Things weren't weird. Oh my god, was it Christmas? And was this a miracle? Because: Things. Weren't. Weird!!
For once, after a huge emotional blowout like that? Things weren't strained or awkward or falling apart. How many friendships, how many relationships had ended in quiet, mournful apologies and closed doors? With Ryland there by himself in an empty room wondering if he'd ever be anywhere different. In snapped strings that had been fraying for longer than Grace had wanted to acknowledge?
But with Dvylikh, things seemed... better than before. It was like they'd not only found some even ground to stand on with one another, but they'd taken a flipping sledgehammer to a wall that had been built between them. The exchange had been cathartic in a way and Ryland had broke the surface of it feeling refreshed and hopeful and ready to take on this new hurdle that had been slapped in his way.
Okay, Big-Alien-Blood-God-Whatever, get ready for a really annoying dose of Ryland Grace. Goliath was right there outside his door and, oh boy, did he have a really nasty pebble to sling at it!
Grace had eaten with @euripharinx, had smiled and bantered and had enjoyed how...boring it was. It was domestic and simple and there was NOTHING exciting about it and that MADE it exciting. He was on another planet, lightyears away from Earth, talking to someone about workplace grievances and hypothetical contingency plans should one of them wake up a worm at some point.
The laptop had been properly situated in the man's reach and Grace had marched over to the nursery to fetch enough things for some seedling starters. Dvy had insisted that there wasn't much to it, but Ryland still saw the importance in giving him something to do besides sit on the computer all day. And, for the record, any amount of plant-raising had A LOT to it to Grace. Every plant out there that the scientist had grown had been grown with a lot of kicking and screaming from both himself AND the plants.
❝ I'm going down to the site again. And before you say anything, I'm going to be careful. It shouldn't be more than a couple of hours. I'll come back, eat with you, and then hole myself away in the lab for the rest of the night most likely. ❞ All conveyed as he multi-tasked and helped put Dvy's hair up and out of his face.
He had given the man a pat on the shoulder and had half-jogged out the door.
So a thing about Eridians is that they were VERY intelligent. And more importantly? They exchanged information in a way that went far beyond how humans collaborated. It was normal for a species to gather and share intel and knowledge, but the Eridians really knocked it out of the park.
So it shouldn't have been much of a surprise when he'd suited up and entered the isolated site with the sub and had been greeted by one of the scientist team who then conveyed to him they had also fallen down the same track of thinking as he had: that this was an organism.
He stood and listened to the briefing (eventually joined by two other scientists). They repeated a lot of the same information he had already stumbled upon but what was new was that they seemed to have found the central focus of it. At least here on this sub. The area (to the right near a few controls and valves) had been roped off further-— a sort of matryoshka doll situation. A site within a site.
Grace had already seen how the meat in general looked beneath a scope. Now he intended to see if this focused area that seemed to be Ground Zero looked any different.
He had bid farewell to the scientists as they left, most to return to their own more established labs away from the contamination site just like he had been doing just about every night now.
A sample had been scraped from this concentrated area and he'd brought it over to do a mounting.
❝ Alright, Goliath, let's see what you've got cooking under the hood... ❞
It was... a lot of the same. It was a lot of the same of what he'd already observed but almost as if it was kicked into overdrive. The state of destroyed cells, overtaken and burst was astronomical. This was cell lysis on cocaine.
He had leaned away from the scope and onto the table, had let his head fall between his shoulder blades. Think, Grace. What did this tell you? If they were going with the really weird, hyper-intelligent Fungi theory (which was the only theory he HAD right now), then that meant this was where spores of some sort touched down and where they had cultivated mycelium growth. And the visible meat chunks? The fruiting body? And then the ship had been overtaken. That would explain how Dvy had been kept alive and how it had infected him. If his theory was at all correct, they were looking at a strain of some sort of highly opportunistic, alien fungi. Greeeeeat!
There were bits and pieces that could be explained away by existing science, but so much of this was theoretical. Unexplored territory. Blanks he had to fill in along the way and he was NOT a full-fledged mycologist!
So this Fungi hivemind was aquatic in nature, specifically BLOOD aquatic. It was hyper-intelligent to the point on fantastical proportions. This all bordered if not crashed directly into the realm of mysticism with just how impossible it all seemed.
Oh boy.
His head ached. Every line of thought he pursued to answer one question only opened up ten more to be answered. Okay. Enough theorizing, he needed to get get hands on some actual results. And what better place to start than with what he'd already confirmed was some sort of weakness to this thing? Xenonite.
In his gloved hand, he took up a chunk of it removed from a storage bag and tossed it once, twice in his hand like a ball. He waggled the crude cylinder towards the corner.
❝ Okay, Fungus-Amongus, lets see how you like being messed with. ❞
His intent was raw contact first. To literally go and scrape the xenonite over the surface. And if that didn't do anything substantial? He'd resort to trying to file it down into smaller flakes or to mix it with something that would make it a more soluble solution to introduce to any porous materials of the sub. HELL, he'd resort to the classic state it was in: xenon gas. Every state and form he could manage to use on this stupid sub, he would.