Eight Legs Too Many || ONC 2021 and 2022

Chapter 3: Shiori runs over a streetful of spiders (and also meets Death)

Yoko wouldn't let it go.

The whole drive to the hospital, she continued to pester Shiori about her social life—or lack thereof.

"I really don't get it. You talk to me without any trouble—"

"Do we have to discuss this now?"

"My leg hurts, and I gotta think of something to take my mind off the pain! Humor your poor dying sister."

"You're not dying, you're barely even—"

"Here's what I don't get. You talk to me, you talk to your labmates—you walk right past Death's tower without batting an eye, but you still refuse to walk past the bar where that cute bartender said hi to you six years ago!"

Shiori shuddered. It was one of her most cringeworthy memories, right up there with the time she'd accidentally dropped a boa constrictor on her boss.

"He didn't just say 'hi.' He interrogated me about my life! For ten straight minutes!" The funny part was, Shiori didn't even remember what the bartender had looked like. She'd been too busy averting her eyes in shame. That was the last time she'd ever let Yoko drag her anyplace 'fun', but the damage was done: she was scarred for life.

"Some people call what that poor guy was doing 'asking friendly questions', you know." Yoko sighed. "I think the bar's gone out of business anyway, so you can stop avoiding that road. Y'know—"

"Oh thank goodness, we're here at last!" Shoiri braked in front of the hospital a little more suddenly than was necessary, earning an oomph! and a glare from Yoko. "Get out and find some unsuspecting doctor to torment. I'm going to lab."

"Now?"

"Well, where else can I go?" Shiori waved her hands despairingly. "I can't go home, can I? Not with him there!"

"You can come into the hospital with me! Your dying sister!"

"Yeah, no. My snakes aren't going to dissect themselves." Shiori shooed Yoko out of the car. "I'll be just a few blocks over. Call me if you actually start to die."

She parked in the garage near her workspace, scraping spiders off the outside of the car. She didn't start to relax until she'd taken the elevator up to the eleventh floor, stripped herself of her Hazmat suit, and was finally settling into her bay.

The whole lab was deserted—none of her labmates had wanted to brave the spiders. This was perfect for Shiori: she liked her labmates, but she preferred having the space to herself. She could blast music at ear-shattering volumes without fear of judgment, and she could settle down into her experiments without having to worry that someone might interrupt her by asking her a question—or, worse, by trying to show her pictures of their cat.

She felt calm seep through her as she gathered up today's batch of snakes and began to euthanize them, piling their corpses one atop the other as she carefully cut out their hearts.

She liked boa constrictors. They were simple. Predictable. They either were hungry and nippy or full and didn't give a fuck what you did to them. To be fair, they didn't have that big of a brain. She supposed spiders didn't either, but spiders were eight legs too many. She preferred snakes.

Their unique energy utilization and ability to starve for days, only to rev up their metabolisms when a meal came along, was one of the reasons they were such a hot research topic these days, what with all the famines and periodic food scarcity. But Shiori would've studied them even if they weren't relevant. She just really, really liked snakes.

Well, except for the ones in guys' pants.

It wasn't that she didn't—ahem—want to like them. But she was just so awkward around guys she didn't know. And the one guy she had known in... er, a Biblical sense had been downright awful at it.