Rita slowly calmed down. The murderous impulses that had completely overtaken her senses slowly faded. Finally, it reached some sort of critical threshold and she snapped back to clarity. It was like waking up from a daze.

Rita groaned, holding her head in her hands.

Welcome back. Guess it happened again, huh?

She was hiding in a dark corner in the back of one of the many ruined buildings in the city. This one might have been a coffeeshop once. She could see shards of ceramics scattered behind the counter of what must once have been cups and saucers, while on the desk, the partially collapsed remnants of the cash register still stood.

You remember how we got here?

She nodded. “Yeah, we ran until we couldn’t hear the fighting anymore and then we hid. Just like last time, I remember everything. I just… couldn’t think straight.”

The moment she’d spotted the red skinned demon woman, she completely lost her mind. She’d barely taken a single step before Alice took over again. Her mental roommate promptly bugged out, as far and as fast as she could.

By the way, that brain buzzing works on more than just giant freaky snake things. I managed to avoid some kind of flat, round cockroach by noticing its buzz and going around. Not sure if you noticed in your fugue state.

Rita smiled faintly. “Oh. Umm, thanks I guess.” Then she took a deep breath. “And thank you for saving my life. Again.”

Hey, don’t sweat it. It’s our life. You could say I have a vested interest in keeping you in one piece

“Yeah…” Rita said before hanging her head.

What now?

“I don’t know. I just wish I could have talked to them, I guess. You saw the two, right? They looked human, just like Knight” she said.

Knight? Oh, the guy in the armour. Right.

“Yeah. And the big red woman is ‘Demon’. Because, you know, horns?”

Right. Anyway, I think Demon has some kind of mind whammy that drives people to attack her. Did you see how the masked teens completely forgot we existed the moment she showed up?

Rita thought about it. “Maybe. But I’m not sure. I wanted to kill all of them equally. Not just Demon. But… what if she really is some kind of demon and those people are like… mind slaves or something?”

I’d say that’s a bit of a stretch. We have nothing to base that on. But whatever they have, we know it doesn’t work on me. So at least there’s that.

“Yeah.” Rita looked up, hit by a sudden realization. “You’re right! It doesn’t work on you! You can talk to them!”

Er… what? I thought we just agreed that Demon might be fucking with people’s minds?

“No, listen! That doesn’t matter! You’re immune, so you can go talk to them!” she said, climbing to her feet. “They think we’re one of the monsters! All you need to do is talk to them and convince them we’re not!”

Rita… I don’t think you’re quite understanding the problem…

But Rita wasn’t listening. “Look, I know they can’t speak our language. You just start communicating to them, like your name first, asking them who they are. They’ll see you’re not a monster, and then they can take us out and we’re saved!”

Rita… Rita stop. We don’t know these people. Heck, we don’t even know if they are people. Remember the masked teens? The ones whose masks turned out to BE their faces?

She swallowed. She remembered. On her way out of the last building where she’d met Demon and Knight, she’d gotten curious about the teenagers and had tried to lift up one’s mask to see what they looked like.

After a bit of pulling, what she’d found underneath the mask was skull. And probably a new reason to wake up screaming.

“N…no, they have faces. You saw it.”

Yeah, so did the giant, twenty metre snake. It had a whole human head. Doesn’t mean I’d go up and chat about the weather.

“No! They’re different! They’re different than all these other… things! I don’t know how, I just know!” Rita cried out, stamping a foot. Or trying to, spider legs just sort of tap the ground when you try.

Let’s say you’re right. Let’s say they’re like people we know from back home. Then I’d say we’ve got even chances that they kill us anyway or drag us out to be dissected in some lab. We don’t know if they’re government, military, corporate or what. Fuck, for all we know they’re all aliens who caused this shit in the first place!

“Alice, they are literally our only hope!”

What about finding a battery charger for your phone?

