Madame Tarantula

If she steadies herself and focuses, she can recall vague snippets and impressions...

weaving silk dolls under the hot African sun — the intense smell of burning flesh combined with outcries of devil and blasphemer —

But as soon as they start to solidify, they flutter away and are gone, lost to the annals of time.

What she does remember is Paris.

She still holds a love for the bustling melting pot of a city, despite all that has transpired there. Revisiting that period of her existence is as simple closing her eyes and submitting to the whim of memory.

There once was a time where she had woven her web thoroughly through that city, her name on the lips of aristocrats and paupers alike. Everyone knew of Madame's Doll Bordello — in truth more akin to a geisha house than a brothel — where all walks of life, for the right price, could enjoy wine and dinner with some exquisite company. She manned her establishment with all the grace and dignity one might expect, and it truly flourished. Both her patrons and the girls under her care were content and happy, and she shared in their joy.

And then came Alice — though that wasn't the child's name at the time — a frail waif of a boy that crossed paths with Madame during one of her errand trips into the city proper. There was something about the youth that sparked the lady spider's maternal instincts, and she swept him up, took him back to her house, her establishment. Taking him underneath her wing, she groomed and nursed him back into health. All the while the boy was enraptured and marveled at everything around him, clinging to Madame's skirt hem as she walked the manor, taking care of business.

Eventually, when the boy was healthy and strong, she had to figure out what to do with him. She didn't have the heart to simply put him back on the street where she had found him, but she also couldn't put him to work in a traditional sense in her household. As she tenderly explained this dilemma to the youth, brushing his blonde locks, the child dropped a bombshell. I want to be like your girls, and to be loved by you. While there was very little that shocked the Madame anymore, given her line of work, this plea gave her pause on how to proceed.

However, she couldn't say no to the youth, and so she pulled her strings, arranged for a forbidden procedure of sorts. And so the boy was reborn as Alice, and she remained under Madame's wing, the spider's favorite protege and aspiring second-in-command in a sense. Life was good.

Yet unbeknownst to Madame, rumblings of dissent were forming in her house. Either unhappy with the level of control she exerted over them, or her possessiveness, the exact details may never be known, for it was Alice, and not Madame, who caught the assassination plot, and put into motion the means to stop it. Her protege tried to warn her of the danger, but miscommunication and an unwillingness to believe that the situation was that far out of her control only meant that drastic measures had to be taken.

After the argument, the lady spider opted for an evening walk to clear her head and cool off. This absence was all the time Alice needed to act. When she returned from her walk, she was confronted by the vision of everything she had carefully built up over the decades being bathed by flame. In that moment, everything ran cold. She was oblivious to the pained and desperate pleas of her protege, yelling that it was us or them. She wouldn't hear it, refused to believe it, and left. Left Alice, left Paris, left it all behind to travel the world.

Personality
Pending updates.

Lore
As far as she is aware, she has always been. She knows she is old, but putting an exact number on it is difficult. Her kind's psyche can only hold so much data, so to speak, and every five hundred years or so they suffer a 'reset' — basic personal knowledge and learned skills remain, deep acquaintances are familiar, but all else is wiped clean. Unable to recall her parents or if she had any at all, and having not met any others exactly like her to find an appropriate label, she calls herself anansi, drawing inspiration from the african deity though as far as she knows, she has no connection with him.

The self-proclaimed Madame has the following innate talents and learned skills as well as their associated drawbacks:

○ Immortality: In the sense that she does not physically age and is resilient to sickness and disease. She may still be killed with enough damage through physical or magical means.

○ Glamour: She can change her appearance (hair color, eye color, sex, etc.). Smaller changes (such as hair/eye color) can be done at will, though larger changes (such as bodily make-up, e.g. physical sex) take time and thus are not often done at whim. Her default form is an androgynous one, physically male though one would never think it unless they were looking underneath her petticoat.

○ Crawling Form: To put it simply, she has the ability to convert her body mass to hundreds of smaller spiders equal to her weight. En masse, these arachnids hold her consciousness akin to a hivemind. As members of the group are either killed or lost, her consciousness slowly coalesces into the remaining critters. So long as a handful survive and are able to make it to a safe spot, she may return to her humanoid form.

○ Stepping Sideways: Over the cycles of her lifespan, the lady spider has gradually built up her "home web". One could consider it a pocket dimension of sorts. She travels to and from this place via reflective surfaces — it should be noted that what surfaces work for this is very finicky, often leaving her to rely on very still water or mirrors — a process which she has dubbed "stepping sideways". Her home web can be considered her natural habitat of sorts, and she must return to it for a period of rest (~8 hours) each earth day. While she can go without, extended separation from her home web is dangerous and will lead to a gradual weakening of her powers, and eventual death as she loses the ability to travel to her pocket dimension.

She can bring outsiders to her pocket dimension so long as she maintains physical contact with her guest while stepping sideways, though the wear and tear of such adventures generally tend to depend on the individual's species. As a base rule though, most things start experiencing a sense of disconnect and vertigo after a period of ~8 hours.

Currently her home web and pocket dimension takes the form of an old, sprawling victorian-styled manor surrounded by a sea of darkness, which she lovingly refers to as the "glass spiderweb castle".

○ Spider Communication: The ability to talk with spiders. Yep, that's it.

○ Supernatural Senses & Physicality: Akin to a vampire, she has heightened agility, strength, smelling, hearing, etc.

○ Languages: French and English are her current primary tongues though she retains a smattering of various languages, some dead and forgotten.

Relationships
Coming soon.