I was pondering how humanity would be able to fight the Selenoids, given the Selenoids can teleport themselves at will, appear and disappear in such a way that typical human warfare with frontlines would be a nonsense.
Scanners would be a requirement, to detect atmospheric changes, to predict a Selenoid raiding parties appearance before they appear and then to respond accordingly. But what if humans lack the technology to spot such interferences? The Selenoids are after all a completely different form of life to what humans are familiar with, they have more in common with the ghosts or spirits of ancient human legends.
One race that may be of help to humanity are the Khydran Enclaves. Rumoured to be a race that is only 100 strong, the true Khydran known as Monarchs utilise armies of drones to fight for them, so they don’t risk the death of one of their 100. The Monarchs cannot die of old age and instead are reborn every few thousand Jendari years. The remaining Monarchs then send their drones on a crusade to recover their reborn.
The Monarchs govern the race in cycles each of the 100 taking a term that lasts roughly 173 Jendari years. According to Mortan’s Men, Darros Mortan is the only human to ever have witnessed a Monarch and he described it as being like a spider, but it spoke directly into his mind instead of using sound. It is believed the Monarchs evolved from a spider-like race which developed psychic abilities to pull in prey instead of making webs or hunting like the spiders humans are more familiar with. This psychic power is capable of predicting Selenoid attacks before they happen. This was an ability the Khydran believed they could teach to humanity and so offered to take 100 humans from each Xolar faction, the JDA, the SoK and the ALL for training and experimentation. The 300 humans were returned and dubbed ‘The Children of Khydra’. The Children have aided in the war and improved humanities ability to respond to Selenoid attacks, however a number of groups are suspicious of how charitable the Khydran Enclaves appear to have been and wonder what the Monarch’s stand to gain by helping humanity. The Prosecution Directive of the Allegiance of Gnossos, whose job it is to keep Gnossian technology a secret are particularly disturbed by the presence of psychics.
The spider problem is one I’ve struggled with for some time. It seems no matter how you prime or what you do to cheap Halloween bags of spiders nothing will stick.
My former rather colourful efforts, where I made sure to bathe my spiders and used plastic primer have now all chipped and are not particularly useable.
I liked my second go:
Using a permanent chrome paint pen, I drew on the spiders to add a little detail and colour, it certainly worked but wasn’t what I had imagined for the Khydran Enclaves. Even this also eventually began to chip.
I’d tried pretty much everything at this point, priming with pva and mod podge also hadn’t worked. Utilising the nastiest and most toxic plastic primers I could find just couldn’t make anything stick to the plastic.
One thing did stick though, a glue gun, and I knew paint stuck to that. So I set off making strange spiders:
Deathzap 
Nicely done 🙂