A loud booming sound made the building rattle and dust fall from the ceiling.

Rita froze. What was that? It had felt like an explosion, and there had been a red flash outside the window. Was that the military?

Then two of the weird masked teenagers chasing her reached the bottom of the stairwell behind her and hooted as they started up the steps.

Right, focus on the immediate problems, worry about distant explosions later.

She started running (skittering?) again, looking for the next staircase.

She knew that in theory she was eventually going to run out of stairwells, but she wasn’t exactly clear on what she was going to do once she reached the roof. She was working on it, though. So far, she had plead for her life, jump while hoping for the best or pray that there was somewhere to hide. Alright, so her plan could use a bit more workshopping.

Unfortunately, the door at the top of the next staircase opened to reveal drab, grey daylight. It seemed she had proved that basic causality still applied. Keep taking stairs upwards and eventually you had to reach the roof. Unless the scary, masked teenagers ate you first, but she was reasonably sure that was a unique component to her current circumstances.

She slammed the door behind her and leaned against it, trying to catch her breath.

Dammit. What a shitty roof.

It was completely featureless except for a waist high parapet running along the edge and large block of rusty metal that might once have been part of the building’s air conditioning system. Now it just looked sharp, heavy and filled with tetanus. There wasn’t even anything she could use to jam the stupid door.

Thump.

Something hit the other side of the door and the impact jarred her. It had felt like someone had tried to open the door in a rush, and she could only hope that they’d managed to break their… mask. It seemed the door was solid, at least. She didn’t think they would be able to break through it. Too bad it lacked a convenient deadbolt on this side.

For a few moments nothing happened. She thought she could hear speaking from the other side, but it was hard to tell over the whistling of the wind that was even now tugging at her sweater and skirt.

Dammit, what was she going to do? The stairwell exit was a small brick cube and the only two possible hiding places were behind that or behind the block of tetanus. Unfortunately, anyone else who came onto the roof would rapidly come to the same conclusion.

Thump!

This time Rita felt the door move behind her. Her efforts kept it shut, but two of them must have rushed it together. Another hard impact actually caused it to open a few millimetres before she could force it closed again.

Thump! Thump! Thump!

More impacts hit the door, nearly pushing her away from her barricade. If it wasn’t for her eight legs pushing back, she would have been bowled over already. If only she had something that could hold the door closed! Even freaking duct tape would have been better than nothing!

Wait. She was a spider… thing, wasn’t she? Spiders had webs, right? And she’d seen some of those Spiderman movies, it was supposed to be strong as steel or something, wasn’t it? If she could make some, she could wrap it around the brick box and seal the door shut! Like a sticky steel chain!

Trying to ignore the battering on the door and suppressing her gag reflex from having to look at the rather unnatural part of her anatomy, she curled up her abdomen-butt-thing as far as she could between her legs and focused on the ticklish part at the tip. While it would have been nice to squirt webs from her hands or fingers or whatever it was superheroes apparently do, real spiders had to make do with their abdomens. That much she knew at least from watching nature documentaries.

It looked a little freaky, with weird protrusions and creepy looking folds, but now that she was paying attention, she realized she could feel something there. Like a limb that she didn’t know she had, she carefully flexed muscles that she hadn’t tried flexing before.

What are you doing? Alice interrupted. She’d been quiet for a while, likely realizing her mental screaming was doing less to help and more to distract Rita.

“Trying to spin webs!” Rita muttered back.

When she flexed, she could see something moving, but had no idea if she was actually doing anything productive or just giving her best impression of an arachnid bodybuilder. Still, there only seemed to be so many ways she could flex the muscles, and some form of instinct seemed to be guiding her movements…

She reached out with one hand gently touched a whitish liquid that had begun bubbling out the tip. It clung to her hand and when she pulled it away, a thick strand of sticky white thread pulled with it.

She had done it! She’d figured out how to spin webs! She was saved!

CRASH!

A heavy impact smashed the door open and sent Rita sprawling. She quickly recovered her balance and skittered back onto her feet, but when she turned around, she saw there were now five of the masked people rushing out onto the rooftop.

They didn’t all look the same. Their hair, lengths and even their ratty clothes all differed, though they were pretty much all variations on a theme of skinny, punk, yuppie teenagers. Two were armed with only rusty kitchen knives and the rest didn’t even have that, though judging from the scrapes on their bare knuckles they were no less dangerous. All of them had the bloody red masks with runoff trails down their clothes. Through their eye-holes, she could also see that each of them had eyes that gleamed blue whenever the grey daylight caught it.

Rita raised her hands in a placating gesture. “Hey, come on guys, I didn’t mean to barge into your home like that! It was an accident! I didn’t even know the place was occupied, I swear!”

They started advancing on her as she backed away.

“I mean, I totally don’t judge if you guys want to have a giant orgy-pile or whatever it was you were doing, really! It’s just really not my scene, you know? I’m more of a one-on-one kinda girl myself, but I’m totally cool! You do you and all that!”

They spread out around her, the knife wielders holding their weapons out from in front of them.

“And your buddy that died was completely an accident, I swear! I had a knife and I tripped and fell…”

I don’t think they’re buying your bullshit.

