(Rewritten) Ch. 34 – Experimentation

"Mater artium necessitas; the mother of invention is necessity."

– William Horman, 1519

***

My idea was actually stupidly simple, and probably looked hilarious.

I'd gone and sort of glued my antenna to the floor with sticky silk.

Not the fronds at the end of it, they actually lost sensitivity if they couldn't move—they needed to be free to vibrate inside their sockets to excite their nerve endings, and gluing them down damaged that ability.

So instead, I tied the blank bit of each antenna's stem just beneath the hairs to the floor with a string of silk, tensioned like guitar strings, which in turn would jostle the sensilla and give me a garage-jank tremor sense.

The problem was that I couldn't just draw the string directly from floor to antenna. I'd lose tension every time I shifted or looked around. Sitting normally just didn't work at all, I'd suffer from a, uh, loose connection.

In the end I was bent over forwards, with my elbows supporting me atop the stairs, and my butt high up in the air.

This ridiculous position let me draw my strings backwards from my antennae across my ass, and from there down to the floor.

I could adjust tension fluidly by raising or lowering my beautiful bubbly butt half a millimeter, or even just by tightening the muscles of my posterior.

Of course, I'd had to deal with the rather powerful damping effects of so much, uh, soft flesh.

But I found an easy fix—I wrapped a tight sheet of silk around my hips, which meant that where silk traversed buttcrack, there was no direct contact. I could suspend the antenna-binding string down along the, um, crevice, and I'd be perfectly able to hold it taut and sense the ground.

Leah, predictably, got a complete kick out of it. I think that was the first time I'd seen a person literally rolling on the floor, laughing.

Even now, she had difficulty controlling her mirth. If she so much as glanced my way, the giggles popped right out of her again, one after the other, like a giggly drum kit.

I thought it worth it. If this is what it took to distract her from the unhappier experiences of the last few weeks, then yes, I was going to sacrifice myself, no problem.

Nevermind my constant blush.

"How long will it take you to turn this place into a sex dungeon, Tinea?"

Oh, I'd just love to show you, my dear.

"I don't expect to do much binding of the fun variety here, Leah," I murmured, side-eyeing her, "unfortunately."

And there was that unexpected and delicious flush again, tinting her neck every so slightly, riding her cheekbones, and reddening her ears. But this time she fought back with a teasing smirk, that had me imagining all sorts of things.

Damnit, she knew exactly what she was doing to me.

Clearing my throat, which Leah answered with a satisfied chuckle, I said, "I don't sense anything extra-large approaching. My antennae aren't quite supposed to work like this, so it's a bit difficult to tell what I am detecting, but I'm confident that we're not about to get run down by anything bigger than a Six above ground, and there isn't anything below, yet."

"Anything that is coming closer?"

"Yeah, we'll get some visitors soon. Between the smell of Antithesis death, and the sound of your Hummingbird, we've attracted a few nearby units."

" 'Kay, I'll be ready."

Leah seemed to be quite focused on not looking my way. I wonder why.

Eventually a triplet of Threes poked their heads in, and Leah killed the first and last, while I took out the middle one. So far things had been rather easy on us, and I wanted to take the opportunity to see what else I could do with my silk.

Could I create Ripwires myself? What were they made of again? Monofilament strands of graphene?

Actually, what did my spinneret allow me to craft? Could I create minerals?

Another quick bout of sorta-meditation filled my consciousness with more knowledge, and told me I was limited to proteins, apparently. I suspected there'd be upgrades that would let me spin even inorganic materials, but that would have to wait. There were more important purchases to be made.

Proteins. What could I do with them? What kinds were there, and which of these could I create?

Hmm. I knew that enzymes were proteins. Our metabolism was based on them, and we used them to digest food. They were catalysts of chemical reactions. I could probably create some pretty nasty alien-dissolving traps with that, though I suspected they would work slowly.

Oh! Corpse disposal without fire! And without point cost.

"Tynea, I just had a fun thought. Couldn't I make special silk to melt the Antithesis bodies after combat?"

Certainly, though you will need to buy the right genome library for that. You currently do not have the knowledge or the blueprint. It didn't come with the spinneret, and isn't part of the human genome either. Do remember that spinning silk takes energy from your metabolism.

"Ah…so much for saving points. What'd be the price?"

