<em>That was no meteorite. I could track it visually all the way to the ground. And it did not obliterate the area, myself included.</em>Piratharaxalar narrowed his eyes - sparks still, not molten lava the way his self-image said they should be - and considered that. The first conclusion was, this was a controlled descent - or at least, it was not a completely uncontrolled descent. The second conclusion, following from the first, was that the object was artificial - and powered in some fashion. The third was that he had no wish to be caught as hatchling red by anything possessing that sort of capability.<br/><br/>Fortunately, his guise as a human wizard was only a thought away, and between one step and the next, the scarlet dragon was replaced by a human male in his late thirties, clothed in a comfortable, grey thawb and white headscarf, his face sharply cut with an eagle-beak nose and thin lips, his eyes a deep scarlet. So altered, he approached the site of the crash landing - for he had already deduced that whatever object had impacted his homeworld must have attempted a landing, if it had slowed its descent sufficiently for a non-catastrophic impact - to investigate whether any items of value remained, or possibly the helmsman of the object might be found, questioned... possibly subdued and pressed into service or sold. There were many ways to a comfortable bed, and not all required plundering, an activity he expected he was currently too weak for anyway.