I got a little head start on the drabble on my cell today at lunch. So, the POV character and his family take in a dissident and they help each other?

My theme for the aliens is spiders; webspinners if not literally spiders. What does that tell me about them? If you have a hammer… if you have edible webbing, everything looks like it should be tangled up in a web and your technical paradigm is more like Buckminster Fuller

Charlotte the dissident; their alien is on the outside, an outlaw from her society.

I’m thinking that the webspinners are like social insects, like termites, or at the very least maturity is suppressed in the majority and only a few breeding pairs run each nest, if you will. Sexually mature breeding pairs have children who are raised by their aunties and uncles, older cousins or siblings. Without the hormones of an adult breeding pair relative in the nest or hive, more mature webspinners will mature and take their place, or mature and start their own hive. Isolated webspinners mature and seek partners to start a new hive and are killed in warfare between hives in the worst cases. The fleet has a few breeders who have been kept alive for centuries by modern tech and likewise the workers are centuries old, suppressed and oppressed, although there’s a traditional answer to the worst of it...