Blue-Eyed Mother (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
blueeyedmother) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
nexus_crossings2020-08-03 04:00 pm
blueeyedmother) wrote in nexus_crossings2020-08-03 04:00 pm
From the Eastern Country
[OOC: When replying, please include the time of day.. morning, noon, evening, night.. that your character is coming. It will effect the outcome.]
It's hard to say when it happened, overnight or in the wee-hours of the morning, but at some point a portion of the plaza was hung in webbing that strung like spun glass across the facades and alleys. Small beads of crystalline material hung from the webbing like drops of dew on the workings of a spider at sunrise. As the breeze touched the layers of webbing the glass tinkled like chimes but there's an undertone of wailing and human cries in the sound. It's a ghostly sound of unknown origin.
However, on closer inspection of the web one could find skeletons hung, barren bones held in their natural position by more glass webbing. It almost looks like a crypt shrine for the dead in some church under tunnels, though these appear to be only the bones of large mammals instead of humans. The scene under sun or light throws shadows and reflections across the plaza. The glittering like light through a sun catcher dazzling a million colors across the ground and buildings across the street.
The approach of a person is what starts the whispering. "Where has mother gone?" repeated over and over in hundreds of voices from within the webbing. Slowly, tentatively, spiderlings come out the size of a human hand and shaped like orb weaving spiders. However, they are nearly transparent and as they move mirrored sections appear and disappear on the surface of their bodies.
"Where has mother gone?" They ask again in a chorus of eerie voices that are accompanied by human like blue eyes staring expectantly, with hope, at whomever is listening.
It's hard to say when it happened, overnight or in the wee-hours of the morning, but at some point a portion of the plaza was hung in webbing that strung like spun glass across the facades and alleys. Small beads of crystalline material hung from the webbing like drops of dew on the workings of a spider at sunrise. As the breeze touched the layers of webbing the glass tinkled like chimes but there's an undertone of wailing and human cries in the sound. It's a ghostly sound of unknown origin.
However, on closer inspection of the web one could find skeletons hung, barren bones held in their natural position by more glass webbing. It almost looks like a crypt shrine for the dead in some church under tunnels, though these appear to be only the bones of large mammals instead of humans. The scene under sun or light throws shadows and reflections across the plaza. The glittering like light through a sun catcher dazzling a million colors across the ground and buildings across the street.
The approach of a person is what starts the whispering. "Where has mother gone?" repeated over and over in hundreds of voices from within the webbing. Slowly, tentatively, spiderlings come out the size of a human hand and shaped like orb weaving spiders. However, they are nearly transparent and as they move mirrored sections appear and disappear on the surface of their bodies.
"Where has mother gone?" They ask again in a chorus of eerie voices that are accompanied by human like blue eyes staring expectantly, with hope, at whomever is listening.
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skekGra and urGoh have talked to the Arathim Ascendancy, which is unsettling and alien even by Thra standards but not evil - the Arathim's aggression came from legitimate grievances deep in Thra's history, and they had been tricked by the Skeksis along with everyone else. The Arathim who live in the Nexus settled in peace. He wonders if he should introduce them to these new spiders.
"Hello there, young ones. I am skekGra the Heretic."
"And I...am urGoh...the Wanderer." The Wanderer shuffles forward, trying to get a closer look at the strange creatures. Not Arathim, obviously, but these alien glassy spiders could easily be mistaken for them.
"Don't be afraid," says the old Skeksis, lowering his voice. "We don't mean you any harm. We don't know where your mother is, but we have some good friends who are a lot like you."
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The whisper could be heard with the god's sharp hearing. As for the words themselves, they caused his eyebrows to knot into a frown. What did they mean? Why was the spider here? Loki was not afraid of the spider, since he had often taken the form of many arachnid over his years. Mostly to annoy others out of sheer mischief but the form had served him well amongst others. Walking closer, he placed both hands behind his back, cocking his head to the side slightly, a small smirk spreading over his face.
"Well now, what do we have here? Aren't you a curious thing. Why are you asking for your mother?"
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She noticed the webbing first. And tilted her head at the sound that it made when the breeze touched it slightly. Ghostly.
