The other guards they had dodged were harmless in comparison with the Literal who stood in their path.
They would have to overcome every imaginable fear. Standing in front of the Launch Pad was the Grammarian Phobia. Behind him stood many of his prefixes—Agora-, Acro-, Choro-, Arachno- …
“Faith,” Comma called calmly. “Would you come here please?”
Faith lagged some distance behind Quotes. Unaware of what she was about to confront, she was understandably still full of—well, full of herself. Her eyes bulged when she caught sight of the army of Phobias.
“Do you even know what all these Phobias mean?” Quotes asked tremulously.
“We are about to find out,” Comma replied as Arachno- came to stand beside Phobia. “He will probably just turn into an animal or something,” Comma advised coolly. “Anything he creates will just be an illusion.”
But Arachnophobia remained in word form, and the spiders, hundreds of them that rapidly descended from the sky, did not look like an illusion. When they began crawling over every bit of her skin, Comma discovered that they did not feel like an illusion either. At first she stood still, hoping that would make the illusion disappear. Instead, it gave the spiders a chance to roam freely. She had almost rid her arms of them when a fresh batch began descending from the sky. She ducked her head, hoping to keep them from falling on her face. But they began seeping out of the ground in droves. They crawled up her legs easily. She scampered around, beating at her body in a vain attempt to slap them away. The swarming spiders crawled on every vacant space, including each other’s backs.
