheed's holes, she would run back to her egg sac to hover over it. She moved over to Shelob, and picked up the hive stone. Though she was tempted to try to eat it, her cute fangs tapping with anticipation, she took it and planted it instead, tamping a hole and dropping it in, then snacking on a few more of the captured bumblebees instead. She used Lockheed to open several tunnels to the tree above her other self, to weave sunshades to keep her from burning while she waited, even as lower down, his tunnels formed to accept the more interesting bugs that had moved in to the park since her last visit. This included a few mated female yellow-jackets--the males would have died off with the onset of cold weather--some awesome little beetles that had flashy metallic wings and thorax, a few loner carpenter bees, and most fun of all, a Hercules beetle, an awesome two plus inch long horned beetle. She shared in Taylor's jolt of shock and savage glee when after nearly an hour of sitting and waiting, a new stone appeared above Mac, with no-one in sight, and no other activity in the area. --- Jan 22, 2011 Taylor sat up straight when she felt Mac sensing the reappearance of the hive stone. No-one had done it, she was sure of that. When she was paying attention, and had spread her bugs through the dirt, she could feel footsteps above. She had tested this under the playing child, confirming that she could follow him from beneath, matching it to what she could see above. She knew, therefore, that it had not been an invisible person placing the stone, unless they were also weightless. So, what else could it be? There was nothing in the dirt there that could have done it, no other stones or machines, nothing but dirt and bugs and roots. Maybe it was teleported in from a distance? How many of these things could this Tinker have? If they were being made, what were they being made from or of? --- Remembering the sensations she had been able to feel, in her Good-self she reached out and captured one of the rising bumblebees and felt again of it. A slot with a place or location in it, a couple of slider sort of things, almost like numeric values, a bunch of knobs, some more slots... she mentally grasped one of the knobs and turned it, and started in surprise when the bee spun in her hand. She grabbed all the knobs, holding them still, and opened her hand. The bee stayed still. She let the knobs go, and it rose and flew before she snagged it out of the air again. She poked and prodded until she worked out how to sort of let mental fingers brush against the knobs without turning them, then moved her hand back and forth, feeling the knobs spinning. She held them still, and moved her hand... tried to move her hand. It was as though the bee were glued to a wall or nailed down. Loosening her grip a bit, she found could move her hand back and forth until the bee hit one edge of her hand or the other, then it just stopped. While she played with the bee, her Scary-self had experienced a brain-wave of her own, and had taken off at a run for the nearest corner gas station. She purchased a map of Brockton Bay, then left at a more moderate pace. Settling back near her tree, she unfolded, adjusted, and refolded the map until she found the park she was in, Jenny McMurtry Memorial Park. Now for the test of her insectile proprioception. She had been sure that she would find a strong use for being able to just know where her insects were relative to herself. A fly lit on the paper at one corner of the park, at the same time as a dragonfly settled on the ground in the corresponding spot in the actual park. She repeated the steps for the other corners, then sent a dragonfly to land next to the hive hole. Closing her eyes, she tried to land a fly between the other flies in the same relative position as the dragonfly was to the other dragonflies. A pen was tugged off her desk by a black claw, then nudged into her hand, and without looking, her hand moved to where the fly was and made a small X on the map. She opened her eyes, and confirmed that the fly was in about the right spot on the map. "Looks close enough. Have to find a few more to be really sure." She picked up the map, collected herself and her things, and headed off, feeling out through her swarm-sense for another of the bees to mark. In her lair, Good-self had moved on to trying to probe the hive stones, but found that whatever it was about their insect control that was letting them feel something in the bumblebees, it did not extend to the hives. She could not feel any slots, knobs, sliders, or other effects in it. She tried to get Lockheed to place a hole below the hive Scary-self had just left alone, only to discover that apparently he could not place a hole in a place they had not seen. Mac's nearly non-existent sight either did not suffice, or it was simply because she had not actually looked through his eyes when he was