Chương 72: Up, Up, Up

Nobody liked a quitter. Which meant that it was time for round two, you stupid metal bird. It was territorial, it was big, and it was in between me and home. Could I fight it? Not without firearms. Which meant I had to be sneaky, and above all quiet. And I was a great deceiver indeed. Spiders were known for disappearing the moment you let them out of sight after all.

"Is that a bird? What type of worm is that? I've never seen something in that color. Wowie, we are so far up. If we fell straight down, do you think we'd hit anything at all? And if we did, would it be normal ground, or… the underworld. Is the underworld real? Are you even listening, Sam?" I let out a long suffering sigh, looked down the half mile I'd already climbed, then to the side at the single most stubborn bug in existence.

"Parsnip, stop following me."

"Never!" she hissed back with barely contained glee.

"This is the furthest I have ever been from home. It is exhilarating. Oooh, what is that?" A hand-sized blue mite crawled out of a hole in the wall, over her hand. She grabbed it, squished it dead, then began eating it.

"They taste different up here too." Rico poked out of a small knapsack I'd been gifted by Pom-Pom. He leaned over my shoulder with a conspiratorial whisper.

"On the count of three you run up the wall and leave her out to dry. We'll ditch her behind that overhang up there."

"We are not doing that, thank you very much," I shot back.

"She's a friend, and magical girls don't leave friends behind."

"I'm your friend, the bug's your friend, your metal arm's your friend. Next you're going to proclaim some giant dumbass fish as your soulmate, and spend the next half year trying to grow gills." He drummed his fingers on my metal shoulder impatiently.

"You know what? That would actually be kinda hilarious. Go do that, immediately." I sighed and resisted slapping myself in the face. Stealth missions were so much easier when you were alone. We could have crawled through any number of tunnels that penetrated this inter-planetary continent like a maggot-eaten swiss cheese. That was assuming that I was prepared to tear my way through wasps, feral ants, and giant predatory worms with awfully hard heads for what felt like days. It was an option, just not a good one.

If my slings couldn't crack it, I couldn't get past it. That meant, and I couldn't believe this to be true, scaling the outer wall really was the better choice. I would've gotten lost in the tunnels anyways. This far away from home Parsnip's ability as a guide was greatly diminished. There was a warm updraft as we climbed the outer wall. With eight arms, it wasn't easier than walking, but it was smooth. [Sticky] made the entire feat possible.

Though we tried to take advantage of natural terrain and rocky outcrops to lend us support, the stone was smoothed by eons of wind, the surface turning into a slippery slide wherever moisture or algae chose to settle in great splotchy colonies. The overhangs menacing our ascent like walls didn't help either. Without [Sticky] to overcome them and my robotic arm Sin to spin thread for hoisting Parsnip up after me, we would have had to climb around them, often for half a mile or more.

The climb should've been a workout. But my muscles were just barely getting warmed up. My arms had gotten considerably toned through the daily hunts, full of long stalking walks, followed by sudden bursts of speed, lots of running and climbing included. Maybe these guns could make Addy jealous… yeah, no, she still had a big head start on me. But I was catching up, one ideal handhold at a time. Parsnip couldn't keep up. She was, quote, 'built for dancing and violence, not climbing'.

But leaving her behind was just not possible. After slipping for the umpteenth time on some moss, I decided to safely tie her to my back with spider silk.

"I am a huntress," she grumped.

"This is embarrassing."

"It's what you get for being so stubborn. Now stop being grubbish, we have a long way ahead of us." [Proprioception Sensors] was a godsend here, allowing me to not channel [Sticky] for every little thing. I didn't want to burn out the ECC in my brain because I was channeling emotions when I didn't need to. It was a coinflip which would flag first, that magical chip or my physical stamina.

Whenever something moved in the clouds I had to quickly use [Of Many Colors], shifting my body to the color of smoothed sandstone, and stretching the contours of my clothing to fit the wavy patterns beneath my body. Fun Fact: For the purpose of that spell, while tied to me like this, Parsnip counted as apparel. So she also changed colors and outlines, to much oohing and aahing. It went well for the first mile of sheer cliff. Then the wind picked up, and every cell in my body screamed at me to freeze.

I did, pushing as much joy into [Of Many Colors] as was possible. My skin shifted, the hue of my forearms adjusting just that little bit more. A shadow rushed through the clouds, first like a hazy phantom, then as something much more physical. A school of what looked like flying fish quickly flapped their wing-fins before a sizable chunk was bitten out of their cloud. We all went quiet, only the quiet chattering voice of Parsnip still audible over the wind.

