I don't know....

Lmao I’m back- my brain is still chewing on your fic like a squeaky toy- Look at that successful cowboy/space thermos wrangler go!! I really debated whether the American flag should still go on his jumpsuit before I decided that haaaah yeah the US government WOULD do that- Good job as always!!!

Ahhhh thank you! I love this! We've got his space uniform (courtesy of the US of A lol)

Ohhhhh my gosh. I'm having about four million reactions at once and had to try to pin them down into words. Thank yoooou I'm so happy you're enjoying my story and I am SO grateful for this fanart omg 😭😭😭

Look at him! He's so not ready to meet Every World Leader but here he is, doing exactly that. Grace is having a time.

I'm gonna stare at this for the next five hours or so

Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a mission he doesn't remember volunteering for. Alone on a ship scaled far too large for a borrower, he has to try to figure out why he's so far from home, and what he's supposed to do. On top of that, he needs to figure out why this mission is so prepared to have a borrower on the crew--standing at only six inches tall, it's easy to think none of this was meant for him. And yet, everywhere he looks he finds evidence that whoever built this ship built it with both humans and borrowers in mind. An impossible task looms over him. A scientific mystery has somehow sent him hurtling through space, impossibly far from any other human or borrower, and it's on him to surpass an extinction-level threat that doesn't care how big someone is. It will end the world all the same if he doesn't do something about it. But, despite what he thinks, he's not alone.

I can't remember where I first saw this information, but apparently Rocky's aim was to make the wall to the tunnel out of many different materials to find out which one Grace is able to see through easiest, not based on opacity - like a human or something that evolved to see light does - but based on acoustic impedance. For anyone who doesn't know what that is, it's a way of measuring how easily sound passes through a material - usually used in ultrasound scans. Therefore, for a species who uses echo-location, he's working out which material is easiest for Grace to see through - and from what I can tell he just got lucky with the clear Xenonite. I'm also fairly sure that he was completely unaware about species that see through light waves rather than echo-location, based on his reactions to Grace in the movie.

Basically, Rocky wanted to make things as accessible as he could for any alien that he could come across with the limited knowledge that he had of how different species see things. He is essentially setting himself up to be as accessible as he can for anyone he could possible meet out there. Whether its due to desperation for connection, or just because he's Like That, that's why I think he's so neat. His first interaction with Grace is just him trying to make Grace as comfortable as possible.

commission for @echoes-of-the-shadows!

Eva Motherfucking Stratt

Everyone forgets (especially movie fans since I don’t think they even brought it up for y’all) that Stratt wasn’t a scientist like the rest of her crew. Sure, she was definitely smart enough to understand most of what they told her, but it wasn’t her field of study. She wasn’t a biologist or a chemist or an astrophysicist, she was a historian. She was also recommended for the project because she was an incredibly talented diplomat. Canonically, she’s fluent in at least seven languages, and probably speaks several more- give her a day, and she’ll understand Eridian almost as well as Grace. The atmospheric testing, the experimentation with Xenonite, that’s all her crew. But getting to know an alien race, learning all about their language and their history and their culture? That’s her thing, right there.

Hey, folks! Pride month is here, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to promote the custom name and pronoun buttons I make. =]

I opened my little shop in late 2015 because I was having trouble getting misgendered myself, so I started making these buttons and I've made thousands of name and pronoun buttons for folks since. It's so cool to have been even just a tiny part of so many people's journeys like that. I've even got over 100(!) different pride flags made in the Painted style, too, so whatever your flag I've got you covered.