Utah is

Do these things ever lose their glow?" I asked Octavia.

"Not that I've seen."

"So, at least…"

"What do you mean?" said Octavia.

"I'm asking you to narrow it down," I said. "The fact that you've never seen one burn out doesn't mean that they last forever. Maybe they last for fifty years, or a hundred years, I don't know. But we can at least narrow it down if, for example, you've seen a single glowstone that has glowed for five years."

"Yeah," she said. "I've seen glowstone that has kept its glow for at least…twenty years. More than that, even."

"More by how much?" I asked. "Closer to thirty, or forty?"

"I don't know," she said. "At a certain point, I stopped keeping track of years. Why does it matter if it was thirty, or forty, or a hundred years? If you knew that they lasted for a thousand years instead of a hundred, would it make any difference?"

"Yes, it would," I said. "When an object glows, it's emitting energy in radiant form. So whether a rock glows for a hundred years or a thousand is based on how much energy it contains, right? If you took a glowstone that had a thousand years worth of luster in it and cracked it open, it would create an explosion ten times as big as a glowstone with a hundred year lifespan. That could matter!" I wasn't even sure if the math worked out linearly like that — maybe glowstone emitted radiant light at different rates throughout its lifespan, maybe some of the energy they emitted as light was energy that they observed over time from geothermal sources rather than something that was part of their formation — but I didn't want to bog her down with the details.

"You're talking about glowstone exploding, as if that's something that's going to happen," said Octavia. "But it doesn't."

"Except for the one time when it did."

"That was during an earthquake," said Octavia.

"Earthquakes happen here?" I said.

"Very rarely," said Octavia. "I've only experienced one. It was probably more than a decade ago."

I got closer to the glowstone, awed not only by its cyan-tinged light, but by what that glowing implied. I tentatively tapped at it, but it didn't react to my touch — or if there was a reaction, it didn't manifest as a flicker or anything else visible.

Then, I felt a cramp in my leg, and realized that, in the extremely low-clearance cave tunnel, I was assuming a very awkward posture. "Alright," I said, "I think I've seen enough for now."

"Great," she said, leading me back to the part of the tunnel that emptied into the central cavern. As she reached it, she turned to me and said, "Can we do the thing now? Where you go to the surface and attack the ants from above?"

"Sure," I said.

The truth was that I wanted to keep exploring the lower tunnels and see more of what this cave had to offer. But Octavia had already been plenty generous in teaching me things today: we had begun the night with a lengthy discussion on our abilities and the ecology of the desert surface, she had indulged my desire to test my climbing abilities on the cave walls, and she had now shown me several of her tunnels. Octavia was right to want to focus on action: SP was the kind of resource that was 'use it or lose it,' and there would always be time tomorrow for more questions.

As I followed her to the cave entrance, I spoke up. "Thanks for answering all of my questions, Octavia," I said.

"You're welcome," she said.

"I know that sometimes, it might seem like I'm overthinking things. I know that certain things might not seem useful in the moment that I'm asking them. But you never know where a bit of knowledge will take you."

"I understand," said Octavia. "Even if I don't understand, I understand."

I nodded. Her meaning was clear, even if her statement was semantically odd. Octavia did understand my curiosity: she had, without prompting, suggested that I attack the ants from above then quickly return back so that I could observe their movement in the lower tunnel. From her point of view, that was the kind of thing that was worth observing first hand, and I couldn't disagree with her: she understood the value of knowledge in the abstract; our only disagreement was over which threads were worth exploring.

With that thought in mind, for the third time that night, I exited the cave, and headed toward the ant lair with something between curiosity and bloodlust. Time to see how they run.

Royal Road

SomethingOtherThanRain

Re: Dragonize (LitRPG) by Kuiper

Chapter 36: Old Enemies

Report

The path from Octavia's cave to the ant's nest was fresh enough in my mind that I didn't need to rely on an ant to lead me there. If someone had asked me for directions, I wouldn't have been able to point to any specific navigational landmarks, but I could retrace my steps effortlessly: everything from the familiar texture of the ground and the pattern of the random rocks scattered throughout the valley served as a reminder that I had walked to this specific nest before. When I arrived at the entrance to the ant nest and bowed my head, my nostrils flared in what felt like an almost Pavlovian response. This is the spot.

