Ryland Grace calmly sipped his coffee and looked out his window upon the lone human figure standing on the shoreline of the artificial beach.
Ok. it wasn't really coffee. The real coffee, or rather what was left of it once he realized that he wasn't actually going to die and began to ration the surprisingly large remaining quantity of beans, for all of Stratt's faults she at least recognized the importance of an abundance of coffee, was stashed away in a secret Eridian vault like the black gold it was. There had been enough of the stuff to keep three astronauts, or rather two astronauts and a school teacher, sufficiently wired until the rest of the food ran out, and months ago when Rocky had pried open the coffee maker from the inner walls of the Hail Mary it had been a great discovery to find a sufficient amount of powdered cream and sugar to go with it.
Not just for the flavor, cream contained a surprising amount of essential nutrients, enough to keep him far healthier than he would have been otherwise as his body began to slowly unravel from the lack of vitamin C. It was ironic how Grace was no stranger to relying on coffee creamer for essential calories and nutrients in lack of a proper meal, the more things change the more they stay the same.
What was currently in his mug could not be considered a proper meal, it was trace amounts of heavily rationed comma slurry mixed with a sort of Eridian algie that grew in the top layers of the atmosphere and was absent of any heavy metals so long as it wasn't deliberately contaminated with them. It had kind of a nutty grassy taste that wasn't what anyone back on earth would necessarily call tasty, but was in a close enough ballpark to Earth-like flavors to make his poor deprived taste buds jump for joy and mask the worse of the comma slurry flavor. win-win.
So Grace sipped his not-coffee, or his Erid coffee, calmly as he gazed out the window at the human figure in his biodome.
Details were hard to make out at this distance, but he looked young. Older than the kids he teaches but still very much below college age. Tenager. He had black hair, blue jeans, a white and red t-shirt, and a metal thermos in his hand. Just another southern californian kid exploring the shoreline of a seemingly uninhabited beach with a coffee thermos in hand. He assumed it would be coffee, Earth coffee that is, if the science Eridians had met up with the economics Eridians to start selling Erid coffee to anyone who wandered around planetside then Grace would have to deal with fallout of accidentally starting another popular trend with the youths. He was embarrassed enough about the whole glasses trend. Apparently glasses were distinctly reflective to sonar, and close enough to several fashion trends yet distinct enough in the curve of the glass itself to be considered alien and cool among the youths. It was both highly embarrassing and flattering at the same time.
Vaguely he wondered if he should go outside. Say hello, introduce himself, but he didn't give the idea much weight. It would have been weird enough for a thirty year old man to approach an unaccompanied teenager in a secluded outdoor area and start up a conversation back on Earth. No telling how the interaction would go with a hallucination of a kid here on Erid.
So Ryland just stood there and watched the dome lights brighten from early morning to daytime mode, until the figure on the beach turned around and vanished into thin air.
Disappointing, but not unexpected. Grace set aside his mug, stretched, and began to prepare for the day ahead of him.
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