In the far reaches of the Chitin Expanse, the Galactic Zoological Society received a distress signal from the mud-volcano moon of Gloop VII. The message was brief, sticky, and smelled faintly of damp socks: “SOMETHING IS SPLOOTING OUR RESEARCH STATION.”
Klik’s voice crackled over the comm. “Dr. Voss? Are you… bonding with the anomaly?”
She reached into her kit and pulled out a standard-issue xenopsychological comfort cube—soft, warm, and shaped like a triangle. She placed it two meters from the creature’s nose. splootalien
She patted the splootalien’s fuzzy flank. “ Thwap. ”
For the next six hours, she tried everything. Fish-shaped treats? The splootalien rolled onto its side, splooting laterally. Holographic prey? It batted it once with a limp paw, then ignored it. A mirror? The alien looked at its own reflection, seemed to admire its pancake-like grandeur, and splooted harder. In the far reaches of the Chitin Expanse,
Dr. Voss stepped closer. The splootalien rotated one googly eye toward her. Slowly, majestically, it lifted one floppy leg and let it flop back down with a wet thwap .
Dr. Xylar Voss, a xenobiologist who had seen enough horrors to fill three field guides, was dispatched immediately. When her lander punctured the ammonia-sulfur atmosphere, she expected tentacles, teeth, or at least a good old-fashioned acidic ooze. Instead, she found it . She patted the splootalien’s fuzzy flank
It was the size of a beached cargo pod, shaped like a deflated bouncy castle, and covered in short, orange fuzz. Its four limbs—if you could call them that—splayed outward at cartoonishly perpendicular angles. Its belly, a pale cream color, was pressed flush against the cracked mudflat. Its face, such as it was, consisted of two googly eyes (genuine, not metaphorical) and a tiny, pursed mouth that made a soft "mrrp" sound.