Going to post this now despite some of the writing being a bit rushed, since I can feel the exhaustion starting to kick in (I am going to extinguish the sun if it doesn't cool down soon). Hopefully this one is better than my last attempt, but tell me if there's anything I need to change or fix. Also, I refrained from including a picture because I know some people can't stand spiders, but on a scale of 1 to 10 does anyone here mind?

[hider=Spider][centre][h1]????[/h1][/centre][u]Age of Death:[/u] — It's complicated.
[u]Gender:[/u] — Female
[u]Race:[/u] — Spider
[u]Psychology:[/u] — Isolated. Wants nothing more than to experience meaningful interactions but is nonetheless terrified of what might happen if she tries.
[h3][centre]⑇⑉What You Remember⑉⑈[/centre][/h3][hider=Simulacrum]The nightwatchman glanced towards the spider sitting on the library wall, warily leaning away from the large arachnid despite the almost two meters of space between them. A moment later, he turned his attention to operating the building’s warding scheme, whereupon he seemed to quickly put the spider out of his mind, his focus shifting instead to grumbling under his breath about the wards being overkill and a massive pain in his arse; apparently either not noticing or unaware that those very same wards should have deterred any natural vermin, in addition to their security functions.

While she had by now come to see the guard and his nightly patrols as more of a mildly annoying obstacle than anything else, she did at least agree with him that the wards were annoying – if for completely different reasons. An obnoxious buzz incessantly pressing against the edge of her awareness and urging her to leave. She could see how it might be enough to deter her lesser kin, not to mention the difficulties it introduced to hunting, but she wouldn’t leave. Not yet. Not when she was sure she almost had it.

How long had it been? How many hours spent peering over the shoulders of unsuspecting students and eavesdropping on lectures?

The spider waited a minute or two, though her anticipation seemed to stretch it into eternity, then, once she was confident the guard wouldn’t be returning any time soon, she scurried over to a recess she had long since come to think of as her workshop, nestled between a shelf and a wall and empty save for what scraps remained of her previous experiments.

She began to weave, limbs twitching and tapping to a strange but practised rhythm, while her spinnerets got to work extruding silk into odd geometric patterns. 

Minutes later, the spider moved back to observe the odd web she had created. It evidently wasn’t any kind of web a spider would naturally produce, and while not of any human-devised spellcasting system, one with the right expertise would no doubt immediately recognise the array for what it was.

She scuttled forward, the movement almost visibly suffused with her excitement and anticipation. And then she slowed, apprehension leaking into confident motions as she drew closer to the tiny web, grinding them down to a halt. She suddenly felt nervous; a feeling she’d grown accustomed to each time this part of the night rolled around. 

What if… Maybe… No. 

The spider steeled herself, pushing the unnecessary thoughts from her mind. The spider’s anatomy wasn’t suited to shaking her head as a human might, but her limbs twitched to much the same sentiment. Placing her pedipalps upon her creation the spider pushed her mana into the ritual and prayed for it to work.

For several long seconds nothing seemed to happen, and the spider seemed to almost visibly deflate in dejection. She was just about to start the process of dismantling and consuming the web – wary that her experiments might end up being discovered should she not – when she felt it; a twinge at the edge of her consciousness, like a fly struggling to escape from an entirely mental web.

Scurrying out of her workshop, the spider found a human standing just on the other side of the shelf; one that looked almost exactly like the guardswoman who’d left not an hour earlier. Tentatively the spider lifted one of its forelimbs and gave an approximation of a wave, and like a puppet controlled by strings, the ‘human’ waved back.

[list][*][u][1][/u] Possibly the foremost – and likely only – expert on structured spellcasting amongst spiders, she is capable of, through trial and error, adapting spells into a form compatible with her anatomy, using a combination of ritualism and web-based artifice. Being maintained by external silk bindings, spells cast using these methods are exceptionally stable but are vulnerable to damage to those bindings and can only be operated so far from them.
[*][u][2][/u] Through countless hours of observation and tinkering, she has adapted a spell to create an illusionary body. While the illusions produced by this spell are intuitive to control, doing so requires active concentration. Maintaining this spell is relatively easy, however, being a spider, she lacks the mana reserves to cast the spell more than once or twice every hour or so.[/list][/hider]
[h3][centre]⑇⑉What You Don’t ⑉⑈[/centre][/h3][hider=Hated Creature]Why did it always have to turn out like this? It wasn’t… She’d thought… hoped that… This time was meant to be different! Mairi was supposed to understand. But when she’d shown her friend the truth she hadn’t understood, instead, she’d seemed afraid. 

…

The villagers had found her. How had they found her?! She couldn’t think of any way for an ordinary villager to track a single spider… Had some kind of monster hunter or diviner been passing through? Had… 

The spider halted her line of reasoning. She could think about it later but now wasn’t the time. Right now, she just needed to run.

Knowing that for all her eight legs, the villagers could easily outpace her on foot and guessing that whatever means they had used to track her this far would probably divine her exact location sooner or later, the spider abandoned any attempt at being stealthy. Injecting her mana into a portion of the threads that crisscrossed her body in elaborate patterns, an ectoplasmic shell started to take shape around her, rapidly forming into a human guise that would by now be familiar to almost all the villagers.

As expected, it didn’t take long for the villagers to take notice, and despite breaking into a run she made it all of ten steps before the alarm was called. Made it almost twenty more before a force bold struck her in the back, flinging her artificial body forwards. 

The spider’s heart dropped, and not just because the attack had caused her shell to unravel, dissipating almost as fast as it had formed. An ordinary villager would not have had the means to track her down, but her friends? The ones she’d trusted enough to teach magic to. They certainly would be.

The next spell to strike her was a weaker variation of the same spell. It was a common theme amongst variations of the spell that they were more suited for injuring as opposed to killing, but this one in particular was designed to stun rather than inflict anything worse. To the spider, as small and fragile as she was, the distinction may as well not have existed. 

She died in an instant, her final thoughts on whether she was truly so undeserving of love.[/hider][/hider]