Invasion of The Spider People

The sun sat still in the sky, beating down with harsh heat onto brown dirt plains strewn with small boulders. Long green trees made up of a single trunk/leaf stretched up in thousands, hundreds of thousands, into the sky. Nestled in the shadows of two great, four legged shapes was a small compound. The compound stretched for some distance, and every space not filled with buildings and runways, were graves. Hundreds and hundreds of graves.

Rubbing his mandibles with one long leg, X’rill the Spider held his drink close to him, his other leg pushed through the hoop. He sat at his desk within a dark, poorly lit building, rotting with disuse. The desk was a yellow, dusty metal thing, simple in its form, covered in mouldy food and scattered paper. He looked at the recording device in front of him, and pushed the large blue button on it.

“This is General Commander X'rill of the First Invasion of Terror Incognita.” He paused to sip from his drink, “And I am reporting a complete and total failure. The life forms of this place are completely immune to our weapons, cannot be communicated with, and, I suspect... No... I know they are not even aware of our existence.”

Leaning back in his chair, X’rill brought the recording device up to his eight eyed face, “I will start from the beginning, nearly two hundred and ninety two thousand sleep cycles before this recording. When we first arrived, I was a bold young thing no more than nine hundred cycles old. I was young. Brash. Foolish.”

X'rill paused before reaching for a silk water bag, from which he poured a sickly smelling red liquid into his glass. “I must apologise for the irregularities of protocol, High Chamber, but I am quite drunk. And as such, I suspect that I may ramble. Now where... ah yes. I was in charge of the invasion force of no more than three hundred soldiers, all of us capable and strong. When we came to Terror Incognita, we were certain that, with our advanced technologies, we could crush the locals, and add a new empire to our own not unlike the six legged swarms from the earth, which we had laid waste too not too long ago.”
Taking a drink, X’rill continued, “When we first landed, after sailing across the great lake, we noted the gargantuan statues on the sand, with a vast cloth plain underneath. Upon the cloth, which was made of vast red and white... white squares, were various things placed upon it. At first, we thought it to be a... offering to gods or deities of some sort. We saw what we thought at the time to be two gargantuan statues, reaching so high it would of have taken me nearly sixty sub cycles to climb. To climb... some of us tried, and even then we still believed that they that they were statues, not living beings at all. At all. How wrong we were to discover we were.”

X’rill brushed aside some papers, and leaned forwards, nursing his drink between two legs. “They were massive. Huge. Four legged, with hard protrusions at the bottom of each leg. Their eyes were fitted appropriately for their size, and they did not have mandibles as they should of have. They had a sort of fleshy opening, within which were massive protrusions not unlike our fangs.”

X’rill sighed, “I must apologise for my continued slurring, High Council. I will continue. They were covered in a soft fleshy skin, upon which were thousands upon thousands of dense hairs. We did not investigate more. At this time, we thought them built. So we searched for other lives on this new land. We spent so long. So very long. Then our scientists discovered the truth.”

X’rill paused. He drank deep from his glass, and then with a sweep of his arm he threw everything onto the floor from the desk in a great shout. He sobbed for a while, curled in his arms, before getting up and retrieving the recording device. “We discovered it when they had... closed their eyes slightly. They were blinking. But it took so long. So very long even for that. The head scientist... she had the most beautiful green eyes...”

X’rill held his head in his arms, and was still.

“She was so beautiful then. The head scientist told me that they were alive, but they existed on a different plane. That they moved through time so much more quickly. That to even talk to them, assuming that they could understand us, one of us would have to stand still for maybe millions of cycles, slowly saying each word. I was proud. Stubborn. I shouted that we could make them yield. That all things knew pain, and so I took a rock melting laser, and turned it on the giants... I do not know how long I trained the laser upon the hard protrusions. Yet after all of it, somehow it wasn’t even warm. Somehow. Somehow. Impossibly. There wasn’t even time for it to get warm from what they felt. It made no sense. They couldn’t burn, because there wasn’t time for it to burn in. Madness...”

X’rill lifted one of his fore legs, and looked at the device on the end of it. It was long, spiked, and bulbous, shaped to fit the end of his leg perfectly.
“We tried to obey, High Council. But we couldn’t make them listen. Impossible. Couldn’t make them fear. Hurt. Bleed. Terror. Impossible... They were impervious, and so, in futility, we tried to hurt them, to make them obey. We tried. So very hard. And we died. We went mad. We killed ourselves, each other, or simply wandered off never to be seen again. Some died of age. Some were loyal to the end. Some cursed you. Some cursed themselves. We tried to obey, but could not.”

X’rill held up the spiked rod to his head. “I tried. I tried. I tried. I tried. I am sorry. I tried. I am all that is left. In the shadow of this madness and insanity and impossible giants. Impossible giants. I tried. I am sorry. May the Web Spinner send blight upon blight. Take your eggs for sending us to this place... This is General Commander X'rill of the First Invasion of Terror Incognita. I have failed. I am sorry.”

The spike fired once, a dull crack of ionized air and a flash of red light, and X’rill died.

Time passed. Flesh turned to dust. Bones bleached. Automated systems failed. Warnings after warnings were given with none to hear, and a thermonuclear reactor that powered everything failed, sputtered, died.

And exploded.

***

“Hey, Applejack!” said Pinkie, twisting to look at a bright speck.

“Hmm?” Applejack turned, her hat held on tight while she looked at the lake. It was a beautiful spring day, so they had decided to visit the lake.
“Did you see that, AJ?” Pinkie glared close at the ground, daring it to give up its secrets, “It was like a little flash, and there were all these things swirling...”

“Don’t worry about it, sugar cube," Applejack smiled, "Life’s too short for that...”