Radio signals! Primitive, excited. Somebody sends him a song, wordless but lovely. Somebody sends him a lengthy message in a rapid-fire language of clicks and pops and shrill whistles, clearly meant to carry through water. Someone beams up a text corpus in ternary.

Oh, he loves ternary. Bonus points to this planet already.

He sets the computers to decoding. That long message, what was it? Hopefully not too hard to translate?

"Hello! We are so excited to meet you, alien being! Your vessel is so minimalist! Probably that is for [hydrodynamic, generalized to mean 'aerodynamic or similar'] reasons? We are really so excited! My lover is taking over now because I am so excited that if I tried to speak I would mostly just chirp!"

The voice smooths slightly. "Hello. I am the lover of [whistle noise]. We are the [ungodly clicking], children of the sea. We greet you with love."

"- say more than that!" the voice says after a pause.

"I do not have much to say. You are the one who says things. That is how this works."

"Oh, fine - um - we are a semiaquatic species? We - we have a body plan of five limbs, four of which are manipulators and one of which is used for extra speed while swimming - we have iron-based pink blood? I don't know what to say except biotrivia!"

"You are embarrassing yourself," observes the smoother voice. "Alien, we part with love."

The transmission cuts out.

Adorable???

It sounds like they're aquatic. Are there lights in the ocean? He has an encounter suit with a rebreather, and the ship can travel through water.

The lights cluster by the coasts, actually! They seem to be shoredwellers.

Better still! No rebreather needed.

He'll land by the largest cluster first, not the one closest to the Force signature he chased here. He might as well do first contact properly.

Shortly after he lands, his ship is mobbed by neotenous damp-skinned humanoids. They chatter and murmur, keeping the aggregate noise down to a moderate susurrus.

As he exits the ship, some of the aliens' eyes widen.

"Aliens are tall," one observer says.

"Aliens look like us," another complains. "Except - dry and tailless. And they have fur on their heads? Which is weird but insufficiently weird."

"Don't be rude to the alien! It's not his fault he's not weird."

"We have no idea why humanoid body plans are so galactically common," Eserik apologizes. "I have my own complaints, believe me."

The aliens burst into excited chirping for a moment.

"Did we think that the alien couldn't talk?" one asks as the chirping dies down.

"Shut up!" several others respond.

Oh he loves them. "I am glad to be received with friendship," Eserik says. "Does this settlement have a leader? Someone in a position of authority, who can communicate with the leaders of other places?"

Mildly confused look. "Are we talking more - um - project coordinator? Or like, are you looking for a warlord, because we don't -"

There's a chorus of objections. "Don't tell the alien about -" one alien begins.

"- what, are we going to hide the fact that we had warlords -"

"No, but let a [charming-person] handle it, not just -"

"- a terrible idea -"

Ah. Eserik claps his hands loudly. "Excuse me!" he calls out. "It does not actually come as a surprise to me that you are capable of war, if that is what you were worried about. Only a handful of species have managed to maintain peace over the history of their evolution."

They wince when he claps. His proclamation causes some distress; one alien starts crying, then shifts his posture and walks calmly away.

"...we had really hoped that war would be an us thing," another one says unhappily. "Being broken."

"Regrettably, no. There is always war somewhere."

Awkward shifting.

"Um. Anyway did you in fact want a project coordinator or a warlord," someone says eventually. "Since the answer isn't what's a war."

"Project coordinator sounds more appropriate. Though [charming-person] is also a possibility?"

A couple of them laugh. One of them explains, "You don't want to talk to a [charming-person]. They're - um - you know how people can kind of focus on doing one thing until nothing else matters - they're like that with liking people. It wouldn't be productive."

"Ah." He's not entirely sure whether to be concerned about that. "Can you direct me to your project coordinator, then?"

"He's - hmmm, let me - he's at the temple."

One of them points at a palatial building covered in swirling green and blue enamel. It's currently only a few inches deep in the water, it being low tide.

"Thank you. And thank you all," he says, raising his voice a bit. "I hope for a long and prosperous connection between our peoples."

They disperse.

The inside of the temple is lavishly decorated, mostly with pearls, but there's some gold and a handful of semiprecious stones in intricate patterns. There's another little humanoid, floating in a pool of shallow water and humming sonorously to himself. (The acoustics in here are very nice.)

He waves a hand vigorously as Eserik enters. "Alien! Welcome to Iie*a! Nacreous Scale tells me you are looking for a project coordinator? I'm the project coordinator for Red Kelp City - well I'm one of them but the others don't do nearly as much - what do you need?"

"Greetings," Eserik says. "I'm a visitor from the Galactic Republic, but more relevantly I am a member of the Jedi Order - a Jedi Seeker, in fact. We are an order of... well. Some call us wizards, and since I seem to have found a word for that in your corpus, let's go with it. I am here partly to initiate first contact and give your people access to the knowledge of the galaxy, and partly because one of the citizens of this planet holds the potential to be a Jedi, and it is my responsibility to ensure that this citizen is given the guidance they need."

The coordinator seems to mostly follow this.

"...when you say wizards," he says with the definite air of someone who does not know if he is being fucked with.

"I fully mean it," Eserik says. He gestures, and an apple-sized globe of water rises from the pool and begins orbiting the coordinator's head.

The coordinator tilts his head, boggling only slightly. "Well. I'll add that to aliens exist in the class of sucking-undertow revelations, then. What other powers do you have?" He pauses. "Um - my lover reminds me to ask if you have questions."

"We have many other powers, most of them less visually impressive." The water splashes back into the water. "Precognition is very common - short-range combat precognition of a few seconds nearly universal, longer-range prophecy rarer. Given a point of connection, we can see into the past as well. We can enhance our physical abilities, especially natural healing, which we can also induce in others. We can sense and manipulate the emotions and perceptions of others, though this is discouraged under all but extreme circumstances. We can draw upon instinctual knowledge of many things, such as how to fight with an unfamiliar weapon or use unknown machinery. This is by no means an exhaustive list."

He unconsciously folded his hands behind his back while speaking. Bad habit. He releases them. "I do have a few questions - most immediately, what... is... a 'lover'?"

The coordinator chirps thoughtfully. "Um. Lovers are a symbiotic organism which we implant into our central nervous system after ten seasonal cycles, and they... take care of us? They help us control our bodies with greater finesse, and they keep us moving when we feel enervated or blocked, and they add an extra voice to our internal decisionmaking process, and they can in extremis prevent us from making particularly unfortunate mistakes, when passion would overwhelm our better judgment."

...eugh. (Eserik has never desired for anyone to hold the power to prevent him from making mistakes.)

"I see. And this is fully voluntary, of course."

Mildly distressed chirping. "...well, you don't really - it'd be very unfortunate if anyone didn't get a lover. On account of - the other thing that lovers do. Which is preventing metamorphosis."

"Metamorphosis?"

"When a member of our species goes into their tenth year without a lover, they... change. They retreat from society and slumber in a cave, emerging only to hunt, and afterwards they're. Well. Monsters. They can still speak, but - they lose their social instincts, they're far more aggressive, and they just. They're wrong. They can't even make art."

The coordinator breathes out shakily. "We don't like... thinking about them. I'm sorry."

"No, of course - I'm sorry. I'll look for more information in the text corpus, you don't have to keep talking about it."