Fate Deals the Cards: Fifty-Two Pickup Part 2: The Hermit

Ch: 3 Man-Eater

All night long I chatted with the big green spider lady… She eventually sweet talked her way up my tree to join me in the web hammock I’d constructed, high above the forest floor. Fortunately, I had over-built the thing pretty obsessively, since I had no desire to fall from my perch in the night.

As morning approached, the conversation shifted back to my situation; as she once more tried to talk me into turning myself in.

“You really should consider coming back with me… Once I explain the situation, our team leadership will certainly leave you in my care…”

“No chance Mabel… you seem cool, but your friends didn’t seem like they were too concerned with my ultimate fate, beyond their desire to secure an ‘interesting specimen’ for their expedition.” I answered sharply, as sunrise crept over the mountains to the east.

“I have no desire to be left in anyone’s care, I’d rather vanish into the woods than be an exhibit in a zoo.”

“What will you do? How will you manage alone?” She asked gently. “There are no sentient beings on this fragment of a world; only wildlife and the freakish monsters that appear in such places. If you stay here, you will be all alone…”

“And I won’t be alone in whatever cage I wind up in, wherever you ladies come from? Will I wind up in a traveling freakshow? In a laboratory, vivisected to sate some-spider’s idle curiosity?” I asked, none too gently. “Your friends made it clear that my wishes and personal autonomy were not a priority.”

Something about this eight legged lady put me at ease, even when she was encouraging me to trust her highly untrustworthy colleagues. I began to get suspicious when she urged me to ‘just come back and talk to them’... and I almost went along.

“Are you screwing around with my emotions again, Mabel?” I asked wearily. “Because we talked about that already.”

“The magic in my voice is an innate part of me…” She mumbled, sounding embarrassed again. “Lord Aclintherios blessed me with a gift for oratory and debate, I struggle to restrain its magic at times.”

“Magic…” I sighed weakly. Throughout our long conversation I had been studying the construct of webs and bones she’d created to give me a voice, in the manner of her people. The instrument was too solid, too resonant and too damn loud to be anything but magical… I could feel it, thrumming and singing from deep inside the device.

“You did something with the way the threads are arranged… and there’s something more…”

“Yes, young spider. If you can see that, you are gifted with

the spark of magery… Which is yet another reason to return to civilization with me.” She insisted gently… without any extra influence.

“I think not.” I answered curtly, punctuated by a trill of gracenotes that closed the issue definitively, from my perspective. “I’m open to meeting you again, just you. But I’m not going to become an exhibit in a zoo. You’ll have to catch me… and I’ll fight for my life.” I shot her a dirty look when she prepared to say something.

“I’m certain that I’m venomous and I think you ladies know that, so let’s just forget about trying to snatch me, ok?”

“I have already informed the leadership team that I object strongly to their ongoing efforts to capture you.” She announced smugly. “I wrote a memo to headquarters and forwarded it to the entire team, as well.” She seemed to consider the matter resolved, since she’d done her paperwork.

“A memo…” I sighed, deeply underwhelmed by her response to my would-be abductor’s plans. “When they’re extracting my brain for research, will you send a strongly worded letter to the director?”

“Certainly!” She sang. “As a sentient, your rights should be respected!”

“Yay for team civil liberties…” I answered tepidly and with considerable disdain dripping from my instrument. She entirely missed my sarcasm, of course.

“It’s dawn, I’m hungry and your friends are still down to put me in a cage, so I’mma leg it into the woods and find something to eat… If no one comes hunting me, I’ll hang around nearby-ish.”

I waved a free leg to emphasize my next point. “If I even suspect that I’m being hunted, you’ll never see my ass again.”

With that, I handed her back her instrument and leapt for a net that I’d set up a short hop away, from my perspective. It was a good fifteen yards to my landing pad, way too far for any of the ladies to follow me.

“I will leave your voice here, in your web, Gary Ward, human. It will be here if you find a need for it. My team will extract from this dungeon world in three days, I will reveal nothing of your current location.” She called out to me as I leapt for my next tree.

I had to admit, Mabel seemed like she was an alright dame. During our long, rambling talk, she’d given me some great advice on what my spinnerets and web glands could do, with a little focus and practice. It turns out, spiders don’t work metal or wood in their crafts…

When possible, everything they… or , I suppose, we made was entirely textile based; and that meant everything.

Apparently, the spider homeworld was just one vast interconnected web… An actual, physical interweb, transmitting information across their world. My inner nerd was super curious, while the rest of me was super interested in not getting caught by Mabel’s friends.

