005. Monsters

[honkinbigteeth]

You are here journeying alongside your friends - Gerard, the ranger princess Rosamund, the puppet warlock Pinocchio, the clever cat Puss in Boots or Pib, the wielder of the magic book, Timothy Goose, who is your caretaker of sorts and who you call "Mother" as that's what all the children in the village always called him.

You are here following rumors of an enormous spider terrorizing the town of Tuffeton. You believe if you find and kill the spider, you will be able to put it into Mother Goose's book, and in so doing, you will allow another book holder in another realm to use the spider to escape her imprisonment and reach you. At least, that's what you've all decided to do, because what else can you do? This is your second time around, your second story, and the first story ended, bloody, in the dirt, when you all took on a foe who was far too powerful for you. So starting small, with a spider, that's...something.

As you reach Tuffeton, a thought occurs to you to be helpful. This is a new skill you have, in this new story, so the others aren't aware that this is something you can do. They've seen you become a wolf before, but that's it. "One of my animal forms can traverse webs, so one of you could ride me. Though I want to scope out the scene first..." You hesitate, trying to think of the best ways you can help, since all you want is to be able to help them and keep them safe.

"You did great in the last battle, by the way," Timothy says, putting a warm hand on your shoulder.

"Yeah, that was sick," Pib agrees.

Your ears droop. "Mother Goose, I consider that a failure. My objective was to keep you and Rosamund alive, and you both died, so the objective wasn't achieved. I failed."

"No," he protests, trying to sound reassuring. "You did great. Everybody died, so it was kind of a clean slate!"

"We would have died much, much sooner, if it wasn't for you," Rosamund says gently.

"Well, do you want me to use one of my forms?" You ask again. "I can turn into a spider..."

Everyone agrees that you being a spider sounds helpful, so you start to transform. You can't turn into a spider per se, actually. It's more of a stance. Since when you turn into a werewolf your body and bones have to shift and grow and change position, you figure out can do that in other combinations than just wolf. So your bones start to crack and your skin starts to split open and your arms and legs elongate and snap at the joints as your body grows and contorts itself into what is shaped exactly like a giant wolf spider, but has human skin and bones and fur and a little girl's face with fangs and fuzzy ears.

You realize, as you enter the stance, that the others are screaming while Timothy asks over and over again in panic "Are you okay? Are you okay?"

"I'm okay!" you say. But then you notice how nervous everyone seems. "I guess it was pretty obvious I was never a princess," you say glumly.

"No," Timothy says immediately. "You still look like a princess, honey!"

"A princess can look like anything," Rosamund says. Her tone is kind, but Rosamund is a princess and though she has scars on her face and body from the briars she is blonde and regal and incredibly beautiful and never transforms into anything that grosses people out.

"This is just - temporary," Gerard says, who is a prince, but does sometimes look somewhat gross.

"And sometimes, being a princess isn't so great," Rosamund adds. Which you have to admit does sort of seem to be the case, given the situations of every prince and princess you've met, who all seem to be under some kind of curse. Rosamund and Timothy share a look, a 'let's be more conscientious about this tween's self-esteem' type look.

"You look great, sweetie," Timothy assures you, still slightly blanching. "You're a superstar!"

"Gorgeous," agrees Rosamund. "But that's not important, actually, also."

"Okay, I'm trying to internalize that after a lifetime of being taught the opposite," you say.

You find the lair of the spider inside an enormous mine on the outskirts of town. As you touch the web, even though you're only in a spider stance, your transformation magic helps you - even though it's too dark to see, you can sense the web in the rest of the mind. It is enormous, stretches under the hill through yawning caverns, not only horizontal but into mountains and hillocks of web onto itself, a landscape of webs in the inky darkness deep beneath the hill. Many spiders walk this, a incalculable amount smaller than you need to fear, but some deeper that are truly massive.

It's difficult to traverse the web for a human (or a puppet, or a frog), but you are able to walk easily along it, carrying Gerard on your back. Pib, catlike, finds a way to creep across, while Timothy and Rosamund are guided by you and Pinocchio's familiar, which transforms into a smaller spider. Gerard keeps catching smaller spiders with his frog tongue and eating them as you go, and then looking around to see if anyone saw him do that.

