The days passed toward the completion of their shelters, and then they kept passing as the webbed homes became more intricate and permanent than the original intention. Skuld had gotten in on the act early and was doing her best to limit her abilities to those of a child prodigy as she helped to encourage the kumojin in finding ways to use this gift.
It was when the webbing among the group began to run sporadically dry that the settlement's development of extraneous things was slowed down.
******
"Well," Megumi had asked. "Who's still producing webbing strong?"
The answer came fairly quickly as a number of kumojin embarrassedly mentioned having added the leaves of the trees to their meals. A brief experiment later revealed that the kumojin found the coarse leaves highly tasty, but this presented a new problem.
Slowly killing their homes by eating the leaves that fed them was not something that was to be accepted. Another means of supplying the necessary minerals and vitamins was needed.
Kodachi and a number of other kumojin with botany and herbalism backgrounds combed the forests looking for plants that grew quickly in all seasons. Something that could be easily harvested every few weeks to feed the kumojin and supply the webbing that was their primary building material at the moment.
Urd came in at this point, introducing herself as a mystic and a alchemist. What little trepidation she was met with was not for a lack of belief. Magic had already turned their lives upside down once, or maybe twice, and dabbling in it seemed rather dangerous, but, as Urd's first few students started producing incredible results in tending to the plants they were harvesting for the leaves, encouraging plants to grow far faster than they'd thought possible, the benefits began to seem obvious.
*****
They encountered the native forest spiders rather quickly, and found that the creatures responded quite favorably to them. Seeing the benefits of having such guardians, the kumojin began encouraging the spiders to settle near them.
The humans were incredibly nervous at this propsect, but, when it became obvious that the spiders seemed to recognize them as friends of the kumojin, some of the worst fears eased away. Besides, the humans still lived in the trees with the kumojin, and the spiders, while close, stayed in their own webs most of the time.
There were few occurrences like the swarm of hydras for a long time. Then a small spur of undead had wandered down out of the mountains into the forests, including a pair of crypt fiends that spoke in a strange chittering language that some among the kumojin nevertheless seemed to understand.
The undead easily sniffed out the webbed realm as they grew close and somewhat mindlessly began to attack it. Despite the low numbers of the undead involved the warriors found the fight to be much tougher than they expected, not understanding the nature of the undead creatures they faced.
It wasn't until Belldandy, who had been quietly encouraging faith of almost any kind in conversations with human and kumojin alike, stepped forward and seemed to almost reluctantly destroy the undead creatures in a flash of divine power.
The spiritual training of the kumojin began in earnest at that point, as Urd just began to start introducing her "Shugenja" to new levels of her divine sorcery and alchemy.
All during this time, Ranma and others were training themselves and others. Including learning how exactly to teach someone to do something.
And, of course, the first babies were coming.
The first eggs had been laid before the malnutrition problem was discovered. The kumojin took it in stride. Arachne women with human lovers, however, at times found themselves avoided in the wake of their laying eggs. The humans, apparently, couldn't take a reminder of their mate's inhumanity in such a personal way.
What few humans were left, at least. In the magically charged realm they had arrived in, the transformation was slowly taking hold in most of the infected males and non-Japanese that had come. There were a few that remained human, that many assumed had never been infected to begin with, but the percentage was shrinking.
Relationships were rather informal affairs.
There were other cases of multiple women sharing one male, such as had occurred with Ranma. Keiichi (protected and human by virtue of his relationship with Belldandy), Belldandy and Sayoko, a Kali, had a quiet relationship that took even Urd a long while to learn had progressed to the physical.
Single couplings involving a male were uncommon, and usually involved a human male and an Arachne female. Most single couplings, by and large, were two women that had found comfort with each other.
When many of the more insensitve or hidebound humans jilted the Arachne over the matter of the eggs, they mostly found other women to turn to as well. In the cases, more common than feared, where the human repented and the Arachne accepted, that usually progressed to another multi-partner match, though the focus of sharing tended to be the Arachne rather than the male as the second kumojin female tended to feel protective over the jilted woman and distrusting of the human.
There was also a large number of individuals that kept no stable relationship, flitting from mutual parting to mutual parting.
Given the amount of privacy most of these relationships were taking place with, only Driders seemed to make huge public displays at any given moment, and the ever-shifting nature of many kumojin's relationships. It was difficult to get a count of who was doing what.
There were some individuals that needed to be pointed out, however.
Ranma's male form proved to become an Arahcne like his female form rather quickly. He and his four mates remained a stable, if sometimes hectic, relationship. This was a fact that couldn't be much hidden as Kodachi's passionate discussions of her latest pet or concoction were only topped by the public displays of affection she was likely to layer on any one of her lovers she happened to be near.
Shampoo never became a kumojin, perhaps protected by a combination of her curse and her non-Japanese blood, but seemed to adapt much easier than a lot of the other humans did.
Nabiki had initially thought she'd found a kindred spirit in Aoshima, Sayoko's cousin, but the relationship soured when Nabiki laid her first egg and Aoshima proved to be as shallow as ever. She initially turned to her elder sister, but eventually drifted off to join Megumi Morisato's household. The two made an even stranger relationship as they seemingly randomly added third parties to the mix.
Kasumi never seemed to take an interest in either male or female, not that any could see at least, and buried herself in spiritual study, being among the first to discuss things with Belldandy, even before the goddess had revealed a portion of her power by banishing the undead.
After Nabiki left her web-house for a second time, this time for Megumi's, Kasumi boarded with the Norns. There was something of a mutually odd manner of behavior between her and Skuld, finally having reached her mature form at the physical age of eighteen. At times it seemed that they were in a relationship, at others they seemed to say something that would make that seem unlikely. No one, not even Belldandy or Urd, were entirely certain just what was going between the teenaged "prodigy" and the Kali.
Since Belldandy and Keiichi were now happily settled, with Sayoko to boot, Urd had changed her hobby to trying to figure out what was going on between her younger sister and the new priestess.
Cologne and Nodoka were shaping into some of the leaders of the community as a whole, along with Keiichi, Nabiki and Kasumi. Ranma and Akane becaming leading martial artists among Arachne and Kumo, being the lead warriors, while Kodachi was now instructing Shugenja, alchemists and hivemasters along with Urd.
*****
Things were going rather well. Of course, it couldn't last.
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(Posted Sun, 24 Dec 2006 12:10)
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