Death smiles. She is not bothered by the barren bones that she might find. It was part of the cycle to come upon such signs of her legacy after all.
When the whispering starts, Death stops and taps her umbrella against the ground a few times. She watches as the spiderlings come out to approach her. And she kneels down to be at their level.
"I have not seen your mother."
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"Like mother." One says and then the words ripple through the others. It's macabre how the tiny voices speak. They aren't afraid of her and if she doesn't move they will start testing out her boots, tentative little taps with their legs.
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"Then would you like to stay with me, until we find her?"
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They back away from her hand at first and then slowly come forward again. A couple climb into her hand while the others watch.
"We are many." They tell her but they would like the company.
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The skeletons are the most unsettling part. Ben's not in the mood to be anybody's breakfast, least of all a spider's. Still, none of the bones are human, so he hopes that any thoughts of fighting will be unnecessary. They hopefully are intelligent enough to tell sentient creatures apart from food. Besides, he doesn't know if the bones strung in the web were from prey that was captured and sucked dry or just happened to be there by coincidence.
The creatures asking for their mother is strange, on the other hand, but at least it's not a threat. The spiderlings aren't moving to attack. But if these are only baby spiders, the mother must be much bigger - and, he realizes with a nervous glance, that might be where the skeletons came from. Part of the natural cycle, and it's really no different from him hunting in the Wilds or tucking into a meal at a Nexus restaurant, but the jumpiness comes with being in a predator's territory.
"Your mother isn't here." He consciously holds still, despite caution and distrust. Not going to start something when there's no need. Best to talk first, and the spiders are clearly intelligent enough to use human speech. "But you'll be safe here, I think."
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Hundreds of little blue eyes are staring at him with curiosity. Eventually some of the boldest come out and start looking for a way to get to him. His presence makes them want to touch him. If he's close enough little legs may reach out and try to touch him. "Have you seen mother?"
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"The Nexus will have a lot of what you need. There's things to hunt and water to drink out in the Wilds. I used to hunt there. It's not safe, exactly, but I could bring you something to help until your mother comes home. Food. Water." He gestures to his chest, introducing himself. "My name is Ben."
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Then they fall silent and only the glass chiming sound and distant wailing on the breeze can be heard. Suddenly, they all turn their hopeful eyes to the human. "Name us. We have no names. Are we Ben? Ben brings water. What are our names?"
The sentences start blending together, weaving into a strangely musical tone that could be a little hypnotizing from the complexity of all the murmured speaking.
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He's hungry, too, though knowing what he does about how spiders eat he hopes sharing a meal with them won't cost him his appetite.
He's startled when the spiders ask him about names. "You don't have names? Your mother didn't give them to you yet?" Well, there are too many spiders for him to count, so naming them would almost certainly be a process.
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They all stop to stare at Ben when he starts talking about names. There's a lively chattering that occurs, too fast and quiet for a human probably. "You are mother now."
He was feeding them and going to stay. That made him a mother right.
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He means it, too. He can't stay with the spiders forever, but he'll make sure they're safe until their mother comes back.
And if she knows Ben protected and fed her children, he'd hopefully look like a friend and not prey.
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Mantis is at least certain to not touch the webs. They look like glass, sound like glass, but that wailing noise is a deterrent from the odd beauty of how the bones are scattered about. The horror story feel of the scene doesn't bother him, or at least, it doesn't bother him the way that makes him feel in danger. Spiders, especially the kind like the orb weavers, aren't terrifically dangerous.
Mantis calmly offers a hand towards one of the baby spiders. He came into the world and lost his mother quickly. He can only imagine what might have happened to the mother of these creatures. "Mother isn't here. You might be on your own."
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When he speaks a couple scoot back out, slow and keeping at a distance. It is some time before an exploratory leg taps on his fingers. They're curious and if Mantis cared to look, on par with a human toddler as far as mental ability though better spoken than a human at that age.
Another moment and one climbs into his hand, eyes turned up to try and figure out what this person is and if it is friendly. It's one of the others in the web, hiding in the darkness that starts a chorus among the babies. "We don't have any water."
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"Is that it? There should be a store somewhere around here that has a hose or bottled water. Would you like me to try and find it?"
