Had a thought that Grace technically never used reverse translation for Rocky, and Rocky understood him without a translator because he basically learned the language himself.
And you know all those jokes and headcanons about Rocky swearing every other word like any self-respecting engineer would, right? And Grace most likely did enter all those words into the translator, but replaced them with softer censored equivalents because he himself doesn’t really swear so the idea that someone might be talking to him in profanity every other sentence probably never even crossed his mind.
Now imagine this. They finally arrive to Erid. Grace desperately wants to make a good first impression, so he spends days hunched over his laptop, painstakingly assembling a greeting speech out of fragments from Rocky’s recordings.
And the resulting first contact speech sounds… bad. Like really bad. He turns the laptop toward the delegation looking unbelievably proud of himself. Presses play. And the computer proceeds to unleash a magnificent torrent of multilayered alien profanity stitched together from fragments of Rocky’s voice. Grace has absolutely no idea.
Rocky watched all of these preparations in silence the entire time, making those sly whistling noises that could absolutely be interpreted as laughter. Rocky's proud.
Meanwhile the Eridians are just thinking: "Yep. Okay. This leaky space blob really did spend years with our Rocky."
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