Completed When Spiders Fly

[Evarista]

7th of Summer, 517 A.V. The night skies seemed comfortable, Evarista thought, taking the time to observe the vast dark space above her. She was lounging on the roof of the estate with only a bottle of wine and the stars for company. It was a very common way for her to spend a night, but tonight felt different. This was the first time she had actually looked up at the sky and examined it, rather than just staring downwards, either at the night-time city or at her own feet. Once she had noticed that there was actually a sky above her, which was a fresh discovery, a thought was born in her head - the desire to fly. The desire to fall into that black ocean above her, as if it was pulling her in. Of course, since learning to fly would involve effort, she would normally be content to simply stare at the sky all night and fantasize, but her recent experiences told her that she would need to learn. Not because she wanted to. Not because she'd enjoy reality over fantasy, because she never did. But only for the boring, mundane, practical utility. She did already have a bit of experience with flying using silk kiting. Leaving herself at the mercy of the wind was a good last-resort escape route, when the only way to go was upwards, but as a way to get from A to B, it was useless. She supposed she'd have to learn to use wings, just like everyone else who ever wanted to get reliably airborne. Turning her head, she let her gaze fall on the pair of bats that were hanging upside down on the protruding chimney crown. Of course, the rooftop was completely submerged in darkness, so Evarista didn't see the bats themselves, but she did see their auras. They were larger and more elaborate than those she was used to, and even from a fair distance away, she could take a cursory look at them without any difficulty, but it wouldn't do for a proper examination. The relatively rapid undulations of color told her that the animals were not asleep, so walking closer would probably spook them. Continuing to stare at the bats with newfound curiosity, Evarista chewed on the silk goop in her mouth thoughtfully. It was obvious that she wouldn't be able to reach the bats at a five meters distance just by spitting at them, at least not with her weak human mouth. She tried to remember those times she had to spit goop at people and what made those efforts successful, and the common denominator in all those cases was that she was under severe distress and her body made adjustments to her mouth without any conscious input. What exactly happened? Evarista tried spitting a bit of silk normally, like people usually spit saliva, while trying to pinpoint how exactly the fluid came to be ejected. She noted how her teeth clenched, her tongue pressed against the back of her teeth, the small pressure building up behind the teeth, and finally how her jaws came apart only slightly to release the pressure and expel the fluid. The small squirt of goo didn't fly far past her nose, since Evarista wasn't exactly a prolific spitter in normal cases, but this did reveal how spitting really worked. All she had to do now was to make the mechanism more powerful somehow.

[Evarista]

If there's anything Evarista had learned about feats of advanced body engineering, it was to think in abstract terms and to start simply. The first step was to think of her mouth as a container for the projectile fluid. Filling herself with patience, the girl slowly generated a set of chitinous walls inside her mouth, forming a box around the goop she already had in there and encapsulating it in a box-like structure. She was already used to plates of slimy chitin moving around in her mouth, so it didn't bring her any discomfort, besides having to watch out any mobile piece to plug up her throat and trigger a gag reflex. Now that the munitions were isolated, the next step should be... hmm. Evarista froze, standing still for several long chimes as her brain tried to remember what she was supposed to do next. Performing crazy biomechanical stunts in the heat of the moment somehow came naturally, but deliberately studying them felt like it was beyond her intellect. The only thing that motivated her to continue were those bat auras dangling at the chimney. She had to get a hold of one. Forcing herself to focus on the task at hand again, the morpher traced the outside of the chitinous box with her tongue, trying to get a more accurate feel for its shape. As she finally recalled the normal spitting motion, it involved building pressure behind the teeth. That could probably be simulated by contracting the box, which she began to do, using additional improvised jaw muscles to push the plates together from all sides, and also helping herself by squeezing her cheeks together with her hands. "Bllrrg... Ufh.." As awkward and uncomfortable as this was, she started to feel a considerable resistance. The silk and glue felt like it was being put under good pressure; at least compared to what she could do with her teeth and tongue. The third and final step was to actually shoot the pressurized liquid at the target somehow. When she did it normally, she opened her jaws slightly, allowing the liquid a narrow route of passage. The important part was to make the opening small, so that the shot would be focused. It was admittedly easier to do this with a customizable chitin capsule than with a rigid pair of jaws that were arguably not designed for the purpose. Expanding her apparatus with what what could be called a short chitinous blowgun poking out between her lips, Evarista pointed it at one of the undulating animal auras in the distance and then pulled away the plate the separated the capsule from the blowgun. A straight beam of glowing green fluid pierced the darkness for a moment, flaring up so fast that she closed her eyes on reflex. When she opened them again, she saw a concentrated, bioluminescent splatter on the chimney, with a faint aural corona struggling violently to free itself from behind it. The glue and silk had congealed on contact, turning from a watery ooze into an extremely tough and sticky tar-like mass. The added luminescence gave the splatter an artistic quality. This wasn't bad. More than content with her experiment, Evarista got the urge to try out her new weapon on unsuspecting passerbies below, but eventually decided to leave that for another night.

