Ahem hem.
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Person of Interest: The Spider Man
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[WARNING! THIS MEDIA CONTAINS MENTIONS OF BLINK SPIDERS!]
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The blink spider. The perennial menace of Avernus. Loathed above all other dangers that populate this planet, no other creature enjoys an almost universal animosity from all sapient species.
Almost universal.
In the Dis Pharmaceutical Quarantine Quarters resides one man who can be described as the expert on blink spiders. He has lived with them, studied them, and bred them for nine decades. His name is John Aniseed, but to all those who meet him, he is remembered as… the Spider Man.
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JOHN ANISEED: When I was a brat a blink spider tried to bite me and I told it no. Lucky for me I had some telepathy. Then me brother squashed it.
Probably about seven months later I told someone and they sent me to Ol' Bosoms, which is where I found Carmine One. Went through about sixteen Carmines; all my mates were slappin' 'em dead.
[IMG: A class photo of the Sanctioned Cohort UU-234-87. A cherubic John Aniseed is located by an impregnable bubble of personal space. His familiar, Carmine the Blink Spider, is censored for safe viewing.]
J: Right out of Uni I got a job with Antidote Corp milking spiders. I was making about two thrones a year plus overquota until Antidote got merged into Dis Pharmacy, then I got put on annual contract, six thrones a year. Then the team manager died of, uh, spider bite, and here I am.
Due to special considerations, I have my own residential cube. It's a cube within a cube, really. The gap is vacuum, with mobile drones carrying tiny mouse habitats to intercept any blink spiders trying to escape the nest. Blink spiders don't blink into vacuum; we can, because we're sapient and willing to jump into hard void if we have to, but given the choice between atmosphere with prey, and no atmosphere or prey, they will always go for the mouse, and then the drone flashes them with the laser matrix.
Anyway, it's fine, if a bit lonely. Haven't seen anybody for three months.
[VID: John reveals his personal quarters, which is enclosed by transparent environments containing sedated blink spiders. In the corner, a Tamia Jameson Concert poster is visible before John hastily covers it.]
J: We don't need to see that. Oh, this is Carmine. Say hi, Carmine!
[VID: CENSORED FOR SENSITIVE VIEWERS.]
J: Technically she's Carmine the 403rd or thereabouts, but who's counting? Aside from me. I'm counting. Anyway, all these fellas I usually keep psychically asleep. If I need to go out, there's a chemical aerosoliser and cryounit that keeps them all under, plus the emergency void-grenade if I'm gone too long.
[VID: John opens a large box. Inside, several blink spiders march in unison, injecting venom into a reservoir before feeding from a nutrient dispenser.]
J: All under my control. Completely safe! Although they do need to kill something every so often. Keeps their venom sharp.
[VID: John produces a mouse from his robes, and throws it in, before closing the box.]
J: So there are, traditionally, two problems with harvesting blink spider venom. One: getting the venom. Two: making antivenom out of venom.
[IMG: A complex procedure chart.]
Getting the venom is troublesome, because blink spiders don't bite what you want them to bite. Blink spiders will bite damn near everything except two things: dead bodies and other blink spiders. Can't pin them down, on account of they can teleport. With other species on other planets you'd use a bait-servitor or balloon man, or prisoners I reckon. Bait-servitors don't yield as much venom, you see, all the flesh bits start necrotising. A balloon man is better, it's designed to preserve as much venom as possible, but blink spiders know it's not alive, they can sense the vacancies inside.
Pre-mindbending, people'd pick up bitten rats and things, send 'em off to the nearest BioMech dropoff for a few credits. The venom farms, they keep a few thousand rats in a rolling drum, pick out the ones that drop dead. Then Fitzroy Zenkart, he's a telepath, he figures out a way to convince a blink spider to bite a target. Doesn't make him popular, but venom harvesters move on to balloon men. Jenn Yukang, biomancy, she learns the chemical that blink spiders use to identify each other, everyone in Bosoms starts smelling like spider, kids get sprayed five times a day. Slight drawback; everything starts trying to kill you even more. Then, finally, Morabi Kzokysczi, biomancy represent, first psyker to successfully imitate a blink spider venom gland through mutation of the sublingual salivary gland, third to successfully revert it. Terrible kisser. [John pantomimes projectile vomiting and cardiac arrest.]
So we have venom. Problem: how do we make antivenom? Traditionally, you find something that's survived, take its antibodies, and inject them into yourself, either beforehand to build immunity, or after a bite to neutralise venom. Slight complication is that blink spider venom has a 95 to 110% fatality rate depending on species, and if a creature has a physiology strong enough to throw off spider-venom, you don't want to be sticking its blood in you because you will die of bloodsplosion.
[VID: The second AC113 Island Turtle Blood Transfusion Incident.]
J: Initial colony drop had four-hundred enzyme vats in-case we needed to target a gene-virus on some xeno scum at some point, but good luck supplying a planet on them. [John laughs for an excessive length of time at his own joke.] These are still rat-farm times, and they're feeding these things to grox and taking out a few litres every week, but the grox is now inedible, and nobody likes getting injected with groxblood. Then the grox population grows high enough that they can section off a breeding population dedicated to immunity, start feeding them all envenomed corpses, and letting the strongest ones breed more potent antibodies. This is about a hundred-fifty years in, and the BioMech was still doing those things with cloned tissue silos that never quite worked out.
[IMG: An Adeptus Mechanicus Antivenom Flesh Pillar, mid-liquefaction.]
J: The key ingredient is a living host. Not a technically alive and metabolising meat culture, but an actual sentient being. There must be a life to extinguish, metaphysically speaking, to generate countermeasures to the psychocidal level of the venom; a purely biochemical solution only cures eight of ten cases for the weakest strains.
Additionally, there's… hm. It's a bit hard to explain, but part of the countermeasures include "not getting bitten" at all. Ritualistically, physically accepting the venom means spiritually accepting its gift, which significantly undercuts any sort of resistance by the recipient post facto. Some contact-based phenomena get around consent and defiance in their victims this way, like mindmelds and bodylocks, and it's also how you get death touches. The reasoning seems to be that if you really didn't want it, you'd have made it clear by not accepting it. Not exactly fair, though, but it's the warp.
So what I've been working on to get my golds is generating antivenom. Watch.
[VID: John works his mouth, before spitting a clear green fluid into a tube. He places it under a microviewer, and from his robes produces a CENSORED, allowing it to inject its venom into the tube. The venom fizzles, and the microviewer displays a 98% lysis rate of the venom.]
J: Modified salivary gland. I tried sweat glands, but it ruins towels.
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John Aniseed remains the foremost behavioural expert on blink spiders. His Master Sanctionite thesis "Biomantic Autogeneration of Blink Spider Antivenom Type A" was reviewed and approved AC333. When questioned on the direction of his research, he replied that he was "looking for someone to settle down with." He enjoys ice cream sodas, playing his harp, and long walks outside of his house. He is currently single.
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AN: They're not evil! They're just misguided!
