Work Text:
It was the skittering that caught Gorgug’s eye first. The long, segmented legs moved seemingly unnaturally as the bug moved across his workbench. A spider. Gorgug tensed up and stopped working on his current project. It was a fat one, too. He inwardly retched at the thought of how nasty it would feel to grab a tissue and squish it; the idea how many guts and ooze and whatever spiders were made of dirtying the tissue. How unsettling the whole ordeal of squishing a spider was. He was pretty sure that it was harmless, but that didn't mean he was about ready to share his workspace with it.
He searched his bench, looking for a way to contain it for the time being, not trusting to leave it alone while he went back into the house to grab a glass. He had a mug, but the idea that he couldn't see what the spider was doing while he worked was also unnerving. Best to keep an eye on it at all times, even if he hated looking at it. He found his solution with an unused nixie tube he had lying around, and he quickly covered the offending creature with the glass cylinder. He grimaced as the spider angrily crawled around its new prison.
Spider secured, Gorgug now had to get rid of it. He might hate bugs and spiders, but he also hated hurting them, a conundrum for sure. In the past, he’d slide the paper underneath and take it outside, but then there was always the potential (and maybe the one time it actually happened) for the spider to crawl back onto Gorgug instead of out into the grass where it belonged. No, Gorgug needed a better solution, and he was going to solve this problem once and for all.
He had a couple schematics roughed out in his head, and now he took out a blueprint paper and began to draw out his thoughts. Something mobile, so it could go far enough away from him when releasing the spider that he wouldn't have the risk of it crawling back to him. Something soft and safe, so the spider wouldn’t be harmed during capture. And something fast, to make sure it caught the spider as soon as it was spotted and the little bastard didn’t have a chance to scurry off into a hidey-hole.
So Gorgug got to work, dragging out various tools and pieces of scrap, welding and tinkering, and humming as he worked. It always felt so nice to work on a new project, even if it had to do with something he hated. Soon he had a little prototype skittering around, stopping in various places to gently suck up balls of lint he had placed on the tabletop as pseudo-spiders. The device would scurry over to it, drop down to trap the ball, and then, using a small vacuum device, gently suck up the ball into its containment chamber on top. He grinned as he watched the ball roll around in the glass. ‘Spider’ contained, he picked up the device and took it outside. There, he flipped a switch and placed the contraption on the ground. The spider container moved about twenty feet away before there was a slight hiss as it reversed the vacuum flow, expelling the lint ball into the grass below. After a few moments, the device returned to where Gorgug had placed it, free of the lint ball.
Satisfied with the prototype working with immobile objects, Gorgug was ready to put it to the true test. He brought the device back to his workshop, flipped the switch back to its initial position, and set it down. Then, with trepidation, he moved over and lifted the tube off of the trapped spider. Red lights on the sides of his device moved about, spotting its target, and the machine rushed over to the spider. The arachnid had no time to react as the device dropped on top of it, sucking it into the containment jar. Gorgug whooped with delight, happy to see the spider undamaged (but very angry and confused), running around inside of its prison. He took it outside and once more flipped the switch before setting it down in the grass. As before, the machine hurried off about twenty feet away from him before there was a hiss and the machine returned to him, spider-free. Success!
Gorgug picked up his new invention and gave it a loving kiss. “I’m going to call you S.C.A.R. – Spider Containment and Relocator!” he announced, and then rushed inside the house to show off his new invention to his parents.
Five months later, Gorgug would be making money hand over fist with his new invention when word caught on.