She had no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned woodworking, in my study of her unusual and macabre instrument. Mabel seemed startled by the idea of cutting down a tree and drying it out for the purposes of crafting objects. “Really? How odd… If you say so.” Was about all I could get out of her on the topic of lumber.

Despite the fact that several of the lady spiders wore small jewels and the occasional ornament of gold or silver, metal was also completely unfamiliar to them… culturally.

They saw metal as a foreign curiosity, a luxury import and a display of wealth.

The big green lady seemed deeply incurious about metalwork and metal tools; to the point that I began to wonder if she was screwing with me. It turned out that spider society never unlocked the skills of woodworking or metalcraft; remaining blissfully dependent on their own silk and the remains of their prey for all of their daily needs.

Silk could do an awful lot, including tapping into whatever mysterious energy Mabel used to make that little instrument sing out so loudly and carry so far…

The instruments were one of the few exceptions to the all textile rule, utilizing animal bones and skins in their creation. The art and craft was painstaking and required specific ‘gifts and blessings’ be granted to the craft-spider by one or more of their many, many deities. Only a very few artisans crafted new voices, which made Mabel a kindred spirit, in a way.

She had a profound and burning passion for her craft and the instruments, most of which were family heirlooms passed down for untold generations, like Mabel’s own. She had waxed poetic about the superlative quality of her voice, made by her great, great grandmother, from giant ape bones and hides that the old lady had hunted herself.

I had no plans to seek out a giant gorilla and battle it for crafting materials, so I listened with interest and tried out the web tricks she had to teach me.

There was a smooth, strong silk, of course… and an entangling variant, coated with globules of partially congealed silk proteins and some enzymes that kept it sticky.

Exuding the glue by itself was also simple… That was going to be handy, the stuff hardened slowly, but cured hard. The glue was so hard and resonant that I decided that carbon fiber should take the day off to think about its future plans.

Things got really interesting when she showed me how to produce a variant of the sticky thread that was studded with tiny nodules of fully hardened glue, each little gem of epoxy enclosing a nifty little knot in the silk cord.

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With a strand of that between my forelimbs, I could quickly notch and cut animal bones, an essential skill for any-spider who wanted to craft objects. I was just two days into my new life and I had cordage, glue, textiles… and a damn saw.

I spent a long and almost wasted morning hunting for breakfast, the wildlife was pretty uncooperative and skittish. In the end, I pounced on a surprisingly large and cocky possum-like creature that tried to play dead when I lunged for him.

Turns out, I’m hecka venomous and it worked fast too; the poor thing barely got out a squeak when I bit its throat.

The joke was on me, he tasted awful; just-ass nasty. Those things were off the menu unless I got pretty desperate… chewing on leaves desperate.

I spent the week… learning the ropes… of web building and silk crafting. I know…

Since I was alone in the woods, I had a lot of time to think and that pun was just too awful to forget. So, anyway, I figured out how to do some nifty things with my silk and learned more about the local fauna.

I built snares along game trails and in bushes, strung nets among the trees and generally sampled the local ground dwelling fare… It was all pretty nasty. The small hill goats were the least offensive tasting, but they were not, by any means, ‘delicious’.

Barely edible was my assessment and that was a firm decision, backed up by rigorous testing. I tried letting one dangle for a day, cocooned in my web and full of my venom to age a little. That turned out to be a slight improvement in flavor, but it stank so badly that I had trouble catching anything else for two days afterward.

On that second night after the aged goat debacle, I made a nest a few trees over and hung a few webs up to catch any flyers that might be flitting about at night. I had hopes that maybe some kind of tasty bird might fly into my trap…

Deep in the night, a violent tug at my web jolted me awake, as something large hit my netting, high above the forest floor. Something big was entangled in my web and it was throwing a fit!

My anchoring trees swayed and lurched wildly enough that I might have been thrown from my web; if I’d been dumb enough to nest in a tree my web was secured to...

I had a few thin notification strands attached, to wake me if something struggled; but otherwise, my nest was free standing, isolated from the web in a tall sequoia at the edge of my chosen clearing.

I was not nearly fool enough to climb out on my web in the dark to envenom my prey. If it was good and stuck, I could tend to it much more safely in the morning. Likewise, if it was big and strong enough to break free of my web, I didn’t want any part of it, especially not in the dark.

Whatever it was, it would remain a mystery until dawn. I had excellent low light vision, but the stars provided almost no light under the boughs and I had yet to see a moon of any sort in the sky.

