>>5337829"You lucky son-of-a-bitch." breathed Yan.
"Did you get laid?" asked Solomon. "What's it like? How many girls did you sleep with? Were there any cute girls there?"
"Woah woah woah! what's with the sudden interrogation?" asked Carter, caught completely off guard by the sudden change in behavior.
Yan pulled Solomon by the latter's ponytail as admonishment with a look.
"Sorry." Solomon apologized sheepishly. "It's just that because of what we are, we can't help but wonder about the good things of pre-Crucible life."
"Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll, Alcohol, fight clubs, gambling...there's a laundry list of things we haven't tried." explained Yan, counting the items off his oversized claw before sighing. "Or would have tried. Partly because someone has to keep an eye on mom and keep her from going off the deep end, and partly because our mom wants to keep us on the straight and narrow."
"Are the two of you constructs?" asked Liz.
Solomon and Yan nodded in sync.
"Yup. We're constructs of a Vitruvian make."
"Yup. We're constructs of a Vitruvian make."
There was a beat before the two glanced at each other.
"Jinx."
"Jinx."
"Dammit."
"Dammit."
"Double Dammit."
"Double Dammit."
"Ah, there you are." interrupted a woman's voice. Carter and Liz turned to look at the newcomer.
"Mom? What are you doing here?" Yan asked, half-alarmed half-concerned at the sudden appearance.
"The Prescript assassin case went cold." the woman replied flippantly lowering the black bone slate and peered at the two male constructs, her gaze somehow focused directly on Carter through her half-rimmed glasses. "No new leads for now unless something happens to give us a stroke of good fortune or unless someone approaches with new information."
"Don't tell me you're bored already." groused Solomon.
The mother of the two brothers gave a paradoxically warm look yet ice cold smile. "Bored? Why would I be bored when I see the two of you chatting up with a dangerous fugitive?"
Carter didn't like where the conversation was going, on instinct he willed his core to activate. To blend into the background within the perceptions of others as his arachnid companions, as he slowly scooched over-
Only to find that comforting feeling of social invisibility ripped away as Carter suddenly felt his phantasmal aura INVERT upon itself and his Hive-like connection to his spider friends cut-out, Rupert, Tim, Samantha, and all the rest curling up and enter torpor. Stress and panic began rapidly building up inside Carter as if he was stripped naked, be drenched in cold water, and brought out into the public under the world's most intense spotlight; his skin rippling and breaking into a cold sweat from an effect he realized as eldritch scripts revealed themselves on woman in front of him.
Skintalking. The woman in front of him was a skintalker.
(cont.)
