ok eridian!grace has become just kind of a normal au so i think i'm fine with porting my thoughts from the other day over to here too. copypasted from my bsky so it's in Thread Mode
i walk up to the podium and tap the mic. eridian grace, statement.
there's a couple fics that touch on the idea but not as deeply as i'd like. the concept of- as a way to extend grace's relatively short lifespan compared to rocky's- grace's consciousness being uploaded/transferred into an artificial (or grown?) eridian body. i like it
like i dunno the idea of him waking up to a completely new Way Of Being and learning to navigate it from step 0! an entirely alien bodyplan, an entirely different way of communicating (he knows eridian already, of course, but learning to sing it from his own body is another beast entirely),
and learning to navigate the world using hearing instead of sight. and getting to experience the rest of erid that he hasn't gotten to see yet with rocky and co!!! and also dealing with the loss of his physical humanity.
also i think it's juiciest if it's not 100% something grace was Expecting. years and years after he and rocky land back on erid it's a far-flung idea that gets tossed around briefly when discussing the problem of grace's relatively-short lifespan as his age starts to catch up to him.
it's barely considered, at first, because it sounds completely impossible. grace, for his part, is mostly trying to convince rocky that there really ISN'T a way around the fact that he's going to die. everyone does, sooner or later, and for humans it's sooner, it's sad but true. he doesn't WANT
to die, but he couldn't be happier with the life he has lived and (for real this time) he's made peace with it. rocky refuses to accept this outcome, from his perspective the two have spent so little time together (though he's not sure any amount could be enough) and
if there's ANYTHING he can do to help grace just have a bit more time he'll do it. he and the other eridian scientists he can rope in to assisting brainstorm for ages about any and all potential avenues and there's just nothing that seems remotely possible.
and maybe he sticks on the eridian-mind-transfer idea, as farfetched as it is that you'd be able to map a human's brain onto an eridian one, let alone in a way that preserved grace as grace. grace doesn't think there's anything to the idea, it's a complete biological impossibility.
but he's not opposed to the pet projects of a few eridian scientists being "make grace live longer", if they can do that without like, putting him in the torture nexus, sure, go ahead. he just doesn't think it's possible (but then again, "xenon as indestructible material" exists, so who knows?)
and then things take a dip for the worse. a sudden illness, maybe a bad fall & brain injury, whatever, grace is in a real bad way and his aging body isn't healing itself as fast as it needs to be. he's dying. he slips into a coma, eventually. armando keeps him alive, but not conscious.
and then he wakes up! and he can't process ANY of the stimuli reaching him. he can't see, EVERYTHING feels deeply wrong, and there's a cacophany of sound everywhere around him that's utterly overwhelming. he's in a blind panic, as anyone would be- til finally, something familiar cuts through the
noise. rocky's voice, though it's got pitches to it grace can barely comprehend that he's hearing, it's absolutely rocky speaking to him. i'll continue word barfing tomrorrow its really really late
i was almost done talking anyways. but through all the overwhelming alien sensory input he CAN hear rocky talking to him, trying to keep him calm and explain what's occurred. it's a long, methodical process to learn to Exist in his new body.
like, training your own brain from base principles to control your body with NO natural instincts. it's a whole thing. things like "learning how to move your arm". basic movement is the first thing they work on- learning to control those vocal gas bladders to speak is a tall order,
so in the meantime being able to ambulate + communicate at least some via gesture is important (and he can use his keyboard/organ to speak the same as he did before, if he can press the keys). his sensory capabilities develop pretty naturally as they're working on motor skills- really starting to notice what his hearing is telling him, starting to piece together a "picture" of his
surroundings from sound. and things continue to develop from there, eventually things start to feel natural. and you know then he has a couple more centuries to live and a whole big beautiful alien world opened up to him to explore with his best friend. you understand
