One Weird Frog
Pandora hadn't intended to say so much. She missed her master. They had been together longer than she had been alive in her previous life. They almost lived like an old bickering couple up to the point he left his dear house-spider and never returned. But after his death, she had left that life behind as well. May the whole family be beheaded by their treachery.
It had been many seasons now since she had even seen another human let alone a transcended. She was a forest spider now. And this little frog was supposed to be emergency food. A pet at most. A tool to make her life a little easier as her food requirements got bigger and bigger at best.
Now she watched the little frog's sleeping form and wondered what she had gotten herself into. The little frog snuggled and burrowed into the warm mud blissfully as she rubbed its head.
***
Over the next several weeks, Pandora's pet kept its end of the bargain. Her webs would start to vibrate. Her pet would lead the prey down a path. She would rush over to the trap. SNAP! She would grab whatever it was before it could gobble down "the bait". And then her pet would leave once more to whatever butterfly it was chasing that day.
Her pet brought her two to four meals a week. She would call it an over achiever, but sometimes they were quite small. Instead of thanking it for the meal she had gotten in the habit of telling it "Tomorrow then. Today I eat this, but tomorrow I'll eat you" and now it brought her just about anything that chased it. She was still not sure if she wanted to know what it had done to gather the small hoard of tree mice that now filled one of her caves. She had a feeling that it wasn't on purpose.
Even then, while Pandora's days were still busy with repairing webs and making traps, her pet's days were not. She would pass a pool and there her pet would be sitting staring at the sky. She would pass a cave, and there her pet would be sitting singing to the crickets. She was once repairing one of her webs, trying to ignore the movement overhead, when the thread snapped out of her hands and the green figure of her pet swung past her head.
"Spiderfrog, Spiderfrog,
can out swing any demon dog," her pet sang.
"What in the thirteen hells are you doing?" Pandora snapped.
Her pet swung back, now tangled in the web upside down. "Swinging?"
"Swinging? If you are going to play in my webs maybe I should eat you now!" Pandora spun the little frog.
"But you just ate! That rat I brought you was huge and there are still snacks in the larder."
Pandora spun her again. Wrapping a little more web around her center.
"Please, please, don't eat me!" Her pet cried. "I just want to be a better hunter like you. You said monsters and humans get so many points that we can't even compare to them with pure strength, but knowledge and skills can be learned and practiced freely. If I master walking on your webs I can bound through them while the prey follows me, then they will jump right in them and get nice and stuck before you even have to strike. All you'll have to do is wrap them up like a present and devour them."
Pandora grumbled to herself, this pet was smarter than it looked. Unable to argue with its logic, she cut it free.
"Spiderfrog, Spiderfrog,
look over there, it's a termite log."
The little frog jumped up a tree and then on top of one of her webs. Its webclimbing wasn't bad for a frog. Climbing up the web, her pet made it quickly out of sight before switching to another line anchored further away. Pandora decided to forget everything she just saw in hopes that the strange behavior would pass and her pet would return to her place in this world.
"Aunty Spider?" The mental call of her pet cut through Pandora's thoughts. "Help please? I'm stuck again."
***
Days passed, but her new pet's strange behavior didn't. While Pandora was on a stroll to find new ambush points, she came across her pet gumming a plant near the water. "You know frogs are carnivorous, right? That means you can't digest plants, your digestive system only processes meat."
Her pet puffed up in annoyance like a cute little slimeball. "I'm pretending... This is a One Thousand Year Old Ginger going to give me great cultivation powers as I absorb it."
"That's a fern."
Her eyes sparkled. "A One Million Year Old Hearts Tongue Fern with the power to grant poison resistance!"
Pandora rolled her eyes. "Just don't get yourself killed by eating something poisonous."
Pandora continued her walk, but about an hour later she returned to find her pet laying limply by a nightshade that had a bite taken out of it. She tapped the little frog with a long leg, no reaction. No breathing. Her pet had really eaten something poisonous.
What a waste. If she had eaten it earlier she could have absorbed its soul, but now it was just a small lump of meat. Maybe next time Pandora will continue to eat all the transcended she comes accross and her next pet should just be a normal frog.
Pandora pulled out some silk and reached to wrap the little frog up for later. SNAP! It's eyes opened.
"I'm awake! I'm awake!" It croaked. "Your hungry? I'll go get something right now!"
Pandora let her pet shake off the web and hop away. How in the world did it survive that much nightshade for such a little frog? She glanced at the fern. She glanced at the path her pet had bound down. It was gone. She turned back to the plant and cut a few bits off. She could wrap it around something hanging in the larder and probably digest them together so there won't be a strong reaction.
