Experiments (II)

The next day, Alice inspected the Queen once again, using her magical powers to pierce through the incredibly resilient chitinous alloy of her exoskeleton and delving deep into her system.

This time, she ignored the many sights of Maath’s body, moving with certainty through the hemolymph and into her blighted digestive tract, closely comparing its current state with the condition it was in a few hours before.

The young woman spent a good half of an hour probing the infected tissues while using her newly-improved Biomagical Instincts at full swing and, in the end, she got her answer.

It’s still slow. At least for now. There was basically no change from one day to the other. I wonder if it’s because of her size or her obvious magical potential. A slug is only a slug after all.

Only when she felt her powers starting to wane did she return to her own body, sighing in relief at her discoveries.

Maybe there is a way to strengthen Maath even further? Let’s add that question to the pile.

Pulling away her attention from the idea, she briefly explained the situation to the Queen before moving closer to the large, egg-shaped vessel that still contained the infected slug.

Quite a few hours had passed since Maath had sealed it and she wanted to check out the results of her first experiment.

Alice carefully wrapped around her nose and mouth the thick scarf she had ‘ordered’ in the morning from Skitter. From that point onwards, the length of soft cloth would serve as a mask during her riskier experiments. She didn’t want to risk contamination.

When she felt ready, the girl briefly turned towards the titanic Queen and, with a gesture, had her open a fissure in the oval canister, enough for her to take a small peek inside from a safe distance, using her recently enhanced eyesight skill.

Not much remained of Specimen H.

To the biomancer’s surprise, the illness had thrived on the unlucky slug’s body, consuming it down to the last organ, tissue and cell to keep growing and proliferating even after its death, as evidenced by the brown, pustule-like growths that covered the remains of its skin.

Alice was starting to turn and signal the Queen to close the container for good, when the side of her eye caught a particularly strange shape in the otherwise similar mounds of infected matter. Interested, the girl focused her sight on that spot, trying to use her Eyes to discern the object between the other irregular, rounded protrusions.

It was an elongated fruiting body that emerged from the heterogeneous dark-brown tissue around it. It was similar to a soybean sprout, with a somewhat coarse exterior of a dark maroon in color and a tiny, round head of a lighter shade. A few centimeters behind it, Alice could see a similar one, much smaller and just starting to poke from one of the many pustules.

“Those are not bacteria” she told herself with a hint of worry in her voice, quickly turning back to Maath and urging her to shut close the fissure in the container.

That’s some kind of mold or a fungus. I’ll need to do more experiments I guess. Back at home we would use ammonia if we got mold on the walls but how the heck am I supposed to get it here? Not that it would be particularly useful for the Queen. For disinfection however…

With a bit more knowledge and many more questions on what she was fighting against, Alice set out to discover even more.

After rolling away the enclosed container, the first thing Alice decided to do was to search for Qhevi.

For that reason, a few minutes later, she briskly stepped out of the glade and, with Skitter at her heels, set out to explore the colony for the first time since arriving in the Nest.

After crossing the outer edges of the crystal forest, the girl quickly moved through the gently swaying, wide sails of silk that formed the entrance and atrium to the strange palace of the Spider Queen and, while studiously ignoring the large troop of spider soldiers silently staring at her, she headed towards the huge, black stairway that had been carefully chiseled out of the stone of the cavern.

Slightly panting after the climb, Alice stared at the wide, spiraling road carved in the walls of the cave, debating whether to explore the many chambers that had been hollowed out alongside it. She knew the small rooms housed the female leading caste of the colony and, in the end, the desire not to get stabbed and eaten by an offended Thinker won over her curiosity.

With a sigh, she headed towards the huge, square gate that led the rest of the tunnels controlled by the colony.

Once out of the Queen’s cave, it was fairly easy to track down Qhevi, simply a matter of finding the biggest pantry and entering it.

The storeroom in question was quite peculiar. It was located in a somewhat large cavern, probably a bit less than fifty meters in length and width but no more than three meters in height. The resulting space looked like something had stabbed a giant blade deep into the stone, leaving a cavernous gash that seemed to weigh on her chest.

The claustrophobic feeling was further exacerbated by the hundreds of wrapped up prey stored within the space. The white and grey bundles had been neatly laid in many rows upon the dark stone floor, making them look like uncountable mummies just waiting to rise and haunt her dreams for the days to come.

