When Nightfall descended, a humanoid figure with two jets of flame spraying from beneath its feet landed before the villa's entrance without causing much commotion. The insects in the courtyard continued chirping one after another.
Of course, it was not just the little creatures in the grass that failed to notice him. The guards in the courtyard and the servants inside the house noticed nothing as well.
If someone had awakened from sleep and looked by the porch light, they might have seen a strange figure covered head to toe in blue-green metal plating, with something resembling a cassette tape set into its chest.
Where a human's face should have been was a curved display screen, showing a blurry, indescribable set of electronic features.
"Recording begins. This will be my forty-fourth contact with Howard Stark. As a member of a backward species, he possesses intelligence clearly exceeding that of his kind."
He stood before the door, muttering to himself as he began his routine record. The tape-recorder-like mechanism on his chest slowly started turning.
As one of the observers who had recorded billions of years of Earth's history, he knew that after humans learned to build houses and invent doors, they preferred visitors to knock before entering their homes.
He could politely follow local customs. He believed the humans here were all in the dark, and when one held an absolute advantage, displaying an appropriate degree of approachability was a more reliable method of deception.
If he behaved more like a human, then from the perspective of cosmic biology, shared cultural and habitual recognition would provide a solid foundation for communication between different species.
So he raised his mechanical arm and knocked on the door. The metal limb glimmered faintly beneath the porch light, its force perfectly controlled. The sound