Hungry before lunch

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

They see electricity, the same electricity of your brain. If something is not charged they can't see anything at all, and a room of non-conductive objects would be a complete sensory deprecation chamber. They can see a little bit, but they are nearly blind and only use it to notice sudden changes. If you flash a light at them they scream. Instead they just bring a device that generates a charge everywhere they go. They claim their whole planet is charged, but you have doubts

This apparently allows them to see secrets of the universe. They knew about the big bang through out their entire history, because they can apparently just see the beginning of the universe. They find it beautiful, but not all that interesting. You are jealous

Despite being in space, they have not yet discovered steel or had the industrial revolution. It's basically still alchemists and philosophers, but the alchemy and philosophy works and got them to space. You are no longer jealous

They rely on the temperature being way below 40 degrees Fahrenheit so all the fat stays solid and frozen, and die if it's warm. They consider you burning

They get all their energy from air, like eating, to the point they cannot hold their breath at all. They get other things from food, but refuse to prepare it aside from digestion. They just plop it in basically untouched

They age in dog years, dying a few months after turning 9, and only reach adulthood at age 4. That's an absurd amount of time to spend as a child. The one you met is apparently 5 and considers himself a mature adult. The tantrums say otherwise. Yes, he also has arcane knowledge naturally. You are more surprised they live this long considering everything else about them

They have 4 genders and assigned you one, maybe randomly. Kind of rude, apparently very complex, but they have no idea how to explain it. You aren't asking

Rocky: Yes?

Grace: What is the material of your clothing made out of? Since it doesn’t seem that you have any wool-bearing animals or cotton-like plants on Erid.

Rocky: Oh, it’s a rock with a fibrous material!

Grace: (Uh oh)

Grace: Uh, what’s the chemical composition for that rock?

Rocky: Mg3(Si2O5)(OH)4

Grace, doing mental chemistry: So that’s something we call asbest- Uh oh.

And when the Blip-A has been gone twice as long as it should have been with no indication of what happened to them, when the astrophage has been attacking Erid’s sun for 50 years and they are starting to feel the pressure of its effects, when the Tau Ceti plan looks like a failure and the whole crew aboard has been assumed dead and they need to figure out something else… Eridian governments approach Adrian’s dome habitat team with the serious question of how much of the Eridian population could feasibly be moved into climate controlled geothermally-powered xenonite dome cities. (The answer is inevitably “not enough.” But the debates over sending a second crew to Tau Ceti in case what happened to the Blip-A was a weird fluke are not finding any consensus and the planet is snowballing towards total climate collapse and the world is ending and Adrian is bitterly glad that they and Rocky never had children because what kind of future is even left—)

i pulled you out of the icy depths, why are you still so saturated in blood? better yet, where the hell did you come from?