The cave beneath you is a cavern that drops hundreds of feet down, filled with web and spiders, but you are such a large spider that although they can also feel you along the web, you feel like another spider to them and they don't perceive you as a threat. So when you finally arrive to a group of spiders, you have the drop on them. Pinocchio sends up a flare of magic so that all of you can see this dark cave, covered in web and crawling with spiders. Pib hops up on your back too, shoving Gerard out of his way with the audacity only a little kitty cat could muster, and you ferry Gerard and Pib close enough to the spiders that they can attack while you use your spider body to protect both of them from harm. Rosamund and Timothy avoid the spiders as best they can, fighting with magic.

The spiders seem confused about what exactly you are.

"I'm not sure how much of a spider this wolf girl is...?" one of them says.

"Yeah," says another spider. "This is less of a spider and more of a wolf with fucked up legs who's also a girl."

"Hey!" you shout, offended, your voice trembling a little with your hurt feelings. "Be careful who you're talking to! I'm a really nice preteen!" And then you bite their heads off with your human mouth, unhinging your human jaw from your human face to swallow them whole and use it to grow yourself into an even bigger spider.

"Good work, good work," Gerard says from your back, distracted and sounding a little shaky.

You hang your head in shame at the sound of the shock in his voice. "No, I'm bad, aren't I?"

"You're doing very good," he reassures you, but everyone still seems pretty scared of what they just saw you do.

The battle is going fairly well, but as Pinocchio lights up the room, a massive spider (cw: this image link is a battle miniature depicting a big spider with a human torso and babies on the back, it doesn't look that realistic) descends from the ceiling, far bigger than any of the others you've seen. It is absolutely horrifying to look on and is covered all over its back with enormous pink spider babies. The illumination shows that where the head of the spider should be, it is instead a young girl with a spider face (cw: this image link has a realistic looking tarantula face). She's holding a bowl and a spoon.

"Did you want to stay for dinner?" she gasps at all of you, and the horrible pink spider babies on her back are released to attack all of you. You run up close to her, distracting her, while Gerard hops around helping the others with the baby spiders and they all try to attack her from a distance, Pinocchio's spell making it much easier. You're getting hurt, a lot, by the big spider and many of the little spiders, but as long as you're the one getting hurt, your friends are safe, and you can withstand it.

"You're not very nice!" the spider screams as Rosamund pierces her with arrows. When she's injured, rather than bleed, she seems to leak what looks like cottage cheese from her body.

"You're the not nice one!" Rosamund shouts back.

"I'm...not?" the spider asks, suddenly sounding confused.

You get up in her space, and you can see inside her spider mouth the face of a young girl.

"Hey," you say suddenly. "Are you also a preteen?"

"Yes!" she says. "But curds and whey don't really cut it for me anymore!"

Her fellow spiders bite you, poison sinking into your body, and the pain is so much that you don't know if you can hold your spider stance any longer, so you revert back to your ordinary form, a young girl who is part wolf, and you feel strong again, standing before this giant spider looking more like yourself and holding your ax.

"Look," you say. "I get it. Everyone raised you and told you you were gonna be beautiful and charming and good at singing and dancing, and now you're a fucking monster. And I don't know the silver lining of that. I really don't. And I'm trying to find out, but there's just, there's gotta be something to being a monster." And you slice her with her ax, as curds and whey drip from the wound.

"Young girl," Timothy shouts from the darkness. "I don't know what's happened to you, and we're going to figure it out, but in the meantime I'm very disappointed in your behavior right now! I'm going to give you quite a talking to!"

As he speaks, he tries to give his words the force of magic, but she shakes it off. "I don't care what anyone has to say!" she snarls back at him.

She keeps attacking you, slashing you against your face. You nearly fall; for a moment, you do collapse, only to be given the strength to keep going by a spell from one of your friends.

"I honestly think we both know that if all this wasn't going on," you shout back at her, "we'd be really good friends! So don't fight me, we can just be friends!"

