a toast to the alchemists

You're sick. You recognise the symptoms from your crew, you have radiation poisoning. The astrophages that were protecting you and powering the ship are gone. You couldn't find the leak in time to stop it. And now you're dying out here in space, alone.

The life support systems on the ship are shutting down. Everything is shutting down. Your planet will die– your entire star system will die. They'll never know how close you came to saving them.

You think about Grace. Is his ship dying too? Or is he on his way home, none the wiser to your fate?

Maybe you're fighting until the end, or maybe you've 'made peace' with it.

And then you hear knocking, on the outside of your ship. Furious, desperate banging on the window. Your friend, your lab partner, your first contact, has come back to save you.

You know exactly how much fuel you gave this chucklefuck, and now he doesn't have enough to go home. Dumbass. Idiot. More words he can't understand. He gave up his chance to go home for a planet he's never been to? No, he gave it up for you.

All you can do is go to Erid together, on his ship because yours is now a biohazard. He's confined to it while you talk to scientists, to eridians in charge, making them understand that this weird soft alien saved everyone. And now he needs them to save him in return.

Using what he showed you, you help design an enclosure for him. A house with a bed, sand, water, this really specific gas mix for an atmosphere, sunlight. It's a whole thing.

I had a Kakashi bookmark so we held it up against the screen as a joke but the static actually cleared up. Mystified, we tried different bookmarks and objects with the same plastic material but nothing else worked, only the Kakashi bookmark.

We ended up taping it to the corner of the screen and it stayed there for 11 years until we moved out. When I was older people would be like “can you move the bookmark off the screen” bc it did sort of block a bit of the view but I would demonstrate the static issue and everyone was always just like “huh. what the hell?? well…alright.”