We planned for contact to begin in the morning. With my capacitors charged and optics re-tuned, I set out for the long trek to the nearby town.
Instead of taking the beaten path, I opted to walk in the river. It wasn’t so deep, and the current could probably not even push a toy boat. It only came up to my shins.
It was midnight around when I left. Since I took it slow along the path, it was already getting close to twilight hours. I had to periodically dodge a group of six locals and what appeared to be their bipedal pet lizard.
Microphones did not pick up any speech, but my cameras did manage to see their mouths moving in a way that resembled English, but I could not be certain.
Couldn’t help but notice what the things were wearing. They all looked to be wearing binoculars. The white one with purple hair had some weird helmet on. Since it was still dark, I was able to observe closer than normal. I had to drop the NVG’s to hide my eye glow. After I observed, I moved on.
The sun was barely peeking over the horizon when I reached the bridge by the cottage I saw earlier. I took note of the different forest animals that appeared to be guarding the bridge and the cottage. I silently rose from the river on the other side of the bridge. I made damn sure to stay out of sight, so as not to alert the guard animals.
I found a pavilion in the middle of the square. I decided to sit down in the middle of the pavilion and wait. As soon as I sat down, the party of seven came across my location. The looks on their faces… priceless.
The little lizard approached me, carefully, holding out its right claws in the way of a handshake. Despite the diminutive size in comparison to my grippers, I grasped his claws, and did a light handshake. It should be noted that if cringing from awkwardness were a part of my programming, I probably would have.
The little dragon, bravely if not a little shaky, spoke. He introduced himself. I say he, because that is what the voice sounded like. I didn’t hear too much of what he was saying, but it was perfect English. I was speechless from trying to process so much new data.
“Uh, did you hear me? My name is Spike. What’s yours?”
“Oh, yes. Erm, sorry. My name is Rick. Processing terabytes of data at once,” I half lied.
“Is that a lot?”
“Yes.” We sat in silence for awhile. I spoke up. “You know, I always dreamed that first contact would go differently than this, but somehow, it always goes this way. Awkward.”
“Do tell,” Spike said. “Well,” he continues, “Do you want me to introduce you to my friends?”
“Of course.”