And penguins lack large terrestrial predators, so their reaction to humans tends to be, “HELLO STRANGE GIANT PENGUINS, WHAT ARE YOU DOING? DO YOU HAVE ANY FISH?”
There is an international treaty that says we’re supposed to stay 6m away from penguins, and it’s really difficult because no one told the penguins, and they all desperately want to wander up and say hi.
Currently working on a fanfic where Grace and Rocky are adjusting to Erid again (more like trying to survive for Grace but same difference) and the Eridians have to try and find out how to make him food that won't kill him and they're like:
What do you MEAN this thing functions between the freezing and boiling points of hydrogen dioxide?! What do you MEAN this thing has organs that can detect fluctuations in LIGHT?! It doesn't even need to be touching anything for it to perceive it?! So it can just... function in the vacuum of space without being TOTALLY BLIND?! What do you MEAN this thing takes in HIGHLY FLAMMABLE GAS and turns it into CARBON DIOXIDE?! AND ITS NOT USING FIRE TO DO IT?! What do you MEAN it PURPOSELY oxidizes the fluids inside of it?! And consumes radiation as nutrients?! That KILLS US! What do you MEAN that this thing was ACTIVELY MELTING and BURNING ALIVE from your atmosphere to drag you to safety, and managed to REGAIN CONSCIOUSNESS enough to get itself medical help?! It CANNIBALIZED ITSELF TO LIVE?! It can still be awoken all by itself??? With no help??? And still somewhat function while its actively dying infront of us?!What the actual FUCK did you bring back to Erid?!
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.
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".
stupid new theory: murderbot has tons of beef with cargo and hauler bots but not any other bot type bc it got its shit wrecked by a bunch of those guys at ganaka pit. the inorganic memory was purged but the organic body keeps the score 😌
this morning i'm thinking about grace teaching the eridian scientists about evolution on earth, more specifically how some animals on earth have echolocation and that's why he had an easier time understanding their primary sense than they did his. and also that some animals that live in no light environments evolve to stop having light sensing entirely and animals who live in both high and low light environments can have both.
which makes grace wonder if there are eridian upper-atmosphere life forms that have light sense, and if any of the species that travel between the biomes have both.
the next thing rocky knows grace and the eridian scientists are conducting all kinds of experiments on upper-atmosphere life forms trying to see if there's something eridian biologists missed because they couldn't conceptualize a biological process.
rocky about to beat skulls in because they need to become human experts first so they can keep grace alive permanently and with confidence! the eridian scientists only survive because grace plays the "it's enrichment" card and rocky has to grumbly relent.
