That’s just an expression, by the way. I still haven’t figured out whether or not black holes play a part in this story or not. Come to think of it, I don’t even know if a singularity has sides. Yet.

  Anyway, the day I met James seemed pretty standard, so far as I could tell. Sure, it’s not every day that a mana stripped human washes up on the beach of your private island, but it’s not like you expect that sort of thing to change your life.

  To be totally honest, I was pretty much expecting him to spend a few days as a fun curiosity for me before dying of thirst.

  Harsh, I know, but pretty much the only thing I knew about mana stripped people at that point was that dying of thirst was a thing that they did. Besides… I mean, you just had to look at the guy.

  The first I saw of him, he was about a mile off shore, a scrawny dude hanging onto a broken piece of wood and kicking like crazy to get away from some big shark that wasn’t even trying to eat him. It was probably just curious about what a creature like him was doing in the water some hundred miles from the nearest major land mass. Then again, maybe I’m projecting a bit.

  The sun was just beginning to rise, and it was shaping up to be a pretty pleasant day. I watched the human in amusement from the top of my island’s tallest tree as he kicked his way towards my beach. I had precious little better to do those days. I wasn’t exactly hiding, so it’s probably a miracle he didn’t glance my way and decide that drowning was a noble enough way to die. He tells me that a lot of people in your world are even more scared of spiders than the people here are, and your spiders are only, like, two inches tall, tops.

  It took him over two hours to swim one mile. He passed out pretty much the moment his piece of wood touched the sand. The idiot would have been washed away with the tide if I didn’t go to pull him away from the water.

  A few things about him piqued my interest as I got close. Well, one thing in particular. He didn’t have a shirt or shoes. He was just wearing what seemed to me like impractically fragile shorts made of something I’d never come into contact with before. It was all stretchy and elastic, made with those crazy machines you people have.

  Here’s the thing about us big scary spiders. We know our textiles. I have algorithms for summoning certain complex, semi-organic compounds hardwired into my very DNA. From the second curiosity started manifesting in my mind, I was getting a feel for other silks, and even some fabrics, from every kitted out adventurer that passed my way. I even figured out how to make a few of them myself before getting marooned on a tiny deserted island with nothing but some trees and a barely adequate mana well.

  Suffice it to say, James’s pants were the single most interesting thing I’d seen in over twenty years. I literally spent hours mulling over them, trying to get a feel for the underlying structure. My own silks were slightly more complex in some ways, but I’d never seen that sort of uniformity in any organic compound.

  How to explain the difference between synthetic polymers and amino acid chains… Basically, conjuring organic silk kind of feels like working from a selection of puzzle pieces. I have a few complex building blocks built into my brain, as well as an intuitive understanding of how to combine them to achieve desired qualities.

  With a synthetic polymer chain, it’s basically just the same complex puzzle piece strung together over and over again. Simpler in some sense and likely easier to produce once I figured out the trick to it, but I didn’t have that intuition telling me how to build the pieces or how to fit them together properly. I couldn’t even begin to guess how things like temperature and production speed might impact the stability of the chain, and… and I should probably stop talking about clothes, shouldn’t I? You probably don’t care about James’s pants, and things’ll probably get awkward fast if I get started on his underwear.

  Anyway, I dragged James out of the water and he slept for the next seven hours. Fortunately for him, it started getting hot pretty early that day, leading me to pull him into the shade of the trees. I hadn’t even considered what the sun might do to his pale, fragile skin, so he was lucky to wake up with a pink back that day instead of second degree burns.

  I made sure to get out of sight when he started to stir. In case it wasn’t clear already, I’m something of a ‘big scary spider,’ and humans tend to have adverse reactions to my existence. I didn’t really want him trying to kick me to death the second he woke up. He’d fail, of course, but it’d be annoying. Besides, I was running low on mana and needed to recharge at my well for a while.

  From on top of a big tree stump spurting out a constant trickle of mana some twenty feet into the woods, I kept up a sense of what was going on in James’s head. I can’t read thoughts, per se. Even the telepathy experts of the world can at best interpret snippets of a stream of consciousness. Observing the mind of any creature is like watching the weather. There’s so many factors that go into it that it’s impossible to observe it all at once, and it’s never truly predictable.

