funny title

Murderbot's Pterrible Pterosaur Ptorment

And some sillier doodles

Thing for your double loopers au (I don’t remember if that’s the name it gen just left my head) do Rhode and Odie get along eventually? I know you said something about it going either way with Rhode having to also leave Odies universe, but is there a possibility they get to do silly shenanigans together ::] ?

doubling time!

in the case where they do get to coexist (which is what I've been mostly thinking of lol that means we have more au and less sad) eventually they do come to terms with each other's existence & learn to be friends <3 things are a little rough at first, in terms of both big things (all of rhode's loop trauma. the general bitterness. having to explain why there's two of them to everyone else. the uncanniness of being around Yourself) and smaller ones (turns out you can get very annoyed by your own annoying habits when it's a separate you doing them lmao) but over time they start to grow & heal from the whole debacle and get along more.

in my mind one of their first Adventures together is them going to nab feldspar. rhode realises shortly after the "who are you why the fuck did you replace me" convo that they. highkey forgor about feldspar. they're currently grounded however (acting Weird will not get you into space unfortunately) & cannot access their ship. slate may have actively fucked up the wiring just in case. odie, however, has a perfectly functional ship that just came home from the moon.

rhode offers the idea as something of an.. act of goodwill. I swear im just some guy from a parallel universe I'm not actually here to steal your life, I'll even help get your parent back! ...you just gotta let me use your ship. ofc odie is Not giving up their ship after all this bullshittery tyvm. you may have my life and my moments but that's my ship. so they're coming with. very funny imagining them sneaking to it lmao, rhode getting war flashbacks to the stranger every time somebody almost spots them.

between rhode's flight skills & general knowledge and odie's substantially better social skills and ship maybe they can get that old fish out of bramble! upon convincing feldspar to come with they have a. very interesting time as feldspar realises they may have somehow completely forgotten rhodonite has a twin who's apparently also an astronaut and a very good pilot. they did not it's an infinitely weirder situation in fact. but it is very fun imagining them like:

---

"'s gonna be a bit of a ride," rhode said, looking back at the pair. "y'all might wanna hold on to something. and.. try not to scream too much. thrusters 're a bit much, at first."

feldspar frowned a little, staring even as they turned back to the controls, realigning the ship. for a moment, their gaze flicked back and forth between rhode and odie as something like concern grew on their face.

"what is it?" odie asked, glancing back as well. was... rhode up to something? were they all about to get eaten alive by an anglerfish?

all that greeted them was rhode, far too relaxed for someone piloting in dark bramble as they leveled with the node they'd come in through. odie's brows furrowed as they turned back to feldspar.

"I, uh, don't mean to be rude, hatchling, 'n I know it's been.. a long time, but..." feldspar lowered their voice, leaning towards odie a little. "have you always had a twin?"

odie made a baffled noise, eyes widening, while rhode just snorted from the pilot's seat.

"oh, stars, no--" rhode said. "that'd make things a lot easier, though. hold on!"

the ship's thrusters engaged, hurtling them towards the node. feldspar yelped, grabbing onto both odie and the netting on the wall as they rocked back from the force. they only relaxed marginally as the thrusters disengaged, the ship shooting out into a wider node of the bramble.

odie shook their head. "what they meant is, it's.. complicated. they're, allegedly, me. just from.. a different timeline, or universe, or some shit. they're rhode, I'm odie, we're both rhodonite."

feldspar... took that surprisingly well, it seemed, mulling over the idea for a moment. "I.. can't be too surprised that you're the one this happened to, hatchling."

".... that's fair."

---

or something to that effect!

the return to hearth would be such a mess lol- rhode may have turned off their radio as much as they could to ignore anybody harassing them about this (common time looper behaviour) and let's say that nobody else is particularly happy about that decision. hornfels is so incredibly pissed over there but rhode does notttt have the mental bandwidth to worry about it rn. upon landing you have a horrific mashup of situations because frankly both rhode & odie forgot that anybody would give a shit about them doing all this.

imagine being gossan here. your mentee/kid just took off into space in the middle of the night right after one of their friends said they were acting even weirder than normal (like they'd only now come back to hearth...) using a ship that's supposed to have been completely unpowered & without fuel. and shoots dead on for dark bramble. yk that place you suspect your best friend straight up died in. and they're not responding to anything during the whole flight, even as they come sailing back out towards hearth. why did they do that. what the hell. the ship finally lands & you head up the elevator to go tear them a new one and-- that's feldspar. that's odie helping feldspar down out of the hatch that's them alive and.. not well, but still alive, somehow. and then a second rhodonite jumps out of the hatch. the one you just saw earlier today the one who's been acting so damn strange for months. personally id explode but yk maybe gossan is a stronger soldier than I.

