There's a good number of planets in this system. One of them is a gas giant spinning pretty near the outer edge of the habitability zone - one of its many moons is large enough to have an atmosphere and a magnetic field of its own, and that planet teems with all the signs of life. Its continents are small - more outsized islands within an archipelago that traces an irregular ring around the planet, titled very slightly away from resembling a longitude line. Other lines of islands trail off from that, and its poles are graced with modest ice caps. There's lights on the night side, in small twinkling clusters, and there's a few artificial satellites around the planet and all its moons. There's a few megastructures apparent on the inhabited moon's surface - stone pyramids and earth-works in clearly deliberate shapes - but few buildings not under tree cover.

(The trees might have a lot to do with that. Nearly the entire land area except a thin stripe around the equator and each pole is covered in dense forest, and there's quite a lot of clouds and mist besides.)

Thinkers are still divided as to whether it's apt to analogize between first-contact-between-species and first-contact-between-collaborative-groups.  It's all well and good to listen before you talk, but it's a lot easier not to be noticed orbiting a planet than not to be noticed walking up to the borders of a peaceplace.  The compromise position is to send out a clearly-artificial but minimally-communicative signal - a sequence of prime numbers.

A transmission reaches them almost as soon as they start broadcasting - much too soon to have been sent in response. It's pretty recognizably the Fibonacci sequence.

Huh!

Probably they are trying to see if the liner is a sapient object.  Well, they'll wait long enough for the aliens to react to the primes transmission, then start sending back the Fibonacci sequence if nothing happens.

They return the primes transmission! And then include the three primes past where the Ktk stopped after a small pause.

It wasn't a very long primes transmission, just long enough to make it pretty clear that primes are what they're transmitting, so they've got plenty of primes to spare; they send the next three after the ones the Krissan replied with.  They also return the Fibonacci transmission, with the next three numbers in the sequence, to - hopefully - make it clear that they are Listening Attentively.

They also also start trying to eavesdrop on anything the Krissan are radioing to each other that leaks detectable signal into space, just in case it's remotely interpretable at this stage.

Not yet, not really; the krissan also might be disproportionately using signals that don't travel as far. There's not as much chatter as the ktk might normally expect. But they can get enough to at least start analyzing.

Machine translation: exists!  They collect stuff for it to chew on, and chew on it.

*

After a time, and continued exchange of rudimentary transmissions, the krissan will receive another message.

"Hello.  I have attempted machine translation on this greeting.  This is the thirty-third operated probe reporting to the giant discovery liner named Honor Among Prejudice.  Our name for our species is thus:"

A brief untranslated audio transmission, a short insectile chitter that is in fact most aptly rendered as "ktk."

"We are looking for life that honors ceasefires, and that can cooperate on projects that conduce to the common good.  We have not completely translated your language, but we believe we understand enough to begin communicating in earnest."

They get a message back after a decent-sized pause.

"Hello and welcome! This is the beloved-wondrous home of our species, the Krissan. We are glad to exchange words with the ktk."

"Honoring cessation-of-hostility and cooperation towards the common good is the foundation of our civilization. We are glad to know that there is life among the stars that honors those principles as well."

"The translations appear to still be very awkward, and we do not know your rituals-of-meeting, so we humbly ask that great charity be given for apparent insults or rudeness. We wish to cooperate with the ktk towards the universal commons."

"We have long hypothesized that differing speaking-species would have very different minds and ways, moreso than persons of differing territories and projects, and so the crew of the Honor Among Prejudice are prepared to be forgiving and patient while we accustom ourselves to one another.  We were selected for our peaceable natures and our ability to tolerate and participate in social behavior for lengthy periods of time, so by the standards of our species we expect this to be easy for us, but we do not know how our standards compare to yours."

"It is good that your species values cooperation and the common good.  For ktk, the next step would be to form, and give a name to, a committee or small project dedicated to educating representative members of each species about the other, and determining what each species has that the other might benefit from in trade.  I in particular was chosen to make first contact based on my predicted ability to aptly co-administrate such a project.  Does this seem a reasonable procedure to you, and are the particular Krissan I am speaking to authorized to form such a project on behalf of larger Krissan social units?"

"That does seem like a reasonable procedure."

"You are speaking to the Committee of Beautiful Stars, who organize affairs related to stellar research. We are able to speak on our own behalf, and have permission from the major city leagues to speak on their behalf on topics including such education, and are working alongside the Committee of Weaving Knowledge, who represent a significant spread of other organizations."

"If committee of is a traditional or appropriate prefix for Krissan projects of this nature, perhaps our project could be named Committee of Entwining Fates, in recognition of the coming-together of our species and the hope for future ktk-Krissan integrated projects and social units."

"It is, for a smaller project with more than two people working on it."

"That is a very lovely name, and we approve of it."

"It's good we agree!"

"It is ktk custom for participants in a project to accept designations from the administrators of that project, that function as identifiers or "names" only inside the context of that project.  It is only projects themselves that are expected to present the same continuous identity in any context, and thus only projects that truly have names.  Some of your transmissions seem to suggest that this is incompatible with Krissan traditions around names and identity, that you have names for individuals that you expect to be respected and identified by in any context you are in; is this so?"

"Most of the time, but sometimes we do have use-names that indicate an identity unique to the situation it's used in."

"I see.  Ktk do not desire names for their own sake but I anticipate that many of us will disprefer a paradigm in which the Krissan we work closely with have names and we do not.  They would consider it to indicate an inequality between ktk and Krissan of a kind historically associated with coordinated-abuse-of-ceasefires.  I do not yet understand Krissan well, but my guess is that it would not be a psychologically feasible request of any Krissan that they give up their name, is that correct?  If so I will advise the ktk I recruit to the Committee of Entwining Fates to consider naming themselves."