--- Aranea ---

Aranea was looking at the people in the carriage with new eyes.

Not literally new eyes. Despite how much she had grown over the past day, all eight of her eyes were still her original set. They were just a lot bigger now. Rania said that bigger eyes were cute, which was great. Maybe people would be less arachnophobic if they thought she was cute?

Her literal eyes were cuter now, but the metaphorical new eyes with which she was looking at the people in the carriage were much more important.

That was because her metaphorical new eyes were actually her consciousness!

She was sapient now! That was weird and new, and she had so many new thoughts in her head now.

Like for example, yesterday she hadn't known what a metaphor was, or how eyes could be metaphorical. But now she did!

It was weird and confusing, but fortunately Rania and Pebble were helping her cope with it by explaining things to her. They really were so nice. But that wasn't even the best part.

No, the best part was that Rania was family now!

There had been a big discussion earlier about something called "legal status" because Aranea was a very smart spider now, and also the size of a pony and really, really strong, and apparently all of that meant that she couldn't be Rania's pet anymore.

Aranea had been very upset when she heard that. She liked being Rania's pet!

But then Rania said she wanted to adopt Aranea as her little sister instead!

That was so cool!

When Rania asked her if she wanted to be adopted, she had vigorously nodded her head, because she knew now that that was how humanoids said "yes".

Aranea was so happy to have such an awesome big sister now. She had had big sisters before, but they all got eaten. She was pretty sure that Rania would not get eaten though, because she was the best.

Aranea continued to look at people with her metaphorical eyes.

No. wait. She was looking at people with her actual eyes, which were cute, but she was also looking metaphorically as well? With a second set of eyes? She wasn't entirely sure how that worked. Did she now have eight cute eyes, and eight metaphorical eyes, for a total of sixteen eyes? She would have to ask Rania or Pebble later, but for now she would continue her metaphorical and also literal observations.

Rania was talking to her Sidekicks and praising them for defeating their own mini-boss.

The Sidekicks all looked very happy that they all survived and did their jobs well. Only Lynn was a bit strange, because she sometimes got this forlorn look on her face when she looked at her now empty wine flask.

Aranea didn't know much about the Sidekicks, but she felt a strange kinship with them. They were also following Rania around, just like Aranea did! Aranea knew that she was much cooler than them though, because she defeated a super powerful Bad Guy while they only defeated a minor Bad Guy, who maybe wasn't even all that evil anyway?

There was some disagreement on the general level of evil-ness of the people they had defeated.

Rania said that Maru was Good, because she was dating Atrog and therefore must be Good by osmosis. Atrog said that wasn't how it worked, but Aranea trusted that her big sister knew what she was talking about.

Rania also said that Cilia was clearly evil because she said "We will discuss your performance later" to Maru, which sounded super ominous. But then Dov said that this was not evil at all because getting an honest performance review was a good thing and something to look forward to. Apparently Rania's comment was a little bit offensive against Brytius' religion? So her big sister apologized for that.

Aranea didn't really understand any of this. Being able to think was nice, but also a lot of work. She would probably need to kill more people before she was able to follow along with this sort of discussion. It looked like that was how getting smarter worked.

In any case, regardless of relative levels of evilness, she felt a bit smug about how the Bad Guy she defeated had been way stronger than Maru. Luckily the Sidekicks couldn't tell how smug she was through her body language and didn't seem upset with her at all.

Lynn even gave her some wine earlier, and she loved it, but then Atrog took it away and said a pony-sized spider was bad enough without being drunk. She thought that was kind of mean of him, but then Rania said that she wasn't sure if Aranea was old enough to drink yet, because she didn't know how to translate spider-years to humanoid-years or how awakening affected that. Aranea did not really understand what any of that meant, but if Rania was worried then she supposed she should stop drinking wine. Her big sister was the best, and she didn't want to disappoint her.

Some of her physical eyes and most of her metaphorical eyes came to rest on Galanys, who was looking back at her and waving her hand.

Aranea tried to wave back, but the movement felt odd because she didn't have hands.

She liked Galanys, because Galanys wasn't scared of her like some of the others. She also knew how to pet her properly, which was great. She had done that wrong at first, but then Rania had shown her how to do it right, and since then Galanys had sometimes given her scritches that felt amazing, just like a dog.

She wondered how she knew what petting or scritches were, or that dogs liked those. She had seen dogs before, back before she was sapient, but how could she know all of those things now if she hadn't been able to understand these things back when she saw them? Her memory didn't make sense to her.

But Pebble said "Don't worry about it."