Her rear legs bumped against the parapet. Shit. Rita grit her teeth and yanked out her knife out of her waistband. “Okay fine! Stay back or I’ll shank you so hard your grandmother will feel it in her mask! Just like I did with your friend! Yeah, that’s right, I killed him, and his little dog too!”

Are you feeling okay?

“No, I’m freaking the fuck out and hyperventilating, what do you think?!”

Rita’s wide swings with her knife seemed to give them pause. They stopped edging closer and instead settled a little deeper into combat stances. Then they looked around at each other, as if to decide who was going to rush her first.

They’re coordinating. They’re going to rush us all at once. Get ready.

“Get ready to do what?”

Do your best not to die.

Like some sort of macabre puppet show, they all nodded simultaneously and dived forward.

Rita lifted half her legs and kicked. Her feet connected solidly with the two knife wielders, forcefully propelling them backwards. She had been aiming for them, but her success was mostly the result of luck.

The remaining three piled onto her and tried to pull her to the ground. Luckily, eight legs gave a hell of a lot of stability and she managed to stay upright even as hands dragged at her sweater. To her great surprise, she seemed to be stronger than the skinny teenagers.

An ugly slash with her knife laid open one’s arm and made him flinch back. Fists slammed into her back and side, which hurt. She tried to retaliate with her knife, but one of them caught her arm, preventing her from stabbing it cleanly.

She’d just managed to get one of her legs in between and kicked it off of her when she felt a burning pain in one of her rear legs. Turning, she saw one of the knife wielders had gotten back into the action and had slashed across her leg, leaving an ugly line of oozing blood along its length. To make matters worse, the second wasn’t far behind, rearing back for a stab right into her abdomen-butt.

Her muscles tensed up without her input and she inwardly thanked Alice for the rescue as she leapt away from the two in an attempt to create a bit of distance. Unfortunately, one of the teens was still hanging on to her sweater and when she jumped, his weight pulled her off balance as she landed. Throwing himself forward, he finally managed to drag her over and onto the ground.

Numerous blows struck her shoulders, thorax and legs as the others dogpiled in, but, guided by the sensitive thin hairs on her lower body, her feet struck out with unerring accuracy in retaliation. Each kick sent an attacker flying.

Her knife sunk deep into the shoulder of one of the masked people that had slipped past her legs and was ripped out of her hand as it recoiled with an inhuman screech.

She had more reach with her long legs, but there were five of them and she’d been tired from running all this way to start with. The only reason she was still going was pure panic adrenaline, but her muscles were starting to cramp up from fighting them off. One of her legs refused to respond fast enough at a particularly inopportune time and was rewarded with a deep slash from the knife of one of the armed attackers. Her entire leg went limp, as blood started to gush out of the wound.

Suddenly, all five of the masked teens moved as one and took a step back out of reach. She used the opportunity to stagger to her feet, leaning against the parapet around the edge of the roof and trying to stem the flow of blood from her leg.

All five of them were wounded with various scratches and scrapes from her sharp clawed toes, but the injuries did not appear to be anything more than superficial. She hadn’t specifically been trying to hurt them, just to get them off her.

For a few moments she just waited. What was going on? Why were they just standing there?

They’re waiting for you to bleed out, I think.

Shit. Alice was probably right. She quickly tied one of her socks around the open wound, keeping a careful eye on her attackers, but they made no move to attack. One of them silently pulled her knife out of his shoulder with his one good arm. He glanced down at the blade before tossing it over to another masked woman who caught it without even looking.

It was the one decent injury she had managed to cause and now they had her knife in trade. This was not going well. And based on the sound of heavy footsteps coming up the rooftop stairs behind the five, it was about to get worse.

All five of her assailants turned as someone… something stepped out of the stairwell and up onto the roof. It was another masked woman, but red-skinned and impossibly huge, easily over eight feet tall. She was also built like a truck, with arms like tree trunks and legs that were more in the range of concrete pillars and every inch of her corded with thick, bulging muscles. She was dressed in thick leather, unlike the other masked who all wore nothing but faded jeans and filthy t-shirts.

Even her mask was different. It was metal, for one thing, with a single slit across her eyes. Most notable, however, were the two backward-curving horns sticking up out of the top of the mask, which appeared to have been modified to accommodate the strange bit of anatomy.

Behind her, another man also stepped out. Rita had seen suits of medieval armor in movies and such, but it was the first time she saw someone wearing one in real life, or whatever this was. The ease with which he moved made it seem a lot less cumbersome than she had thought it would be.

He also wasn’t wearing a mask, and the expression on his face was grim and cold. But despite this being the first human face she had seen since she had woken up, all she could feel was… RAGE.

INTRUDERS.

Uh, Rita?

INTERLOPERS.

What are you doing?

KILL.

She and the masked started to approach the intruders together. Whatever animosity had existed between them simply wasn’t important anymore. What was important, was that these… these… FILTHY INTERLOPERS were destroyed, at any cost.

The first of the Masked to reach them tried lunge forward with its rusty knife, only to be swatted by the knight’s mace, sending it flying right through the parapet to drop out of sight in the distance. The second was eviscerated by one slash of the horned demon thing’s ugly, jagged sword.