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They don't necessarily need the water brought to them but they are also too nervous to go out alone to look.
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But do you know what he's NOT ready to deal with? A bunch of human eyed giant spiders asking about their mother in a web full of bones.
This. Is not a thing he wants to deal with. Not now, not ever.
"Nope!" he throws his hands up, "Nope nope nooope."
He turns on his heel and swiftly walks back from whence he came. Let someone else deal with the weird mutant spiders. Because it's not gonna be him.
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"Mother??" The babies stream out of the web in unison to go see what the movement is. Tiny legs tapping across the concrete and road as they follow the now receding form, but they are fast. They will catch up.
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Jalen makes the mistake of looking back.
He shrieks in very unflattering way. They're following him, why are they following him?! He has never run faster in his LIFE then he is now.
"NO! Not mother! NOT MOTHER!"
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She only has a few seconds to be bewildered before the glitter appears and she hears the pitter-patter of many, many tiny feet.
Well, that explains it.
Okay. Presumably the antiviolence field won't allow the strange man to be killed an eaten in the Plaza, but she's just enough of a bleeding heart to step in anyway. She darts the few yards to where she's left her motorcycle parked by her favorite plant store, starts it up, leaps on, and speeds through the narrow streets to get ahead of him.
If her timing is perfect, she'll pull up in front of him in time to offer a hand and a ride like some weird fever-dream of a white knight. If it's less perfect, at least she can probably pull between him and his eight-legged friends.
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However, instinct kicks in and a couple of them let out strands of webbing to get aloft and start floating after, a more graceful if less controlled way to see what this object is with all it's legs and now shiny parts.
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IF it is. They're going to catch him, they're going to drag him back to their freaky little bone webs and-
Screams again as he's nearly run over by... whatever that thing that lady is on! He doesn't even care what it is! He doesn't know where she came from but he's fine with this terrifying angel woman God has CLEARLY sent to him in his time of greatest need!
"The spiders are flying! Why are they flying?!" he grabs her hand with his free one so she can haul him up. The spider are full of surprises it seems and he quite frankly doesn't want any MORE.
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That's an empty threat, really. She's starting to think the spiders are...children? Is it them calling for their mother?
She glances up and notes the few ballooning over their heads, and laughs out loud. She could probably outrun them in the open, or so she thinks, but that would involve driving off into the Wilds with a strange man clinging to her back, and potentially upset spiderlings in hot pursuit.
Nah.
She makes a sharp turn and heads for the Viper's Pit. "When I stop, hop off and try to get inside. We're not going to outfly them on a motorbike."
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"Is that where we're heading?!" he ask incredulously. They appear to be heading in the direction of an establishment called 'The Viper's Pit' and he's not thinking too rationally at this very moment, "I can certainly tuck and roll better then most but I DO hope that's just a poorly named tavern because the addition of vipers would hardly an improvement on this situation!"
He just wants a quiet place for some alone time with his drink. It's all he's ever wanted.
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They can hear well and the sound of the vibrating things that had carried their mother away, or at least what they thought was their mother, drew their attention. They approached cautiously looking for what it was and where their mother was at.
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Trouble is getting there, which she realizes is going to be more complicated than she hoped when the little spiders crowd into the street between them and their destination. Well, fuck. Under most circumstances, Furiosa would have zero compunctions about bowling into a group of individuals blocking her way when she's in a motor vehicle. Human, spider, alien--wouldn't matter. Except the child-voices have her second-guessing herself.
She hesitates, with a split second to make a final decision, and swears out loud before making a sharp turn and slamming the brakes, just barely managing not to tip the bike and spill herself and her passenger into the street.
Look, they also look like glass, too, and glass can puncture tires. That's her fallback excuse. She's not running over the leggy little schlangers.
She puts a foot down to keep the bike from falling, idles the engine without stopping it. "Okay. I guess we better talk, then. Why are you chasing him?"
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So, despite never having seen such an unusual display of shimmering and glasslike spiderwebs like the ones before him now, Mordred is unsurprised by the sight. Merely curious. He's confident enough in his own power and ability to connect with the strange and unknowable that the wailing and bones threaded throughout the area earn only a single raised eyebrow.
