A Weary Traveler’s Home

And Simon, who values his own name. Who values the identity it gives him. Who hates being called by some moniker, to be dismissed as just some convict, just another meaningless body to be used and discarded.

he just released his new album

it’s a suspend your disbelief thing because there is NO WAY someone without a forensic linguistics degree is figuring out how to communicate that fast, and even then maybe not because Eridian has no basis in human language so you can’t use roots like Latin. can’t even spell words out because they don’t have the same alphabet. however we get to see them both start with very simple words (Grace Rocky save stars) and gradually build up to using past and future tense and more complicated sentences.

grace and rocky don't make it back to erid right away. and during one of their side quests they encountered the COI space station. the COI was initially hostile, placing both grace and rocky "under observation".

grace and rocky, after a week of quarantine, make nice with the COI and manage to negotiate their way into what they thought was a license to GTFO, but was actually a barter -- "i'm a scientist -- microbiologist. rocky's an engineer. together, we're pretty much the greatest minds of our generation." rocky didn't quite agree with the oversell, but this seemed to spark something of need in the COI officers. grace was unsure what to make of it.

he and rocky were immediately led into a lab, a metal box handed to them. grace held the box at arm's length at first, nearing it to the side of his face at a snail's pace, and was about to shake it as if any given audio queue would clue him in as to what it was.

"just kidding," he beamed at several alarmed faces in front of him, their hands and arms paused as they attempted to stop grace from shaking the box. they backed away after a few seconds, regaining composure.

rocky did the equivalent of tsk tsk in eridian.

a few turns in his hand, a squint here and there, grace held up the box again and said more than asked: "this is a blackbox?" he kept that lilt in his voice, in case that also still sounded polite in this part of the universe.

and as if it were the first question to a test both grace and rocky were unaware they were taking, the officers led them further into a more restricted area of the lab. when the slid apart, in the middle of the room was a cylindrical glass case, hooked on hundreds of wires to all sorts of machines.

"it's..."

"... a tree," rocky's programmed voice completed over the speaker of grace's laptop.

"yes," one of the officers nodded.

…but i think it’s incorrect.

looking at the facts, ryland grace is a tiny, flail being, sent into space. he gets into all sorts of scraps. he can only exist on erid by rolling in a ball filled with extremely flammable gas. he dies a weird death only a few dozens of years on erid.

they had their chosen suicide methods ready but the hail mary was designed to keep them alive for years, i’m assuming they wouldn’t have immediately thrown their hands up and said “welp missions over time to die!”

they had all of earths digital entertainment and knowledge at hand, not enough fuel to get back to earth but definitely more than enough to sustain them for ages and the whole universe right there- they could have done anything.

did they have space bucket lists? places in the universe they wanted to check out? space joyrides just because??