Between the paralyzed corpses, she quickly spotted the large tarantula she was looking for, busily walking down one of the ‘aisles’, followed by an orderly file of much tinier spiders, like the ugliest flock of ducklings following their mother.

Every time the Thinker stopped, the row suddenly disbanded, and each spiderling sank their short fangs in one of the cocoons nearby, injecting their paralytic venom to prevent any movement, before eagerly resuming their plinking behind the female.

The sound of the many fangs sinking in chitin and flesh alike, gave her a brief flashback of her first experience in a larder of the colony, which she quickly repressed, along with the accompanying shivers, before joining the clutter of arachnids.

Over the course of the week she had spent in the Nest, Alice had gotten to know some of the Thinkers that regularly visited the Queen’s halls. Qhevi, for example, seemed to prefer shorter conversations, even when talking to her sisters; and exactly for that reason, she instantly explained the reason of her visit.

“I need small prey for my tests.” She said, pointing at the smaller sized cocoons around her, “and I need to see the dead Spear Spiders. I need their metal.” she briefly signed trying to ignore the hatchlings quickly surrounding her.

As she was talking, a particularly curious one carefully extended one of its thin limbs to feel her naked leg, only to be instantly bonked on the abdomen by Skitter. The tiny spiderling let out a shrill yelp before quickly skittering behind the large Thinker, staring morosely at the bigger male.

Qhevi bristled and sent a powerful hiss towards the bully before turning back towards Alice and clicking once in assent, soon moving through the rows of bundled up food, stopping every few paces to point at a cocoon or the other, the spiderlings behind her quickly marking it with an intricate line of knotted silk.

The Thinker was done in less than ten minutes, stopping in front of her and gesturing at the spiderlings already busy dragging the smaller bundles to the exit of the cavern.

“Thank you. Now for your dead I guess” she murmured before following the spider out of the cave and through a secondary tunnel that finally led to a similar, if smaller, hollow where she saw dozens of deceased Spears, each one curled up in a mess of contorted limbs.

Most of the carcasses stored in the cavern seemed to be sporting one or more injuries, likely the results of a fight with some of the other inhabitants of the system, almost none seemed to have died from old age but, looking at the Queen herself, she wasn’t even sure it was possible.

As she started removing the metallic fangs and spikes from each one of the dead monsters, piling them on the ground in a small heap, Alice tried not to think of the act as defilement.

After all, she thought, they do eat them themselves. I’m fairly sure they would be okay if it meant helping their Queen.

As soon as she was done with the grisly harvest, Skitter helpfully bundled the bounty and she dragged it back to the glade along with her new test specimens.

Once back in the clearing, she quickly threw every spike and fang into to bowl of Lumen to clean them up of their non-metallic parts. She did notice that the water level was starting to drop but decided to postpone the refilling for the next day. She had new things to discover.

After waiting for Maath to end yet another meal, she asked her to build a number of bowls and cages out of the metal of the ground.

As soon as the first few containers were completed, she asked Skitter to rip the bundles and, after taking her time to inspect the paralyzed creatures contained within, she quickly moved each one to a cage.

Once every preparation was completed, she eagerly sat down on her futon and resumed her daily conversation with the Queen. Over the course of a few days, their talks had quickly gotten more complex, their knowledge of each other other’s language far deeper.

At first, she had been surprised at the speed of her progress, the ease she had while learning each word and figure of speech; now, however, Alice was sure that the Boon of Insight that she had been gifted so many weeks before by The Whispering Mother was the main reason for that sudden surge of new knowledge.

“It will take time to do all the tests Maath. I’m starting from zero and going forward you see.”

“Zero? What is zero?”

“The number? Before one? You use zero when you want to say nothing. The absence of an object.”

“Interesting. I guess right now there are zero cures” she chuckled, her metallic exoskeleton rippling with the sound.

That was the usual way their conversation went, Alice would start talking and Maath would ask questions regarding terms she would use, trying to understand them. The giant spider had a very strange sense of humor, something she hadn’t really seen in the rest of her species and had attributed it to her age and evident intelligence.

On top of that, Maath had the uncanny ability to find the most difficult words from Alice’s phrases and keep prodding until she was satisfied. Alice was still having nightmares from her conversation about the nature of a ‘horse’ and of a ‘gift’ and why one shouldn’t look at it in the mouth.

And now, she thought, I’ve just had the incredibly stupid idea of broaching the concept of mathematics… as if it wasn’t the subject I hated the most at school.