there, being satisfied with knowing where he was. Lockheed opened a portal at the surface next to the hive, and Good-self slipped over to it, waiting while Mac pushed it up, then reached one of her slender furry legs through and knocked the stone through to her side of the portal, then let Mac wander through after, a little bit irritated at herself for forgetting him while she went off to look for more. Scary-self slipped in through another of Lockheed's tunnels a moment later, staying just long enough to lay out the map on the bench before heading back. A little reluctantly, Good-self unfolded it and let flies settle on it to match the dragonflies that Scary-self was placing. She leaned over a marked a little X under one of them, then turned back to her own puzzles. The sliders in the bees did not seem to do much of anything, but when she messed about with one of the slots, she had felt something pass from the bee to the hive, something that she almost thought she could have intercepted. She had tried again, but nothing had been passed the second time, so she had let that bee go, and now she was waiting for another one. When the hives produced another bee, she was ready, her black and white hand flashing out and snatching the bee from the air. Following her instincts, she held it up to her chelicerae, waving them as if eating, then activated the slot. She felt a boost, and noted that the stone in her chest had glowed for a moment. She pushed at it, watching it flare with light. So, that was a remote way of drawing in whatever energy or glow they were collecting. She chittered happily, then whistled in frustration through her spiracles, and went back to make another mark on the map. --- Jan 22, 2011 Scary-self was back home with Angry-man, so Good-self... so, Arachnae, was trying to avoid noticing what Sc... what Taylor was noticing, and to keep from accidentally infecting her other self's speech with her own idioms. She did not want to see Danny's reaction to being called Angry-man, no matter how true it was. She knew she had a good supply of bee-stuff available, and she was trying to decide what to use some of it on. She was tempted to make a sister-daughter-self, but she knew she should practice and get better at it first. A wasp, then. They were the next most useful bug, after spiders and dragonflies, and maybe even before dragonflies once they started heroing. A bit bigger, not too much, maybe two or three inches, to let it have a good supply of venom. She brought a cicada-killer wasp to herself, already one of the largest of wasps, with quite a painful sting for all they rarely stung humans. Drawing up the bee-stuff, she began carefully molding her intentions and the wasp, growing and tweaking it. She could feel as she did it that the bee-stuff would cover for some of her failings, but that it would be better and use less if she was more careful. So she paid attention to things like making sure its spiracle-trachea system could manage oxygenating its tissues, borrowing some branching design from her own system where the bee stuff had already covered for Taylor's failings. When she had a three inch long wasp in her hands, she dove into its venom system. Its volume had increased faster than its surface area, so she had a bit more room inside to work in a trio of glands where there had been only one before. Its primary venom would remain the painful cicada-killer, the second would be pure adrenaline, the same substance in an epi-pen, which Taylor had been considering the expense of. What to do with the third? She briefly considered trying to make it produce healing water, but found that she could somehow sense that it would take many, many times more bee-stuff than she had. That was still a massive revelation, though. That it was possible at all just meant she would have to husband her supplies until she could manage it, and she would be able to heal as well as harm. Lacking the capacity to do that yet, she considered a numbing agent, and finding it within reach, set it as the third option. She drew out the pathways of the venom, making it a two chambered process, where venom could be dosed into a chamber before being injected, so that she could vary the dose being administered. Glancing over at Shelob, she tweaked it to be sterile. She could adjust that later on, once they had made a decision. So far, this was all just variations on what they had already done - get bigger, change the shape a bit, and so on. Taylor had also been considering whether they could induce cape-style powers, though. She had managed to do something like that with Lockheed; but was it a one-off? It had come to her without her really planning or understanding it, the knowledge that she could do it had just been there in her mind. Could she do something more deliberate, more planned? She stroked the wasp in her hands, and it buzzed its wings in response. As Taylor