The walk to the dungeon wasn’t long, taking only ten or so minutes along a well-worn dirt road heading north out of town. Arriving at their destination, John was taken aback by the sight of a marble pavilion in the middle of nowhere. It was octagonal in design, with eight sides supported by eight romanesque columns. The roof was a perfect dome, smooth, glossy white, and seeming to glow despite the cloud cover.
As they approached, John noticed a group of people milling about the base of the southern steps, one of whom appeared to have something analogous to a clipboard. The human woman looked up at them as they joined at the edge of the small crowd.
“Ah! Ex and Sally, excellent. Crunch and Munch just came out, so you’re free to go in.” the woman said, primly.
“Hi Addy! This is John! He’s going in with us today!” Sally exclaimed with typical exuberance.
“So long as it doesn’t mean you go over your time slot, I don’t actually care,” Addy responded with a wave of her clipboard.
“You’re the best Addy!” Sally gushed.
“Yes, I know. Now go before I declare you late and give your slot to someone else!” Addy pointed at the pavilion with her charcoal stick.
Ex hurried up the stairs and John rushed to follow. Sally, for her part, walked up the stairs like she had all the time in the world.
The center of the structure was a solid expanse of smooth, flat marble. And standing in the middle of it was what appeared to be an enormous set of mirrors. There were seven in all, each nine feet tall and six feet wide. While they didn’t dominate the center of the large construction, they were certainly eye-catching, with golden frames and flawless flat surfaces.
Ex immediately walked to the third mirror and pressed his hand against it. The mirror flashed with light briefly then the image on it changed to a dark, oppressive cave filled with thick strands of spider webbing.
“Just so you’re aware, we’re not responsible if you die,” Ex said.
Sally snorted and John just shook his head. With that out of the way, Ex stepped into the mirror, and the other two followed him.
The transition from pavilion to cave was smooth, like stepping from one room to another. The only way one could tell they’d traveled any distance at all was the abrupt change in scenery. The Portal behind them closed, plunging the cave into darkness that lasted only a brief moment. A golden light appeared hovering over Ex, filling the cave with a soft, illuminating radiance.
“Remind me to get that spell from you later,” John said, even as he looked around.
The cave looked much like it had through the mirror, however looking behind himself he could now see a series of stairs headed upwards. It appeared the portal placed them at the beginning of the third floor. Walking over to one of the spider webs hanging from the wall, John tested it. It wasn’t a sticky web, but it felt both strong and tough. It was a bit thicker than he’d been hoping for. John had expected something more like thin thread, like one might use for sewing. This was more like thread you might use for leather working. You could make a cloth out of it, but it wouldn’t be the beautiful, flowing silk he’d imagined.
“Alright, how long do we have?” John asked, turning back to Ex and Sally who were checking every corner and crevice of the room.
“About two hours,” Sally replied. “Ah! Found one!” Her hands lashed out lightning fast and she grabbed out an eight-legged abomination. It was squirming in her grasp but she held it by the back of its head and cephalothorax. The spider was maybe a foot and a half in size, its coloration was brown with designs of silver and gold, and it was covered in tiny bristles. The giant eyes and mandibles were what had John’s attention though. They were both highly creepy and made him regret his life choices.
“Well,” said Ex with a grin. “Don’t just stand there John, milk the giant spider for webbing!”
“I hate you,” John said, even as he slowly approached the struggling creature. It hissed and redoubled its efforts to escape, but Sally had a good grip and it was unable to extract itself.
Reaching forward, John grabbed the spiky, rough abdomen and pulled it forward, finding the spinnerets. The thrashing spider made it hard to keep his grip and he honestly wasn’t sure where to go from here. The video had involved sedating the spider, not manhandling it! Looking at the spinneret he could see a small piece of silk poking out. Steeling himself, he grabbed the fine strand and pulled with slowly increasing strength.
The silken thread stretched out but the thrashing of the spider made it difficult to pull consistently. Still, John had a good grip now and he released the abdomen and backed away. Using his free hand, he created a dowel of stone which he started wrapping the strand around. Again, the jostling and jerking made the task difficult, but once he had it tightly wrapped, he started rotating the stone with a bit of magic, spinning it to extract more of the silk.
Ex whistled. “I didn’t actually think that was going to work,” he said and John gave him a glare even as he sped up the draw, letting the dowel drift left and then right, to cover the entire thing in an even coating of thread.
