One By Millions

Chapter 8

The next day Shino was awoken by the birds outside again. She sighed and rolled out if bed. She seemed to be sighing a lot lately. She checked the clock.

Eight AM.

It was a reasonable time. Seeing as she was already up she figured it was best to start her day.

She spent twenty minutes doing stretches before heading into her bathroom. She climbed onto her little ladder and reached up to her cabinet to get her toothpaste and toothbrush. She grasped onto the handle and pulled it open and got her items. She closed the cabinet and pulled her hand away.

"Huh? "

Her hand was stuck to the cabinet. She blinked in shock and pulled again. Her hand didn't budge.

"Huh? "

She pulled again, this time she added a bit more strength. When she did she fell off her ladder and landed on the floor. She groaned in pain and sat up immediately. She brought a hand to rub the pain out the back of her head. When she brought her hand up she found that it was still attached to the cabinet door. She looked up and saw broken hinges where it used to be. Her toothbrush and toothpaste were also stuck to her other hand.

"What is going on? "

For the next twenty minutes Shino struggled and tried to remove the objects from her hands. She had to focus really hard for her apparent stickiness to weaken. When it did she started to study her hands.

To any normal person nothing would seem wrong. But Shino's eyes were a lot sharper than any normal person and she could see the tiny hairs on her hands. She followed them up her arms and even saw some on her feet.

A sudden thought entered her mind.
Spiders climb walls.

Spiders use something called Van der Waals force, an electrostatic force that attracts all surfaces on a molecular level. Spiders have tiny hairs on their feet, and each hair causes a slight bond to a surface that's not much on its own. However, the thousands of hairs multiply that force until it can support the spider's weight.

She could obviously stick to surfaces and had tiny hairs all over her body. Every human has hair so the info wasn't much, but she was sure she didn't have these hairs in her palm.

Then came another thought. There is no way the tiny hairs could be strong enough to remain stuck to the cabinet door when she pulled away. Not on their own at least. There had to be an explanation towards that.

Maybe she could enhance the flux of inter-atomic attractive forces on surfaces she touches, increasing the coefficient of friction between that surface and herself. It could be possible.

She turned her hands palms up and traveled towards her wrists. There was a slight bump there. There was no such thing yesterday. She pressed a finger to it and a string of white substance shot out. It was very tin and weak. It resembled spider web.

Shino looked at the broken cabinet door. She had pulled it off. She shouldn't be able to do that. That door was pretty thick and the only way she could pull it off was if she was a lot stronger than she normally is.

Shino clicked her tongue and glanced back at her hands.

"The signs are as clear as day, but should I believe them? "

She walked out of her bathroom, pulled on a jacket and left her room. She slid down the stair railing and landed on her feet as usual. She made sure not to touch anything so she wouldn't have to go through the struggle of decreasing her stickiness again. There were voices in the kitchen so that's where she went.