The Burned World
He graciously accepts the trade, and than begins leading you down towards the swirling mass of oranges and reds of the planet's atmosphere. The ship beeps a few times tentatively warning of re-entry, as Mac finishes packing the solars back away to protect them. Within a few minutes you are hovering above the clouds of the planets atmosphere, the rippling mass rolls like a sea across the planets sky just below you. Like great leviathans you can see movement inside the clouds, the crystalline dragons occasionally cresting the clouds though they pay you little attention. Waiting till the air below you is clear, the ship angles downwards and plunges into the swirling vortex.
The ships systems go berserk as peels of lightening ripple and wash over it's metal skin nearly blinding you with their fury. Great beasts begin to converge on your position as you pick up speed in an attempt to get out of the electrical storm. With glowing hot armor, screeching warning sirens and a shaking that threatens to tear your teeth from your very skulls you pass through the clouds. Sudden silence takes hold, interrupted only by the creaking of your cooling metal as the view of the alien world rises in the distance.
As far as your eyes and scanners can reach the landscape is a desolate blackened place, illuminated only by flashes of lightening from the storms overhead. Great glowing fungii that grow in fractal patterns float along on lazy air currents high above the burned worlds surface. The surface itself is pocketed with craters of all sizes and inside the largest of them you can see what looks like small domes, among which tiny figures move.
From He-Who-Touches-Clouds directions you come to hover over the large crater, and once there a few of the figures detach themselves from the quickly forming mod to float up towards your vessel. They are similar to him in shape, though frequently far smaller in stature and as varied as possible in coloration. He leaves through the airlock to converse with his fellows, the songs of which overwhelm the translator preventing you from listening in and their combined speech can be more felt than heard as myriads of harmonized notes rain over the ship. After some time he returns to lead you down to land on a flat mesa at the edge of the crater, while the city grows quiet as they watch you touch down.
At this closer location, you can see that the domes are molded from a clay like substance and range in size from tiny room-sized balls filled with hundreds of minuscule holes up to 500 feet or taller imposing structures who's doorways range from human sized down to the mouse like holes on the smaller balls. The structures material is grayish in nature, though most are painted in swirling patterns of different colors. While their inhabitants include the four-armed winged creatures like He-Who-Touches-Clouds, heavy carapace beetle-ish beings that move about on eight legs and the smallest ones being tiny worm creatures with many segmented shells and hundreds of tiny legs on all sides of their bodies. The only uniting factor between all of them is the presence of the crystal dust floating about their bodies though their usages of it vary; Whilst the winged ones use it to fly, the beetle creatures use it to manipulate objects in place of any actual arms and the worm beings appear to focus it into a sharp drilling edge allowing them to swim through the solid rocks at an incredible speed.
He-Who-Touches-Clouds returns to you through the airlock, and with a sweeping motion of his four arms says "Welcome to my homeland, The great hive of the Midlands. I have told my people that you are most honored guests and while each and every one of them would like to meet with you, I requested their patience. The obsessed one, who wishes to look inside everyone's heads may come with me to the statue gardens now if he likes, Father already agreed to what he would like and is interested himself in watching your examinations. Otherwise, do you have time to stay and if so how may I accommodate you? If the cycles are lacking for your peoples we shall proceed to the hunt immediately however."
Author
Topic: Under the Alien Stars-Burned World (Read 11650 times)