Press on and forage at night...

You’re naked and defenseless. You’re not going to be able to sleep until you find something to kill and/or eat, somewhere safe to sleep, and ideally, some kind of weapon. To simply lay down at this point would be idiocy. Checking yourself out, you can see your body glistening with the slightly slimy swamp water and pod goo, which you wipe off your body as best you can. Your wits on high alert, you once again head off to the south.

Within a space of two or three miles, you find yourself in a jungle thick with low lying plants and infrequent large vined trees. As with the swamp, the scene seems to be very close to your expectation of what a “jungle” looks like, but with subtle differences. Unlike the swamp, the jungle is overflowing with insect and small animal life. Each creature you see looks completely different from what you’re used to, but some occupy fairly obvious ecological niches. For instance, you’re constantly accosted by what appear to be very small lying leeches that behave quite similarly to mosquitos. You see mouse sized creatures with six legs that look very much like extremely furry cats. The plants themselves again look almost normal, but are the same shade of yellow as the bubble trees in the swamp.

You’re primarily keeping your eyes peeled for edible plant or animal life. You know from your father’s xenobiology lessons that eating animals is preferable to plants on an alien planet. Animals tend to defend themselves physically, which can be overcome, while plants tend to defend themselves by being unappealing food, either through taste or poison. Your experience with the pod had certainly told you that the native plant life (was it a plant?) makes good use of poisons.

With night having fully set in, you are concerned that stumbling around in the dark will get you in trouble. You decide that you might be better of simply staying put and observing for a little while. After about a half an hour of waiting, your patience is rewarded. You see a group of small, furry, ball like creatures that seem to roll around rather than walking. You pick one up, scaring off the others, and assess that it will make a fine meal. You wish you had the means to start a fire and cook the thing, but raw food is better than nothing. You swing the thing against a tree and it stops moving.

As soon as you set the thing down to look for something you could use as a cutting tool, your bounty hunter sense starts to tingle. You don’t look around, for fear of letting whatever it is know that you’ve noticed it, but you immediately know that there is some kind of predator nearby. You curse yourself, because as soon as you saw a pack of easy prey moving around at night, you should have known that there would be a predator nearby.

You stand perfectly still for a moment, waiting for the thing to move. Then it does, and you turn towards the noise. You don’t see it at first and then you look up in to a tree. What you see is a sort of, slit-eyed, kangaroo-faced creature with four thick legs. Each paw had four wide fingers, clearly intended for gripping the vines of the jungle, but likely also useful for getting hold its balled prey. The thing was eying you curiously…