Thread by @cwodtke

@rdonoghue Giant spiders mean….

@rdonoghue I want to be a spider farmer now.

I read the entire thread and have no idea what you are referring to except I’m wildly in favor of all of it.

@rdonoghue I'm now inventing a story about Jue, who forages teacup spider silk.
The teacup spider, called so because it is about the size of your grandmother's teacup, spins a strong and soft silk that takes die marvelously. It is high in demand, but sadly no one can farm the spiders.

@rdonoghue They cannot stand human contact. If you find a cave or other isolated place and harvest the silk, they will leave and never return. Thus the rise of silk foragers, who have learned to get the silk without disturbing the spiders.

@rdonoghue But lately the teacup spider has appeared in some of the bigger cities, in attics, basements and warehouses that are unpeopled. Jue comes from a long line of silk foragers, but hates the country. They moved to the city on the base of these rumors. Unfortunately...

@rdonoghue foraging the silk means trespassing. Jue has basically got to get permission (and lose some of the profit) or sneak into these places.
Since the places are uninhabited, the temptation is almost impossible to avoid.
That said unpopulated does not mean unprotected.

@rdonoghue Beyond the already annoying ghost populations, the basic curses everyone puts on their locks and the rodents of usual size, if there happens to be something of value stored in that uninhabited place there will be worse things to navigate.

@rdonoghue it's possible I should find a role-playing group.

@rdonoghue So Jue is well known to the homeless and urchins for paying a glint for a verified sighting of a teacup spider. A glint is good money, you can buy a piece of fruit, a loaf of bread or a small kebab with that. But it's worth it as silks is worth 50 brightness a yard.

@rdonoghue One day Sheef comes to Jue with a lead. A mated pair seen in crawling under the eves of a small shed in the wharf district. Jue gives Sheef a hayglint to guide them to the shed.

@rdonoghue Jue takes one look at the shed and knows this won't end well.
First, solider-ghosts which cannot be reasoned with and tend to be good an manifesting. So that's a big PIA.
Second, they can spot several teacups under the eves, so no way they are walking away from it.

@rdonoghue Ok, gotta pack. Will add a sentence to this story for every like. Which means @rdonoghue you can probably keep it going by yourself lol.

@rdonoghue What's next? Do you want to know more about

@rdonoghue As you know, Superman lives in Metropolis. Jue lives in Necropolis, which is both its name and tells you what it is. The founding of Necropolis is apocryphal, but the takes go a little like this:

@rdonoghue Five thousand years ago, or perhaps ten, long enough no one's grandmother knows for cure, there was a big city (for then, as it is said that it was 1/20th of today's Necropolis, yet people then thought it to be perhaps the largest city in the world.)

@rdonoghue It's name then was Sen or K'Ren, also a source of historian dispute. And it had a rival city called Jesh'au, which was where the swamp-city of Shaula is now. Jesh'au was not quite as big, but it was run by a Queen who loved warfare. This queen decided to cut Sen down to size.

@rdonoghue And she did. The war lasted over a hundred years and when it finally ended, Sen was more graveyard than city. The graveyard had grown and grown, populated y the people of Sen, Jesh-au and the villages between them. It was run by Mortician/ Grave Keepers Kayla and Hart.

@rdonoghue Jayla and Hart were committed to the dead and the mourning to point of a religion. They provided housing for the mourners, land for them to sustain themselves so they could be close to their loved ones, and allowed vendors to live in the graveyard to serve the mourners and dead.

@rdonoghue Their graveyard had been called The Necropolis for centuries before the war of no winner. After the war, it was the city.
Kayla and Hart also took in all the necromancers, séance mediums and anyone else who preferred the dead and wanted sanctuary from their homelands.

@rdonoghue After a few centuries of death-magic workers living near corpses, death became more of a spectrum and less of a final rest.

The war ended when the people of Jes'au decided both the war and the queen had gone on too long. They rebelled. Many ended up permanently in Necropolis.

@rdonoghue The good news, as far as Jue is concerned, is that Teacup spiders are not disturbed by the dead, just the living. This makes Necropolis probably the only city they could inhabit.

@rdonoghue Jue looked at the shed and the soldiers. They thought perhaps this shed had been a watcher's hut, and ghosts were made when someone killed them before robbing the warehouse next to it. They hope so, anyhow, because if the "treasure" was in the shed there would be more protections

@rdonoghue They sat there for the rest of the afternoon. There were three shift changes for the guards. All the guards we are dead.bshe thought the last shirt were corporeal. Zombies likely. Damn, that meant there was a good chance something of value was in the shed.
Jue would have to...

@rdonoghue ..hire a necrodimisit.
They decided to go ahead and watch for another 24 hours. The number of spiders going in and out was amazing. Jue thought this might be a score that could keep them living well in the city for years to come, if they didn't disrupt the nest.

@rdonoghue Jue had struggled since leaving the family holding. The Silk Foragers preferred isolation. Many lived alone, or as mated pairs of they had small children. Very few of them wanted human contact. Jue was an outlier.

@rdonoghue Jue had all the skills a silk forager learned from their parents. They could find and harvest the silk, of course. They could weave cloth from the silk and die it. The forager people tended to prefer chameleon dies. The forager people preferred to be invisible.

@rdonoghue Jue had lived hermit for three years before deciding to move to the Necropolis. Their parents had brought them there to sell silk, and Jue never forgot the brings colors of the people in the market. They loved the clothes, the music, the buskers, the food.

@rdonoghue Jue had returned home, but after their gender ceremony, they were just counting the days until they could leave.

