VICCUS THICCUS

do not get IR blocking fabric or thick wool to cover your nose and mouth

do not get IR blocking sunglasses since facial recognition has moved up to targeting and identifying the upper face

do not avoid having your phone or any bluetooth devices around these cameras as they can detect and track those signals

do not buy cheap green lasers 1 milliwatt or above from etsy or walmart or amazon (i will not try and find a link if you ask)

do not use them to fry those fuckers from a distance damage the delicate inner sensors by pointing the beam in the lenses

AND unless you want to cost Flock more money in repairs, do not buy a small circle saw or a reciprocating saw and cut down the pole

OR do not climb said poles, spray paint on the solar panels, cover the lens with paint or a sticker, then use bolt cutters to sever the wires

when doing all these things, DO NOT avoid using latex gloves as fingerprints can leak through

DO NOT USE DEFLOCK TO FIND FLOCK SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS NEAR YOU

remember, flock is for YOUR safety :) even though crime rates have not gone down since they were implemented, they're being abused to track down exes and s/os, and many face pools or houses or schools or gymnasiums! Where there are no liscence plates to be found!

DO NOT DO THESE THINGS and enjoy a life under surveillance!

enjoy living in the country where 87,000 of these cameras were used to track down a woman who got an abortion!

enjoy living in the country where there's no consequences for a flock exec to watch a inside of a gymnastics place without their knowledge!

Remember, this is their American Dream.

I learned this as a child. I was perhaps ten when this story took place. Our female guinea pig was pregnant, but she’d gotten mites and needed a bath. She was wildly pregnant. Bulging at the seams with babies. Ready to burst at any moment because all the babies needed to stay in there long enough to be full pigs. But we wanted to avoid the babies all getting mites and needing baths. We failed, they all needed baths. Mites are a bitch.

We knew she had three babies cooking in there. How did we know? We could feel each individual bulge in her belly. My mom was overseeing the pig bath but I was pretty much just doing my own thing, scrubbing her gently, rinsing the soap carefully.

After the bath our mother pig was not in the best mood. I was carrying her back to her freshly made mite free bedding when she’d had enough.

I was acutely aware that I was holding four lives in my childish grip, and I bore her along as if she were made of precious jewels and spun glass. Balanced in my hands I could feel the bulge of each of her babies slithering wetly around under her skin.

Which is why when she hauled off and sank her teeth into the meat of my hand I didn’t flinch. I didn’t drop her. I bore her as carefully and steadily as if I weren’t now bleeding freely, and I set her gently into her pig palace.

As I drew my hands away I screamed:

“FUCK!!!”

I then turned to look at my mother, who’d been watching the process intently.

I was fully aware that I had just done the worst possible swear directly in front of an authority figure and was very probably going to be punished. My mom was looking at me with a blank expression that I was waiting to turn stormy or disappointed.

“That must have hurt a lot,” was all she said.

She helped me throughly clean and bandage the bite. All the babies were born healthy and sound, looking like someone had used a shrink ray on trio of a guinea pigs.

(Also, of Opera/theater is the show biz of Erid, then radio would be the TV. And not just podcast talk radio. Full sound scapes productions and ongoing plots. There are def eridian soap operas that have been running for literal centuries)

Another thing… the costuming.

There’s a reason I ended the act one post at the point that I did. Because act two has to face the music that a culture as button up as Erid needs to make the choice. Take creative liberties and keep Rocky in his crew uniform for the show, or commit to the true events and have their star saving lead actor proudly showing hole.

Big productions do not want to put an age restriction on their performance and instead put Rocky in a ruggedly torn and barely holding on uniform. This has the effect of every eridian now carnally thirsting for Rocky’s character and Rocky himself by extension. It’s agreed that Adrian is a very lucky boulder.

(Listen, I know book lore Eridians reproduce asexually, but that does not mean they cannot still have attraction and desire. They are intelligent social creatures with a modest body culture, let them be a bit repressed and weird about it. If anything it gives Rocky a bigger reason to have embraced the nudist life in space.)

There are absolutely productions who have Rocky in his underwear the entire time if they play it more comically. Very few go full nudist, and if they do it’s played into as a sign of Rocky’s madness in isolation.

(There is 0 reference to eating at all in any play, as not only is it considered obscene, that is not something Rocky ever admitted to showing Grace in interviews lol)

And yes! The Grace puppet gets its own wardrobe too! The puppeteers and costume designers spent an entire day with Grace in his dome, watching the way he moved and how different cloths fit him. They all loved the dress and the way it twirled on his two legged body.

By the end of the pre-production, Grace ends up doubling his wardrobe with everything the designers make him. They give him the first drafts and ask him to model in it for the puppeteers to give the designers notes on how to adjust the design to fit the puppet itself.

Grace ends up becoming friends with not only the puppeteers, to Rocky’s delight, but the costumers as well. So much so that when the Opera premieres, they offer to dress Grace for the red velvet carpet. Grace gave them almost full creative freedom, only asking that it be comfortable for his soft body.

