Aubrey Adkins | Emily Prichert
“Emily,” I cried out under my breath. Although it felt weird calling her ‘Pinup,’ I also did not want to reveal her identity either, so I kept my voice down so no one could hear it. That, however, was beginning to become difficult, as the supposedly imagined crowd of people continued to encircle and enclose me. I kept turning around as I tried to figure out an escape plan, but I couldn't find one. I was hemmed in.
When I tried to retreat further into the center of the circle created by the crowd’s perimeter, I suddenly felt my spider abdomen bump into something solid. I turned my head and discovered a wall of steel bar, lined up in a row. I found myself trapped in a fenced-in cage.
“What’s taking you so long?” I begged Emily in my desperation,
“Get me out of here!” “I’m trying as fast as I can. It’s not an exact science, you know,” she responded to me. “And out of what?”
“Don’t you see the bars?” I cried out. Jesus, she probably thinks I’ve lost it. I bet she can’t even see these ‘illusions.’
I then tried to force my way out with brute force. The two bars I took hold of began to bend under the pressure of my spider strength, but a jolt of electricity channeled through the bars sent me jumping back away from the cage wall. When I peered down at my bare palms, I found that my healing factor had already done its job fixing any damage the electric jolt might have done to my hands. But I now knew I would not be able to get out of here through those bars, despite my metahuman powers.
Wait. Bare hands? Where the hell did my costume go? After I crossed my arms in front of my bust, I reassessed my surroundings. Thick coatings of spider silk covered the enclosed cage, from floor to ceiling. From how many people were crowded right in front of one of the cage’s side, this cage must be so sort of weird zoological exhibit or something. And I was unfortunately the specimen on display.
I then scanned the crowd with my eyes. People were laughing and taunting and throwing objects at me through the gaps between the cage’s bars. They all seemed to be enjoying the spectacle, urging one another on. However, to me they were all just a sea of strangers. I didn’t recognize anyone. They could have been anonymous, and I would know just as much about them as I do now. I felt so alone, seeing no one I knew. However, through the ruckus of the crowd, I could hear someone weeping.
“Mom? Dad?” I called out to my parents, who were surrounded by the crowd. Although they were well out of arm reach, I tried to stretch out one hand in their general direction, forgetting about the electrified bars. The jolt I felt in my palm painfully reminded me of this fact. And even after I called out to my parents, they slowly backed away from the cage, disappearing into the nebulous mass of the gathered crowd.
“Wait! I’m still your little girl!” I cried out desperately to my parents, even though they were no longer within my field of vision.
“I’m still me, no matter how different I look on the outside.” “Mommy, why does that spider have boobs?” I then heard a little girl ask her mother. The mother, in turn, wore a concerned look on her face, showing that she was slightly worried about the question her daughter had just asked. Like what any mother would do in this situation, she tried to do some damage control.
“I’ll explain it to you once you’re a little older, sweetie,” the mother said.
“I’ve heard it use them to trick men so that it can eat them later!” the girl’s older brother blurted out.
“Billy!” the mother chided her elder son for undermining what she had just told his sister.
“That’s what Timmy said at school!” the young boy answered back.
After I saw this little family walk away, I noticed a more familiar face in the crowd. It was Will. He wore on his face a sorrow expression. Not one that showed regret or disgust at my appearance, but rather pity, pity for what sort of life I had been sentenced to. There was also a sense of helplessness around him, since he could not do anything about this situation.
“I know them titties are mighty fine,” one of the onlookers said to Will, speaking to my boyfriend over his shoulder, “but what inspired you to get into bed with something with eight legs and a spider butt?”
Four other men surrounded Will and started to push him around, passing him between one another. They kept insulting him for being my boyfriend. I wanted to desperately to help him out, but since I did not have my mechanical web-shooters are on wrists, I couldn’t do anything without getting electrocuted by the cage’s bars.