  It’s an instinct for my species to analyze the mental state of creatures who are going somewhere, and to adjust the stimuli they receive in hopes of changing their direction. The humans have some horror stories about us Xikirix Spiders luring adventurers to their deaths with the sound of distant cries for help. It could happen, but it’s the sort of thing that requires extenuating circumstances to occur. We’re more likely to take advantage of smells you find pleasant and other instinctual attractors.

  All of that is to say, I could tell that James was waking up due to how the patterns in his brain were adjusting. I could feel the moment he opened his eyes based on the rush of stimuli. I couldn’t see him through the foliage, but I have pretty good hearing. He groaned as he sat up and rubbed his eyes. His mind rapidly kicked into gear, swirling up into a hurricane as he tried to process the world around him.

  I still get a kick out of the first words that came out of his mouth.

  “Ahhh, what the heck,” he said, sounding a bit like this squire I once saw who got his foot stuck in a rotting log.

  I’d been planning on asking him about his pants the second I knew what language he spoke, but that last word threw me for a loop. Fortunately for James, English is mostly the same here, and he’s double fortunate that my former home was enough of a global nexus for me to recognize it, but we have no ‘heck.’

  One of my rarer skills is that I can get a general sense for the meaning behind the words people use as they speak them. It’s one of those instinctual things. To this day, I couldn’t tell you exactly how I pull it off.

  I mentally prepared my English voice and got ready to mess with his head a little. To James, it would sound like an average sort of guy with a soft, approachable voice was speaking to him from somewhere in the opposite direction of my magic stump. I based this voice off of that adorable log squire. The guy spent three hours screaming for someone to help him get his foot unstuck from that log, all while somehow avoiding the attention of any monsters. I definitely didn’t find the whole situation funny enough to have something to do with that.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but did you just substitute the word for the place of eternal suffering with a word that, if I’m understanding it right, exists purely for the sake of avoiding naming the place of eternal suffering when you get mad enough to want to? If you use it for the exact same reasons, doesn’t it functionally mean the same thing anyway?”

  “The heck if I know,” James said absentmindedly. “I have a daughter now. I need to be a good example.”

  I wasn’t sure what to make of that. While I was trying to work out what having a child might have to do with making up meaningless words, James seemed to register what had just happened. His mind sparked with a sort of activity I recognized as a sort of fight or flight response.

  “Wai… Who’s there?” he asked, and I could hear him slapping against the bushes as he spun around in confusion.

  “The name’s Zeek,” I said cheerily, deciding to just ignore the heck thing. “I’m the friendly fellow who pulled you out of the water when you passed out on my beach. Feel free to thank me by telling me what your pants are made of.”

  “M-my, pants?” he asked. I think he felt self conscious about his outfit after that. Most humans have that weird sort of response when they notice they aren’t fully clothed. “I don’t know, polyester or something?” he said after a moment. “Look man, do you have any idea how I got here?”

  Thus, James hit me with my second language anomaly of the day. What the heck was polyester? The word when he used it seemed to evoke some kind of stiff, blue material that so far as I could tell, had nothing to do with fabric, and also did nothing to explain what sort of creature made this 'polyester.'

  “What the heck is a polyester?” I asked. “What did it come from?”

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  “I don’t know where it comes from!” James said, and I didn’t need to be able to see inside his head to be able to tell he was distraught. “I bought them at Kohl’s!” he said. “I’d very much like to get back there and buy a new pair after what these have been through, but I have no idea where I am, so can you please tell me how I got here?

  I sighed to myself. It seemed like the pants would have to wait until he calmed down a bit. “Kohl’s” had been easier to interpret than polyester, but it made less sense. I mean, surely, if there was a store that big, with that many mystery fabrics, I would know about it. The place had enchanted doors, a weirdly high ceiling, fancy tile floors, and racks upon racks of clothing, all of which seemed to be made of crazy exotic materials. How could a textile enthusiast such as myself not know about such an amazing place? It was an affront to my very identity to even suggest it!

  “The most I know about where you came from is that you swam here this morning,” I said. “Do you not remember where you were before that?”

  “Of course I remember!” James said irritably. “I was in my apartment on my way to put my little girl back to sleep, and then I was hitting my head on a freaking wooden beam in some 1800’s pirate ship with no sails. Then the pirates yelled at me in some kind of Spanish, stole my bathrobe, and threw me overboard…”

  James took a breath.