"Q-q-queen of skies, she-of-legend. I regret everything! Samantha, take me back down immediately." I couldn't. If we moved, it would see us. And worse yet: I was out of spider silk. The beak came first, long, jagged, sharp like a heron's and perched on a neck the length of a city bus. Then came the wings, glistening with the sheen of metal. I observed the entire creature from my spot with eyes on the back of my neck.

Now that I wasn't entangled in a life-or-death struggle with it, more details rushed in through my extra spider eyes. Old scars. Missing feathers. What looked like bite marks on its tail feathers. This truly was a queen of the skies, and yet even a queen was not without rivals. It sailed in lazy circles, on the lookout for easy prey caught out in the open, or so I thought. When it landed on a rocky outcrop barely four hundred feet above me, I tried not to let the shudder that ran through the rock move me.

Why here, why now? Stay calm. I am a rock. Just a rock. We waited. And waited. After half an hour, it flew away in a hurry. We continued our climb, only for the bird to return to the same damn place a couple minutes later. Except this time, we were closer, close enough that its final wingbeat nearly tore me off the side of the cliff. The bird's squawk was a honking bass, like an angry goose sent from god as his eighth plague.

Beating it in a fight was out of the question, but I didn't want to fight it, I just wanted to climb past its dang fluffy behind! What was it even doing up there? It was ruffling its feathers, poking the rock beneath it… Then I saw them. A tiny head poked out over the side of the outcrop. It was the grumpiest, fuzziest face I'd ever seen on a bird. Nonetheless, its protruding beak and forward-facing eyes revealed how beneath the fuzzy down feathers, it was still a predator.

The chick was the size of a fully grown cow, and for some reason, it was looking straight at me. Please don't tell me you've got 20/10 eyesight. I'm doing my absolute best here. At that moment, something started climbing up my leg, something chitinous with many legs. The chick noticed it too. It squawked, flapped its almost hairless wings in excitement — then stumbled out of the nest and fell right towards me. Chickenshit— I could have dodged.

One small leap to the left and we maybe wouldn't have slipped and fallen into the abyss below. The big bird would have noticed of course, but I was practiced in running away from that particular predator; the climb didn't necessarily have to happen today, or even tomorrow for that matter. But watching the dumb baby bird tumble towards me, its tiny brain realizing that it had just made the mother of all cluck-ups, I felt my body responding before my brain could veto the decision.

[Of Many Colors] was only one of the abilities my new essence granted me. The other was the reason I'd picked it over the grasshopper essence in the first place. [Arachnid Form - Variable] Charges: Variable Cost: Extreme +++ Change into one of four arachnid forms, each assigned one emotion, one stat, and charged individually. When taking any one form, the associated stat, emotion-generation, and spells charged by the associated emotion are enhanced multiplicatively. Multiplier increases by [1%] per level.

Current multiplier: [149%] Body-form: Joy (1/1) Sense-form: Fear (0/1) Mind-form: Anticipation (1/1) Soul-form: Joy (1/1) Note: Transformations require an upkeep of assigned emotion while active. Upkeep increases with time spent in the transformation, resetting upon returning to base form, or activating a different transformation. I'd used the Sense-form while balancing on the giant rolling scrap mech as a test run.

The scaling was great, the cost abhorrent, and it was everything a magical girl could ask for except oh my god I am about to be squished by a four hundred pound chick. The mother bird only now realized that one of her chicks had decided to engage in premature practical physics studies. It would be too late to catch it, too late for her and the chick." Arachnid Form: Body." A small theme song started playing, hopefully only in the back of my mind.

Within moments, my body swelled, muscles expanding and bones reinforcing twice and thrice over. It hit my core muscles hardest, new muscle groups pulling me forward into a hunched, almost crab-like position that reminded me of Addy in her warform. Chitin grew out of my skin, covering me in heavy armored plates. My upper pair of limbs grew faster and larger than the rest, leaving me with two hefty arms laden with spikes, and five only moderately muscled ones that could still outbox any professional boxer.

Orange and black stripes covered my body, and then it was complete. And I was happy. Whiptail-scorpion-tarantula-hybrid-mode activated— ooof! The chick impacted me, butt first. It tore three hands off of the wall, bending me back even in this powerful transformation. I grit my teeth, secured the bird with my middle arms, before slamming my spike-covered fists into the wall and making them stick. The chick didn't like being held at all.

