As funny as it is that rocky sees grace and complains about grace and humans in general as a terribly inefficient blob of water and fluids and teases constantly...
I REALLY think this should be a relatively rocky-exclusive perspective. He's watched this incredibly stressed human drip all kinds of tears and goos while they were floating around in space, and grace let down basically all of his guard around rocky personally, have discussed and understood eachother over life threatening missions. To Rocky, grace is Grace!
But grace does have some naturally combative push to him (see, the commentary that got him stonewalled in the scientific community in the first place, and being able to keep up with and handle Eva stratt) and further more, when an eridian is Not Rocky, i.e. not incredibly socially withdrawn and traumatized and maybe on their own spectrum of divergence before his ill fated mission and was very susceptible to latching onto a strange and unusual creature in just as much crisis as him...
That is to say. The eridians are going to meet grace with wildly different priorities and expectations. And what they're going to get is a human dangerously close to deaths door, and cornered and dying humans aren't always the most friendly or cooperative and kind, even the Nicest Humans You Can Get.
So they get a dying human. And as tumblr loves to say, humans are terrifying to aliens, and fuck do they persist. Rocky's so-described "pathetic space blob" grace is terrifying to most eridians, especially the scientists studying him.
He drinks solvent and breaths combustion. Instead of simply dying when his body runs out of nutrients and calorie stores, it has begun to Digest Itself. His body is pumping chemicals they do not understand and every chemistry panel they run shows new levels of new chemicals and hormones. The human body replaces most of its cells constantly because even breathing, especially at a higher atmospheric pressure, is destroying their own lungs.
This thing "hears" things they cannot comprehend and he is unable to describe beyond "color" and "brightness" which are things you can not contextualize, and calls the strangest things beautiful. It has no entirely discernable traits you can understand ecologically as a predator- no armor, no weapons- and yet it eats meat and that is one of the many nutrients it needs to survive. You as a resident of erid do not have many creatures with "eyes" and so have no idea that the strongest mark of a predator is neither claw nor fang, but forward facing eyes, all the better to catch your prey, to meet a foe head on and fearless. You just know it "sees" and that it eats meat, and many other complicated things.
And in place of not receiving all those nutrients, it's body will litterally digest itself and keep going without them. Oh, this new chemical in it's latest blood panel allows it to ignore it's own pain to the point it won't realize it's injured. It can wake up from a dead sleep if you are too loud or too "brightness" around it. It speaks in an archaic graveling noise and is capable of imitating the strangest things, including a haunting near-vocalization of the eridani language of its own, which it calls "singing" and it does this at the strangest of times, when happy and when nervous. It is neither fast nor slow, but over time and observation, you realize this strange towering bipedal creature expends an entirely minimal amount of energy to walk, a process of controlled falling turned mobilization. You hypothesize that for lack of predatory weaponry like claws or sharp teeth, this thing simply evolved to follow you. To "see" you with it's forward facing eyes even in total stillness, total silence, and follow for as long as it takes: it won't spend much energy, and it won't starve waiting for you to exhaust. It'll start digesting *itself* while waiting for it's prey to lay down and have to sleep. It will "watch" you sleep with "eyes." You cannot wake up the way it can, and it will eventually catch up to you.
Also sometimes it cries excess amounts of saline rich solvent when you compliment it's latest research paper. Rocky calls him an idiot and the overseeing eridian scientists watch on with a sense of morbid eldrich horror. Right, right, just a "leaky space blob", sure.
They're kind of terrified of the future delegations with this planet. They litterally get to space by explosion. Not only are they scary- they're INSANE. And they're told the one they have is "a push over".
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The reason that I fell in love with Rocky as a character, as a physics student, was during Grace's first in-person meeting with him, and there is just one small area of clear material that Grace is able to look through.
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.
We NEED to talk about this scene because it shape-shifts when you watch the movie a second time???
On your first viewing, when Grace leaves the party to join Stratt on the deck, you’ve been following Grace's POV for the whole movie. You can feel how he's trying to break the ice and connect with Stratt via humor: "Permission to come aboard, captain?🫡"
And Stratt being Stratt kills the joke immediately: "You’re already aboard." And by killing that joke she also kills his attempt at connecting with her. That's her thing. You feel it in the knock-knock scene and you feel it here because Grace is feeling it. He stammers and he's nervous ("Talk too much, that's my problem, like right now"). His attempt at human connection is painfully unrequited (again).
