Chapter 1: The Persistent Suitor
The lab was a beautiful mess. Petri dishes stacked like precarious crystalline towers competed for shelf space with humming bioreactors and tangles of fiber-optic cable. The air carried the sharp, clean scent of antiseptic undercut by the constant ozone tang of overheating electronics. In the center of it all, Auren loomed.
His spider body, a monument of sleek black fur and subtle muscle, was still, all eight legs folded politely beneath him. His human torso, pale and slim, was bent over a lab table, two of his arms delicately adjusting the focus on a flickering microscope. The other pair were crossed over his chest. To anyone glancing over, he looked like a particularly docile, if enormous, research assistant. The eight faint purple eyes across his forehead—two primary ones and three smaller on each side—were narrowed in apparent concentration.
He was, in fact, watching a fruit fly struggle in a nearly invisible web he’d spun between a stack of reports an hour ago. The tiny drama was far more interesting than the melted protein sample under the heat lamp beside him.
Footsteps, quick and light, approached. He recognized the rhythm. Dr. Priya Nair.
He let his posture slacken, his focus go deliberately vague. A soft, buzzing chitter started in his throat.
“Making progress, big guy?” Priya’s voice was warm, laced with its usual playful curiosity. She stopped beside his table, peering at his microscope. Her long black braid fell over her shoulder, smelling of jasmine shampoo and ethyl alcohol.
Auren turned his head toward her slowly, letting his mandibles click once. He shuffled a half-step closer, the padded tips of his legs making soft shushing sounds on the sticky floor. He leaned his human side against her, a gesture they’d file under ‘seeking warmth’ or ‘non-verbal affection’ in their logs. His long, floppy ear brushed her arm.
Then, with a movement that seemed entirely clumsy and instinctual, he shifted his lower body. The large, brown equine-shaped penis, normally sheathed, emerged slightly. He rubbed its slick, veined length against the crisp white fabric of her lab coat trousers, just above the knee, chittering again innocently.
Priya didn’t flinch. She didn’t scream. She glanced down, a smirk playing on her lips. “You are such a weird one, you know that?” she said, her tone conversational. “All that genius splicing and this is what you come up with?”
She reached down, not with revulsion, but with the clinical curiosity of a biologist observing an unusual reflex. She gave the glans a quick, sharp flick with her fingernail.
“Bad boy. That’s not lab-appropriate behavior.”
Auren jerked back as if electrocuted. His entire spider body skittered two feet sideways with a clatter of legs, a high-pitched, utterly theatrical squeak erupting from his long mouth. He brought all four hands up to his human chest in a pantomime of shocked affront, his eight eyes wide.
Priya threw her head back and laughed, a rich, lilting sound that filled the humming room. “Oh, your face! You look so offended! It’s just a little flick, you big baby.” She adjusted her gold-rimmed glasses, still grinning. “Instincts, right? Silly boy.”
Auren kept up the act, letting a low, rattling hiss bubble in his throat. Silly boy. The irony was so thick he could taste it. He watched her turn back to her terminal, her shoulders still shaking with amused laughter. The urge to web her chair to the ceiling just to see the look on her face was almost overwhelming. Almost.
Instead, he let his spinneret twitch visibly, a drop of pearlescent silk glistening at the tip. He ambled away from her, moving with a slow, swaying gait toward the next researcher, a jumpy post-doc named Leo who was always nursing a cold brew coffee.
Leo looked up, eyes widening slightly. “Hey, Auren. Easy there, pal.”
Auren chittered at him, a drooling, mindless sound. He lowered his head, sniffing dramatically at Leo’s coffee cup with his human nose, then nudged it with a clawed finger.
“Dude, no. This is mine. You have your water dish.” Leo pulled the cup closer, his anxiety a palpable scent.
Perfect. Auren leaned in further, his mandibles clicking near Leo’s ear. He could see the man’s pulse hammering in his neck. The simple, predictable fear was like a bland snack. Entertaining, but unsatisfying. Priya’s flick had been… spicier. An unexpected ingredient. He replayed the sensation—not the flick itself, but the sheer, delightful audacity of it. She thought she was correcting a beast. She had no idea she was playing tag with a mind that was, in its own way, laughing right back.
He let a long strand of saliva drip from the corner of his long mouth onto Leo’s keyboard.
“Oh, gross! Dr. Nair!”
Priya’s voice floated over, amused and distracted. “Just wipe it off, Leo. He’s probably just curious about your typing. He likes the clicks.”
Auren withdrew, shuffling back to his designated corner, a shadowed space between a refrigeration unit and a cart of glassware. He folded his legs, resuming the statue-like pose. His primary eyes closed, but the smaller, lateral ones remained open, taking in the room.
He watched Priya lean over her notes, humming. He watched Leo wipe down his keyboard with frantic disgust. He felt the deep, subterranean hum of the building’s power grid. His own inner amusement settled into a slow, warm simmer.
The game was so much better when they didn’t know they were playing. The flick had been a new move. He’d have to think of a worthy counter. Something that wouldn’t break his character. Something that would make that lilting laugh ring out again, all while she remained perfectly, blissfully convinced of his adorable stupidity.
His spinneret twitched again in the dark, planning.