[centre][h1][color=bc8dbf]The Spider[/color][/h1][/centre]
From the moment the spider had started paying attention to the others, she had felt overwhelmed. No small part of her wanted to interact with the people present, was desperate to introduce herself to each and every one of them and find out everything about them in turn… but at the same time, at that very moment, it was just too much. 

There were simply too many of them. Too many ifs and buts and maybes for her to contend with in her mind. 

So when an opportunity arose – the strange hairless woman whose attention danced from person to person, offered a greeting to the spider’s simulacrum – the simulacrum didn’t respond, simply shrinking back upon itself as the spider desperately tried and failed to think up an acceptable response to the greeting. 

Only when the strange woman’s attention shifted once more, did the spider realised she’d missed her chance, her body and simulacrum both sagging with a warring mixture of relief and disappointment, not that she would make any move to rectify the missed opportunity; instead settling in to observe the other interactions happening around, all the while wishing that somewhat might deign to approach her simulacrum and at the same time desperately hoping that they did not.

The spider couldn’t help but feel a pang of jealousy as she watched a short girl manage to actually respond to the bald woman’s greeting. But it was the marble-skinned man who's words managed to properly catch her attention, as he asked a question that hadn’t once occurred to her.

Did she have a name? Obviously, not one that she could recall, but then, had she ever had one? From the single memory she could parse it seemed almost weird to think she might once have had one, but at the same time now that she thought on it, the spider felt almost as though something was missing; a hole where a name might go…

Before the spider could figure out any answers to the peculiar question, she was snapped out from her musings by the approach of yet more people. Once more she hoped that an opportunity to interact with them might arise, even as her subconscious mind undermined that very wish by edging her simulacrum away from their approach.

When the first of the newcomers – a pikeman with horns of a sort the spider didn’t think she’d ever seen on a human – announced his suspicions of the group and demanded they stay where they were, the spider decided that maybe this particular person wasn’t one she wanted to talk to. When he moved to threaten the lady that offered greetings – a motion so fast that even with her eight eyes the spider had to reposition herself to see where he went – she decided he definitely wasn’t someone she wanted to talk to.

At the very least, the other two newcomers seemed more agreeable than the pikeman, both acting to talk their more aggressive fellow down. 

When the elderly woman – the shaman the spider presumed – managed to produce a gust of wind with a mere tap of her staff, the spider was forced to momentarily retreat back behind cover, wondering exactly how the woman had cast what was clearly a spell with so little fanfare…

At the same time, inadvertently responding to the spider’s actions and intentions, the simulacrum takes several steps back of its own, and to any observing close enough, they might notice that while the magical construct responded to the world around it – the sudden gust of wind whipping its clothes wild about – the world did not acknowledge it in kind – ash and debris passing unimpeded through its illusory body. Of course, from where she was sheltered the spider was unable to observe this phenomenon – though she’d hardly have been surprised had she been – nor did she notice the way the shaman looked right at her, if only for a moment.

Once the wind had died down and she felt relatively confident the shaman wasn’t about to start it back up again, the spider peeked back out of her hidey-hole and returned to her people-watching. 

It was becoming increasingly clear that of those that had come to around the spider, like her, none of them seemed to remember their names, nor presumably much else of their pasts. The three that had stridden in from a little ways distance on the other hand apparently retained knowledge of their names and pasts, which seemed like a pretty important distinction to make. What was it that made the two groups different? 

Was it just a matter of location? Perhaps some highly localised spell or phenomena had caused them all to lose their memories? The spider could certainly believe such a thing might be possible, but at the same time, the foul-tempered pikeman had seemed to indicate that the spider and her fellow amnesiacs had just shown up out of the blue, and their group was certainly disparate enough to call into question whether they’d been connected before now.

Ever so cautiously, the spider extracted herself from the safety of her cover, then when she was sure no one was walking by to potentially step on her, she scurried over to another patch of cover, before repeating the process several more times in an attempt to map out the area her fellow amnesiacs had arrived and to see if she could identify anything special about it.