I exhaled the same volley of breath attacks I'd used the last time: [paralyzing breath]. [poison breath]. [noxious breath]. [poison breath]. [noxious breath]. Possibly overkill, but when it came to killing fire ants, I preferred to overshoot rather than undershoot, especially when it was so close to bedtime anyway. I'd wake up with full SP anyway. Can't take it with you.

With that thought in mind, I decided to sprint back to the cave. On my way back, the kill notifications started scrolling by.

Fire ant defeated! 1% exp toward next level

[...]

SP: 5/16

There was something about the rapid scroll of notifications that gave me a thrill. But as I watched them pass, a few things struck me as subtly different. For one thing, I was making progress slower than I had previously — for one thing, I had reached the point where a single ant kill was no longer enough to provide 2% of the exp that I needed to level up. Perhaps one day I might outgrow the ability to effectively "ant farm" as a way of easily leveling up. Part of me had hoped for the opposite: I had invested some of the returns from the previous ant hunt into leveling [mouth] (the points that I hadn't spent mastering [roar] and [speech] specifically), and my damaging breath attacks supposedly scaled with mouth level; I had hoped that I might actually attain a higher kill count this time.

But it seemed the opposite seemed to be true: the kill notifications were scrolling slower than they had the previous time. A natural consequence of busting the same bunker twice, I supposed: ants were likely once bitten, twice shy. That, or I had just offed a significant amount of their population that they hadn't successfully replaced yet.

As I sped back to the cave, there was a bit of movement that I caught in the corner of my eye, something that actually made me slow down for a moment to check. All I could see was the outline of the jagged landscape. I was well aware that a jagged landscape could hide all sorts of things, but I didn't have time to track down what might have just been a tumbleweed, so I continued toward the cave.

As I neared the cave, I saw a familiar shape near the entrance: the silhouette of a hyena. Ah, I was wondering where those went. How odd that my first reaction was one not of fear, but of recognition. Of course, I hadn't forgotten: Hyenas hunt in packs. I glanced to my sides, and saw their shapes closing in. One from the left, one from the right. Wait, no, scratch that: two from the left, two from the — no, wait, maybe more than that. They seemed to blend in so well with the texture of the ground, and hyenas on each side of the formation kept weaving in a way that made it difficult to track their movements. I tried to focus on one, and it almost seemed as if its hide was subtlety changing in hue as it moved to match the color of the rock. Active camouflage? If it was a [scale] ability that I had access to, maybe hyenas had access to something analogous…

Best to avoid this fight for now. I had urgent business back at home, and this ambush didn't change that. I charged at the one hyena that was at the center of the formation, standing between me and the cave entrance. Two smaller hyenas revealed themselves, almost fading into visibility beside the the one in the center. Actually, it wasn't that the two side hyenas were small — it was that the center one was exceptionally big, standing perhaps a foot taller than the rest. The alpha of the pack?

No way out but through. In the past, I'd successfully body slammed hyenas, but the size of this one — and the mass that size implied — made that move seem like a poor choice. Best to go around than through. The hyenas flanking the alpha — which now numbered two on each side — made that trickier, though. I'd have to break through the mammalian wall at some point, so I might as well pick a weak point. I sized up the hyenas, picked the one that looked the smallest (second one on the left), and charged straight at it.

The hyenas, seeing my direction change, adjusted their formation so that the largest one again stood directly in my path. This time, I didn't adjust course: I charged straight for the middle one, then at the last moment, swerved to swing myself sideways into the smallest of the bunch.

I heard a yelp of pain, and the hyena went flying, landing several yards from the cave entrance, limp and whimpering. I had lost momentum from the collision, and felt a bite on my tail that was so sharp I almost didn't feel the pain as it went in — though I certainly felt the pain once the squeeze grew tighter. I opened my mouth and emitted [noxious breath].

SP: 4/16

I tried to march forward, expecting the toothy grip on my tail to loosen as the gas cloud enveloped me, but it didn't. I looked behind me, and saw the largest hyena, standing in the sickly green gas cloud, still gripping my tail and not letting go. I exhaled [poison breath], but the hyena persisted, its massive teeth still holding my tail, but it still didn't let go.

SP: 2/16

I panicked. Using damage-over-time as a deterrent only worked against foes who had a small enough health pool for the damage over time to present a potentially lethal threat. Larger size probably meant a larger health pool. In my fear and panic, I used the last of my remaining SP and exhaled [paralyzing breath]: if I couldn't kill the thing, I could at least immobilize it.

