Spider facts!

  Category: Behavior

  Subcategory: Response to injuries

  Spiders, like many arthropods, are able to voluntarily remove limbs to aid in their survival. This process is known as ‘autonomy.’ It is known that this process requires nervous input, as the spider loses the ability if the limb is anesthetized. Situations where spiders will pursue autonomy may include escaping predators who have grasped onto a single limb (similar to the approach used by some lizards to abandon their tails), or where a dangerous prey animal such as a bee or wasp has managed to sting the vulnerable space between the joints. Spiders have also been known to autonomize limbs if they are trapped during a molt. As long as the spider has additional molts left in its life span, it has the potential to regrow the entire limb.

  It took Jon a moment to reorient himself. He had actually managed to sleep for some time. Oregano had jolted the rope twice, meaning he wished to be hauled up and there was no immediate danger. Jon pulled the rat up to the ledge, and it promptly hopped off the ladder and onto the surface. Oregano took the scene in. He felt a mental prompt from the rat, and accepted the communication, thought’s and feelings washing over him from the diminutive creature.

  Oregano sent him an image of Jon’s repaired leg, accompanied by a happy warm feeling. The rat was pleased he had managed the repair, and Jon sensed Oregano was also somewhat surprised by his success, especially with energy to spare. Moving on quickly, Oregano also sent Jon an image of the carrion on his back being placed in front of the hungry rat. In this transmission, the rat was doing what Jon could only describe as a caper. Finally, he saw an image of the one and a half remaining bunnies. There was a feeling of puzzlement accompanying it. Why hadn’t Jon eaten them yet?

  Jon considered before answering. He took the alpha’s meat off his back and placed it in front of the rat, who immediately began guzzling it down. One nice aspect of the mental communication was the lack of actual speech: no noise, no additional risk of discovery, and no need to pause what you were doing.

  Jon briefly replied to the rat’s earlier question,

  “I don’t think I’ll have enough energy to finish a full upgrade, and I don’t want to waste the bunnies.”

  Oregano dismissed this, sending him an image of a rat building a nest and stopping halfway through to gather additional supplies. The meaning was clear with the accompanying emotions. One could take breaks when making the changes with the energy, and the work could be completed later.

  With this cover blown, Jon sheepishly admitted his other reason for not eating,

  “I feel hungrier than I ever have in my life. It’s messing with my head, and it’s frightening.”

  While Jon’s initial reason had not even brought the rat pause, it actually stopped eating with this last admission. Oregano carefully placed down the section of meat he had been working on, then licked his paws and sat on his hind quarters. He sat looking at Jon, who felt embarrassed. The rat gestured for him to continue with a paw. Haltingly, Jon did so:

  “It seems like it almost gets worse each time I eat. Eating is amazing, but it doesn’t really feel like it’s me eating. I feel like a conduit. It’s almost like something is possessing me when I eat. Every time I do, it gets easier for that thing to get in, and harder to get it out completely. I feel like if I keep letting it in, it won’t leave.”

  Jon had expected the rat to chastise him, or to call him foolish, or maybe to request the food he rejected. Oregano did none of these things.

  He looked at Jon for several long moments, and then sent an image of an infant rat, its eyes just opening, getting a glance of deep waters from the banks of a river. The babe squeaked in fear. The fear was justified. The waters were deep, they moved swiftly, and such a small creature could be lost in a few heartbeats. But the little rat still had to drink.

  Jon was about to reply, feeling confused about how to proceed, when the rat lifted its tail sharply. Oregano was not done, and he did not wish to be interrupted. The rat continued:

  The image changed. The infant rat was held by an adult, who navigated the waters carefully and with purpose. The infant was brought to a shore line, where it was able to drink from a still pool rather than the more dangerous currents. The infant grew older, and it needed to drink more and more. The little pond was no longer enough, and so the older rat brought it back to the river to drink. There were several other rats the same age there, all learning in the same way. The older rat instructed the younger one on how to take from the river, moving in shallow areas and swimming with purpose. The young rat obeyed. Its thirst was quenched momentarily, but it would always need to come back to the river when it grew thirsty. As he watched, Jon saw the image shift to focus on another young rat.

  This rat had been instructed in the same manner, but it had not listened well. It drank deeply, moving to stronger currents. Paradoxically, Jon sensed the rat never stopped being thirsty, though the amount it drank should have made it burst. The rat traveled further from the bank, out into deeper waters. This brought much to distress to the other rats. Then the juvenile disappeared. None of the other rats went after it. Jon knew why from the accompanying emotional context: if they tried to follow the young rat out there, either the current or the other rat would drag them under as well.

