The ship's arrival is not dramatic. No burst of light or radio noise or spatial distortion. One moment empty space. The next, a near black egg of metal over a thousand feet long, if not by much.

It reappears much closer to the third planet after a cautious hour in the very far reaches of the system, curious about the odd patterns of high wavelength light.

When it gets close enough, a space telescope is pointed at it. A few planetside sites send it messages.

It's not just RADAR. Those are - communicative. Of course, he doesn't know the sigils.

People.

He is incredibly nervous and irresistably curious.

The ship drifts in space, letting off a merry glow of infrared that slowly fades and watching the surface for a few hours, trying to pick out patterns in the radio signals.

They are starting with some numbers, it would seem. Checking if he's a person.

He messes with his RADAR until it can send the same kind of signals back and completes the sequences, sending out some of his own.

Are any of the transmissions pointed at him near water?

Yup, this one's from a coastal city.

The ship will-

Hmm. That's a lot of things in orbit. Wouldn't want to hit any of it.

-Reappear directly above the ocean some fifty miles out and descend straight through the atmosphere to settle in the waves.

Then a shining blue creature emerges and flies in high expanding circles.

There are people with cameras and boats very interested in this development as soon as they can get there.

It dives close to the first boat it spots and settles on top of the waves a few hundred feet away, bobbing like an inflatable pool toy and watching.

Tailless.

Let's see what they do.

They take so many pictures. One yells "HI DRAGON ALIEN".

It is too buoyant to really swim but it manages to get closer to the boat, head tilting curiously.

"HI DRAGON ALIEN!" it shouts a voice recording back.

The person who yelled laughs a little hysterically. "Welcome to Green!" they call.

It approaches the boat maybe twenty feet away but does not say anything else, listening instead.

There is another boat, over there!

The shiny creature lifts off and lands again between the second boat and the ship.

The projection is not very capable of communication on its own but it can give crude and unnuaunced messages like

Stay back.

The boat brakes hard, though this isn't sufficient to stop it right away, it was going pretty fast.

That's okay, he just doesn't want them to come touch his ship. 

Approaching-your-territory-peace/parley. Desire communicate/music/thoughts.

Music? The first boat has somebody with a portable speaker and now it is playing music, does the alien like that?

That gets him to move over to the first boat again. Ah, so they do have Song! Of a sort. He is beginning to suspect that their overly complicated verbalizations mean things the same way Draak can scream simple messages into the air, but not sure what to do with that revelation yet. Because these are definitely the Tailless, as far as he can tell. They're not trying to kill him at the moment. Maybe they've forgotten?

He will have the projection croon along to the music with trilling purr-like oohs and aahs and uurs and see if they suddenly try to attack.

They do not suddenly try to attack! They congratulate themselves on communicating-after-a-fashion and continue playing music that seem like it'd go well with the oo-aa-urr thing.

Music can be uncomplicated fun for a while! He has a clear preference for slow songs.

If more boats show up the music time will have to end, though.

Yup here's another boat.

...Hmm. Well, no reward without risk.

The projection retreats and flies into the top of the ship. A moment later, a much bigger dragon, less shiny this time, emerges and tries to discern which boat is most important. He doesn't have much to go on besides size and shininess though.

The newest one is the biggest.

He roars - well, it seems to have some sort of vocal characteristics, it changes in pitch and tone. It's almost musical and lasts about thirty seconds.

Then he slinks into the water and swims to the largest boat. The clawed 'hand' at the end of one wing holds up a large engraved copper rod, and a talon scrapes one of the indentations.

Invitation/Request Music/Duet/Telepathy

One of the people aboard the big ship steps to the prow and waves with his whole arm.

Hello, comes the wash of feeling, confidence bubbling with cautious anxiety and overshadowed with INTENSE CURIOSITY and a thrumming multilayered string instrument-y sound hovering in the background somewhere.

I have come from across the black sea, exploring. A sense of cosmic awe at the sheer vastness of space takes over the emotional tones for a moment.

You are PEOPLE! I am trying not to be overwhelming.

I should hear you if you wish me to!

Hello! replies the person, who is also typing without looking as fast as possible with a computer someone's holding in place for him. Can you hear this?

It is faint and muddled in comparison to one of my kin, (Pride!), but that is to be expected.

If I am unwelcome in this (territory/demense/home) I am willing to leave without challenge.

We are interested in what brings you here and what you have to say!

My pride and joy is exploration and seeing things which nobody else has seen! Before now all I have found in (sense of vastness) is unliving matter. Wondrous and thrilling and beautiful in hundreds of ways, but no kin, no beasts of the land or plants to fill it, no (naturesouls?) of the Four and not even bacteria. This is a joyous day for me to have found you, even as it also frightens me.

We haven't met any stellarneighbors before either! What's your concern?

You resemble old planetneighbors from a sorrowful time of history. This planet is not the planet we call Oldhome, and yet you resemble the Tailless Menace quite strongly in physical form...

I'm so sorry that you had that experience. We consider ourselves a peaceful people.

Hope but reserving-judgment!

Whether your minds resemble the old enemy is something I am equipped to learn. I am one of the few who yet live from that time.

I am very curious about all your devices!

I'm typing on my computer to have reminders of this conversation available later. It's a historic moment. Is there another device you were wondering about?

Image of boat. Wonderment at the controls and curiosity about the powerplant (electric?). The vague notion of ordered radio signals. Image of the camera devices. Music box.

The guy on the boat will try to explain about all those things!