@rdonoghue The foragers recognized the usual five genders, plus two more. Jue had selected "yes" after visiting necropolis.

Jue spent weeks dying fabrics with colors beyond what the foragers uses: face your death read, lost love blue, false spring green...

@rdonoghue About to take off. Will be unavailable for a bit.

@rdonoghue Oops, thread went awry.

https://twitter.com/cwodtke/status/1417577521655304192?s=19

@rdonoghue The sale of this fabric had gotten them a small house by the enviable musicians graveyard. Jue felt that eighteen years of silence was more than enough. It also paid for Jue's discovery that they loved every kind of food. Especially the expensive kind.

@rdonoghue That money didn't last long but so far Jue had been able to find teacup spider nests regularly. Until a month ago. Some idiot who didn't know what they were doing were disrupting the habitats. Jue fantasized about catching them almost as often as they dreamed of eating at Sadou's

@rdonoghue The next morning Jue felt they had a good sense of the guards' patterns. Luckily they were all dead, but there wouldn't be any spiders if any were alive. The dawn guards seemed the most transparent and thus least likely to manifest. Still, probably best to get a necrodimisit.

@rdonoghue A real one would cost a fortune and would have a multimonth wait list. It would probably be fine but Jue worried about their unseen rival. Would the ghosts slow them down? Too many know unknowns. Beat to visit Charl.

@rdonoghue Charl was not a certified necrodimisit. Hell, Charl wasn't a certified anything. Jue had made the mistake of tumbling Charl when they first came to the city and was doing all the things. But Charl acted like he had done Jue worlds biggest favor since and was exhausting.

@rdonoghue Jue went back to their tiny house first though. Without sleep Jue couldn't be at their best, and a mistake could destroy a productive nest. Plus the could NOT face Charl after being up all night.

@rdonoghue The musicians graveyard was shapes like a sundial. Early burials by the sleeping legends were at the center, and they stayed quiet. But as the sections grew larger, each had been committed to a different flavor of music and ever so often that too would break into new genres.

@rdonoghue The recent dead were as restless as any citizen of necropolis, and pubs and restaurants would tucks themselves between the graves of popular artists who often would jam for a small fee paused to their descendants. The forgotten dead would play in hopes of being remembered.

@rdonoghue Continues

https://twitter.com/cwodtke/status/1417578454858543107?s=21

@rdonoghue

https://twitter.com/cwodtke/status/1417577957690945541?s=21

@rdonoghue

https://twitter.com/cwodtke/status/1417579064987107329?s=21

@rdonoghue Twitter don’t branch

https://twitter.com/cwodtke/status/1417580224024391681

https://twitter.com/cwodtke/status/1417607613337018368?s=21

never compose a story in Twitter in an airplane,

@rdonoghue @jonathan Jue's house was deep in the east slice. Many long-dead musicians there slept deeply, but a few still played and created a luscious 24 hour canvas of sounds that let Jue sleep, or when they couldn't, not care.

@rdonoghue @jonathan The next morning Jue woke before dawn to the sound of a lone trumpet speaking of loss of heartbreak within the triumph of fame. Jue wondered what the death-augers would make of that. Probably consider it a good omen. Jue’s people knew that combination was not a happy ending.

@rdonoghue @jonathan Sheef wouldn’t be up for hours, so Jue used the time to brew tea, listen to the lone trumpeter make their way through a set that rarely had a song still played in the Necropolis, and pack for the days exertions.

@rdonoghue @jonathan The teacup spider is born from an egg the size of a rice grain. The egg is as blue as the spider themselves, though lighter. An adult tea cup spider is a very dark blue with a lighter blue at the tips of their feet, and their underneath fades from dark blue to lavender.

@rdonoghue @jonathan It that anyone sees the underside unless one is lucky enough to catch one which is very rare.
Most spider forager children catch a tea cup at some point and try to keep it in a jar. This is how the forager people know about the underbelly. The teacup spiders do not like this.

@rdonoghue @jonathan The teacup spider will either go to the corner of the jar and sulk to death in six hours (some as fast as three) or if let go, will then fling itself into a death situation. Death by dog, chicken or creek is common for a captured teacup spider.

@rdonoghue @jonathan The foragers have discussed this at length (usually in their teens around a fire in the middle of the night with a few beers.) The prevailing theory is that the tribe will never forgive them for being captured, but some think it’s that “humans are just really gross.”

@rdonoghue @jonathan Jue was at Sheef's doorstep at 1pm. Sheef was currently a salt trader, which was oddly risk-free and low profit for him. When she first met him, he was selling loatha-mushroom based leather and other fabrics. Those fabrics did take die as well as teacup spider silk, but tended to

@rdonoghue @jonathan fall apart within 72 hours. He was unable to convince people disposable fashion was a good idea, despite the fact the loatha-mushroom fabric took the die as well as teacup spider silk and was 1/50th the price. Necropolis really wasn't' a fashion forward town.

@rdonoghue @jonathan He'd also been part of the rather unfortunate sartorial zombie fad. And had almost lost anything when he'd tried his hand and raising carnivorous miniature casmore goats. The city had fined and jailed him after the flock had almost killed him during their escape.

@rdonoghue @jonathan Sheef claimed to this day the city should have rewarded him for reducing the rat population. Jue knew the reason the city had to increase the pay of the sewer workers though and suspect Sheef got off easy.

@rdonoghue @jonathan Jue used to have to wait until afternoon because Sheef partied all night and slept in. This new respectable Sheef got up in the morning but was too unpleasant to be bothered with until after lunch and his first whisky.