  “...And then I got attacked by a freaking kraken, then the pirates killed the freaking kraken, and I spent the next nine hours swimming here with a bit of flotsam from the battle while being circled by freaking megalodons. I just want to know how I got from my living room to a magic pirate ship. Please tell me you know what’s going on and I haven’t completely lost my mind?”

  I did not tell him that I knew what was going on, and I was pretty sure he’d lost his mind.

  “Uh… yeah,” I started, “I’ve been stuck on this island for twenty three years, dude. I’m not a big expert on teleportation spells. Sorry.”

  James gave a deep sigh, and I felt his mental state get a little less hectic.

  “I’m sorry,” he said wearily. “You said it was… what, Zeek?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “I came up with it myself.”

  “Well Zeek, I’m James,” said James. “Am I to understand that you have no way off this island?”

  “That’s right,” I said, trying not to show how bitter I felt about that particular piece of information.

  “Am I to understand then,” continued James, “that I also have no way off this island?”

  I thought about it for a second. “I guess you could build a boat,” I said. “Hopefully not too fast though. I really want to study your pants more. Actually, maybe I can just make you a new pair of pants and trade for the ones you have.”

  “What is it with you and my pants?” James asked, seeming defensive for some reason. “Where are you anyway? Why can’t I see you?”

  “I’m in the woods about twenty feet from you and you still havent told me where polyester comes from,” I said.

  James turned and started shambling off in the opposite direction from me. “I don’t know where polyester comes from,” he grumbled, though slightly less irritable than before. “I think it’s some kind of plastic they make with some kind of oil in big, complicated factories.”

  I tried to process all of that. Oil seemed like the simplest thing to understand. Some kind of flammable black stuff. ‘Plastic’ seemed to involve a bunch of strange, colorful cubes that fit together to make little models of things. Factory… That word was kinda familiar, but what James meant by it wasn’t at all what normal people meant by it. He seemed to imagine some massive metal structure that seemed to be perpetually on fire for some reason.

  “Have you tried making a boat?” James asked as he continued to make his way towards the far edge of the island, stumbling and limping over roots in his bare feet.

  “Of course not,” I said. “Everything in that ocean is bigger than me. I’d get eaten alive in seconds.”

  “Why’d you tell me to make a boat then?” James asked. “It’s not like I can fight a mega shark any better than you can.”

  I have to say, I was a little confused by his logic here. I took a moment to consider the way he’d so frantically tried to swim away from that shark earlier. Surely it couldn’t be…

  “James, you do know you have no mana, right?” I said.

  “If you mean by that what I think you do, then yes,” James said. “I think I’d know if I was a wizard. What does that have to do with anything?”

  “So… monsters have nothing to gain from killing you?” I said. “What, did you think you were still alive just because I really need someone to talk to?”

  James froze. Some level of understanding seemed to dawn on him, and his mind started going back into overdrive.

  “To be fair,” I said, hoping to calm him down, “I probably wouldn’t have eaten you even if you weren’t a cripple. It is really boring on this island.”

  James didn’t move. “Uh, Zeek,” he said. “I’ve walked more than twenty feet into the forest.”

  “Yep,” I said. “You went the wrong way. It was very amusing.”

  Silence for a moment.

  “Uh, Zeek,” James said again. “The volume of your voice hasn’t changed at all. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’ve been slinking through the woods just in front of me, trying to lead me into some kind of trap.”

  “That would be characteristic of my species,” I said. “But again, there’s no point with you. I’ve got nothing to gain from it. And I already told you, you went the wrong way. My ‘voice’ is just a projection I’m telepathically transmitting into your mind.”

  “But I can hear it, Zeek,” James said. “Right in front of me.”

  “Yeah… and?” I asked. I was really starting to think maybe James was just an idiot. “I’m a Xikirix,” I said. “Luring people into traps with the sound of audible voices is kind of my thing. Well, at least it’s what you humans tend to pretend is my thing. In any case, that strategy wouldn’t be very effective if the voices didn’t feel audible, now would it?”

  James picked up a stick.

  “Please put that down, James,” I said. “I really don’t want to kill you, but I’m not that much stronger than a cripple, and defense isn’t my strong suit. If you actually try to kill me, I will probably have to kill you. I don’t actually need you alive in order to study your pants, but I’d still prefer to have you around.”

  James seemed to hesitate. Then, “Why?” he asked.

  I hadn’t really thought much about it. I didn’t much like the answer. I didn’t really want to admit it, and I could have easily lied, but I’d never really talked to anyone before, and it kind of just came out.

