Industrial Strength Magic

Chapter 267: Spider Politics

Perry watched Heather’s confusion skyrocket as she glanced around the serious faces.

“Is someone going to explain to me what The Butthole is?” she asked, arms crossed.

“The Butthole is a…geological tumor,” Australia Man said, searching for the right words. “Discovered it back in nineteen eighty-two, before spiders had claimed the territory. From a distance, it looked like…”

He motioned to Heather.

“A butthole.” She supplied.

“Exactly. A mysterious hole in the desert with wrinkles all around it, about the size of a football field. It wasn’t until a few years later when we noticed that it’s actually slowly drawing land in, disappearing it into that black hole. The hole itself stays the exact same size, while Australia itself is literally shrinking. That I cannot allow.”

Perry raised a hand. “It’s not gonna consume the Earth is it?” he asked. A relevant question when these things were possible on a long enough timeline. Perry’s timeline was getting pretty ridiculous. If it was in the next three months, Perry would punch someone.

“Dunno.” Australia Man said with a shrug.

Perry’s eye twitched.

“But I’m about to give it an attitude adjustment.” Australia Man said, tipping his hat rakishly.

“Now this I gotta see.” Perry said. “What are the coordinates?”

“Well, the wrinkles around the pucker –“

“Please stop.” Heather said, holding up a hand. “I’m sorry I even engaged with this, and I swear to god, I’m gonna smack the next person who uses words like ‘Pucker’ and ‘Wrinkles’.”

“The…” Australia Man visibly struggled to find the words. “Special Distortion…” He glanced nervously at Heather.

She nodded.

“Around the…rim of the…thing…doesn’t conform to traditional coordinates. You could get us close, but if you tried to land us right on it, swoop.” He gestured to indicate them being flung off into the distance. “Only way in is to walk.

“Ah, a non-euclidean space. Makes sense,” Perry said, nodding. “I’ve had to deal with a couple of those before.”

Perry recalled the egg-like ovoid in the center of both Neuron’s lair and Professor Replica’s hideaway.

He quickly slammed off the thought of the thing that shall not be thought of, lest it use his thoughts about it as a doorway to re-enter circulation, as it were.

As he turned his thoughts away from it, the creature stared back at him from the thin membrane between dimensions that had been gradually thinning from Perry’s mere attention. His mental scar, always waiting to say ‘hi’.

Perry gave it the finger.

The creature gave the Eldritch Abomination equivalent of a shrug and faded back into obscurity, disappearing into the dimensional ether like a whale diving under the water.

It was still there. You just couldn’t see it.

Diverting his attention back to the conversation, Perry reoriented. The entire thought had taken less than a faction of a second.

“Anybody ever been to the center of-“ Perry glanced at Heather, who gave him a raised eyebrow. “The Phenomenon?” She nodded, satisfied that no one was going to going to use any more butt imagery.

“Nah, not alive, anyhow.” Australia Man said.

“Not even dead.” Backdraft added, his face patched up and hand cocooned with duct tape. “Thanks for the save, by the way.” he said, patting Perry on the back with his uninjured hand.

“Welcome,” Perry said, nodding before turning his attention back to the issue. “So how close can I get us before it becomes a problem?”

“For safety…about twenty miles away, then we bushwalk the rest of the way.”

“That’s not bad,” Perry said with a shrug.

“Through the densest optic spider territory on the continent.” Australia Man said.

“Slightly worse.” Perry admitted.

“It’s fine, they’re all reasonable people when they’re not trying to kill you.”

Perry glanced up at the white-haired tarantula looking back down at him. It gave the equivalent of a shrug.

“Is there a taboo against selling your webbing?” Perry signed, awkwardly at first, this being his first attempt.

“Nope, but I’m a giant spider in the middle of the Outback, what am I gonna spend money on?”

“Name’s Paradox. I could probably arrange some barter,” Paradox signed, offering his hand.

“Steve.” Steve signed before shaking it.

Over the next couple minutes, while Australia man and his team were making plans to get survive the optic spider territory, Perry and Heather were haggling for a sample of Steve’s optic spiderwebs, which had remarkable properties that Perry NEEDED to study. It was a stretchy fiber-optic cable, and it’s physical properties could move light like a physical pump, creating blasts of ultra concentrated light when contracted.

