"What..." Bella's voice is barely more than a whisper, "...Was [i]that?[/i]"

It has been an eventful afternoon. 

The very moment the dropship opened up, Bella's mouth had fallen open in wonder. Only one other time in her life had she beheld a field of grasses and flowers this vibrant or fragrant, and it had fallen utterly short of the magnificence of this day. To call it perfumed would be a lie, to call it a portrait would be an insult. The myriad dotted reds and purples and yellows popping out of the green-brown-orange grasses had no discernible pattern to them, because nobody had arranged them. It could not be called a garden because it served no master to begin with. And when she'd seen the first butterfly, Bella had thrown herself on the ground with delight and refused to move from the spot until she was certain she'd counted every kind in the field. 

When they found a waterfall it was another moment where everything had fallen still to appreciate the rush of the current more. Watching fish breach the surface at the bottom where the foam gave way to clearer waters, Bella's tail twitched with ancient instincts she did not know she possessed. It took every part of her willpower not to pounce on them from a hundred meters up. The last time she had seen anything like this she'd only been able to view it in comparison to Nero's Tellus, but the presence of life here shook even her oldest memories free from her thoughts. It could no longer be looked at through the lens of what was 'allowed'. As if existence were a question of legality or political influence. 

She could hardly move through the forest for all of her twirling and leaping. To the top of what seemed like every tree; to peer at the leaves in their hundred patterns with wonder and curiosity and to laugh at the top of her lungs every time she startled another bird. To sniff at the many kinds of bark and learn the scents of sap and how it compared to the nectar of a flower, and to bend her ears to catch every paw and talon as it stalked them through the foliage. This, she told Redana, was a world she had dreamed of. In her worst moments it would come to her, this place of a trillion noises that still felt like silence, and when it filled her mind it was the only time she could steal real rest from the Palace. She spoke of it without even grimacing or glaring at anything.

But now, her finger points at empty space ahead of a plain of chest high grasses. There not moments ago was a creature she had never seen. A magnificent beast and proud, covered from tip to tail in soft, spotted fur and walking on four legs. Its head had sported a pair of sensitive, triangle shaped ears that had lifted to comical height when it sensed the pair of them. She had stared into its slitted, jewel-green eyes, watched its back hunch and its long tail lower as it dug its claws into the earth. At once predator and prey. At once majestic and delightful. Equally ready to spring forward or backward, equally likely in its demeanor to welcome or repel. It felt so far above the pair of them in its attitude, and then it had vanished without a sound as if it too could will itself across distances without the need for motion. 

"What was that?" she says again, "Do you think it has a name?"

Bella looks at Redana, her eyes full of awe.

"They could try for a thousand years to engineer a Servitor that would rival that... creature and never come close to it. Dany, I can't - what was - can you even - without..."

Words fail her, and she takes the woman next to her into her arms and starts to cry. Redana feels both warmer and cooler, softer and firmer, but above all more real to her than she ever has before. She squeezes, teases out the shape of muscles with her fingers and takes deep breaths of that rich golden hair, more soothing than its ever been even with the scent of roses washed out of it forever. She feels hands against her back, and releases a purr from deep inside her throat.

She has never felt more Human in her life.