[Evarista]

Crouching in front of the trapped bat and leaning in close, Evarista looked over its physical form closely, which was now decently illuminated by the glowing goo around it. An image of the flaming and acid-spitting bat-like monstrosity she met on the lakeshore flashed past her eyes. This little fellow was decidedly harmless in comparison, but it still had what she wanted: wings. Hopefully, she wouldn't need to turn all the way into a bat to fly, and that replicating the wings would be sufficient; either making them large enough to carry her normal weight, or make herself light enough to be carried by a reasonably sized wingspan. Peering into the aura, the girl peeled away the turbulent layers of the bat's perceptions and sensations, as she wasn't interested in those. Instead, she dove to the structural level, to see the basics of how the bat was built. The very first thing she saw was the outline of the bones, and it startled her. This was basically a little human! Blinking and shaking her head to reassure herself that she was seeing things correctly, the aurist traced the bones with her eyes again. No, there was no mistake. The bat was, more or less, a runty human with short legs and long fingers. Being so used to models that were radically different from humans, examining a fellow mammal felt like she was looking herself in the mirror. The structural alternations she would have to make in herself to mimic this were minimal, and didn't require re-imagining any fundamental concepts of life, which was a given with her previous models. Maybe this would be easier than she had anticipated. Since a long study of the specimen didn't seem necessary, Evarista decided to start practising right away, copying what she saw to get an initial feel for it. Having pulled off her blouse to keep it out of the way, she started by simply elongating the bones on her fingers on her hands, one after another, with one basic accompanying muscle on each side of a finger to support movement. In the dull glow of the splattered chimney, she watched her eight fingers turn into thin striped talons... then noticing that she had turned her hand into spider chitin without realizing it. Although, since she saw no reason to break that custom, she went ahead and continued stretching out her talons beyond normal claw length, eventually seeing each of them turn as long as her arm. A few awkward attempts to move her new digit designs showed that it was uncomfortable, but she imagined she'd get used to it. Looking at her reference, she noticed that the arms, on which the wrists and fingers rested, were also noticeably longer in proportion to the body compared to humans. That would probably also be necessary, so she went ahead and stretched out her arms as well, first elongating the upper arm by a a dozen of centimeters, then doing the same with the forearm, protracting it somewhat more. Feeling her human tissue stretch and expand made her shudder; it was not something she used to, being much more comfortable with first turning the human parts into arachnid ones before doing any engineering. It seemed wise to do that even now, since her chitin was much tougher than her bones, and generating it was effortless for her at this point. To keep the structure consistent, she took the time to convert her arms into chitin as well, except for the joints, which she kept as-is. Once the ticklish sensation subsided, she looked at her freakishly long and brightly striped limbs and digits with amusement... and with some skepticism. She wasn't confident something like this would allow her to fly, but the construction wasn't done yet, so it was too early to be disappointed.

[Evarista]

The basic skeleton was done, now Evarista had to refine it. Looking at the bat, she noticed that the fingers were not the same length. The middle finger was longer than the index finger, the ring finger was longer than the middle finger, and the pinky was the shortest one, shorter than the index finger. Making sure her adjustments were symmetrical, she tried folding her arms and hands around herself like a cage, like the bat was doing when it was hanging upside down. The initially awkward lengths of chitin wrapped around her with surprising harmony, without any digit sticking out, tangling up or otherwise feeling like it wasn't correctly built. That was a good sign. Feeling ready to move to the next step, Evarista turned to her model. At first, she thought there would be two separate wings, one for each hand, but that didn't turn out to be the case. While the wings weren't connected with each other, they were forming a single streamlined structure together with the bat's back, tail and legs. Evarista's intuition told her that all of this was going to be necessary to fly properly, so she wouldn't get away with just having a flap of leather on each hand. Luckily, however, the goal concept still wasn't all that complicated. In the end, it was just a large, strategically shaped sheet of leather that used all four limbs as fixtures. Not having any suitable leathery morphing material in her existing arsenal, the girl decided to use the original in front of her. The bat had stopped struggling by this point, probably due to fatigue, which allowed her to take a good look at the aura of the wing membranes and their specific make-up. She expected it to be simply thick skin, but was quickly proven wrong - the wing leather turned out to be a complex and purpose-built kind of tissue. Evarista realized that, since the bat was mostly the same as a human as far as she was concerned, it was probably safe to assume that she'd find the same type of building blocks she would find in herself, albeit differently arranged. Indeed, peering into the thick and intricate colors of the aural blueprint, she saw familiar shapes immediately. The basic component seemed to be cartilage, or binding tissue; elastic meaty material that provided a tough base and platform for other types of tissue, but was not complex or special beyond that. Through the cartilage ran a network of nerves, blood vessels and muscle strings. Nothing exotic, in other words, and nothing she couldn't start imitating right away. At first she was unsure where to start generating the leather, but quickly found the obvious place - the wrists, at the bases between the fingers. Just as humans had a tiny bit of extra skin there, she first generated minimal cartilage membranes to imitate that, and then let it grow along the fingers. Soon after starting, she applied the same principle to also grow a membrane between the pinky finger and the elbow, and finally between the elbow and the side of her torso, eventually letting the various membranes merge into what looked like a mantle. She kept her arms folded and the fingers close together, to allow the new material to engulf and fasten around the bone more easily, watching as semi-liquid flesh crept up the skeleton and congealed around it. When the process reached the tips of the talons, she slowly spread the fingers of one hand, seeing the skin expand like a foldable fan in front of her. This was just the base, however. An overview of the surface made her understand how the layout of the other components was supposed to look, and soon a webbing of blood vessels sprung across the grey cartilage, enlivening it and making her feel the heat of surging blood spread between her fingers. Parallel to the blood vessels, she drew a web of nerves, then flexing the fingers gently. The prickling sensation told her that the nerves attached correctly. Finally, the last type of tissue was muscle, but not dense slabs of it as human bodies had. Rather, it was a thin web of muscle strings, evidently meant to keep the leather taut, easily expandable and contractible. Giving the construction a preliminary glance, Evarista was content. That should be all.

