love that Grace dresses business casual as a teacher, but when the astronauts are touring the place, he jas to cover his silly science shirt, implying that he thinks you need to dress appropriately to work at a middle school but not when working ina high tech lab on a high stakes international collaboration to save the world

if I feel like absolutely torturing rocky then I sometimes like to imagine a scenario on erid where a few months into The Scurvy Era grace sits him down like "hey pal. there's a chance that the scientists here won't figure out how to meet my nutritional needs any time soon. I would love it if they can! but it might not happen. and I don't want to die very slowly and painfully of starvation. now listen to me. ideally I don't want to die at all. but more than that. I do not want to die. of starvation. I don't need anything from you to help with this, I can address it on my own, but if this becomes a real problem then I am going to solve it. Do You Understand What I Am Saying Right Now." and rocky isn't even allowed to immediately become evil about it.

I imagine that at this point they've had The conversation about how grace got on the ship in the first place and rocky is aware that his friend has some significant issues about having his personal autonomy overruled, so in the moment he just says "hnnnnnn. Iwouldbesadifthathappened but. I can see why you would. feel that way." then as soon as he's out of range he physically attacks the first person nearest to him.

the phm book rules because if youre paying attention rocky is just oozing ptsd at every turn (slaps the top of his carapace) this bad rock can fit so much trauma in him

it's sick and twisted when performing arts people get famous enough that they have to polish up their social media presences and change their fun personalized usernames. laura dreyfuss has mercifully changed her insta back to hotdamnitslaura, but it was a sad day when we lost stephanie hsu's "hsulace" handle and she's a serious enough film actress now that I doubt we'll ever get it back. james ortiz you must promise to never waver from your jorts-based themeing.

god now i'm really thinking about it. grace + rocky little mermaid "dark fairytale" style au where, after the incident where they both almost died getting off adrian (the planet) and rocky was almost too badly incapacitated by exposure to grace's atmosphere to drag him to safety, rocky ends up developing himself a humanoid body through sheer stubborn engineering ingenuity and some kind of impulsive, highly emotionally driven deal with a devil-type figure who animates the xenonite form rocky has built and gives it life and a way for rocky to transfer his consciousness into it - but with the caveat that he can't be both human and eridian, so if he wants this form he has to accept that he will dissolve into seafoam Die For Real within its confines, and sooner than even an average human lifespan would permit if he doesn't take good care of it. grace is initially overwhelmed by the joy of oh my god, we can actually hold each other like i've always dreamed of, but it's a matter of days of rocky avoiding the subject of when + how he's going to go back to being eridian and clearly suffering from being in an unfamiliar shape that he isn't adapted to for grace to realise that something is very wrong and they need to not only find a way to reverse-engineer a way for rocky to transfer back to his original body but also fix rocky's self-worth if they're going to save him.

walk with me. okay. if we're going full little mermaid let's say that rocky's had this fear festering in his crystalline brain lattice for years since the adrian (the planet) incident and, once grace's presence is established on erid and keeping him alive has been successful enough that it's not an immediate all-encompassing priority to occupy himself with, it comes back to bear full force as rocky realises that he's going to have to watch grace die from the other side of a glass wall anyway. he's separated (amicably or not, up to you) from adrian (the eridian) due to the revalation of how much they've changed and become incompatible in one another's absence, so grace is all he has left - and there's nobody to temper his anxiety or stop him to consider what an awful, preemptive grief-driven idea this is. so rocky seeks out an old eridian bio-engineer who was exiled many years ago for unethically experimenting on their own kind, long enough ago that most are convinced they're just an urban legend to frighten pebbles with (like rocky was when he first heard the story), and upon finding the sea witch i mean eridian, strikes a deal to enlist their help (because there's no way rocky would let someone else completely take over a project that he has his heart set on for him) to engineer himself a human body so he can be with grace "properly" until the end. even the unethical morally bankrupt bioengineer eridian does warn rocky that it's an irreversible transition (not the gender kind, although there's definitely potential for explorations of gender identity and how the body reflects the way we and others perceive ourselves to be had there), but rocky is adamant that it's what he wants. if it's rocktiz specifically, then either rocky designs his human body and reinvents james ortiz from first principles lightyears away, or maybe he decides to take a look at the person whose voice was recorded to create his speech synthesiser on the hail mary for inspiration + sentimental reasons, and upon finding images of james ortiz on his earth thinking machine decides "yeah he's perfect, i want to look like that" (no real james ortizes were harmed in the making of rocky's suspiciously james ortiz-shaped human avatar). cue the equivalent of the little mermaid taking the potion that splits her tail into legs and barely making it to the surface before her air runs out, but it's rocky stumbling to the biodome in a human form that's rapidly beginning to reject the high-pressure superheated ammonia-rich atmosphere of erid (maybe they coated it in an ultra-thin temporary protective layer of xenonite that rocky's shedding like scales with every step from the moment he transfers himself into it?) and collapsing inside on the beach for grace to find when he wakes up.