SP: 0/16

The grip on my tail seemed to stiffen — the large hyena slumped to the ground, its legs lacking the ability to support its weight, but its jaws were still clamped around my tail in a vice-like grip.

My first thought was to take advantage of the hyena's paralysis to attack it with my claws and teeth, but as I swiped and bit at it, I was shocked to find that I couldn't pierce its hide. I did my best to force my claws into it with enough pressure, but my [level 1 claws] seemed incapable of accomplishing that task. I tried biting it, sinking my own teeth into one of its legs, and had more success — I managed to puncture the hide, and it started bleeding — but the hyena's own teeth-grip on my tail didn't loosen. Could I even kill this thing before the paralysis wore off?

What I wanted most was to attack the hyena's face — to claw at it, gnaw at it, anything — but it was impossible to reach the hyena's face with any of my claws or teeth when its jaws were locked around my tail — attacking it with my teeth would literally have been like trying to bite my own tail, something my body was not flexible enough to do.

I looked toward the cave, which was less than ten yards away, and crawled forward, dragging the stiff and paralyzed body of the hyena behind me.

While the hyena gripping my tail seemed undeterred by the effects of the [noxious breath] and [poison breath], the smaller hyena I'd smacked into earlier was still trapped in the cloud, and it wheezed desperately in the moments before the damage seemed to overtake it.

Shadowstalker Hyena defeated! 20% exp toward next level

Crawling forward while carrying a massive deadweight hyena was agonizing, the only comfort being that the gas cloud was enough to deter the other hyenas from attacking me as I crawled. But even though I was making progress toward the cave entrance, I still didn't have a plan for how to escape this hyena's grip, not with 0 SP. Should have gone with [harden scales] instead of breath attacks, I realized with hindsight. Nothing to do now but move forward.

The gas cloud was nearly dissipated, and the pack of hyenas behind me — which now numbered at least half a dozen — was starting to circle in closer.

Then, Octavia emerged from the cave entrance, scuttling behind me. "Don't stop!" she yelled.

"Hadn't planned on it," I breathed as I crawled forward.

I couldn't see what was happening behind me as Octavia went to work, but I heard the sickening sound of tearing flesh, and a few seconds later, I could feel the grip around my tail starting to loosen. And a moment later, my tail was free, and I hurried forward, not taking the time to look behind me. As I ducked into the cave entrance, I heard a bone-chilling howl which rang out for a moment, then was abruptly cut short.

Ironhide Hyena defeated! 15% exp toward next level

As I saw the notification, I glanced back, and saw that the large hyena — and a sizable area around it — was covered with the same inky black sludge I'd seen Octavia use before. The other hyenas made no effort to follow us through the stuff, and Octavia made no effort to attack them. She scuttled behind me.

"Best that you avoid touching me for now," she said. "Just head inside, and I'll tidy up my web behind you."

"Alright," I said, walking ahead of her. I tried to avoid damaging her web floor as much as possible, but large chunks of it still clung to me, though it didn't prevent me from making my way past the entrance tunnel and back to the cliff overlooking the central chasm. A minute later, Octavia came in behind me. "Sorry I took so long to come to your rescue," she said. "I was monitoring things on the lower level."

"Understandable," I said.

"I was wondering why you were taking so long," she said. "You missed the action in the lower tunnels. Or, most of it. I can still show you some of the aftermath."

"Is it time sensitive?" I asked. "Do we need to go right now?"

"The parts that would have been time-sensitive are already over," said Octavia. "Whatever's left of the ants, it's not going anywhere any time soon."

"To be honest, right now I'm more curious about what's going on with the hyenas. I've never seen one like that before," I said, glancing back toward the cave entrance. The system notification had called it an [ironhide hyena]. "I've seen dozens of hyenas, and I've never seen anything like that 'ironhide.' Come to think of it, the other hyena I also killed seemed to be different. It was stealthier in its approach. And…also smaller than the others. A 'shadowstalker' hyena. Up until now, I've only dealt with 'ravenous hyenas.' I'm wondering if it's a reason to be concerned."

Octavia nodded. "I think it might be. Hyenas like that are rare. There used to be more of them, many years ago. But when you see one, there's rarely just one. That would explain why you encountered two new variants tonight."

"At least two," I said. "Who knows if the others were some other different kind of hyena."

"It's odd," she said. "I don't know why it's so rarely just one of them. In this place, things tend to rarely change, until they suddenly change all at once."