When you finish the movie, you learn, however, that that is not true at all. You hear Stratt's voice crack when she has to do what she has to do, and you realize how her carefully constructed armor fractures because of him. He is not nothing to her.
And when you (inevitably) watch the movie again, and your POV is not limited to Grace's anymore but you can shift your view to Stratt ever so slightly, then suddenly the whole connecting-via-jokes business drops away to make room for the metaphorical meaning of "coming aboard".
"It is okay to be in your space? Am I allowed to be closer to you?"
And her answer?
He is already in her space, behind her defenses, and he doesn't even realize it (blissfully unaware about SO many things in fact). He is asking to be allowed inside the house while standing in the damn living room.
Of course watching a movie a second time will always deepen your understanding of the characters, but it's remarkable that Stratt's answer does not just gain a more differentiated level of meaning. Instead, it is transformed into it's opposite, from a very clear "I am not letting you in" to an equally clear "You've come in uninvited a long time ago", and both can be true at the same time!
ok but rocky being the sole survivor of the radiation bc of how much time he spent by the astrophage kinda implies just how much time he spent alone even before his crew died
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I lovelovelove the "Grace is a predator at heart and is built for speed and instincutal action, which scares the ever loving FUCK outta Rocky" posts, so I'm gonna expand upon it a bit.
- Eridian scientists and doctors doing their best to help him when they first get to Erid. A few weeks in, he's in and out of consciousness but doing better, a doctor (in a xenosuit obviously) comes in to check on him, sees he's asleep, so goes to examine him closely, because, you know, alien. Grace, who was only dozing, jerks away so fast it gives poor Dr Limestone a heart attack.
- the rest of the doctors make an agreement to give Grace plenty of warning before coming near him when he's half asleep again. Rocky explains that yes, Grace just is that quick, and he knows when things are going down.
- when the biodome is done, Grace and Rocky take a trip around it and explore. Rocky thinks it will be funny to throw a stone at Grace. Grace friend has no sound perception, silly. Grace can't view things when he's facing away, Grace will never see it coming. Grace hears Rocky scuffling around and gets the weird human sixth sense, so turns at the last second and catches the rock mid air, in one hand, then skims it across the water. Rocky is VERY unnerved, and also cant work out which bit is more impressive, the catch or the skim.
- later, when teaching the pebbles, they go on a heavily supervised trip into the biodome. One little pebble breaks off and hides in a rocky outcropping. Teacher Grace will never find them here. Cut to Grace stalking through the rocks like a true predator, all senses straining, and eventually snags the wayward rock and carries it back to the group. None of the other pebbles consider going AWOL again. Teacher Grace can find them.
- Grace deciding he needs more exercise, so going for runs around the biodome. He decides to go for endurance. Rocky comes to visit only to watch in horror as Grace runs for an hour pretty much straight. "How long can you do that for, question?" "With proper hydration and calorie intake, and rests, pretty much as long as I like." "What the fuck, question."
Grace explaining sheepishly to Eridian linguists that the reason he uses different pronouns for Rocky than for the rest of the population is that he reflexively defaulted to assigning Rocky the same grammatical and social gender that he himself uses, in a way that has historical precedent but in modern English is considered somewhat chauvinistic and backward, and he's not proud of it but also the habit is pretty deeply ingrained now and unless Rocky objects it's probably easier to just keep on as he has been...
and immediately being informed lol. lmao. do not even worry about it. you have no idea what kind of buck wild grammatical constructs Rocky has invented for you. everyone else addresses you as foreigner/scholar. they're somehow managing to refer to you as their sibling, ward, and semidivine culture hero at the same time every time they talk about you.
I see half the fandom characterizing Adrian as patient and selfless, and I see the other half characterizing them as bitter and unaccommodating, and I also see the joking and non joking 'what if Rocky were the trolley operator' fics and ideas, and I've come to the conclusion that you all are missing the beauty of the superior third option that is Adrian also being traumatized and feral over their mate.
