So many thoughts but head empty

- inhabitants of the vat have taken to affectionately calling themselves the vatlings, with Eva as their benevolent dictator and head of their unofficial government on board the ship

- after some weeks of boarding the ship, time quickly becomes lost on everybody so they revert to basing everything around the position of the sun/moon/stars

- this quickly led to an ongoing joke of the vat being a pirate ship with Stratt as the Captain

- and quickly spiraled into the whole ship, save for one Captain and her lapdog, dressing up in pirate costumes one April fool's day (of course Ilyukhina bought extra costumes for those two but the best she managed to put on them was a hat and eyepatch)

- she did get Stratt a real sword though, no one knows how she managed to procure it but Eva proudly brandishes it in her office

- sickness is rare but not impossible on the ship, if one person is down, it is inevitable that everyone goes down (except Stratt and her primary crew, who she drags onto a private jet to wait out whatever disease to run its course)

- if she so much as hears one cough from any of them, she kicks them off and sends them back to the vat (Grace only survives since years of teaching around living petri dishes has strengthened his immune system, while Stratt is always the last one standing, but her cursed sleep and eating schedule ends up being her downfall)

- the multicultural makeup of the ship has led to factions forming among vatlings of similar origins, and mock wars are declared nearly every week that always devolve into petty pranks

- peace treaties too, each with more ridiculous articles than the last, such as renaming little russia to little america after a cold war reenactment between members of ROSCOSMOS and NASA (which did not last longer than a week thanks to Komorov)

- Grace refuses to pick any side during these wars but ends up helping anyway, including stacking neon party wigs on Dubois (with help from Shapiro and Ilyukhina) after he nodded off during another last minute team meeting, or convincing Leclerc that no it's not snowing that's just frozen rain

- they rarely attempt to prank Stratt, once Ilyukhina convinced Grace to try the same prank they did on Dubois on her, but the best they managed was one green wig and a blurry picture when she passed out after three days of irregular sleep (one eye shot open and that was enough to send the pair scampering from her office)

- Ilyukhina often defects for no reason other than to stir drama, while Yáo pretends to not care but is willing to broker information to anyone for the right price (a pack of cigarettes and an hour of their PTO)

- being the dictator director, Eva does not step in during these wars, so long as work is completed by the end of the night (she understands how stir crazy living on a boat can be)

- the mess hall has a rotating schedule to represent the different cultures on board the ship which inevitably means everyone complaining once its time for English-based meals (no one wants to eat mushy peas or beans on toast, but an argument breaks out on whether chicken tikka masala belongs to England or India)

- the Olympics causes a return to nationalism among the vatlings and is the only time Stratt is seen repping her country's flag

- speaking of, the vatlings held a mock Olympics (the Vatlympics) themselves with increasingly strange competitions based not on country/heritage but on respective roles on the ship

-Stratt catches wind of this and forms her own team made of the best in each crew simply termed the Leads (did not last long, Ilyukhina quickly retermed them the Strattlings)

- she tried getting the astronauts to join her team but they chose to stick together led by Yáo who surprisingly became quite competitive

- events included but were not limited to swimming laps around the Vat, running along its length (suprising to no one Redell wins), bowling using discarded equipment and a mannequin head that no one knew where it came from (Grace has shockingly good aim), a spelling bee amongst the science factions (despite being the lead astrophage researcher, spelling is not his forte), extreme hide and seek (won by Shapiro and Dubois who of course knew all the best hidden places), and cultural dance forms (it was impossible to select a clear winner but Lokken did surprise everyone by performing a hallingkast)

- they hold a funeral for Antarctica headed by Leclerc (he's bawling the entire time), Ilyukhina almost poured one out but quickly remembered the newfound Prohibition enforced on the vat

- an illegal speakeasy is formed by the chemists when Stratt limits alcohol usage only for galas and the monthly team bonding events, they take orders from the crew teams until one suspicious request for mead shows up (little known fact, Eva has a sweet tooth)

- a makeshift Eurovision is held (including non-euro crew members), Eva almost considered joining but started getting a sore throat after endless meetings that always ended in her yelling at greedy capitalists trying to profit off the end of the world

- Lokken and Grace's beef is so well known amongst the vatlings that a silent system is formed to alert if one gets within 10 feet of each other (fails every time, those two can rarely hold a civil conversation, Grace likes to think himself a calm man but Lokken knows the exact buttons to press)

- (eg. During the Vatlympics in a particularly heated staring contest between team bio-engineer and team Leads Strattlings, Lokken and Grace had the misfortune of being paired, Lokken only won when she whispered independent evolution, causing Grace to yell about panspermia)

Grace who does jazz hands and taps when he's asking a question and says some words three times like Rocky. Grace who makes chirps and trilling noises when he's happy.

Grace who starts thinking and dreaming in Eridian, who sometimes has dreams that are just sound, no visual. (Grace who, if he ever goes back to Earth for whatever reason after years on Erid, forgets some words in English and speaks in the sentence structure of Eridian because he has to translate from Eridian to English when he speaks outloud).

Grace who does scarification (even if Rocky protests at first) - I've read some fics where he does the Voyager pulsar map, or dots and lines showing his route from Sol, to Tau Ceti, turning around towards Sol, and then the line going all the way back to Erid. Even though he already has the scars from Rocky saving him, maybe Rocky's family crest. A scar showing his rank as Captain of the Hail Mary - maybe something to represent her, too.

Grace who wears Eridian gems, as earrings, in a chain for his glasses, in strings draped over him that clink together when he walks - the most important ones, like the earrings he wears all the time, the color of the blueish-green gems (or spots?) in/on Rocky's carapace.

Grace who wears a bracelet on each arm that have ribbed marks like on Rocky's arm so he can properly say goodbye (not something he had to do, but something that felt right to do, something that made him feel more like himself), sound included.

I wanna see the unbridled joy on the faces of human schoolchildren who get to meet the first Eridians who come to visit Earth. I wanna see the Eridian ambassadors insisting to the humans that they get a chance to meet their schoolchildren, because they themselves were schoolchildren when a human teacher came to their planet and inspired them to become astronauts.

I wanna see humans getting permission to set up a small embassy somewhere in the Eridani System, possibly even giving a very elderly Grace a chance to see humans again. I wanna see how surprised the humans are that he doesnt want to come home to Earth, but also see them quickly realize just how amazing it is to live, study and teach on an alien world.

I wanna see Humans & Eridians joining forces and creating a massive space program with the goal of inoculating every star in the Milky Way that has been infected with the astrophage. I want to hear them say "the fact that there are three Systems with life this close to each other implies that the whole Galaxy is likely teeming with life- probably even whole civilizations. And none of them deserve to go through what we went through. Screw any ideas about a 'prime directive.' We CAN help, and we WILL help. Lets spend the next 1000 generations saving the galaxy, together."

I wanna see more of this world, generations after these two planets were saved by a pair of alien scientists who became best friends, and who each risked everything to make absolutely certain that the other's world was just as safe as their own. I wanna see these two great peoples coming out of this horrible generational trauma, coming together to celebrate the life that they all get to live with their newly-found cosmic neighbors.