"Change begets change," I said. Somehow, the fact that this had happened days after my appearance in this desert didn't feel like a coincidence.

"There are two times in the past that unusual hyenas have appeared," she said. "On both occasions, the result has been that it's become harder to find food. Seems obvious why: bigger hyenas are hungrier hyenas."

"That does seem logical," I said. "But I wonder if you might be mixing cause and effect."

"What do you mean?" said Octavia.

"Maybe it's counterintuitive," I said. "But what if the food shortages — or the things that caused the food shortages — were the thing that caused the hyenas to evolve like that?"

"That doesn't seem right," said Octavia. "Food becomes more scarce, so the hyenas grow bigger?"

"Or stealthier, in the case of the shadowstalker," I said. "I'm not sure if 'shadowstalking' requires more or less food. But generally speaking, selection pressures force creatures toward an equilibrium point. If food is scarce, then it's advantageous to be smaller. Are you familiar with the square-cube law?"

"I'm guessing that has to do with geometry," said Octavia.

"Yeah," I said. "Basically, as a creature grows bigger, its volume and weight and need for food scale up faster than its cross-section area, or footprint. That matters, because the cross section of your bones and muscles determines how strong they are, how much weight they can carry, and even how quickly your body can digest food. The most important thing is that the bigger you are, the less efficient you are. So if food is scarce, it's good to be smaller. Being smaller can also make you harder to hunt: less weight makes you more agile and nimble."

"That explains why some hyenas might get smaller," said Octavia. "But why would some become bigger?"

"Sometimes, creatures get locked in an evolutionary arms race," I said. "If you're much, much smaller than another creature, then you can compete on efficiency. Mice can flourish in the presence of elephants, or lions."

"Is that why elephants are afraid of mice?"

"I…have no idea," I said. "I think that's just a literary trope. But the point is, the existence of the much, much larger creatures doesn't really threaten the mouse so much. In fact, the mouse is so small that even the lion, a predator, might ignore the mouse. After all, as an apex predator, the lion can hunt much bigger prey. Its time is better spent going after antelopes, or zebras, or whatever."

"Makes sense," said Octavia.

"So, it can be good to be much, much smaller than other creatures," I said. "The problem is when you're slightly smaller than them. Say you're a hyena. You and the lion compete in approximately the same evolutionary niche: you hunt similar prey, and the lion might even steal prey that you've killed. And because the lion is bigger, it will win a confrontation with a hyena almost every time. Hyenas get by on the fact that they tend to live in larger packs: they're more reliant on group cooperation. And if the hyenas are the hyenas in this analogy, then…maybe I'm a lion."

"You don't seem like a lion to me," said Octavia.

"I just mean in terms of the ecological niche I occupy," I said. "Think about it: I can probably beat a hyena one-on-one; they have to rely on superior numbers to beat me. And I'm an obligate carnivore, so the hyenas would presumably be in direct competition with me for food. It seems like the hyenas only started changing like this several days after I arrived — and after I had several encounters with them."

"That's true," said Octavia. "So maybe the hyenas are 'evolving' in response to your presence."

"Yes," I said. "Back on earth, evolutionary timelines are super long, of course. For a hyena to grow bigger than a lion would take many, many generations. And because the hyena's reproductive cycle is measured in years — as opposed to days or weeks for smaller creatures like insects — that could take a very, very long time."

"Centuries," said Octavia.

"Try millennia," I said. "But here, evolving 'stronger teeth' or 'thicker hide' or even 'a bigger skeleton that carries more muscle mass' might be something that could happen in a matter of days. I mean, look at how far I've come in the past week."

"I didn't see you the moment you came out of the egg," said Octavia. "But I know what you're talking about. My first few weeks here were a time of rapid growth as well. So, you think that this is all because of you?"

"Yes," I said. "Like you said, this is a very recent development on the hyenas' part. You said it's been a long time since you've seen hyenas like that."

"Years," she confirmed.

"You and I are kind of different," I said. "I mean that in terms of how we've developed, and the abilities we've chosen."

Octavia nodded. "I've spent a lot of skill points upgrading my metabolism, learning to digest new kinds of fruit, and learning how to make more webs with less energy."