  Jon was unsure exactly why Oregano had chosen this long-form story to explain the situation to him, but the emotional undercurrents in the story felt like some sort of parable. This place the rat had shown him did not exist, and the water metaphor did not really make complete sense, but the meaning did come through to him.

  The river was the hunger. He still had to eat, just as the infant had to drink. Each time he ate, the hunger would call to him, just as the deeper currents did. If he allowed the currents to take him, Jon would be lost. If he approached each meal with purpose, and only allowed himself what was needed to survive and grow, he could still return to himself and the shore.

  Jon confirmed the meaning with Oregano:

  “So as long as I keep to my purpose, and eat with intention, I can eat safely?”

  The rat gave him a little nod of satisfaction. Jon followed up with another question:

  "So how do I keep my heading in the river? What kind of purpose should I approach my meals with?”

  Oregano tilted its head at him, then sent him its impression of Jon’s home. It was the same image he had shared with Oregano earlier, impossibly far, but with Jon traveling there one step at a time. Oregano’s version of the image superimposed the river over his path, with the shoreline being present at each step along the way home.

  Jon was not sure he completely understood the rat’s meaning, but he felt the succinct version was that Jon had to create his own path. His purpose of returning home could be his guiding light in the river of endless hunger. Oregano returned to his meal, leaving Jon with a final note. The image was of the meat of the two rabbits starting to decay, the energy in them weakening. It was a suggestion to eat the rabbits quickly.

  Jon remained hesitant, and Oregano sent him a mental encouragement, like a parent trying to get a toddler to eat their veggies. Jon gave an internal sigh, then began eating. As he did so, he kept in his mind his purpose. The journey home. Jon needed to survive, and if wanted to do that he needed to eat, and he needed to remain himself. The euphoria was no less intense for all his misgivings, and Jon found himself tempted to give in to the blind hunger throughout the meal, abandoning his other senses to fully immerse himself in his feast. But he remained focused, holding onto his desire to return home.

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  As he ate the remains of the half rabbit, the energy filled him the same as before. Jon began eating the last bunny, and noted a new system prompt.

  “Game, borderline. Cuniculus spina”

  This time, the meat was not so appetizing. It was similar to the difference between water fresh from the tap and water that had been left on a nightstand for a few days. There was a musty quality to it. Jon still ate it, but the energy was not so invigorating as the other bunnies he had eaten.

  His meal completed, Jon decided to work on one of his easy upgrades with the energy from his kills. With his increased psionic sensitivity gained during his last upgrade, he felt comfortable watching the tunnel below them with his mind-sense while he worked on the next upgrade. Jon could tell Oregano was a distracted, having finished his meal and started to work on an upgrade of his own. At least, Jon assumed that was what all the twitching meant.

  Jon had found the initial upgrade decision difficult, but this time he felt it was easier. His jumps had sufficient accuracy and power, and his webbing was not much use in a fight while he needed to keep wandering. Jon was sure both of those things could change quickly, but he also was confident he wanted a stronger psionic pulse. He began working on the option for increasing the power of his psionic attacks, as well as increasing his reserves.

  The last upgrade had involved making rafts and a sluice gait equivalent for the reservoir of psionic energy he kept in the psionic pulse generator. After feeling the upgrades in action, Jon had a better sense of why they were made the way they were.

  The rafts floating on the reservoir acted like the superior olivary complex in humans, a region of the brain that helped with sound localization. The superior olivary complex had two sets of receiving neurons lined up in parallel, and when your ears heard a stimulus the corresponding neurons on that side would “light up.” Your brain could calculate the time difference between each ear receiving the sound by how far the signal got along the switches on each side. By using this information, your brain could calculate the relative location of a sound in the horizontal plane. Jon had always had difficulty wrapping his head around how this worked, and even more difficulty when you took into account the various other dimensions and distances required for your brain to calculate where something was. But he had always thought the structure was pretty nifty.

  Jon’s mental sense worked similarly. When he got feedback, the rafts moved, and his new neurological system was able to sort out direction and all sorts of additional information from the way the rafts were disturbed. The exact mechanics were far beyond his understanding, but he intuited that at least the direction piece was similar to the superior olivary complex.

  The sluice gate was less complicated. The gate allowed him to send out waves of energy in concentrated bursts in a single direction. He could rotate which way it faced, and that was about it. The gate had far less waste than simply sending out an omnidirectional wave, which helped immensely in keeping his reserves up as he used the power. The rafts allowed him to tell which way to send things for maximal effect.

  As Jon began receiving instructions for the upgrade to his power, he realized this change would be a lot simpler.

  He was going to do two things: first, he would create a secondary organ which concentrated the density of the energy in his reservoir. Second, he would make a mechanism to allow the sluice gate to open wider when needed. The combination allowed for more power per pulse, and for more overall energy to be present.

