Splootalien

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.

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. splootalien

Not attacking. Not scheming. Splooting —the full-body, belly-down, legs-akimbo sprawl of a creature that had given up on dignity entirely. For the next six hours, she tried everything

Klik’s voice crackled over the comm. “Dr. Voss? Are you… bonding with the anomaly?” Holographic prey

And Dr. Voss? She filed her report with a single photo attached: a googly-eyed, orange-fuzzed alien splooting next to a very relaxed xenobiologist, both of them belly-down in the mud, looking up at the stars as if to say: Come sploot with us.