Since Cletus' window was still dark, and I felt enough time had passed, I thought I'd see if I could get him ready to join us properly. "Design caste", I said out loud. Djraine was nearby, and heard me say it. She looked at me and smiled. I gave her a big hug- I couldn't help it.

The semi-familiar voice responded. "Caste name?"

"Tank!" I exclaimed. What better choice could there be for a third caste? We had offense and construction, but now something defensive was in order. I wondered how that caste would alter the crystal caramel crab's form, since it was most definitely NOT a tank right now. The rules of this world seemed to deal with such things itself, so it would be fine. It wasn't as ridiculous as the afterlife was, so it could be trusted.

"Caste name accepted". I swear, every time that voice said that, I felt pretty good. I wasn't going to abuse it, though. Too many castes just for a jolt of dopamine would make it so I didn't even remember who counted as what.

"Select base aspect." I replied with "crystal caramel spider" but it wasn't recognized. It actually sounded like the computer from a famous space opera when it hit an error, which happened at least once an episode. "What aspects are available to me?" I asked, though I heard the error again. "Caste design in progress. Please complete procedure before initiation". Okay computer, or afterlife, or both...

Okay, so I had to choose something, but it couldn't be something I named myself. It had to be an official name of something, which I had access to, and I couldn't do anything else that would require a command until I did. This was annoying! Fine, then. I made my choice, and thought about saying "wolf spider". I had that for awhile so I might as well. I wanted someone with thick legs for a tank, and I didn't think having long hair would be a good idea in a fight because it would just give someone something to grab onto. However, rose hair fit that category too and it had defensive abilities naturally. "Rose hair tarantula" I finally said.

"Select social affinity." The voice was letting me continue, so I was pleased. "Human", I replied.

"Select base instincts." I really did want it to have the crab instincts, but since that wasn't something I could do... "human", I replied again. When I was a human I realized that the only reason my species developed most of what it did was because we were slower, weaker, less perceptive, less armored, and less armed than everything else. Our intelligence allowed us not just to compensate, but overcompensate, for all of this crappiness. Therefore, a human would probably be a good idea. The problem, of course, was that humans were wildly unpredictable, unless you were some kind of psychologist and sociologist and statustician and priest and all sorts of other things at the same time, and also a sociopath and control freak to make sure your expectations were always right. I wasn't all of those things; only some of them, and none of them professionally.

"Select class." The voice asked me something I had already put a lot of thought into. I wanted to say 'blacksmith' but a lot of definitions meant that it only worked with certain materials, and I wasn't sure most of that was even available. It certainly wasn't right now. I also wanted to make sure it would work with both weapons and armor, but also distribute finished pieces, collect loot, and organize whatever repairs were needed and figure out what supplies might be needed for other things. Inventory organization, handling of equipment, item identification. There was one class I thought might work. "Quartermaster", I said. I didn't have to put in a description so I guess someone else had done this before. Hopefully they had the same description.

"Caste complete." Cletus hadn't emerged, but at least his caste was ready for him. It took a few more days for him to emerge. It was within the same few minutes that we got our first visitor. Some of my children had already met the woman, and the ones who did were luckily the ones near her when she came running through the empty spaces in the webs leading to our lake. She saw the corn, first of all, but then she ignored it and started yelling. I only understood most of the words.

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"There are vrlumit wycee on the mwrara! Stam cha angry since the garumesh returned aie-m'chu!" The gardener woman was red-faced and frightened, desperate. I was surprised she had run this far. Maybe she only walked swiftly and then ran when she caught enough of her breath? It didn't really matter, I guess.

Alright, so I'm assuming that the birds returned, but without riders, and the outlying villages that they had been vaguely sent to were being searched for information on what happened or where they went. Luckily, we had taken all the evidence with us. The equipment was stripped and placed where the Yuck wouldn't eat the leather parts, and the corpses were thrown in the back of the main chamber. That was how I got another new aspect! Like I had seen during the funeral, these weren't humans; they only looked very, very much like it. The jewel in their sternum was part of who and what they were, and such a thing was obviously not a human feature.

My year 2300 self didn't think there would be a problem, but she wasn't a student of history and didn't realize what danger the people were really in. My 600,000 year ago self didn't pay much attention to inter-tribal behaviors and didn't understand. My black widow self, maybe ninteenth or twentieth century- judging timeframe from the newspaper I saw as a sapient, was a spider. Three hundred million years ago, I was solitary and wouldn't and couldn't understand such things. In the only life I lived from birth to death though, I did understand. The knights would be sent out to investigate the disappearance of other knights, and would interrogate whoever they met. In any of the villages where they were thought to have disappeared, or more than likely, all of them... people would probably be beaten or killed if they didn't know exactly when and where the missing knights were.

The concepts of 'chivalry', 'honor', and 'nobility' in Medieval and Modern times were extremely different. I enjoyed romanticising the past as much as anyone else, but my year 1500 self kept me forcibly within reality. That me didn't argue with the status quo; I wasn't able to even if I tried. I knew it wasn't actually the year 1500 then, but since the calendars had changed since then, I couldn't really be sure what year it actually was on the new calendar that I had always known after those years.

Cletus hadn't been introduced to any of the villagers, and not even to his brothers, sisters, or me, really, either. His window flashed like I was getting a message on a videophone program, so I switched to it. He was awake! It was pretty dark, but it would be since he was in the back of the cave. I piqued his curiosity and brought him outside. I wanted to see him just as much as I wanted him to see the gardener woman. I should probably get her name. If we were doing introductions now, we should probably do all of them, but a proper introduction to a single person who is flustered is not the best idea.

I called my children, letting everyone know that we were all going to go on a trip, following the woman home. Hopefully we would get there before things got bad, but going unprepared would be stupid. One of the tree branches we hadn't made use out of was smashed off of the log with the morning star, and a few more hits got the its smaller branches to come off. I'd take that one, and of course, I slathered mud onto it where I thought it might stick. We had a few weapons, but none were impressive, at least not to me.

One wooden club, covered in dirt. A cudgel, morning star, hunting knife, a shortsword with a slightly warped blade, and a sharpened, but awkwardly shaped wooden spear. I made sure that Cletus took the plate armor I got from the commander. Its straps were destroyed far earlier, but luckily he kept some of his crystal caramel, though it was more like a thin layer of extremely sticky sweat than whatever else it used to be. The front and back plates stuck to him just fine. Sting didn't take any weapons, but he didn't need any. He was a giant scorpion drider! Cletus, on the other hand, besides his sticky sweat, had altered a bit. His legs were even in length and thickness now, but still looked like hardened blue chitin, which he also had on his upper arms and shoulders. His red hair was short enough that it looked like he had just finished shaving his head with a barber's electric razor instead of a blade. His fingers looked dangerous- his thumb was thick and at a bent angle like someone making a fist, but his three fingers were thick and plated with exoskeleton. Just like Malas and Djraine, he had short red hairs on the underside of his forearms and sides of his spider abdomen. Seeing a crab turn into a spider, who was also half human was interesting! But we were wasting time. I took the lantern because there wasn't a reason not to, and we started to follow the woman back to the village. It was easy enough to find now that we had made a road... well, not really a road, but close enough.

Malas kept getting distracted and wandering off, but luckily there were enough of us that someone was always able to grab a hold of him and get him to rejoin the group before he could have actually gotten lost. I wonder what was going on with him...