Like squeezing juice out of a fruit. It made no sense. The only thing Perry could think of was that it could store light based on the state of it’s unique polymer chain, bouncing it around inside, while ALSO transferring the majority of it along it’s path until the state changed, either making more space to catch light, or shooting the already trapped light back out, like pumping a bellows.

So neat!

Heather jumped into the haggling because of the mirage-like effect achievable with the webbing. She wanted it for her clothing line. Admittedly that was a cool idea, but Perry wanted to unravel the secrets of its production, and most importantly, the secret of it’s Essence.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Whatever allowed it to defy Physics.

It seemed to imbue light with some properties that transcended physics. Namely how did it damage his armor? Perry’s hypothesis was that the lasers shot by the spider somehow caught entire atoms and carried them along at light speed without losing any to do it.

A subatomic energy loophole that generated exponentially more energy than they put in.

If you raise the speed of an atom to light speed without paying for it, you’re storing a shitload of kinetic energy, and even Perry’s armor would start getting a little rugburn from the rough treatment.

Now this wouldn’t be the first infinite energy machine ever made since The Tide arrived, or even the first Perry had ever made, but they were few and far between for the common man and typically prohibitively expensive. It’d be interesting to see if this could be used to make a perpetual motion machine without using the Tinker Twitch.

That would be quite valuable.

And that was just the boring money-making side of Perry talking.

Mostly he was interested in how to integrate it into his spell frames and armor.

I should see if there’s any overlap between the webs and the crystals I use to store Disintegrate.

Maybe I could use them as propulsion, if my hypothesis is right. you could make the solar sail idea, without using a sun as the source. Interesting.

On the other hand, while Perry’s armor was STRONG, thousands of times stronger than it should’ve been, those were not astronomical numbers. Astronomical numbers march past the screen for minutes to hours to lifetimes. A few thousand?

Nothing special. Not truly. Not yet.

They haggled with Steve, settling on trading a large sample of webbing in exchange for a Paradoxed pair of scissors with spider-grips. Good for fine work on the web or trimming errant road-flare nose-hairs.

“Alright,” Australia man said shortly after they finished, while Perry and Heather were tucking away fiberoptic silk through one of Perry’s storage portals leading to a climate controlled warehouse.

“We’ve got a destination,” Australia man said, showing Perry the coordinates.

“Try not to eat people, alright?” Australia man signed. “You’ve got a pass this time, but when I come back, you better be somewhere else.”

“Understood,” Steve signed. “Is land crocodile on the menu?”

“Sure, go nuts.” Australia man replied before nodding to Perry.

Perry entered the coordinates into his portal spell and watched as the shimmering hole in reality opened up.

“As always, after you guys,” he said, motioning.

The five members of Australia Man’s team took deep breaths and walked through, followed by Paradox and Wraith.

“Goddamnit,” Perry muttered under his breath as they arrived in an ocean of light-bending webs that seemed to stretch on forever, along with buildings literally made of the eye-tricking material.

Skyscrapers that seemed to blend in with the sky, and a pervading sense of cold and darkness as the massive web drew in light and heat, storing it for the day it would need to blast a hole in the moon or something equally overkill.

Not to mention the moon-men clones might have something to say about that.

That wasn’t the reason he cursed though. The reason he cursed was the infestation of massive man-eating spiders going about their daily lives, their thousands of skittering legs rustling against the web in every direction as far as the eye could see, filling his mind with audio input and nearly overwhelming him with it’s sheer scope.

One giant spider at a time, he could handle, but thousands, moving where he couldn’t see them? Directly behind him at all times no matter where he faced?

Bit of a problem.

Perry took a deep, calming breath and let it out slowly.

You can do this. They’re just people. That one’s got a little briefcase. That one’s got corrective glasses. That one’s eating a smaller one in the shadow of an alleyway.

Perry shuddered and reeled his senses in, trying to balance his Stability, but finding that it made him even more likely to have a panic attack.

It wasn’t the best choice, but it was the most practical one.

Perry left his Attunement above his Stability.

He’d rather be cold than shrieking and running away. If giant spiders were anything like normal predators, that would be a great way to ring the dinner bell.

