Icy

Haunted Houses

I imagine that Rocky wasn’t too fond of Grace cutting his hair or clipping his nails the first time he saw that. Body modification and all that (not at all like chiseling your legs)

Dreams and nightmares are a common one that I’ve seen. Eridians sleep like their on anesthesia- pass out and nothing until they wake up.

Rocky discovering color can be seen would be a huge discovery for all Eridians. All of human culture revolves around color-Eridians don’t have that.

Grace chews on things, usually pencils or his glasses legs. This definitely confuses Rocky. R: Why chew but not chew eat? G: It’s relaxing. Stress relief.

Not a cultural thing, but biological: random muscle spasms, shivering, goosebumps, and sweat. Also things like teeth grinding, snoring, sneezing/sniffles, coughing, drooling, yawning. Humans are so noisy and wet to Eridians.

R:The human body is weird and gross and way too noisy.

R: How did you ever manage to avoid predators? Too many fluids, leaky blobs.

(And poor Rocky who’s spent 40 years alone in space without a single sound and must have been so overwhelmed and over stimulated by Grace when they first met)

And that’s without mentioning sleep talking/walking must have really freaked Rocky out the first time it happened. Like oh yeah, by the way, humans talk/walk in their sleep when they’re stressed. It’s really any wonder to Rocky how early man managed to survive when they made so much noise in their most vulnerable state.

And I’m thinking about how oceans have salt, making the ocean in the Bio-Dome undrinkable. How confusing and stupid for a race to rely on water so much, whose planet is completely covered in water, but didn’t evolve to be able to drink it.

R: Water in front of you. Much, many volumes as requested. Why not drink?

G: *drinking water out of a cup from his house* It’s salt. Humans can’t drink salt water. It dehydrates.

R: We can take salt out.

G: Then it wouldn’t smell like the ocean.

R: . . .

And like, what’s the deal with rain water? Why does Grace let that enter his system? It’s so loud and wet-why ask for it in the first place?

Speaking of weather, Grace wants cloudy days. He makes shapes in the clouds-how does a cloud look like something else? It’s a cloud!

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.

Like that’s such a loaded way to feel bcus yes he was able to figure out how to kill the astrophage, yes he was in fact the man for the job, yes they were right to send him.

But!! It’s that, mixed with the fact that the guy who even helped him get to this step is still unconcious or dead for all he knows!! And he has no way of knowing how to get this to the other planet it needs to go to if its the latter!!

Like that’s such a loaded way to feel bcus yes he was able to figure out how to kill the astrophage, yes he was in fact the man for the job, yes they were right to send him.

But!! It’s that, mixed with the fact that the guy who even helped him get to this step is still unconcious or dead for all he knows!! And he has no way of knowing how to get this to the other planet it needs to go to if its the latter!!

yoda