A battle for survival in pitch darkness against an unknown and clearly mighty foe was way too stupid an idea to entertain. Instead, I took my scaredy-spider ass a quarter mile away and tucked into my secondary nest, hidden in a stand of tough, thorny trees.

I had a single thin strand running to a dry bush a few dozen yards outside my thorntree nest, it would keep rustling and rattling as long as my web kept getting tossed about.

If it fell silent, that would mean either my prey had exhausted itself, or escaped. As strong as the thing felt, I was good with either option… unless it was delicious. I really needed something tasty after my last few meals. About a half hour after the initial strike on my web, the tattle tale bush near my nest fell silent, leaving me a long, silent night of tense speculation.

Dawn brought me out of my snug little nest among the thorny trees and into a mess. Two of my enormous anchor trees had been pulled down to the forest floor, pinning whatever was ensnared in my web beneath their crushing bulk. Still it struggled, trapped under that terrible weight of fresh timber; I could hear it thrashing among the tangled webs and branches.

From a freestanding sequoia near the scene, I took in the chaos from above. A black, shiny staghorn beetle the size of a garbage truck was pinned in my web and half crushed under several tons of fallen trees. Caught in mid-flight by my stupidly strong webbing, its armored wing covers were pinned open, exposing its less armored interior to the falling trees.

The ginormous bug was still thrashing and struggling weakly, even though it was all but done in. I slipped close and sank my fangs into its body, delivering a solid dose of my venom; probably enough to kill it twice over from full health. I backed away after biting it once more, on the other side of the beast’s truck sized abdomen, just to be sure.

“No, It is not a sapient creature… That is a male Arachnean of the spider domain. They exist nearby this fractional world… There must be an entrance into their domain as well.” A strange, buzzing voice called out from a thicket nearby.

I jumped for the nearest clump of brush and vanished into the bracken and understory trees quick as can be; before I knew what was happening, really.

“We should withdraw, since it is likely the mate of one of the females of the species.” The voice continued, calmly addressing someone else who also remained unseen. “The females are quite intelligent and reasonable, though I do not possess their language. Males are simply large, dangerous predators that are best avoided.”

“I din’t know, Skrithi’ee… The way it acted seemed more than just an animal.” A rough and male human voice muttered quietly. “Any chance it might stalk us?”

“None, lord Flintshard. With a meal like that in its web, I doubt it will hunt again this month.” The buzzing voice replied. “Since it has slain our prey, we should begin our hunt anew. If a party of Arachneans is on world, this is now a race. If you wish to find and slay a ranked monster first, we should proceed…”

“Well, what about that thing? It killed our bug, if we kill it, won’t it still count?” Yet another voice demanded, while I was busy dealing with a complex and deeply disturbing problem of my own.

A shining pane of semi translucent golden light was shimmering in front of my two main eyes, while leaving my remaining six unbothered. That was super disorienting all by itself!

The golden panel was another whole mess of crazy ingredients stirred into the loony-bin gumbo I was boiling up for dinner. There was even text on the shimmering pane of light that kept partially blocking my vision in some very confusing ways.

Congratulations! As the first sentient being to defeat a monster three ranks above your own level in single combat, you have become the first Dungeon Lord of this Dungeon World!

“As a non sentient, the dungeon system will not perceive him as a viable candidate for lordship of this realm. We should continue our hunt and leave him unmolested.” That buzzing voice said, still sounding calm and cold in the dense forest mist.

“Attacking that creature will only antagonize whoever brought him here.” The cold, almost mechanical voice said firmly. “I will not participate in such a venture, as it lies outside my contract. I strongly suggest you refrain, in any case. They are formidable and dangerous beasts, even if his mate does not appear during your battle.”

I was liking this reasonable sounding creature, but it also sounded like their assumption that I was just an animal was saving me from a fight. I had no clue what was going on, but it seemed like they were hunting monsters in hopes of getting one of my new golden panels of annoying text for themselves. Three more windows had stacked up under the first, while the being was talking.

As the first Dungeon Lord of this reality, you may freely choose its initial name and general theme. Later changes to these initial parameters may incur costs and penalties, based on dungeon growth, status and activity.

Lordship of this reality may be freely transferred to a willing and eligible sapient by mutual consent. Lordship will transfer to any sapient that slays the current Dungeon Lord. If the current Dungeon Lord is slain by a non sentient or by misadventure, the lordship will remain vacant until primary conditions are met by another sapient being.

