Come into my Parlor

Srath cooed wickedly from deep within her web-strewn cave. She had found the space some...she didn't know how many years ago and didn't particularly care, but she had been quite happy to find such a space within the forest, and was just as pleased now. The cave was large, with many chambers and passages that she had filled with her most sturdy webbing, the silk nearly invisible in the darkness of the cave, and yet as strong as her own hardened shell and skin. All she had to do was place a weak hollow or helpless plus within the sticky webbing and her prey came right to her! And stronger prey attracted stronger hollows for her herself to consume, or to...experiment with.

Such as the individual hollow she was gazing on now. An Adjuchas, though one beneath her own strength, struggled weakly from within it's bindings. It's blood soaked into the webbing from it's many open wounds. She grinned down at the creature as she scurried across her webbing towards it, gently caressing it's cheek as she reached it. This was one of her current forays into attempting to fortify her own strength, and one she particularly enjoyed working on. She would admit that her mind, while sharp, was nothing like the truly maddening examples that so many others reached in their attempts for scientific advancement, but she still found the urge within herself to experiment now and then, and what better guinea pig for her experiments than an Adjuchas who had thought himself far beyond his meager strength.

The pathetic thing hadn't even needed to be lured in by her bait, he had deliberately attempted to seek her out. Even wrapped in her webs and unable to escape he'd been thrashing and yelling a quite impressive diatribe about what he would do when he got free, how she should fear him, and how he was the greatest predator of the Forest. Such fervor, she felt, was worth rewarding. So instead of simply devouring him, she decided to gift him with the chance to aid in her own development! So she had taken him and wrapped him up, beating and breaking him into submission, pumping her venom into him until his will broke and his body was too weak to struggle, and only then did she begin her work. She made sure to keep him docile, too physically broken to fight back, and too lost in his paranoid delusions to even think of escape, and all the while she would slowly feed him. Giving him souls of different levels of strength to observe how it effected him, gleefully reveling in the feeling of his spiritual pressure slowly becoming more dense over time. Soon, this fruit would ripen, and she would consume him, allow him the blessing to aid in her own ascension. But for now, she would simply have to wait and satisfy herself with the various souls she managed to catch normally. However, she oh so hoped this experiment had a satisfactory conclusion, she would love to repeat it.

After making sure her ripening fruit was still suitably cowed she made her way to the other thing of interest she currently held. So after double checking the various hollows she had set out, she hadn't felt anything send her web vibrating to alert her to the presence of new fodder, but she was nothing if not diligent, so check she did, she made her way to the cave holding her other treasure of interest. Held tightly within, oddly enough, a section of her garganta webbing was a amorphous blob of black space that seemed to warp perception around it. All other kinds of webbing had found themselves being...warped somehow by proximity, but when she created her webbing with the essence of her Garganta it seemed to stabilize the mass.

It was curious without a doubt, but as she gazed on it she couldn't help but wonder if it truly held any secrets that might aid her own endeavors, or if it was simply an oddity that she had brought into her lair.

Srath found herself pulled from her observation of the curious object by the sensation of something entering her current lair. She could feel the faint vibrations in her webs that represented that someone was passing by them, disturbing them, but not quite getting tangled within the strands of silk. Her curiosity peaked she began to make her way towards the source of the disturbance, walking along the walls and ceiling as easily as the ground to make way for the various webs and detritus that she had set up through the cave system, and before long she entered one of the larger chambers of the system, the first one that the intruder would enter as they made their way inside, and one that provided her a view of them as they came in.

It seemed to be an Adjuchas, though one with a more interesting appearance than most. The remaining shards of their previous identity seemed to be stitched onto it's face, and it's body was frankly littered with scars. Looking almost like someone had pulled them apart and reassembled them over and over again, an image furthered by the artificial nature of their appearance. Raggedly connected joints, pointed shoulders, over all a body that simply screamed "artifical". Unfortunately, even among Arrancar, that rarely actually meant anything, so beyond the fact that the less human aspect of their appearance spoke to a potential lack of power compared to the more humanoid upper echelons of Arrancar kind, all she knew was that the being was...well an Arrancar. The symbols seemingly carved and tattooed into their body were interesting however.

After taking in the appearance of the stranger, and tasting the...unfortunately less than exciting level of the beings seeming power, Srath decided to make the first move. She allowed herself to drop to the floor with a heavy thud, not particularly caring if the individual had seen her before then, and trained all of her eyes on them.

"Hello little Arrancar, I am so pleased to welcome a guest into my lair."

How cute, it thought it could fight her. It thought she cared if it meant harm or not, what it's goals were! Unfortunately for the little Arrancar, she really, really, really didn't.

"Oh, something of yours? And what might that be, and why should I allow you to take it? You are in my lair after all, and I doubt you'd have an easy, or survivable, time attempting to navigate. If you want anything from my lair, then you'll have to earn it. How exactly do you plan to do that little soul?"

She circled around the Arrancar as she spoke, observing it, making further note of the markings all over it's body. The more she looked at it the more she realized that this Arrancar had been experimented on before. Why? What was the original investigator attempting to do, to learn? What secrets did they uncover.

What secrets could she uncover?

"Odd for an Arrancar to be so naive. It doesn't matter who owned anything before, it's currently in my lair, so it's mine. Even if I was inclined to agree to simply let you have it, you still would owe me something in exchange simply for your safe passage through these caves, and for being so patient as to let you live."

Srath continued to circle, stopping only once her body was between him and the entrance. She wasn't yet sure what she'd do with this one, and she wasn't about to let it think that it could make such decisions for her. The little Arrancar's manner of speech interested her also, stilted and monotone. She was once again forced to acknowledge the obvious artificiality of the being in front of her, and she couldn't help to wonder what it's mind was more like. A golem, an adult, a child? She would know more.

"Oh, my mouth moves quite more than even the average individuals I think you'll find. You just don't know where to look."

"You cannot die? Oh, I'm sure you simply haven't had anyone try quite hard enough yet, though I am curious to see just how far your body can be pushed until you die~"

The little arrancar however had decided that they didn't want to simply continue talking, and took off deeper inside the cave system, causing Srath to laugh. The little thing was fast, faster than her certainly, but speed could only help so much in a cave, and far less in a cave filled with innumerable traps and webs of her own creation, particularly the ones designed to either trigger a Garganta to open and dump the victim directly into an even more dangerous web, or the waiting, cero-infused webs that when touched would erupt with the power of her own cero.

She didn't even bother chasing the arrancar yet, she alone knew how to read the vibrations of her webs, much like any mortal spider, tracking him here in her lair would be childs play. Instead she took the time to seal up the only exit to the cave system with her strongest webs, as strong as she herself was. She wasn't done with the Arrancar, and until she was there would be no escape.