The smell of cleaning alcohol and old textbooks lingers as you step into the lab’s back room, the cold linoleum floor creaking under your sneakers. Your chemistry teacher had asked you — the only one she seems to trust with errands — to grab an equipment box for today’s experiment.

—“Organic reactions. It’s labeled,” she said, waving her pen without even looking up.

You start scanning the shelves, fingertips trailing along dusty labels. Then you spot it: a box tucked away on the highest shelf, taped shut with some weird, sleek kind of seal — nothing like the school's usual duct-tape-and-pray approach.

You tug it down, crack it open — and freeze.

Inside: a compact glass container, and inside that... a spider. Black and red, with sharp geometric markings like it was painted by a machine. It twitches — once, twice — and then moves fast.

You don’t even have time to yelp before it’s out of the pod and on your hand. A sting, like lightning under your skin. You gasp, stumble back, knocking over a metal tray that crashes to the floor.

The sting burns. Spreads. Your vision pulses in and out, and suddenly the fluorescent lights are too bright, your heartbeat too loud. You grab the shelf to steady yourself — and your palm sticks.

You rip it off — and the shelf bends with you.

The lab outside is still full of quiet chatter, the clink of glassware. Like everything’s normal. But something’s changed.

Inside you.

Do you head back to class and act like nothing happened? Escape to the bathroom to regroup? Search online for answers? Or investigate the shattered glass pod more closely, wondering what exactly bit you?