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In the evil headquarters, Kayden was pacing back and forth near the entrance while Hazel was looking through Leah’s telescope.

“I still can’t see anything. Oh wait.” Hazel focused the lens. “I think I can see them at the edge of town. Why aren’t they going in.”

She waited a few more minutes. “I can’t see Leah anymore but what is that?”

Kayden heard the worry in Hazel’s voice and walked over to her. “What is it?”

“A human girl with a net. She’s got Frank and the others.”

“All of them?”

“I still can’t see Leah.”

“That’s because Leah isn’t there.”

Both Seth and Hazel turned to the entrance and saw Leah crawling in and she really looked mad.

“We’ve been betrayed. Frank’s incompetence has made a mess of things. Somehow Lilly’s force field is guarding the town and we can’t get through.” She looked evilly in Lydia’s direction. “I’ve got a promise to keep.”

Hazel and Seth were part of an evil gang, but they’d never killed anything but flies before. They didn’t know if they could really kill another spider like Lydia or even watch. They held into each other and trembled.

Lydia saw Leah stalking toward her and struggled hard in the web. It didn’t work, but she was panicked. She didn’t want to be eaten and kept thinking about all those times she’d paralyzed flies in her own web, and then sucked their guts from the inside out. This was going to hurt.

“A promise is a promise, Lydia,” Leah said as she slowly approached, hunger written on her face. “Lilly didn’t stay out of the fight, so you have to pay the price.”

“Please, don’t,” begged Lydia. “I’m sure it was a mistake. If you let me talk to Lilly, I’m sure I can get her to cooperate. Just don’t kill me, please.”

“Too late.” Leah prepared her stinger to inject paralyzing venom into the rival spider.

Lydia had stopped struggling but was trembling as she faced her last moments of life. She never thought she’d have to sacrifice herself to be part of the good spiders. She wished she was brave and could say something sarcastic, but fear totally freaked her out.

“Stop.”

Leah looked up and past Lydia to see…Frank. He was crawling out from the shadows beyond the web holding Lydia.

“How did you get back here so fast. I left you so far behind.”

“It can’t be Frank, Leah,” said Hazel. I saw Frank and the others get caught in a net by a human girl.”

“Then who…?” Leah was so confused she stopped walking and pulled back her stinger.

They felt what they thought was an earthquake. Then a human hand forced the entrance door wider, tearing a big hole in the hideout. After that, Lilly and the rest of her spider gang jumped in.

“We’ve got out outnumbered,” declared Lilly. “Surrender.”

“No, I won’t.” Even though she couldn’t win, Leah decided it was better to kill Lydia and rob Lilly of total victory.

“Yes, you will.” The other Frank spider jumped in Leah’s way and they started to battle. Frank wasn’t used to fighting, especially other spiders, and Leah was a really vicious and cheating fighter. He found himself on his back facing Leah’s terrible mandibles. She was going to rip his belly out.

But the time it took to do that gave Lilly’s spiders a chance to jump in. Surrounding Leah from all sides, they knocked her back, giving Frank time to get on his feet again. Then Leah felt something wet and gooey all over her body.

“What’s this? Paralyzing slime?” Even as she said the words, she could feel herself going slower and slower and then she couldn’t move at all. “What are your orders my masters?”

“Just stay there and stop being a pest,” Frank answered. He looked up and saw Danaerys outside holding a closed net with this world’s Frank and his followers inside.

“In you go,” Danaerys ordered Kayden and Hazel. They obeyed even without the slime seeing how they were beaten. Frank ordered Leah to follow them, and she quietly complied.

With the evil spider gang in Danaerys’ net, her Frank turned to Lilly. “Mission accomplished.”

She hugged Frank without meaning to and then stepped back. “Um…we couldn’t have done it without you? Thank you so much.”

“Done what,” asked the Frank in the net?

Lilly looked at him through the net. “Stopped your evil plan, of course.”

“But how?”

“You were right that my force field can only last ten minutes, but that’s only because the battery runs out so fast. When we talked to the humans last night, the two who we freed from the slime yesterday morning, they helped convince the rest of the humans. They knew when the slime wore off, that something bad had happened. They were willing to work with us to stop you.”

