"So how do you keep it all a secret?" Naomi asked her mother next day over breakfast. Anything to get her mind off the weight.
"What do you mean?"
"Driders, fairies, monsters, monster hunters--we never read about them in the history books. Why is it that most humans don't know about us?"
Her mother sighed. "It's complicated, but basically regular humans--not counting aware humans like your father--simply lack the awareness. I could walk down the street in full drider form and all they would see was another human. Now that you've been woke you'll see the differences. They're like dogs that live among people but can't understand our speech."
"So they're like animals compared to us?"
"Well, kinda. That's why we used to treat them as food or servants. Now we're supposed to treat them as equals, but its hard given their inferiority. Monster hunters like your father evolved to protect the regular humans from us, but now they just hunt outlaw creatures that eat or otherwise exploit humans."
"But we're still allowed to eat fairies?"
Her mother grimaced. "Fairies are good for nothing but mischief."
Two years of carrying around this ridiculous weight, Naomi thought. Two years of never being comfortable, constant back pain, having to go to the bathroom every twenty minutes.
She had an idea. "Spiders lay eggs, don't they?"
"Yes."
"Can't we just put Sheena in an egg for two years? That way I wouldn't have to carry her around."
Just then Naomi's mother's phone rang. Glad of the distraction, she answered "Arachnia here."
After a brief conversation in a chittering language that Naomi had never heard before Arachnia put the phone down.
"Word travels fast" she said. "Driders have a Queen, and that was one of her officials. They heard about you being woken as to your true nature. They're sending someone to talk to you about your rights and responsibilities and take your oath of subjection to Queen Lolth."
"What about what I asked about? Can we put Sheena in an egg?"
"Can you just not make any trouble till she gets here? My family is enough in the doghouse with the Queen for me marrying a human and then not eating him after mating."
"We eat our mates?!" Naomi was horrified.
"Well, it's kind of expected. Driders are a matriarchy, and devouring our mates is one way of keeping the male population down while nourishing ourselves during conception. It's not like there's a law saying we have to, though."
"Dad knew about this?"
"It came up in our relationship early on. He knew about it. I promised him I wouldn't eat him ever, under any circumstances, but he still insisted on wearing an explosive self-destruct device the first couple of hundred times we made love." Arachnia smiled fondly. "Monster hunters are kind of paranoid--not that I never wondered what he would taste like in a nice Hollandaise sauce."
What kind of species am I part of, Naomi wondered, aghast at what her mother was telling her.