Rita walked out the front door of the coffee shop they had been hiding in. “Look around us, Alice!” she said as she swept around with her arms at the rows of ruined and broken buildings. “This place is a shithole! NOTHING is whole here! Nothing works! We have as much chance of finding a functioning battery as we do to find a fucking takeout restaurant that does home delivery!”

Rita, what we need to do is gather supplies, find shelter, scout out the terrain…

“No!” Rita exclaimed, spinning around on the spot. “You want to play survival and fashion rabbit traps from egg cartons and paper clips, but I just want all this to stop! I want to be myself again! I want to go home!”

Rita… I don’t…

“And you are going to shut up and do what I tell you or I will slather myself in barbeque sauce and run us straight into the nearest creepy crawly, screaming ‘EAT ME!’ at the top of my lungs! Do you understand me?”

Alice was silent for a few moments. Then she gave a mental sigh.

Alright. Let’s try your plan. I’ll try speaking to them.

Rita collapsed to the ground. “Thank you. That’s all I wanted.”

They sat in silence for a while longer, until Rita fished out the bottle of water from the little backpack she’d found.

“You drank some of my water” Rita said with a scowl, holding the bottle out on front of her.

Yes, so? We have the same body. And technically I used it to clean some of our wounds, something you should have done in the first place.

She opened the bottle and tipped what was left, feeling the lukewarm liquid slide down her throat.

Hey, remember when Mrs. Hinley’s dog bit us?

Rita lowered the now empty bottle and closed her eyes. She remembered the incident clearly enough. She’d been helping the woman carry some stuff out of her house when the dog spooked for some reason and took a chomp at her hand. She remembered the woman rushing her to the emergency room while she cried for her mother. It had been a… formative experience.

It had also been her experience.

“You mean bit me. You weren’t a thing back then.”

Well, I like to think we have equal share in our past, thank you very much.

“Fine, whatever. Why bring that up now?” she asked tiredly.

We needed five stiches and it still took days for the blood to stop oozing out. Remember how gross the wound was?

“Yeah, so?”

Check the cuts on our stomach and the scratches on our arms.

Rita sighed and gingerly untied her sweater from around her middle and lifted her shirt to check where the glass from the window had sliced her up.

The wounds were healing. Not visibly or anything, but it already had that thick, deep scab of a wound that had closed properly and was well on its way to healing over.

She carefully ran a finger over it. It didn’t even hurt. The scratches on her arms were already nothing but angry pink lines.

Look at that healthy pink colour. No sign of infection, even after we used that sweater of yours as a bandage. You saw how disgusting it looked when we found it. You know we only rinsed out the worst. So, you tell me how this is possible.

Rita blinked stupidly at the sweater she was still holding in her hands. However bad had been before, it now had a thick coating of dried blood on top of everything.

“Maybe all that infection stuff was exaggerated?” she asked. She’d never had a wound get infected before, after all.

No. No it isn’t. Before antibacterial medicine people died in droves from the slightest little cuts. Come on, I know this, so you know it too! And we must have lost a litre of blood back there. We didn’t bother cleaning our big, messy stomach wound until almost an hour afterwards! Yet, somehow, we just ran from a train snake with a human head without even feeling the slightest bit woozy. How are we not dying from a fever or blood loss, Rita?

Rita rolled her eyes and got to her feet. Whatever had happened with the snake after Alice fled had finished. She could feel Demon and Knight’s group starting to move again. If she wanted to catch up, she had better get moving as well.

“Alice, I woke up with eight legs, a spider butt and… you. This is hardly the most shocking thing that has happened to us today.”

“Yes, I absolutely think it was on purpose” Gora said. “Not only that, it was calculated.”

Ava snorted. “Then why lure the giant worm down a cliff that broke half the bones in its body?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it didn’t realize it couldn’t safely navigate down?” Gora replied. “But it taunted it, making sure it stayed close by until we showed up. It knew we were going to come investigate. Did you see the way it turned its head to look at us, right at the end? It knew exactly where we were, and it wanted us to know it.”

