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Anachronistic Arachnid Number 84 Log

Although we have all deliberated for a long time, it unfortunately has become necessary for Gorthorn to take on his souls. We can't survive out here otherwise. The fighting has escalated, and we are hard-pressed to hold our position.

Gorthorn is adjusting well to his new form. He had to grow substantially to be able to handle the extra magic.

The undersides of his new wings are membranous, but the tops are feathery. He's kept all of his fur.

Being a quadruped has thrown him for a bit of a loop, but he's figured out how to at least sit up on his haunches. He's lost a bit of dexterity in his 'hands'- or forepaws.

I've noticed the ball and socket joints of his shoulders seem to have more movement than a typical quadruped, however.

He scoffs when I just plainly call him a dragon. He's a 'counterfeit' one, he insists. The magic he integrated just granted his boyhood desire to be a dragon. It reached back in time, he said, and probed his mind. He hadn't sincerely wanted that for ages.

Tosh, say I.

You are one, Sire.

So you're still chimeric? Unless you specifically don't want me to refer to you as one, you are. I don't care what the genetic tests come back as.

See, there are many types of shapeshifting. Some have an effect on genes, and some do not. Broadly, for major changes, cells adapt to the newly projected blueprint. For minor changes, cells more or less go about their business and only modify things that are absolutely necessary.

The queen studies this. She says, think of an animal, for example, that gained a vertebra by mutation. Evolution is adding and subtracting bones all the time. The cells that aren't involved in the embryonic formation of the vertebra? They wouldn't need to change their genetic code to form a spinal cord or muscles around it, hypothetically. They would simply read the signals from the surrounding cells to find out what needed to get built. The difference between a liver cell and a muscle cell, after all, is not their identical genes, but what their neighbors tell them to become as stem cells. They'd be performing the same function with or without the extra genes. Minor shapeshifting is the same. It usually leaves genes alone. As someone learns higher level shapeshifting, it will be more difficult to change that fundamental basis. That's why shapeshifting sometimes has a time limit, too, especially major kinds. Cells are reasonably good at adapting to different imputs for short periods, but eventually the complex starts to break down.

_He's the size of a real dragon now. Just think of all that accelerated cell division! We're going to have to carefully screen him, because the errors accumulate faster than white blood cells and corrective enzymes can erase them. Yes, that's right, increasing your size increases risk of cancer.

The Greeks named the black tumors they found in autopsies 'cancer,' and shapeshifters have long known, at least visually, that it was the cause for overly ambitious magic wielders' deaths, though now we know the mechanism for it.

Conversely, decreasing your size increases your magic reserves as all that matter is converted to energy._

We're fairly sure healing magic can take care of it all for him, but we're entering new territory here.

Gorthorn was going over the doctor's hastily scribbled notes with him. He observed that there were two different handwritings.

"Oh yes," the spider nodded, "usually I consistently use my dominant hand in reports to you. Mid-left."

Spiders' handedness was, understandably, much more complicated than two-handed animals. They normally could write with at least two, sometimes on one side of the body, sometimes on opposites. But one was usually more tidy than the other. Being able to write with more than two was viewed similarly to being ambidextrous.

Their native language could be written left to right or right to left, so a spider who only had one dominant side could choose which direction was easier. The Duchess had been part of a campaign to start printing up and down in schools as well, to expand calligrapher's ability to experiment with word designs. Knowing her, she might do diagonals in the future. She was also a lover of anagrams, which were much more common to the tongue. He supposed it made sense for a species that spent so much time hanging upside down and swinging back and forth that a fixed direction would not be as heavily encoded in their minds.

Spider's culture largely centered on hands, and when sign language was discovered, they leapt at it. Many animals had sneered at them for adopting a human custom, but the spiders paid them little heed. They taught it to sapient animals or spawn that had trouble talking.

While the doctor was interpreting and rewriting some of the less legible parts, the king wondered whether getting six different arms out of his black suit's jacket sleeves was difficult. Stiffed and starched coats were often already awkward to put on for people with just two limbs. Did spiders have to allot more time to their morning routines to get everything in order? Or were they so accustomed to it that they took about the same amount of time as the next monster? He would ask when they were done. How in the world did he coordinate all those limbs? So, not only did he have a massive memory storage in that head, and a scientist's problem solving skills, he also managed to fit all the motor control in there . . . it was just fun to think about.

One of the things that had first drawn him to Wing as a boy was the sheer novelty of the species, and all things considered it hadn't diminished all that much.

---

Another handful of days later, Gorthorn woke up panting.

His conscious mind had been dropping hints, but his subconscious was not so subtle.

He cursed inwardly. Wing had just finished warding him off about discussions about intimacy, and here he was, half-asleep, trying to grasp at anything, anything that could drive out the images of Wing wiggling under his grip, mouth open-

Wiggling.

Struggling?

He suddenly was very concerned not with pushing the feelings away, but with getting the garbled memories back together to examine them more closely.