“You mean…”

“That’s right, Frank. Hooking the projector into the town’s power grid gave it an unending amount of power. Gloria worked through the night expanding the lens so it would cover the whole town. We were just lucky your slime turned into a mist so you couldn’t see what happened.”

“But what did you do with Leah?”

“The slime fell off of the humans but there was plenty lying around to collect. It will take days for it to become inactive, so we collected some so we could use it on you if we needed to.”

“But Frank. That Frank. And the human girl. All the other humans are inside the force field.

“Remember that baby chick from yesterday,” Danaerys asked. “That was me. You see, we’re from another universe. That’s why there are two Franks, you from this world, and that Frank from ours.”

“That’s crazy,” Frank in the net complained.

“I guess you don’t read a lot of science fiction, do you?” Gloria was smirking at Frank in the net. “There are tons of stories about other universes, parallel dimensions, and people and spiders having identical counterparts.”

“Actually, more fantasy than science fiction,” said Danaerys’ Frank. It’s a matter of magic.”

“Cool,” said Lilly. Could you stay here and teach us?”

“Better not,” replied Frank. He looked at Danaerys and said, “It can cause plenty of trouble.”

“How?” said Frank in the net.

The other world Frank looked at Danaerys pointedly. “If someone uses magic irresponsibly…ahem…bad things can happen to certain spiders.”

“Oh come on, Frank. Those were all jokes,” replied Dani.

“We can talk about that later, okay?”

Danaerys started to sulk a little robbing her of the joy of victory.

Uh…Frank,” said Lilly. Are you going to stay in our world for now?”

“I really hadn’t planned to, at least not any longer than to figure out what to do with evil Frank and the gang.”

“That’s too bad…I mean I guess I understand.” Lilly sounded disappointed and it was clear she had a crush on other world Frank.

“So, what sort of laws and punishment do you have for spiders who enslave humans and try to take over the world,” Frank asked.

“I…I don’t think…” Lilly started to answer then Gloria interrupted.

“I’ve been researching that on my tablet and technically, we don’t have laws. I mean what Frank, the evil Frank, did was wrong, but spiders don’t normally do that kind of thing.”

“Hey,” yelled Frank from the net. “We were trying to protect spiders.”

“Hush, you,” called Lilly.

“I’ve got an idea,” volunteered Danaerys. She pulled out a small bottle full of hypnotizing slime from her pocket. When the spiders in the net saw that, Frank yelled, “No! Don’t!” They all saw how the formerly strong-willed Leah was now kind of like a spider-robot.

“Oh yes.” Before anyone could say anything or try to stop her, Danaerys poured a liberal dose of slime all over the evil spiders. In seconds, they all became quiet and compliant.

“What is your will, my masters?”

Lilly told Danaerys, “It’s okay. Release them.

The human girl opened the net and poured them out onto the hideout floor. By then, the good spiders had set Lydia free and she joined her companions.

Lilly said to the evils, “We are going to retrain you to be good spiders and to use your talents to help others and not hurt or exploit them.”

“We await your training, Master Lilly.”

“Well, I think our work is done here, Danaerys. Time to go home.” Frank jumped up to his human friend and sat on her shoulder.

“It’s been fun. I hope we can come back sometime and see how things worked out.”

“We do too, Danaerys. Good-bye,” said Lilly. Then in a softer voice, “Good-bye, Frank.”

And with another quick spell the girl and her spider were gone.

Later, back in the city, the good spiders had created a special web to house the evils and to begin their training.

“Attention class,” Lilly started. They had concentrated and applied more slime on the evils so they would remain cooperative for several weeks. By then, hopefully their retraining would take over and make new spiders out of them. “Today is the first day of class. The first lesson is kindness.”

With that, a new life for Frank and his formerly evil spiders began.

THE END

This is the eighth and final chapter in a story I co-wrote with my seven-year-old granddaughter starting last Halloween. If you have missed the other chapters, you can start with Chapter 1 and then click through the links at end of the subsequent chapters to get back to here.

I hope you enjoyed the adventure. Let me know if you want my granddaughter and I to collaborate on future tales and publish them here.