Cthulhu at the Beach

While visiting a small planet around an ordinarily boring star we happened upon some natives of limited cognitive skill and frightening body plan. These small, unscaled, wingless animals have only one visible orifice from which they make their mad skittering chirps and ingest their food, have brightly colored soft carapaces which cover very little of their soft bodies, appear amphibious and take it in turns to warm their blood on the shore and then cool off in the water, where I presume they also hunt and ingest their catch. Off in the distance I could make out strange structures, of regular sides and unnervingly straight geometry, which I can only assume are their temples and domiciles, which nearly drove me mad to look upon.

These creatures, by some deep unnatural rhythm and lying on special tapestries, would first lie on their wingless dorsal sections and then turn over, with their ventral sides down leaving them exposed to attack from predators. This could only indicate a natural trust of the fellows of their species or some hidden defensive mechanism, perhaps spikes or stingers hidden just below their flabby skins. Perhaps these creatures are merely stupid. Unfortunately, I witnessed only one incidence of predation in my time among them which I'll outline later.

Some of the creatures, the smallest of them, spent more time in the water, presumably as they have not yet learned to regulate their body temperature or need to be cooler for some arcane reason. They also spent their time on shore building small scale dwellings of wet sand in practice for building their own dwellings when they age. Some were tossing around and punishing a red and white minion which I assume must have been insolent. I observed the skin of one of these minions left on the sand, apparently flayed, for it's attempt to escape into the water.

I also noted a mating ritual. Some of these creatures would strap themselves to boards of either organic or artificial make, and then, by proving they could stay on the board the longest would win the right to fertilize their mate's eggs. While I have yet to find a nest of these creature's eggs, I'm sure they keep them in those distant and unnerving temples further inland which I'm loathe to approach.

As the world turned round away from the central star and it's fading light signaled danger to the creatures, perhaps not as stupid as I first surmised until I witnessed this predation, they grouped together and gathered their tapestries and ritual garb while others gathered the smaller creatures out of the water and off of the sand and collectively moved inland. After they reached a short distance inland they moved directly toward a lazy herd of shining, hard, insectoid creatures which quickly swallowed them up in their many mouths and roared to life. From this I can only surmise that the insectoid creatures were in some way camouflaged, perhaps by some means outside of the normal visual spectrum. The insectoid creatures then began to move further inland, past those unnerving structures, signaling to one another through a series of raucous honks and beeps.