James was standing by the time I got back with a little bundle of assorted fruits. He still seemed pretty shaky, but he’d clearly felt the need to get up and stretch a bit after four hours propped up against a mahogany tree, even if he’d been dozing for most of it.

  “All right,” I said as I scuttled into the clearing. “I’ve got a ripe coconut, some green things, some red things, and something I think is called a sugar apple. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen someone eating one before, so it should be edible. Not sure about the red things though.”

  James grimaced as he lowered himself back down to the sand. He cautiously unraveled the silk wrapped bundle, seeming a little unnerved by it for some reason.

  “Uh, how did you get the string?” he asked nervously.

  I met his eyes, trying to work out whether he was serious. I mean, I knew he was from another world and all, but still. They had spiders there, didn’t they?

  He watched in trepidation as I raised my forelegs and summoned a strand of silk between my claws. I then decided to show off a little, bringing my second pair of legs forward for some flashy weaving.

  It’s hard to describe the process of producing a dragline in the way I understood it at the time. It was very instinctual. I just sort of summoned a pattern of familiar pieces, folded them together a bunch, then embedded them within a more flexible silk structure. That got me the strongest sort of thread I knew how to make at the time. A little less elastic than other silks, but much harder to break. I used the same sort of folded crystalline structures to produce the needles I affixed to my claws for finer weaving.

  The durability of dragline was handy considering the dramatic flourishes I engaged in as I rapidly strung together a rough weave of James’s face, complete with a close approximation of the dumbfounded expression he wore as he watched.

  He stared thoughtfully at my artwork as I finished, his face transitioning between a few different variants of confusion before he finally leaned back a bit and said, “huh.”

  “Do spiders in your world not make silk?” I asked, wondering why he seemed so surprised.

  “No, they do,” he said quickly. “Just… not in the same way.”

  If I had eyebrows, I probably would have raised one. “How do your spiders make silk then?” I asked. “Do they shoot it like dragon fire or something?”

  James bit his lip for a moment.

  “Oh, they shoot it out all right,” he said, matter of factly. “Just not from the mouth.”

  I would go on to spend the rest of my life trying in vain to erase the image that came with that sentence from my memory. Tragically, I have yet to succeed.

  I looked at the bundle of fruit I’d brought him as the realization dawned on me. “You thought I’d wrapped your food in feces,” I said as I lowered my glorious artwork in shame.

  “Technically no,” James said. “But also kind of? In any case, I’m thrilled that you can summon magic string out of thin air. Also, your artistic skills are seriously impressive.”

  He glanced down at his bare chest and still stained shorts. “In fact, I’d like to commission that ability of yours, if I may. Cosmic radiation is kinda bad for my skin.”

  He picked up one of the green things as I tried to process the picture of wavy red lines emanating from a big yellow ball that suddenly popped into my head. He gave the fruit an uncertain sniff, then started peeling away at the skin, revealing a pinkish color underneath.

  “Smells okay,” he said. Then with a shrug, he took a small bite. His face scrunched up in a grimace as he chewed, like it was a struggle to keep it in his mouth. Then, he started spitting out seeds in gooey clumps. He smacked his lips dramatically as he swallowed what little fruit was left when all of them were gone.

  “I miss processed food already,” he said solemnly, moving to take another bite.

  I tried not to theorize too much about the comically large fruits and vegetables that came to mind as he said that, opting instead to just ask him what he was talking about.

  “Can you explain what you mean by that?” I asked. “What sorts of processes make fruit bigger?”

  With effort, James swallowed another bit of pink mush.

  “I’m not an expert,” he said. “I was a buyer of the results of processing, not a processor myself. I think it’s a mix of selective breeding and growth enhancing chemicals. Nobody back home really liked the idea of those chemicals, but it didn’t stop us from buying the giant oranges.”

  He gave me a concerned look as I went quiet again. “How exactly does that translation thing work?” he asked. “Like, do you get what the word actually means, or do you just get what I think it means? Because, if it’s the latter, you should know that I don’t really know what chemicals look like.”

  This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

  Considering the nonsense that had just popped into my head, I was inclined to assume the latter.

  “Uh, are chemicals a bunch of colored balls connected together with gray sticks?” I asked.

  “The latter it is then,” James said with a nod. “I can’t say I was entirely aware that I think of chemicals as looking the same as molecules, but it doesn’t really surprise me.”

  Molecules did indeed translate as another bunch of balls strung together. I did get a bit more of the overall meaning now that James was consciously thinking about the difference, but I’d pretty much decided to let him explain things from here on out instead of trusting my translations too much.

