Chapter 10 of Bonded is out now on AO3! The one where IT finally happens! Link in comments!

Ilse couldn’t remember ever being so warm in her life. Not hot, not uncomfortable, just… warm. A pleasant, cozy temperature, that enveloped her in total embrace and slipped between the cracks of her body and mind like a cloud of temperate steam. It was like her blanket had increased in weight by a dozen fold and was able to contour itself to her every curve and angle, surrounding her like a skin that trapped heat and sent it baking back into her body in some kind of welcoming feedback loop that kept her in a state of placental comfort. Like an unborn baby sitting suspended in her mother’s womb, Ilse could have remained motionless forevermore, careless and snug, content to rest in this divine warmth until the sun swallowed Mercury in a few billion years, getting hot enough to evaporate Earth’s oceans and forcing Humanity to find someplace else to live.

But, children had to be born, and spider-powered Mutant heroes needed to wake up. In the moment between consciousness and unconsciousness, between sleep and waking, between light and dark, Ilse’s mind was filled with memories that she couldn’t remember making, yet here they were.

Lying in her bed, asleep. She tossed to her side, and then, there was her Skelett Summen. In bed? Why was it— Okay, well, it was always telling her something or other, but this time, there was a legitimate danger sense vibrating her skull like a struck bell. She remembered feeling the print of a hand on her back, burning into her ribcage as her danger sense told her to move or else she would be touched by… something.

It grabbed her, she could recall. For only a split second as her eyes blinked open and her mind retreated from the fuzzy stillness of sleep, she could remember gasping as this feeling, this contact on her back, spread like water. It had been viscous and hot, sticky but not like tar or like paste; it was only sticky because it felt as though it was grabbing her with purpose. There was intention to the way this warmth clung to her skin, biting down on her flesh with a toothless, jawless maw, forcing her to thrash in a half-second of panic as a wave of burgundy brought feelers clawing their way up her face and into her eyes and—

Then she was awake. The memory faded with her slumber, and she wasn’t panicked. She was calm, more calm than she had been since she was seventeen, as she felt the pull of gravity suckling on the flow of her blood. Any Human would asphyxiate and pass out with this much strain on their cardiovascular system, but Ilse’s biology was tailor-suited for stunts like this. Being upside-down was borderline commonplace for her, as it took her this long to even notice the fact that she was, indeed, upside-down.

She made a noise as she awoke, glancing to her either side and then, looking down the length of her body, into the sky, she followed the pale-yellow string of a web with her eyes up to the eve of a tall, five-story building. Industry had slowed to a stop for the night long ago, and so in the silence, Ilse was able to hear the moist, tacky peeling of her hands releasing her web strand just before she fell.

Plummeting only a handful of meters, her fingertips and the toes of her shoes gripped the vertical, brick wall in front of her like anyone else could grip the ground. This fall was calculated, as where she stopped was just in front of a window of sleek, clean glass that showed her not only the crack of dawn behind her, but also her own reflection in the pale, infant daylight.

Netzknochen stared back at her from the window, but it wasn’t the suit of bright, white leather and breathable fabric that was so standard in her memory. She was… red. Burgundy, really; a half-red, half-purple mix, and she was… shiny. Something like sleek latex hugged her every angle, clamping down on her body in a level of skin-tightness that she wasn’t sure she was comfortable with, given how thick and padded her suit was supposed to be.

The thin, burgundy rubber on her body was marked with black, as if somebody had taken the liberty of redesigning her costume for her without her permission. As much as she was confused, at the same time, how could she hate it when she looked like such a badass? The spider on her chest was still shaped like a skull, its round cranium oriented up toward her chin now as the spider’s mandibles pointed down, extended in a venomous expression. There were angular, aggressive eye-sockets cut out of the black skull, filled with the same shade of red on the rest of her body; and, like there was supposed to be, there were eight legs. Four were oriented upward, two innermost back legs reaching up and hugging her neck like the tie of a bikini top, and the two outermost back legs extended out a tad more to contour the visible musculature on her shoulder, circling around the bulge of muscle and heading toward her back. The other four legs looked down, past the spider’s jaw; the outermost front legs curved out in something of an ‘S’ to hug the rounded curves of her hips and waist, and then the innermost front legs followed the same pattern except a bit lower, spiraling around her mid-thigh and connecting to her back, where there was a mirror copy of the same spider.