Thank about it. Rocky's a spitfire and bounces off the walls at baseline and they looked at that little autistic, bossy ball of energy and went 'yes. that's them. the creature I want to spend the next 500+ years with'. They have to at LEAST match their energy somewhat. And if you think you wouldn't be a fucking ball of PTSD and bitterness at your culture and society after fifty plus years of not knowing they were alive or dead, you're fucking operating on moon logic. Honestly, Adrian and the other families were probably begging for a rescue mission that never happened for various political and logical reasons; and while it probably would have ended in mass fatalities as well, so thank goodness that figurative and literal ship never got off the ground, the fact that it didn't happen probably burns more than a little, reasonable or unreasonable.
So one day Adrian gets some Eridian diplomat on their doorstep, and they're expecting the formal condolences at long last, but instead they go into this whole spiel of ' so. So! Turns out twenty two of the original crew died, but your mate survived! When did they die? Oh, early on, so your mate was submerged in crippling and literal deafening loneliness for over four decades; and now he's back and acting weird, and he's become codependent with this weird fragile squishy human being that's the only reason he came back at all, and he's refusing to send down the cure unless we make the blob an aquarium. Could you come to the space elevator and tell him to stop being so unreasonable?'
If that were MY mate? I'd fucking lose it.
Just throwing things at this poor messenger and shrieking like " Oh! Oh!! So it's somehow Rocky's fault that you're refusing to take a few months out of the several hundred Eridian years we have left to ship the cure we already have to Threeworld before things actually become problematic to make sure one of the two saviors of our entire species doesn't die?! To give the sole survivor of the mission--my mate, who's been alone and in silence, with no one to watch him sleep, for hundreds of years--some sort of solace and peace?! And you're wondering why he's acting erratically?! Maybe you wouldn't be in this position at all if you'd sent the rescue mission for which we've pleaded for years at every single thrum! I don't care if this Grace thing is a literal giant space amoeba; get the fuck out of my house and tell the powers that be to give it literally everything it wants and needs!"
And they're all 'be reasonable' and Adrian's like " I've been reasonable for hundreds of Eridian years, and you would not be in this situation if you'd actually sent a rescue mission and not simply wrung your claws and hoped for the best, so fucking live in the nest you made. All I'm going to do if you get me on the radio with Rocky right now is tell him he's doing amazing and give him advice on how to properly parboil the Taumoeba so that you can't even recover even the slightest scrap of DNA if you don't give the flesh blob that saved his life and saved OUR lives PLURAL goddamn vitamins."
Like, they think it's bad that Rocky basically stands over Grace's sleeping body and hisses? Wait until they get the MUCH LARGER ERIDIAN doing that for Grace and Rocky. Wait until the much large Eridian leads the families of the dead twenty-two crewmates to the space elevator to riot because this sure sounds like a coverup to them!! This sure sounds like the deflection of blame on the sole survivor!! This sure sounds like the same paralysis that left them to die alone in space because you didn't want to admit failure!!
Yes, I know, I'm weaving some sort of political intrigue plot that probably doesn't exist in canon. All I'm saying is that you all are missing the delicious implications of a mission that went radio silent for fifty plus earth years with no word from the government and no obvious attempt at rescue, followed by your partner coming home with the only being that's been around to watch him sleep since the rest of the crew died forty-some years ago, and people are calling him weird and changed. You'd be horrified. You'd be sick.
You'd be pissed the fuck off at every body of power that let this happen.
Obsessed with the idea of Grace fully assimilating into Erid's society, meaning he becomes an Eridian teacher.
"Teacher" isn't really an profession on Erid like it is on Earth. Their school system is set up in development stages and pebbles move up as they're ready. Eridian teachers are more accredited caretakers than they are focused on a specific subject, working to make sure the young of their city or village are developing the best they can. Less "we're going to sit down and learn division" and more "this is a structured place pebbles go to hang out with a qualified Eridian who can nurture them." For smaller education stages, it's normal to drop your kids off for days at a time.