"No one wants to be my friend!" she says. "If I had friends, why would I walk all the way to the top of a hill to eat curds and whey by myself? Why?"

"Yeah, that's how I am, too," you say. "They all look at you like you're a monster. You were special when you were young and then you fucking went through puberty and now you're just ugly. But you know what? You gotta get in the story circle with Mother Goose. He will tell you the story that will make you leave this cursed world."

"I could leave?" She's hesitant, like she's not sure what to do. Timothy begins to write something in his book, as though he's suddenly realized how to help, but as she hesitates, Pib throws one of his daggers to pierce her and kill her.

"Sorry, little girl," he says. "Feels bad."

But as Timothy continues writing, there's a golden glow from his book, and the dagger seems to cut not through the spider but appears almost to cut into parchment somewhere between the girl's torso and the spider as though it is slicing through the pages of a book. And in the wake of that cut, instead of a girl torso attached to a giant spider, two entities are there. One, a giant spider, and one a little girl in a pretty dress with a spider's face. The giant spider is cast in a glow of golden light and disappears into Timothy's book, leaving the little girl behind.

"Oh," she says, looking around, confused. "I'm not a spider anymore." She is still kind of a spider, but it's not quite the same. "I feel like I was hurting some of you..."

You all reassure her that you're all okay.

"Are we in a giant web?" she asks, her voice trembling. "I'm scared of spiders!"

"Oh gosh, that's hard," Timothy says gently. "Since you sort of are one..." She seems confused, and then touches a hand to her spider face. "Will you tell us what happened to you?" Timothy asks.

"Yeah," she says. "I'd go up on my hill to eat curds and whey, and one day a spider came down and it scared me really bad. I wanted to get away as fast as I could, but something strange happened after that." She hesitates, looking at the book that glowed with golden light and took the other part of the spider away. "Could I touch it?"

Timothy hesitants. "Um, let's not touch the book right now, why don't you and Ylfa just play together for a little while, I think I have some string in here for crafts, and - "

You look at the girl, and you can see she's heartbroken at the thought of not touching it. You understand where Timothy is coming from; some people who have touched it have seen terrible visions, while others have been pulled in and preserved there, and either way, he's hesitating to subject a little girl to it. But you know how you'd felt, when you first transformed into a wolf. How much you wanted things to go back. You would have wanted the chance to go back into the pages of the kinder version of your story.

"Let her touch the book," you say firmly to Timothy.

"I, well, okay..." Timothy hesitates, but then he holds it out. "You can definitely touch the book if you want to, but sometimes you'll see really scary things. And as I'm saying this out loud I'm realizing, you maybe just saw the scariest things you're ever gonna see in your whole life, so yeah, if you want to touch the book..."

She reaches out a hand to touch it, and sees the version of her story on the pages. The story of Little Miss Muffet, complete with an illustration of a little girl knocking over her bowl of curds and whey as she runs in fright from a spider. And the spider girl frowns. "In my story, am I supposed to always be scared?"

And she pulls her hands away. "Who are you guys?"

"We're people who are also in this scary time," Timothy says, "but we believe that it doesn't always have to be so scary."

"And sometimes I think you have to be a little bit scary in scary times," you add.

She seems to resolve not to touch the book, and pulls away. "...I think I spun up all the people in Tuffeton into cocoons," she says. "And maybe some are down there at the bottom of the mine, too."

Gerard hops down to the bottom of the mineshaft to look. After a little while, he calls back, in an obviously shaken voice, "There's no one down here! They must have all gotten away somehow! Out some tunnels!"

"Really?" Miss Muffet says, obviously relieved.

You aren't the most perceptive, but you can tell Gerard is lying about that, not very convincingly, but you also understand why Miss Muffet would want to believe him right now, and you decide to yourself that Gerard did the right thing.

You all leave the mine and go back to Tuffeton, where there are giant cocoons of spiderweb everywhere. "Gerard," you say to him quietly, "I'm pretty strong, but do you want to come cut them down with me, so she doesn't have to see if they're all dead inside their cocoons?"

