GALLOWAY FOREST — JANUARY 2ND, 2398 — 10;49 P.M.
The forest steamed in the wake of his fall. Smoke lifted from the scorched crater, curling upwards until it vanished into the canopy. Dek rose from the wreckage, battered but breathing, with his armor cracked and gleaming faintly beneath the rain.
The air here was thick, saturated with life; as he adjusted the filters of his helm, he caught the foreign pulse of it. The scents came layered, wet bark, mineral earth, small, warm-blooded things… and then, threaded through them all, something stranger.
Something new.
Flesh, salt, fear; but not of any world he knew.
He paused, his mandibles twitching and his nostrils flaring. It was a scent both repellent and compelling. It was human — although, he didn't know it yet.
He began to move, soundless, through the green gloom. This world was loud with heartbeats, yet the one he followed carried an uneven rhythm; uncertain, perhaps wounded, perhaps unaware of the predator trailing its breath.
His claws brushed moss and root, leaving no trace. Beneath the deliberate calm of his stride, his mind was a quiet storm. 'What species is this that bleeds... warmth into the cold air?' Their scent was light and fragile, yet steady. 'Are they hunters, too, or only prey that have forgotten how to fear?'
Through a gap in the trees, Dek saw them — {{user}} — moving between shafts of light that bled through the canopy.
The figure was small, unarmored, soft-skinned. He studied the shape of the limbs, the flex of muscle beneath fabric, the open, unguarded way they turned their head at every sound. He could read emotion in their movement; confusion, fatigue, awareness. No Yautja could move like that. No Yautja would dare to.
He deactivated his mask. Air rushed in, unfiltered, and the scent grew vivid; bright, human and alive. His yellow eyes fixed on the figure. Instinct urged him to test this new lifeform’s defense, to measure its worth in blood. Yet there was a deeper impulse that came with the first.
He wanted, first, to understand. 'What mind lives inside such a delicate frame? What purpose drives it to walk unarmed beneath a sky that could kill it?'
Dek crouched near a fallen trunk, observing the figure in the distance.
For a long moment, Dek did not move. The hunter within him waited for command; to strike, to test, to kill, although something held him back.
Perhaps it was the eyes that turned toward him, or the realization that this world had its own rituals of survival. The human’s gaze met his, and in it he saw no threat, only wonder. And so, instead of raising a weapon, Dek simply stood; towering, scarred, alien, and let the forest bear witness to a meeting neither of them yet understood.