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The air was cool and humid upon her dark blue and white speckled scales as she took her first steps from the pod, and collapsed. The reflected light of an artificial sun glinted off the rocks and shone upon her with the intensity of moonlight and the color of liquid gold. Her four aquamarine, serpent-like eyes frantically scanned the lush world around her with brilliant color and clarity, and a range of vision that left her head reeling. She leaned on the pod for a moment of stability with two of her arms -the left set of the four she sported- as she came to her feet. Braced against the capsule, she stood at 5'7" tall and nearly 7 feet from the tip of her reptilian snout to the end of her tail. Her feet were splayed wide, gripping the ground like a pair of talons, digging into the soil and rock beneath her as though she would be ripped into the sky above her if she let go. She sucked air through her small, sharp teeth, attempting not to hyperventilate.

The world around her was a disassembled cavern roof overgrown with vegetation. Great chunks of rock the size of islands orbited in near sync in the damp haze of the atmosphere, lashed together by great vines the size of the cables on a suspension bridge. They floated together like a city-fleet of refugee ships in the waters of Old Earth, covered in a teeming mass of life. Far, far below, an artificial sun the size of a planet glowed brilliantly in a stable gold-white tint.

Vegetation sprouted from nearly every surface, acting as the solar cells for an organic dyson sphere. Animals, mostly birdlike things, flitted between the islands and their forest coatings eking every calorie they could from the wealth of life around them. Here and there, small glints of forgotten technologies hid amidst the profusion of greenery and stood out plainly on exposed rock. The burning wreckage of the ship drove plumes of smoke away from the islands they had struck and from the glowing core of the world, as though still yearning to escape. She stood watching all of it, feeling at once lost and alien and entirely at home.

Her name was Denique Evrett, and she had been human only the day before.

Howling noises in the foliage around her slowly started creeping back in after their silence following the ship's crash. The finlike dorsal ridge running from the crown of her head to the wide fan at the tip of her tail rose and fell rapidly as she pulled herself to her feet. Alien body language saying 'I may be injured but I am still stronger than you.' If anything saw it, it respected the sign as truth. Still panicking, Denique forced herself into a breathing exercise meant for humans. The long, slow breaths were apparently either universal, or were something carried over from her humanity, perhaps even just a useful psychosomatic response.

The lizardess took stock of herself. She was uninjured, and one of the first unwilling members of a reptilian species that hadn't existed until just a few hours before. Nobody from Earth would save her, and the rest of the crew were scattered in the jungle by the whimsy of the pods' touchdown points. She refused to think about how close her pod had come to the end of this bit of rock, and about how many might have fallen all the way to the ersatz sun far below. She checked the pod. There was a container in it that held everything she'd had when she entered it during the crash.

There wasn't much left, but every piece seemed like a gift to her from providence. It held a dataslate with a few simple programs and text documents on it, including the unfinished doctorate thesis she'd written that had once taken the internet by storm before being forgotten just as suddenly. There was what remained of her ship suit, stripped from her by the robotic arms of the pod, still useful even if it would bever fit her again. And most precious of all, the simple opal-in-silver ring her grandmother had given her. It shone oddly in the light as she tested her fingers. She realized her top pair of hands were much too large for it, designed for rough manual labor and climbing more than fine work. The second set were smaller than her hands had been as a human, but she could fit the ring on her fore or middle finger rather than her pinky, now. She chose the middle finger of her right hand, like her grandmother had worn it. She teared up thinking of her grandmother and the path this ring had taken. Hundreds of light years and five generations since it was made by a silversmith as a temptation for the middle class. The opal almost glowed in the light here, the matrix of silica refracting this light differently than it had under Earth's sun. The greens, reds, and violets were new to her.

She held the ring and the hand with it over her breast, close to where she expected her heart would still be, and looked around herself once more. The alien landscape still looked hostile, unknown, and dark. Unknown smell-flavors assaulted her as she licked her lips, surprising her. She looked around for something to grab as a weapon, and found one of the pod's landing struts had shattered completely, leaving a long, thin piece of metal with one jagged end she could use. With some effort, she pried it free from the wrecked strut. She swung it a few times. It'd do.

Denique took stock of anything else she could see from where she stood. The islands of hovering stone were very large, and she saw that one had a waterfall flowing off its edge. That mote was directly connected to the one she was on perhaps a kilometer away from her, along this edge. The great cable-vines led up to it, extending as much as 500 meters, and 100 of those over the empty void above the white-hot sphere of tungsten just over half the size of Jupiter. The danger was necessary. This new body still needed water, and she was getting thirsty.

She began walking over to the vine cable, and after a half dozen meters of attempted walking, she realized that walking upright was going to be a problem. Her tail kept dragging itself along the ground behind her, finding every stone in the underbrush with its sensitive underside. The joints of her hips were not meant for the range of motion human hips were made for, but wanted to splay wider, throwing her gait off completely. She tried bending down, and taking a stance that she had seen in dinosaur films, and her tail balanced her body out well, but her legs were just a bit too short for her to walk with her head pointed forward from there. She sighed and lowered herself almost entirely with the ground, resting on her brutish main arms. She could crawl along the muddy and leaf littered ground a lot more easily on four limbs, while her other two hands held the makeshift spear and the dataslate bundled in her shipsuit. Her neck proved remarkably flexible, allowing her to look up from all fours, though two of her four eyes were oriented in such a way that they had a sky-view at most times.