Despite thinking of the seven of them as a seven-course meal, they were largely ignored. The spiders around them seemed to be in a hurry whichever way they were going, skittering this way and that with a purpose that seemed beyond simple hunting.

Then the briefcase caught up with Perry.

Are they…going to work?Is this a city?

“So, umm…is this what it was like last time you were here?”

“…No.” Australia man said, scanning the surrounding city.

“Oi, you there!” Australia Man signed, motioning to an approaching spider. “Who’s in charge?”

“The mayor’s office is that way,” the spider signed in ultra-fast twitches, motioning to one of the nearly invisible skyscrapers. “Now get out of my way, I’m running late.”

It bowled past them with little regard for their comfort.

“Alright, stay close together, and don’t get complacent.” Australia Man said, turning his gaze toward the building they’d been pointed to.

“I don’t…think that’ll be a problem, Bob said, white as a sheet as he scanned the surrounding spiders, who were starting to pay attention to the sudden meatsacks in their midst.

They were starting to draw a crowd.

“Bewdy, let’s go.”

The seven of them walked through the slightly tacky roads that seemed to pulse with light and attempt to help them forward, but they were calibrated for spider-kind so every step had an unusual amount of force added to it that made it easy to teeter off balance or trip and fall.

Not something you wanted to do in the middle of Spider City.

No consideration for the two-legged, Perry thought ruefully as they entered the…’skyscraper’.

It was made of layer after layer of optic webbing compressed and compacted until it was solid, plastered over what looked like a bone-like structure, according to Perry’s ground-penetrating scanner.

The elevator was…an empty shaft with looser webbing leading all the way up to the ceiling. It was more appropriate to call it a vertical hallway, seeing how all the spiders were walking past each other at full speed.

“Ey, what’re these squishy humans doing in here? Did someone order takeout or something?”

“Mayor. Now.” Australia man signed.

“Top floor, can’t miss it.” The spider signed before walking over them,

The seven of them craned their necks, peering straight up the vertical hallway.

“I got this,” Perry said. “I’m gonna lift everyone with a plane of force under your feet. It’ll feel like you’re standing on an invisible elevator. Don’t move too much.”

Dragor’s Kinesis.exe

Perry lifted them and began rising through the shimmering building, spotting two optic spiders standing next to a water cooler, sipping out of a handful of giant straws that bloomed from the top of the cooler, to accommodate their lack of hands.

“The spiders have plastic.” Perry said.

“I can see that.” Australia Man said.

Further up they spotted a spider on a computer near the back of the office watching another spider build a web-sack before beckoning enticingly.

“Huh.” Perry grunted as they passed by. It was probably too fast for the others to register what they’d seen, but…

“Christ,” Bob said, massaging his forehead.

Well, maybe not too fast for all of them.

They made it to the top of the building a few steps later and stepped into the highest section of the light-bending building.

Perry struggled to properly understand the scope of what he was looking at, as the optic spider’s face seemed to take up the entirety of the room. Suddenly Perry realized that the ‘bones’ that had been holding up the building were the ‘mayor’s’ legs.

“Well, that’s a big spider,” Natura blurted, seemingly shocked out of her ‘love all animals’ mindset.

“Greetings.” A pleasant human voice spoke, seeming to reverberate through the building itself. “Always nice to see you again, Aussie Man.”

“Lucy. You’re looking well.” Australia Man said, tipping his hat. “Still interested in space travel?”

“My species must advance to the stars because the one day the Tide will inevitably withdraw, and without it, we will suffocate. I’m speeding us through the 20th century, breeding our people smarter and enhancing certain attributes that will serve our people well in the vast reaches of space.”

Perry rubbed the smooth front of his armor idly. He was fairly sure he’d run afoul of one of those certain attributes that Lucy was breeding for. It made a lot of sense if Steve the optic spider was intended to be a bio-thruster.

“I’m surprised nobody’s tried to eat you yet, Lucy. Your people aren’t known for their…humanity.”

“Oh, they’ve tried.” Lucy said. “Any who can kill and consume me is entitled to become The Mayor. One by one, they fail and I consume their corpse.”

About as cutthroat as Perry expected Spider politics to be.

“But you’re not here for a chat,” Lucy said, her fangs twitching in thought. “You’re here because of the wrinkly mammal hole.”

Heather sighed, burying her head in her hand.