Two hikers watch strange dolphin-octopus creatures emerge from the sea on a rainy, mountainous beach.

"Fifty meters? How the hell are we going to carry it?" Webb asked as the two paused for a water break. Julian laughed. "That's fully inflated. It folds to something like half a meter when deflated." Taking a swig of his canteen, he put it back in his pack. "It's only twenty kilos." Webb breathed a sigh of relief as he pulled out his tab and consulted the map. "Drone should be right over the next hill." Just as soon as the two reached the top of the hill, Julian pulled Webb down to lay on the wet grass, his finger on his lips signaling Webb to stay quiet before moving from Julian's lips to point towards the beach. Webb's gaze followed Julian's direction, revealing movement down below where five slow... octopus things... crawled out of the sea, each being using its eight long tentacles to pull itself along the sand. Their heads reminded Julian of a video he'd once seen of a dolphin, yet their necks bent so that they faced in the direction where they crawled in an almost human-like fashion. It would have been easy to mistake the first two as just another instance of Borealis fauna, even their skin blinking different colors wasn't something they'd not seen, but when the other three emerged from the ocean with long sticks held in their tentacles, Julian knew they were something more. Not letting his eyes off the strange alien beings, Webb whispered, "Holy shit." "Holy shit," Julian agreed, his eyes briefly scanning past the aliens further up the coast. "Drone should be right See more