Kayla Nichole 🌙

And you fought, and you fought, and you fought - in vain, and pleaded, and pleaded, begging, please, don't do - they did it anyway. So now you think, maybe they were right. Maybe I am expendable, once the job is done.

When you're given the chance at life again, you almost don't take it, because to get home the one person who cares has to suffer a little longer, and you think if you're willing to let him then you're not worth it. You acquiesce only because he insists you are.

You saved two worlds and still, when you find out the person who cared is at risk, and a world you've never known with them, you throw away your own life to save him, recommitting to the suicide mission you did not willingly undertake because he is everything and you're just grace.

You cannot imagine that when they find out that you live on, she falls to her knees and sobs with relief when she's finally alone, he begs your forgiveness like you're the Saint of Unwilling Sacrifice and Unlikely Survival, forgiveness that she knows better than to ask for, because Grace can only go so far.

You subsist off of consuming yourself for the rest of your life, but really, what else is new? question The only reason you thought you were safe when training them to die was a surety in your own inadequacy and sometimes you wonder if you could have done it all if you had remembered then or if your anger would have killed them all or if you would simply fall short and take 8 billion with you.

You don't think about the fact that to teach something is the highest form of understanding it, or that the lie was not because you raged against it but because you had surrendered to it, and that's not peace, that you felt it as a need sometimes, at your most exhausted, the same monotonous way you felt the need for hunger, thirst, and sleep, and somehow it was just part of the survival drive too in a situation where it had to gnaw itself apart to survive.

There's a video diary you never made, from when you first woke up from when you didn't know if he would, from when you were on your way back to a broken home you'd been tossed out of before you were ready from when you were alone from when you were alone from alone from before when you didn't know silence's oppressive sound from after when you would have given 8 billion just to hear that musical voice.

You never made it. You think that makes you a coward. You've never thought you were better than your most scared, desperate, human moments, so that when he nearly died to save you, you saw it as a violence you had done unto him.

Yet now you stand on the shore of a sea created just for you - a little bubble in a place even more hostile than the one that signed your death warrant (and how could you blame them for such an unforgivable thing - they were just, same as you, trying to survive, and sometimes you thought they might be right, because who were you to put a price of 8 billion on a life not worth 1? question).

Often, an Eridian and their partner will refer to each other as their "melody" and "harmony" (Grace definitely thinks of the Sanrio character when he first hears "my melody" and is confused)

In polyamorous relationships, polycules are called chords (actually closely related to the term for family trees, chord progression, but using family in a not-always related sense so it doesn't have certain connotations) and metas are called countermelodies

A family (found or born/adopted) is called a symphony

An Eridians vitals are called their rhythms

Eridians have three main genders with many subgenders. These are based on the type of rock they are composed of - igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic, and then more specifically the exact type of rock. This is called their Composition. An Eridian that is trans within the same larger gender group is called a Variation. An Eridian that is trans from one group to another is called an interpolation. An Eridian with multiple genders in multiple groups is called a mash-up (at least, that's the closest english word, it sounds better in Eridian). Eridians can also have xenogenders outside of these - they're less well-known, but equally respected. Multiple Eridians have their eggs crack (not literal eggs oop) when they first learn/hear Grace talking about human genders, both binary and non.

(Transition uses gradual, controlled moltenization within specialized cocoons and careful incorporation and removal of compounds and elements.)

There is another sapient species on Erid that are named Danians by Grace in English. They are made of metal rather than rock, and have clashed with Eridians in the past. They are closer on the food chain to herbivores than apex predators and are much larger than Eridians. They are often hollow, composed of a single or multiple tubes, and see through something closer to feel than sound, attuning themselves to vibrations through solid surfaces. The Danians agreed not to send any of theirs on the mission in part because of this and how zero-g could mess with that, but also to avoid conflict on board. However, they worked closely with Eridians building the ship and at their version of mission control.

There are mourning songs, but the primary sound of grief is silence. Eridians who are grieving the loss of someone close to them will be silent for a period of time proportional to their relationship to the deceased. In a few famous cases, they will remain silent for the rest of their lives, communicating through a tapping rhythm language that functions much like sign language does for humans. One of these cases was when a much beloved singer lost hisher husband, and never sang again.

