Prologue [aroace]

6

Eru was typing a report about a book when suddenly, his eye caught a small spider chilling in a corner.

Eru wasn't scared of small spiders, so he grabbed it and threw it out. He sat back down again to continue, but he got to thinking; "why are we scared of spiders? I mean, people expect men to not be afraid of them as they need to be strong, for some reason, but women can be scared of spiders all they want and people accept that. But why? Is it actual fear, or are we scared because we've told to be scared of them?
I think it's the latter. I think we are made to be scared of certain things. A baby is born with curiosity and learns by experiencing. If he never experienced a spider hurting him, he would never be scared of them. I wonder what would happen if we let a baby grow up with all information in the world, but without judgement and prejudice. How would that kid turn out?
Everyone around us is an influence to our judgement. If our parents were never scared of spiders, then why should we? My mum hated insects and was disgusted by them, but she wasn't afraid to kill them and hurt them. Heck, she once just grabbed a rat and threw it out of our house. And now everyone get out so I can disinfect this place! She had yelled.

If we grew up without parents, without kids in school, without religion or the government, would we then be happy? It's weird that we seek social contact as it hurts our self-esteem. We only look for social contact when it results in us getting validation. But again, if one got taught that they don't deserve validation, they go through life unknown for what's best for us, and then I wonder how they turn out. We are made scared of certain people and things, just like we are made scared of certain animals. If for once we did research, good research, before judging, what would happen then?"

Eru decided to follow his own hypothesis and do some research. "Would I be scared of spiders if I did actual research on them? Would my opinion of them change?"
He first looked up most dangerous spiders of the world. Number one was the Brazilian Wandering Spider which mostly lives in Brazil. Actually most of the time the spider bites without venom but when they do, you can get a muscle shock caused by high levels of serotonin in the venom. They bite when pressed against something or are hurt. Eru never heard of this spider before, he actually thought that the most dangerous spider was the Black Widow Spider, that comes on number two.

The rumours he heard about the spider were mostly false; the spiders are non-aggressive and only bite out of self-defence. Yes, the bite is very strong and can cause a lot of symptoms, but only five percent of all the reported bites were fatal, and the people who died were mostly very young or very old. On top of that, Black Widow bites have become very rare over the years.

Next was the Brown Widow Spider then the Brown Recluse Spider, Six-Eyed Sand Spider, Chilean Recluse Spider, Northern Funnel Web Spider, Sydney Funnel Web Spider, Wolf Spider and lastly the Red Legged Widow Spider. To no surprise of his own, most of these spiders are found in Australia, Florida, Brazil and other warm countries and desert-like places in America for example. Australia always has the weirdest things living there. Eru lived in a colder climate so he searched up spiders that lived in his country.

Meanwhile, he got a notification on his phone. He knew by the sound of it that it was Safire who had texted him, yet he couldn't bring himself to answer her. Instead, he turned his phone silent and kept on doing research about spiders.

Did you know that spiders have hairs on their legs that can sense vibration, scents and even humidity! They can't hear, but they can feel the vibrations of their enemies. Spiders can even calculate height. How amazing is that! There are even spiders who make their webs strong enough to catch birds and bats. The country in which Eru lives has around 700 different kind of spiders and none of those are venomous. Only a few have a nasty bite like the Woodlouse Spider. Its bite is like a sting of a wasp. Eru found a list of the most common spiders in his country and most of them he indeed has seen once.