zeroGravitas
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The cave 1-4
🕑 Added 2025-06-15 20:38:34 +0000 UTCLisa and her companion are tasked with clearing out a worm nest. Rockworms can tunnel through anything and can make solid rock look like Swiss cheese. This causes the ground to become unstable, so they need to be exterminated. Good thing worm flesh is a delicacy among spiderkind, worm flesh makes them go wild.
Spider sign laguage:
These spiders don't have vocal cords, they can't speak, but they still have lungs and can blow out/suck in air through their mouth parts, so they can hiss, wistle and make clicky sounds. Their preferred method of communication is waving their pedipalps around. A properly trained spider carries sensors (the white bands with wires) that track their pedipalp movements and translates that into simple words like "danger ahead", "friend?", "food?", or slightly more complex statements: "human in trouble" or "may I egg?". If the spider is pointing or giving directions, these show up as an arrow on Lisa's HUD.
Spiders are trained to respond to commands by their handler and typically understand their handler well. The markings on their 2 pairs of front legs are for identification.
Drawings can be found in the /Cave folder in the archive here.
Comments
zeroGravitas
I finished Children of Time last week, I am now going through book 2, with the sentient octopuses and slime molds. Great stuff.
Deserthawk6
More spider content is always welcome
I am Me
Are you familiar with Adrian Tchaikovsky "Children of" series? They're kind of speculative evolution science fiction and the first one, Children of Time, is chiefly about the evolution of this race of intelligent spiders. There's this little section where because the spiders communicate via vibrations sent through webbing, when a human falls into their hands, uh, metaphorically, they assume it's some kind of dumb beast of burden because it doesn't respond to any of their attempts to communicate, and they have no conceptualization that the noise its making might also be attempts to communicate.
