Lizi Rinz

They’re best friends but by both Earth and Eridian standards everyone is like “Oh wow, they’re… close-”

Like little to no cares about privacy around each other because, well, fuck you aren’t getting much of that on a spaceship for multiple years now are you?

Wherever one goes there’s a 50% chance the other will be there too.

Whenever Grace talks to another Eridian he uses some sort of portable instrument to communicate but with Rocky they just speak in two separate languages at each other. It’s like seeing someone speak to someone in only Chinese and the other person only responds back in English.

Would be funny if Eridians aren’t very touchy but Rocky is basically clingy as fuck when it comes to Grace. Always tugging on his pants like a toddler to get his attention and stuff.

Grace just using Rocky in either his ball, enclosure or his xenonite suit as a backrest while he’s grading or doing work or something, Rocky fully absorbed in his own thing. Sitting as close together as physically possible while having zero interaction with each other. Parallel play at it’s best.

These two come in a pair. Do not separate.

All of this and more, fully platonically, people wonder if they’re the world’s first weird inter solar system couple and if they’re in some weird polycule with Adrian but no, they’re just like that.

It’s just Rocky and the human he adopted as a permanent part of his family that he will spend every possible second of the rest of his short life with because he won’t be here forever and he’s not going to waste any of his time for the world.

This applies to both versions of canon btw. Their unnecessary, almost uncomfortable openness with him about their sex life, and how comfortable they are to talking to him about it in the scenes in the book vs. in the movie, where they fully just look at him in the karaoke scene with pure "we saw you from across the bar and liked your vibe" couple energy.

I can't remember where I first saw this information, but apparently Rocky's aim was to make the wall to the tunnel out of many different materials to find out which one Grace is able to see through easiest, not based on opacity - like a human or something that evolved to see light does - but based on acoustic impedance. For anyone who doesn't know what that is, it's a way of measuring how easily sound passes through a material - usually used in ultrasound scans. Therefore, for a species who uses echo-location, he's working out which material is easiest for Grace to see through - and from what I can tell he just got lucky with the clear Xenonite. I'm also fairly sure that he was completely unaware about species that see through light waves rather than echo-location, based on his reactions to Grace in the movie.

Basically, Rocky wanted to make things as accessible as he could for any alien that he could come across with the limited knowledge that he had of how different species see things. He is essentially setting himself up to be as accessible as he can for anyone he could possible meet out there. Whether its due to desperation for connection, or just because he's Like That, that's why I think he's so neat. His first interaction with Grace is just him trying to make Grace as comfortable as possible.

So like, with the stars dying, I'm thinking Eridian media might have gone on a whole "aliens are bad bad bad out there killing stars and wanting to eat Erid" and etc trend for their sci-fi. Long ballads about what are essentially evil Eridians with the equivalent of prosthetics doing terrible things to the galaxy and brave heroes like Rocky going off to stop them. Because y'know that's probably how you'd conceptualize a huge scary conflict like total cosmic annihilation in a way that makes it seem beatable: designate a bad guy you can just defeat in order to stop it.

But then Grace and Rocky get to Erid and that trend gets immediately flipped. Turns out that there were kind of bad aliens, the astrophage and all, but that's more like a natural disaster, and hero Rocky has returned with the weirdest, nicest alien ever. Erid media suddenly rockets back to a prior era of optimistic sci-fi previously considered intolerably twee and cringe after the solar disaster kicked off, where the aliens are always nice nice nice, incredibly weird and sometimes goofy as fuck but friendly and not the bad guys.

Of course you never get full consensus on these things, so there are also creative Eridians who are like. But what if evil humans question? Evil humans posing as saviors infiltrate Erid and replace Eridians with pods that hatch into creepy non-Erid rock monsters question? Evil human comes to Erid under guise of niceness and KILLS Eridians question???

Which is broadly considered like. Holy shit dude stop being gauche the nice alien saved the planet stop fucking writing stories where his skeleton cracks open like a nest of evil eggs and turns into a bunch of monsters! Rude, statement! Aliens very nice statement!

And like at first all the Eridian scientists are very sure to keep this sort of stuff away from Grace, they don't want to insult him or imply that he's being slandered in their media or anything. And again overall the popular trend turns a lot more to aliens-as-friendly, especially if they're expressly humans, and the sci-fi writers of Erid are having a total BLAST speculating about Earth and writing stories about it and etc, Grace seems to very much enjoy answering questions for the ones who want to keep things accurate and chuckling and enthusing over the creativity of the ones who don't. He's like, oh yeah they are definitely also doing this back on Earth, don't worry.

Researchers laughing and nervously just being like, yes of course, this is the full extent of it, not to worry! Normal thing which humans are also doing!

Until one day Rocky just brings Grace a recording of a full-blown Eridian horror sci-fi where Grace HIMSELF is EXPLICITLY a horrible monster that goes on a killing spree and tries to destroy Erid.

The other researchers are losing their shit. RoCKY?!?! WHY QUESTION??? Oh fuck Grace is going to be so upset! He's such a sensitive soul he doesn't even like it when one of his students gets distressed!

Curious pebble (3/?)

Part 1 / Part 2

When You Look at Dr. Grace

field trip cancelled

Based off hit tumblr post: