Sorta Scary Story (my teacher wouldn't let us call it a horror/scary story. We had some very dark children . . .)

All Hallows Eve on Spindela

"Are you sure we should be doing this?" I whispered as my friends and I climbed down a dark hill covered in boulders.

"Yeah," Nyssa replied from a few rocks down. She jumped a few more before asking, "Why are you whispering?"

"I don't know," I mumbled, the light from my wristband swinging as we climbed.

"He's just nervous," Pecross stated in his robotic Mexican accent. "The dark has a similar effect on most humans."

"I'm not scared of the dark," I argued. Meavia laughed at that, then yelled at me to hurry up. We reached the bottom of the hill and stood on a level area of black dirt. In front of us was a shadowy, ragged building. It seemed different from the other buildings on this planet, more ominous. Thick, piling spires crawled into the sky and the building's base was lumped on the ground.

"Well this looks fun," Nyssa said and walked up to the doors carved with spiders. I wasn't sure I liked that detail as much as she did. But I followed nonetheless.

Pecross pushed open the doors when no one else would, and we stepped inside. The empty space in the building made it seem like the outside was a shell. There would be high points in the ceiling or nooks in the wall right where they should be on the outside. It was hard to tell though due to all the cobwebs. They were draped around the room like tangled blobs of tinsel. It reminded me of one of my neighbors back home, who always loved the fake spider webs and went way overboard with decorating their house with them each Halloween. This year had been no different. I remembered seeing children going trick-or-treating before I left, and they would dare each other to go through the cobwebs to get to the door and the candy.

I used to do the same when I was a kid. But things were different now. I could be on Earth, celebrating Halloween with my friends there, but Nyssa, Pecross, Meavia, and Draga were funner, even if they were aliens.

We'd gone to Spindela, Draga's home planet for Halloween. She'd said there was a big, old building that was super scary out of town, and we'd decided to go check it out. Sadly, Draga said she couldn't come because she had to help out with her town's festival. As soon as we saw people riding on giant spiders in their parade, we hightailed it out of there and to the mysterious building.

I never knew what Draga meant by 'scary.' A lot of things on her planet looked scary, but Draga was so sweet and kind, it didn't seem right she'd even know the actual definition of the word.

"Whoa, looked at these beds," Nyssa said, snapping me out of my thoughts. She was pointing her light at some beds. The black stone frames rose from the ground, and were covered in old, silky webs for blankets. I noticed more beds and things like it on the walls and some even on the ceiling. Meavia jumped onto one and pawed through the blanket.

"This is disgusting," she muttered and jumped off, trying to get the cobwebs out of her purple and red fur.

"Did Draga say this place used to be a hospital?" Pecross asked, scanning a piece of webbing.

I hoped they were wrong, because an old, abandoned hospital seemed like a bad place to be during Halloween.

Something crashed to the floor in a plume of dust. I gasped and looked over toward the sound. Nyssa was coughing, and webs covered her black and orange outfit. She looked up at me and said, smiling with satisfaction, "I've always wanted to do that. Hospitals are so stupid."

Pecross looked at her, confused. "Wouldn't you be dead without hospitals?"

Nyssa waved away the question and walked further into the dark, forcing the rest of us to follow.

"Am I the only one getting a bad feeling about this?" I mumbled as we walked.

"Please don't tell me you're getting scared just now," Nyssa groaned.

"I didn't say that."

"I would like to argue with that," Pecross muttered.

"No, just don't."

"Yeah, Pecross," Nyssa said. "We don't want another one of your lectures."

A faint scuttle rang out from the dark. Meavia shot her head toward it. The rest of us did the same.

"You guys heard that, right?" I whispered.

"Yes, I'm turning on x-ray vision," Pecross replied.

"Don't!" Nyssa barked at him.

"Why not?" Pecross and I asked in unison.

Nyssa sighed. "We came here to experience freaky stuff like this," she argued. "So don't ruin it!"

"But what if whatever's out there is hostile?" I wondered.

"Then we can take it," Nyssa said with confidence.

Meavia came back over toward us and motioned for us to follow her with her tail. She lead us into an area densely covered in the webs. Walking through walls of cobwebs definitely wasn't on my bucket list, and the others seemed to dislike it aswell.

"Meavia, Drake," Pecross muttered. "Isn't there something you can do about these things? I don't want to get them inside my circuits."

"You're waterproof but not spiderweb proof?" Nyssa teased the android. "Wimp."

Pecross started to retort, but suddenly he fell on his stomach and began to get dragged away. He screamed at us to help him, but despite our efforts, he was lost in a wall of webs.

We stared in horror at the dusty hole. Meavia trotted tentatively toward it. Nyssa grabbed her tail, and the cat hissed.

"We have to stay together. We don't know what's out there," she reasoned. When Meavia didn't look convinced, Nyssa added. "Pecross is smart; he'll be fine."

I was surprised by the softness in her tone. The pale blonde Ma'amkian girl was usually rude and cold, not caring if she hurt anyone's feeling by what she said. Then I remembered she had a tiny little special soft spot for cats, even bodyguard types like Meavia. She wasn't even a real cat, just a rare piece of power.

"Fine," Meavia agreed reluctantly. "But we aren't leaving without him." She sniffed around for a bit, before leading us down a dark path. Nyssa was scanning the area for anything dangerous, and Meavia was leading the group. I followed a few feet behind. Even if I wasn't as emotionally tough as the rest of the group, I was the most powerful, being able to create supernovas.

Meavia could do similar things, as she was my Medium, but she was mainly meant for protection.

Nyssa didn't have any powers without technology. She used a weapon that was a bit similar to a lightsaber, but it was more adjustable. She also used a metal circlet that could allow her to levitate, but she rarely used it as it required a lot of energy.

Pecross was an android, but he acted very human-like. He could use actual finger guns to fight, firing lasers out of his fingertips.

But most of our abilities would be useless here. They'd set the place on fire at most.

We kept walking in the dark for a few more minutes before Nyssa screamed. I grabbed her hand, trying to keep her from getting pulled away.

"Just let go!" she yelled at me. "You're gonna tear my arms off!"

"Drake, listen to her," Meavia ordered, and I let go. Nyssa disappeared into a hole, leaving me and Meavia alone.

I stared at where my friend had been a moment ago. What were we going to do? I wasn't smart like Nyssa and Pecross, and we didn't have any technology to track them.

Meavia started going into the hole. "The best way to get to them fast is to follow their path exactly, no matter the risks," she told me.

"I'm not as small as you," I argued.

"Well suck it up!" she yelled back, and I sighed and started to crawl through the cobwebs. Not much time followed before we started to cough from all the dust, and my body was getting cramps from being in the crawling position so long.

"I was wondering when you'd get here!" a cheery, familiar said as we crawled out of the tiny tunnel at last.

"You sure took your sweet time," Pecross teased. He and Nyssa were sitting at an obsidian table with bowls of candy. Draga was there too, holding special sticks used to get spiderwebs off your clothes.

"What are you doing here?" I asked the spider-like girl.

She blinked her eight red eyes and smiled, her large fangs poking out of her mouth. "I knew you wouldn't find anything, but I didn't want that to ruin your Halloween. So I set this up for you guys!"

"Wow," I said and started to dust the webs off my clothes with one of the sticks. Soon all five of us were seated at the table eating treats and swapping stories. Maybe my friends were a bit odd, and literally out of this world. But I couldn't have asked for a better Halloween.