[Evarista]

Standing tall, the girl spread her arms wide and unfurled her wings for the first time, feeling the wind of the rooftop fill them like sails. Having sensation in the wings felt uncanny, but Evarista found it cathartic, enjoying the caress of the wind against the leather. The pleasant feeling was transient, before the girl's stomach suddenly sank in a moment of weightlessness the ground detached itself from her feet. Evarista's split-tick reaction was panic over the prospect of being blown off the roof, but her journey ended as suddenly as it started, with the flat surface of the roof striking her back and wings painfully. Giving a long groan, the clumsy flight aspirant raised her head to look around. The wind only knocked her back a meter at most, but now she understood that when you have wings, you have to pay attention to the wind at all times. Spreading the wings at the wrong angle was like crashing into an invisible wall, and she was thankful that she learned the lesson now rather than later. The good news was that, at least, the wings could lift her into the air, paper-thin as they were. She pondered for a while how she would be able to handle something so thin without popping it by her first careless movement. Just making it thicker wouldn't work, since she realized that thickening the tissue over the whole wing area would quickly make the wings heavy as lead. Just imagining all the pain and misery of constantly tearing the wings during the many accidents that were sure to happen during the flight learning process made her wince. Maybe leather wasn't the right way to go after all. As she laid spread-eagle on the roof, the girl stared at the starry sky and considered the alternatives. Her mind immediately wandered towards what she was most comfortable with - silk. Silk wings? Why not? Thin, light, flexible, extremely tough, and completely painless in case of collision. Nature may have designed bats differently... but Evarista wasn't nature. She was her own designer. And this was yet another opportunity to spit nature in the face. Folding her awkward limbs carefully to avoid being knocked down again, Evarista stood up, cautiously supporting herself on her knuckles. She watched the bruised leather slowly retract into her hands, revealing the black-and-yellow striped skeleton again. Back to square two, then. Could she generate silk as easily as she generated leather? Up to this point, she thought of silk as something that had to be spun as fiber, but was that necessarily true? Since silk dope was liquid, it could be shaped like anything. When you pour water into a carafe, the water takes the shape of the carafe. The same could be done with silk - generate silk dope, pour it between two sheets of skin, let it congeal - and you have a sheer sheet of silk without having to spin thread. Not a bad idea. Evarista's jaw suddenly hung open in epiphany. No, this wasn't just a good idea. This was genius! With that method, she could make not only wings, but she could also make cloth, and virtually anything else she wanted! She couldn't believe she went around making silk for years without having realized this sooner, and that was a sign of stupidity if anything, but... now she had it. This was it.

[Evarista]

