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Grace’s stomach was doing flips in his abdomen. His abs rippled with spasms as another wave of nausea crashed over him. Sweat dripped from his forehead to his temple and into his hairline.
Armando had already given him an IV line to keep him from getting dehydrated. He’d had food poisoning before, but this was something else. He guessed because the Taumeoba has no real calories to it, that his stomach was empty as quickly as it had filled so maybe he was just starving again?
Rocky was trying to keep himself busy, Grace had not slept in a while, but Rocky got impatient waiting for him to sleep. Not to mention he hates the squishy noises coming from Grace's stomach.
Grace squeezed his eyes shut as he rolled over again, his left arm becoming numb under the weight of his chest. He breathed through as much of the discomfort as he could before Grace settled onto his right side.
He opened his eyes, just a little, the surrounding light seemed to bend in weird ways. His vision was blurred but not in the way it normally was when he wasn’t wearing his glasses, this was worse. Nothing his eyes were seeing made any sense to him.
There was something moving in front of him. It looked almost like a giant marble, except it was not smooth like a marble. It looked as if it had jagged edges to it, more like a giant dice?
“Hello—” Grace’s voice sounded awful, it was barely there. The dice seemed to wobble back and forth in front of him, but he just couldn’t get a good look at it properly. He squinted at it and could see something moving inside of it. It kind of looked like a— “Spider!”
Grace rolled backwards and off his bed. He hated spiders, the way they moved and the amount of eyes they had, even if he couldn’t see them all from a distance. He hit the floor on his back with a thud. He could vaguely hear music and shouting around him. Was he at a party or something? Was he drunk? Or high? That would explain why he felt so bad, the one and only time he had tried drugs at university, he thought he was dying. Before he could check his surroundings properly, the dice rolled toward him.
“No! No! I hate spiders! Get away from me!” Grace tried to shuffle away from the monster, but his quilt was tangled between his legs. He slid on the floor in place for a moment before managing to kick the quilt away from himself. He grabbed it in one hand and threw it at the dice that was slowly rolling toward him.
The quilt blinded the spider for a moment as it fought to get the quilt off of itself. Grace used that time to keep shuffling backwards, not taking his eyes off the creature. The problem with this was that he ended up backing himself into a corner.
He curled up into a ball, trying to make himself as small as possible. Maybe it would leave him alone.
“If I can’t see it, it can’t see me.”
Rocky wiggled his ball under the quilt in an effort to shake it off. Was this another human game? Grace had taken a fall from the bed and ripped out the line that Armando had given him to help him feel better. That couldn’t be good.
“Grace, question? Why Grace throw quilt, question?” The last of the quilt slipped off the side of his ball as he got closer to Grace. He wasn’t really saying anything that Rocky could understand. His voice was very small and quiet, more like a harsh rasp than actual speech.
Rocky observed Grace for a moment, he was shaking, leaking and muttering something to himself. His face was scrunched up with fear as his eyes darted all over Rocky’s ball.
Grace had explained to Rocky about his glasses and how they helped him see properly. Did Grace not recognise Rocky without his glasses? But he had so many times before? What has changed?
Rocky decided it was best to leave Grace alone. If Grace was afraid of him right now, he wouldn’t be helping by staring at him. He rolled out of the dormitory and toward the lab, where Grace kept his Taumeoba food farm.
There was a label next to the most recent batch, the same batch Rocky had seen Grace eat from. Rocky pointed his spectrometer at it.
Batch smells funny. Must try testing different additives with it next time.
Rocky huffed to himself. He knew how inefficient the human body was. Seemingly any small thing could set off its immune system response. It would appear Grace was stupid again and decided to eat from a bad batch of Taumeoba.
Rocky rolled back to the dormitory but stayed out of Grace’s eye line. He could sense that the human was still curled up in the corner, muttering and mumbling to himself. Rocky didn’t want to leave Grace like this, but Grace was afraid of him right now so what else could he do?
Rocky stayed put, monitoring Grace from afar. He tapped his claws against one another as he thought about what to do to help. Grace often liked humming to himself or listening to what he called orchestral music. To Rocky, it sounded a lot like his own vocals.
Rocky began imitating the music he had heard Grace play before, he tried to shy away from words they had programmed into the laptop. The last thing Grace needed right now was a laptop spouting a bunch of words off randomly. To Rocky, he was saying absolute rubbish. Nothing he was saying made sense in his language, but it seemed to be helping Grace. He could see that the human was slowly uncurling. He lifted his head from his arms and blinked a few times before looking around the room.
“Rocky?”