Extracting the silk took almost seventeen minutes and netted John around what he estimated to be eighty yards of silvery silk. Upon inspection, John found that the silk of this spider was much thinner than that which he’d found attached to the wall, being maybe one fourth the width and much more suited for regular tailoring or weaving.
“Is this the smallest the spiders get?” he asked curiously.
“Nah, there are some as small as Ex’s hand, but they come in colonies so we usually wipe those out with fire,” Sally explained.
John frowned, this thread was probably still too thick for what he wanted, but he’d need smaller spiders for smaller thread. He supposed this would just have to do.
“Next we should try killing one and see if we can still extract the silk,” he commented. Sally and Ex just nodded, then carefully walked into the next room, burning the long, blocking strands of webbing as they went.
Killing a spider and extracting its webbing proved to be a no go, something about being dead prevented the webbing from flowing anymore, so John and Sally had to wrangle the live spiders when they could catch them. This was in between fighting off colonies of small spiders and ambushes from the larger ones.
Spiders had dropped on John more than once, and at first he panicked and did the spider dance. However, he eventually realized the spiders were actually having a harder time hurting him than he did them. It turned out that having a high constitution was good for more than just dealing with chookers.
Eventually their time in the dungeon came to an end. After collecting an estimated three hundred yards of spider silk they made their way to the final chamber where a giant spider dominated the room. It was easily six feet across, and covered in sharp bristles. Despite that, its carapace was actually quite beautiful, all gold and royal blue. Of course, the effect was ruined by the eight enormous eyes and the fangs as long as John’s forearms.
Sally immediately charged forward, slamming into the bulk of the creature while wrapping herself in a corona of fire. Ex followed her in, his shield and mace leading the way. The two wailed on the giant spider in what was hardly a fair fight. The spider danced and jumped, it even tried to entangle them in webbing. Sally however, was faster, always being where the spider was headed, and her fire was more than hot enough to burn away the webbing.
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For his part, Ex was more about keeping the creature off balance and stealing focus away from Sally. His attacks lacked her punch, and he used no offensive magic, but he managed to make a nuisance of himself that the queen just couldn’t ignore.
In a few moments the two had beaten the queen down and burned most of her to ash. As the body ceased moving a griding sound heralded a new set of stairs appearing at the back of the room. In addition, a mirror rose out of the floor, showing the image of a familiar pavilion. Meanwhile, right next to the stairs a wall slid out of place to reveal a large chest. Ex hurried over to open it with Sally right on his heels. John followed them both at a more leisurely pace, knowing that nothing in the chest was for him.
“Trash, some coins, and a few earth stones,” Ex muttered annoyedly. Sally just shrugged.
“Hey, at least I’m paying you for the spider silk!” John said cheerily. “That’s thirty silver you just made!”
Ex perked up at that. “You’re right! We should do this more often!”
“Maybe, I’m not sure how much more silk I’ll need, but I suspect this will actually be enough. Which means I need to take that post I made down,” John explained. “That said, if Sam, the weaver, likes this stuff, it might become an export, in which case she’d probably pay to have it harvested.”
“Here’s hoping!” Sally exclaimed as she jumped through the mirror.
Standing back in the pavilion they could hear Addy shouting “Ex and Sally are out! NEXT!” The woman then glared at them until they got out of the pavilion.
“She seems high strung,” John commented.
“She took the task of organizing all the delves on her own, without support or pay. The only reason it sticks is because most of us like her way better than the first come first serve option,” Ex explained. “She doesn’t actually have any authority beyond what we give her, and some days not even that.”
“That sounds like a sucky job, why does she do it?” John asked.
“Don’t know, but she did name her character Administrator, so… maybe she just likes organizing things?” Ex suggested. “Now, enough about Addy! Silver!” John snorted and passed Ex the coins as they started the walk towards town.
Once more the walk was short, and once they were in town Sally and Ex announced that they were off to watch a movie while they waited for their next slot. John bid them farewell then (after stopping to remove the post from the job board) made his way over to Ellie’s stall.
“Hey Ellie!” John said brightly.
“Oh! John, did you get what you were looking for hon?” she asked, eyeing a bit of webbing that was still stuck in John’s hair.
“Yep!” he said happily, appearing one of the spools and showing off the pearly white silk.
Ellie looked at the spool with wide eyes, then tentatively touched the silk. “It’s not sticky?” she asked, perplexed.
“Not all spider webs are sticky, they have to intentionally decide to have sticky silk,” John explained.
