Doctor Worm smiled, an unsettling re-arrangement of the squrimy things under his well-made mask, as the other maho dropped a pair of large sooty coins into his cold hands. The distraction had worked and Uncle Slug had been too preoccupied with dealing with Baroness Spider's minions to notice a trusted lieutenant wasn't there in the port of Oakland. He smiled as he felt the weight of the black oboli. The simulacra he'd created had also done its job, causing Baroness Spider to think he was disposed of and the Beacon Society believing they had him in a cell. Too bad the animate dirt clod would literally decompose soon. Maybe they would think he was dead, but Doctor Worm didn't think that was likely. He knew the Beacon Society was not as stupid as the Obsidian Cabal or Hermetic Order believed; they were merely naive.
    He glanced down at the dark tokens in his hand. Three would have been better, but two will have to do. To the strange goat-like maho who'd stolen them, Doctor Worm fished out a pair of red-gold oboli. "So... you'd prefer to be more human then? Hmph." Worm glanced over the other maho. "As I told you, the best I can do is repair your transformation. You'll always be a faunus when you change." This was a lie, but Mendel wasn't a particularly generous person. At least it wasn't a complex problem such as the one between Sybil and Benedicta. The worm man cleared his throat. "This may hurt."

    The spider woman wasn't hard to find. Mendel had created her, merging a spider with a person while drunk on power decades ago. She was a creature of habit, preferring her lair in the wooded hills of Alameda county. He watched Baroness Spider as she sat sleeping in the center of the web, flipping a black obol between his fingers absently. He would prefer to disjunction her, leaving one very traumatized person with magic powers and one (squished under his heel) spider. But he needed insurance and control.
    "After all," he said to himself, "I'm not some Saturday morning cartoon villain." The obol glowed and shifted its shape as he wove a spell, using his intimate knowledge of Baroness Spider's magical pattern to create a binding spell.

    Long after the begging had stopped and the screaming wasn't ringing in his ears, Doctor Worm looked out across the San Francisco Bay from his seat on a fallen tree. "Well Sybil, now it's your turn to learn who your master is." Worm smiled again.