Rita, those things WILL kill us! STOP!

Alice’s feet suddenly stopped dead, and for a moment she just stared at her hands in surprise. She was in control, fully, for the first time in her… existence? Whatever. No time to ponder that. Rita was still there, somewhere, screaming and raging incoherently in the back of her mind but it was as if she was scattered and unfocussed. Unable to stop Alice from seizing the reins.

Then the freakishly muscular demon – demon woman, Alice corrected herself, there was no mistaking those endowments, despite the layers of muscle – grabbed the last Masked by the head. It barely had time to struggle before there was a crunching sound and its body went limp before she tossed away off to the side.

Alice began backing away slowly. Inside her head, Rita redoubled her screaming and raging, demanding they charge into combat in a suicidal attempt to kill these people, but she ignored her. She’d seen the ease with which they had dispatched the masked hooligans, and she had very little doubt that if she came within arm’s reach, she would suffer a similar fate.

“Gora? Igs sa roma?” the stern-faced knight… asked? Alice wasn’t quite sure. He spoke in no language she had ever heard before, but it sounded like he asked a question.

The demon made a grumbling sound like a bag of slightly feminine gravel in response before both stepped carefully closer, dangerous looking weapons still held at the ready.

“Can… can you understand me?” Alice tried, but that seemed to be a mistake. Both the knight and the demon tensed, rapidly speaking to each other in short, curt sentences and taking combat stances.

“Well, fuck you too, then” she mumbled under her breath as she watched them approach. The only stairway off the roof was behind them, which meant she would have to either go through them – suicide – or find another way down. Luckily, she had already figured something out.

As soon as her rear legs found the edge of the parapet, she spun around and leapt, sailing out over empty space. She felt as much as heard the parapet shatter under the demon woman’s blade behind her, bits of rock plinking off her back even as she started falling.

For a brief moment an icy chill settled into the bottom of her belly as she considered that her lifeline might have been destroyed along with the stone and she was destined for a sudden splat seven stories down.

Then the strand of silk caught that she had stuck to the edge of the roof as she vaulted over and she swung back down to slam painfully against the side of the building.

In her mind, the plan was to rapidly scale the side of the building like an oversized spider and be long gone by the time the idiots on the roof found and thought to cut her silk strand. In reality, her feet could barely find enough purchase on the rough brick walls of the building to steady herself, much less carry her weight.

She had maybe five seconds before her stomach lurched and the lifeline her rear legs had been holding in a death grip suddenly went slack.

It was pure luck that she had happened to hit the wall right next to an open window. Well, “open” was a relative term. Pretty much all of the windows were broken in one way or another, but most still had partially intact panes of glass or at least jagged shards still sticking out of the window frames.

The window she managed to wriggle her upper torso through before the thread got cut had… well, less. She managed to get her chest through without mangling too more than just her sweater.

The sudden loss of her silk cord, however, made all her spider parts drop like a sack of potatoes. She nearly got dragged back out the window by the painful lurch as her body swung around and it was only by grabbing onto the frame with her hands and the fact that she’d managed to get her front legs hooked over the bottom sill in time that stopped her from plummeting to a rather messy death down below.

Alice wanted to swear a blue streak, but she simply didn’t have the breath. Rita had never been the most regular visitor to the gym and when she had gone, upper body strength had never been particularly high on her list of priorities. She had arms like twigs and shoulders that were not up to the task of carrying her weight.

Her new body had to weigh at least twice as much as her original petite frame back in her glorious two-legged days.

Her muscles were burning, and her rear legs were scrambling fruitlessly to find any real vertical purchase on the sheer wall. She was going to start slipping any moment now and there was nothing she could do about it…

Cramps started in her shoulders, shooting down her arms from basically holding up her entire body weight, until she simply couldn’t hold on any longer.

For one terrifying moment she was slipping backwards before her head slammed into the upper part of the windowsill, hard enough to make her see briefly see stars, but luckily not hard enough to quite knock her out entirely. Rather, her new position allowed her neck to carry some of the strain, easing the load on her arms and shoulders and allowing her to catch herself.

She tried again to pull herself up and inside, but her arms were like noodles now and her neck was starting to hurt. This position wasn’t sustainable either, but her arms were just too tired and weak to drag herself inside and her legs had nothing to push off against.

Unless there was...

Her rearmost legs stopped scrabbling to find non-existent footholds in the brick and instead reached back to her abdomen and gathered some of the sticky, waiting silk. She quickly stuck it to the wall and to her immediately relief, the glue held as she placed one foot on the tiny nub of sticky silk she had stuck to the building and pushed herself up.

Only one of her second pair of legs was still working, the other being the one that had been cut deeply during the fight on the roof and now hanging limply by her side. Luckily, as she managed to hook her third leg over the window ledge, it appeared that three legs were the breaking point that allowed her to hoist herself up and through to collapse in a twitching heap on the floor just inside the window.

For a few moments, all she could do was suck in great lungfuls of air and reflect on close she had come to becoming a spider shaped stain on the asphalt.