The planet is quite earthlike in terms of gravity, size, temperature... The moon is a brownish iceball about half the mass of Luna (with almost the same radius).

In the atmosphere of the planet, particularly above the poles and oceans, there are numerous anomalies spraying EM radiation in strange ways. They almost seem like exotic types of storms that are directing themsleves. They don't seem to be any kind of ordered signal, perhaps a natural phenomenon?

The people live mostly on one large continent that is built up with dense farms, lights at night, and hundreds of cities. The other continent seems to be newly inhabited, with much less land occupied. It's currently close to sunset along the eastern coast of the emptier continent, though much of it is currently occupied by rolling thunderstorms (the non-anomalous kind) today.

She does love a good sunset, and she can always relocate later if she doesn't like her first choice. She picks a settlement that isn't currently beset by storms - she doesn't particularly see the need to try to fly in one, plus appearing in bad weather isn't the best first impression, with most species - and circles overhead before setting down a few minutes' walk past the edge of town, avoiding any obvious cropland.

It's fairly foresty. Her best choices might be either: A field growing cover crops right now, a large stone square with a statue on one edge of town, a water landing, or a big hill north of town cleared of trees, with a paved path and benches along it.

The hill looks good; she doesn't want to crowd them and does want to be able to deploy her terrestrial drones.

Her first visitor runs up the hill on digitigrade legs, covered in fur and wearing bright red pants. His snout falls open in wonderment as he gazes at the metal ship that descended from the sky. (In the distance, a raft of logs he had been tugging along grounds itself on the river shore.)

He runs in a wide circle, inspecting it from all angles, and shouts out some words.

"Hello!", she shouts back.

He waves. And tries what seems to be a different language.

Another person is walking fast up the hill. This one looks a lot like a human, aside from a pair of tall ears protruding from the top of her head, wearing a flowy dress. They shout at each other for a bit.

She pipes the audio to her AI and gets it started on figuring out how to translate the language.

She'll hold off on sending any drones out just yet - she doesn't have an unlimited number and wants to be a little more confident that nothing will happen to them.

The woman clasps her hands together firmly. And then the visitor is suddenly aware of several things: This is the town of Gale Rocks. Lots of people saw them land, and more visitors will be showing up soon. There are doctors and craftsmen in town too. If there's anything they need to do or be warned about, please make that clear!

Um!

Telepathy isn't unheard of, among the species that humanity knows, but interspecies telepathy without some kind of tech to receive whatever signal is being sent out and translate it into a format the receiving person can perceive was assumed to be impossible. And yet - she's fairly sure she's not hallucinating? She hasn't been under that much stress, and she's not supposed to be prone to it even if she was.

"Can you understand me?" she tries, on the external speaker.

She can only do projective! Sorry! She's pretty sure the Baron has trinkets for Kelosian, and he's probably coming!

Welp.

She'll wait, then, and take the time to prepare some things on board.

More people show up and chatter. All of them are mostly humanoid, but few appear entirely human. They seem curious and wary rather than alarmed. The red pants guy is shooed back to the logs (more are coming downstream and they're kind of piling up).

A woman with shimmey scaled forearms and gold colored eyes arrives and 'says': Establishing communication has primacy here. Normally, simply touching a language disk is all that's needed to use it. I have one for Kelosian here. May I approach and hand it off to your vessel?

She opens her cargo bay door; a squat robot holding a tray in its pincer hands rides the ramp down and wheels its way toward her.

The crowd murmurs. She does her best to look impressed instead of startled. Smiles and walks up and deposits a hand-sized disk of stone with what is probably a lot of writing or possibly some sort of circuitry embedded in it as a blue metal, and places it on the tray while examining the strange body.

Denika lets them look for a few moments, and then directs the robot back inside, leaving the ramp down so that they can follow if they'd like.

No, she will stay out here, thank you. She walks back to the crowd and makes some sort of announcement. They seem to be deferring to her. Mostly; Two others come up to her and start arguing quietly.

The ramp stays down; nothing else happens for a few minutes.

"I don't think it's working," she says, eventually; hopefully the disappointed tone of voice will come through.

That is unusual, the woman from earlier replies after thinking about it for a few seconds. Receptive empathy isn't working either. I'm surprised projective appears to be working given that. But we can't keep that up all day. Can I have the disk back, it's expensive.

The robot trundles back out with the disk, promptly enough that it might have already been on its way.

"Well, keep talking, my AI will figure it out sooner or later."

Two more robots come out after a minute, one with a tray of snacks and another with a set of gently-glowing orbs that it sets around Denika's perimeter.

The scaled-arms lady plays yes-or-no games for a bit and arrives at the message that their visitor will quickly learn to speak Kelosian.

Some of the crowd is going back to their day as the immediate excitement wears off, but more keep showing up from the surroundings to replace them. They're doing a lot of talking! A group of five wearing uniform robes save for the differently-colored hoods and trim have brought some books! They're teachers, though teaching a recluse inside a metal ship is a new one. They'll read the books aloud and repeat childrens' lessons on sums and writing.