It pecked me, hard enough to draw blood along a soft spot in the armor between my neck and shoulder.

"Stay still you stupid oversized chicken nugget," I hissed. Rock chips drizzled down around me. Suddenly, the ever-present updraft grew tenfold. It lifted us off of the crumbling stone in an odd arc, before depositing us and the chick in a nest of twigs, tree trunks, and downy feathers. Hesitantly, I cracked my eyes open. There were three derpy looking chicks staring down at me with curious eyes, and above them there was Momma-Bird.

She absolutely could catch the chick because of course this giant bird could magically manipulate wind. How else could it fly with feathers made of metal? Currently she seemed to be debating with herself on how to get the unwanted intruders out of her nest without disturbing her brood.

"Parsnip. No. Sudden. Moves," I whispered.

"S-samantha, you don't happen to speak bird, do you?" Parsnip asked, nervously cutting herself out of my bug-carrier.

"I don't," I hissed back.

"It wasn't part of the offered courses in The Academy."

"You should tell them to rectify this mistake." I dismissed the transformation, feeling miffed at how little I got to use it, yet knowing full well that looking big and scary was not getting us out of this sticky situation. Don't do anything suspicious. Be normal. What is normal for a bird? I looked around. There were a lot of downy feathers in here, both shed by the chicks and likely plucked out of Momma-Bird's own supply.

I grabbed all the feathers in reach, puffed myself up, and turned my skin the shape and texture of the chick's gray downs.

"Sqwuak, sqwuak?" The chicks seemed to enjoy that show. They prodded me with their beaks, chirping and squeaking with abandon. I could basically hear their thoughts.

'Yo, we just got a new sister. Look at how skinny she is! Stealing her share of the food is gonna be easy'. Momma-Bird looked unconvinced. She squinted, and until this very moment I didn't know that birds could squint. It was an awfully human reaction, completely out of place on this many-ton bird. Ah crap. She knows. Something in the down feathers wiggled. I grabbed it, and found… a fist-sized tick. It was a heavy gray water balloon tucked into the gray fur of the chick I'd tried to catch. Ticks were nasty.

Foggy once gathered a few ticks after she disappeared on a seven-day adventure that left my entire family worried and my sister crying and sobbing. We had to pluck them from under her fur, and from every part that wasn't covered in fur. She seemed cranky at the time, but so relieved afterwards. This bird ought to know how dangerous ticks could be, especially to young chicks. Maybe. I have to bet on something. It's either this, or a date with gravity.

"Parsnip, do what I do, but slowly, carefully." Without thinking much, I grabbed the tick by the head and tugged. The baby chick squirmed and squawked as the tick used its hard, spiny legs to clamp onto its skin. First I had to tear those off one by one, then get a good grip on its head while wiggling the mandibles out. The biggest issue with removing ticks in humans and animals was the risk of tearing the tiny head off, as leaving that stuck in the skin was just asking for an infection.

Parsnip, bless her heart, was at my side, assisting the operation. With a smooth pop, and a small spray of pus and other nasty juices, the tick popped free. Momma-Bird squinted harder at me. Her long beak descended on the nest, the chicks suddenly jutting their own up towards it. She rolled over one of them, nudged another into place. Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work! Oh god, is that a bot fly larva? And what's that wriggling in your ear canal?

Oh man, this is seriously not good for you, little chick. Parasites were a fact of life out here in the wild. They were an annoyance and an inconvenience to healthy birds as long as they didn't carry any diseases. However, old, weak, and young individuals with little ability to groom or bathe could quickly succumb to an onslaught of opportunistic critters. I noticed the piles of discarded chitin and rotten skeletons off to the side of the outcrop the nest was situated on. Some of the bones looked rather avian.

This wasn't the first time she'd tried to raise a brood here, safe from winds in this nook. While her size and magic made her nigh-invulnerable, it was that same size that made it impossible for her to care for her chicks in detail like this. She curled around her chicks. Her head was now level with mine, big round eyes staring straight into my soul. It was terrifying, being this up close to her, feeling her breath tickle my skin, her wings closing around us like a steel tent. We couldn't leave.