It was the same reason that she could now understand Common. Getting stronger meant getting smarter, and she would learn basic things like these for free.

She thought that didn't sound very logical, but he said "Seriously, don't worry about it. Or else it might stop working".

That sounded bad. Rania said that Pebble was very wise and smart, so she trusted that he knew what he was talking about.

She decided that ignorance was bliss, and chose not to think about this topic anymore.

She liked Pebble a lot. He was helping her cope with her newfound consciousness, and she was very glad for the help. Even before she became sapient he had always been very nice to her. She still wasn't sure how she was able to hear him at all, but that was probably another case of "Don't worry about it".

Galanys was sitting next to Dov, so she was who most of Aranea's metaphorical eyes were drawn to next.

Dov had tried to use her telepathy on Aranea because she was sapient now. It kind of tickled, and she did hear something in her head, but then Dov cut the connection and said she still had a headache from the weird thingy they found that made her eyes glow and she would rather not risk it right now. But it sounded like they would be able to talk soon.

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Aranea was looking forward to it. She really wanted to introduce herself properly to all of her companions.

Hopefully they would all be friends!

Dov smelled differently now, and looked human again. She was talking very excitedly about all the weird things she saw when she touched the thingy, and how her genes were now even weirder than before and how cool all of that was. Aranea hoped that this meant it wouldn't take too long for Dov to recover and use her telepathy.

Maybe telepathy could even help Aranea make friends with other people? Maybe people would be less arachnophobic if they could hear her talking to them in their heads? That sounded like a reasonable assumption to her.

Her metaphorical eyes settled on Balron and Whiskers. Whiskers had bravely given her life in the fight against the Bad Guy, but she was very lucky because she was immortal and Balron could just revive her.

Balron was very happy because all of them were still alive. He said they were doing much better than his old teams did back before he became a professor.

He was also happy because he learned a new thing about security: He needed to create contingencies that did not rely on magic at all. A mana drain like the one that Victor Cale had used was very rare, but it would have really helped to have at least one weapon or device that kept working.

He was confused though, because he did not understand how Victor lost, because he should have been protected against Aranea's bite.

But Rania was very smart and explained to him what happened: Victor got the genre wrong. He thought it was a more classic adventure, but they were obviously in the inspiring story of underdogs growing beyond themselves, and that was why Aranea was able to save them all.

Aranea preened at the praise, but she was a bit annoyed because Pebble kept snickering and said that no, that wasn't the right genre either.

Whiskers was sitting on Balron's shoulder, but she wasn't saying much. Aranea had always had the impression that Whiskers was mostly just humoring her, back before she was sapient. It was weird to think about how they might be equally smart now. Whiskers was pretty weird. Pebble was much more like a person than Whiskers was, although other people had trouble understanding him.

Finally, Aranea focused all sixteen eyes of hers, both the cute ones and the metaphorical ones, on the remaining two people in the carriage: Atrog and Maru.

They had all talked to Maru a lot over the last few hours, and most of that had gone over Aranea's head.

But it looked like maybe it had all been just one big misunderstanding, and everyone was friends again? Or maybe not? Being sapient was very confusing, and she found life had been a lot easier when she didn't need to think about anything at all.

As far as she understood, Maru had been bamboozled by Victor. That made sense to Aranea, because he was a Bad Guy and that was the sort of thing that Bad Guys did.

She said that he was researching how to interact with other universes. There was a huge discussion about this, but Aranea understood even less about this than the rest, because she had been busy eating steak at the time. It had been the first time she had ever eaten steak, and it tasted amazing. That was much more important than whatever weird things the Bad Guy was up to. There were smarter people than herself on the team, so they could figure that out while she focused on the tasty steaks.

Maru was told about how the government was secretly evil and Victor was the Good Guy. But it seemed like Rania managed to successfully clarify that Victor was in fact a Bad Guy, which would make the government the Good Guys by default.

Her big sister even had a brilliant idea to prove this: All she had to do was to randomly shoot politicians with Arrows of Bad Guy Slaying. The arrows would fail, thereby proving that the government was the Good Guys.

But unfortunately Galanys said that she should not do that. She said it would probably just kill them without proving anything, because they are politicians. Aranea and Rania didn't really get that reasoning, but the others all nodded sagely at it.

In the end, Maru said she didn't know who to trust, but that she was going to just do things that are obviously good no matter who is right, by stopping the war. Aranea liked that way of thinking. It was very simple and straightforward, and it would help people, which was something that her big sister would approve of. Just do the obviously good thing, and don't think too hard about it. This idea appealed to her, because thinking was hard and anything that allowed her to make her big sister proud of her with less thinking sounded like a great idea.

