Original artwork by  angel27 who is also known as  The-Angel-of-Angels, go check him out! Support his Patreon! [ https://www.patreon.com/Angel27 ] This pic above is older, quicker work of his, his newer stuff is 10 times better!

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So I got this picture ages ago, late December 2010, in fact. (How time flies.. @_@) I began to write a mini-story back then, about one possible origin for my spider character. I say 'one possible origin' because I don't think I'd fully commit to this one I've made here. This one is like.. if ArachNed was a comic-book character, almost. Angel's work has something of a comic/superhero look to it, after all. :}

[also, I don't think I ever really call the spider in the story by name, so it could be any anthro spider that's built exactly like Ned is, so.. yeah, I have deniability if I want to come up with other origins, haha :P ]

So, yes, as I said, I began this story back when I got this art, so the beginning of the tale might not be as good as my normal, current writing.. but then the ending should be alright, I hope!

Enjoy. :>

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The Birth of a Spider - by Amethystine

-

Glenn groaned and looked up from where he had fell, face-first to the floor.

There, outlined by the sun streaming in from the open door behind it, was the largest spider he had ever seen.

It stood there, all of four foot tall, on two legs, staring down at him with 4 shining, menacing eyes.. something of a malicious smile strung between the corners of its mouth, where small, alien limbs wriggled and twitched.

The spider was very much not like a spider at all, being more like a man, with its humanoid stance and two thicker, supportive, bipedal legs. It also had two main arms that seemed very much like his own.. save for the hands that only had three digits, two fingers and one thumb.
There were also four extra limbs, long and spindly, which flexed and snapped with cruel pincers. They were rooted to the man-spider's sides, and those limbs and how they moved, more than anything else, were what dispelled any illusions one might have about calling the monster a mere miniature man in a costume.

That and the huge, bulbous abdomen that bobbed up and down behind the beast, a strand of silk slowly slithering from the spinnerettes at the back.

Glenn's heart raced as he realized a number of things. First, that the thick net of webbing that had previously blocked his exit out of the door was still there, framing the fearsome figure in the front door, which meant he was trapped in the house with the enigmatic exo-skeleton-clad nightmare.

Where had the monster come from? He was told it was just a disused house between owners.. being held by a bank. It was about to be sold, and the bank had paid for someone to ensure it was up to par, and he had been called, to gas it.

After Glenn had finished fumigating, he had found the web there, and had been unable to tear it down on his own. Increasingly frantic, the exterminator had attempted escape at the backdoor and several windows, all of which were found to be stuck shut. He had to presume, upon being confronted by the sizable spider, that it had been sticky silk that had held them all closed.

The second thing that forced its way through Glenn's thick skull was a bit of recognition: the streaks of black and white that adorned the abomination's abdomen and twisted around its torso. The spiders. The normal ones, whom he had been here to exterminate, they were all black and white.

In his own orange jumpsuit, Glenn began to sweat. At least, sweat more than normal. He was surprised he hadn't realized it sooner, but gave himself some leeway, due to 'giant spider man thing' taking precedence over species recognition. Still, the colouration that covered the chitinous body of the ever-watching spider-thing was pretty obvious.

"I'm sorry!" yelped Glenn, quickly scrambling to sit up.

The bug responded a distinctly other-worldy way, all spit and chitter, clicking and gurgling. It was not a language, there was no rhyme or reason, just fervour and fury. It seemed feral, and this terrified Glenn.

He had hoped it was intelligent, some sort of master to the house over-run with spiders, with whom he could reason or plead. He had apologized for spraying his deadly chemicals on what he thought had to be this giant's family.. maybe its children? He prayed they hadn't been. He secretly wished that his miraculous mixture had mangled the man-spider as well, that he had killed the creature, whether he had known he had done it or not.

What Glenn didn't know and couldn't know was that he HAD affected the animal that was advancing upon him, more than he would ever know. It was something that would change both of their lives, irrevocably.

~

While the exterminator had enthusiastically, ecstatically ended the existences of enormous amounts of arachnids with his newly improved 'formula', there was one who did not die. The spray had always just been applied to the walls and floor and turned into an airborne poison.. until Glenn and tinkered with it, using any unstable compounds he could acquire. His latest trophy from a recent job had been a canister of... he wasn't sure what. All he cared to know about it was that it had the familiar bio-hazard symbol on it.

Some might have called it stealing, and him, a thief. He just called it another form of more enjoyable payment. The laboratory that had had the infestation of mice wouldn't miss it, he was sure, since they had so many of the same silver cylinders laying around.