Her lenses, too, were different. Instead of being rounded, right-triangles, they were sharp, almost angry, if not for the fact that they were inverted. The rounded end was on top, now, and the long hypotenuse of her lenses was oriented down instead of up; this gave her masked face an expression more like jolly or… maybe crazy? The line of stitches over her mouth still ran right where they needed to be, unchanged, which added to the Halloween-ish look the eyes gave under the hood that covered her burgundy head.

It was thin and transparent, see-through, and if she didn’t know any better, she would have said it was made… out of her webs? Pale, white-yellow strings sewn together with a membrane of silk between them formed a classical hood, and attached to it was a short, bicep-length cloak made from the same material that she knew damn well she didn’t spin herself. She would have remembered that, right? Just like she would have remembered where this suit came from…

Was she dreaming?

Netzknochen- if that’s what she called herself in this dream- leaned back from the wall as the soles of her burgundy boots kept her glued in-place and balled her hands into powerful fists. It was then, after the initial confusion subsided and she got a real good look at herself in the glass before her, that she began to notice how full of vitality she felt. She could have bench-pressed the sun right about then, as her fingers squeezed hard against her palms and her bent arms flexed their muscles in order to get a feel for this foreign power surging through their fibers. She leaned back a bit more, looked her suit up-and-down one more time, and took in a breath that felt cleaner and more full of rich oxygen than any breath she’d ever taken in the City Center. It charged her like a battery, sparking something in her brain that came out as an aroused sigh as she basked in that warm feeling and the energy she felt boiling just beneath the surface of her skin.

“This feels…” Netzknochen looked at her right arm in front of her, lines of muscle sinew visible from under her new, sleek suit of… whatever it was, “good.” She finished, talking to herself in bold italics as she felt the need to emphasize out loud to her audience of nobody that she felt like she was on top of the fucking world.

Her legs flexed with an equal amount of muscle density, and it was then that she realized she’d never actually seen her muscles inflate like this. Spider-blood filled her thighs and rushed down her knees, and like it was nothing, she sprang off of the building with a whoosh of air behind her. The cloak on her back flapped like a banner as she caught incredible air and then tucked herself into a little, red ball so that she could flip backwards about twelve times before throwing her right hand out behind her and blasting a thick, hearty rope of yellow silk from the back of her hand.

It slapped a building’s side with an audible thump, sending orange brick-dust into the air in a small cloud as if it had just been struck by the head of a steel hammer. It was noticeable, her webbing was denser and more big around than it was supposed to be, and it came out with more force than she’d ever had any need for it to. Swinging fast in the middle of the city streets as they yawned out the day’s first trickle of activity from civilians, Netzknochen breathed in again, and then threw herself off of her pale, ivory rope, with a hoot of excitement.

There was no understating it; she felt great. Better than ever. Was this how it would have felt to be Netzknochen if she had healthy bones? Was that what this dream was about? She almost didn’t want to wake up, if that was the case, even though she knew she’d need to soon. Another web carried her momentum as she rocketed up the road, flying by windows and traffic lights and vehicles as little more than a reddish-purple flash.

Even in her dreams, she couldn’t escape her Skelett Summen as it buzzed in her head like a child pulling at their mother’s pant leg in a supermarket. It nagged her about something ahead, both her hands holding on to a string of webbing that sent her careening forth far too fast for most anything to put out an effective attack on her. Was it a trap? Did it even matter, if she was just dreaming?

She spotted the thin, grey line of a chain off in the distance in front of her thanks to the humming in her skull telling her where her attention was needed. What was that? Why was there a chain in the sky, drawn between two buildings tight like some kind of tripwire?

It was a dream. She supposed she shouldn’t have expected anything to make sense.

She took the trap head-on, unsure of what else she could have done in such a short distance and at such a high speed anyway. She slipped more webbing out from her right hand’s spinneret, putting herself lower as she swung forward toward the chain so that, instead of hitting it with her body, the metal tripwire now very visible against the glowing, gray-blue sky would catch her web.

That maneuver sent her looping around with a jolt once the string of tacky, yellow silk bent against the chain. Instead of swinging forward, she almost immediately was yanked up and then backwards, and she rode that change in direction for two circles around the taut line of thin, linked metal braids before her feet caught her and she balanced despite her blistering speed. The chain bounced with her weight atop it, and as the metal links of it jingled and sang, Netzknochen’s sixth sense brought her attention to her left, where there stood a familiar figure.

A full-face mask of black and a gothic, hooded cloak of tattered, torn, black fabric rustled over black tunic and black pants. All-black, the figure met Netzknochen’s look with what seemed to be smugness, though she couldn’t tell for sure with her completely covered in shadow.