  Jon checked his reserves; he would not be able to complete this upgrade with his available supplies. He opted to prioritize work on increasing the density of the mental energy.

  Jon wanted more power in the psionic attacks, and he felt increasing the width of the gate without increasing the density of the energy would have diminishing returns. He followed the intuition that followed the rush of energy, and made a filter at the mouth of the energy river flowing into the psionic pulse generator. This initial filter was somewhat primitive, but managed to exclude the majority of the non-psionic energy circulating in his body.

  Jon regarded the non-psionic energy. He had noticed it several times now, and even worked with it to heal his extremity. He wondered momentarily what it was, but then he felt a sense of warning: he was running out of time to complete his work.

  He returned to the task at hand. He would have to investigate the other stuff later. Jon could only split his attention so many ways, and he was already trying to make this mental structure while paying attention to the spider-silk strands in the tunnel below. Jon created a secondary system for diverting the non-psionic energy back to his veins, where his heart could pump it to the rest of the body.

  As the initial layer of the filter completed, Jon felt himself running out of the creative energy from devouring his opponents. He could sense this was the last point of stability, and he risked collapsing the whole structure if he continued. Jon returned his whole focus to the world around him. Oregano was already up and about, and was apparently waiting for him to complete his upgrade.

  Jon received a communication from the rat inquiring as to how his most recent changes went. Jon noted it went well, and asked Oregano what he had chosen to improve. The rat sent Jon an image.

  It showed Jon from Oregano’s perspective during their initial meeting. In Oregano’s eyes, Jon was a massive black spider towering many times Oregano’s height in the corner of a cave. The rat turned to flee, then felt an enormous mental pressure, followed by darkness.

  The rat had been surprised by the success of the attack. It had thought itself largely impervious to strikes by other low-leveled creatures. Oregano seemed somewhat embarrassed by the error, but it did explain why he was so bold stealing food from Jon in the first place.

  Oregano wanted to correct this deficit. The rat had very little direct offensive capability, a downside of his creature type and his nature if Jon understood him correctly. However, he was naturally durable and quite hard to kill. Oregano had increased his resistance to psychic attacks as a response to Jon’s easy victory earlier. The rat invited Jon to try to knock him out again.

  Jon felt a little hesitant, but decided to oblige.

  “Ok.” he sent “but if it starts to hurt, or you feel weak, tell me and we’ll stop, alright?”

  The rat sent him an affirmation.

  Jon reached out mentally, first hitting Oregano with as much energy as during their first meeting. It felt a lot like when he attacked the alpha cuniculus spinae. There was some space with resistance before he could make contact. The mental attack did very little, and the rat looked triumphant after a moment of minor discomfort.

  Oregano asked Jon to hit him harder. Jon reached out again, this time applying more power. He estimated this attack was as strong as the unfocused psionic assaults in his first fight.

  The resistance soon dispersed beneath his second psychic attack, and Jon felt the rat’s consciousness buckle. It was like dropping a bowling ball into a bucket of water instead of a baseball. After the attack, Oregano was standing there, breathing heavily, but still awake and alert.

  The rat inquired if Jon could apply more pressure. Jon answered honestly,

  “Yeah, I can hit a lot harder now. I’ve put all my gathered kill energy into improving those attacks.”

  Oregano wilted a bit. Jon explained further,

  “The amount I hit you with just now would probably have left the standard bunnies seizing on the ground.”

  This seemed to perk Oregano back up. Overall, the little rat counted its newest upgrade as a win. It had never encountered an attack like his before, and it seemed to think his ability would be uncommon. Oregano did not care if he had a perfect defense to a unique attack, just some defense at all was a win in its book.

  Oregano then changed topics, requesting a chance to get some real rest while Jon kept watch.

  “Sure thing bud,” Jon agreed.

  Jon opted to sit at the edge of the ledge with two of his limbs resting on his web. It was easier to sense what was happening down below when he kept contact with the silk. Jon heard the rat settling down behind him to rest, and again felt the hunger flaring.

  Jon had no more bunnies left.

  There was a little consolation morsel right behind him. He would not even have to turn around. The rat wouldn’t feel it coming. Jon felt the new denser energy from his filter settling at the base of the mental reservoir, and that stuff had some real pep. Oregano would not suffer, it would all be over before he could even….

  Jon shook away the invasive thoughts. He shifted in place before settling, and prepared to meditate. It had not driven away the thoughts last time, but it had made them more bearable. Jon tried to refocus his hunger into something useful. He told himself he needed to keep watch to ensure he did not miss better game.

  The moments passed, and the thoughts came back, but they were more measured. When things got too painful he focused on wondering what the bare branch bear or the lobster-cherub would have tasted like. He bet they would have been delicious.