  “So… what’s the difference?” I asked, curious about how the strange pieces in my head might come together.

  James picked up a stick as he finished his seedy fruit. He also picked up the sugar apple while he was at it, taking a bite. He seemed to like it a little better than the pink thing, but there was still an annoying quantity of seeds for him to work around.

  “Basically, everything is made up of these things called atoms,” he said between chews, sketching circles in the sand. “Most every atom is made up of positively charged bits of mass called protons, negatively charged electrons, and neutral neutrons. Adding a proton changes the element, as it significantly alters the behavior of the atom. Are you with me so far?”

  I stared at the circles in the sand quizzically, as if I had the faintest idea what they actually meant.

  “Let’s pretend that I am,” I said, sincerely hoping he’d eventually get to the part where he explained what in the heck he was talking about.

  “I should probably mention that atoms are incredibly small,” he said. “You can see some really tiny stuff with the help of mirrors and shaped glass, but it takes a special sort of microscope to examine atoms, and even then, we don’t really know what they look like. That’s why we use the colored balls to represent them.”

  “As for molecules,” he explained, connecting some of the balls he was drawing. “Those are what happens when atoms form bonds. We know of nearly a hundred naturally occurring elements, but the rest of the different materials you see in the world around you will be these molecular combinations, or combinations of these combinations.”

  He considered for a moment.

  “Your silk might actually be a great example. Do you get any sense of what it’s made of as you produce it? I guess it might be made of different stuff than the spider silk I’m familiar with, but I would expect some kind of pattern involving a few different molecular combinations strung together a few bajillion times.”

  I took a moment to consider that. If I tried to imagine the puzzle pieces I created as balls and strings… Yeah, that kind of worked, didn’t it? I started summoning silk again. I had to think on a smaller scale than I was used to, but I could work out the structure of the pieces if I focussed hard enough. I was the one making those pieces, after all.

  Almost subconsciously, I began weaving again. If I focused on just one of my pieces, and conceptualized it as different sized masses bound together, its shape would be something like…

  Leaning back on my third set of legs, I brought the rear set forward and started working in three dimensions. I kind of got lost in the process, hardly even processing the passage of time as I wove. I think it took me about twenty minutes, all said and done. When I felt like I was finished, I found myself staring at what appeared to be an utterly incomprehensible mess.

  I wilted a little in disappointment, looking towards James to get a sense of how embarrassed I should be.

  James seemed to be having a hard time getting his mouth to close. His brain had surged up into a stormy mess, only this time it evoked a sense of… awe?

  “Zeek,” he said softly. “You know you’re a gosh-freakin genius, right?”

  I looked over my tangled mess again, wondering what exactly he saw in it. I stretched the structure out a bit, and… there it was.

  I wasn’t entirely sure what I was looking at, but it was certainly interesting. It was essentially a bunch of different sized, spherical holes, each connected together with one or two prominent bands of silk. I could kind of make out a central structure roughly shaped like a Y, but each of the points of said Y had other spheres attached to it.

  “Is that a molecule then?” I asked James, wondering why he seemed so shocked to see it.

  “It certainly has the right shape for one,” James said in an almost reverent tone. “I don’t know exactly what it is. Probably some kind of amino acid if your silk is like what I’d expect. It’s just… if you can really work out the atomic structure of whatever you make, I imagine that might make you the most intelligent person I’ve ever met.”

  I took a moment to work through his meanings there. It was hard to be sure, but I was afraid my translation ability might be catching him in a lie.

  “I don’t have frizzy white hair though,” I said, matter of factly.

  The look on James’s face switched from inspired to confused in a microsecond. “What?” he asked.

  “Before when you said genius, and just now when you said intelligent, I got a very clear image of some dude with frizzy white hair,” I explained. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d assume that guy was the smartest person you’ve ever met.”

  James laughed out loud the second I finished speaking. Not entirely sure why, I found myself buzzing along after a moment. I suppose it just felt good to receive a compliment, even if it was immediately overshadowed.

  “We probably shouldn’t get started on Einstein just yet,” James said as he caught his breath. “Or possibly ever, come to think of it. I’ve got two years of medical school behind me to draw from for chemistry, but I don’t know the first thing about general relativity.”

  I opted to ignore that last bit as I let my molecular diagram collapse and crawled back onto my stump. Summoning silk really did take a lot more mana than blowing up coconuts. That said, I was still in a bit of a weaving mood, and James still hadn’t seemed willing to give up his only pants. Perhaps it was time to make him a new pair.

  I started weaving as the sun began to dip towards the horizon. “So,” I said after a moment. “What did all of that have to do with chemicals again?”