And so, that day, he had been amusing himself by spraying the stuff directly onto any spiders he could see, then watched them _melt_, safe behind his mask and his protective suit. The compound still became the deadly gas it was meant to, but it also acted as acid upon any arachnids unfortunately enough to have it applied directly to them.

The way the toxic material sizzled and the way that the arthropodal creatures twitched and writhed, it was clear to Glenn that IF a spider could know pain, they knew it, in those agonizing last moments.

After some time, he was spraying spiders directly, but not staying to watch 'the fun', leaving a trail of tiny, half acid-eaten corpses where-ever he went.

The chances that one will achieve a one-in-a-million fluke of a result from a specific action don't get any better as the action is repeated, but with such a large sample size, there can still be one outlier.

In the attic, where cobwebs were king and there was no shortage of dust, Glenn had emptied the rest of his tank, since he was nearing the end of his task and because he knew there was bound to be a bevy of bugs.

The human had left, without knowing how one fat drop would cause a chain reaction in a web-wrapped pocket that held hundreds of unborn spiders. An arachnid egg sac.

The glob of potential genocidal gas had landed upon the silk-bound bunch, and had eaten through dozens of fetal spiders at once, dissolving them instantly. Slowly, the increasingly diluted compound had sunk through layers of eggs, destroying them. The acid had slowly became less lethal. It had still burned through all of them.. until it hadn't.

One last egg had not been obliterated.

Perhaps with the lessening of the purity of the toxin, perhaps with the mixture of the spider organic material, even perhaps that this egg was special, things had gone differently.

The egg had been breached, but not entirely broken. The formerly insidious fluid flowed in, corrupting the material that cradled the life not yet begun. It triggered growth, and change.

The tiny life had blossomed and fed upon the mixture, growing.. and continued to absorb the murderous man-made material as well as the liquified remnants of its brothers and sisters.

It had mutated into a combination.. a hybrid born of the forces that had wrought it; Human science and its natural spider mother.

In roughly an hour, this strange new life had developed into the fearsome form, the figured that Glenn would come to be trapped by. It had grown so much, it had instinctively sought out more.. eating the thousands of departed and semi-melted relatives without truly knowing what it was doing, in those first desperate minutes for sustenance.

Slowly, a mind had formed deep in the dark of his initially animalistic consciousness.

He had realized, slowly, that he was similar to the small forms he had feasted upon. What they were coated in, it sustained him. Something told him that he was wrong, different, that he should not consume those that were so like him.

He had not understood, and his lack of comprehension in a mind boiling over with new knowledge had enraged him.

He had lashed out.

A fist punched a hole in an attic wall, clean through to the exterior.

He would come to know later that he was stronger than he looked, stronger than he 'should' have been.

Through the hole in the wall (which was something of a minor revelation to the young man-spider), he saw.. the truck.

Something about it had made him want to investigate.

It had been the most natural thing in the world to open a window, unlatching it first. The lock had simply made sense to him.. but then so had climbing out onto all eight of his limbs, to swiftly clamber over the slanted roof that had laid beyond the glass and down the vertical wall of the house.

Glenn had still been inside, working through the vacant domicile's large basement.

The spider had found the truck.. disturbing. His still developing mind kept telling him that almost everything in it was for killing. For pain. Symbols and warnings amid what seemed like weapons and implements of torture.

Then he had heard the laughter, even through the closed basement window.

The spider had been able to recognize joy, and he had looked in. He had found the human destroying life, and being mirthful about it.

The spider had come to know what he should do.

He had to end this life.

He had calmly, quickly and easily created a web in the doorframe. He remained outside while doing it, then had climbed all over the outside of the remote, isolated house, to stick the other doors and windows firmly shut with further adhesive silk.

Glenn had come to the door and found himself blocked, and then realized he was utterly trapped as he had gone from room to room in a panic.

He had returned to the front door, only to fall flat on his face, thanks to a thick trip-line of stretchy webbing.

That was when he had looked up to find the monster spider, standing in the door that had been empty seconds prior. The spider had re-entered via the attic window and crept downstairs once more.

Glenn scrambled to his feet, backing away.

"Please, don't hurt me!"

The spider tilted his head at him, then slowly pointed toward a thick puddle of acid-melted arachnids. What he had come to recognize as his kin.

"I-I'm just doing my job!" he stammered, then added, "I.. I didn't want to have to kill all of you.. I didn't enjoy it!" He was over-selling his own lie simply in the telling of it.

