Character Profile: Maestra

Name: Maestra
Species: Spider (Arachne/spider/humanoid monster)
Setting: Mostly jungle or forest; in human settlements, a dark out-of-the-way nook, not among the public. Anytime.
Microstories: Hot Spider Tea
Sexuality: Pansexual
Ancestry: Uruguayan, Lao
Birthday: May 6th
Sections
She’s a Spider
Mother of Monsters
Wife of Dead
Maestra’s Mansion
Empty Nest Syndrome
Wild Children
Preferential Treatment
Webs for Walking
Webs for Wear
Hypnotic Venom
Life and Death Destiny
Military Marriage
Armed for Sports
She’s a Spider
Most of Maestra’s anatomy is related to spiders. She has ten eyes, two big ones with four smaller ones surrounding them, and fangs with her venom sacs at her chest. She has four arms and four legs, her legs jointed like spider legs and split and pointed at the ends, while her hard arms end in hands with sharp fingers. She has two pedipalps behind her shoulders which she can scrunch up or extend, used for extra finesse or to reach back to her abdomen. She has a large abdomen to her back with spinnerets at the end she uses for the creation of silk.
Mother of Monsters
Maestra is a motherly spider lady, who will treat guests with gentle kindness. She will knit guests gifts, invite them for tea, and generally show people care and affection. She’s a welcoming lady who has raised hundreds of children over her many years, starting from small eggs. All of her children are now full grown and left, aside from the ones who died, usually killed by their siblings. Her children, nearly every one, are monstrous beings, often but not always spider-like. They’re all either violent or subjugative or otherwise terrifying in some way, murderous or wild or viewing others as their property. No matter how monstrous Maestra’s children are she loves and appreciates them, always able to keep them under control but usually letting them run wild.
Wife of Dead
Maestra has had her children by numerous people over the years. She is quite old, though it’s unclear how old, and has had children in waves. Each person she has mated with she has killed and eaten, using some parts of the body to incubate the eggs with. She was sometimes, but not always, open about it. Sometimes she was open about it but took control of their mind in one way or another, although she was usually more gentle than that—sometimes her mate knew their fate and embraced it. These days, however, she’s past her mating period, so she will never again devour another mate, but she’s sure her children have found plenty to take.
Maestra’s Mansion
One of the people Maestra has mated with was a gentleman who had a mansion built in the jungle Maestra lived in. She describes him as a true gentleman who treated her with kindness despite her inhuman appearance and crazy children, so it may be that he was a willing mate, although when asked Maestra tends to dodge the question. Regardless, after his death she moved in to the mansion, filling it with spider webs and letting her children run around the place. This gave her a more private, safer place to raise her children and to take those she’s interested in to. As she had always had an interest in architecture, she took to the place with joy.
Empty Nest Syndrome
As Maestra no longer has mates, and all her children have grown, she now has empty nest syndrome, often lonely in her big mansion by herself. A few of her children visit on occasion, but for the most part she looks for other people to invite over to spend time with. She’s become friends with a few local lamias and other travelers, including a local one who uses some of her silk for fashion purposes and a noble lamia, also long-lived, whose secrets they keep. Some people she will invite to stay for a while, mothering them with suffocating kindness. Sometimes her invitation comes in the form of a web cocoon that’s difficult to refuse, and she keeps them around for a while.
This can be a problem if her children come visit.
Wild Children
With few exceptions Maestra’s children are mad and dangerous. Some are maniacal controllers, using powers they’ve inherited or gained to control the minds or bodies of others for their own purposes, sometimes mutating people into other forms. Some are outright violent, murdering others for sport or employment. Her children are so varied it’s difficult to tell when one is related, even when they share both parents. While many have features related to spiders, they come in all forms of monsters, some with features of other bugs, some reptiles, birds, and even some mammals. Some defy classification, and it’s never easy to tell if someone is a child of Maestra or comes from some other source. Some potential candidates include . . .
–Ada was never seen in full, but she seems to have similar abilities to Maestra.
–Melba is a spider creature like Maestra, but she also seems to have the ability to transform people into spiderlings over a period of time.
Preferential Treatment
While Maestra is kind and gentle to visitors and will treat them like her own children, she will not treat them better than her own children. She has all the appearance and intention of treating visitors well and helping them and being motherly, but if one of her children show up and hurt, harass, or have designs on the visitor, she will side with her child. She doesn’t seem malicious in this, and rather brushes it off as her children just being their rambunctious selves. She actually finds their actions, regardless of how horrible, endearing, and will gush over how cute they are even as a victim may be screaming for help. Generally it’s best to not visit Maestra when her children are around.
Webs for Walking
Maestra can create multiple types of silk, including sticky and non-sticky, some built for strength and some for softness. Before she moved into her mansion she would live surrounded by sticky webs coated among the trees, primarily to hinder anyone from reaching her, although she sometimes used it for prey or to find someone to share a cup of tea with. After she moved into the mansion she still surrounded it with webs to keep people away, but she also put webs all throughout the mansion to climb to higher floors, using silk that was sticky enough to hold onto but too sticky to get out of. Nowadays she has fewer webs around the mansion since she doesn’t have her children to protect, but she does keep a few to scare off people.
Webs for Wear
Maestra can also make silk used for clothing, and has taken to knitting clothing and accessories. She’s learned to dye the silk to knit in different colors, and tends to give gifts to visitors and keep extra silk on hand.
Hypnotic Venom
When Maestra bites someone she can inject hypnotic mind control venom into them that will make them obedient and suggestible. She can do this to take mates, but more often than not she’ll use it for slightly less dubious purposes, such as making someone be a maid for her mansion or a caretaker for her children (although her caretakers didn’t tend to last long among her children). She’ll also use it to make someone relax or silence bad thoughts, although she’s certainly not licensed to do such psychological things. She mostly just wants to help them feel better. She has also used this to make people forget they met her. The hypnotic effects fade after a time, but the psychological changes linger.
Life and Death Destiny
Maestra comes from an old entity, one she says she saw rarely and doesn’t know much about, but she says she was the firstborn of it. She says she was told she would have a strong destiny, and subsequently looked after her many siblings. They were rambunctious, and “looking after them” sometimes involved killing them as they tried to kill her. Eventually she rose above her siblings and was given the title of mother, to continue the line of monsters she came from. She doesn’t know where this line came from but doesn’t question it.
Military Marriage
More than one of Maestra’s mates have been military officers. She has an interest in hearing of brave warriors on the field of battle and finds officers alluring. She can become rather more violent than she normally is if she falls for a military officer who then tries to fight back, but she enjoys the struggle against them. She keeps numerous keepsakes from soldiers and warriors she’s met over the years.
Armed for Sports
If a sport has a big focus on use of arms Maestra enjoys it. A favorite of hers is table tennis, where she will use four paddles at once even though that’s not necessarily in the rules. Slightly more in-line with the rules is where she will use two paddles and go against two people. (Only slightly more in-line.)