“What’s it like fucking a spider?” Another onlooker, who seemed to have been the ringleader of the group, taunted Will about our relationship. “I’ve heard a rumor that that thing has tw—”
Before the punk could finish his sentence, Will struck the man in the face with his fist. The punk’s friends immediately jumped Will and knocked him off his feet and onto the ground. They kept kicking and beating him for smacking their friend in the face. Despite any cries for help that Will made, no one in the crowd had the guts to jump in and save him from these men who were beating him.
“Break this up,” a man in a black suit and dark shades yelled at the hooligans who were assaulting Will. This guy came freaking out of nowhere. “This drider seems monogamous, so
we cannot let you kill this man.”
Several other men-in-black hurried onto the scene and escorted the rowdy men off the premise, while two other men-in-black dragged Will away to what I assumed was a more secure location.
While I was focusing my attention on the scene that had just played out in front of the cage where I was imprisoned, I failed to notice that knockout gas that was being slowly pumped into the exhibit. By the time I realized what was going on, it was already too late, although there probably was not much I could have done if I had known about it beforehand. Everything started to spin as I almost lost total consciousness. I tumbled to the floor, barely able to keep my eyes open.
I heard several distinctly different footsteps enter the exhibit cage. A cold sensation touched my skin when someone wiped the middle of my arm with an alcohol rub before the person inserted a needle into my arm. They were draining some of my blood, probably because of its healing properties. No matter how I felt about this, I could do nothing to stop whoever was doing this. I was just lucky they did not want to drain me dry, as displayed when they stopped the blood extraction after a few minutes.
After this, I felt something cold press up against the spinnerets on my spider abdomen and those located on my wrists. Then suddenly, an intense pain erupted from those areas as my spider silk was forcefully extracted from my body. As I suffered through the pain, I waited for them to stop, although after each passing minute, it seemed like that the pain would never end. It was not until I heard a concerned voice did the silk extraction stop.
“The eggs!” someone exclaimed, “they’re missing!”
“It must have laid them,” another concluded confidently, although I could still hear his fear in his voice. “Everyone out, now!”
“Wait! There’s one on your head!” a third screamed. However, since I was still under the influence of the knockout gas, I could not turn my body to see what was happening. All I knew was that there was an outburst of screams, both from the men inside the exhibit and the onlookers outside. I did not find out what was going on until a cat-sized spider walked in my line of vision. Then, I saw dozens of similar spiders trying to slip through the cage’s bars, intent on attacking the vulnerable people standing outside.
“This isn’t real,” I repeated to myself as I closed my eyes, hoping that everything would be okay when I opened my eyes once again.
“This isn’t real.” “It’s alright now. It’s over,” I heard a woman’s voice try to calm me down. When I felt a hand touch my shoulder, I tried pushing back.
“Hey! It’s just me,” the voice said again. When I peered up, I saw that Emily, still dressed as her supposed ‘Pinup’ superheroine identity, had knelt down to the grown and was propping my upper body up off the ground. I then let out a deep sigh of relief, knowing that that nightmare was over. But I knew that I would not get over what I saw and experienced as easy as waking up from a dream.
A piercing screech abruptly sounded above us as a winged metahuman, who had also been affected by the berserker-rage inducing devices that the Hounds had used, darted towards us. This metahuman’s flight was powered by non-feathered wings on its arms, much like a bat. However, before it could swoop down and pounce on us, we heard the twang of an arrow being shot from behind us. The arrow soared forward at the winged metahuman. The arrow exploded prior to impact, thereby releasing a giant net that entangled the metahuman. Since the metahuman had been caught in this snare, it crashed down onto the ground a few yards away from Pinup and me.
“Kore wa don'na kaibutsudesu ka?” A man dressed in some sort of orient garb, wielding a bow in his hands and two swords equipped to his belt, said. I had no idea what he had said, although if I would have to guess, I think he was speaking in Japanese.
“Please tell me he’s with you?” I whispered to Emily.
“I mean, technically not, although I do know who Kensei is,” Emily replied to me. “But I don’t know why he’s here in Pacific Point and not with Icon and the gang in Lost Haven.”
“Wait…what?”
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