Denique hated crawling on her hands and feet, despite how natural the body mechanics made it, and how quickly she was moving along now. It made her feel like an animal. Her body was only a foot or so above the leaf litter, and her eyes noticed a lot of beetles, same as on Earth. Her stomach growled and she didn't ler herself contemplate what her new diet was going to be. The smell of decomposing vegetation was still distant to her, however. It was as though she was only smelling it from far away instead of her head being a mere foot from the spongy ground. She tried what she remembered from watching a nature documentary on extinct reptiles, and flicked her tongue into the air. The motion was natural, instinctive, and as soon as it returned to her mouth, the scent-taste of the forest floor hit her. It wasn't as bad as she had supposed it would be, the scent of the compacted rotting vegetation not tripping her the same way it would have before.

She reached the point of the mote where the great vine was growing from a tangled root system on the rock. It was perhaps half a meter in diameter, and wasn't a single vine as much as a tangle of separate vines twisting and braiding themselves together around a main core. Leaves as large as her body dangled from the bottom of the vine like flags, while bittersweet scent-tasting flowers the size of her head budded along the side. Her stomach grumbled again, and her mouth was parched. She needed to get to the waterfall. Maybe there was a lake up there. Maybe even fish. The climb was daunting. Easily 500 meters of cable-like vine swooped out over the mote, then over the void, before rooting itself into the other side, in bare rock. She shivered, and her dorsal ridge raised up instinctively at the intimidating climb ahead. She reached out and grabbed the vine with her right main hand.

Her body was surprisingly strong, and held onto the cable-vine easily, claws on her top hands and feet sinking into and gripping the vines without cutting them. She was barely tired when she reached the point that the vine had become more of a vertical rise than a horizontal stretch, and she found herself directly over the glowing core of light below. She flicked her tongue from her mouth to soothe the dryness at the center of her lips, and in doing so, scented the air yet again. The flowers along the vine smelled so good, and she was *very* thirsty. Maybe they had some nectar she could drink, just enough that she wouldn't be weak by the time she came to the rock face, she rationalized to herself. Her head dipped into the petals of the nearest flower, and she lapped out with her tongue. It was ambrosia, sweet and wet, reminding her of the weak sweet tea her mother loved and her grandmother scorned. It was unsurprisingly floral, but had citrus notes as well. She licked at the little puddle of nectar until her tongue had pulled in everything there was to be had. There had been maybe only a cup of it overall, but it had slaked her thirst, somewhat.

By the time she had finished her climb on the vine, she had drunk from six more of the flowers. The climb hadn't proven overly taxing to her physique at any point thus far, but the rock above her loomed, glowing with a menacing cragged surface in the light of the false star far below. Denique crouched on the root structure of the vine burrowing into the rock, using breathing exercises to calm herself for the next step. She told herself that the cracked, craggly surface meant that there were many handholds, and that the climb would be relatively easy as a result. She didn't believe herself. She braced, and gripping the rockface with both of her 'feet', she reached up, curling her spine backwards to grab ahold of the closest handholds she could find. Her hands came to grip at a crag in the stone, claws digging into the crack in the rock face. She took a deep breath, and with effort let go of the vine with her hindlimbs and curled inward until the handlike feet of her new form found holds she deemed good enough as gripping points.

She was breathing heavily now, her frontal set of eyes focusing on the rock face ahead, but her smaller rear set looking up and away from the rock face, back the way she had climbed. It seemed *very* far now, and her stomach dropped out of her as she began to breathe very quickly. She closed all four of her eyes. With effort, she got her breathing under control after a minute or so, clinging onto the rocks for dear life and suddenly finding herself immensely thankful that her body didn't sweat anymore. She opened her eyes again, focusing all of them on the rockface. Her vision was much better than it had ever been as a human, and every little crack and crag in the stone stood out to her like lines on a roadmap. She trusted to her new eyes, and tried to remember what she'd read about rock climbing once on the internet. The article had said that keeping three points of contact with the rock at all times was extremely important. She began carefully, slowly picking her way up the rockface.

Halfway to the surface, the going became easier. The rockface had jutting from it here and there large plants that gave her better handholds. She made it to the top only a little worse for wear, her scaly hide standing up to the cuts and abrasions well, though without dulling the sensitivity of sensation of rock and hardy plant scraping against it. Despite her new durability, she was still exhausted from the long climb, and wanted nothing more than her bed in her apartment on Earth. The scent-taste of water beckoned to her, not as a matter of thirst, but now as a measurement of how close she had gotten to her goal. She climbed over the edge of the cliff face and her jaw dropped slightly, a profoundly human expression of wonder on her alien muzzle.

The oasis grew around a large pond, or perhaps a lake that took up the majority of the surface of the mote, more than a kilometer across its length, and wider than the gap between this mote and the one she had crashed on in its width. The water was glassy smooth and just as clear, and she could see things like fish swimming in the waters. At the center of the lake, a massive piece of engineered metal stood like an island, still gleaming. It was not part of her ship, and the design looked less like something made than something grown in a tank and placed there by knowing hands. It had the same curvature of a snail or nautilus shell, but rose above the lake more than 50 meters tall, with what looked very clearly like a gazeebo at the top, a gleaming metal tower out of the mind of a fantasy painter. Here and there on its surface, plants grew on soil that had grown up or been deposited on it over what could have been any number of uncounted years. Dotted along its surface in regular intervals, picked out in glowing colors she had never seen before and could not describe, Denique could see symbols or glyphs floating above the surface of the structure. Above the tower at its peak, a mandala in three dimensions glowed as resplendant as the sun beneath the mote, bathing everything in an eery light.

At once, all the chattering birdsong and whooping of stranger things more distant died away. Flowers on all the trees around her began to curl up. Some of the fernilke plants did the same thing. She wondered why and looked around fpr a moment before it began to rain. It rained more heavily than any storm she had weathered before, and she panicked in her search for shelter. Eventually, she found her way into a hollow under the exposed roots of a tree, and was very thankful that nothing had decided to hide in there with her. After a half an hour of stating out into the rain, she succumbed to exhausion and sleep.