“I’ve been chasing you all night,” She yelled, standing on a rooftop with her chain held in her hands and a foot lifted up so that her combat boot might provide some leverage against a short lip on the roof. “Did you really think I’d give up after you hid?!” The cloaked figure was so angry with Netzknochen, and as the Spider crouched on the chain and looked up at her, she couldn’t fathom why.

This was that same character who she’d stopped outside of the industrial fire yesterday. This was the person responsible for getting those people killed! She didn’t seem to have any powers beforehand, so how did she manage to hold the chain in just her hands even when Netzknochen’s momentum sped into it and yanked it along with her before she chose to slow down and investigate? Any normal Human would have had their arms ripped out of their sockets by g-forces like that. Did that mean that the hooded figure was a Mutant after all?

That didn’t matter, there was her Skelett Summen again.

Danger, coming from… below her hands and feet? Her palms, fingers, soles and toes vibrated with an alarming intensity. The chain? What was—

A crackle of electrical indigo belted from the chain’s tensile line, as if it was a glow stick that had just been cracked. Netzknochen hitting it was the catalyst, and now, it began to shine hot and bright before letting off a thunderous pop, a wave of kinetic force bursting out from within it almost like magic. There was no room for a battery or energy generator, yet, there was a discharge of energy that pushed Netzknochen away with a hard, weighted punch even after she hopped off of the chain to dodge out of the way.

She was stronger in this dream, though, and no bones were broken as she lost her balance midair thanks to the hit she took. Tumbling and falling was usually a much bigger deal, but because she was in no pain and was uninjured outside of being somewhat scrambled, it didn’t take much longer than a moment for Netzknochen to point her two fists at the rooftop and send elastic arms of webbing up to catch her fall and send her springboarding back up to meet her attacker. She pulled on her webs and caught air, performing a somersault as she cleared the waist-high concrete barrier on the rooftop and then touched down right in front of the cloaked woman without a sound.

“You again?” Netzknochen asked, an annoyed huff accompanying her words to illustrate with no reservation how she felt about seeing this person so soon after their first meeting. “I thought people who dressed in black and wore chains were supposed to have a high suicide rate.” Her words shocked her as they came out, but she didn’t let that show outside of her mask. What the hell was that? She didn’t say things like that! She was nicer than that, wasn’t she? Then, she thought about all the times she said things like that- worse than that, honestly- to herself, in her own head. “Afraid of being a statistic? Or are you just a pussy?”

“Don’t fucking talk to me like we’re friends!” Barked the woman in black, pulling on the chain she’d tripped Netzknochen up with and then yanking it back into her hands. On its either end, Netzknochen could see now, were sharp, serrated knives, which explained how she managed to get the chain stuck between two buildings like that.

“You think me telling you to kill yourself is friendly banter?” The Spider asked with a tilt of her head as her own cloak flapped and she stepped back to get some distance from the weapon-wielding psycho. “Lady, I mean it when I say it, you would be so much easier to deal with as a news story after blaming me in your suicide note.”

“What… the hell is your problem?” The woman wearing black jingled her chain as she stepped back, somewhat aghast at Netzknochen’s boldness

“I wish I knew!” Netzknochen answered in complete honesty with a shrug as she threw her arms out to her either side.

“You go silent all night, and now, what, you want me to believe you’re just like this?” Proposed the cloaked figure with a knowing tune in her voice, like she was aware of something that Netzknochen wasn’t. That never happened.

“All night…?” Netzknochen paraphrased with a gasp. “We just met, right now, after the fire. What the hell are you talking about? Did you breathe in too much carbon dioxide and get brain damage?”

“Don’t act stupid, Spider!” The chain swirled as the woman began to twirl it around and Netzknochen’s sixth sense buzzed to warn her of the danger of the incoming object. “I chased you all the way from Stadt Park to Old Town, and now here we are, back in the City Center.” She swung her chain around to lasso Netzknochen around her slender, sleek, burgundy waist, but she melted away from it like water as she bent over backwards and went parallel to the rooftop they stood on. “And I’ll keep chasing you! All day! Change your costume all you want, I’ll always know what you are, and I’ll make you leave this city alone!”

“I’ve been sleeping all night, dipshit!” Netzknochen argued, falling back onto her hands as the chain swooped above her and then crunching her abdomen up to bring her legs forth where she could then snap her thighs closed over the metal braid. This was a different chain than the one she’d broken the day before, and it felt stronger at a touch when she clenched her muscles over it, as if she couldn’t quite pull this one apart like the paper covering over a straw from a fast food place.

