based on that one xitter post where rocky gotta go down to erid alone without grace. Why? Because the universe loves making him suffer.

Now that we have discussed this: I would like you to imagine the first time after Rocky left for Tau Ceti that somebody has the gall to speak of Adrian and Not refer to them as “Rocky’s Adrian” when the context would make that the appropriate way to refer to them. Implying they’re available now.

Grace and Rocky play hide and seek— or Rocky finds out about persistence hunting the hard way, and Grace gets some pumpkins to roll around his enclosure.

I wanted to experiment with a more sketchy comic, instead of spending weeks and weeks on making it “Perfect”— and I had so much fun with it!! I need to do these more!

but rocky and grace put the whole diplomacy thing in jeopardy by being too best buddy with it. like they're both really low level members of the mission. some engineer necessary for ship maintenance, and an obligatory molecular biologist they brought along in case they found more alien cells out in space. and these two guys like, somehow keep ending up hanging out essentially "at the back of the classroom." consistently left out of the actually important negotiations, and well, they're bored!

grace steals some laptops and starts jury-rigging his own personal translator for rocky, despite the fact that the official translation software is way quicker to learn and much more nuanced. rocky starts learning english, simplifies his eridian, and immediately starts mocking grace for needing the software. they start blabbing to each other about all the weird quirks of their respective cultures and advanced science their planets can do. the whole time they are ribbing each other about culture stuff. grace eats in front of rocky. rocky forces grace to sleep in a corridor somewhere so he can keep watch.

then stratt and the eridian leader find out and it's like

stratt: you. you've been meeting in private with a member of the eridian deligation?

grace: ... yyyes.

stratt: and you shared with them classified scientific documents?

grace: i... maybe gave him. a laptop. he's so smart! what was i supposed to do?

stratt: HIM? you've assigned male pronouns to a genderless species?

grace: he said he likes to match!

stratt: do you even know the name of this eridian?!

grace: i call him rocky :)

stratt: 😰

then on rocky's side of things it's like

eridian leader: sorry did you say you called the human after one of its digestive noises?

rocky: yeah :)

eridian leader: and. you've been telling it about how to make xenonite. one of our most vital trading resources.

rocky: yes yes, grace is very ignorant about basic chemistry 🙄

eridian leader: right. and you watch it sleep. despite the fact that all the human beings we have spoken to have described this as a cultural violation?

rocky: well he didn't like it at first but he came around!!

anyway both sides of the delegation are sweating profusely (metaphorically speaking) until they see rocky and grace in action and are like ohh! they're both freaks. we are not to blame for this. these two are just really bad at navigating cultural norms.

location: Grace being American, I imagine the main exhibit would be at one of the Smithsonians (or affiliates). originally I went with Space Center Houston, but the National Air and Space Museum in DC might make marginally more sense. it’s pretty small, but they do also literally have Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit and the command module from Apollo 11, so a Hail Mary exhibit might make a nice companion.

name: Earth’s Saving Grace: The Story of Project Hail Mary (if this was real life it would be called like “The Lockheed Martin Hail Mary Exhibit” or something equally asinine, but this is fake so I can ignore that <3)

actual artifacts:

at least one of the Beetles probes (probably Ringo, idk I’m attached to that one for some reason) 

xenonite taumoeba breeder tank 

replicas of the yellow and red jumpsuits grace wore, with highlights on each of the individual patches and what they mean + the patches that were on Ilyukhina + Yáo’s suits

a small replica of the astrophage panels used to power the Hail Mary

I imagine Grace kept some kind of physical research journal while working on Stratt’s Vat, that would be in here

interactive:

tech panel breaking down time dilation + the difference between the actual time the hail mary traveled to tau ceti, the time as experienced from earth, and the time as experienced by the crew onboard

tech panel that teaches about base 6 + Eridian numbers, and has a little quiz where you’re given a number in base 10 and have to convert it to base 6 (or you’re given a number 0-5 and have to pick the Eridian equivalent) 

tech panel with a 3D model of Rocky you can spin around and click various parts of to learn about Eridian biology (or at least what they know of it from Grace’s logs)

tech panel comparing the planet characteristics of Earth vs Erid, + potentially Venus vs Threeworld +  maybe Sol vs 40 Eridani A; I’m not sure how comprehensive I want this panel to be actually thinking through this a Sol/40 Eridani A comparison would be built in, as I envision you being able to both look at the planets themselves side by side and switch views to look at their orbits around their hosts side by side 

other elements:

one of those semi-enclosed movie rooms with the big wall projection(s), where they loop through a curated collection of the video clips sent back by Grace [when the museum is busy this part of the exhibit in particular is packed]

wrapping around the exhibit is a timeline of the entire mission, from the Petrova line discovery all the way to the Sun returning to full brightness (and when they have confirmation that 40 Eridani A has also returned to full brightness, I imagine this would be added as well) [the actual line part of the timeline is red, of course]

a dedicated wall with pictures of all of the big players in the mission, and a placard naming them all. Stratt is at the top (which she hates), with Grace immediately beneath her, and then the remaining astronauts side by side underneath him, continuing down through technicians scientists etc. Grace never took a mission picture the way the rest of the astronaut crew did, so it’s just his final yearbook photo as a teacher. it’s led to a number of conspiracy theories online that maybe he never actually agreed to be the tertiary scientist, but it’s explained in the exhibit as highlighting that he wanted to be remembered as a teacher, not an astronaut