Grace expects to be a science teacher, but then he becomes an Earth-studies expert, which then turns into a general education teacher. They're curious about his planet! He's teaching both English and Eridani, social studies, science, and art at the same time. Grace has no complaints—it's incredibly rewarding and an honor that Eridians trust him to help their children grow.
His classes range from Eridians just a little smaller than Rocky to little pebbles he can carry around like a football. He loves his older kids, but his favorites are the little ones he has to teach things like walking in a line and how to raise one arm when four are on the ground. They're just... so bad at being alive. Some days he can barely believe the sea of skipping stones chirping around his feet are sentient beings.
Functionally, they're kindergartners, but unlike ones on Earth that Grace had to do observations of for his credential, these ones come with a certain... expectation for his job.
This results in a unique predicament: five pebbles on his doorstep.
The artificial Sun has barely touched the horizon and they're just... there. A group of little ones from his youngest class chirp at him in their bio-dome suits, the less coordinated of them rocking back and forth in little xenonite hamster balls.
The teacher just stares and listens to the chorus of little clicks and stomps (read: angry taps, the heaviest of them is 20 lbs in the dome) for a second. He has to be dreaming—a messed up nightmare where someone abandoned five entire children on his doorstep before he's even had a cup of coffee.
Rubbing his eyes and pinching his arm doesn't make the little guys go away. Any other day he'd go grab Adrian or Rocky from the bedroom, but the pair are off at a science conference a few cities over and won't be back until that night at the earliest.
"Parent said give this to Mr Teacher Grace," the largest of them, Orange, bonks his right calf with a tablet.
Grace takes it and squints, tracing his fingers over the writing. It's fluent, true Eridiani written with elegant penmanship—not the pidgin he's fluent in. There's an attempt to break apart certain words, but most of it is incomprehensible.
♮! Grace-Doctor-Savior-Captain-Teacher-AdrianRocky-Mated𝄐 ... ♮. Parent back by λV̶.V̶V ... ♯ ? Erid teacher ... Dome ... Already fed ... ♮ !Thank you𝄐
Like Grace has been doing since he met his first Eridian at Tau Ceti, he shrugs, says, "what the heck, sure," and goes with it.
Orange, Marble, Burrata, Turnip, and Plum are great students. Some one-on-one time would be good for everyone. It's an honor to be trusted like this, really.
He can handle 5 free-roaming pebbles for 24 hours.
"Please, come on in," he smiles and bows with the confidence of a man who has only ever done this through the auditorium's thick barrier.
Grace thinks this might have been easier if more than one of them could form actual sentences. Orange happily points and says a few words, but the others just stomp and chirp nonsense that kind of translates as emotion in the human's mind.
By the time the marine layer fogs the windows, he's sure his baseboards are never going to be the same. The biggest in their xenonite suit has clipped the hallway corner enough times that there's a chip taken out of it. There's a reason Orange is still in his youngest group—they're incredibly bright and creative, but they're still working on the locomotor skills needed to execute those ideas.
His ankles are bruised from the balls hitting them. Not stepping on them becomes a challenge. It's like bumper cars, but Grace is a giant in the middle of the track that was once his kitchen.
Grace gets a moment of peace from placing them into the nest in the bedroom. The stair platforms Rocky and Adrian take turns sitting on surround the mattress the human lays on, creating a little fenced in nook. It works great for watching each other sleep, but it's purpose now becomes pebble jail. Four of them settle down and starfish easily, snuggling down with happy little chirps that squeeze his heart. Burrata gets their little legs tangled in a blanket and the resulting struggle is like watching someone try to pick up noodles with chopsticks for the first time. Grace feels so bad that he lets them all back out.
It isn't until the sun is fully in the sky that he decides to integrate them into his day and go about as normal.
The kids get beckoned into one of the sleds for transporting his teaching equipment to the amphitheater. It takes at least ten minutes to get them all down to the garden—he ends up putting marble in his pocket—without them falling out.
They're all eager to help and soon he's on his knees in the dirt, surrounded by an excited thrum.
"I don't know what the word for this is," Grace pats the bundle of what he can only describe as a zucchini-carrot cross hanging off a large stem, "but it doesn't kill me, so."