In this position, her scales were a fortress preventing anything from reaching her chicks, or from them trying their luck at another leap of faith. Okay, fine, we'll help get the parasites off your kids. And clean your nest while we're at it, because I am not sitting down while this place is infested with bloodsuckers and other nasty critters. The parasites are so big, I wouldn't be surprised if they themselves also had parasites. But make no mistake, I have places to be.

I don't have time to be playing the spider maid. I do this, and you let me keep on climbing. Deal? Deal. +++"Goddangit, why are you all so cute?" I sat down with a harumph, arms crossed while I stared at the three derpy looking chicks. They stared back at me. They were lanky, barely feathered, and awkward; objectively ugly in every way. Not even their downs had fully grown in.

"Your name is Nugget," I said, pointing at the leftmost one.

"Yours is Dumpling. And you…" The last chick hacked, coughing up a slimy skeleton of some sort of squirrel-thing.

"Hairball. You're definitely a Hairball." In the background, Parsnip dutifully dusted the outer bits of the nest off with a self-made duster. All she'd needed was a stick, some feathers, and some spider silk for rappelling off the side. My silk reserves were rising again. Whenever I offered Sin a fat tick, the robotic arm unfolded into a horrorshow of metal teeth and sharp sawblades, tearing the thing apart with a bloody splat. Afterwards, my silk reserves ticked up by another couple percent.

<<i crave protein>> The chicks had accepted me as one of their own. It was a great achievement in human-to-bird communication, only eclipsed by the fact that Momma-Bird didn't eat me or Parsnip or even Rico the following day. She seemed hella impressed when I snapped a rock at a leg-length centipede that was crawling towards the nest. After I'd finished brushing down her kids for any further parasites, she left to find some more food. Which, hey, maybe she was just a good judge of character.

Or maybe my convincing act of shredding the parasites into a gory mess convinced her that I was the type of bug that ate the bad bugs, and that fowl wasn't part of my preferred diet. Vaguely, I remembered that there were even types of spiders that kept tiny frogs as pets. The frogs ate small pests the spider couldn't, protecting its eggs, and in exchange the spider protected it from predators. Therefore, this was simply good spider behavior. And good magical girl behavior too. What magical girl didn't like animals?

I'm a maid spider. A not-getting-paid spider. When I get back to the surface, the first thing I'm going to eat is a big, juicy hamburger. Something without bugs in it. No matter how much my spider half is telling me that ticks taste best when they pop inside your mouth, my human half just can't seem to appreciate it. The chicks were mercifully quiet as we cleaned away their refuse. A survival instinct, to prevent attracting predators while their only lifeline was out catching food.

Will you stupid chicks stop making a mess all the time? I just cleaned that corner, dammit! Why do you think you were so full of parasites? I am wasting so much time. Aaaah! The one good thing that came of this was that I had time to practice charging my transformation spells. After Addy's training and gaining a bunch of levels, my Soul, and thereby ECC-efficiency, was large enough that most spells were easily charged if I could spare the headspace for it. The transformations weren't 'most spells'.

At a cost of extreme +++, charging them for an hour straight was barely enough to get an eighth of the way there, and that was per charge. I needed eight hours of uninterrupted joy to charge my Body-form, and then another eight hours of fear to charge my Sense-form. They were my trump cards, and until I finished recharging the two of them, I felt a bit naked. There was a buzz in my backpack. Rico peeked out, rubbing his eyes.

"So, we there yet?" Three baby birds locked onto him. Slowly, he slinked back inside.

"I'm somewhat busy trying to keep us alive over finding a way out," I hissed, taking my own duster and brushing a flea off the side of the nest, yeeting it into the abyss.

"We could use some help in case you haven't noticed."

"Help? Help!?" he hissed inside my backpack.

"I'm a bite-sized snack for these, these… things. I'm not suited to help, let alone distract. I am staying right here." I gasped.

"Rico, they aren't things, they have names. This is Nugget, Dumpling, and Hairball, and they just need someone to set a good example for them."

"Oh great, she's gone and bonded with oversized birds," Rico muttered.

"Wake me up when you have something I know how to help with."

"How am I supposed to know what you know if you won't communicate with—" A distant sound made me pause. It sounded like a clack, or a tik. It happened again, repeating in uneven intervals. Parsnip perked up too. She peered over the edge of the nest, and I followed suit. There, below us, was a human-sized ant. The ant waved its feelers, tasting the air. Then it climbed a few steps closer.

