Rita gingerly reached out and poked the bottom of her… erm… spider. Yep, she could feel it. It felt like someone was poking her tummy. But not her normal tummy, her… other… tummy…

It was so disconcerting she had to close her eyes and just rest her head in her hands.

Think. Think. Nightmare. Yes. That’s it. It’s a nightmare. Has to be. This was some kind of terrible dream brought on by watching too many horror movies late at night. While eating too much red meat. Yes. Also, possibly alcohol. That totally makes sense. Those were all things Rita tended to do. So clearly the logical conclusion was that this was a bad dream and when she opened her eyes, she was going to be back in her room having likely fallen out of bed and hit her toe against the wall, because it was really hurting like the dickens.

Slowly she opened one eye and squinted at her legs. Or, where they were supposed to be, anyway. Nope, still nightmare fuel down there.

She was sitting against the wall in the corner of her room. Down to about her bellybutton, she still looked normal, as far as she could tell. Below that, and attached where the head would normally be, was her… thorax? Was that what it was called? Rita thought she had heard the word used before for the bit that the legs were stuck to, and indeed she had eight long, multi-jointed spider legs currently curled up in front of it like a dead spider.

Experimentally, she moved a leg and the sight of one of the spider legs slowly uncurling made her shudder in revulsion and quickly curl it back up. At least, if she could move them, it meant she could keep them still.

Behind her thorax was the round, elongated form of her abdomen, roughly the same size as her thorax. Smaller than she had anticipated, but she was nevertheless glad since it was also, technically, her butt now.

“I like big butts and I cannot lie…” she mumbled to herself and had to stifle a giggle.

Shock. That’s what it was. Oh wait, no, it was a nightmare, so all of this is fine! It's all fine. She’d probably need professional help once she woke up, but that was a problem for later. For now, she could giggle like a crazy person at how her butt was now the size of a really big watermelon.

At least she wasn’t a big hairy spider, that would have been even worse! She had another insane giggle at the idea of her rather petite figure stuck to some vicious, hairy tarantula body the size of a car. Or a cockroach! She could have been stuck to a filthy giant cockroach! Wouldn’t that have been a lark? Then she could lay horrible cockroach eggs, even if her upper body got cut off! Eggs with more eggs already inside them… or was that aphids? Yo, bitches like eggs, so I got that bitch an egg in an egg…

More giggles. She was rapidly losing what was left of her sanity…

Snap out of it! You’re freezing! You need to get warmed up!

Indeed, she was still completely nude and now that the adrenaline was starting to fade, she was beginning to shiver uncontrollably. She dragged the blanket off her bed, but it was filthy and wet and by this point almost frozen stiff by the wind still howling through the apartment. What she needed was clothes! Dry clothes!

It took some effort to turn around and drag herself over to her closet without using those horrifying spider legs that she still had no idea how to use. When she tried to pull it open, the whole door fell off in a cloud of dust, the hinges having rusted off. For a moment, she looked at it, puzzled, before she realized it made perfect sense since this was clearly a dream. With a shrug she reached up and began pulling out articles of clothing onto the floor in various states of decay. Most were little more than rags with holes.

Moth eaten… moth eaten… nothing but tatters... covered in… is that dried blood? Pass. Moth eaten… ugh, slimy… ah! This will do!

A short search turned up a mostly intact shirt and a sweater that was too filthy to tell its original colour. The dresser next to it yielded valuable underwear in Rita’s size. She pondered the thong for a moment, looking down at her slightly arachnified lower body, before tossing it. At least the bra was just dusty. Nothing a vigorous shaking couldn’t fix.

With a chance to look around while dressing, Rita realized it wasn’t just her clothes, closet door, window and living room wall that was tattered, broken and rotten. Everything in her apartment was, in some manner, completely ruined. Rusted, cracked, broken, spattered with strange brown stains or just covered in upwards of thirty years of dust. Yet the strangest part was that it wasn't consistent. In some places the filth and broken edges still looked fresh, in others the dust lay thick and powdery, as if the place hadn’t been disturbed in years. The top of the dresser had a literal pile of dust on it, but all that remained of her bedside table was a pile of what appeared to be freshly chopped splinters. She could even still see her phone’s power cord sticking out of the pile.