"♮?♫♪♩𝄐" Orange's claw points and there's an agreement from the rest of the group.
"Yeah, that sounds about right."
Plum points at Grace, back to the vegetable, and then back to the human. They punctuate a rumble with two little stomps of a back leg.
Grace knows that one. He takes out the small notebook he keeps in his back pocket and unclips the heavy charcoal pencil on the cover.
"On Earth it's kind of like a zucchini. It's more," Grace gestures towards his mouth with the pencil, "sharp to my mouth. Which is fine, that makes it taste different than other things. Humans need variety."
"Sharp," Marble echoes. They jazz two hands clumsily and Grace tries to keep a straight face, but it's a little like watching a meatball become animated for the first time.
He coughs and starts digging the charcoal into the paper, "Now, I'm by no means an artist..."
Gardening turns into making pickles. Grace is a little jealous that the pebbles learn anaerobic respiration faster as kindergartners than he did as a freshman in undergrad. They parrot back the Eridani words for some of the concepts, but they're honestly more excited about the bubbles than they are learning about heterofermentative processes and decarboxylation.
Making pickles turns into watching Grace cook, which becomes it's own chemistry lesson. Orange sits on the counter and Plum, Marble, and Burrata go in the fruit bowl. Turnip bravely conquers fire and Grace helps them use a spatula to flip a piece of bread in the pan.
Once they're knowledgeable about the wonders of sandwich creation, they politely banish Grace to the soundproof bedroom while he eats. Normally he eats over a lesson plan or movie on his laptop, but listening out for any pebble xenonite-ball accidents keeps him entertained.
He's expecting a three Eridian pile up, but it never comes.
Grace finishes eating and goes out to check on his houseguests to find them all tuckered out around the coffee table. He plucks them up one by one and puts them back into totally-not-pebble-jail for safe keeping during quiet time. It's a task done in a few quick trips—Grace has dumbbells heavier than Orange. Marble and Plum can both fit in his arms.
There's protest when he goes to put Turnip down, so he settles down with them on his side. It takes a little work to find a position in the bed that doesn't crush anybody, but soon all five pebbles scoot up against their teacher. Grace takes the quilt from over the closest platform and covers the lot of them. Burrata scoots up to below his chin to avoid another incident, and the warm xenonite against his skin has Grace's breathing growing heavy.
Quietly, the front door shuts and two pentads of claws click across hard floor. The taller of the pair starts to sing Grace's name, but is quickly interrupted with an angry stomp.
"Adrian will sleep on couch if wake mate-Grace," Rocky trills and pokes his partner's arm through the xenonite suit. "Rocky put things away, mates stasis together."
The taller Eridian scuttles off to the far side of the bungalow, quietly rumbling as they take in the uncharacteristic mess of the place.
Rocky sets down a heavy bag of trinkets from their travels on the table and hums quietly at the thought of Grace opening them tomorrow morning. They'd been bickering over a "backsplash" for the human's food preparing station for awhile, and he had found a beautiful cut of intricately patterned xenonite at the market that Grace should love.
A high pitched whistle from Adrian has Rocky scrambling out of his thoughts.
"Song, come quiet."
Blunt claws slide across the smooth floor as the shorter Eridian shoots over, frantic clicks bouncing off the soundproof wall their human insisted on in their own home. It's not quiet, but it's urgent.
"Mate-Grace okay, question?"
He slides into Adrian's with a hollow thunk. Rocky stomps worriedly, rumbling and pausing when the sleeping body of their mate bounces back with five little shapes.
"There's pebbles in our nest, song."
They rumble and click together in the doorway for a moment. Rocky's hum picks up, gently thrumming against their mate. The connection buzzes with life—adoration, pride, want. The mates' contentedness echos across the space, kept a piano symphony to not wake their sleeping third.
"Grace very good with them," Rocky chimes with a low whistle and steadies himself against Adrian. "Mates very lucky."
Adrian hums with interest, tapping two claws together in thought. They still the movement and bring their hand up to their mate's carapace, gently petting the scarred surface through the thin layer of xenonite.
"Will talk tomorrow. Rocky, Grace, and pebbles sleep. Adrian watch."
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