"And I, meanwhile, have spent almost all of my skill points trying to make myself more lethal to other creatures," I said. "I mean, I did learn how to talk, but I only got to that point because I'd spent time upgrading my mouth to make myself better at poisoning or paralyzing other creatures." I glanced toward the cave entrance, then back to Octavia. "I think the hyenas used to be more like you. And now they're starting to become more like me."

"You think the hyenas were upgrading their stomachs?" she said.

"Maybe," I said. "I mean, they weren't learning how to digest plants like you were. But maybe they have other ways of upgrading their stomach, getting better at digesting spoiled meat, or just converting an equivalent number of calories into more energy. Maybe that's the thing that made them 'ravenous hyenas,' instead of 'shadowstalker hyenas,' or 'ironhide hyenas.' I mean, the word 'ravenous' is all about a creature's state of hunger."

"Wouldn't that imply they're less efficient, though?" said Octavia. "'Ravenous' seems to imply needing a lot of food."

"Maybe," I admitted. "I have no idea how hyena biology works. Or how the systems governing this world work, which seems like the more relevant point."

"Neither do I," she said. "But I think your idea makes sense. The hyenas started changing for a reason. You really think this is all happening because of you?"

I nodded. "As I said, change begets change. What other recent changes have there been to the status quo? Not to sound egotistical or anything, but I'm pretty sure that in the past week, the arrival of a newborn dragon has been the most interesting development in the hyenas' lives. And now I've been here long enough that they've started to adapt countermeasures."

"Makes sense," she said. "Maybe we should stick to the underground for now."

"That seems sensible," I said. "But this new development is something to be concerned about."

"If it really becomes a problem, we can just avoid the hyenas completely," said Octavia. "It's been years since I've had any real encounters with them. They stick to the surface. I'll find ways to find food for you in the underground."

"It's not just them I'm worried about," I said. "I mean, think about what this implies about the effect that my presence is already having on the local ecosystem. It's got me thinking about what's already happened, and what might happen next. Because…what if the hyenas aren't the only ones who are developing new abilities?"

Class: Baby Dragon

Level: 9

Progress toward next level: 72%

Royal Road

SomethingOtherThanRain

Re: Dragonize (LitRPG) by Kuiper

Chapter 37: Ant Graveyard

Report

Octavia scuttled toward the central chasm. "Do you still want to come down? You missed the action, but you can still see what's left of the ants. They'll be good for a meal, too."

"Of course," I said. "Though…on the subject of pilfering the remains of defeated enemies, how about that hyena I killed before? The smaller one."

Octavia glanced toward the cave entrance. "Did you want me to go check?"

"Or I could check," I said.

"I think you should stay here while I check."

At 0 SP and less than half my HP, I wasn't in a position to disagree with her, so I waited patiently as she dipped out of the cave entrance.

She returned a few moments later. "Gone already," she said.

"I'm not surprised," I said. "Probably already devoured or dragged off by the other hyenas. I've seen them do it before. Well, not in the act, but my first day in this desert ended with a hyena corpse at the bottom of my plateau, and the following morning began with that corpse gone after the hyenas had spent considerable time circling it. Freaking cannibals." As soon as I uttered the word, I glanced nervously to Octavia. "Uh, not that I couldn't be friends with a cannibal, if I met one with the right disposition."

She looked at me with an expression that I couldn't quite make out, until she spoke and the tone of her voice conveyed obvious amusement. "Are you asking if I'm the type to eat my own kin?"

"I wasn't accusing you of anything," I said. "But spiders have been known to do such things, particularly female spiders. Not that I'd want to generalize."

"Would you think less of me if I were?"

"Not particularly," I said. "Maybe my thoughts on cannibalism would be different if I were talking to a fellow dragon. I suppose I am curious, on some level."

"I haven't eaten fellow spiders," said Octavia. "Though, maybe that's just due to the circumstances of the life I've lived. I'm not sure if I would, given the opportunity. But I think it would feel weird, eating a friend, or family. It would feel like a betrayal, don't you think?"

"I'm quite averse to the idea of being killed," I said. "But if I'm already dead, well, it matters a lot less what happens to my remains. Sometimes, you've gotta do what you gotta do. I suppose if I died, I'd prefer for my friends to inherit my possessions than my enemies. And 'the clump of cells that used to be my body' falls into that category. I wouldn't want them to get any pathogens I was carrying, which can be an issue with cannibalism, but in a world like this, you can't be too picky with what you eat."