Thus, while her guinea pigs fought off the paralysis, Alice spent a number of hours trying to explain basic arithmetic to the extremely interested Queen, her body slumping more and more as time went on.

Despite the almost painful boredom she had experienced throughout the ordeal, in the end, the young woman had managed to obtain yet another tool for her research.

It had all happened when Alice had started using small pieces of silk and metal to show the more difficult operations, painstakingly ordering them in neat lines for the Queen to see.

“This is probably gonna take a while. You see, there are symbols for the numbers that we use to simplify everything but I don’t have anything to write and I don’t want to get naked”.

The Queen had stood still for a moment before raising her arm from the wire and gently placing it on the ground in front of her, the huge limb sinking in the metal as if it was water.

A couple of seconds later, the leg was removed and the surface stilled again.

“Touch it, Alice” Maath had said and she had gently lowered her palm on the section of metal, her eyes widening when she felt its clay-like consistency.

“You can write now. Show me those symbols”.

She did, using a finger to quickly write rows of numbers and mathematical symbols; their discussion delving further into that science.

Many hours later, the specimens finally stirred from their paralysis, some of them trying to escape from their cages and bowls, offering a very harried Alice a reason to drop the basic—and quite winged— explanation of algebraical knowledge to the Queen.

She instantly and eagerly approached the subjects of her first test, two fist-sized Rock Crabs she had previously placed in two separate cages.

After obtaining a new set of clean spikes from the glowing basin and having them molded into bistouries, she once again removed an extremely tiny sample of infected tissue from the Queen and fed it to one of the crabs, leaving the other alone.

As soon as the tiny crustacean had ingested the corrupted substance, she filled both enclosures with a large amount of meat, being as careful as possible to give each creature the same amount.

First Experiment she carefully wrote with her left hand on the still-soft part of the floor, smiling at the way her nail easily sunk into the soft and cool metal and then grimacing at the crooked lines of the letters caused by her righthandedness. She shrugged before writing the next line.

Does the infection change the host’s food requirements?

Two Rock Crabs, one infected and one healthy were given the same amount of food.

She finished writing and then sat down a few meters away from the cage and started watching.

At first, the two creatures showed identical behaviors, they both gorged themselves on the pile of meat and bones she had left and then, once full, they ambled through the new space, sometimes ineffectually trying to move through the small holes in the cage but generally content to skitter sideways from one side to the other.

As the hours passed however, the infected crab started moving more erratically, sometimes twitching in place for minutes before suddenly sprinting from one side to the other without rhyme or reason; after a few more minutes, from the palped mouth of the crab emerged a small amount of brown, bubbling goop which splattered on the floor of the cave.

The creature started frenetically eating the food it had been given, using its tiny but strong claws to sever small chunks of flesh that soon disappeared inside its continuously moving mouth.

The first experiment ended a few hours later as the carapace of the small crustacean started deforming under the pressure of its insides; the creature didn’t seem to notice as it kept gorging itself on the rapidly declining amount of meat. From the opening of its shell, a dark brown sludge started oozing out, caking the interior of the cage.

When the creature finally stopped moving, Alice watched in horror as the work of the blight continued on its carcass, small and rounded pustules appearing on the rapidly dissolving body. The enclosure was finally sealed when the first of the elongated fruiting bodies started emerging from the rotting mess that had also started propagating on the remaining meat.

The infected Rock Crab showed a different behavior. It consumed a lot more and at later stages seemed to ignore its worsening condition.

She carefully wrote on the metal, her face set in concentration.

The infection kept spreading after death with appearance of mold/fungi-like growths.

Once finished with her descriptions, she quickly moved the sealed cage next to the first one and proceeded to tiredly prepare the next day’s experiment.

The following week was going to be rough.

Four days had passed since her first trial, and the metallic floor of the glade had quickly started filling up with ideas and experiment logs that Alice inscribed on its surface with the help of a stylus.

Second Experiment

Does the infection affect behavior?

Six slugs.

One infected slug was placed into a bowl with a healthy companion.

One healthy slug was placed into a bowl with a healthy companion.

Two infected slugs were placed into a bowl.

The healthy slug behaved normally.

The first infected slug consumed the healthy one after a few hours.

The two infected slugs tried to consume each other.

Blight grew normally on both bodies after death.

Third Experiment

Does the infection grow quicker when the host eats?

Two small centipedes, both infected.

Different enclosures, one with food, the other without.