How fascinating!! He has more questions. This alien is, it seems, A Nerd. He had to build all his computers by hand, you know. Well, 'hand'.

The boat person doesn't know all the details but can have things looked up if the alien is in a hurry to learn them.

I'm not going to explode from curiosity - how does looking things up work? - Hesitation and a sense of doing-the-annoying-but-morally-right-thing. I should give you a chance to ask questions as well. It is only fair.

They would like to know if other aliens are on the way, how the alien chose this landing site, what his name is, if "his" is the correct descriptor, where he lives when he's at home, if there's a whole federation of planets they can join...

Nope, he invented and built the only lightbridge that exists! At least among the Draak-Kin.

It was the place that was trying to talk to him and was also near ocean.

His full accumulatedname is Seeker of New Truths, the Claw that Finds Secrets, Voyager of the Black Sea, Eye that Sees All, Silent Watcher of the Hidden Depths, Scholar of the Ocean, Wise Herald of the Hidden World. His preferred shortname is The Seeker or just Seeker.

He is male, not that it particularly matters most of the time, does it matter most of the time for Green's species?

He will launch into a loving full-sensory-immersion description of his lair and territory (some swamp and some coral reef and some forest and a mountain) and the many interesting long-term experiments going on in it at that question.

Certainly he is not part of any sort of federation.

Gender matters for some languages - not this one but they still usually like to know, though it's not important for most things. Mostly they were just curious if aliens even had male and female in a way analogous to theirs; other important differences, such as that he is an awesome dragon, are more plainly visible.

Is there anyone who might want to be in a federation with them? Who-all is out there?

He is rather awesome, isn't he? Regardless, yes, Draak have the same bigender layout. The bacteria and fish of the two planets he has seen, at least, seem surprisingly similar to Green ones so far. He would like to confirm this observation with some animal facts.

There's the Tailless Menace, of course, who arrived in starships but then there was a war and the starships left and never came back. Encounters with other aliens have been very rare. There are a few others generally ranging from confusing but probably benign, to highly dangerous but not malicious as it does not think. That last one is probably a bioweapon?

...is "Tailless Menace"' the only term they have for those people the Greens look like?

It's not really a word, more of a bundle of concepts. Each creature 'hears' them slightly differently.

Is 'tailless', focusing simply on the body, any better? Or perhaps the division between stout Delvers, tall Warriors, and the Farmers, most similar to these Greens of the three kinds?

Well, you see, Greens don't have tails either.

The Menace never deigned to speak with Draak. Perhaps these tailless should name themselves, then. 

How about "Greens"? Their planet is mostly blue but they live on the green part.

If that is what they wish, they will be the Greens.

Names are very important. Can this Green speak for all Greens?

No, he can't. There are several Green federations that don't nest.

The name will be tentative for now then.

I am getting irritated and may leave (to his ship, not offplanet) soon. It is nothing in particular you are doing, I am allergic? to potential threats.

That is understandable though they'd like to know how they can avoid seeming threatening to alien body language parsing in the future!

It's mostly being outnumbered and sort of surrounded.

That's totally fair. They will let all their neighbors know that this should be a one boat at a time situation.

That is for the best. Draak are solitary.

He retreats to the ship for a while - hours.

When he comes back out, perhaps whoever is there if-it's-not-the-same-person can explain how federations work? The Kin have one planetwide federation that almost never does things, or none at all, depending on how you look at things.

There is one boat there and it's a different person.

A federation is when a bunch of political units form a sort of club; it's a step up from a peace agreement or even an alliance, where they allow more interdependence and cultural blending between certain polities in order to collect some mostly-economic benefits from doing so.

Huh.

Draak... Barely do politics compared to Greens, he is getting the sense. There are a few respected experts in this or that, people with better reputations, but that seems much more individual and informal than a 'federation'.

Aside from the extremely rare Moots, they have no government and no enforcement save fear for one's reputation. The rules of Tradition thus are not laws in the sense of being enforced by a formal political body, more of an informal social contract.

Well, it makes sense that a solitary species would be less on top of each other.

He would like to hear what a typical Green's life is like, to try and understand them.

Well, the details vary a lot, but generally people are born to married parents and have some number of siblings and alloparents and allosiblings (sometimes one or more of those numbers are zero), with whom they live, and they learn stuff, sometimes in a school or alacarte lessons or just ambiently from reading and existing, and they might move out when they're getting to the point where their relationship with their parents needs to transition to a less premised-on-childhood form and distance will help with that, and then move back in or form their own household unit as the case may be. Most adults take some kind of remunerative work sometimes but the amount of time spent on that as opposed to on domestic maintenance/organization/caretaking varies.

Draak-Kin mature for 4-5 years in an egg, becoming conscious and telepathic during the final year. One parent teaches them while still in the egg and leaves before they hatch. After they hatch, they are on their own to thrive or fail, and will usually stick to where their parents put them for a decade or two before adolescence. Life milestones tend to come with long periods of hibernation. They usually fight or challenge other kids for territory and to prove themselves, and eventually settle in for the long term in whatever territory they ended up with and then spend most of their time on their interests. The line for adulthood is being able to fly.

But that all seems kind of vague. On both sides. Perhaps they should try a specific example?

Sure. This specific Green grew up with his moms and a friend of theirs who donated sperm and that guy's best friend, and he has four siblings (one from the other mom), and he moved out for a year when he was 16 and then came back for three years and then moved out again to be closer to his job and then got married and put down roots and currently lives with his wife and her sister and his three kids and a friend of one of the kids who drifted into their household due to preferring not to live with his own.