Amadeus stifled a gasp as the creature rounded the corner and he was staring at a huge lizard thing. No stranger to alien worlds and their inhabitants Amadeus was still struck by the creature's appearance, which reminded him of some of the monsters he'd faced in various wars on untold planets. The creature stood almost three meters in height, towering over the vehicle relics around it, and it's triangular head whip about, scanning the surroundings for something with both its eyes and nose as it sniffed the air.
Walking on two legs the creature looked quite capable of running on all four to increase its top speed, though likely at the expense of agility. Other striking features included the claws which tipped its three fingered hands and feet. Almost a third of a meter in length the things looked more than capable of ripping through the metal bodies around the creature, and when it ran the tip of one claw over a vehicle chassis it left a small streak of yellow, presumably some kind of poison.
The most starling feature though was the tail, which looked to be only a meter long at most when Amadeus first glimpsed it, but proved itself to be on a kind of catch spring, able to shoot out at high speed growing to nearly five meters and adding force to the blow. On the tip of the tail was a hooked claw, and it looked even stronger than the claws on the creature's hands and feet.
With a violence that seemed sudden the tail whipped out slammed into a nearby vehicle, smashing through the side before the creature retracted it, ripping off the door and sending it sailing through the air. The creature then pulled at a belt which Amadeus had not noticed before and pulled off a strange device which the Combine soldier recognized a primitive radio communicator, probably made for short range communication with a receiver held by another nearby agent.
"I don't see anything. Are you sure this is the arrival point?" demanded the creature of whoever was on the other end. Surprisingly the thing was speaking English, a language Amadeus knew through the Games he'd played set on Earth. The language had been for a time the closest thing to a universal dialect the planet had, had, at least according to those who believed in it.
Oddly the device only crackled and sparked at the creature, emitting tones and pulses similar to those that Zee had been when Amadeus had tried to wake the CAP. Obviously Amadeus was not the only one having trouble, though the creature took the devices failure to respond much more harshly that Amadeus had Zee's. Swearing and cursing the thing beat on the small transmitter with its hand before the device finally gave under its strength, shattering into dozens of pieces, which solicited a whole new round of profanities from the creature.
Amadeus, still unsure of what exactly the creature was looking for, though he assumed he was the target, was faced with a decision. He could reveal himself to it, and hope that despite appearances the creature proved friendly, or at least benign. And then of course there was the ever faithful Plan QRITOD, which stood for Quickly Run Away In The Opposite Direction, his favorite fall back plan if he could think of nothing else.
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