Amentans colonizing places
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Seen from space, the planet is a mottled ball covered in vivid colors, with just under half the surface covered in oceans dotted with archipelagos and large islands a hundred or two miles wide at the most. There is only one continent, though it may as well be three, with a massive series of inland seas and channels almost severing it. Grassland, prairie, forest, mountains, jungles, deserts, and ice sheets cover the surface in appropriate places. A dozen shades of green and half as many colors of brown and grey speckle the surface, along with rarer instances of stranger colors - a dull purple, black, brownish-red, neon orange streaked through with blue. The biomes don't quite look natural. They're all roughly round, and mostly the same size. The placements don't always make sense. Weather patterns ought to dictate a mountain range between forested areas and deserts, but this is only usually the case.

And there are people down there, living low-tech lives. Sporting tails and covered in various shades of colorful fur, with long snouts sometimes bearing tusk-like teeth, tough ridged horns that grow to considerable length, and a dog's nose, moving on digitigrade feet- Something like a cross between a fox or boar, and a goat or deer, walking on two legs. A pretty even density all across the planet, even in the areas with nasty predators. The highest visible evidence of technology are stone walls, steel swords, and muscle-powered cranes.

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Huh, furry people. Furry steel-age people! They can help them like nobody helped Amenta! The round biomes is weird, maybe there are underlying craters with mineral deposits that affect things or something like that.

A shuttle lands about a mile away from a village in a low-nasty-predator-concentration prairie.

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They notice right away. The thing they do about it is make a lot of noise and go up and touch a tree in the village grounds for a few seconds one after the other, before assembling into a militia.

One old-looking alien (grey fur, hunched posture, broken horn) calmly walks out from the village with no visible weapons, to stare curiously at the shuttle and the newcomers. The locals' clothes are very loose and light and not super covering, probably because of the fur. At least five more are watching from a good distance away with bows and arrows.

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A green steps out, with her hands up, nervously glancing at the bows and arrows but still advancing till there is some reaction.

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The old alien makes a barking sort of sound sort of sound and keeps walking forward, stopping about ten feet away. Takes a sheathed knife off their belt and makes a tossing motion and a 'mrr' sound that might be inquisitive.

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The green slowly shakes her head, ready to bolt if headshaking turns out to mean "stab me" on this planet.

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Headtilt.

"Only the old, old, oldest tales speak of those who live beyond the sky. Which I presume you must be. I offer you my blade, will you not take it?" The alien sentence uses sounds Amentans could make, plus a sort of tonal barking, and concludes with another 'mrr' and a more insistent wave of the sheathed knife.

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...she holds out her hands, tentative. The mic pickup on her shoulder grabs everything he says but that doesn't mean they understand it.

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Alien hands it to her handle-first, then steps back again with a happy bark. They wait expectantly for a few seconds, then seem to dismiss whatever they were waiting for with a head-jerk to the side.

They gesture at the shuttle. "This is your sky-ship or what have you, mrr? Such a ridiculous amount of metal. Ahh, you don't understand this do you..."

Head-jerk again. "...Sky." Pointing upward. "Ground." Down. "Sky-ship." Shuttle. Headtilt.

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The green repeats these words as best she can, which is pretty well, and then points at the knife, and the native who gave it to her.

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"Knife. Balori. Mrr? Dwellin." Pause. Alien points to the bow-wielders who are still a bit wary in turn. "Dwellin, Hista. Dwellin, Mako. Dwellin, Captu."

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"Amentan, Kasotu," says the green, pointing to herself.

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"Amentan?" Pointing at a grey closer to the shuttle.

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"Amentan, Hatsush."

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"Kasotu, Hatsush. Mrr..."

Alien spins around and gets into a low stance, arms raised and teeth bared against an invisible foe, tail lashing, striking out with a lunging punch. Then smooths everything and turns again. "Fight. Was fighting. Amentan fight?"

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Headshake headshake!

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Alien barks loudly and shouts something to the watchers. They also start barking repeatedly. It might be laughter?

Then they rip up a patch of grass with their clawed feet and start drawing in the dirt with a finger, a crude sketch of one of the local animals- A quadrupedal boar-looking thing. "Leadfoot fight Amentan! Careful careful!"

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"Hatsush fight leadfoot," Kasotu says. "Amentan not fight Dwellin."

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"Not, mrr? Not ground?" Alien points at the sky. "Not, 'Not'. Only Hatsush fight? Not Kasotu?"

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"Kasotu not fight. Kasotu -" She touches her green ringlets. "Green. Hatsush grey. Grey Amentan fight, green Amentan not fight."

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Alien seems to think this is deeply weird. "All Dwellin fight."

Balori is happy to exchange words via pointing and charades with Kasotu for a while. This is the kind of thing that takes patience.

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Kasotu does charades! Insofar as there is any room for figuring out anything specific besides what's convenient she's curious about their legends regarding sky-ships.

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Some of the very oldest and completely unverifiable legends say that people wander the sea above the sky in ships of metal, and don't agree much beyond that. This is far beyond living memory.

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Huh. Amentans are new to wandering the sky in ships of metal, so they are not who the legends are about.

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Balori doesn't know who they could be about, if they're about anyone at all, and shrugs (that head-jerk to the side is their shrug) about it. You'd need A LOT of metal and master craftsmen to try and make something like that.

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Is it very hard to find metal on this planet?

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