Welcome to Gaia! ::

Once the duties involved in setting up camp were mostly complete and Naeria was able to go outside of the barrier to farther her investigations of Earth, the biodiversity she encountered was even more incredible than she'd expected.

She found the source of at least some of the chirping noises she'd been hearing fairly quickly. They were small, flighted creatures, and her ComTech revealed that they were called birds and that they had hollow bones. That was fascinating, and she wanted to know more, but it turned out that these birds were very fast and that their capacity for flight made it difficult to get close to them for long enough to conduct much investigation.

That left the plant life to scan, of which there was plenty.

Within half an hour, she'd found twenty species, everything from the small, soft green moss to the black oak, of which a single leaf was the size of her face. Each was an incredible example of life in its own way. She was prepared to spend longer doing a more thorough examination of some of these species now that she'd gotten a basic scan of most of the ones in the area, but that was when she saw it.

It had a stalk, the way the trees did, but it was not much bigger than her hand. At the top, instead of the crown of leaves, was some sort of convex crown, and it was a bright red that stood out among the green and yellow foilage. It was speckled with raised white dots.

Naeria's breath caught in her throat. This was magnificent.

She scanned it immediately, of course, and that only revealed something more fascinating.

It was toxic, which was good to know, but it was also neither classified as a plant or an animal.

It was something else entirely. Something new.

Naeria turned slowly, glancing over her shoulder first before her feet turned to face the man who had found her. He didn't seem startled by her presence, as some of the locals who had not been informed of their arrival might have been, and he did not carry weapons or wear dark clothes like the Negaverse agents that Lyndin had warned them to avoid.

Her eyes locked on what he did carry, though.

The orb sparkled gently, the way the stars did in the sky at home when they traveled past. Her eyes went wide, but she managed to only stare for a few seconds.

She remembered their briefing. Magical items represented Knights.

To confirm, she asked, quietly, "Are you a Knight?"

They were meant to gain the senshi and knight's trust. To do that, she could answer his question. She moved sideways slightly to show off her precious discovery.

"It's a fascinating life form," she said. "It appears to neither be a plant or an animal, but something else entirely."

Not a knight.

"Are you a senshi?" she asked. That seemed the less likely option, but then she hadn't actually seen a senshi in person to know what they were like.

Either way, he had plenty of information on Earth's wildlife, and that was holding more of her interest in this moment. "Fly?" she tilted her head. "Like the buzzing things, with the piercing mouth and the multifaceted eyes?"

She had found one buzzing around the food some of the humans had brought for them, and it had stayed still trying to find its way through a sheet of plastic wrap for just long enough for her to scan it.

"They are also intriguing, but clearly animal. This is neither plant nor animal, is it?"

“So it is a sister to the fly?”

That didn’t seem accurate. Siblings shared nearly all of their genetic material, and while the basic scan did not offer in depth genome analysis, she could hypothesize based on their physical features. The Fly Aminata lacked legs, and wings, and eyes, which suggested considerable genetic differences.

Perhaps he was using a human saying that meant something else.

The word fungi on the other hand, seemed vaguely familiar. “I might have read about fungi, but it’s been some time,” she said. It hadn’t stood out to her as much then as it had now, when she could see this breathtaking specimen in front of her. “Can you tell me more?”

Sometimes it was difficult for things to hold Naeria's attention, but for that half an hour, she listened, rapt. Of course she poked in with the occasional question, never having encountered this at all before, and she very much encouraged tangents, but she eventually fell into the familiar rhythm of academic discussion, a smile growing brighter on her face the more they talked.

"These are my favorite organisms here," she decided at the end of it. "Of course plants and their photosynthesis are also fascinating, but way that these eat what they live on is so practical and elegant. They recycle waste on top of that, and they do it while being so beautiful. I just-"

A hand fluttered to her chest, and Naeria gave a wistful sigh.

"I would love to see any records you've kept on Earth's lifeforms," she said, "Or just to speak to you again." All at once, she remembered one of the customs they'd gone over in their briefing, and she held a hand out to the floating man in front of her.

She was curious about the floating, too, but it seemed he did not like it so much when she asked questions about him.

"It is nice to meet you," she said.

The floating man seemed experienced with this nature and the cycles that were intrinsic in that. Naeria was not. She was still enthralled, still staring, although eventually she stopped looking at the single mushroom specimen and switched to examining some of the nearby plants in detail instead.

"On Velencya, we recycle everything manually. There are no organisms like this to assist us with it. There is no nature," she said.

What he said next actually managed to pull her attention from the forest floor entirely.

"You are a space traveler?"

She was silent for a long second after that, wondering if a third question about himself would be considered appropriate, but in the end, her curiosity won out.

"Where are you from?" she asked. "Even our current data from this trip suggests that Earth's space travel is very rudimentary."

“Astraya?”

It was a name that Naeria had not heard before, but she’d read it a few times, in the section of the databases that covered things such as mythology, legends, and other popular stories that lacked evidence to back up their actual existence.

Naeria squinted, not sure what to think about that. She could tell he didn’t like talking about himself, but he’d talked plenty about the mushrooms, which were what currently had Naeria’s attention, anyway.

So, after a moment she returned his smile and asked, “Are there mushrooms there?”