Okay but imagine being the team of Eridian scientists tasked with keeping Erid's Only Human alive for as long as possible while the whole planet's environment is literally trying to kill him. And then Rocky shows up and is like:
âGrace says he would like half of dome to be water.â
âOh, is necessary for humans to have large amounts of water question?â
Small Eridian equivalent of a sigh. âNo. Not needed for life. In fact Grace will die if he falls in water and does not get out.â
âTell him we give him water in containers that won't kill him. Lots lots lots of water on Erid for Grace to drink.â
âNo. Grace say he want water on ground. Also want it with excess sodium chloride compound so it will be unhealthy for drink.â
To celebrate Erid getting their sun back on track, Grace asks for some alcohol. There's a small amount left from the Hail Mary and Rocky offers to take it to the science Eridians to see if they can synthesise more.
âGrace want this liquid for celebration.â
âOf course.â They scan it. âYou have wrong liquid. This contain compounds which are poisonous for humans.â
âYes yes yes. Grace say humans like feeling of being slightly poisoned.â
Hi! First, I'd like to say that I'm absolutely loving your Murderbot Diaries art!!! It makes me so happy every time I see it; it's such a treat. Second, if the notion suits you, I'd love to see your take on the scene in Artificial Condition where ART does surgery on Murderbot.
(smth smth the creation of actlikeahuman)
thank you!! and thank you for the suggestion, this was fun to chew on <3
(no promises on anything but i Am accepting murderhelion-centric prompts! i have not read syscol yet though so no spoilers! and if yall like what i do and wish to further encourage me, i take comms and accept tips on ko-fi <3)
This is when MB and Farai first met (every time I read this scene, it feels like Farai is interrogating her spouse's affair partnerđĽš)
And i'm happy to see the two of them building trust in each other in the latest series.
+The cutest part
If time permits, Iâd like to illustrate an episode where MB is afraid of small children (because theyâre so tiny), as well as an episode where Three and ART happen to strike up a conversation about MBâs drastic change in appearanceâwhich is surprisingly radical for a SecUnit.
YAY FOR 500 FOLLOWERS THATS HUGE CONGRATS!!!!!! đ maybe for doodle requests, mb in some colourful clothes? presaux or art gifted them to it perhaps? dealers choice if it actually likes them or not
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 friendly, 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".
Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as âproblematicâ in class and our professor was like, âThatâs cool, but âproblematicâ doesnât really mean anything. It means that the thing youâre describing has a problem, and in and of itself thatâs not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else itâs not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like youâre trying to say that this is bad, but you donât want to say âbad.â Is that right?â
So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the âbadâ thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, âIâm uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.â
Once we stopped calling things âproblematicâ and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, âthatâs racistâ or âthatâs misogynisticâ or âew capitalism grossâ out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, âUhhh... Iâm not sure whatâs so bad?â and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.
Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I canât help but think of this professor being like, âGood starting point, now letâs get specific.â I think when we have to commit to saying âthatâs ___â it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever weâre claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes itâs art, and it should be full of problems, because thatâs what art is.
grace, who has been alone for five minutes: oh my god. an alien! im not alone anymore! i hope he wants to be friends :)
rocky, coming up on 50 years of solitude, imprinting on grace in ways baby ducklings can only dream of: if you leave me to sleep where i can't watch your heart beat i am blowing up this tunnel with us both in it
man having your life even a little bit together will really make you realize how chronically sleep-deprived and poorly fed and under-enriched everyone is and then when they turn to you to implicitly agree that that's just the natural state of existing you feel like the asshole for being like "actually I think you might benefit from eating breakfast regularly and picking up a new hobby"
jbbartram-illu
origamiaround
