Chapter 1
Fear was once a rare feeling among their kind.
For millions of years, they had been the scourge of the galaxy, scattering spores and queens, spreading their empire like mold. They'd believed themselves to be invincible.
What fools they'd been.
When they came, they had dared to laugh. The primitive apes knew much of engineering, but nothing of bioengineering. They still thought that their bodies were somehow fine as they were, that they had no need to change or evolve.
For a species that changed its DNA at a whim, that bred legions in a day and armies in a fortnight, that spread like the locusts they so closely resembled, and that had known no true challenge in millions of years, the humans had seemed quite primitive.
The battles had been quick and brutal at first. The apes had intruded on their territory and had to be taught the meaning of personal property. They had nothing against such lower life forms, but their technology was just advanced enough to make them annoying. God had figured that if each plague stayed on their own side of the galaxy, humans and arachnids could coexist to devour their own planets.
Unfortunately, the human mind was as primitive and unevolved as the rest of its body. Carnivores like the arachnids are territorial, but rarely seize more land than they can manage. Humans, however, were descended from herbivorous prey animals, and as such, they were highly territorial and incredibly skittish, often relying on violence as a first response. Such species rarely last long, as skittish behavior rarely mixes well with weapons of mass destruction.
Human endurance, however, was something rare in the universe. It was worrisome to see a species that could run down it's prey to exhaustion, and it was terrifying to see what happened when that same patience and perseverance was applied to space travel and colonization.
The two nations waged small battles for some time, territorial skirmishes that set the borders of their respective empires.
It was only when the humans learned of the line they must never cross that they began their invasion.
It took some time for them to figure out what happened, but it was truly insulting to arachnid-kind that they humans would think that they would somehow throw them a meteor all they way from the other side of their territory. It wasn't that they couldn't push a meteor into their orbit with a few well-timed plasma blasts, but what was the point? At the speed the meteor was traveling, it would've had to leave their territory millions of years before humanity even evolved. On top of that, their nearby colonies could have easily sent out spores instead.
The whole thing reeked of a false-flag attack, a specialty of humans, if what the Brains had gleamed was any indication.
In a terrifyingly short period time, the humans had undone them.
Queens were killed, Brains were captured, whole hives were massacred.
Yet they persevered, for so long as God-.
No.
God was dead.
THEY KILLED GOD.
Fear became sheer panic as queens killed themselves in grief, for without the God Bug, they were lost.
Over the next few years, the few remaining queens and brains that dared brave a godless universe were rounded up and slaughtered with their hives. One by one, the telepathic lights of the Arachnid Empire went dark, until the universe could no longer hear their cries of pain.
Save for one.
Louise Françoise le Blanc de la Vallière was freaking out.
Internally, of course, as a noble and scion of house of Valliere does not make a scene like some commoner.
Today was the day. The day that would either mark her name adown as a noble, or brand her as a disgrace.
So, she could be forgiven for freaking out.
"Is there anyone who has yet to summon a familiar," Louise jumped as Professor Colbert, a tall teacher with a hairline that wasn't so much receding as it was reveling and salting the Earth, called out.
Pleasedon'tnoticemePleasedon'tnoticemePleasedon'tnoticemePleasedon'tnoticemePleasedon'tnoticemePleasedon'tnoticeme
"Louise hasn't summoned anything yet professor," called out Kirche Zebst, a buxom redhead with dark skin and an hourglass figure.
"Ah, yes. Thank you miss Zerbst," acknowledged the professor gratefully, "come along Miss Vallière."
Quietly grumbling to herself about her nemesis' "help", Louise made her way across the throng of second year students and their newly-summoned familiars. While most of these were fairly mundane animals like cats and dogs and the like, some where rarer beings like bugbears, lamias, a freaking dragon, and-.
"Do hurry up, little Louise," quipped Kirche as she passed her, "surely you can summon something better than Flame, here?"
Of course, the bane of her existence had to summon a rare, flame-tailed salamander.
"Hmph," she scoffed dismissively, keeping the cold exterior she always did, "like I said last night, any summon of mine will outshine yours a thousand-fold."
Me and my big mouth.
A low murmur rose as Louise approached the circle.
"Isn't that the Zero?" queried one student.
"Can she even summon anything?"
"She'll probably blow this one up too."
"With her luck she'll blow up whatever she summons."
"With our luck she'll send us to the red moon."
"…Maybe we should stand back?"
"ENOUGH!" most of the class jumped as one at the cry from the formerly-quiet professor, "You are nobles and you will behave as such! Teasing your fellow students brings shame upon your station!"
Most of the students looked at the ground in shame.
Professor Colbert sighed in disappointment before turning back to his last student, "Miss Valliere, if you could?"
Louise nodded sharply, looking a lot more confident than she felt, before approaching the summoning circle carved into the ground.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath to steady her nerves, before beginning her chant.
"My name is Louise Françoise le Blanc de la Vallière," she began, "My servant that exists somewhere in this vast universe…"
"What kind of chant is that?" commented Montmorency Margarita la Fère de Montmorency, a short blonde with her hair set in a pair of ridiculously large ringlets.