“You’re still talking about the spider, right? Could we please refer to ‘it’ as ‘her’?” Ava asked, rubbing her eyes. “‘She’ was clearly female, the human part at least, and this constant referring to everything as an ‘it’ is getting seriously confusing.”

“Ava, it’s a Nightmare-spawned monster. Humanizing it…” Gora started, but Ava cut her off.

“Nobody’s saying she isn’t a monster! But, fuck, even monsters can have gender, right Miss Demon? And do we all agree on the name ‘Arachnida Sapiens’?”

They were walking again, past more breathtaking, panoramic views of post-post-functional architecture. They’d left the site where they battled the Giant Headworm behind after slicing off and storing a couple of large slices of meat from the thing. According to Gora it was highly sought after in certain specialist restaurants, back in Grailmane.

“Ava, I have told you before. I am not a demon. I am a cambion. And the next time you mix them up I will have to assume it is not a mistake and take offense” Gora growled, a note of warning in her voice.

“We can’t name it” Samual interjected before Ava could reply with another scathing remark and possibly get herself slapped by someone that could backhand a rhinoceros.

“What? Why not?” Ava asked. “We found it first, so we get to name it. That’s how scientific discovery works.”

“Only if it has not been already named, dear girl” Zaxier said kindly. “And our esteemed leader, Gora, only said that she had not seen it before. Chances are that the species has been observed before, if rarely, and she is merely unaware of it.”

“Exactly” Gora agreed. “We will need to get back to Grailmane before we can check the records.”

“But it might still be something new, right?” Ava asked, hope evident in her voice. “And if it is, we could name it?”

“If nobody has seen one before, we could name it…” Gora agreed, “…in consultation with the Delving Guild in Grailmane.”

Ava groaned. “They the ones that came up with the name ‘Giant Headworm’?” When Gora nodded, Ava deflated even further. “For fuck sakes, we’re never going to be able to name it something cool!”

“I think Giant Headworm is a pretty cool name… I mean, it had that giant head, right?” Bob said.

“Shut up, Meat, nobody cares what you think” Ava snapped at him.

“I do agree with Ava that we need to call the creature… something” Zaxier said. “We can hardly refer to it… her as the ‘spider-thing’ on a permanent basis. I rather suspect that there are other creatures with an arachnid countenance in this place and such imprecise naming might cause confusion in an engagement.”

“Fine” Gora sighed. “It’s the Nemesis. There. Precise enough for you?”

“Nemesis?” Ava asked, surprise in her voice. “Isn’t that a bit melodramatic?”

“That creature, Nemesis” Gora patiently explained, “is one of the single most dangerous creatures I have ever encountered in the City Zone. Do you know why?”

The entire group shook their heads, various expressions of confusion and surprise on their faces.

“Because it thinks. Almost everything else here is just some variation on claws and teeth and muscle. I can fight that. But something that thinks like you or I do? That scares me. Back there, it had a chance to take out Bob and Zaxier. A chance that it created for itself despite my best efforts at not letting it do so. A chance it did not take for reasons I cannot fathom.”

“Not only is it thinking like us” she continued, “it is outthinking us. And that downright terrifies me. It is playing with us and you are treating it like a pet, more concerned with what you’re going to put on its collar than how you are going to kill it. I don’t know if I should be appalled by your stupidity or amazed by its genius in playing you.”

“I’m not…” Ava began.

“Stop. I don’t want to hear it” Gora said with finality.

For a while they walked in shocked silence. Around them, the buildings became more and more intact the further they travelled from the cliff face, shifting from post-post-functional architecture to just merely the post-functional kind. Gora’s eyes kept flicking to the windows.

“The next time we see Nemesis” Gora spoke again after a few minutes of thoughtful silence, “I want you to cut loose with everything you have, Zaxier and Ava. Whatever it takes to make it dead. I don’t care what else is threatening us, Samual and I will keep it off you. Nemesis is the priority target as long as you have a shot, got it?”

“Yes.”

“Alright.”

Ahead of them, the tell-tale orange flicker in one of the windows had Gora breathe a sigh of relief. They’d found the Campsite.