When the spiders come close, Mordred watches them for a moment, studying the strange shifting moonlit brightness on each arachnid's back, before crouching to bring himself down nearer to their level.
"I don't know. I've only just come to this place." A beat. "Perhaps you'll have to learn to manage without her." It's not a taunt, but advice that he suspects enough of the softer peoples of the Nexus would be reluctant to offer. Sometimes the truths worth knowing are harsh.
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It's like talking to a bunch of preschoolers in human terms. They hear his words but look curious and confused, something easily conveyed with their blue human eyes. Eventually, several move up onto a deer skull, tapping on it with their feet to get his attention.
"Too small to hunt." The chorus seems to pick up among all of them slowly.
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"Then you may have the good fortune of returning to the Gods or world beyond soon, to rejoice at the sides of the powers that shape this place." --is what he starts to say, when something odd in the air catches at the edges of Mordred's consciousness like so many little hooks. A strange magic, and a presence tied up within it that feels intimately familiar (cold, grasping, hungry, death? Death.) It seems there's something even more to all of these little creatures than he initially understood. Completely distracted, Mordred reaches out a hand to a nearby spider, palm upturned.
"Will one of you crawl upon my hand?" He's prepared to be told no and assumes he can get a read on the magics colliding with his own by touching one of the webs, but this way is simpler.
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His rounds take him close to the webbed section of the plaza; he'd have liked to have gone through that area to get to his destination. He can go around if he must, but the moment he hears the tinkling sounds of the chimes, the hairs rise on the back of his neck. This strikes him as something supernatural, too eerie to be his business, per se, but when he sees the bones strung up in the web, he can't turn away and pretend he didn't see it. He's got to at least double-check and make sure they don't belong to anyone he might have known.
Thus, the sky overhead is still grey and pearly when he enters the network of glittering crystal and bone, but the reflections make it dazzling nonetheless.
The whispering question makes him want to turn and run, but oddly the appearance of the spiderlings is...well, reassuring isn't the word, but at least there are living creatures asking the question, not ghosts or the wind whistling through the bones.
Spiders. That Micolash fellow was obsessed with a spider-looking kinda creature, as he recalls, but his drawings looked nothing like these. They're creepy, but beautiful. More so with those humanoid eyes.
Cricket is in general surprisingly comfortable with the world beyond humanity breaking through the shell of the mundane. He was fine with the star spirits, as comfortable talking to Winter as any human should be, and Loki has a part of his heart that he fully intends to let him keep. It comes almost naturally to try to converse with these creatures, whatever they are.
"Whose, yours or mine?" He asks, standing still with his arms at his sides and spread slightly to show he's not carrying anything to hurt them. "Mine ain't ever been here. She died when I was little."
"Don't know about yours, but if you wanna tell me about her, maybe I can look for her?" Even as he says it, it occurs to him that's probably a bad idea, but it's too late to take it back.
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When Doctor Octavius sees webbing like that, however, pride demands she investigate in kind. The dangers hinted at with those skeletons though means she will not be investigating without precaution. She's suited up in her full protective gear as she steps lightly toward the thickest bit of the webbing draped over an alleyway, humming a little tune under her breath.
She's waited until nearly dusk to proceed, well after most of the foot traffic has gone from the Plaza. She has an image to maintain here, after all. If a Pesky spider person shows she'd rather not become a spectacle. What she finds though is not at all what she would have expected when she went looking for 'Spider People'. Unless one Peter Parker has fornicated with some experimental spider, in which case...ew.
This.
This was not the expected outcome. Just how many are there...?
"Fascinating." Horrifying. "Did she leave you here, little ones?"
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"Mother is gone." Once one says it they all repeat it in a weird, out of unison chorus of tiny voices. They've seen a lot of people today so they are less afraid by the time Liv shows up. Some of the boldest have moved all the way out to the edge of the web to get a better look.
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"Is she coming back?" If the little ones are so bulbous and large, how massive must the mother be? Large enough to capture and web large mammals to ornate her web with their bones. Telling then at how large these children could potentially become.
Does the Nexus know how dangerous this is?