Didn't do any of the actual Eridian opera because I got to cough up in figuring out how puppet grace would "work"

"Dr Ryland Grace was right actually as proven by the Eridians who are basically rock" nope nope nope.

"Dr Ryland Grace was wrong because the Eridians *are* water based as stated in the novel" well yes but that's not all.

*

there's two parts to Grace's original argument:

1. there's nothing special about hydrogen and oxygen, other elements and chemical reactions could also serve as the basis for life. (remains unproven even at the end of the book since all the lifeforms e.g. taomoeba, astrophage, eridians are water based)

2. The Goldilocks Zone is For Idiots, aka, life could evolve outside of the commonly accepted temperature range. (proven true by the existence of Eridians who inhabit a planet with a tempterature over 200 degrees Celsius)

*

In conclusion:

Dr Ryland Grace was *partially* correct in his paper because while Eridians *are* water-based/carbon-based beings, they do not inhabit the Goldilocks Zone at all.

*

screenshots from PHM below

Thank you @zanoscar and @gabblerachet bringing up the ideas of Eridian puppeteers wearing specialized noise canceling robes to hide themselves like kabuki theater stage hands.

Historically in Japan, these stagehand roles are puppeteers or the special effects artist of their time. Ignored by the audience and the players. They are only acknowledged if one suddenly breaks their ‘character’ and attacks a player, revealing their face and themselves as a cleverly hidden assassin and joining the cast properly. This is where the Ninjas of modern media come from.

Now, for the Eridan opera, we could play that nearly one to one. But! What if we invert the assassin element and then combined that concept with another ancient theater tradition: the Greek chorus?

Here’s how I envision the first act of the Opera:

The big opening number serves two purposes, to provide exposition of how big of a threat the Star Eaters are, and to give every single one of the 23 Eridians on Blip A their moment to shine in the grand opening.

Rocky is seen is the opening too, of course, and he's portrayed with the personality he was known to have had then. Still blunt and direct, but aloof and socially shy. Adrians introduction gets a more impactful moment than Rocky does, but he also harmonizes with and uplifts them as the loving mate that he is. This also shows his best skills as an engineer thematically, building up and supporting others.

The launch of Blip A is an absolute banger of a number. The big epic ensemble of the crew as they leave Erid and set off to Tau Ceti.

From here the focus follows Rocky properly, as he works diligently in his quiet isolated job monitoring and operating the engines. He’s called up to attended meetings or do some repairs on occasion, but is a largely solitary stone as well as a workaholic.

And then the crew mates start to get sick.

Those who are still healthy desperately try to save the others, but they have no idea what is happening. As their conditions worsens, each crewmate gets a tragic reprise of their introduction song. There's even a romance subplot between two crewmates who found each other because of this mission and die together, holding each others claws as mates.

So! In Eridian theater, when a character goes to sleep they could be shrouded in the heavy silencing cloth so to imitated the paralyzed state. The actor will stay in the scene as long as the character is present/asleep/alive. But, if the character dies in their sleep, then the actor would rise up and leave the center stage, joining the Greek chorus for the rest of the play, literally haunting the narrative. They can also fill the role of the stagehands too, there to provide special effects and be puppeteers to continue supporting the narrative beneath their heavy shrouds.

At the end of the first act Rocky is the only one that remains in the center stage.

Rocky is shown to spend allot of time watching the corpses of his crew (now props). Waiting for them to awaken. Hoping one, any one of them, might revive from their paralyzed coma.

The unwritten theater rule that any dead player who joins the chorus is truly dead. Their song has joined the great symphony of the afterlife and only the echos of them remain to be heard

Now, what follows is Rocky's decent into grief and madness. The survivors guilt, the belief that he failed to save them in some way.

He is just one engineer. Not a captain or an officer or a biologist, or even a medical personnel. He is there to build the tools they would need, to make the theories a reality. But if he has no direction, if he doesn't know what they need to continue the mission, what can he do?

The answer is Wait, in the vaccum of space, surrounded by the echos of the dead.

For 46 years.

The Eridian Governments: wtf WTF wtF???

The Eridian Scientists: *celebrating like they've won the intersteller lottery*

THREE MONTHS LATER

(Thank you @star-critter, @ironthingcreation, and @attorney-gender-al for the inspiring comments and tags!)

There must always be three puppeteers, to represent the three man crew that were on the Hail Mary/the sacrifice of humanity. Grace might have lived, but all three of the humans were sent to die.

The singing voice for Grace is traditionally done by a pebble. Because a pebble is the only one that can get the right pitch and limited vocal range of a human. Every Pebble ever cast to play Grace gets a pair of ‘glasses’ to wear. (This kicks off a fashion trend in Erid youth of stylized glasses worn like jewelry) 

Any time Grace is in the scene, a heart beat is constantly heard and is at the tempo of a how at rest or active Grace’s would have been at this moment. To represent what Rocky remembers hearing at that time. Whenever Grace went on a space walk outside the ship, the ever constant heart beat of the play would stop, leaving Rocky alone again. It would only start again when Grace returned from the airlock.