"Crap. Go away. Shoo." The ant stepped closer. I readied my sling. One more step, and its fate was sealed. It took the step, and I let loose my projectile, smashing into its eye and cracking the solid structure with a crunch. The ant twitched, but its grip on the walls only tightened. It let out a series of ticks and clacks that sounded like a machinegun with anger issues.

"You should probably kill it far away from the nest," Parsnip offered.

"They don't call them 'avenger ants' for nothing." Indeed, the oversized insect decided that it was best to charge the source of its anger and pain. I readied another two rocks, aiming for its legs instead of its eyes. It was well-armored, and last I checked ants didn't need their eyes for climbing. They communicated via vibrations and pheromone trails, though maybe a concussion would communicate my objections to its presence thoroughly enough. Another stone cracked at its leg, crushing one of six clawed feet.

A second one went wide due to wind and the awkward angle. I didn't make that mistake twice, casting [Arms & Arms Proficiency] for good measure. The ant lost grip on another leg. Its ascent was slowing. It was just about ready to fall. The clouds parted in the distance. A scythe of solid air smashed against the wall. When the squall dissipated, all that was left of the ant was a clear-blooded smear on the wall. Momma-Bird had returned. She landed on the nest with skyfish in her mouth.

Nugget ate a big beak-full greedily, gobbling it down without chewing. Dumpling did his best, but missed the mark. He spent most of his food time rolling around the nest, trying to find all the fish he'd spilled from his mouth. And Hairball, Hairball was busy choking on what looked like a fifty pound mackerel. For a moment, Momma-Bird's eyes met mine. She seemed to debate with herself before coming to a conclusion. Seconds later, I was slathered in an armful of flopping fish.

"I suppose this means I have officially been adopted."

"Gee. How wonderful," Rico muttered. I could feel him rummaging around in my backpack.

"It's almost like you don't care about going back at all."

"Oh, but I do!" I tore off a fish's head with my mouth, squeezed its blood into my mouth, and quickly gutted it with my set of knives. Raw fish wasn't so bad compared to ticks. It was sorta like giant sushi, except without the rice, or the veggies.

"But I've been thinking—""Finally!" Rico yelled.

"— that even if I go back up, after all the time that's passed, what'll I have to show for it? A few levels, and a new essence, whoop-dee-doo. I may have transformed myself, but what have I actually done with that?"

"<<Untranslateable parable>>. What's so wrong with wanting to get to safety first, especially if that safety has lots of whipped cream and strawberry sweets?"

"That's the point. It isn't safe up there, not for me, not for anyone I care about." I couldn't imagine returning to the surface after nearly three months and going 'hey, I know you thought I was dead, but I lived! What did I do? Oh, y'know, just a little bit of leveling. Look at this cool thing I can do!' going any way but poorly. I left a lot of people up in the air. The Poker Club probably never took off. Becca was still getting used to existing in a magical society as well as her new body. And Addy…

Addy would probably take my extended stay-away as justification to do something similarly poorly thought out. I needed a counter to the pactmaker, and a surprise for Addy, achievements and laurels. Something that'd make my involuntary self-exile if not worth it, then at least tolerable. I'd helped save a city of bugs, sure, but Addy saved entire cities regularly. Probably. It's sorta what Custodians do.

"Why can't I start small?" I said, half asking Rico, half asking myself.

"I don't have to change the world all at once. What kind of magical girl would I be if I didn't start with the issue right in front of me?" I watched as the chicks variably burped, rolled forward onto their bellies, and suffered from hiccups.

"The biggest issues seem to be greed and indigestion," Rico muttered.

"For now. I just don't want to imagine what will happen if I leave these little peepers alone." +++ They would die. Horribly. Taken apart by angry bugs, limb by limb, sinew by sinew. That was the answer mother nature had for me. It wasn't very motherly of her to send an army of ginormous ants after us, but hey, the 'mother' part of 'mother nature' was a human addition, and humans were known to be quite flawed. A hooked foot appeared on the left side of the nest.

I kicked it, only for a second one to appear to the right. Then came the mandibles, snap-snap-snapping at my face." Arachnid Form: Body." I grabbed the mandible with four arms, then stabbed the ant in the eye with the remaining three. It twitched, curled up, and fell off the nest, taking a branch with it. Turns out that the avenger ants really didn't enjoy the smell of one of their scouts dying. I could see a hundred, maybe as much as five times that crawling up from holes and crevices far below the nest.