I got four for Rhode from the oc color questions

🧡 - 1 and 2 💛 - 3 & 🖤- 6

Don’t have to answer all of them and these can go for Odie too! I would always like to know more about your silly fishes ::3

orange 1 - desc themselves as a child? looking back, they'd call themselves a. very silly child. they were very curious, a bit too reckless for their own good, always wanting to Know Things and stick themselves into situations a small rhode does not need to be lol- they would also describe little baby odie as a Climber. that kid seemed to believe they needed to take evolution a step further and not only go away from the water but into the trees too. stars the sheer amount of time the adults around them spent getting that hatchling out of trees. they probably tried to use slate as a climbing pole a few times when they were little lmao. this trait carries on to this day in how they explore (re: trying to parkour through the broken walkways up to the black hole forge district, climbing along the cliffs of the stranger alley the time, ect)

orange 2 - embrace/suppress emotions? ahem. 🎶 when you feel depressed, and misunderstood, whatcha gonna do? repress it! 🎶 that is to say. ouh does rhode try to choke down their feelings. they try to stay Very focused and methodical as a means of distracting themselves, partially preloop and intensely so during it. they can't rely on anyone for much of the early loop (they hit up giants deep a ways in so before then they assumed they were. like. Alone alone in this) so they hurl themselves into trying to solve the mysteries to ignore everything. during the loops gabbro is a major factor in why they Don't just completely suppress everything, their presence & companionship is very important to rhode & helps them. actually express and work through the Feelings that accompany. well. all that.

yellow 3 - lying? see this post!

black 6 - nightmares? ohohohohohoh rhode's nightmares! a lot of the time, their postloop nightmares centre their most pressing fears & guilts--especially the idea that they cannot fix things, cannot control anything around them, cannot help, cannot save anyone they love. it's often a mix of their own memories & stuff spat out by their brain, lots of motifs of time and physical danger and people being upset with them. they have reoccurring nightmares specifically about being back in the time loop, but Something is wrong and there's nothing they can do about it--the core's shell thing won't open, they don't know the right coordinates, the sun is going too fast and they're being held up by something, any manner of Situations.

there's also a nightmare that's been dinging about in my head for a while, something of a cross between the home village when the sun goes out (dark) and the sim dreamworld. what if the people you loved were angry ghosts because of your failing neither truly dead nor alive and they blame you for it. they're asking you why you killed them why there wasn't another way. you are small and helpless and they are so very angry. a lot of the time it focuses more on harm coming to others than it does them, both realistically and unrealistically. also, I see some of the alt endings (especially ones like isolation & trapping yourself in the sim) as nightmares rhode would have! they very much do not like those nightmares they're too realistic and leave them feeling half dead.

there's. a reason why rhode tends to avoid sleep early on postloop. they strongly dislike waking up after all that, and it tends to freak out other people when they startle awake screaming or crying. oh the stress hornfels has ensured lately as the lightest sleeper ever... this is where the sleep deprivation fic comes in!

(they also have secondary, weirder dreams that link back to observing the eye, where they're like. some kind of disembodied observer to the universe, usually astral bodies interacting or something. they're significantly more peaceful dreams but rhode is Very out of it when they wake out of those)

as for odie! one is about the same, two is pretty similar but they're a bit more on the embrace end of the spectrum compared to rhode. overall I fear odie is. somewhat more emotionally healthy, and they're a bit more willing to express their feelings instead of intensely bottling them up all the time, for better or for worse (re: the way they react to meeting rhode. they're expressing emotions alright!)

odie is, somehow, even worse at lying. they have the same tells and stuff as rhode but they're more internally awkward about lying to people. they don't like it. this often causes them Problems lol

Into The Wilds.

(Close-ups under the cut!)