Scurvy

Alice was woken up by a warm and wet sensation on her cracked lips.

She instinctively parted them and let a trickle of thick liquid enter her mouth and coat her parched tongue, barely able to register the coppery flavor before she forced herself to swallow it, feeling its warmth soak her dry throat and spread across her chest and stomach.

She immediately tried to open her eyes but she found them sealed by some kind of substance that had caked the entirety of her face, drying up on it and forming a rigid coat that clung stubbornly to her skin like dry mud.

Using her hand to tear it away proved impossible, her entire body too weak for such a movement, only a twitch of her fingers a sign of its continued presence.

Unable to see or move, the girl could only focus on the other senses she had available.

She could feel the coldness of metal on her back and the weak gusts of wind that touched her wet and clammy skin, only managing to further lower her body temperature. She was naked, but no shiver ran through her muscles.

Next, Alice focused on her sense of smell and felt the heavy, metallic scent of blood wafting from everywhere around her, telling her of the nature of the fluid she had just ingested, its coppery flavor still sitting on her tongue. She was covered in it.

Her ears were ringing and, in a weak attempt to speak, the girl opened her mouth once more, only for another trickle of blood to flow down her throat and into her airways, causing a gurgling cough to wrack her weakened body and sending waves of pain straight to her brain, waking her from her daze.

Alice groaned weakly, a wheeze of air flowing out of her lungs and breaking the silence around her, causing a cacophony of clicks and hisses to briefly assault her sense of hearing before a thunderous reverberation of metal slammed against metal silenced every other sound.

She groaned again.

“Alice?” a voice tentatively asked.

“Yugh” she answered as another coughing fit broke her attempt to speak.

She finally registered the strange feeling of painful fullness into her lungs, a small bubble of blood popping on her lips as she opened her mouth once again.

Barely able to breathe, Alice could feel her chest strain and tremble with every breath, her lungs unable to pump oxygen into her system. She could feel them full of liquid.

She realized she was slowly drowning.

Still unable to open her eyes or move, the girl attempted to use her powers to delve deep within herself but, as soon as she tried to open the barrier of her well, a massive lance of agony speared through her nape.

A whimper escaped her mouth as warm tears formed in her eyes and mixed with the dried blood stuck to her eyelids, finally allowing her to open her blurry eyes.

Alice could barely turn or raise her head but she immediately saw that her body was completely covered in dried-up ichor. She found herself completely surrounded by equally soaked spiders, each one holding within its pedipalps the crushed remains of some kind of red internal organs, still dripping vital fluid on the metal floor.

She breathed in and out one more time, a gurgling wheeze escaping her throat together with a single word.

“C-ohre” she pleaded, focusing the entirety of her being on the act of stretching her index finger, pointing it at the barely visible futon a couple of meters away.

The Spears Spiders ambled around with uncertainty, still looking at her, one tentatively approached and attempted to squeeze more of the bloody organ in her mouth which she immediately spit out, trying to quell her spasming chest, hurting for air.

“C-ore” she wheezed again, her body straining to keep her collapsing lungs pumping.

A plinking sound reached her ears as her eyelids started growing heavy, closing more and more often. She was ready to resign herself to the darkness when she heard another click and something smooth and hard impacted her belly, bouncing a single time on her stomach before stopping exactly on her belly button.

With a small glimmer of hope, Alice attempted to form a connection, relief flooding her viscera when she found a billowing mass of dark, cold energy waiting for her just past a thin barrier of crystal.

She pushed through, ignoring the second lance of pain that was soon squashed by the crawling power that had started spreading into her body, its tendrils prodding everything they encountered.

Alice, however, didn’t let herself get overwhelmed and immediately reigned it in, grasping one of the largest branches and immediately moving towards her stomach and intestinal tract where she reached for the small amount of Lumen particles she had carefully stored there for any eventuality.

As soon as the girl felt a connection to every glimmer contained within, she forced a single-minded compulsion into the specks, forcing her will onto every particle to attempt the only thing that could possibly save her life.

Another spasm shook Alice’s body as the Lumen pushed out of the stomach, past the esophageal sphincter and into the esophagus itself. She could now feel them moving upwards, clinging to the folds of the esophagus as they climbed towards the larynx, painfully crashing through it and into her trachea before they finally launched themselves into the lungs proper.

