Mimi fell into a pit of spiders.

In better times this would be no problem. She loved spiders! They had fuzzy little legs and cute button eyes and round abdomens! They were great conversation partners! But these spiders ignored her warm greetings and entreaties of friendship. They hissed. They chittered. They swarmed her.

Golly.

She screamed for help. Spiders entered her mouth. She closed up her throat valves but she could feel them inside skittering with their spindly limbs, golly gee whiz. She waved her arms. Spiders covered her arms in a black writhing mass, they were dragging her under, gosh golly gee whiz they were ruining her DESIGNER CLOTHES. She'd spent hard-earned money on them and they were tearing holes in it all! Unforgivable!

She summoned two dozen rubees and stabbed all the nearby spiders, scraped them off her clothes, crushed them, chopped them, pulverized them, but more just kept coming. They were infinite. She was in the Dimension of Spiders and she was doomed.

Somewhere near her she heard the telltale sound of Dimentio's teleportation as he unfolded from thin air, hovering above the pit. In the dark his stupid jester outfit practically glowed. He proffered his signature smile. "It appears that you're having some trouble... do you need assistance?"

WELL WHAT DO YOU THINK she would've said, but her mouth was clogged with spiders. They were crawling over her floral-print silk-crepon Monova™ designer dress. They were crawling over her lace-trimmed ruffled Angelina™ designer bonnet. They were crawling into her air vents. They would clog up her machinery and then she'd be done for, so hurry up and help doofus! She waved an arm. Spiders dripped from her arm. Spiders dripped from her face.

For one agonizing moment Dimentio continued smiling at her with his stupid smile and did absolutely nothing.

Then he snapped his fingers. The world shifted ten feet, she fell onto the ground. Spiders poured off her. Her dress was tattered, her gears were discombobulated, her arms oozed black sludge.

She yelled, "YOU DUNCE, YOU TELEPORTED ME INTO A PIT OF SPIDERS,"

"I'd shush if I were you. We wouldn't want to attract undue attention. Who knows what could be lurking around here?"

She opened her mouth to counteract, but he was right. That was the worst part. She dropped her voice and tried to express the depths of her fury via menacing whisper.

"You said this dimension had a bounty of gems. 'Gems galore! Gems to make your eyes water! Gems like salads in a salad!— some dumb metaphor, I don't remember. And then you teleported me into a pit of spiders."

"But I thought you were fond of spiders. You happen to be one, after all! Admittedly a robotic imitation—"

"I don't like spiders when they're trying to eat me alive. Where. Are. The. Gems."

"Ah, well..."

He looked around. She looked around.

What they saw: darkness, spiders, cobwebs, ominous gaping tunnels, ominous gaping pits, more darkness and more spiders. No gems in sight.

"Dear me. What a shame." Of course he sounded completely upbeat. "It seems I erred in my triangulation, so the calculations were slightly skewed! We may be off target."

"Off target."

"There are indeed gems in this dimension, I swear on my word. On my honor as a magician. We'll simply have to travel some distance to reach them—"

"Can't you teleport us there? How far is it?"

"I haven't a clue! I've never been to this dimension before, you see. This is the only landing point I have. And we can't bypass the journey when we have no idea of the destination. But as they say, the journey is more important than the destination—"

Mimi resisted strangling him. "You ruined my clothes. Do you know how many rubees this dress cost?"

"A true tragedy. I weep at your plight."

"And my gears are misaligned! I can feel crushed spider bits in my machinery! I think my arms are leaking and it's all your fault! Can't we go back and find a better place?"

He made a sweeping gesture at the total darkness that surrounded them. And all the spiderwebs. "Mimi? I don't think the denizens here care about your fashion sense. Since arrival I've seen nothing besides darkness, some scattered corpses, many feral spiders who are apparently bent on the destruction of your designer clothes—"

Mimi resisted strangling him. Again.

"—but look towards the silver lining, once we've obtained and sold off those lovely gems you can use the expanded budget for whatever your heart desires. For now I'm sure you have a way to shake off your injuries, so won't you use it? Who knows what other creatures could be lying in wait?"

Cue a rumbling from above. The sounds of chittering magnified a thousandfold. She blanched, terrible for her complexion, but the thought of more spiders ruining her day was not fun.

"I do think you should hurry."

She hurried. Snap! went her neck, her head corkscrewed, her gears realigned, her false eyes unfolded into legs, her legs folded out to reveal her elegant true self. She stretched out her six proper limbs and skittered onto the side wall, a spidery paragon of perfection. Not everybody shared this opinion, some ran screaming, but to his credit Dimentio didn't bat an eye. Though could he even blink?