Still, though, she popped up off the rooftop with a spring of her hands and sent herself into a pivot, yanking on the metal links as they remained fixed between her thighs. She pulled the chain, but she didn’t expect to get their owner with them, so the feeling of her Skelett Summen blaring dead-center over her face, by her teeth, caught her by surprise; she was midair, and wouldn’t be able to reposition without some kind of webbing maneuver, which she was still too confused about what was even happening to think to do.

So, not for the first time ever but certainly as a major event since she allowed it to so seldom happen, Netzknochen was punched in the face. She was upside-down in the air and the woman in black rags seemed to almost use the Mutant’s momentum with which she was pulled to close the distance between them. She was faster than before, more agile, and when she struck Netzknochen, it felt like no ordinary attack.

With a mighty ‘wham,’ the drum head of Netzknochen’s face was beaten a single time, thrown off-balance with no friction in the air to speak of. Netzknochen fell, something she wasn’t used to, and as fast as she was able to throw her fists out in front of her to shoot lifelines of webbing at the building she was sent over the edge of, the woman who had thrown her came diving down after her.

“I was debating whether or not it was brain damage or if you were just stupid,” The Spider shouted past her burgundy mask as wind rushed through her ears and the cloaked figure caught up to her in freefall, “and now I see that it’s just—”

With a crash, glass broke and metal groaned. Force shattered the windows of a car and the metal roof under Netzknochen’s back was depressed into a deep, wide crater. The ghostly woman in black crouched on the Spider’s red chest, wrapping her chain around her right fist and then giving a shout as she- without missing a beat- continued on with their fight. She bashed Netzknochen in the face again, kinetic force dissipating in an oceanic wave of indigo down the chain’s coiled form from her fist.

From inside the car, after the door popped open, slinked a man who groaned with pain. Bleeding from his head and cut to ribbons everywhere by pebbles of broken ballistic glass, he fell onto his face once he freed himself from under where Netzknochen fought the crazy woman who would have the poor man dead just to make her spider-like opponent look bad. Actually, she did do almost that, to the letter, the day before, didn’t she? She let all those people die. She would let this man, his short, spiky, black hair slick with blood as he popped his narrow, almond-shaped eyes open wide at the fight happening on his totaled vehicle. He was dressed like he’d been headed into work, and now, his day was ruined, and his life was in danger… all because of her.

“Fuck off!” Netzknochen growled, her left hand reaching out to take the top of the open door of the man’s car. The window had since been blown out of it, so her fingers could curl around the doorframe just fine as her spider-muscles did their job and allowed her to rip the door straight off of its parent body with no effort at all. Like she was chest-pressing a bottle of water, Netzknochen brought the easy weight for her to handle around with a swish, before the large, wide, hard sheet of metal and plastic was smashed into the cloaked woman’s side at over 150 kilometers an hour.

With a hideous, hollow-sounding, plastic-metal pop, the car door used as an improvised weapon was crunched and misshapen where a Human body was whacked with it. The cloaked woman was sent soaring off of Netzknochen when she was hit, flying a handful of meters to her side before thumping into an empty, locked car that was parked on the side of the road, perfectly legal, just the property of somebody minding their own business. The window she crashed into before falling to the street in a crumple exploded, and there came a sound she should have been expecting as the vehicle rocked; its alarm. The sound it made was sharp, shrill and rhythmic, bleating like a sheep if the animal was somehow cranked up several octaves and was able to cry on a frequency no person should have had to endure.

It was grating, and it brought a moan from Netzknochen’s masked mouth as she crunched into a small ball on the roof of the car and brought her hands up to cover her ears. It didn’t work, though. Nothing was working. The sound penetrated her skin, sinking into her bones and rattling her organs as if there was a supersonic jackhammer repeatedly punching her in the head that she couldn’t turn off. Her skin crawled and her temperature changed, nausea welling up as she rolled onto her knees atop the man’s totaled vehicle and let out a sickened groan.

“Turn it off…!” She dry-heaved, nothing in her stomach to come up. God, when was the last time she ate? “Somebody kill that alarm before…” Netzknochen’s head inside her pale, yellow hood thrashed and her web-cloak flapped behind her. “B— before I…!” She took a sharp inhale, her sickness turning to a self-preserving fury that came out of her mask as a monstrous roar. She screamed like she’d never screamed before, her mind filled with thoughts of ripping the vehicle asunder like some sort of beast. It needed to go; if it was doing this to her, then what was it doing to everyone else?! Agony stripped Netzknochen of her inhibitions, her throat filled with screams of frenzy before… silence.

