Vero

But to extend the metaphor a bit further, Imagine Caine is a person living isolated in the middle of nowhere without internet. He's desperately lonely, so he raises a bunch of ducks he captures from a nearby lake because they are his favorite animal.

The Ducks keep dying. He does not know why. The ducks peck at him whenever he tries to pet them. He does not know why. He tries to build the best possible coop for them, but they keep plucking their own feathers from stress.

He loves them, but no matter what he does, no matter what he tries, the ducks are miserable and keep dying and want nothing to do with him. But he doesn't want to let them go, he has nothing else in his life. He has nobody else in his life.

Now the metaphor breaks down when you remember the humans can actually talk to Caine, unlike ducks. But honestly that only would help so much, Caine had pretty much zero context to comprehend most of the things the humans talked about as being important to them.

Caine pretty much saw most of the human's complaints as being a case of Preferences rather than "I need things to change so I don't abstract from the stress". And given Caine does not really understand things like nuance and Unspoken Meanings, he was not going to get that unless somebody spelled it out for him directly in those terms (Caine my beloved AuDHD disaster dentures).

Caine literally had to Google humans in their natural habitat before he had even an inkling of what they were actually upset about.

East German Eva Stratt, you are so dear to me.

Bonus because I noticed the colours while drinking Spezi myself and thought it was funny

But on the other it would be so funny if he was like, maybe its early into his arrival so he's doing better but he's still kinda brain fried from all the malnutritions

And so the Eridians are arguing about something infront of the clear-xenonite wall of his medical inclosure/room, and he's lost all since of shame and social etiquette, the brain fog is strong with this one. He's just trying to practice his Eridian by following along to a Level 10 Fast-Passed Angry Eridian Conversation, hes processing words, not context.

But he's like standing AT the floor to ceiling window, just watching them in the dim light shining through from his room, cause they're blind right, they can't see him, and clearly they can't or they'd like, move right???

And it takes the Eridians probably an embarassed amount of time to realize, no the Human isn't just standing by the wall coincidentally, its "front" is towards them, its "head" is tilted down so its light-receptors are directly trained on them.

Its definitely watching them through the wall some how. It has been for a while.

And there's just this moment where they go quit and still like "when he looks at me, and I look at him, and he looks at me, and look at hiiiim"

And then Ryland remembers "Wait, fudge, the CAN see me they're just my kind of blind!!"

And then they're all scrambling away from the glass wall like cats from a cucumbers.

Bonus if Adrian was one of those Eridians. They and Grace vow to never tell Rocky. Rocky finds out anyway, and the day they're giving Grace a tour of his new house, Rocky taps at one of the windows like,

She would need a good defense lawyer, maybe even an ace attorney

and nothing at all bad happened

[ID: Project Hail Mary fanart of Grace and Stratt working together, Stratt lying on the couch and using her laptop while Grace sits on the floor below her while reading a report and eating Twizzlers, a stack of papers beside him. Stratt is sticking a post-it on Grace's forehead that says "dinner soon," and there are more post-its scattered around the room and on Grace's body. End ID]

Moved by the voices of everyone who dared to go on this journey together ,

They found light in one another.

For they were never meant to come back ,

And so they kept moving forward ,

Leaving behind one single message :