IWUAaDNW: Growth 3.8

Once he was done, Gwen took her party across the empty room to my other spider room.

"Okay, that is a hatchery," she declared assuredly, and she was right.

Although to be fair, it was an easy guess. It had the same cobblestone ground and rock walls as the Lair, and the same layer of webs that covered the latter, but that's where the similarities ended. The center of the room was a column of rock covered with webs, and that pillar was crawling with thousands of spiders, none larger than a thumb. More tiny spiders ran across the ground, and the walls, and the ceiling.

I had hoped that this room would unlock spider webs for me, somehow. Instead, I'd received options to research and start summoning Greater Spiders, Small Tarantulas and Small Lesser Taratects, the latter of which seemed to have their own evolution tree and were, based on the bestiary's description, "weaker than their small normal baseline, but a warning sign for guilds whose dungeons start summoning them, as their greater forms stand at the summit of what spiders are capable of.”

Which was, admittedly, something interesting and worth investigating. However, it hadn't been webs. Sure enough, I'd found what I was looking for in the bestiary: "Small Webweaving Spider". Which, it turned out, this place apparently considered an entirely different species. So my "normal spiders" couldn't provide me with webs, if you excluded those that were found in these rooms. That one was on me; I really should have checked the bestiary instead of just assuming this place made sense. Lesson learned.

It also explained why my spiders were listed as "Small Normal Spider" whereas all the other bugs I had were "Small Lesser X".

I'd already sent my pixie out to find a wild webweaver for me, and had told Ulfric I was on the hunt for one. So far, no luck. The adults in the village were busy with all the construction, and if they didn’t want the kids to carelessly manipulate wild spiders, I understood that quite well, depending on what the local breeds were like.

I watched as Gwen walked to the center of the column and started inspecting it closely, uncaring of the spiders that shuffled about within inches of her face. Cirys, meanwhile, had elected to stand far back, and was eying the spiders that scampered on the ground warily. Samel had picked one up and stored it in a glass vial. Nedagg was skittering about, trying to catch and eat them. It was failing most of the time, but succeeding just enough so that the game stayed interesting. It reminded me a bit of a puppy scampering after a rolling ball.

"I think... yeah, I see eggs." She reached for her mace, then pulled at the webs so the eggs underneath were revealed. The spiders in the mass ruthlessly attacked the mace, but of course they weren't hurting it.

She reached in with her gloved hand and fished out a pinch of eggs. Her hand came back covered in angry spiders that were biting the hard leather.

"Hm... I'm guessing Taylor isn't controlling those. That's important to note. Samel, vial please."