The first centipede ate the food and died approximately four hours later.

The second centipede became increasingly agitated, trying to escape and attacking the cage. Died from its injuries approximately four hours after the first.

Blight grew normally on both bodies after death.

Not gonna try on the Queen.

Fourth Experiment

The third experiment was tried again.

The infected centipede without food was restrained to prevent movement.

Died from the infection approximately six hours after the one with access to food.

The infection is slowed but not stopped by starving, probably needs a large amount of nutrients to grow.

[…]

The sealed containers started accumulating on one side of the clearing, closely guarded by the surly Chillushrith, her hulking form almost always ambling through the clearing on her seven remaining legs.

Alice would spend her time observing the next experiment while casually talking to Maath, their ability with the language increasing by leaps and bounds.

Between one trial and the other, she would sometimes leave the clearing, using the small amount of free time she had to explore more of the Nest, sometimes accompanied by Skitter, and sometimes following one of the other Thinkers, each eager to show their craft and role in the colony.

She had walked beside Eisor as she surveyed the entirety of the Nest, moving gracefully from one tunnel to the other, directing spiders, resolving fights and, in one case, putting down a large mole-rat creature that had managed to escape its bindings by cutting them with its huge, sharpened incisors. The monster was rampaging through the main tunnel, shrugging off the lines of silk thrown at it while its tough, glabrous hide protected it from the spiders’ fangs attempting to sedate it.

When Eisor had seen the mess, she had quickly directed a large cluster of spider to engage the mole in a close and frenetic melee while she carefully moved around it until she was at its back.

Just as the monster was preparing to crush yet another group of males, the Thinker had climbed up on its back and pierced its nape with a single, bladed limb, severing its spinal cord before directing the disposal of the bodies that had accumulated.

Ruthless and Effective. Alice had thought, slightly shivering at the sight of so many dead.

The next day, the young woman entered the chaotic ‘atelier’ of Ozren, the small and ever-chittering female having created a mess of silken constructions in the tall cave she called home, together with a small swarm of similarly caffeinated spiders.

To Alice’s surprise, however, Ozren and her troupe weren’t alone in their hollow.

Hidden behind the silken curtains, ropes and cocoons, and surrounded by abstract stone shapes, stood a large grey spider silently staring at her with her eight eyes.

This new Thinker, whose name she didn’t know, was definitely different from the others she had encountered; her carapace resembled the tunnels’ dark stone and didn’t have the usual metallic shine common in her species. Apparently, the only metallic parts on her body were her extremely thick frontal limbs which, more than legs, resembled large sledgehammers.

After a bit of inquiring, Alice discovered that she was the one responsible for all the stonework around the cave, the huge square door being her most recent work. Over time, in fact, the magical powers granted by her bloodline had become less and less connected to the metal and more to the stone surrounding it, giving her the ability to mold stone to her will.

It must be due to an affinity. Like I obtained the Life Domain, she lost the Metal one and got the Stone. At least that was the idea that she built in her mind as the arachnid showed her powers by perfectly polishing a previously rough part of the floor.

As a small thank you, she informed the two Thinkers of the damages incurred by the stone dam she had crossed when traveling to the Nest and even went as far as using a couple of stones and some lengths of silk to depict a very ugly Golden Gate Bridge for the very interested duo which soon forgot about her, too engrossed with the architectural depiction.

Not all the caves proved to be interesting but one in particular was nothing short of horrifying. Alice escaped less than two minutes after entering Ricee’s chambers, her very peculiar breeding program a nightmarish vision she wanted to scrub off from her brain.

Still nauseated, she was walking towards her tent to hopefully sleep away the memory, when her foot suddenly squished something soft, warm and smelly. She slowly looked at her feet, only to find it completely covered in the luminescent blue mold that grew all over the small piles of refuse that the colony used for illumination.

She tried to shake off the substance from her feet but most of it stubbornly clung to her skin, the blue light fusing with her own glow. Despite the cool visual effect, the smell it emanated was horrendous and she quickly ran to the clearing and put her entire feet into the Lumen basin, watching as the glimmers slowly but surely cleaned her foot.

“Thank god I can use them to clean up. I don’t even want to think of my state without the little guys” she exhaled watching the mold get consumed.

Watching the mold get consumed.

“Damn. I really don’t have any more reason not to try with them uh” she muttered.

The young biomancer finally lowered her foot on the ground and went to sleep.

Things were gonna get glowy.

*****

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