After she was done looking at all the people with metaphorical new eyes, Aranea felt exhausted and she lay down to sleep.

When she woke up again, they were almost done crossing the feywild already!

The others all seemed pretty surprised by this, but Rania explained that it was only natural: They had just defeated a major Bad Guy. There shouldn't be any interruptions now until they got back to the Quest Giver. Interruptions at this point wouldn't be narratively appropriate.

Soon they reached Northpass, and a lot of things happened, and Aranea got kind of overwhelmed by all the new experiences.

There were so many people here!

And most of them were staring at her! How rude!

Arachnophobia was running rampant in the city!

It made her very sad, but at least her big sister gave her plenty of hugs to make her feel better again, which was nice.

She tried to evade people's judgmental looks by climbing up the walls and walking on the ceiling. But that didn't work. Most people missed her now, but those that saw her freaked out even more.

Arachnophobia was a terrible thing, and she was deeply afraid of arachnophobes. After all, arachnophobes were irrationally afraid of her just because of the way she was born. Arachnophobia was very speciesist, and could drive people to commit hate crimes against spiders. She had heard that arachnophobes sometimes murdered innocent spiders who were even helping them to keep the house free of annoying flies!

Shortly after they arrived in Northpass, Dov got arrested.

There were a lot of guards, and they wanted Dov to come with them. Aranea thought they were going to fight, but Rania said it was ok.

Then there was a lot of talking. Seriously, so much talking. At least people stopped paying attention to her as she hung from the ceiling.

It turned out that the government was a huge mess because of House Ulein's betrayal.

To everyone's surprise, councilor Vol Ulein cooperated completely and claimed that she didn't know about any of that. She volunteered for truth telling spells, and the Coros people said that she wasn't lying. So she was cleared of her charges. Then she started giving lots of orders and cleaning house.

She also said that her head assassin had disappeared, so he was probably a traitor. She explained that as the noble house in charge of international politics, they had control of most of Oruk's assassins.

Aranea thought that was pretty cool, but Rania was worried. She said that fighting assassins was much less fun than fighting more straightforward Bad Guys.

Then they all talked to the Coros people some more, who were really happy about something called "political precedent". They tested Maru as well, and found out that she wasn't lying about anything and just really, really wanted to help. So she was pardoned and immediately drafted into the war.

Atrog hugged Maru then, and that made Aranea realize something important: It felt nice when her big sister hugged her, and apparently other people could do that as well. So she resolved to start hugging other people in the future as well, to show them how much she liked them.

Then Pebble pointed out to her that Davak Goront, the Coros leader, was the one who arranged the poison that she used to kill Victor. He made a very reasonable argument that Davak deserved a hug for that.

Aranea agreed, so she jumped from the ceiling and surprise-hugged the man.

A lot of people started screaming. Somebody fainted.

Davak Goront froze, and he looked kind of pale. Did he not like her hug?

Was he an arachnophobe, too?

But then Rania told him "That means she likes you!", and then he relaxed. And he even hugged her back, though it was a bit awkward.

She was very glad that he was not an arachnophobe after all! It had just been a cultural misunderstanding, which her big sister cleared up. Her big sister really was the best.

Then Davak said he needed to go get a change of clothes and excused himself.

That had gone well! Even better, it had taught her something: Even if the man had been an arachnophobe before, then surely the nice experience of the hug would have cured him of this irrational hatred. Maybe she could use this? People liked hugs, so it stood to reason that she could fight arachnophobia by hugging people. She chould be the bigger person and try to make friends with arachnophobes instead of hiding from them, even if they hated her.

Aranea resolved that she would fight arachnophobia one hug at a time.

Shortly after she had this revelation, a messenger arrived and said that the Cassandra Project was now down. Rania cheered, because other heroes got to do lots of cool stuff offscreen and she was happy for them.

Everyone was happy about this at first, because the scrying spells were no longer lying all the time now. They only had the usual amount of lying now.

But then a message arrived that made everyone really sad: There was an invasion from the East!

Things got even more hectic, and people started talking even more!

Dov's parents were coming, and they were really, really mad!

And House Ulein had fought them already, and that had made them even madder!

--- Denissa Mardok ---

Finally the ad break was over. That had taken longer than expected. She hadn't seen this many insect-themed thoughts in a long time. The Xeltek were insects, and kind of looked like spiders if you squinted hard enough, and that really showed in their ads. It all felt really disconnected and eerie. It didn't even have any normal dialogue. So weird.

In any case, back to debugging the universe.