  “I’m smarter than I’m supposed to be,” I said. “All of my siblings got themselves killed trying to fight novice adventurers, not seeming to realize that they were being used as training. The masters would have stepped in if one of them ever came close to winning. They never stood a chance. Even the Xikirix that knew to fear humans didn’t live long where I’m from. The masters always hunted down the ones who got too big. I stopped growing and started getting smarter instead. I don’t really know why. I managed to escape eventually, but then I got stuck on this island...”

  I paused. It was suddenly hard to speak. I didn’t know how to describe what was happening at the time. It’s funny how we only notice the moments that change our lives in retrospect. You see, there was something funny happening in James’s head. It was a familiar pattern, like a special kind of cloud you recognize as the one that makes the sunsets the most beautiful.

  It was the pattern that happened in humans when their fellows got hurt. The way they would feel each other's pain. It occured to me that there were no other humans on this island, and what that meant was… frightening. In all honesty, I felt a wave of bitterness wash through me. I’d never fit in among my own kind, but it’s not like humans had been any better. They’d have killed me given the chance. Truthfully, I hated the whole species. I hadn’t really realized that, but I hated them all. Even James.

  I’d joked with myself about making an exception for him. I don’t think I planned to kill him for the fun of it at any point, but I don’t think I would have hesitated if I felt I had a half decent reason. Being mana stripped meant he wasn’t a threat. It didn’t mean he was a friend. I blamed him for his nature, and I didn’t see a problem with that.

  But then, he’d gone and actually made an exception for me. Or at least, I thought he had. It’s hard to describe what was going through my head.

  “Go back the way you came,” I found myself saying. Then, I adjusted my voice a bit. “I’m sitting on a tree stump in a little clearing!”

  To James’s mind, the words would sound like they were being shouted from exactly where I was, as if I had actually spoken them.

  “I swear it’s not a trap!” I shouted, not entirely sure if I was telling the truth.

  James hesitated, but he still listened, dropping his stick as he tripped his way in my direction. I tried to sort through my emotions as he came. I didn’t make a habit of looking into my own mind. Had that cloud, that constellation in James’s head been the same as my own? At a technical level, probably not. Our minds weren’t the same shape. Did that matter? Was that how I felt?

  Was I… lonely?

  My island’s jungle is pretty dense, but not so dense that James and I couldn’t see each other a few feet before he broke through the bushes into the small clearing around my mana stump.

  I expected him to hesitate when he saw me, and I expected to blame him for that. He did hesitate, but then he didn’t turn away. He lurched into my clearing and leaned against a tree, looking at me with a mix of emotions I couldn’t interpret.

  “You’re a tarantula,” he said softly.

  The meaning of the word came to me. It was like an infant Xikirix. To James, it was something that had once crawled over a child’s hand. It was an unusually vivid image. There were goosebumps rising up the child’s arm, and yet, he was laughing as the creature's tiny legs tickled his hand.

  “I’m a Xikirix,” I said as I took a moment to size him up. He was shaking, ever so slightly, but I didn’t think that was all because of me. He was overwhelmed. A pale, weak creature in a strange place. He was practically naked. His dirty blonde hair was a disheveled mess and his pruny skin was far from recovered from its time in the ocean, let alone his brief exposure to the sun. He’d been trying to calm himself down, but his mind was still a swirling storm that grew more difficult to interpret by the second. I was struck by something I couldn’t understand at the time. I was accustomed to reading minds as opposed to faces, but there was something to his eyes that made me wonder if that was an oversight.

  “Zih…cur…ix?” James said slowly. “Zeek the Xikirix, then?”

  Everyone had their own meaning in mind for the words that they used. Xikirix usually meant an unintelligent monster with malicious powers. It was something that schemed, taking advantage of the weak and foolish.

  When James said Xikirix though, he meant a fuzzy brown spider about the size of his torso, sitting on a tree stump and somehow managing to look ponderous despite its inhuman form. He just meant me.

  “Just Zeek is fine,” I said.

  “Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you Zeek,” James said. He had a few things wrong. His Zeek was a little larger than life. It was a frightening and mysterious creature he didn’t understand. Yet somehow, to James that could be a good thing. He hoped I was good. At that moment, I suppose I decided that I wanted to be. For him, at least.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you too, James,” I said. “Now about those pants…”