"Hehe." Octavia chuckled. "I probably wouldn't survive very long as a spider if I was picky with what I ate. I mean, before I could digest fruit, I mostly ate bugs and things like that."

"Indeed. Can you imagine?" Then I considered the idea. "Hey…Octavia, is it…unpleasant?"

"Is what unpleasant?" she asked.

"Well…you're a spider."

"Yeah, I'm a spider. So what?"

"Well," I said. "You said that you don't find it gross to eat insects. What about all of the other things that go with being a spider? Having eight legs, having all those eyes…it must be a completely different existence. You can't even blink."

Octavia looked at me with those unblinking eyes. "I…I'm not even sure what you're asking. What about you? Is it unpleasant being a dragon?"

"No, not really," I said.

"I don't see how I'm any different from you," she said. "You have an inhuman body. You walk on four legs, and have a tail, and you have breath that smells like nasty cigarettes, but I don't hear you complaining about it."

"Does my breath really smell that bad?"

"When you're attacking enemies with it, yeah," she said. "It's fine normally. Or…at least, it's not unpleasant. Definitely noticeable, though. I mean, that's what happens when you eat meat, right? If any of it gets caught in your teeth, it starts to rot, and other creatures can pick up on the scent, even if it's just a tiny bit that's too small for you to even feel. Isn't that why some animals chew bones?"

"I…I don't know," I said. "Does chewing bones really remove food from your teeth? Where did you learn that?"

"From working with dogs," she said. "If you give them something to chew on, like a bone, it helps with oral hygiene."

"Ah," I said. "Maybe I should get in the habit of chewing bones, then. Not really much in the way of toothbrushes or dental floss here. I suppose we're missing a lot of creature comforts."

"Do you really miss dental floss?" said Octavia. "I don't. I've never even thought about it until now. It's just…this is the life we have."

"And you're content enough that there's no need to fantasize about other lives?"

She shook her head. "It's more like….I never even considered those other lives in the first place. I'm a spider. So what would be the point of thinking about anything else? It's not as if thinking about being a human is going to make me human."

"No, I guess not." I looked at the spot where the ironhide hyena had been, the ground still stained with its blood. "Anyway, no need to linger here."

We returned inside, and I followed Octavia to the lower tunnel (climbing the wall myself, rather than allowing her to carry me). As we entered the tunnel, I thought to ask her about a coordinate system.

"Hey, Octavia," I said. "What do you call this tunnel?"

"Oh, this is the Little Dip tunnel," she said.

"Ah," I said. The name made sense, considering that the tunnel did have a notable dip partway through. "Is that your naming system? You identify each tunnel with a notable landmark, or defining feature?"

"Yeah," she said. "I'm not sure what else you would call a tunnel like this."

I decided not to suggest an alternative. A system of names like "sublevel 1, south" like I had been using in my own head would have made things more legible to me as someone trying to learn things for the first time, but it was probably easier for me to adopt Octavia's naming convention for the tunnels rather than forcing her to relearn names that I came up with. Bureaucrats trying to lay out cities hated identifiers like 'yellow brick house at the end of the block,' but it wasn't as if we were managing a neighborhood that had to be made legible to a mail carrier or census taker.

"Got it," I said. "Little Dip tunnel." Sublevel 1, south, was only silently added in my head.

As we proceeded down the eponymous 'little dip' and made our way to where Octavia's layered web wall arrangement stood, I was surprised to see that one ant seemed to have broken past the first tier of webbing. Before, her web defenses had struck me as unnecessarily excessive, but I now found myself grateful for the multiple levels of failsafes she had installed, reminding myself that most of these layers had been added only in the past few days: I was the one who had instigated the incident that had required her to beef up security.

One by one, Octavia lowered her vertical web "walls," which I now realized were much like modular web nets that she could apparently relocate at will. After exposing a path to the outermost wall, she scooped up all of the ant remains, carefully picked the webs off of them with two of her claws, and tossed them back to me. She called back. "These are for you to eat."

"Thanks for dinner," I said, chomping down on the nearest one.

"Dinner is later," she said. "This is just an appetizer."

She sent a dozen more fire ant carcasses my way, and I greedily devoured them, growing giddy with anticipation. If this was what qualified as a mere appetizer, I was eager for what dinner was in store.

After sending the ant remains my way, she repaired the damage to her outermost web wall (which seemed to be pretty minimal), poked it at several points to test it, then made her way back down the passage, hanging her web "walls" up behind her as she walked. As she rearranged the webbing behind her, I asked, "How do you do that?"