Momma-Bird was tireless in battering them with magic, metal wings, and vicious pecks, but after the first hour she stopped using the wing scythes. Evidently, she needed some magic to fly, and dipping too far into her reserves risked her plummeting out of the sky. She wasn't like a Custodian, who could go on charging their spells all day every day. Perhaps she reloaded her stored magic by sapping some from her prey. If so, that was an additional problem.

Many birds exhausted themselves trying to take care of their young, and I had the feeling that this mother lost her mate early on. The birds were practically made for tag-teaming child rearing. One bird could sit in the nest, resting and covering it entirely in their metal feathers while the other one went out to look for food. Maybe if there had been a Momma and a Poppa bird working in tandem, they could have fended off the ant's assault.

As it was, the huge heron was showing signs of fatigue, and I certainly couldn't defend the nest without a backpack full of firearms, even if Parsnip was doing more than her fair share. Her boomstick boomed, exploding an ant here or there to the manic cackling of a bug girl having too much fun. But with every second passing and every ant joining the fray, nature was posing Momma-Bird a brutal question: Was it worth the energy and risk to herself to continue defending this nest?

Or should she fly away, leaving her chicks to die so she could reproduce another day? Her feet weren't made for grabbing. They were atrophied, and she wobbled whenever she had to stand on them for longer than a few minutes. Her beak? Very, very sharp. If she decided to pick her chicks up, the risk of wounding and killing them was very real. Their metal feathers were but small nubs, barely starting to grow in. And all of this was the result of one tiny action.

If only she had brushed the ant away instead of turning it into jam against the wall.

"The ants are starting to circle around," Rico noted.

"Give it up, Sam. You can't save everyone."

"Nonsense!" Parsnip said, cackling as she batted a severed ant head into the abyss.

"We shall fight here, and fight to the last. For the queen-of-legend and her squawking, poopy spawn!"

"The ants won't follow you if you climb up a mile or two," Rico said in between explosions.

"With your magic, it ought to be doable."

"If I do, the chicks will die."

"The chicks will die, the mother will find a new mate, that's life. How else do you think half of the planets out there get taken over by invasive organisms, self-propagating sentient spells, and death machines? Nature doesn't care about your self-righteous morality. Nature loves a winner."

"Nature is cruel," I shot back.

"But that doesn't mean we have to be." There was a sudden gust of wind that made the entire nest wobble. The chicks were entirely silent, sure to weather the storm if they just made themselves inconspicuous. Then the shadow of Momma-Bird fell over them, and they cheeped in excitement despite her weary stance. Slowly, she opened her beak, trying to pick Dumpling up. Its cries of happiness quickly turned to cries of distress, then pain.

"No, no! Stop it!" I whacked an ant off the nest, then turned to whack her beak with the same stick. She let go, if only because she too was unsure of her own judgement. There had to be a way out of this, there just had to. I climbed onto her, tested her beak front to back. Sharp as a knife. I checked her stomach. No convenient kangaroo pouch, just overlapping armored scales. A flying tank. Right. Time for the MacGyver solution.

With herculean effort, I grabbed Nugget, then Dumpling, then Hairball, hoisting them up on Momma-Bird's back in turn. Aiming Sin, I quickly fastened some sloppy spider-silk seatbelts for them, wrapping around their upper, middle, lower chest, then vertically across their shoulders. The chicks seemed very alarmed by this sticky goo, but I made sure that Momma-Bird could see what I was doing. She gave me the odd side eye between pecks. Then she turned her head away, focusing entirely on repelling intruders.

She trusted me, or at the very least had no other option but to trust me. Thus, Nugget and Dumpling were secured in moments. Halfway through securing Hairball, Sin's web gun ran out of protein. Fuck. The ants were closing in from above and below. Some of them yanked at steel feathers, trying to clamber onto the wing tips even as she whipped them off. I could feel it in her poise that Momma-Bird was moments from taking off. I wasn't ready, but in her mind two chicks was likely better than none. No. I refuse.

"Arachnid Form: Mind" My large body-transformation shrunk, then grew, then shrunk again. I felt my limbs go noodly and wobbly, as if I'd cranked [Elasticity] to the max while turning into stubby versions of themselves. Everything about me was becoming diminutive, as if I was turning into a type of chibi-Samantha. It stood to reason that if my transformation mimicked the appearances of arachnids associated with that stat, that the Mind-transformation would imitate that of the smartest arachnids.

All of which were tiny, adorable jumping spiders.

"Holy shit, I'm tiny!" I said in a squeaky voice, now barely five foot tall.

