She/Her. Acespec. Artist. Space Lover. I cycle through like 5 things: Marvel, Avatar: the Last Airbender, Psych, Spooky shows, and Fantasy/D&D. (sometimes Star Wars, but we casual on that rn. i have beef) Lover of Action-Adventure Comedy films. Writer of Angst.
Obviously, you're on my Main Blog. Currently, I'm on a Project Hail Mary kick that I don't think will go away anytime soon, but I do post other random stuff, too.
ATLA/Zutara: @aoireispiritofjourneys
Loki: @skjaerelokidottir
My Art: @akoros (I haven't posted much yet, so if you're interested in more, my old stuff is on insta @akorosart and my more recent stuff is on Cara @akorosart.)
i know that sight is the main sense humans have that's basically "eldritch" to Eridians but its important to note that they can't smell either.
like not only do we have an additional sense to perceive light but scents too which protects us and helps defend us from all sorts of things.
like we can distinguish at least 10,000 different odors, with some research on the topic claiming that the worst "performer" (smeller) could 'probably still distinguish between 80 million scents'
like think of all the times we've been saved by poison or gas leaks and disease and basically all other things simply because we could smell it.
all im saying is there's a lot of fanfic/fancomic/fan whatever potential here when it comes to human sense of smell
Eridians can't see*, smell, and hopefully can't taste. Does this mean they only have 2 fucking senses?
I thought Grace would already be freaky with just the ability to perceive light alone but it would probably be way worse when it gets learnt that he has three additional senses over Rocky and all other Eridians for that matter.
Like,
Rocky: Constructing the biodome will be easy. The only thing we'll struggle on is sight since humans have 3 senses instead of 2.
Grace: 5.
Rocky: what?
Grace: we have 5 senses. debatably 6, though its unproven. sometimes people even think we have a 7th.
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".
Humans being persistent predators is probably a terrifying concept to Eridians. A creature that slowly follows you until your body forces you to sleep knowing you will be unable to wake up as they inevitably get closer and closer.
Grace’s explanation of old human hunting practices probably spawned a whole new genre of horror on Erid.
This and Rocky chasing Grace up and down the biosphere before he quickly has to stop. While at the start Rocky easily outsped Grace, Grace, even freshly recovered from starvation and in 2x gravity, outpaces Rocky.
After Grace does an endurance test for the eridian scientists they are horrified by how long he can continue without a long break. Rocky is mad that some of Grace’s leaking actually has a purpose (humans are one of the few species on earth that sweat, and this cools us down enough to keep going when other pursuit predators are forced to stop)
This is doubly funny when some bad eridians try and kidnap him and he just, evades their initial assault and then they quickly grow too tired to keep chasing him. The only reason he could evade them is because he could see them coming long before they could hear him
Talk about horrifying. A creature that can linger outside where you can perceive them, but they can perceive you. You can outrun it, but as soon as you stop for a rest it’ll be there. You can climb away from it but it’ll still find you. You can’t escape it, you can’t outsmart it, you either stop it at the start, or pray your asleep by the time it finally catches up so you don’t have to feel it’s attack.
Rocky shows Grace one of the horror movies spawned by this and Grace doesn’t know whether to be embarrassed, mortified, or laugh.
Imagine Grace defined his name as the elegance definition of grace and Rocky spends years thinking how fucking ironic this clumsy leaky space blobs name is.
Until Grace slips out a sentence along the lines of "could you give me a little grace here" and Rocky immediately points out he used a word wrong so Grace has to explain that yeah, grace means elegance but it can also mean mercy sometimes too.
And Rocky has to suddenly reconcile that the clumsy leaky blob that saved his life twice, that almost certainly doomed himself to come back for him, name is Mercy.
grace and rocky get to erid and both of them are hitting every eridian squarely in the uncanny valley because they've both absorbed so much of each other that they feel both too eridian and not eridian enogh. rocky faces in the direction he's paying attention to and it feels like he's trying to hide something, the way he and only he of the eridians seems to always be showing the same face of his carapace when he speaks to somebody. he speaks in metaphors that only make sense to somebody who understands light-based vision. his intonations are funny, rising on questions when they otherwise wouldn't, falling flat, his sarcasm goes to space dry and restrained and comes back with such force it almost feels like he's lying instead of joking sometimes.
and grace who is so alien, but reflects eridian mannerisms that they've never considered strange before but coming from a creature so soft and strange, it just doesn't feel right. grace who stomps his foot twice when he asks a question, and it rings out flat and dull instead of the strong, sharp sound of an eridian hand on the ground. grace whose voice is so alien, so one-note, so full of articulations that are sharp and round and everywhere in between, but who echoes the melodies of eridian poetry and music, sometimes on accident but sometimes perfectly in time with what rocky translates him as saying, and later, perfectly in time with his keyboard.
rocky and grace who mirror each other more similarly than they mirror their own cultures. who speak to each other in a strange pidgin eridian that nobody else quite understands fluently. who share jokes from movie and tv shows from earth filtered through eridian folktales, plays, and musicals until they only make sense to the two people who know both cultures. they're not strange to each other, but it puts other eridians on edge. even adrian, at first. they've changed each other, you see.