= Drawlloween Story #2 - Auntie Hauntie =
 
The Arachnids and the Makros on Tublua never had a special harvest time, the trees in the Makro forests have always borne fruit all year round, the pastures are consistently grazed by the fattest and largest cattle to be found anywhere in the galaxy, and the Arachnids trappers in the tops of the mile-high tree giants are also always busy clearing their barely visible nets of insects up to the size of men and birds up to the size of dinosaurs.
When all seasons are so lavishly blessed with everything edible, it doesn't really occur to pick a special date in the year to celebrate it. Although the coexistence of the macros with the humans, or micros, as they now call themselves on Tublua, since their arrival, over a hundred years ago now, was not accompanied by harmony - quite the opposite - the macros did not miss another opportunity to celebrate, even if it came from those hated imps that spread everywhere, and the arachnids, which had many children to entertain, certainly did not, too.
So the Thanksgiving feast was established for decades now, a time when the Arachnid men who had moved far away set out to revisit their home web, showering their sisters' children with small tasty gifts from their new homeland.
Samantha Bal's sister's husband, Ludoviko, hadn't needed a long trip, he was from Klendathu, a relatively new arachnid city named after a planet out of human literature where a handful of micro-researchers had settled with the Bal family and a few others, and had chosen a Micro-bride in Miranda, and even if they only had seven children, two sets of twins and once triplets, he couldn't have been happier at the sight of them, the pattern on their abdomens and the number of eyes they inherited from Dodo, mixed with Mira's soft features in their little faces, and the patter of their spider legs as they frolicked together.
 
Since Sam was the only sibling of their mother Mira who had to take over the task of bringing presents, and the little ones were already pestering her a month before the festival, she decided to reintroduce another tradition from Earth to keep them busy in the meantime: the fright festival Halloween. She studied what could be adopted from it and came up with the idea of a Haunted House, and to make it a bit more interesting, in the form of an Escape Room.
 
Sam almost couldn't keep up with drawing the plans and thinking up the puzzles fast enough alongside her research work, that's how quickly the good half-dozen spiderlings finished turning them into reality, and so just a few days later the haunted 'house' was ready: an opaque cocoon of black-dyed spider silk, with seven rooms where each of the kids played their part as terrifying characters from earthly folklore, helping people solve the puzzles: The boys played Dracula, Frankenstein's monster and a skeleton, while the girls portrayed a werewolf, a mummy, a ghost and a zombie.
The entrance to the house had to be made in the form of sweets, and Sam herself was dressed as a witch at the exit, completely absorbed in her role, and after the children, who despite the disguise still looked hilariously cute, she at the end gave a huge scare to those who had to take the exit of shame, since they had not managed to solve the riddles in the appropriate time.
 
The house was such a great success that word even spread to the Macro territory, and the children were asked to build a similar puzzle house for them. The whole gang of spiders from Dodo's kin participated, and so that one, too, was spun off in no time, heading toward the Macro settlement near Klendathu.
This was also a huge success at first, but when the macros realized that the last creature was a Micro, who even dared to scare them, they indignantly went back to their settlement, not knowing that this very witch was one of the reasons why the tensions between the Macros and Micros flared up again. Fewer and fewer curious Macros came, and already in the afternoon no more visitors arrived, so the little ones went back to the city with their father, the bit of sadness comforted away by the mountains of sweets the Macros had brought.
 
Sam stayed a while longer, roaming the woods, the destination of her earlier research as an exobiologist specializing in food chains before devoting herself entirely to genetic modification, and sought out the place where she performed her rite of passage, where she was inducted into the coven of Cruz's followers. If it weren't for her family, she wouldn't be able to wait to discard her mortal shell and take her place in Cruz's garden. With the fun she was having with her nephews and nieces, maybe she should reconsider and start a family of her own with her perpetual fiancé, Oleg.
 
When she returned to the macro haunted house late in the evening, she heard loud banging inside. Someone had broken in and was tearing apart the furniture, and judging by the volume, they had to be macros. Even though no macro was likely to stop by for some puzzle and creepy fun in exchange for a handful of candy anymore, the fact that someone was just destroying her little darlings' work like that was upsetting to Sam.
She snuck into the house, where two macros were tearing apart the decorations in two of the rooms. She strapped the hoverpack on her back, with which one of her nieces played the ghost, and confronted one of the young macros. The latter, however, immediately struck at Sam with his bare fist, and was astonished when the latter did not dodge, but his fist disappeared into a mouth that opened on Sam's face like a space portal in front of him. A powerful slurp from Sam, and not only his arm, but the whole guy disappeared into her maw. What remained was the grotesque image of a woman with a pointy hat, dressed in a black costume, from the bottom of which hung out a bare belly eight times the size of her body itself, in which the guy delivered kicks and punches, but all of which fizzled out on the elastic wall of her belly.
That's when the second guy came in, and Sam found herself again in the role of the fearsome witch, only this time the second guy really had to fear for his life. She recited some sayings of a dwarfish, Macro-devouring being from an ancient mythological text of the Macros, the true meaning of which she herself had not understood until she learned of Cruz's coven, and when the guy tried to make his escape, Sam hovered over him, and simply put in a dive with her mouth wide open. Due to the tremendous weight the hoverpack had to support, the batteries were exhausted after only a few moments, and not a second too soon.
Sam herself was surprised how easy it was for her to devour them. The last and first time had been at her initiation, by the skin of her teeth, and had she failed, she would have become the head witch's meal herself. But now, with further genetic modifications, which included the biological use of the latest Hammerspace technology, it was a piece of cake for her. And the turmoil that took place in the massive sack beneath her heart produced a sense of well-being in her that she had never experienced before. So she endured it, restraining her digestion and concentrating on it only after it had subsided. Sam was curious to see how long it would take her this time, the first time she had lain in the forest for a whole week and had to listen to the ridicule of her fellow witches for days. This time she was sure she could get it done with sleeping over it once. Too bad, she would probably have to torch the house the next day, since she would probably have to relieve herself on the spot. Maybe she could think of something so that in the future she wouldn't have to face another mess like the one of the next morning, in case something like that happened again.