With that info in mind, I slipped back into the forest and hunkered down, listening through a bit of web I left in the bushes near the clearing. The old tin can on a string method worked almost magically well, when I used my silk to construct a diaphragm and conductor; the fidelity was impossibly high…

“So now what, back to base camp?” Another voice asked, accompanied by the sounds of quite a few boots marching on the forest floor. “I doubt there’s another A rank monster in the vicinity…”

I had already tasted my giant monster bug and I was not prepared to eat him, unless I was starving; he tasted like hot, mouldy cardboard. Instead, I followed the voices, at a very, very discreet distance and from the tree-tops.

I couldn’t listen in while I was on the move, but following their movements through the silent forest was quite easy, thanks to my super sharp spider senses. I trailed the party without making visual contact, tracking them by sound and scent, since I was bright white and covered with colorful splashes of neon colored fur.

The ‘base camp’ was a tidy collection of cabins, assembled from the forest’s bounty, All green lumber log cabins, chinked with mud and moss… Except for sturdy and well varnished doors, windows with actual glass in them and clay roof tiles.

A neat corral and simple barn sheltered a small herd of horses and donkeys, surrounded by a loose ring o a half dozen small cabins.

All the outward facing walls were blank and sturdy log affairs with a palisade stretching between them pierced by two gates. It was obviously a wildlife deterrent and would hinder me, not even slightly.

One gate stood by the shore of a fair sized lake with a few canoes tied onto a humble pier and the other faced a lightly wooded plain, stretching down a wide, fertile valley.

I really liked the look of the place, aside from the people I saw scuttling around and greeting the returning party of hunters. They all seemed to be really short and burly, even the women. Maybe it was some trick of my spider eyes, but they looked almost like dwarves… Fantasy dwarves with the whole bearded and robust, hard drinking attitude.

Only one being stood out among the twenty or thirty people milling about and having a safari in my new dungeon world. Moving among them casually, aside from staying far from the horses, was a long, angular green mantis. The creature produced that weird, buzzing voice by rubbing its legs and wing cases together, simulating humanoid speech without the usual apparatus.

I strung a parabolic web in a tree overlooking the compound and ran a slim line to carry the sounds of the camp to my new hideout. I staked my claim on a hidden nest among the spikiest and thorniest bushes and trees I could find… High up on a hillside that had a good view of the action, just under a quarter mile away.

I was most keenly interested in the mantis creature, since it was the only being I’d met that seemed disinclined to kill me at first sight. I spent a week working on crafting a voice for myself, while eavesdropping on the humanoid camp. It turned out they were actual dwarves… hard drinking, rowdy and good natured. They interacted with the mantis being cordially, since the creature seemed to be a contracted guide and was highly professional at all times. The dwarves clearly held reservations about the creature and kept a distance from those long, barbed forearms, perhaps by simple instinct.

Skrithi’ee was pretty terrifying, at nine feet long and slightly more massive than a good sized pony, the urbane and intelligent armored insect predator was not a being to trifle with.

Several times over the week I listened in, frustrated dwarves would bring up the idea of hunting me down; since there seemed to be no more monsters of sufficient level in the area.

“Maybe it’s a monster spider, just with no obvious mutations…?” Was the most frequent suggestion.

“If it’s just an animal…” Was the runner up in popularity.

Each time, the mantis guide would flatly refuse. “My contract stipulates that I shall not participate in the hunting of any member of any sentient race… Female Arachneans are sentient, thus he is not a valid target.” The creature insisted firmly.

“Further attempts to influence my decision will void our contract. Do you wish to retain my services?”

They did wish to retain the matis’ services… The dwarves were grotesquely clumsy in the woods. They clanked, stomped, banged and grunted their way along, scaring off everything for a half mile, whenever they went on a hunt.

Skrithi’ee, on the other… whatever I have instead of hands, moved in silence. The mantis vanished into the woods as soon as I lost sight of it, every single time. It was a master of the slow, silent stalk, where I was built to lie in wait and pounce. More than once I found myself stalking her, as she circled the compound, carefully trying to figure out who was spying on the camp.

I noticed right away, that if I stared at her too long or too intensely, she would feel it on some level and try to search me out with her own subtle and refined senses… Senses I sensed with my own, spider senses…

Magic was seeming like a more reasonable explanation for a lot of the weirdness I was experiencing. Of course that was in addition to all the mundane, ‘You’ve been reborn as a giant spider!’ and ‘Dungeon Lord’ stuff I was dealing with already.

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