had done, she ran through the local capes in her mind. Armsmaster was a legendary Tinker, and Kid Win was also a Tinker, and she excluded them from the start. A wasp was not really suited to trying to create and use mechanical devices. Vista did something with spaces, making them bigger or smaller, but that was similar enough to Lockheed's ability that she would not be sure it was not just a variant. She needed something different enough to be sure it was a general ability. Gallant did something with emotions, which was again a very poor fit for insects. The closest they really came to having emotions was hive or personal defense instincts and behaviors, or mating behaviors. Aegis had something that made him very durable, but PHO had been cadgey and contradictory about what it was. Shadow Stalker did something with shadows, turned into them or walked through them or something. Walking through them was again too close to what Lockheed did, but turning into them? She felt for whether she could give the wasp an ability to turn into shadow and back. Once again, it felt possible, but at an expense of bee-stuff that was all out of proportion, far more than they could get with their current collection methods in any reasonable timeframe. A twinge of unpleasant emotion from Sc... grr, from Taylor, told her that dinner was over and done and Taylor had finally fallen asleep. Her dreams were turning unpleasant, and it was bothering Good-self. She shifted and stretched, pleased at the note that she could drop the confining proper terms and use what felt right to her mind. Another blast of negative emotion, of fear, of being cramped, trapped, hit her, and her feet buzzed out a staccato note against the floor as she ran in place, wanting to get out, get away. Irritated and acting on a sudden realization of what she could do, she shoved Scary-self's dream focus into Lockheed, and sent him out to fly in the night sky. That would get rid of this confined feeling, and leave her room to concentrate. Indeed, she felt a surge of ecstatic joy, that faded into quiet wondering awe and pleasure, and she looked back down at her wasp. Other capes, Miss Militia could create any weapon, not a good fit for an insect. Triumph shouted, lion's roar or something like that, wasps did not have lungs or an ability to shout. Assault did something unclear with kinetic energy, she did not understand it well enough to even try and phrase it as a power she could grant. Battery, some kind of charging and speed boost. Speed she could do something with, but how would that impact the ability to fly? If the wasp's wings were torn off as soon as it tried to move super-fast, that would be miserable. She thought of Lung, the leader of the Azn Bad Boys gang, who turned into a dragon-like thing with metal plates and fire. How the metal thing would work she could not imagine; heavy metal was not compatible with flying on insect wings. Fire was tricky, but if immunity to flames came with it, it might be workable. Could she grant an ability to produce and be immune to heat and fire? Yes, but again too expensive. A remembered image from Taylor's imagination drifted through her head, and she irritably tried to see if she could grant laser eyes. --- Jan 22, 2011 Seriously? Laser eyes she could do, but not flames? Not only could she do them, but as far as she was able to tell, laser eyes seemed ridiculously cheap. Unwilling to risk her wasp on it, since she found it difficult to credit that it was even possible, much less useful, she gave it a hug and a pat and let it fly off to rest on the rafters, sending several cockroaches up to feed themselves to it. She considered giving the laser eyes to the cockroaches, but decided to start smaller first, to hopefully limit the impact in case it proved problematic. A common housefly flew over. It had maybe twelve days left to live, she judged. She did not bother trying to make it grow or improve it in other ways, she just pushed the laser eyes at it, trying to grant that power to it. It took barely a second, and she felt that it had worked, though it looked no different. "Why was that so easy?" she vocalized. Lacking proper vocal chords and practice both, a listener would not have understood it as words as all, just slightly modulated buzzing from her chelicerae rubbing against each other. "Oh, right," she murmured a moment later. "Because it's in the Book." The fly did nothing notable, and its eyes were not glowing. She looked where it was facing, and saw nothing there either. Squeezing her abdomen to cause air to exit quickly from her spiracles was the closest she could come to a sigh, or she would have certainly sighed. She reached out, feeling the fly with Taylor's power, and her legs rang out a clacking thrum against the floor in her excitement. She could feel slots and knobs and sliders in the fly now! The first slot, when filled with the concept