I hope the inaugural meeting went well! And this is about first contact, I suppose, or being the first to land on a new planet. At least I hope that comes across!
A first Ahead was grassland. The grass here was mostly green, but if you picked a blade and turned it between your fingers you found that it was blue-green with little strands of indigo weaving up its length. The survey drones had spotted that fast, even before they'd decided that the atmosphere was safe and opened the ship-doors, so they had a pretty good idea now: the grass had been genetically engineered at some point. The problem was that they still had no idea what it had been engineered to do. There were trees as well; unusual things that were squat where an earth tree was tall and that spread out sideways much more than they reached for the sky and the sun. A single tree could take up nearly an acre of space by itself. The trunks were as large as houses to support the arching canopy of branches and the branches were a steadily thinning network out from main beams. The birds, for want of a better name for the flying things that had tiny little humanoid faces and shrieked like banshees when they were hungry, liked to sit on the thinner branches. They avoided the thick main branches for some reason. Asoka was probably working on a theory about it, but she'd yet to propose anything in the group chat. Sessima looked out across the grassland, ready to move on and survey the next quadrangle. It was flat, almost bleak to her eyes. No shrubs, and the trees were all on the edges -- an artefact of how they'd laid out the quadrangles rather than anything suspect. Something moved, and she started, surprised. There were few mammals of any kind on this planet, which was one of the reasons for landing here. There had been too many mistakes where they'd landed first and worried about the native population second. She flicked the drone into the air and took control via her headset; it soared up to a comfortable height and quickly identified the movement on the ground. "Fast," she murmured. It was probably about as fast as a horse. That made her momentarily sad; she'd been hoping that they'd be able to raise horses here. It was good land for them, assuming that the grass didn't turn out to be poisonous. She looked at the drone's ranged analysis, which was limited to size, shape, body temperature... very much first impressions. "Well," she said, wishing there was someone to talk to, "that looks like a very fast hippopotamus. Probably not a good thing."
Greg - thanks, things went pretty smoothly, all things considered. Lots of new staff, several new elected officials.
I love the sound of those trees, for all that they are probably dangerous. I suspect the grass is also dangerous, just in a different manner. And that fast moving hippo?
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I hope the inaugural meeting went well! And this is about first contact, I suppose, or being the first to land on a new planet. At least I hope that comes across!
A first
Ahead was grassland. The grass here was mostly green, but if you picked a blade and turned it between your fingers you found that it was blue-green with little strands of indigo weaving up its length. The survey drones had spotted that fast, even before they'd decided that the atmosphere was safe and opened the ship-doors, so they had a pretty good idea now: the grass had been genetically engineered at some point. The problem was that they still had no idea what it had been engineered to do.
There were trees as well; unusual things that were squat where an earth tree was tall and that spread out sideways much more than they reached for the sky and the sun. A single tree could take up nearly an acre of space by itself. The trunks were as large as houses to support the arching canopy of branches and the branches were a steadily thinning network out from main beams. The birds, for want of a better name for the flying things that had tiny little humanoid faces and shrieked like banshees when they were hungry, liked to sit on the thinner branches. They avoided the thick main branches for some reason. Asoka was probably working on a theory about it, but she'd yet to propose anything in the group chat.
Sessima looked out across the grassland, ready to move on and survey the next quadrangle. It was flat, almost bleak to her eyes. No shrubs, and the trees were all on the edges -- an artefact of how they'd laid out the quadrangles rather than anything suspect. Something moved, and she started, surprised. There were few mammals of any kind on this planet, which was one of the reasons for landing here. There had been too many mistakes where they'd landed first and worried about the native population second. She flicked the drone into the air and took control via her headset; it soared up to a comfortable height and quickly identified the movement on the ground.
"Fast," she murmured. It was probably about as fast as a horse. That made her momentarily sad; she'd been hoping that they'd be able to raise horses here. It was good land for them, assuming that the grass didn't turn out to be poisonous. She looked at the drone's ranged analysis, which was limited to size, shape, body temperature... very much first impressions.
"Well," she said, wishing there was someone to talk to, "that looks like a very fast hippopotamus. Probably not a good thing."
Greg - thanks, things went pretty smoothly, all things considered. Lots of new staff, several new elected officials.
I love the sound of those trees, for all that they are probably dangerous. I suspect the grass is also dangerous, just in a different manner. And that fast moving hippo?
Definitely pet material.
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