amaze amaze amaze!

ROCKY ✦ ( PROJECT HAIL MARY )

❛ Good. Proud. I am scary space monster. You are leaky space blob. ❜                ╰┈➤ app.  stats. 

ever wanted to meet an alien? ever wondered if it would be friendly? well i present to you: rocky the eridian.

a five-legged creature with no eyes, rocky uses echolocation to see! that means his hearing is insanely good, so don't even bother trying to hide anything from him.

uses musical noises similar to whale song to communicate. his speech is translated by the star system as a human voice overlaying his own.

weighs 800 pounds and is usually burning to the touch, as well as confined to a hamster ball while in earth-like atmospheres. will be using his newfound freedom on the island to touch Everything.

was sent into space with a crew of other eridians on a mission to save his planet by figuring out how to prevent their sun from dying. ended up being the only survivor of the trip, and was stranded in a different solar system for decades.

his best friend is a human junior high teacher that he trauma bonded with during said savior mission. do not separate, please.

          rocky didn't understand what was happening on the island, really. despite all the time he'd spent around grace, he still wasn't a scientist, and he definitely wasn't an expert on human ( or human-adjacent ) biology. plus, there wasn't exactly a surplus of people he could ask. and so he wasn't shy to admit that whatever was happening was a mystery to him. because rocky was still pretty sure that humans weren't supposed to be growing flora from their skin, and that's what... seemed to be happening here.

          rocky had never been able to position his arms in the way he'd seen grace do similarly, hands resting on his middle and an exasperated expression on his face. but, in this particular moment, staring at the paper that apparently had all the information he needed, he really wished that he could. because it would perfectly capture the current things he was feeling right about now. mainly: annoyance and irritation. because while the paper might have everything rocky needed to "get started", there was a crucial flaw in this plan: he had no idea what it said. even focusing on it with all his echolocating strength wasn't enough to parse the ink sunk into the glossy page.

     which meant he simply had to resort to stomping his claws angrily, carapace swinging side to side as one arm waved the paper around angrily.

          this, rocky was relatively sure, was a forest. the impressions he was getting from his surroundings were similar to the 'trees' grace had shown him, though the real things were quite a bit different than the impression he'd gotten from the image inducer. but, still. tall, with spindly limbs that reached far far upward into the blank vastness of the sky, clustered all around him. the wind rustled through their 'leaves', creating a great wash of noise for rocky to "see". it was... soothing, he supposed. he could understand why grace seemed to like them so much.

     at the moment, though, it was the little things underneath his claws that interested rocky. they swayed in the wind, sticking out slightly from what rocky assumed was 'grass'. their impression told him they had soft, oval-like protrusions radiating out from a circular center, and rocky got the feeling he would crush them if he touched them.

          Rocky was, in the purest form of the word, frustrated. his claws clacked against the stone path beneath him as he quickly moved along, three of his limbs focused on walking while the other two fiddled with the "toolset" he'd been given. gentle tapping told him they were likely made of a similar material he had seen grace use—a material that was absolutely useless against most actual materials. a fluted sound of exasperation left him as he tucked the things back into his bandolier, once again scanning the area around him. more of those moving machines, and more of the flat surfaces that rocky was certain probably displayed earth writing.

     writing that was inaccessible to rocky, without the imager device he'd made. another sharp note expressed how he felt about that.

     it was, perhaps, luck that made the sound bounce off the smooth surfaces around him strangely. enough to make rocky tilt his carapace to hear the returning frequencies better, and actually focus closer on what he was hearing. close enough to pick up on familiar angles and planes around the corner in front of him—shaggy hair, a time device ticking around a wrist, glasses dangling from one ear. he turned ( an unnecessary but involuntary movement ) and was moving before he even really registered it.

          rocky was... not on fire. this was, to anyone familiar with eridian biology, very confusing. because as far as he could tell, those were humans—or, at least, a species similar—walking all around him. gentle bouncing back and forth from claw to claw told him that this was the same weaker gravity that humans preferred, and the lack of pressure against his carapace informed him that the atmosphere was, as well. this was, as previously stated, very confusing. because surrounded by oxygen and temperatures so far below his own, rocky should be on fire. and yet.

     the faint clicking of his fingers tapping against each other could be heard as rocky thought, trying to understand just what in the world ( his or otherwise ) could have been happening to prevent the untimely combustion of his body. but he wasn't, as all those years of orbiting tau ceti alone had proven, a scientist. and he certainly didn't have enough information to even try to guess, even if he was.

     well. he could at least try to fix that.