It was rather disappointing when we broke up the clay deposit in the cave. I had figured it was rather thick, but I was very wrong. If we wanted to actually make use out of the stuff to the point of industrialism, even just for our own little burgeoning city, a new source would be needed.

The deposit I found but didn't bother with for so long was only a few inches thick! Once it was broken through, most of it fell into a deep hole. Well, a hole wasn't accurate... there was a large drop, which who knows how far down it was, but the echo from the falling clay was pretty informative. It was a wide cavern that had shallow water at the bottom. If we weren't spiderian, then I doubt we could make it down safely without a rope or climbing picks to get back up.

Plus, now the arched doorway full of clay was even more questionable now. Who would do this, especially so skillfully, if it wasn't meant to be passed through? Who would have been on the other side to make sure the clay didn't fall through, and how else would it remain smooth if someone's palm wasn't there to smooth it?

...

It was time to go after the scalewolves. Besides our stolen weapons, we did have some decent clubs. The little wooden spikes wedged into them made them look studded with spines, which I was worried about. I fought those creatures, and knew they were smart. I doubt these would be enough. So, each of the wooden spines was envenomed with poison from my black widows. The widow archetypes- like Aneis the black widow and Sun the orb weaver, used one-handed clubs. The wolf-spider archetypes like Djraine and Cletus used two-handed.

I mean, why not? Weapons should fit their users. Small and agile? Have your weapon encourage it. Slow and strong? Let your weapon reflect that. Sting, my half-scorpion/half-human son, however, was his own weapon. Me? I used a lighter stick than the others since I wanted to carve a groove into it so I could stuff it with mud for my special.

But someone needed to stay behind to watch the birds and our prisoner, so I left Sting. But for some reason my mind began to wander, and I remembered a good friend of mine from my first life.

Neither of us had a family that had the slightest idea of how to treat others like living things. I had met other people through my life who had complained about various things, stating they were traumatized by what happened to them. "Mom bought me the wrong iPhone! I can't believe she'd do this to me!". Sure. Yeah. Trauma.

Once I even BEGAN to say what happened to me, I could tell they were traumatized by me just reporting what already happened. My own psychotherapist had a stress-ball one day, just a little ball full of sand you were supposed to squeeze to relieve your tension. After hearing from a friend of mine in a conference call, just him saying what he had seen my mother do to me... well, my therapist- a trained professional- destroyed her stress ball. What she learned about my past had even traumatized her, and it wasn't even from me! What happened to me was so bad that a third-party hearing about it got affected severely.

Why did any of this matter? What did it have to do with my friend? Well... what they had told me of their own family history, thier own past... it was so horrifically, monstrously, incalculably, demonically evil, that my own problems paled in comparison to the point that I didn't think I should have the right to complain.

What happened?

Well...

They told me that when they were much younger, someone had given them a puppy. I don't remember who they said gave it to them. Anyway, they were in the back yard, playing with the dog. Dad was high on meth, and drunk. As usual, he decided to go beat his child. The dog growled and barked, trying to protect its master as a dog should. That made things worse. So, so, much worse. Dad decided to beat the dog, then strangle it unconscious in addition to his kid. Had his kid hold the dog, and wait for it to wake up. When it did, the dad strangled it unconscious again. When it woke up again, it was too weak to fight back. With the dog yelping in terror and pain, while the child had to hold the dog and stroke it and was forced to tell it that everything would be okay, he cut off the dog's paw while she was forced to stroke it, and after being cut off and the dog killed, its severed paw was sewn into the child's hand.

The friend wasn't in school very much. I found out from them many years later that it was because they were kept at home and made to heal there from broken bones. I met them in high school, and we were in a small area set aside from the main campus because it was set up for people from broken homes or with emotional disabilities. Well, after I left the school, I was told by multiple other students I was in class with, that the friend's dad had come to school and taken the friend out of class- but not far enough out of class. Only in the doorway. While there, in front of everyone, he punched their now teenage offspring in the face, breaking their nose, in front of everyone. It isn't like what I was told about the dog was out of the range of possibilities.