Gainai' floated with almost serene grace in the cockpit of her tiny shuttle, the Ghost. Her long, tattooed and ebon-clawed fingers danced majestically over the boards in front and above her, and she stared with unblinking, Saurian interest at the hunk of metal a few hundred kilometers away from her. It was emitting an automatic emergency bleat, in a language of which she only understood bits and pieces of. Canting her elongated muzzle upwards in an instinctive sniffing pose, she contemplated getting near enough to the ship--the escape pod, as that was all that it could be--to investigate personally. She was sorely tempted: anything that required further study she leapt on (sometimes literally).

Her melon and yellow body, naked save for the elaborate tattoos which seemed to dance from her head to digitigrade feet, writhed as her indecision grew. If she stopped and investigated, she would lose more time on her journey to the planet she was supposed to be exploring. But... if she didn't stop, she would be haunted with wanting to know what she missed.

"Chess'anee. Foolish Lizard! Just go on your originally intended adventure and leave this behind," she muttered to herself, her stiff, scaled lips producing a wholly serpent-like voice. "It's probably dead whatever it is anyways. Grrrr. But one doesn't know if the feline has died unless one opens the box and checks, does one?" Resorting to philosophy. It was a cheap-shot straight from her brain, and it worked every time.

Muttering strung-together profanities, she hit the breaking jets and set a course for the distress-emitting escape pod.

When her shuttle grew close enough to the hunk of junk, she adjusted her course enough to keep level with what looked like an air lock. Well, it was close enough. She worked furiously over the keyboards, twitching her head to peer at one screen and then another, her actions as quick as a small bird's. Satisfied, she stopped for a moment to watch, via exterior cameras, her docking tube extend out through the intervening space and clamp down with tentacle-like suction against the air lock of the pod. Now, to cycle in the air...

The thought of trying to contact whatever was inside the little craft never crossed her mind--in fact, at this point she'd be just as happy to find something dead as she would be to find something alive.

A little robot--basically a square on wheels on the bottom, thrusters at the back, and several arms and sensors melded into the front--floated cheerily through the docking tube. Gainai', concentrating furiously, worked the controls on the automated unit.

"Quickly quickly little machine, find the code and break the lock!" She peered unblinkingly at the screen which now held the robot's view of the airlock. There! On the side! A pad, rectangular and with several buttons...

She clacked her teeth together and set the machine to studying the pad. It was obviously a number system of some kind (they always were), so it wouldn't take long before she found the right combination...

"Ah ha! Got it!" She crowed, tapping her claws together with delight as the robot blinked violet with success. Its little pincers moved slowly, though efficiently across the pad, and at last the hatch slid open--joltingly, as if it were damaged. Of course it would be partially damaged, it was distressed and scorched and looked like it might as well have been scrap. That didn't bother Gainai' at the moment.

Back to the controls, she cackled as the robot fell in the inner chamber. Artificial gravity! Well, whatever was inside might be advanced enough to understand her commands, if it was alive. She grinned and ordered the little bot forward, mud-brown eyes glinting in anticipation.

The robot, quicker now that it wasn't fighting to keep itself stabilized, reached with one telescoping arm to the obvious inner-hatch release, and Gainai' all but floated into the screen as she tried to see what was inside.

A glimpse of bipedals. Upright, or mostly so... flat faces. "Primate-like... hoommmm," she paused, the gears in her head working over-time. Suddenly she flung her arms back, causing her whole body to spin out of her chair. "Hewmanz! Ha!! I found my very own hew-manz!!" She cackled insanely and righted herself, tail and muzzle twitching with her exuberence. Humans were such difficult creatures to capture: they were always swarming together and trying to attack things, but these were injured! And she had them not two hundred metres away! What total luck!

Now, assuming that they didn't try to damage her little robot, she could set up the protocols for basic commands... where did she keep those files on human languages? Tapping furiously away at her multiple control panels, Gainai' hissed in thought. Ah, here they were. My, they had so many... "Ah well, to speak apart is to work together..."

She began running the language files to the robot, which would run off greetings in various languages. Gainai watched with even more anticipation, gleeful and somehow remaining scientific about it, waiting to see which one would get a response.