Once there, Alice found the two organs filled with slowly-congealing blood. Every time she painfully inhaled, the fluid would proceed to block most of the air from reaching the alveoli and releasing the oxygen it contained, making every single breath not only painful, but barely sufficient for life.

Her mind slightly fuzzy, she moved the glimmers into the blood, prodding them with her the borrowed power to make them consume the thickened fluid and empowering each particle so that it would work as fast as possible.

As the glimmers started their gradual process, the young woman focused her entire being on the arduous task of surviving, forcefully redirecting the small amount of oxygenated blood still produced by the lungs straight to her brain, ignoring her limbs and remaining organs which soon grew completely numb and unresponsive.

Minutes passed as the Lumen started replacing the blood, their numbers growing quicker the more they consumed.

As their numbers grew, Alice gently streamed them out of the trachea, trying to ignore the painful feeling of complete suffocation every time her airways were blocked by the glowing mass.

As time passed, the lungs were gradually emptied and the previously-submerged pulmonary tissue was now able to absorb the oxygen from the air.

As the oxygenated blood started streaming through her system, Alice allowed her body to start working normally once more.

Within a few more minutes, the numb and unresponsive limbs started sending waves of throbbing pain that, despite the torment it inflicted, made her sigh in relief after the terrifying lack of sensations that had plagued her mind.

It was a calmer Alice that opened her eyes once more, turning just enough to catch the sight of the Spider Queen who had almost fallen down of her cushion to move closer to her dying guest.

“Hi Maath,” She weakly smiled, “apparently you are not the only one whose body is a real mess”.

The titanic monster stared at the pale human, her pedipalps twitching randomly as if unable to even find a response. She pushed herself back on the cushion and extended her leg towards her silvery wire.

“You reckless Hatchling.” She vibrated, a relieved chuckle shaking her silvery exoskeleton.

Two entire days had passed since her unpleasant discovery and Alice had slowly started recovering from the worst symptoms of her disease. Her mood, first very sorrowful and abated, had quickly grown more positive as sadness was replaced by boredom.

She still tried not to think of her latest close call with death and she had definitely promised herself to pay a lot more attention to the things happening inside of her body. She knew she was still lacking many necessary nutrients, but she hoped to solve her problems with time.

To her dismay, however, the only available solution for the lack of vitamin C that had caused the scurvy turned out to be a diet mainly composed of raw mole rat liver, something that the Colony had apparently started even before she had woken up, causing her to almost drown from her cure. It would have been quite ironic.

The eager spiders, under Maath’s orders, had lovingly squeezed any internal organ vaguely resembling a liver onto her face, hoping that at least one of them would help healing their guest. It had taken her a long time to sponge away the remains of dried blood, even with the help of her Lumen.

While waiting to regain her strength, the girl had also obtained a number of blankets that allowed her to keep her precious body heat away from the warmth-sucking metal and breeze, along with the promise of a new futon and set of clothes once she felt better. She would probably have to sew them herself but even the materials would be a godsend.

When she finally managed to sit up, her body still weak and wobbly from the blood loss, Alice finally noticed the blood-caked floor of the clearing, dozens of mole-rat carcasses laying in various states of decomposition into the main pool, eagerly consumed by the glimmers.

The tiny particles were now numerous enough to change the consistency of the water they floated in, making it more akin to a light syrup on her fingers.

Despite the process of desensitization the caves had forced upon her, Alice still found herself nauseated by the fearful screeches, the death throes and the smell of rotting blood and feces that had started coating the clearing.

After the first few hours of that grisly spectacle, the young woman had requested a cleaner process and also started controlling a good amount of glimmers to clean the floor of the glade from the worst results of the slaughtering process.

Nonetheless, whenever a new mole beast was processed, she would thankfully accept more of its warm, freshly-harvested liver and force herself to eat as much of it as possible, empowering her stomach to digest it as fast as it could in order to quickly obtain the small amounts of vitamins it seemed to contain.

Within the end of the second day, the pallor on her face had been replaced by a much rosier complexion and the hundreds of tumefactions and bruises on her body had turned into healthy skin, aided by her enhanced regeneration and focused use of Hemostasis wherever the blood didn’t stop by itself.