of 'On,' produced a red dot against the wall where the fly was pointed, as if a sniper were lined up, ready to shoot. It jittered about as the fly twitched and moved. --- The smelly tight confines of the locker, the mocking laughter from outside, the nightmarish feeling that Shelob and Arachnae were just the result of her going crazy faded to insignificance when the lights of Brockton Bay spread out beneath her, stars and clouds above, and the light of a waning but still more than half full moon. What was that called? A gibbon moon? Something like that. She rolled onto her back to look up at it, then rolled again and pulled up, soaring into the sky. "Flying dreams are the best!" she cried out, as she angled down and dove towards downtown. She had to pull up a bit when her speed made her wings hurt, so she was not quite able to dive-bomb the streets like she had half-wanted. For a dream, it was amazingly responsive. A slight tilt and shift in control, and she smoothly slid several hundred feet to the left to avoid a radio tower. Downtown came up and she passed swiftly between buildings, then, pushing the dream, she took a nighty degree turn at speed. "Yes!" she shouted, at the sheer ease of it. No slow arcing turn, forget turning on a dime, she could felt like she could turn on a needlepoint! A red glow attracted her attention, zipping down between buildings, and she took off after it, rapidly catching up. "Kid Win!" He was flying on what looked like a flying skateboard, lit up from beneath by a red glow. His armor was red and gold, his eyes hidden by glowing red lenses, and she wondered if her yellow lenses would have looked like that. Now she had Masque, of course, so she would not be using them, which was a little sad. Maybe she could have multiple masks? A young lady was gripping on to buckles on the back of his armor, balancing on the board behind him, her hair flowing in the breeze where his was shorter and only ruffled by the wind. Brown and straight, but wind whipped, she had a mask, and something around her neck on a chain, making a bulge at the top of her chest inside an otherwise skin-tight blue and white bodysuit. Now, who was that? Oh, right, "And Target Practice, awesome!" She zoomed behind them, grinning when she saw the girl look up and behind to see where the buzz was coming from. "I wonder where they are going?" She started out of her reverie and enjoyment when Target Practice threw something at a nearby building, and she felt a sudden sharp pain. "Dreams aren't supposed to hurt? Not a dream, not a dream!" A hole opened in front of them and they shot through, appearing over Winslow High, where she lifted up and pulled away, heading away from downtown towards the docks. "Not a dream, not a dream, what's going on? Lockheed, I'm in Lockheed..." A nightmare, she had been having a nightmare. As Taylor came awake in her bed, still flying with Lockheed, memories filtered in, and she understood what Arachnae had done for her. She smiled softly as she drifted back to sleep. "Frickin' laser beams." "Not safe to test in the lair," she murmured sleepily to Arachnae, or Good-self as the innocent little darling kept calling herself. She flew out to the bay, settling on to one of the still-floating, trapped vessels. Ships had been scuttled seaward, in a line, blocking the bay, but the ships trapped within had been abandoned. Many still floated, that had been well anchored, others had been dragged or sent by waves or wind to the shore, or crashed against the scuttled vessels worsening the barrier. A phalanx of twenty laser eyed houseflies flew through Lockheed's opening to where she waited on the ship, only half aware that she was exerting her power here, far from where she physically was, as she delved in to them, feeling the slots and knobs and sliders. She faced the flies away from her, towards the wheelhouse, and pressed into the first slot, activating all twenty lasers at once. Twenty red dots appeared on the wall. There was little visible between the flies and the wall, but everynow and then a droplet of spray from the waves against the ship would pass through a beam, refracting and revealing it. A fly twitched back and forth, and one of the dots broadened into a line. She giggled, the sound coming through oddly accented in Lockheed's buzzing, and reached deeper into the flies. The twenty dots stretched and warped, some becoming circles, others squares, then several began attempting to form letters. The letters shifted and warped as the flies repositioned, slowly coming together to form a red 'LOCKHEED' floating in the air. Other letters floated around, then digits, as she practiced. The night wore on as she dreamily moved from block capitals to small letters and then cursive, accomplished by having multiple flies all tracing out the same word, each a little bit behind the one before it, creating a continually updated lingering image.