The spider snarled and spit and lunged forward, shooting downward onto 'all eights', and rushed faster than seemed possible, over to the exterminator. Piece by piece, he tore the man's tools from where they hung affixed to his orange suit, breaking them one by one, tearing them apart with uncanny might.

Even in his rage, the spider made a show of twisting the long-necked chemical sprayer's metal into a surprisingly artful spiral shape. Creative or not, the man could only imagine that happening to his spine after his skull was crushed as easily as the canister had been imploded in the beast's fist.

Glenn had been forced back up against a wall, as the semi-feral creature half-climbed him. He was huge for a spider, but small for a man, and that somehow made his strength all the more frightening.

With his fight or flight instincts finally forcing their way out through his stunned stupor, Glenn struggled to move and found his legs bound: stuck together and to the wall, the spider's lower appendage having been busy while the main pair stripped the exterminator of his vile arsenal and dismantled it.

He was being disarmed AND cocooned.

A knife was then found. A hunting knife. It wasn't exactly blood_stained_, but one could tell it had seen plentiful use. The smell upon it was mammalian, to the spider. Some animalistic instinct recognizing blood not of his kind, and not of the human, but of things similar to the human. It may have seemed like he had killed his own kind, or things near to him, in the kingdom of all species.

Further disgust rolled through the spider as his four eyes considered the blade, then the man.

He had to end this man's life.

The arachnid finished the cocoon up to Glenn's chest, who whimpered for mercy as his arms were secured.

Hisses and clacking, garbled chitters were all the spider had to say to the monster.

He rose the knife over his head, clutching it with four limbs, while the other two held around the human's orange-clad chest.

With a pitiful final pleading for forgiveness, Glenn shut his eyes.

Then he felt something hit his chest, hard.

His body spasmed, shaking in place, within his adherence to the wall.

He didn't feel THAT much pain. He supposed he was happy he had kept his knife for putting down trapped raccoons and things rather sharp. Better to be cut with a sharp blade than a dull one, right?

After a moment, his chest hurt; it was sore, but he couldn't feel the knife inside of him.

His eyes still shut, he just assumed one couldn't feel a blade inside themselves, there were no nerve-endings in there.

He felt cold.

Surely it was the icy hand of the grim reaper, come for him, at the end of his life.

He opened his eyes, imagining he would see the face of his killer, or the reaper, or his maker.. or the devil.

He saw nothing.

Not nothing, not blackness, though, just.. a total lack of anything special. No giant spider-beast-man-thing, no skeletal claimer of souls, no omnipotent beings.

No knife in his chest.

Was his fate to starve to death? His arachnid attacker was more cruel, and intelligently so, than he first realized.

The pain in his chest, Glenn surmised, had been the spider-thing shoving himself away from its victim. The chill, he was ashamed to realize, was his own cold sweat and the lack of another body for warmth, pressed up against him.

Slowly, he attempted to struggle out of his bonds, thinking long and hard about his life in the process. Why had he been spared? Did he deserve to be? Had he been forgiven?

The exterminator found that one of his arms was oddly easy to free from his silken bonds. He wriggled and wrenched it free, twisting to one side with the effort.. only to find the knife embedded in the wall next to him, on the side he turned to face upon getting his arm loose.

He was able to work the blade out of the wall and used it to cut himself free, slowly and carefully.

Had the spider set up his eventual escape? Dazed and exhausted from the ordeal, feeling drained by the usage of adrenaline, he stumbled outside.

Glenn found his truck torn apart.

Nearly all of its contents had been ripped out and smashed or wrecked, left mangled in the dirt and grass all around the surrounding driveway and yard.

The only thing left inside were the non-lethal traps and implements that his parent company had provided him upon start-up. Things he had never used.

The message was clear, clean up his act or face the consequences.

He looked around. He didn't see the black and white figure anywhere, but he felt those four coal-black eyes upon him.

Somehow, he knew the spider would be watching.

~

And so, Glenn's life ended and began anew, different, on that day. - A day when another being began his own odd life, from out of the ruins of a family he never knew and from the work of scientists he would never meet.


[End]


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Bonus ArachNed Poem!

There once was a spider named ArachNed
Candy and sweets, he wanted to be fed
He loved treats, simple as that.
Naturally, he got real fat.
He had a heart attack and got real dead.

-

The moral of the story is: Be healthy!

Bonus lesson/moral: Amethystine can't limerick worth a damn. (Yes, I just used 'limerick' as a verb. :P )


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