"Aaah! Why this, why now — no, don't panic, mini-me. Focus on the task. Parsnip!" Parsnip landed on Momma-Bird's back on one foot with a twirl. She was covered in gore, panting heavily as she slumped down, definitely out for the count. I grabbed hold of her with one set of arms, then the chubby Hairball that was in the process of squishing me with the other ones, and channeled [Sticky] on my entire body. It came as naturally as breathing. I was Samantha the cute gummy jumping spider, of course I was sticky.

This was good news. I could leverage this as my child friendly form. Spider merch would fill the aisles of every toy store! The people would love me, and then I could use that love to fuel even more stickiness! Whoop whoop for the anticipation boost, but let's focus on the present for now, shall we? With a sudden lurch, Momma-Bird took off. My lunch traveled to the tip of my toes, and suddenly the focus of my boosted anticipation turned from spider merch to all the different ways we could fall off and die.

Was [Sticky] holding? Yes? Good. Now, no channeling fear.

"Ahaha, we are flying!" Parsnip chitter-laughed in a mad tone.

"Mother-mother would never believe me if I told her. Weee!" When I dared open my eyes, the stone wall and the nest was at our back, quickly growing diffuse as we entered a bank of clouds. I caught a hint of small fish and sky-eels swimming here and there, but beyond those most creatures chose to avoid us. It was genuinely peaceful, for a while. The clouds parted, slowly at first, then all at once.

We were flying over an ancient-looking world, with trees that grew in zig-zag patterns and leaves that seemed to turn to follow us instead of the sun. Wait… there's a sun here. Two suns. … did the bird just hop to another planet? We might have gone from stranded to omega super stranded. Crap. But all I can do is hold on. Then, there came another cloud front. When we left this one, the air felt thick and choked with fumes.

Great factories rose out of a moss-carpet of cities like angry mountains spewing fire and brimstone. The chicks cheeped loudly as if to drown out the drone of industry below, but devolved into coughing after a moment. Somewhere in the far distance, a rocket launched. Then I noticed three more, their drive-plumes growing closer awfully quickly. Not rockets. Guided missiles. Momma-Bird ignored them, evidently having taken this route before. She dove into a dark thundercloud and then rain pelted us, cold and frosty.

The wind jostled and tugged at her flight path. For a short eternity, I wished that I was back home. Then those clouds broke as well, and below us was a fairly normal looking land. The trees were normal sized and shaped. Towns dotted the landscape instead of sprawling to the horizon. The architecture was a bit odd, but it looked quite livable, normal almost. Are we back on earth? Sorta reminds me of The Shire. As long as this place doesn't have giant ants or anti-air batteries, it'll do.

Momma-Bird was of the same opinion. She circled a copse of trees three times before landing in a clearing. It was approaching dusk, the sleepy sun creeping over the horizon. She managed to pluck her children from her back, only taking a moment to peck at me since I currently looked like a child-sized tick.

"It's me, don't worry," I mumbled, my wobbly, elastic form solidifying as I transformed back. Momma-Bird looked hella impressed. She gave each of her chicks a nuzzle before giving me one as well, purring and cooing. She cried once, then wrapped everyone around her in her protective dome of metal feathers. Parsnip, for all her enthusiasm, was already asleep. It was high time for a nap. I wasn't exactly sleepy, more so tired from constantly slinging rocks and channeling spells. I could use a nap.

I could figure out whatever comes after that then. With half-lidded eyes, I noticed a small tree turn to face me. It had a face carved into it, grumpy and wrinkled and old.

"You're standing on my root," it said.

"That's uncomfortable. You owe me." I groaned even as the barely perceptible weight fell on my shoulder. This wasn't earth, but of course it just had to be Faeworld, didn't it? Maybe this is all a bad dream. Maybe when I wake up, I'll be back in Bugsrest, or Hill 43, or The Academy. Yeah. Sleeping my problems away sounds like a good idea right about now.

"Psst. Sam. Can I ask for a favor?"

"Rico? Friends don't need to ask for favors. Just ask," I mumbled through a yawn, "and I'll answer.

'S what friends are for, y'know." He was silent for the longest while. Somewhere half between dream and reality, his voice still reached me.

"I wanted to say thanks. And goodbye. I didn't think I'd make it home ever again when I got captured. Stay quiet, relax, don't argue with the trees and the animals. I'll make sure you're properly compensated. For everything."