She could feel the marrow within her bones untiringly produce more blood, her cells continuously splitting to close the few gaps that remained in her veins and lungs, destroying the many cells that had died when starved for nutrients and oxygen and using their basic components to create more. Even the newly-formed bones of her right arm, still only coated by a thin layer of glimmers, seemed to be reforming their marrow and blood vessels contained within. She knew she would have to keep working on the unfinished forearm but, despite her catastrophic oversight, her attempt had been a success.

In the meanwhile, Alice had also started directing a more en masse production of cores, using the spiders as a workforce to feed dozens of bound and paralyzed specimens at the same time and using the carcasses of those that failed to further feed the Lumens or the Colony itself.

The few creatures that mutated were instead carefully culled by the strongest Thinkers or, when they weren’t in the clearing, by the Queen herself before their core could be removed from its emplacement which, Alice noticed, varied wildly between each specimen.

By the time the young biomancer could stand up once again, the colony had managed to obtain eight more cores.

While most of them were pea to bean-sized, Alice spotted a single, light-blue one that was instead as large as an acorn and had apparently come from the massive slug she had started experimenting on before the accident.

The creature, after obtaining some kind of ice-controlling powers, had been harvested while she slept and its body had promptly been eaten by Maath herself.

“That prey was a rare find,” she had explained, “It is unusual to find individuals as large as that; while plentiful because of their endless breeding, they are slow and weak creatures, prey of many in the caves. That one grew to such size is nothing less than a boon of the underground.” She had proclaimed with a click of satisfaction.

“Does it mean it was an older creature?” Alice had asked curiously, trying with all her might to ignore the liver offered by a particularly ugly spider.

“Most likely,” the ruler had replied with a click of assent, “the older the prey, the more sublime its taste. I can only dream of the flavor contained within the delicious flesh of one of the titans of the caves,” Maath had said, her fangs dripping copious venom that started soaking through the silk, “a wondrous meal coupled by a great achievement.” She added dreamily.

The cogs in Alice’s mind, however, had already started turning as a theory started taking shape in her brain. She continued.

“The titans? Like that massive millipede I’ve seen? Are you one of them? And have you ever fought one? Killed it?” she prodded as the spider started pushing the dripping liver towards her face.

“I know not of a millipede titan but these caves are home to a number of them, some more cunning than others, but each one a true power that shouldn’t be trifled with.” She stated, a hiss of pain escaping her maw as she adjusted on her throne.

“I suppose I could be counted as one, at least I could before the Anathema. Some of them I fought, over territory or prey, but I’ve never managed to slay one of them, sometimes they were too strong, otherwise simply because they decided to flee when they felt threatened. Alas.” She finally said, longing in the words vibrated out of her silk.

Alice nodded, “and they are all ancient like you, right? If they are so strong it must have taken them a long time, right?” she asked again.

“Yes. I’ve met them countless times, sometimes seen their path of destruction as they surely have sometimes seen mine. The caves are slow to change, and slower to conquer after all.” she stated and a click of assent came from a few of the spiders still busying themselves in the clearing, some of them evidently staring at their massive matriarch now that most of the Thinkers seemed to be away from the glade and unable to reign them in.

Maath’s carapace rippled almost imperceptibly as a small chuckle shook her thorax.

“And they are all capable of using powerful magical effects?” Alice continued her inquiries, her theory slowly becoming more and more feasible as the Queen confirmed it.

Now Maath stopped, a startled click escaping her mouth, “How do you know?”

Alice smiled wide as she pumped her single fist in the air in exultance, “I fricking knew it! The older you are the more likely you are to develop a core naturally right?”

“Yes but—” she waved her hand around and interrupted the massive spider before she could ask.

“Wait, wait a second. It all fits! The Lumen are like a catalyst! They activate the process regardless of the age but if the specimen is too young or weak or doesn’t respond well it dies! The larger you are the easier you can sustain its injuries and your body is already moving towards the core itself!” she exclaimed. “I’m sure I’m right!”

“I just wonder what would happen if I gave the Lumens to a creature with a non-Lumen core… Why haven’t I thought of this before?” she started talking to herself animatedly, walking in circles as she prepared new experiments.

Another chuckle quaked in the halls of the Spider Queen as the matriarch clicked amusedly at the tiny biomancer.

“You really are a strange creature Alice.” She softly vibrated on the wire, unheard by the concentrating human.

*****

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