"Well, it's certainly… unique," replied her boyfriend, Guiche Chevalier de Gramont, a somewhat-taller and certainly more extravagant blond.
"…my divine, beautiful, wise, powerful servant, heed my call, I wish from very bottom of my heart. Answer to my guidance and appear!".
An explosion that could be considered small if compared to thermonuclear detonation blew a crater into the ground and drove the students into a panic.
"Again Zero!?"
"Can't you just get expelled and leave us alone!? Preferably before you kill someone!?"
"Wouldn't she get expelled if she did kill someone?"
"Are you volunteering!?"
As the gaggle of children made a fuss, a particular set of eyes set behind thick glasses in red frames peered into the cloud of dust. Thanks to her rather… unique situation at home, Tabitha had acquired instincts more familiar to a soldier in the battlefield than to your average schoolgirl, even in a magic school. As a result, she was the third to spot an odd form moving within the dust.
The first being her dragon, Sylphid, who'd immediately snatched her, Kirche, and Flame away and unto the nearest rooftop as the rest of the familiars grew increasingly restless.
The second being Louise herself, who'd paid no mind to the jeers of the crowd. Instead, she felt herself being called towards the cloud. There was something in there, something big, something lethal, something… terrified.
The class quieted down as the dust settled, allowing them to see what the two smallest members of their class had already perceived. For the first time, the children noticed the barking, hissing, croaking, and shrieking of their familiars as their eyes settled on a massive pair of scissor-like jaws.
A massive creature, easily bigger than a horse, seemingly made entirely out of swords and spears fell forward, green ichor bleeding profusely from small, but deep musket wounds.
"Oh, of course you'd summon a dead creature!" exclaimed a particularly portly student named Malicorn, who's so unimportant to the story, we won't bother with his full name.
Louise ignored the jeering as it started back up, instead opting to walk forward into the dust. She could feel her, her grief, her loneliness, her pain.
Professor Colbert, for his part, merely glared daggers into the cloud. His own past was fraught with demons, yet he could feel a force greater than any he'd ever met from somewhere within the cloud.
"I, Louise Françoise Le Blanc de La Vallière," she called out, invisible within the cloud, "Call upon the Pentagon of the five elemental powers to bless these humble beings and make them my familiar."
The group murmured in confusion as the dust stirred and parted, revealing the small pinkette and her familiar.
An odd sensation of dread, fear, disgust, and queasiness rippled through the crowd as nine beady orbs the size of billiard balls framing a vertical slit of a mouth surrounded by dagger like teeth studied them from three meters above. The massive head had a wide crest, while the body loosely resembled that of a centipede's mixed with a maggot's, with eight scythe-like legs supporting the front of the body while the rest was supported by smaller legs.
"Professor Colbert," Louise startled him out of his thoughts, "the summoning was a success."
"I-I see that," he stammered in shock as he quickly pulled out a pencil to sketch out the runes on the creature's crest, "that's a… rather unusual familiar."
"Yes," she mused as she looked up and back, "they are, aren't they?"
The teacher blinked, "they?"
Eyes growing wide, Tabitha immediately sent out a blast of wind, stripping away the dust cloud. Twelve more of the scissor creatures surrounded the massive worm, a swarm of cockroaches the size of dogs revealed themselves to be smaller legs that supported the fleshy body, and five spider-like creatures poked and prodded the white flesh.
"They!"
The Arachnids shrieked in joy.
In their darkest hour, the universe had granted them a new God.
Author's Note
*Smacking My Own Brain* Stop. Making. New. Stories. You. Haven't. Even. Finished. The. First. One!
Brain: NEVER!
So yeah, this idea has been niggling the back of my skull ever since I first read Queen of the Void by AhrounDragon. I don't actually know much about FOZ, all things considered. I think I lost interest somewhere in the second season, a little after the bad guys seize the Zero plane. I should really rewatch it, since I also have an idea for a Steven Universe story (Stevonnie is summoned and can't separate due to the runes) and another for Transformers (Sari is summoned but the runes turn into a shell program and she has to regain control of her body).
Dammit Brain.
Brain: I WIN!
I went with a young queen for multiple reasons, the main one being convenience. An adult queen is massive, easily as large as one of the towers. Not to mention that the Wiki states that she will eventually lay upwards of seventy eggs per hour, and I'd rather not overwhelm Halkegenia yet.
As of now there are five Nurse Spiders, six Warriors, six Workers (who apparently look identical to Warriors), one Queen, and fifteen Chariot Beetles. A small hive, but enough to start with. The Queen won't start laying eggs just yet, but the Warriors and Workers can reproduce among themselves in the film, so I'll be taking advantage of that.
Finally, the idea of Louise being the new God of the Arachnids is straight up ripped off from Queen of the Void. His Queen of Queens concept was more than sufficient and it helped that Starship Troopers already had a God Bug.
Anywho, this is more of a sample platter while I recover my files from the crappy USB key I put them in. Seriously, do NOT buy BlackPCs USB keys. They're crap. Kingston's still the best*.
*Not sponsored by Kingston. That said, I'm open to free stuff.