Chapter Text
It's not right. Even before Grace is fully conscious it's like emerging from a bad dream, or from sleep paralysis: his brain is trying to tell him something really, really bad is happening.
He tries to take a breath and can't do it, and it's either sleep paralysis or worse, and he tries to move but everything feels stuck on at the wrong angle. He kicks out and feels something catch and uncatch somewhere around his neck, and he tries to breathe again and now he can hear screaming. Is it him? Sounds like him. He can't see. He tries to open his eyes and nothing happens. He tries to open his mouth and nothing happens.
Someone with 'the right stuff', chosen for a calm problem-solving astronaut mentality, trained to have every reaction aligned to the mission, would work the problem right now and try to figure out the medical situation they were having.
Grace, who is not the right stuff and never has been, attempts to flail his way out of whatever's wrong with him.
He ends up somewhere, can feel he's moved although the sensation is dull and his limbs won't obey him. He can feel a pressurised catch-uncatch click every time he moves, like a joint popping in and out, and every sensation is coming from the wrong place.
Another noise and he feels it, awareness sharper now as the sleep-void fades, a thick harsh guttural sound that sparks every nerve in his body and skitters across the planes of the room and bounces right back again. It sounds like someone who tried to scream, choked on their own spit, and had retched hard.
It's around this time that Ryland manages to command any thought beyond blind panic, and that thought is I felt the room.
The sensation of movement is terrifying, because it feels like he's pulling at tendons inside his own neck and making them click, but he kicks out again. He learned something when he did it last time, and maybe if he keeps thrashing someone will eventually take pity on him and help. Distant sounds that he faintly registers as himself clatter and ripple from five points around him, clear as a bell, and from them the world takes shape.
He's lying on the ground. He's in the bedroom on the Hail Mary, and in front of him there's a thing, and it's moving. He can feel a thick rounded thump-thump-thump that he realises is a heart going jackrabbit fast, and all the scrapes of clothing against skin, and wet processes in the mouth and clicky-snaps of the eyes and the internal squeezing of intestines and the minute slooshing of the cochlea of the inner ear. He is hearing an entire human at once, who is doubled over on the ground and moving his jaw open and closed and turning his head like he's trying to Exorcist-swivel it around.
The situation becomes clear all in one shot. Ryland instantly rejects it because it's stupid and insane, and then he starts the reluctant, hysterical process of trying to prove the hypothesis correct.
Kick. Five points in his body connect with the ground and he feels all five reverberate. From them he can feel everything. The Hail Mary extends from his hands in every direction, inside and out, nearly as clear as seeing every room at once on a map, fading with the more twists and turns the sound had to take. There's a half-empty bottle of water next to Ryland's bed, and several hundred feet away there's another on the bridge, which he must have forgotten to get rid of. He can focus on more of the world at once than seems right. Honestly, the fact that his brain is making sense of any of this is kind of the most concerning thing of all.
He tries to marshal the sound-sense, and then that stretching-click like he's trying to move his arm and his neck at once, and moves. He splays his fingers and puts them on the ground and feels the floor, a dull sensation heightened by sound. He has three fingers, and they all move the wrong way. They have to be closed to stand on without discomfort. Movement is an act of balance: every motion is a kind of pressure that needs to be managed, rather than a muscle that needs to stretch or contract.
He's still not breathing in a "lung inflate, lung deflate" kind of way: if he tries to focus on that, his body comes up blank, like he's asking a question his nervous system doesn't know how to answer. If he's asphyxiating then he's not feeling the effects yet. He feels a gentle breeze on one part of his body like air is moving, and from there comes a kind of satisfaction like taking a deep breath. It feels entirely subconscious.
What is not subconscious, however, is what happens when Ryland puts all that together and gets all his arms moving to stand, and hears his own body writhing on the floor behind a thin veil of xenonite, and through that movement feels himself as he is now, five legs and a central carapace: which is to promptly put his entire conscious effort into finding an outlet to scream.
The result flows from the top of him, another pressure let out all at once, and he screams in five different multitonal chords as his legs splay from the pressure change and he promptly falls over.
No. Nope. Nuh-uh. There is no possible way. Great dream, nice try, time to wake up, he thinks, and he already knows that's not true but how else is this even possible and come on, they were finally doing okay! The flight to Erid was into its second of five years. They'd had issue after issue taking the Hail Mary way past its intended mission window and spent half their time troubleshooting problems, but the ship had been error-free for two months now and they'd been fine! Rocky had had enough time to kill to build himself a fully jointed suit, and Grace had beaten the last boss in Dark Souls 2.
And now, Ryland's brain fills in as he tries to skitter to an upright position, tangling every one of his excessive number of limbs in the sleep support structure he'd fallen off of, I'm an Eridian.
More accurately, he's Rocky, because he's got a pretty good theory of who it is taking shaky breaths on the floor next to the bed.
"Rocky," he tries, and makes a noise like a dying whale. The body of Ryland Grace, which from this sensory experience resembled a bundle of water balloons with sentience, whimpers on the floor. He makes a sticky noise with his mouth, pushing his tongue in weird directions like he's trying to get rid of it. Oh, please don't choke on that.
'Rocky', from Rocky's voice, was a specific mix of chords, and Grace had been training on a program to try and speak Eridian for when they got there. He knows the word. He just needs to figure out which… thing does what. Sounds had emitted from the top of his body, feeling like a pressure pot he was opening the valve on. He sways on five limbs and tries a few valves at random.
The trill that emits from him, while nonsensical, is unmistakably Eridian in nature. This gets his body's attention, head swinging to face Ryland, eyes clicky-snapping-blinking rapidly.
Ryland can't get his voice in order, but he just about has control of his limbs. He points one arm out at the body on the floor, staggers himself on his other four clicky-pressure-change arms to the shimmering veil of xenonite, and presses his hand flat to the panel.
With his hand on the xenonite, the world shivers into even deeper clarity; the veil falls away, and he fears for a moment he'll trip right through the wall. Every ripple of air that touches the human side of the barrier is amplified and given new texture, and Ryland's human body gains another step up in resolution. Ryland realises he can now hear the minute constrictions of the pupil, if he focuses: there he is, he's looking at me.
The human body's eyes rolled and focused, rolled and focused again, and then, curled and hunched, coughing and whimpering at the cough, he gets his hands underneath his chest, scrabbles feebly with his legs, and crawls-drags himself to the panel.
Shaking, crying, drooling, nose running, Rocky places a hand to match Ryland's against the panel.
Well, Ryland thinks. This is really, really bad.