Timothy picks up on this too, and brightly agrees with the suggestion that you and Gerard go on ahead while he continues to ask her some questions. And he gently takes her aside and begins talking to her in that kindly adult way he has, the same way that was the reason he was the person you came and found and decided to stay with after everything that happened to you when your story went wrong. You and Gerard go and start cutting people down, thankfully finding them alive but screaming and traumatized as you do, while in the background you can hear Timothy trying to speak over the screams as he's telling Miss Muffet "It's important that we be honest about this, and try not to hide - " there's another scream. "Well, let's put a pin in that."

"Relax!" you shout at one of the screaming people. "You were at a sleepover party! You were just at a sleepover and you got tuckered out from having too much fun!"

"Yeah!" Pib chimes in, more because he finds this funny than because he thinks this is even sort of a plausible cover up. "You were at a sleepover, relax!"

"You were playing hide and seek," Rosamund says. "You were at a platonic, non-sexual adult sleepover."

Pinocchio uses a magic spell to convince the mayor of the town that this was, indeed, a non-sexual adult sleepover gone wrong, so he gives a little speech to everyone apologizing for the spider attacks at their adult sleepover, and it seems Miss Muffet is off the hook. Grateful for your assistance, the shattered and haunted townsfolk supply you with curds and whey and cheer you on.

During the celebration, Gerard pulls you aside.

"Um, listen," he says. "I just - earlier in battle and pre-battle, you were saying some things, and I just - "

"Am I in trouble?" you ask him, unsure why he's decided you need a talking to. "I'm sorry."

"No!" he says quickly. "No, no, no. I just mean - you're not a monster."

"Oh." Your heart sinks a bit. "Well, I very much appreciate that, Gerard, but I've done some pretty monstrous things. I blew my family away, and I killed the woodsman."

"But do you blame Goldilocks for the things she did while she was a spider?" he asks, getting Muffet's name wrong.

"No," you say, "But I do notice the way that people are scared of her and they treat her differently. I mean, you obviously must know. You were a frog, and then you got to be a prince, and now that you're a frog again, all you want to do is be a prince."

He seems uncertain. "That's...true, but..."

"And Elody! If Elody had had a spider for a face, would you have fallen in love with her?"

He goes quiet for a long moment. "You know? I think I would have." He sighs. "Listen, you actually are quite different from me, because when I was a kid,I was very selfish and very rude, believe it or not, and that's why I was cursed to be a frog in the first place. And you're... You're very much not that. You take care of these people around you, and when I want to run away, you're always... You stand up to people, and I know that everything that's happening is very scary, but I think that maybe these are the people that we need to be to survive in this world."

This is very kind, but you're unsatisfied. "Don't you just kind of wish that the person that you needed to be to survive in this world was a handsome prince?"

"Very much so," Gerard admits.

"And that's kind of where I'm at," you say. "I'm accepting my station, and I'm trying to make peace with it, too. But this feels like the next step, right? You got to accept it before you embrace it."

"Yes," he says, "but I will add that when I fell in love with my wife, I was a frog then."

"And she loved you for more than how far you could hop?" you say.

He chuckles a little. "Yes, yes. And back then, I didn't have princely things to rely on, and I think maybe because of that, I was more interesting, and more thoughtful."

"Whoa," you says. "You were more interesting when you weren't a prince? That's crazy. All the stories are about princes and princesses."

"But they usually stop when the person becomes a prince or princess, don't they?"

"That's true," you say. "...What I saw you do down there was way more interesting than any story I've read about a prince." You think about that. "Can I ask you what it was that made you love Elody in the first place? You said you'd have loved her if she had a spider face, so you must have loved something else about her."

"Well, she was always very adventurous and rebellious, and she would clash with her parents, and she would run off into the woods and talk to me. I found her fascinating," he says, and then sounds a little more sad. "And then once we got together, maybe I got too complacent and too comfortable." He looks embarrassed then. "Well, I didn't mean to turn this into you having to - you're not a monster, that's what I'm saying."

You're not sure you can believe this just yet, but you still appreciate him for trying. "Thank you, Gerard," you say. "I'll give it a good noodle."