She sends out another robot to sit with the teachers, once she figures out that's what they are; this one is taller, around human height, with a screen at face level showing what's presumably their reclusive visitor's face, unremarkably human with pale skin and long brown hair, with a smaller rectangle in the corner showing an abstracted long-eared doll's face that glows gently when it speaks. The two of them together make for a very bright student, though it's mostly the doll picking up the more complicated bits of vocabulary and grammar.

As the sun approaches setting most of the gawkers go back to town. The teachers and a few others stay. A few produce illumination from nowhere or from small rods and pendants. One pair of rough housing teens are instantly cleaned by their mother with a sweeping gesture.

The teachers include moralistic leanings in their lessons- Strength and will, tools and cleverness, caring and patience, curiosity and empathy, diligence and planning.

Soon they will be far along to have a decent conversation, right? The woman from before says she is Katherine Maxim, daughter of the Baron, and once again welcomes them and asks if they need anything.

Well, far enough along for a simple conversation, at least.

"I am brain-ship 1213; you can call me Denika. I thank you for your welcome. I don't need anything from you but I want to wait here while a thing I need is brought to me. It will take a little more than half a year."

"Brain-ship? You've turned yourself into a ship, and a flying one at that? That's amazing!" The scaled-hands woman bounces in glee. "You've seen how far we take it-" She waves her own arms. "Tails and snouts and claws and for the more daring an extra arm or venom gland or the like. And the Ejer part of our heritage - our parents and their parents - is more responsible for that than the Kelos part, in my opinion. We didn't know anyone else was doing that sort of thing! Oh, if you're going to be stuck here for that long, we'll definitely have to figure something out for you- The storms get very bad in summer, you know, it's spring now."

"I think I'm different from your tails and snouts and claws, but I can't talk about it yet. What kind of bad are the storms?"

"They're windy and rainy. Very windy and rainy, it can blow people completely away when the big ones hit. The low parts of the town always flood, we only build for three seasons by the docks. Everything gets put away in summer. Thankfully just wind and wet- We don't get any dragons here, at least usually."

"Blow away is-?" and her face is replaced by a video of a tornado encountering a house. "I don't think a storm can do that to me." Well, unless she's flying, but they didn't get quite that far with the vocabulary.

"Yes, that's what it means. We'd also sort of like to keep using the hill- I guess people will get used to you if you stay here. It's a nice view, right?"

You can see the whole town here, smaller buildings on the right side of the river and taller ones on the left, the sawmill a bit upriver, wooden-masted sailing ships by the docks and the ocean visible in the little valley the river flows through.

"It is! I like the," and a picture of the sunset from her current vantage point. "But I can go to a different place if you want."

"The sunset?" (That is off to the west, over rolling forest with the occasional clearing or hamlet.) She smiles. "Yes, it's nice. We're lucky to have this place- Kelos is crowded. We might want you to move later. In a few days. Are you sure you don't need food or anything? Those snacks were tasty... Some artificing work maybe?"

"I have a tool to make them. I don't eat, I have a different thing. I think I'll have the words tomorrow."

"We're all going to pack in for the night soon, since you don't need anything and there's no danger to the town. I'm sure you'll have a lot of visitors tomorrow when there's more light, though most folk have work to do, of course."

"That's okay. I do -" a picture of someone sleeping - "but little, I can talk most times."

"I think we'll have a lot to learn from each other! We'll be very happy to chat and trade, I think. It might be a good idea to talk about our laws now, or it can wait."

"Now is good. I might not know all the words, but I can ask about the words I don't know tomorrow."

"Hrmm... You hardly need to know the whole civil code if you're staying here. It's about taxes, giving money to the government, that kind of thing. The most important laws: Do not murder or assault - don't destroy or harm a person, except in self defense or in defense of another. Harming them can mean hitting them or making them stay somewhere or making them cold and hungry or being so loud they can't sleep. Theft and fraud- Getting money by taking things that aren't yours or lying about things you're buying and selling- Is also not allowed. If someone owns some land and says to leave, leave. Absolutely do not sacrifice part of your magic to cause another person harm, injury, damage their property, or target them in any way. This is a very bad crime, every country agrees that it's illegal and punished extremely strictly. There are wars over this crime, thousands of people fighting each other is a war."

"I don't know 'magic', 'sacrifice' - do I need to know this now or is tomorrow okay?"

"Magic is things like the language disk and projective empathy? Or lighting fires, or separating materials? Sacrifice is a natural action we can do with our magic that takes it away but does much more magic right now. I don't think you can do this, but if you can, very very don't."

"Okay, thank you." Her best guess is that that word means 'magic' - which doesn't mean they actually have magic, at this tech level it wouldn't be too strange for them to be confused about it, though also it's fair enough to call the telepathy magic. In any case, the other word is clear enough, and 'don't break things to hurt people with them' is easy enough to avoid altogether.