"Do what?" she asked.

"I mean, the webs stick to the ants, but not to you," I said. "Come to think of it, I guess that's a feature of every spider. The webs catch prey, but the spiders can walk around on their own webs without issue."

"Not all of the threads are sticky," she said. "I just grab the parts that aren't sticky."

"Ah," I said. "And you must have some kind of pattern that lets you know which parts are going to be the non-sticky parts that are safe to touch.

"Not really," said Octavia. "I just know."

"Know how?"

She shrugged. "I just do."

'Spider's intuition' was a totally reasonable answer, but it was a disappointing one. I had sort of hoped that there was some rule that I could keep in mind — even if I lacked the sort of long, dexterous limbs that would have allowed me to navigate Octavia's webs with the same ease that she did, it was a bit of a bummer that "which webs are sticky, and which aren't" was apparently proprietary knowledge. Then again, that trade secret was an important part of our security. It might also be part of why an ant had managed to get past the first web: it had happened, by sheer chance, to find a series of non-sticky threads that let it proceed down the tunnel enough to get caught in her second vertical web trap. If twenty octillion monkeys could bang out a Shakespeare play through sheer trial and error, then it stood to reason that out of scores of ants, some might find a crack to slip through.

"Are you done eating?" said Octavia, interrupting my thought.

I looked down at half a dozen ants in front of me. "Not yet, but I can be." I scarfed down one of the ants, swallowing it whole. "Are you going to eat any?"

"Later," she said. "It takes longer for me."

I nodded. Her mandibles were sharp, but she didn't have a flexible jaw structure like I did. I couldn't quite unhinge my jaw to the same degree that some snakes did, but my jaw flexibility was definitely one of the traits about me that seemed the most reptilian.

Several seconds of swallowing (and very little chewing) later, we headed back.

"By the way," I said. "What do you call the, uh, central chasm? The big hole that connects to all of the tunnels, I mean."

She looked at me. "It's the central chasm. I guess that can be its official name, if you want it to be."

"Glad we're agreed on that," I said. "So where are we going next?"

Octavia rocked from side to side, as if she were weighing two options. "Let's go to the Sparkling Vault." She led the way to a tunnel several levels below the 'little dip' tunnel, and as soon as the tunnel fed out into a larger chamber, I could see the reason she'd chosen the name. It was by far the most spacious cavern I'd seen in this underground network, and best illuminated: huge chunks of glowstone protruded from the cavern ceiling, which arched in a way that gave the impression of a vaulted ceiling. One wall of the cave, I noted, was also almost completely smooth — and I heard the drip of water that served as a clue as to why it was smooth. It was an incredibly slow drip, but water, given time, would erode mountains.

The ceiling wasn't even the most interesting thing about the Sparkling Vault. While the glowstone was so high up that it provided only dim illumination this far down, along the walls of the chasm, I could see the texture of something fuzzy. As I got closer, I realized it was moss, and in several places, I could even see leaves that looked like ivy. Plants! They were the first vegetation that I had seen underground. I turned to Octavia. "Is this stuff safe to touch?" I asked, pointing at the leaves.

"Why wouldn't it be?" she said.

"Poison ivy is a thing," I said. "And, you know, these look like ivy leaves."

Octavia walked over and touched a leaf, as if to make a point.

"Okay," I said, "It's safe to spiders. But what about to me? I'm pretty sure actual poison ivy isn't dangerous to insects, either. It itches because of an allergic reaction. I think maybe it only affects mammals, because there are some real-world bird species that eat the berries off of those plants, and it's not as if touching the leaves harms them.."

"Actual? Real world?" said Octavia. "I'm pretty sure this place is the 'real world' now."

"Point taken," I said. "It's just, I don't know what I don't know, you know?"

"No, you don't know."

I sighed. "Well, there's one way I know of to gather experimental data." I reached out and touched one of the leaves.

Octavia looked at me with an expression that seemed to ask, "Why did you do that?" I decided to answer her unspoken question. "I wanted to know if it would make me itchy. Seems like it doesn't. And I'm not dead, either. That's also good to know, considering that 'poison plants that kill you instantly' might not be off the table in a setting like this."

"That would be an extremely stupid way to die," said Octavia. "But you touched it anyway. Why?"

"You also touched it," I pointed out.