The alarm was shut off, and the sickness in Netzknochen’s gut melted away. With a nauseous gulp as she attempted to push down the bile she was so close to spewing into her mask, she panted, and then opened her eyes.

In front of her, there were two arms. Not hers, those were sitting on her knees. These arms came from behind her, somewhere, and were a shiny, slimy, muscular, burgundy color. Veins and fibers ran along the arms, coiled and braided vines of matter that reached forward, far ahead of Netzknochen and curled like prehensile tendrils upward a handful of meters. Spilling motor oil and gasoline onto the street in a massive, flammable pool of volatile fluid were two cracked halves of a mechanical eggshell, held firm in either one of these arms.

The car, a blue vehicle that looked old and used, had been picked up and torn in half. In either arm was an equal part of the vehicle, as dead as a doornail and leaking life-fluid that was supposed to be kept inside the closed system at all times. Severed internals and shredded metal externals caught the light of the early dawn, and it was only after staring with an open mouth for a long few seconds that Netzknochen craned her neck to look over her shoulder to see who the fuck did that.

What she was expecting was some new crazy person, some Mutant with prehensile arms that could stretch or something, somebody who wanted Netzknochen dead because why not. That just made sense, that was how her morning was going. When she turned, though, she saw no one, and there was a heavy, creaking sound as the car that was floating in an ominous display before her was moved. As if turning her own back, shifting her own weight, moved the heavy clumps of mechanical garbage, Netzknochen got a sense for what she was dealing with.

Were these arms… hers?

The reddish tendrils throbbed with a pseudo-muscle that gave them their form, almost as if they were something else trying its best to imitate Human anatomy. Netzknochen looked over her shoulder, craning her neck, and then looked down her own back to spot two stumps of slimy, fleshy mass pulling away from her back, underneath her cape. The arms reached out and around her, her eyes following them over her shoulders and up and out until she spotted the end, holding the ripped-apart vehicle up in the air like its two halves were styrofoam.

Leaning away from her own foreign appendages, Netzknochen gasped and then the arms on her back dropped the car in two grotesque, crashing sounds. Once the heavy halves of vehicle made cracks in the sidewalk where she dropped them, the arms came in a bashful retreat back to her, slithering slow and steady until they simply disappeared into the burgundy surface of her back. She shivered at the sight and the feeling, and she was unsure how she should even have responded to that.

She wasn’t so sure she liked this dream anymore.

As Netzknochen stepped down from the hood of the first vehicle she’d totaled that day, the whimper of the man she’d fallen on top of and almost crushed caught her attention. That cloaked woman seemed to have run off somewhere while Netzknochen dealt with the car alarm situation, leaving the casualty of their battle to be helped by the actual hero.

“Here, here.” She pushed aside the weirdness of her morning thus far, dream or not, to be Netzknochen, the one who helped people. This man wouldn’t die because of his injuries, not today. Not if she could help it. She reached down to scoop the man up, his weight more than easy to carry over her shoulder or something and swing away, but as she advanced, he gasped and thrashed.

“Don’t touch me, mutie—!” He cried, upsetting his injuries more than he upset Netzknochen as he released a wince of pain and quit trying to crawl away. “You’re disgusting! After all you freaks have done to this city, you’re going to hurt me in one of your mutie fights, then act like you’re saving me?!”

“You’re not too hurt to yell or be racist, apparently,” Netzknochen’s tongue cut through her mask and put a metaphorical lashing on the man’s cheek. That just— it just came out. That was the sort of thing she usually kept to herself. “If you want, I can fix that. Or, we can go to the hospital.” Did she just… threaten him? Well, it’s not like she wasn’t thinking about it, and it’s not like she would ever do it, but to actually say it aloud…

“Fine…!” Growled the injured racist. “Fucking muties do whatever you want anyway…” He groaned out some more offensive nonsense as Netzknochen rolled her eyes under her mask and picked him up to throw him over her shoulder.

She was careful not to hurt him, but she also made no reservations about grinding her shoulder into his ribs, subjecting him to the full g-forces of her traversal capabilities as she shot a grapple of webbing up and pulled on it to get airborne. He let out a grimace, and she let out a chuckle. He didn’t seem to like that she was laughing at him.

So, that woman left again. She refused to commit to a fight with Netzknochen, opting to run away whenever it seemed like she’d lost. She was stronger this time around, and perhaps she would have been a challenge for Netzknochen if all she was wearing was leather and hope that her bones didn’t shatter, but now Netzknochen was stronger, too. Whatever this suit was, it put her well above that black-hooded figure’s grade.