While excited to put her idea on trial, Evarista ran into a problem right away. Her initial plan was to generate two layers of epidermis and pour unspun silk dope between them, but that wasn't enough to make silk. The dope had to be sheared to make it solid, and while that was easy to do with a string, it wasn't as easy to shear a whole sheet at once. Would she have to make one huge, flat spinneret for that? That would be too impractical. Brought to a pause, the morpher stared at her lanky talons blankly, trying to come up with an alternative method. Think simple, think abstract, she told herself. That was the exact opposite of what all the great lectors at the Institute taught her, but being the dumb dropout that she was, she grew used to using dumb dropout methods to get what she wanted. As long as it worked, right? Imagining a spinneret, the way she used to make it in her mouth, gave her the answer. When using a spinneret, you don't spit out a bunch of goo and then try making strings out of it, you shear the silk as you pull it out of the gland. Making wings didn't need to be any different. She wasn't supposed to sprout a skeleton and then try wrapping silk around it, she was supposed to make everything work together as a package. Realizing that she's been doing everything backwards, Evarista gave a long sigh of frustration and began degenerating the long talons until they were human-sized. But that wasn't all. She continued degenerating her arms... until they were gone, completely absorbed into the base of the shoulders. Being built from scratch was a part of the mechanics behind her idea. Not having arms felt uncomfortable, but it was temporary. In each of her shoulders, she generated a large spinneret, feeling the foreign yet familiar biology swell under her skin, and the gland fill with unspun silk. This would be the base. Now came the most important part. When she was spinning silk normally, she used a pair of mandibles with pincers on the ends to pull and shear the material, and this would be the same, except that the freshly sheared silk would be permanently attached to the levers used to shear it - the fingers, which would do the shearing through the very force of their own creation. Concentrating on her right shoulder first, Evarista began generating a "hand" with "fingers"... inside of the silk gland. The chitinious prongs were to pull the silk dope out of the gland and through the spinneret as they grew, shearing it in the process. But it couldn't be done gradually; it had to be done quickly and forcefully, so that the silk was put under enough pressure to be sheared, and thus solidify. Abrupt growth of tissue was not something Evarista had pleasant experiences with, and she'd have to practice to make it smooth, but she was comfortable enough with the materials to know that she could do it. Once the budding talons had gone through the liquid in the gland and touched the back of the spinneret, the morpher clenched her teeth and prepared herself for the moment of truth. Since her sight was used to darkness, the flash of luminescence seared her eyes, but they remained wide open as a macabre bloom burst forth from her shoulder. Stripes of black and bright yellow, the exoskeletal fingers, expanded and unfurled like a flower before her, stretching and pulling a softly glowing membrane. A strong surge of nausea pierced her body, almost making her hurl; the rapid growth made her feel as though she was roughly turning her flesh inside out. Even as her body was still shaking in revulsion, her eyes stared widely at the new limb as it straightened out, with drops of luminescent slime staining the roof below. This was right. This had to be right. The rush of adrenaline spurred her to shift focus to her second shoulder. If she didn't do it right away, she wouldn't be able to do it at all. "Aaaugh! Rrrh..." The other limb bloomed just as harshly and rapidly, the sheared silk spreading its surreal green light through the air. Droplets of glowing liquid sailed high into the night sky. Trembling violently and barely able to stand, Evarista leaned her back against the chimney behind her, with streams of sweat rolled down her face and bare torso. Fortunately, the mind-quaking nausea retreated as quickly as it had struck, as her body gradually got used to the rudely introduced limbs. Finally regaining enough composure to look at her creations, the girl simply stared in silent amazement, spreading the wings carefully before folding them to prevent being blown to the ground again. Framed by chitinous fingers was a mantle of sheer, elastic silk, emanating its ethereal bioluminescent glow across the roof and her tired body. It was a pair of bat wings, just as she practised earlier, but it was also something more. It felt like a part of her. Even though she used a bat as a model, she ended up using only arachnid materials: chitin and silk. These wings were something that Nature couldn't dream up in her most feverish nightmare; an abomination beyond any mortal's most perverted fantasy. It was majestic. "Haha... hahaha... hahh..." Feeling the last of her strength leave her, Evarista slid down to the ground, breathing heavily staring at the black sky above her. It no longer seemed so distant. For just a moment, it felt like not only her body, but her soul grew wings as well.

[Karyk]

 

Evarista

Skills
Observation: 3
Morphing: 5
Logic: 3
Biology: 3
Unarmed Combat (Spider Form): 1
Auristics: 1
Flying (Bat Form): 1
Lores
Self Reflection: Distress can lead to more rapid morphs
Morphing Form: Silk Projectile Mouth
Biology: Bats are similar to humans in bone structure
Morphing Form: Bat Wings
Biology: Bat Wings form a single streamlined structure
Biology: Bat Wings consist of multiple complex tissues
Morphing: I can produce liquid silk, not just strands
Morphing Form: Spider Silk Bat Wings
Miscellaneous
None

 

Notes and Comments

CS Checkmarked: ✓
CS Reviewed by Me: ✓
Season Request was Submitted for Grade: Summer 517
Season Thread was Started (IC & OOC): Summer 517 & Summer 517
Is that Season's expenses paid?: No, it is current season and not required
Eligible for grade? Yes

This is by far the best morphing thread you've done. This is how it should b e done, it was incredibly well detailed. Maybe would've liked to see some more lasting overgiving. Auristics could've used some more detail. But very well done, definite improvement. Please mark your post in queue as Graded.