Class I Protein Catalysts would cost you fifty points. It's a generic catalog that covers a lot of ground, but it doesn't contain enzymes tailored for the needs of combat. It does have interesting options to further improve your digestion, including the ability to break down otherwise lethal toxins, or even recycle inorganics. The set of enzymes to melt the models One through Nineteen, goes for one hundred and fifty points.

"That's a bit expensive, but…there's a lot of ways in which I could apply my silk that don't involve bonfires, I guess. Some other ti—"

My antennae twitched as vibrations plucked their strings. "Leah, incoming."

I decided to detach myself from the floor. Ass up might have been funny and sexy, but it wasn't a very agile position to be in.

While Leah readied herself again, I rushed to the doorway and tossed several thick, slack strands of sticky silk across it, a bit like barbed wire, designed such that you couldn't climb over it. I wanted to see how the xenos would react to unknown obstacles, and how strong it needed to be to hold them.

I made it back to Leah's side for a quick hug 'n' squeeze that had her smiling happily, about a minute before the group of aliens arrived at the facility, still out of eyeshot, but not beyond our drone's ability to survey.

These ones weren't going slow or careful. They'd smelled the deaths of Antithesis and it had spiked their aggressiveness.

They also weren't the basic Threes.

"Leah, I count eight Antithesis. Four Fours, two Threes, a Six, and…a Five." I reported. Leah quietly swore. "It blends in real nice with the green of the swamp. But it's almost as big as the Six—I don't think your Hummingbird will be effective against those two."

"Still got those mini-missiles?"

"Yeah. Tynea, can I use them in this enclosed space?"

Certainly. Prepare for an extremely painful shock to your antennae.

Ah, shit. I could probably cocoon them, though. It would remove my ability to sense much…

Leah looked at me with an uncertain worry in her face at Tynea's answer.

Thinking about it, I came to a conclusion.

Staying here had been a mistake. I'd believed the building would serve as a cover for us, hide us, but now it was messing with my ability to fight effortlessly.

Nothing for it.

They needed to die, and we needed to move earlier than I thought. We couldn't sit still, not with more of these big lugs after us. I could already hear a dozen more rushing closer, perhaps two minutes out.

"Leah, we need the Threes and Fours to die first. I'll set up for the two big ones."

She nodded at me, and took her previous stance, lying down on the stairs, weapon resting on the top step.

Meanwhile, I began to wrap my antennae with sheets of silk. These were non-sticky, and I made them as soft and fluffy as I could, like those microphone covers for windy conditions.

It left me blind. Being restricted to the narrow senses of a human, even enhanced as they were, felt terrible and turned me jittery with stressed anxiety.

"Tynea, this is bad. I need a better way to deal with shockwaves inside buildings."

Your Class I Esoteric Defense Systems catalog offers suitable items. A straightforward automatic impulse muffler is worth thirty points. It uses an energy field to deaden sound waves above an adjustable threshold.

"Yeah, make that my first purchase once I have the points for medicals and ammo, please."

Done.

The Antithesis arrived.

There was the Six in the middle of them all, like the leader of a squad. They saw us the same moment that Leah opened fire through my sticky silk ropes and pelted the first Three with a salvo of four whistling micro missiles.

As if on command, all the smaller models rushed towards us. I let Leah pick them off, and centered my own sights on the Six's black pit of an eye, followed by a gentle tug on the trigger.

That kill was as satisfying as the previous. The HSRP round cracked into its skull and just…violently disappeared, along with a good meter's sphere of fleshy plant matter. Arteries sprayed a flood of stinky, yellow-green sap everywhere and the Six kept staggering forward, looming above the doorway. But, robust as the behemoths were with their redundant organs, a proper decapitation was still fatal. The Six's massive corpse collapsed once its momentum was spent, pasting the cadavers of the smaller models beneath it.

I still had no line of fire on the other big creature, and killed the first of the Fours instead.

Seven HSRP left.

Leah's Hummingbird tore the second Three's skull to pieces, and she turned it on the Fours.

The smart weapon's projectiles were individually a little weak, but four of them did prove enough to kill the tentacular monsters, so I left them to her and moved up the stairs, to angle sideways in an attempt to get a line on whatever the last large alien was.

I'd barely taken three steps, when a series of explosions rocked the world all around me.

***