“Well, I’ll be honest, I thought you were entirely crazy. But this is quite fine. Not as thin as I think Sam would like, but she should be able to make something out of it,” Ellie explained.
John nodded. “Where can I find her?”
“Give me a minute and I’ll show you to her house hon,” Ellie said as she started disappearing baskets. A moment later the stall was empty and she was leading John down the street to a small house near Phillip’s shop. She knocked on the door and then waited patiently. After a few moments a faint shuffling could be heard from within the house, then the sound of a chain rattling as the door opened a crack.
“Whoizzit,” the voice was muffled, but the speaker sounded both sleepy and annoyed.
“It’s Ellie hon, I’ve got John with me, he wants to talk to you about some weaving,” Ellie responded with pleasant cheerfulness.
“Do you know what time it is?” the voice, ostensibly Samantha, replied.
“Almost noon, well time for people to be up and about,” Ellie continued her cheerful assault.
“No weaving to be done, don’t shear the dogs for another month,” Sam groused.
“John has a new type of thread he wants you to look at,” Ellie said, making a grabbing gesture to John. He handed her a dowel of thread.
“Lemme see,” Sam said, just before a knobby old hand snaked through the door and grabbed the dowel from Ellie’s hand. Ellie let it go without hesitation.
There was a long moment of silence from inside, then the door closed, the chain rattled, and it opened fully to reveal an elderly woman in a heavy dress and shawl. Her face was weathered and craggy, and she had a slight stoop. Gnarled and wrinkled hands danced across the silken threads as ancient eyes squinted at John thoughtfully,
“What is this? It’s silk but it’s not worm silk, too thick, not in enough strands. All one piece? Eighty yards on this spool. Light, very light. Spider silk?! I’ve heard of spider thread but rarely, every so often some fool tries to use tiny strands of webbing to make clothes. I suppose you’d get something very fine if you could use that but it’s silly. This comes from the dungeon spiders? Giant breeds I’d guess, still remarkably fine though,” Sam muttered, mostly to herself it seemed. Finally, after another minute of pawing at the strands she looked at John intently. “How much cloth were you hoping for?”
“A piece of fabric about thirty inches by ten,” he replied.
“Well this won’t cut it, you’ll need at least…” she trailed off as she examined the thread again. “forty-two hundred yards,” she pronounced finally and nodded her head in a sagely fashion.
“Forty-two hundred?” he asked dumbly.
The old woman shrugged. “Give or take a few yards, yeah. How much you got?”
“Three hundred,” John said almost numbly. It’d taken almost two hours to gain three hundred yards of silk, if he needed almost four thousand more it’d take him nearly twenty-four hours of just harvesting to get the amount he needed. It’d also cost him almost four gold to pay for that much silk. There was no way he could gather this all himself, he’d have to convince other people to do it for him, that meant he’d have to take their word on how much they brought out… or did he?
“How did you know how much was on the dowel?” he asked Sam.
“Well, I used Inspect on it, didn’t I? Don’t tell me you didn’t try identifying your own spool of thread?” The old woman proceeded to cackle as John shook his head. “Always Inspect everything. You can get taken for a ride if you don’t.”
John eyed the spool and used Inspect.
[Spider Silk Spool]
* Type: Ingredient, Material, Item.
* Length: ~80 yards
* Quality: Good
* Description: Harvested from dungeon born giant spiders this webbing is composed entirely of dragline silk and is useful in a variety of applications, though most notably it is suitable for use in textiles.
“Why does it say about eighty yards?” he asked, perplexed.
“Cross skill interaction. Your Measure isn’t high enough to give a precise amount but it’s high enough to measure the bulk to within a certain tolerance, about eighty yards, give or take,” Sam said. “Now hand me the rest of it,” she said, making a grabby motion with her unoccupied hand and John passed her the other three dowels. She took them and disappeared them into her own inventory. “Come back when you’ve got the rest,” she said, and then promptly closed the door. A moment later the rattling of the chain pronounced it locked once more.
“And that,” Ellie said with her ever present smile, “was Sam.”
“O-okay,” John stammered a little, slightly shocked at the abrupt ending to the conversation.
“Don’t worry hon, she’s not the most agreeable sort, but she’s still good people,” Ellie assured him, then started on her way back down the street. “Anyway, it sounds like you need more silk! Best get to it I think.”
John nodded and sighed, then followed her back to the square where he logged out for lunch.