A deep corner of his mind emanated wordlessly that Wing was a challenge, a code to be cracked and a submissive to be put in place.

At that, the fire monster ripped off the covers of his bed and went to go douse his face in water. No one was a challenge, he bid that predatory part of himself to go back to its dream den.

It seemed to pace back and forth, taunting that everyone was a challenge, not physically, but intimately or rhetorically too, just because you treat them nicely makes no difference.

His father's voice echoed to him, though he couldn't make out any phrases clearly. It was draconian, both literally and figuratively.

He bared his sharp teeth. Fine, then, he replied. A polite predator.

It fits. But it is different. It makes all the difference.

It licked its own chops, appeased, and drifted out.

He leaned over the water basin, breathing a bit heavy.

By the time he had put on his robes, he had blessedly forgotten most of his dream about Wing, though the edges of it clung to his mind.

---

The king's indoor garden in the middle of the palace was a small affair, that only used enough soil for a room that was about twenty by twenty feet. He would have liked to have a grand sprawling courtyard and pathways, as he had on the surface, but every possible available space was needed to grow food down here. Had the garden not served a highly specific purpose, it never would have been planted. Wood elementals thrived with plants dedicated solely to them, as did other elementals with exclusive access to some of their element to work with. The bond wasn't strictly essential, but for a dragonkin or other predators, the stakes were much higher.

Fire elementals, upon arriving at their dark destination, raptly studied what little light got to the caves. Sunlight is thousands of times brighter than fire, and also has a wider spectrum of light. Fire dragons of ages past could literally create artificial sunlight, but never wrote down the method of achieving it. Here, plants did not grow as well without the blue components of light, but wood and fire elementals worked together to get the best results possible for crops.

Gorthorn had crossed his legs and taken up a meditative pose.

Before he closed his eyes, he reached out and brushed a yellow petal between his forefinger and thumb, knowing full well that it would bruise later. His own yellow fur stood on end as the tiniest bit of magic trailed from it to him. Oh, to be a flower, he thought, with not a trouble in the world. How spoiled rotten you all are, you don't even have to endure pests thanks to me.

And, you aren't even aware of your crushing responsibility. That of keeping _ me _ sane.

My responsibility in turn, constricts me like a serpentine body. The one thing that dominates, no matter how much of an apex predator I aspire, or do not aspire, to be.

"Spiders couldn't keep pests out of your garden," Wing had said, "they don't eat enough. But I believe ladybugs might?"

"Ladybugs are predatory?" the young prince asked disbelievingly. "Those silly spotted things, named after girls?"

The small spider grinned and glanced around. His sharp eyes spotted a spotted red bug and he darted, catching it easily. "Only in their level of the food web."

"Ewwwwwww," the other boy said as he crunched on it.

"You sound like a girl when you do that," the spider said impishly. He seemed to savor the surprise and distaste for his diet, but in the future he'd appreciate even more that his friend grew used to it. "We're still top Greaters, masters of that part of the web."

His huge chest expanded with a deep breath, and returned with the breath out. He repeated the gesture- gesture- greater- he tasted the two similar words experimentally.

Greater. Master.

Always striving to be.

The words came slightly out of order as he relaxed his mind.

Maybe his rejection of the dream had been too hasty. Wing had said, what was it? That his wife was sometimes irritating. He had enough memories of them being happy together to piece together what that meant and didn't, he thought. So dismissing it on the basis of the spider's moratorium on sexual topics was not a fully valid reason. Obviously, a partner- and perhaps a potential partner?- was his exception. That he had never gotten the slippery spider to spit out what he really felt about two men being together, now that was the stickier problem. Sticky like a web. He had plenty of clues, and a good idea, but if he continued to-

The white part-lion huffed in annoyance.

He'd like to respect his friend's wishes.

After all, he'd let plenty of passing fantasies go. If he acted on every one, he'd never get anything done.

But.

For some reason, he was not too troubled by this.

He brought to mind the doctor sitting across from him, chatting away about his latest projects. Gorthorn wasn't worried that this might ruin their friendship. They had been through much worse scrapes. He would either find a way around this if it backfired, or he could make it work. He was confident.

But if he was going to . . . The master politician would have preferred to circle the topic at a distance and further measure Wing's reaction to it, but it seemed the spider was forcing his hand. He couldn't help but picture the black suited, rail thin man grinning at him with his own pointed fangs and playing a trick, though he would have never dared.

Spiders were notorious tricksters, but the doctor had never taken an interest in that except if the king counted his slipping on solipsism and helping him against verbal opponents. That, and jokes that were word traps. Word webs. He loved setting those.

Gorthorn smiled.

But then he frowned. No, wait, that was sophism, not solipsism, he chided himself. The doctor was somewhat of an epistemological solipsist. But radical solipsism? Wing never would have accepted a worldview where Gorthorn's consciousness didn't exist.

https://www.sofurry.com/view/1182970Chapter 5