Welcome back, monster lovers! Annabelle Hawthorne has once again returned to present you with the next stunning chapter of "Please don't show this to my therapist, Book 8!"
(I'm not anti-therapy, I just don't want this dominating my other issues)
Hello, new friends! You've clicked on this because you're in disbelief that this is somehow the 121st chapter of a story. "Surely the chapters are short" you may think, but nay, I have deceived you! Not only is my average chapter around 13k words, but there are also 3 spin-off novels in this series along with so many sex scenes that I am legally obligated to warn readers with nut allergies. So if you don't want to go into shock over the sheer confusion you'll experience by jumping in, you should probably go all the way back to chapter 001 and start there! (That's right, two zeros, like fucking James Bond)
(Annabelle's lawyer here. We are under no legal obligations regarding nuts, please disregard)
Returning friends and readers, hello and well met! This summer was long in all the best ways and short in all the rest. I did get a chance to rest and recuperate, which will serve me well in the fall and winter months while I fight the desire to buy a bunch of pumpkin spice crap from Starbucks (why must it taste so good?!?).
A huge shout out goes to my beta readers who help me look for inconsistencies. You'd be surprised how much garbage sneaks through. Lit's own TJ Skywind found a glaring mistake in this draft that other early readers missed entirely, that's another author here who is committed to quality. If you're ever stressed about when the next chapter might post, I put all that info in my bio fso you can schedule appropriately.
Anyway, it's about time to let you get to it. Don't mind these mini-blogs I always do, it's just me
Chiming In
Eulalie sat in her web hammock, her attention firmly focused on one of the monitors as she typed lines of code into a text editor with one hand. The other hand casually flicked at a fidget spinner that was held in place by the paw of her fourth leg which she had curled upward. In truth, she could have written code solely by sound if she wanted. Her hearing was sensitive enough that she could now recognize the distinct sound of every stroke on her keyboard. Still, being able to triple check for errors now was far preferable to potential hours searching for her mistake later.
That, and then she wouldn't be able to listen to the satisfying buzz of ball bearings as her fidget spinner whirled. It sang to her as she flicked it again, then she flexed her paw so that the spinner was balanced in the center much like a juggler might spin a plate.
Movement out of the corner of her eye caused her to shift her attention to a rat carrying a strand of fiber optic cable. The creature came to a stop beneath her, its whiskers twitching with anxiety as it held the cable up for her inspection.
"We lost another connection," it said. Eulalie studied the rat for the span of a breath to identify it. Her senses dug through all the markers: fur, scent, pheromone, the way the rat held its tail aloft when he walked on two paws, the small clip in his left ear. This was Basil, who belonged to a family of rats who had taken their names from the contents of a spice rack once upon a time. Basil was technically a legacy name. Right now, Basil Sr. was in charge of organizing incoming cookbooks for the Library, but not because he was named for a spice. The whole family knew how to read and understand food labels, which was definitely a niche skill set for rodents.
"Tell me more, Basil." She leaned over and took the cable from Basil and held it up to get a better look at it. Sure enough, the cable was neatly severed by a collapsing portal. There was a bit of an art form to the magical portals the rats made. When they fell apart, anything caught in the portal was simply detached at a molecular level. There were likely some interesting applications of this process, but the Arachne had plenty of other things on her plate.
"This one came from the server room in the Computer Sciences Department at MIT." Basil cleaned his face nervously. "It was spotted by the intern."
"The intern?" Eulalie's eyes narrowed. "Do you mean Carl?"
Basil nodded. Carl the intern was a new student in the Computer Sciences Department. For whatever reason, he had been put in charge of the server room maintenance, and had become the bane of Eulalie's existence on the MIT campus.
Server rooms were easy to infiltrate once you bypassed external security. Unless there were problems with the server, nobody paid much attention to what was going on with the hardware itself. It was easy enough to plug a direct line into a server and maintain a continuous connection. In fact, Eulalie often did maintenance of her own to ensure nobody looked twice. There were over a dozen college campuses right now that were running at peak performance due to her interventions.
However, Carl was either some sort of cable savant or a bored nerd. This was the third time this month the man had discovered one of her cables. The rats monitored stuff like this for her, and protocol upon discovery was to immediately shut down any portals to that location. This meant that Carl had likely discovered what appeared to be a cut cable attached to nothing, or perhaps even a hole that went a few inches into the wall and terminated abruptly.
Now that was something she wished she could see. She fiddled with the cable for a moment, wondering if it would be worth installing another one sometime just to see how fast Carl would find it. However, if this guy was half as good as she thought he was, there was a chance he was doing diagnostics on that particular server already. He would see that information had been going both ways through that port, which meant problems for Eulalie. The safety of her niece and the house came first and always. Sighing, she handed the cable remnant to Basil.
"Go ahead and pull any other connections from MIT," she said with remorse. She hated losing a direct server connection because it would be that much harder to dig through data flowing through the school. MIT had some cutting edge research, along with top secret government programs that she had been eagerly watching. The Arachne turned her attention to another screen and set a reminder to check on Carl's enrollment at MIT every six months. The guy was due to graduate in two years, and she didn't want to forget to go back later. Someone like Carl was good to know about, and maybe even hire someday.
Ignoring the rat, she opened a command console window and quickly set up a search program that would dig through forums, message boards, and anywhere else a server junky may go. If Carl started asking around about mysterious cables that disappeared into walls, she wanted to know right away.
When she turned her attention back to Basil, she was happy to see that he had at least relaxed a little. The rats trusted her, but they got very anxious whenever failing a task, even if it wasn't their fault. Reggie's predecessor was largely at fault for this. That rat had been a real bastard.
"Dismissed," she said as she leaned back into her webs. "And thank you."
Basil bowed low, then scampered off with the cable in tow. She watched him vanish into one of the tunnels carved in the wall, then reached out and flicked her spinner again. It practically hummed while spinning, and she tossed it in the air with her paw only to catch it on the end of another leg. Grinning, she looked back at the code she had been working on.
The flow of air shifted slightly in the room and was accompanied by the sound of sliding fabric. Eulalie frantically typed in an attempt to finish one last bit of code just as Sofia entered the room. She hit enter and leaned back so far in her hammock that she was now looking at the cyclops upside down.
"Ugh, I hate when you do that." The cyclops shivered, then continued into the corner of the room where a small table and chairs had been placed for visitors. Earlier, the rats had set up a small plate of cheese and fruit. Eulalie had wondered who was coming to visit her.
