Nancy was a normal enough girl growing up, quiet, intelligent, well behaved, the only thing that made her stand out was her fascination with insects and creepy crawlies. At recess Nancy could always be found crouched down by the bushes or at the foot of a tree intensely studying any bug she could find, she would catch them, name them and play with them, it was as if she felt an unexplainable kinship with the animals, especially with spiders, they were always her favorite. At home, Nancy would sit in silence watching a spider weave its web, copying the patterns it created on a piece of paper, soon enough her room was full of sketches of spiders and their webs taped to the walls and closet doors. Other kids found her creepy and off-putting of course, but she paid them no mind, only getting involved if she ever saw someone mistreating her real friends.

Nancy's parents were kind and loving towards her, they always saw their daughter's excentricities in a positive light, they imagined her growing up to be an entomologist, or heck, those drawings she's always making weren't half bad, their little girl could be an artist! They worried, as all parents do, about her not having many friends, but they were sure she just needed some time to grow up and mature on her own terms. Overall things were pretty quiet at the Duvall household, that is until the day Nancy got her legs.

She was 8 years old when it happened, fortunately no one but her parents were around to see it, unfortunately that meant Mom was the only person around to be the target of the uncontrolled animal rage that took over Nancy's mind once those 8 gigantic exoskeletal appendages burst from all around her waist. By the time she regained her composure she was laying in a pool of blood, Dad was in the corner sobbing into Mom's limp body, the spider legs were gone, but she couldn't feel her regular ones anymore.

Dad was never the same after that, he wasn't abusive, he never mistreated her, he just seemed afraid. Nancy was taken away from school for a few years after that happened, but pretty quickly she was able to prove she had enough control over her transformation to go out in public again. Without the income from Mom's job they had to move away from their comfortable suburban house to a small cramped apartment in the city, plus Dad thought it was a good idea to cut ties and start a new life before anyone asked too many questions.

Something changed in Nancy after that day too. The physical therapy never made much of a difference, she had completely lost all feeling from her waist down and had to be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life, but she didn't care, she had always felt like she was something more and her feelings were finally vindicated, she was truly one with her insectoid friends, her brethren. The experience made her even more a recluse, she became desensitized to death and most human suffering, the only things that she cared about were her friends and her drawings.

Over time, isolated with only the company of her aquired insectoid family, Nancy started to develop ideas about how the world ought to be, she became outraged at the way these beautiful creatures were treated by society, she imagined a future where they got the respect they deserved and she could live in true harmony with her brethren, away from any human interference. In fact, Nancy began seeing herself as more spider than human, she was only temporarily trapped in this limited body, but her position in human society could be an advantage, she would do what the rest of her kin couldn't and use her extraordinary body to set the world on a path to arthropod paradise. The only problem was she had no idea how.

Nancy kept going through the motions of her human life all through middle school and high school, seeing as she couldn't yet weave her own web she got interested in the next best thing, fashion design, and when she graduated high school at 17 she got into the prestigious Lobenhof Institute of Design in New York City with a full scholarship and moved to a student housing apartment building in Queens provided by the Institute on her own (or rather, with only her 8-legged family).

Nancy had just been in New York a single day, her bags were still half packed and she was feeding Shelley, a Black Widow she had found outside her new apartment building the previous night, when she noticed a presence behind her in the room...