***
A week later Pandora's pet was nowhere to be found. She had stopped by a few times to drop off prey she had led to Pandora, but otherwise every night she would dissappear until late the next morning going to bed covered in mud from somewhere else.
Pandora was starting to wonder what was keeping her pet so busy, but instead of her pet she had found a new waterfall near one of the warmer pools. It was trickling out of a hole in the dirt under a root about a meter off the ground. She couldn't think of any creature that would build such a thing, but it didn't look like regular water erosion either.
"-Eeeeeeeeeeeee."
Pandora stepped away as it started emitting a screeching sound.
PUMPH.
SPLASH!
A small ball of green shot out of the hole and hit the surface of the pool creating a huge wave that enveloped Pandora. She hadn't planned on a shower.
Whiping the water out of her eyes, when Pandora looked back at the pool there were two large black eyes staring up at her out from under a leaf in the water. "What in the sanctity of nature are you doing?"
Her pet ducked under the water and replied mentally. "Building a water slide?"
"Why?"
"I figured I could increase my burrow speed by increasing my digging skill and, well, I didn't want to just dig holes everywhere because that wouldn't be 'productive', so I decided to build a waterside!" Her head popped back out of the water. "And it worked! I got faster and better each day."
Pandora had wanted to eat her, but she couldn't argue with the results. "If you have so much time on your hand, then go dig us out a bigger place to live."
***
Pandora's main cave was now big enough that she could hang from the ceiling on one leg, stretch down to the floor with the opposite leg, and still not touch it. It wasn't the original cave she had brought her pet to when she first saved it, but a place a little lower down the mountain that the little frog found. It was closer to animal trails and had the potential to be made bigger yet.
How the little frog knew of her current growth problem, Pandora only had suspicions of. If she hadn't started growing she could have stayed in the city, but at her size now someone would mistake her for a demonic dog and send adventures to hunt her down if she got too close. Then again, since it was rude to ask about a lady's weight, the little frog was probably too scared she would eat it if it mentioned anything. It wouldn't have been wrong, but now Pandora was unsure how conferm her suspicion.
Pandora's pet was currently jumping and crawling over a web she had strung up by its request. While Pandora rested and watched, the little frog dipped its front toes in handmade pigments and spread them over the roof of the cave. Every once in a while it would glance down at her, grab some more pigment, and then returned to work.
"What in all of creation are you doing now?" Pandora asked.
"Painting," the little frog chirped.
"Why?"
"Because I want to make this place pretty. You know it's home when you can paint the walls." It looked at Pandora and then added a couple of swirls in blue and green with a few yellow dots.
Pandora clicked her mandibles. "Why do you keep looking at me?"
Her pet looked away. "I'm painting the ceiling like the pattern on your back. It's so pretty I thought it would be nice to look at throughout the day."
"But I'm just black with a few red stripes on my back. Most people used to mistake me for a common house spider. Even house Farrell had to use a special spray to tell the difference." That was the best part of using Pandora spiders for assassinations, unless a person knew about them they never thought to be wary.
"Really?" Her pet smeared some orange and red on the ceiling. "To my eyes the black has rainbows swirling this way and that. They hide just under the surface, but shine a little in the moonlight."
"You make me sound like a peacock."
"Maybe you were in a past life." The little frog chortled.
Pandora stiffened at the thought. Could she really have been? "You are one weird frog. You don't act like a frog nor like you are 100 years old."
Her per flipped upside down on a strand of web and stared at her. "Why should I act like either? I'm not really a frog (though the other frogs don't seem to mind) and I'm not 100 years old (that was the old frog), why act like something I'm not?"
Pandora couldn't reply. In the city, acting like a normal spider in front of everyone but her master had been her life for decades. Climb in through the window or crack, make it to the bedroom, bite them when you have a chance, then return to the extraction point. If the family had suspected anything was different with her in those first few years with her master they would have taken her away. She had been stronger than a normal spider but still not as strong as a human who had killed many.
Her pet yawned and jumped down. "Aaaaunty Spiiiider?"
"What?" Pandora clicked.
"Your silk is so beautiful and your skill at weaving so masterful, would you make me a blanket?" The little frog looked up at her with pleading eyes.
"Why do you need a blanket? You built a pool in the back that has plenty of warm mud. Isn't that enough for a little frog like you?"
The little frog puffed up. "Mud is not the same as a blanket. It is slippery and eventually dries and flakes off. I want a nice warm blanket that I can wrap myself in and snuggle into like a cocoon... that is not made to prepare me for eating."
Pandora covered her front eyes with a leg, rubbing them. "You are one weird frog, but so be it."
"Yay!" The little frog began jumping around excitedly getting tangled in the support web and splattering the room in paint.
'Ah, soon the cold would be returning,' Pandora thought, 'the snow will bring peace and quiet once more.'