When Grace sings of his lost memory, it’s in a very haunting way. It’s a horrifying idea to eridians to awaken to a blank mind. Eridians have perfect memories. Any Erid that doesn’t is incredibly rare and usually actively dying or horrifically injured.

Rocky and Grace being in some kind of meeting with the science thrum on Erid's surface (Grace in his xenonite suit), shortly after they arrive, when Rocky notices that Grace is being even more clingy than usual. Like he's constantly got at least one arm on Rocky's carapace, and has not moved away from Rocky since the meeting started. He's much stiller than he usually is— even accounting for his weakness from the malnutrition— and his light sensing organs keep rolling around in their sockets, meaning that he's anxiously scanning the room.

Rocky begins to worry. Is Grace getting sicker? Is the higher gravity having a worse impact than they thought? Or is he just nervous to be around strange Eridians? (Though he hasn't had this reaction to anyone else? Is there something up with the science Thrum??)

Rocky is like spiralling into anxiety until they have to move to a different part of the room for some reason and Grace, slowed down by the suit, briefly loses his hold on Rocky.

Immediately, he crashes into a table. And then backs into a wall. And then nearly knocks over some important Eridian science equipment. And then stands in the middle of the room, looking confused and slightly freaked out, both hands stretched out in front of him, opening and closing like he's grasping at the air.

Wait.

“Grace.”

“Yeah Rock?”

“At which point during meeting did light emitting devices in room stop working question?”

“Uh… like two minutes after we got in. Sorry, didn't want to be a bother.”

Thank about it. Rocky's a spitfire and bounces off the walls at baseline and they looked at that little autistic, bossy ball of energy and went 'yes. that's them. the creature I want to spend the next 500+ years with'. They have to at LEAST match their energy somewhat. And if you think you wouldn't be a fucking ball of PTSD and bitterness at your culture and society after fifty plus years of not knowing they were alive or dead, you're fucking operating on moon logic. Honestly, Adrian and the other families were probably begging for a rescue mission that never happened for various political and logical reasons; and while it probably would have ended in mass fatalities as well, so thank goodness that figurative and literal ship never got off the ground, the fact that it didn't happen probably burns more than a little, reasonable or unreasonable.

So one day Adrian gets some Eridian diplomat on their doorstep, and they're expecting the formal condolences at long last, but instead they go into this whole spiel of ' so. So! Turns out twenty two of the original crew died, but your mate survived! When did they die? Oh, early on, so your mate was submerged in crippling and literal deafening loneliness for over four decades; and now he's back and acting weird, and he's become codependent with this weird fragile squishy human being that's the only reason he came back at all, and he's refusing to send down the cure unless we make the blob an aquarium. Could you come to the space elevator and tell him to stop being so unreasonable?' If that were MY mate? I'd fucking lose it.

Just throwing things at this poor messenger and shrieking like " Oh! Oh!! So it's somehow Rocky's fault that you're refusing to take a few months out of the several hundred Eridian years we have left to ship the cure we already have to Threeworld before things actually become problematic to make sure one of the two saviors of our entire species doesn't die?! To give the sole survivor of the mission--my mate, who's been alone and in silence, with no one to watch him sleep, for hundreds of years--some sort of solace and peace?! And you're wondering why he's acting erratically?! Maybe you wouldn't be in this position at all if you'd sent the rescue mission for which we've pleaded for years at every single thrum! I don't care if this Grace thing is a literal giant space amoeba; get the fuck out of my house and tell the powers that be to give it literally everything it wants and needs!" And they're all 'be reasonable' and Adrian's like " I've been reasonable for hundreds of Eridian years, and you would not be in this situation if you'd actually sent a rescue mission and not simply wrung your claws and hoped for the best, so fucking live in the nest you made. All I'm going to do if you get me on the radio with Rocky right now is tell him he's doing amazing and give him advice on how to properly parboil the Taumoeba so that you can't even recover even the slightest scrap of DNA if you don't give the flesh blob that saved his life and saved OUR lives PLURAL goddamn vitamins." Like, they think it's bad that Rocky basically stands over Grace's sleeping body and hisses? Wait until they get the MUCH LARGER ERIDIAN doing that for Grace and Rocky. Wait until the much large Eridian leads the families of the dead twenty-two crewmates to the space elevator to riot because this sure sounds like a coverup to them!! This sure sounds like the deflection of blame on the sole survivor!! This sure sounds like the same paralysis that left them to die alone in space because you didn't want to admit failure!! Yes, I know, I'm weaving some sort of political intrigue plot that probably doesn't exist in canon. All I'm saying is that you all are missing the delicious implications of a mission that went radio silent for fifty plus earth years with no word from the government and no obvious attempt at rescue, followed by your partner coming home with the only being that's been around to watch him sleep since the rest of the crew died forty-some years ago, and people are calling him weird and changed. You'd be horrified. You'd be sick.