In fact, as Netzknochen flipped through the air with the man held tight on her shoulder, exposing him to motion sickness and g-forces that he shouldn’t ever have had to experience as a normal Human being, it struck her that she was in no pain at all, after that fight. Not a single bone felt broken and not even her skin felt bruised. Was this suit more than just sound-based nausea and incredibly strong tendrils? Was it something like armor, too?

She performed a backflip and twirled in a corkscrew at the same time, a volley of acrobatics running the injured man on her shoulder through a blender that elicited a scream out of his lips before another web caught them and she whipped around a street corner to approach the motorway that led to a hospital nearby. She moved very fast, several kilometers between her and the site where she moved him from already as the four-story, rectangle-shaped building came into view from above. A web released her and sent her slingshotting into the air and onto the hospital’s rooftop.

She hit the surface in silence, and then she hopped straight down the four stories to the ground where her burgundy-colored boots slammed gray brick. The road behind her rumbled with a passing ambulance, likely rushing off to the scene where she’d come from to ensure everybody was okay, and she wasted no time walking into the orange-brick building through its automatic sliding-glass doors.

Inside, it was cold and sterile, and it was those qualities that encouraged her not to stay for very long. She was wearing something she didn’t understand, doing things she’d never do, and saying things she’d only ever think; she didn’t need to be anywhere near sick and vulnerable people right now.

“Help him,” She called out to anyone who would hear it, a nurse sitting at a desk in the lobby jumping up out of her chair in shock when Netzknochen dropped the man off her shoulder. He fell almost the complete 157 centimeters of her body length and hit the white, tile floor with a thud and a grunt. As the nurse rushed over, scrubs swishing, Netzknochen nodded at her and made her quick exit, stepping backward out the door and then- as soon as she was free- flinging herself with two strands of webbing up and onto the hospital’s rooftop. Flipping once before landing on her feet, Netzknochen moved inward a few meters and then put her hands on her head in three separate waves of shock, surprise and anxiety that all hit her at once now that she had the shortest moment to herself.

As breath left the ring made from her lips on her face, there was a slight pulling sensation, and then cold air touched her face and her eyes were assaulted with the typical glare and color-smear of the world without Netzknochen’s lenses. Green eyes wide, blonde hair ruffling in a light breeze, Netzknochen’s gloved fingers reached up to touch her hot face, unmasked and unhooded, and she then took a moment to digest what was happening.

She’d had a passing thought about unmasking. She’d wanted to stand up here for a minute, pull off the cover over her face, and breathe while she thought about her morning so far. It was almost like her suit, thinking right along with her, said ‘okay,’ and then reacted as if it were some sort of machine interfaced with her mind, pulling her mask off for her. It melted off her face from the center, attached still to the bottom of her jawline with strings and fingers of burgundy that looked almost like a swath of her webbing, albeit the wrong color. It filtered into her suit on her shoulder, where it seemed to have no seam, no closing line or any kind of fabric fold; it was like this red suit was all one piece, which could move and shift and grow and shrink on demand, or even without command.

As neat as that was, it was scary.

Where the fuck did it come from?

Why was she out, as Netzknochen, when she remembered specifically that she needed the night off? Where did her memories of the night go? Was she even dreaming? It was starting to seem more and more like this was real life, so with her knowledge of that fact, she decided to focus on the memories she did have; her battle with the dark-cloaked woman.

She mentioned that she’d been chasing Netzknochen all night. Weird, and she definitely didn’t remember that. She hit her a few times and didn’t cause any injuries- still a mystery to Netzknochen how her bones weren’t broken- and then yelled about how she’d chased the Spider from… from Stadt Park.

Stadt Park; a weird coincidence. Netzknochen hadn’t been there since she saved those men from Schocker’s gang of bozos. Since she ditched that weird rock. Well, maybe she should be headed there anyhow; if what the woman said was true and that was where their combat first started- regardless of her missing memories of them- Netzknochen needed to see the scene for herself. At the very best, she’d get some kind of clue as to what was going on. At worst, she’d still be confused.

Her mask welled up like a liquid, waves like the ocean’s curling up from her neck and closing over her head like a hungry creature’s jaws. Burgundy ate her, and after rough, muscle-like fibers of purple-red crashed into one another and the two tides became a choppy sea, the waters calmed, and the glassy, slimy surface was populated with the proper details which faded in from colored obscurity.