When she used to attend school, Arachne Tavey was one of those students whom teachers never paid much attention to, but once she left, they wished they had.
"Always in the Library. Reading. Quiet in class," the teaching assistant recalled. "Only spoke when she was spoken to. Raised her hand a few times, not often. We never saw her with any friends. Ate lunch on her own. Swept by the corridors in silence. It'd been like she was hardly there."
"She got good grades, though," the deputy head remarked. "She seemed reasonably bright. Bs, a few As. No A*s. That's still pretty impressive, even so. Especially for such an introvert."
"Nobody knows where she went afterwards," the headmaster chipped in. "Definitely not to Sixth Form. She brushed out of here quicker than she arrived. Never saw any college applications, either. Maybe she went straight into work? That would have been quite... a disappointment, if I'm honest."
"She didn't talk about her family," her tutor said. "Her parents didn't show up at any Reviews Evening. Turned up by herself. Obviously they were there - they existed - but we had no contact with them throughout her time at the academy. Other relatives? No. Siblings? No. Pets? Well, we knew she kept tarantulas. That's about it."
This is where the trouble started.