Her phone! With some difficulty, Rita dragged herself over and dug around until she managed to unearth her device. It was somehow whole, despite the table having been chopped to bits. Off, though. With shaking fingers, she tried switching it on, nearly dropping it in the process. After what felt like ages of holding down the power button, the screen flickered to life.

“Yes!” Rita exclaimed.

After several more millennia of waiting, the prompt for her pin finally appeared and despite her shaking, she managed to type it in first time.

“Fuck yes!” she exclaimed when she saw the two bars of signal and her spirits soared. She could get help!

Her elation was short-lived, however. She barely had time to also see the one percent indicator on her battery before her phone went dead in her hands.

“No! No no no no please no please work…” she muttered as she struggled in vain to switch it on again. Eventually she just sat with the dead phone in her hands and cried.

Wait, why was she so broken up about her phone not working if it was just a stupid nightmare?

Because you know that it’s real.

What was that? Who said that?

Rita looked around herself in a moment of panic. Strangely, the thing that scared her the most about the idea that there was someone else around was the embarrassment of being seen like this. Her sweater came down to about her first leg joint, but beyond that she wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing. It was just milky white spider flesh all the way to her… abdomen. Butt. She was going to use butt. Spiders had abdomens. She was a person and therefore had a butt. Stood to reason.

But there was nobody around. It must have been her own subconscious. Stupid subconscious, scaring her like that. It was right, though. This felt real. It felt really real. Her foot was still throbbing from where she had slammed it into the wall when she fell off the bed. If this had been a dream, it wouldn’t still be harping on about a stubbed toe. She would have moved on to riding electric eels over rainbow piñatas or something equally stupid. This place was too consistent to be a dream.

Unless the dream was sufficiently realistic that she couldn’t tell the difference? Or was messing with her ability to measure realism? No no no, madness, thattaway. Best to assume it was all real and work accordingly. If it was a dream after all, no harm done. But if she acted like it was a dream and jumped off a building and it WASN’T…

Splat.

But taking this place seriously meant she would have to figure out how to walk. She couldn’t just drag herself everywhere she wanted to go. Well, she could, but she wasn’t going to. Her elbows were already starting to chafe, and the carpet looked as unclean as the rest of the place.

“Ugh… this is so icky…” she mumbled as she uncurled her legs and watched the milky white limbs twitch and jerk as they tried to expand around her body.

She was definitely in control of the legs, but they felt rather weak. In fact, her whole body felt rather weak. When she tried to push herself up to standing, her right legs buckled under the strain and she flopped over, hitting her head against the wall. That didn’t help her still-pounding headache any either.

After lying still and groaning for a bit, she tried again, this time making sure to keep one arm on the remains of her bed and the other on the wall. With a bit of difficulty, she finally managed to lever herself upright on eight shaky spider legs. Slowly, she took her hands away until she was standing by herself.

“Success! Look, Mom, I’m a terrifying fucking monster from your nightmares!” she said to nobody in particular.

Good for you nobody answered.

Wait, then how had she heard it? She looked around again, trying to pinpoint the source of the voice, but there was no-one around.

The broken window was right next to her, so she took a peek outside as well from her new, upright vantage point. It seemed her apartment was not the only place that had suffered from whatever catastrophe had befell this place. The entire city looked broken or filthy or just plain post-apocalyptic. Yeah, that was a good word to describe it. It looked like the apocalypse had happened and this was what was left over. Even the sky had a near uniform grey and drab appearance, as if through thick cloud cover.

One strange new addition looked out of place from what she remembered, however. In the centre of the CBD was a tall, thin tower that jutted out from among the tallest buildings around it. Given Cardale City’s less than stratospheric skyline, this meant it was probably… about 30 stories high? It also seemed to be in far better condition than the buildings surrounding it, though it was hard to be sure at this distance.

The streets themselves were quiet, but there was movement. Here and there she caught glimpses of things slipping across roads filled with rusting vehicle wrecks. Too quick to make out details, but at least some of them looked like people. The others were perhaps dogs?

Then she spotted something that was very definitely neither a person nor a dog slide around a building in the distance and shuddered. In the short moment she had glimpsed it, it had looked like a giant worm or snake, but it had to have been at least 5 metres long!

That settled it. Nevermind walking, she needed to be able to run!