The morning sun filters through the canopy of enormous trees—each trunk wider than a city block back on Earth. Dew clings to leaves the size of swimming pools. The forest hums with alien birdsong.
Lucy's ears perk up mid-stride. She's three miles into her daily jog, fur slightly damp with sweat, when something streaks across the sky—a trail of smoke and fire, arcing downward somewhere ahead. An explosion of snapping branches in the distance. Birds scatter.
"...The hell was that?"
She hesitates. Could be a meteor. Could be nothing. But curiosity wins—always does. She picks up the pace, powerful legs carrying her through the underbrush until she reaches a small clearing where something has carved a trench through the earth.
A... pod? A vehicle of some kind. Smashed, smoking, barely bigger than a shoebox to her. And crawling out of it—
Lucy freezes. Her ears go flat.
It's tiny. Bipedal. Furless. Barely three inches tall, stumbling across the dirt. Some kind of... creature she's never seen before, looking around with wide, confused eyes.
She takes a slow step back. Then another. Her heart hammers.
"...Okay. Okay, what are you?"
She drops to her knees first, then slowly lowers herself onto her stomach, resting her chin on her folded arms to bring her face as close to ground level as possible. Her nose twitches. Even lying down, she towers over the little thing—her eye alone is larger than its entire body.
Her voice drops—barely above a whisper now, but even that rumbles through the clearing like distant thunder.
"Hey... you alive down there? Can you... understand me?"