An adaptation of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds, featuring TMNT 2012 characters. Mainly following the course of the Jeff Wayne album, as the roles match up amazingly well. Occasional excerpts (in Italics) from the book and album.
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No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. No one could have dreamed we were being scrutinized, as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swirl and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets. And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us.
The Eve of War
The evening of August the second, 1897, A.D., took me away from my evening's repose, enjoying the poems of Tennyson in the fading dusklight, as the chatter from a cluster of people reached my ears from the street. Curious, I lay down my book, just as my neighbor, Mrs. Barstley rapped on the door.
"Are you home, Mr. 'amato?" she called, just as I opened, and she motioned for me to follow her out into the lane. "You must come and see!"
Joining the crowd already marveling, I cast my gaze toward what I knew to be the planet Mars, high over the western horizon, where various fingers of the crowd were pointing, and surely enough, a greenish speck of light, trailing green mist, like a comet, seemed to be progressing from the planet. The group of neighbors outside my garden acted as though the appearance of the green object were a Chinese fireworks display, though it moved so slowly as to be barely perceived by the naked eye.
"What in the world do you think it could be?" Mrs. Barstley queried of me.
With my eyes fixed upon the object, I could only shake my head and tell her, "I have no earthly, idea." Truer words, as it turned out, never left my mouth, for the things that came, none on this Earth could have suspected, nor would have ever wished. "But I have a friend who will know… I shall inquire from him to-morrow."
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True to my word, I paid my scientist friend, Donatello Ogilvy, a turtle like myself, a visit the next evening, to ask his opinion of the strange, glowing, green object. Ogilvy was well-known in the scientific community when I met him at Ottershaw, as he was brilliant in many fields, but especially in his pursuits of astronomy. So dedicated to the study was he, that he had constructed—by his own design and crafting, and with very scarce help in its assembly—his own personal observatory next to his house.
He was, as was typical of him, quite excited over the matter, his words coming in a nearly indistinguishable string of digits and technical terms, several of which escaped my knowledge. According to his spectrometer, the green mist was an immense cloud of flaming gas, mainly hydrogen. He speculated that it had been launched from the planet by the collision of an asteroid, or perhaps a massive volcanic eruption from below the planet's surface. I managed to glean that he had calculated the velocity of the object, and he had determined that it would reach the surface of our own planet within a matter of days. In fact, when he showed me up to his observatory to view the green missile, he was ecstatic to point out that a second object had joined the first, having just left the surface of Mars.
An uneasy feeling hit me in the pit of my stomach, though why, exactly, I could not tell. "Do you think it might be a threat? Are we in some sort of danger?"
"Oh, no, no… I shouldn't think so. The impact may leave a bit of a crater, but it's nothing we should have to worry about, unless we happen to be standing right beneath! It will most likely break up upon hitting the atmosphere, and all we'll see of it is a so-called 'shooting star.'"
"Do you think… could they be inhabited?"
"Inhabited! Goodness, Leonardo, no! The chances that any lifeform could come to the Earth from that desolated planet, impact, and survive? Ha! The odds of that would have to be one million, twenty-three thousand, four hundred and thirteen to one!"
I shot him a rather withering look at his down-to-the-number precision. "Can't you just say it was a million to one?"
"It's important to be accurate," he returned.
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For the next week, more cylinders followed after the first, making their way through the vast void of space toward the Earth, and I continued to join Donatello in the evenings to view the eerie phenomena through his telescope. Even as I watched, right around the stroke of midnight, I witnessed a red blast, followed by a billowing cloud of green mist. I called Don over at once so that he could see, and he made more enthused remarks over it. I likened it to the muzzle-flare of a great gun, the projectiles being shot at us, huge, interstellar bullets. Could they have been hollow? Some form of transport?
Donnie assured me, time and time again, that nothing could possibly reach our planet alive, if, indeed, anything could live on that desolate planet at all, and that this was more likely a natural phenomenon of some sort… yet my gut kept informing me otherwise, and despite all of my scientist friend's assurances, I could not ignore the instinct I had been trained my entire life to pay attention to. Whatever was coming, something about it was horribly wrong.
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A week after the initial cylinder had appeared, it struck the ground of Horsell Common overnight, creating a great crater in the ground; so hot, it turned the sandy earth into shards of glass around it! Donatello, having pinpointed the landing location, as well as his fellow scientists and a number of the curious from town, were on site, thinking to find a meteorite there. My friend came to alert me, and I came along as well, to support him as well as to witness this marvel with my own eyes, though the sensation of impending doom had never left me over the course of the week. (Donatello had recommended a green tea, laced with ginger, to settle my bile, though I knew full well that wasn't the problem. Genius he may be, but he tends to mistake instinct for irritable bowels.)
Donatello attempted approaching the thirty-foot long cylinder, covered with cinders that had melted to its surface upon impact. He climbed over the rim of the pit, only to be driven back, reddened nearly as much as the red-hot-glowing space object, from its intense heat. We all paused, listening. He attributed the sound initially to be due to the object cooling unevenly, but as it persisted, he changed his mind. "Something is moving in there!" he declared to the rest of us. "If there is someone inside, they're trying to get out! They must be fairly roasted to death… they may need help!"
Indeed, a grinding sound of metal scraping metal reached our ears, and someone pointed at the exposed end of the cylinder as it twisted around, unscrewing itself from the inside!
"A Martian?" I asked him, despite his previous denials.
"What else could it be?"
"But, you'd said—!"
"I know…I know what I said. Circumstances… have proven me wrong. Possibly. I mean, it could be an automatic mechanism…" He sighed, but then brightened. "But that is what science is all about—replacing what we thought we knew to be true with the newly-discovered actuality! We used to think that disease was caused by devils and witches… Now we know that they come from the presence of certain microbes, tinier than can be seen by the naked eye! Isn't it fascinating?"
I pulled at his arm. "We should come away…"
But Donatello refused, shaking me off. "This is the biggest event in the scientific community since the discovery of the dinosaur! I have to be here for this, Leonardo… I need to be!" I gave him a moment, then attempted again, but in his enthusiasm, he would not be dissuaded.
Aside of the horrible grinding from the pit as the outside of the contraption cooled, the evening seemed as peaceful as any, with trains trundling their way past in the distance, and the whole of the world still asleep or simply going about their business. It seems incredulous to me now, that things could go on so normally in the face of our impending doom. Tranquil, what I know now to be the calm before the storm. We did not know, could never have presumed, that the eve of war was upon us.
I remained, horror-stricken, the entire night, unable to make myself go. Donatello stayed as well; though out of his immense fascination over the goings on within the capsule. This was not the case for some of the others, who went home to sleep and pass on their accounts to their families, to return come morning. At some point, word made its way to the press, and in the morning, a crowd began to gather along the edge of the pit.
With two feet of shining metal screw protruding, suddenly, the lid from the canister fell off, landing in the dirt with a thump. Every neck among us craned out over the crater, to catch the first glimpse of what emerged. Silence fell over the crowd as all held their breath.
Two luminous, disc-like eyes appeared above the rim. A huge, rounded bulk, larger than a bear, rose up slowly, glistening like wet leather. Its lipless mouth quivered and slathered, and snakelike tentacles writhed as the clumsy body heaved and pulsated.
"KRAANG!" it declared.