In this form she loomed over him. Her sensors worked to make up for her reduced vision, enhancing smell and touch. She felt foul winds from below, thick with decay. The air had the deathly chill of a place sunlight hadn't touched in centuries. Something about this world was uniquely rotten.

The ground hissed. From cracks in the stone white bodies broiled forth, a mass of unidentifiable insects. They clumped on the ground and raised hissing insectoid heads. They had a very murderous look in their eyes.

"Can we go now," she said, as they skittered up the wall. Towards her.

Dimentio floated up, unperturbed as always. "Of course, of course, let's be off! Most worlds have at least a few reasonable inhabitants, I'm sure this one is no exception. We can find someone and persuade them to lend a limb! Perhaps they could heal you up. Perhaps they could fix your clothing as well? Don't you agree?"

"Sure," she muttered, already making her way on the ceiling. The swarm of chittering insects crawled after her. "And you'll help, right?"

In response, he vanished.

"You've got to be kidding me."


Spider Hell was the worst place Mimi had ever been. There were spiders everywhere. Not the cute kind. The "I'll spit acid at you" kind. The "I'll emerge from the darkness when you least expect it and eat your legs" kind. The "I'll pretend to be an innocuous corpse then sneak up and try to kill you" kind.

In another time and place, perhaps an elegant ballroom party where all attendants were dressed in their Sunday best, she would have been delighted to meet so many fellow mimics. They could've dined together. Very classy. But since they were trying to murder her, she gave them no passes. She'd lost three (three!) whole legs to their fangs, their venom, their who-knows-what. Sure she could fire rubees at them and stab them to death but sometimes they got a hit in first, and that sucked. Also, they were her beloved rubees. The jeweled currency of her home world, red and sharp and shiny in all the right ways. It hurt to be rid of them, even if it was for the charitable cause of saving her life from spiders that wanted to murder her.

Besides the spiders, there were also: deadly spikes, fake walls with deadly spikes behind them, fake floors with deadly spikes below them. Cobwebs that gunked up her machinery. Pretty glowing mushrooms that looked like they might heal you but actually tasted like dirt. Tiny tunnels where she had to curl up and roll through blind, hoping nothing was waiting in the darkness. Those stupid white bugs that liked to dig out of the walls and chase her and never gave you a moment to rest. Undulating cylinder things covered in teeth. She refused to call them spiders. What kind of spiders had teeth on their exteriors?

Dimentio was more help than she'd expected. Was he actually sorry about leading her to Spider Hell? Probably not. He had the disturbing habit of laughing maniacally whenever a spider jumped out of the darkness and tried to eat her face off, which happened too often. But despite being invisible half the time he still helped on occasion, lighting dark areas and doing fun things like distracting the spiders with illusions and squeezing them to death in his weird magic cubes. The spiders screamed when he did that. But after what they did to her designer clothes, she had no pity for them.

The caterpillar was the high point of their journey. She found one trapped in a glass jar, very green, very cute, very innocent looking. It made sad blubbering noises. Then it saw her approaching and shied away in fear.

Alright, she knew her spider form wasn't conventionally attractive, but that totally broke her heart. It was also a trap. Obvious trap. Her trained mimic's eye could see the little bristling limbs waiting to strike out, the barely hidden fangs, the mouth that was actually a single eye staring out with unabashed hunger. Like everything else here, of course, it wanted to eat her.

"You're breaking my heart," she informed the weird caterpillar thing. "I should eat you for that."

The caterpillar sobbed.

Dimentio said, "Would you murder an innocent creature? How cruel of you."

"Come on! That thing's too cute to live down here, I bet it'll try to murder me first. And it has hidden fangs. You can see them, you have a good eye." She tapped the glass with a spindly limb. "Hey you. Are you a murderer."

The caterpillar sobbed harder.

"Totally a murderer." She tapped the glass with her second limb. The caterpillar cowered in the corner making pathetic mewling sounds. She looked back to her partner in crime. "So, do you have any ways to take care of this thing inside the glass? Since who knows what's gonna happen if I break the jar-"

Snap. A glassy cube materialized around the caterpillar, which screamed as the walls encroached into its little bubble of safety. Fiery explosions detonated inside the cube. The screams got louder. When the cube vanished the only things left were some crispy bug parts.

Mimi broke the jar and ate them. They were delicious.

She was on the lookout for other caterpillars the whole way, but sadly they didn't find any. Just the usual litany of spiders and spikes and other things that wanted to kill them. As far as dimensions went, this was an awful one to visit. The darkness, the stench in the air, the unceasingly murderous tendencies of every living thing they'd come across. They couldn't even stop to rest, or those white insects would swarm from the ground and brandish murderous chittering mandibles at them until they fled.

Yep, this place had some serious issues.