Speech impediments are a thing for Eridians, and can include being tone deaf, lacking a sense of timing, being unable to make certain pitches (either they are silent or they come out as a different pitch every time), selective mutism, and total mutism. These are accommodated in a variety of ways, from pitch modulators to instruments to worn metronomes.

There's actually a secret third species on Erid. Near the mantle of the planet under the ocean there's a layer of clear, glass-like Mica, which allows warmth and light through. In this way, the inside of the planet functions much like a sun, and a symbiotic relationship between what were originally something similar to slimes but of mud, and plant life, has developed into a species of soil-like beings covered in vegetation. They actually have visual sight due to access to a light source. The Danians have legends of them, which the Eridians dismiss until, when Grace is about 65, they emerge on the surface as part of an exploratory and scientific expedition. There are tensions, but it's actually Grace who defuses them, as they emerge in his biodome (which is a pain for the Eridians to patch up!). He is just as friendly to them as the Eridians and Danians, and calls them "Gardens".

Eventually Eva Stratt is given permission to teach human culture and history classes (via super-zoom lol). It's actually Grace who suggests it after getting far too many questions about the subject that he didn't feel confident answering. Their relationship is just cordial at first, but eventually they address everything (in a big mutual emotional breakdown) and they are... never the same, but friends. It's actually in a better, healed way.

After this, several other human, Eridian, Danian, and eventually Gardenian teachers join an exchange program, first remotely and then sending ships mostly after, working together, they crack the secret of FTL travel. Though, that's a bit of a misnomer, since they're not traveling faster than light so much as crossing the intervening space faster using gravity to bend the space itself, powering said ships with miniature black holes. Carl is one of these teachers, who teaches an adults-only class about human foods. Yao's mother teaches mathematics and one of Ilyukhina's cousins teaches Earth Languages and Linguistics, while her twin teaches Earth Art and Literature (he also does practical craft classes for all Eridani peoples. They're delighted to learn Eridian and Danian crafts, though sadly he passes in an accident before the emergence of the Garden people.

Unfortunately, Eridians are people, and therefore bad things do happen on Erid, such as war, bigotry, and so on. It's not super recognizable to humans, though. The most recognizable is ableism against speech inpediments, but there's also archaic hierarchical dynamics and roles between rock types, prejudice against rocks that are softer (like on the Mohs hardness scale) and so on.

The collective mind formed to solve the astrophage problem is less like a hive mind and more like a plural system. Often, Eridians come away from the experience of collectivization with "echoes", which can also form for reasons such as profound loneliness/isolation and other such traumatic causes (it's more common to form in a peaceful loving setting, in part out of a desire to remain collectivized rather than individualizing). Rocky is one of the isolation-based category. The overall experience is called resonance.

Rocky was horrified upon learning that humans had nuked each other, particularly knowing his crewmates had died from radiation sickness and understanding nukes could cause the same. If he weren't so codependently enmeshed with Grace, he would have taken some space to process that.

Pebbles receive names when their carapace has fully hardened (they hatch soft and partially molten and reach full hardness in most of their body within about two years, though growing involves localized re-molten-ization). Until then, standard tones are typically used, such as "Baby First Litter First Hatch, Baby First Litter Second Hatch, Baby Second Litter First Hatch", or "My First [litter] Most Songs, My First Least Songs, My Second Many Songs".

Rocky almost chooses his kids' English names by sound alone, but thankfully Adrian convinces him to talk to Grace. Grace is horrified when he hears that Rocky wants to name his first litter of kids Smithereens, Hippopotamus, Syphilis, Fuselage, Diarrhea, Delicacy, and Paradox. Rocky is equally horrified to find that the word delicacy refers to food. Instead, they end up picking Mark, Whitney, Jasmine, Bishara, Artemis, and Paradox (it fit them too well, and Grace figured it was harmless).

Inspired by a post I saw about Grace assigning his students human genders, I think it becomes a trend to be given a human name by Grace (though some people pick their own, sometimes to humorous or disastrous results). Grace uses everything from biblical to pop media names, eventually going into noun names as he runs out of ideas. One family ends up with a David, Daenerys, Pepsi, and Miku.

Hekate, mistress of the crossroads.