"Yeah," she said. "But I wasn't worried about it being dangerous. You were, and you touched it anyway. Why?"

"Because information is useful," I said. "Sometimes you need to take a risk to gather experimental data. We didn't know for sure that mammals could survive a trip to space until the late 1950's, when we sent a rocket with several monkeys up for a brief round-trip. And sometimes, the only test subject you have available is yourself. Science isn't always safe."

"Touching a leaf isn't exactly an Apollo mission," said Octavia. "And nothing even happened when you touched it."

"That also counts as information," I said. "I confirmed the null hypothesis. Anyway, there's lots of information to be discovered down here. There's plants!" I looked up at the glowstone that studded the vaulted ceiling — cave roof — overhead. "Probably because of the light, I'm guessing? Glowstone could act as a subterranean light source for photosynthetic plants." I looked around for other vegetation, remembering what she had shown me earlier. "Is this where you grow your fruit?"

"No," said Octavia, speaking quietly.

"Yeah," I said. "That makes sense. The light here is pretty dim; that's why there's so much moss. Moss doesn't need much light to grow. Fruit probably requires a lot more photosynthesis. And you'd need a lot of fruit trees to get a steady diet of fruit. I bet you must have a whole farm down here somewhere, huh?"

"Something like that," said Octavia, again speaking softly.

There was something about her tone that struck me as…not exactly evasive, but she was being more terse and quiet in her speech than usual. Did she not want to talk about her fruit-farming operation? It suddenly occurred to me that where she got her fruit from was a matter of great strategic importance for Octavia: asking her for information about the location was sort of akin to asking for the keys to her storehouse. It wasn't a subject that I would have considered to be out of bounds, considering that she, on multiple occasions, had saved my life, and I had saved hers, but maybe I had assumed we had a closer bond than we actually had. In a manner of speaking, I was still her guest; I could understand if she was reluctant to hand me the keys to the kingdom. Not that I cared much about her fruit farm for my own self-interest — I was a carnivore, after all — but there were lots of things I was curious about, and this didn't seem like an issue that was worth pressing at the moment.

"Anyway," I said. "You brought me down here for a reason, I assume."

"Yes," said Octavia. "This is a pretty significant choke point." She began scaling the wall — the one opposite the wall that had been worn smooth by the constant drip of water — and I followed her up with some difficulty. As I got closer to the glowstone ceiling, I realized what I had missed when looking up from above: there was a lip that overlooked the Sparkling Vault, leading to a wide tunnel. The path down it ended with a series of tiered wall web traps, like the Little Dip tunnel, with one key exception: there were dozens…maybe even more than a hundred ants caught in the web. As Octavia began temporarily disassembling her inner web walls to begin the task of clearing out the tunnel and repairing the webs that had broken, I could see that the ants that out of the scores of ants, two of them had managed to make it past three tiers of webbing — fortunately, there were five layers total, meaning that there were still multiple failsafes that the ants had failed to clear out.

At this point, Octavia was shoveling the ant remains out of the tunnel, not bothering to pick the web off them, instead preferring to bundle them into packages of between five and ten ants each, which she flung my way (and which I arranged neatly at the overhang). As Octavia began spinning new replacement webs, I began clawing at the ant bundles to get a head start on feeding. As I opened the bundle, I saw that multiple ants were gripping something in their mandibles, and I realized that I was seeing unexpected leaves for the second time in as many minutes."

"Uh, Octavia," I said, "Is there a reason that these ants came through here carrying leaves?"

"Oh, yeah," she said. "They do that now."

"What do you mean by 'now?' This is a recent development?"

"Yes," she said. "I noticed it a few days ago, when the ants flooded the tunnel for the second time. A bunch of them were carrying random things. Most of them were small pebbles at first, barely larger than grains of sand. Now some of them carry leaves."

I poked at a leaf, dislodging it from the ant's lifeless mandibles. I watched as the leaf fluttered off the edge of the precipice, past the rows of glowstone protrusions, casting shadows against the wall as it fell. I looked at another ant. This one held not a leaf, but what looked like a clump of moss. Then, I looked at the web bundling that held them, and saw more leaves, scattered throughout it. I poked at another one of the leaves, and realized that my claw was trembling. "Hey, Octavia? Remember what I said earlier about how sometimes gathering experimental data requires doing things that are dangerous?"

"Yes," she said. "Why?"

I took a shaky breath. "I think the ants might be experimenting."

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