"Welcome once again to Gale Rocks! I think I'm going to pack up now. I'll be back tomorrow, but not first thing. Feel free to land in the clearing by the manor east of town if you'd like to visit."

"Thank you!" The screen goes dark and the robot heads back inside.

Everyone else leaves as the sunset approaches, not wanting to be caught away from home at night. The sawmill has a few artificial lights in the distance, but also seems to be shutting down.

Twilight deepens over the forest. The sun sets.

It's lovely.

She leaves her external sensors running overnight, getting a feel for normal activity in the area, but spends most of her time tweaking her AI's translation efforts and planning the vocabulary she's going to ask for in the morning. She sleeps, too, for the few hours she needs, arranging to wake an hour before sunrise.

Her sensors may be powerful enough to observe a bunch of things that go on outside, which includes activity in the well-lit part of town a few hours past twilight, but everything winding down quite quickly elsewhere. A bit of laundry, a bit of cooking, a bit of hanging out together around fires, and then everyone is inside and off to sleep for the most part. Some stay up, reading or writing. There are also a few nighttime visits of various natures, including one where both parties sneak out into the woods before getting to the whispering sweet nothings phase. A few buildings, or sometimes just specific rooms, rebuff most sensor readings.

In the early twilight before dawn, dozens and dozens of men and women make their way towards their places of industry. The sawmill seems to employ hundreds of people, in a fairly sprawling complex, and dozens more head upriver at a run in the morning. A few wolf-shaped teens slink close to her landing spot and whisper to each other about the mysterious ship in the dawn light.

"I can hear you, you know," she whispers back to the teens, gently teasing.

"You can?"

"What's with the blue paint, does it mean you're a devotee-"

"It's probably just decoration, not every piece of color means-"

"-Heard it was FLYING yesterday, how fast can you cross the ocean in that lovely beast?"

"I don't know some of those words yet - devotee? decoration? ocean? beast? But yes, I fly, very fast."

"Amazing!"

"Devotee is temple types, monks, always lecturing and boring and 'living by the moral code of the five colors'."

"The ocean is the, uh, big water, and beasts are what we look like?"

"You definitely resemble a beast more than the rest of us, Tav. Terrible table manners."

"Oh, shut up!"

"I don't know the devotee words. I can go to the other side of the ocean in - if you make twenty-five parts in the day, between one and two parts. Maybe only one part, if the weather is good."

"You can't be from Kelos, then. Or even Old Faron. If either side could cross the ocean in an hour that side would have won the war without breaking a sweat."

"I'm not from across the ocean, yes. I'm from over the sky."

"Another planet? Another sun?"

"I've heard of ideas like that. The stars are suns."

"No, that's absurd. I don't believe it."

"Well, why not?"

In response, she sends her telepresence robot out to play them a timelapse video of her approach of the planet, starting from the edge of their solar system where their sun is indistinguishable from other stars.

"Woah."

"...Yeah that would be hard to fake."

"People talk about reaching for the stars, but to actually do it?"

"The place I started used a long time to learn how. We can teach you, if you want. Once I know more words."

"Just don't tell Old Faron and Kelos. They'll use it to blow each other up. Again."

"Yeah... Kelos really fucked everything up. They killed a lot of Ejer for no good reason, you know? Even here in White Forest, and it wasn't as bad here as elsewhere."

"Mmm. We'll talk to them before we teach them anything, then, and say that they should not do that."

"I'm sure that will completely solve the issue forever with no chance of anyone involved lying or changing their minds." The grey wolf-girl rolls her eyes.

"No, no, you have to write it down first and have a bunch of people who're full of themselves sign it. Then it's a treaty. That'll fix it!" A cat-boy mirrors her.

"Ugh!" The brown-furred one waves in frustration. 

Grey continues, "I mean, the whole Pyre Principle is a treaty that's held up for a good long while, they do seem to keep to it when there's regular reminders why it's a good idea..."

"Oh, but then when this system encountered something that didn't mesh nicely into the existing rules there was a whole lot of murder."

"I mean, the old tribal wars weren't exactly great. I'm pretty glad they're not a thing anymore."

"Because Kelos exterminated everyone who burnt magic in warfare."

The brown-haired one stands up and starts pacing. "Blood, I don't want to talk about this depressing stuff. Why aren't we talking about flying?!? I should have gone for the hawk build!"

"I mean, you can still change it."

"For a few pounds of gold and a few months in bed, sure, not like I have that spare."

"Also," the catboy says, "I hear flying is utterly exhausting unless you specialize hard and practice with it a lot both red and green."

"Do you want to see more pictures from me flying? Or come in and I can fly with you, but you still only see pictures."

"Yes!" "No!" "YES!" "Yes!"

"Look, guys," says 'no', "I don't think, uh, we should be going on adventures with weird ship-people until we know more. There's taking a leap of faith and then there's literally jumping off a cliff-"

"She's nice though!"

"And made of amazing metal with super strong, what's the word, engines!"

"I'll be here other days, too. You can come in and see bigger pictures?"