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“Dr. Grace, I know you hate fighter jets, but this will be worth your time.”
Dr. Grace did not look convinced. His kids on the monitor, on the other hand, were watching the interaction like a tennis match. He looked to the corner of the room for an assist from Carl, but the traitor just shrugged.
“Where you tryna take our teacher, lady?” Tran asked, squinting suspiciously. Newton, Grace loved that kid.
“To a very exclusive, very hi-tech convention in Tokyo to look at some live demonstrations of new technology that might prove very useful to us,” she told the zoom meet. “He will enjoy it.”
“I thought you didn’t want new technology on the ship- tried and tested is better, and all that?” Grace protested, looking like he disagreed with her assessment.
“On the ship, no. But for our work on the ground, it could prove useful. Don’t you want some shiny new tech in your lab?” she wheedled, tapping her foot impatiently. Grace had the sudden image of a recalcitrant purse dog being reluctantly dragged out into the snow for a walk. He was the purse dog.
“The tech in my lab is already state of the art.” Grace protested, clutching his coffee mug to his chest and staring at her warily.
“It’s Tokyo- you’ve never been to Tokyo- you’ll love Tokyo. You like sushi,” she pointed out. “You practically live off of instant ramen despite my and Dr. Lamai’s best efforts. Don’t you want to try the real thing?”
“I dunno, she makes some good points, Mr. G-man,” a former third-period little spitfire named Mel pointed out.
“Traitor,” Grace scolded her, toothlessly.
The rest of the kids were looking into their screens at each other’s faces, weighing the idea. It reminded Grace, oddly, of a thrum.
“How much free time will he get?” Abby asked, doing her best poker-face. She’d won many study-hall games of Uno with that poker face.
“Enough to take some pictures with all those cool anime dingsbums the youth are so obsessed with,” she replied. Let the kids learn some German- she refused to debase herself to the level of saying the English word ‘thingamabobs.’ “He’ll show them to you next week.”
The kids seemed excited by this idea. Grace glared at her.
“Stranger danger!” he told the kids. “We talked about this- she’s the weird lady offering candy from a van. Except the van is a fighter jet!”
“Can you strap on a go-pro during the flight?” Kevin asked.
“I have a Go-pro,” Carl replied.
“Not helping, Carl!” Grace whined.
“Look, I’ll even let you bring your team,” Eva conceded. “Family trip.”
Grace thought for a moment. Ultimately, his kids’ excited faces on screen sealed the deal, to his consternation.
“Fine,” he sighed. “But you have to get rid of that jar with my preserved appendix- it’s creepy.”
“Not happening; It’s my favorite paperweight,” Eva replied immediately.
“Woah, you have his appendix in a jar? That’s cool!” Olivia replied.
“It is not cool; it’s gross,” her teacher corrected.
“You had all kinds of stuff in jars in your classroom, how is that different?” Justin piped up.
“Because it’s my organ! A roadkill snake preserved in formaldehyde is educational; her thing is Jordan-Peele level freaky.”
“I don’t know who that is,” Eva replied. “But I’m keeping my paperweight. Your jet leaves in 20 minutes, so wrap up your class. I’ve packed your bag for you already.”
“Do you see what I have to deal with?” he asked his kids.
“I think she’s awesome,” Olivia declared. “I wanna be like her one day!”
Dr. Grace softened. “Well, I suppose you could do worse. Just try not to blow up any continents.”
_________
Two planets inhabited, trillions of kilometers crossed, and the G-force of a fighter jet was still one of the worst feelings in Ryland Grace’s lived experience.
“Carl!” He yelled desperately as he stumbled out. Carl obediently handed him the barf bag and he made quick use of it.
“Thanks,” he muttered shakily, as Li-Jie, Eva, and Olesya ironically made far more graceful exits from their own jets.
“Sorry about the rough ride,” the pilot of Grace’s jet told him. “But damn man, your screams are like, weirdly musical. I’m in a ska-band, and we could really use the vocals.”
“A bit busy preparing to get shot into space, but thanks for the offer,” Grace muttered weakly as Carl handed him a water bottle with the top already loosened.
“Appreciate your sacrifice, but wow, what a waste of talent,” the pilot lamented.
“You are paid to fly, not to make conversation,” Stratt scolded the man, and Grace gave her a grateful look.
“You know, we didn’t take this trip last time,” Grace told her as they all headed from the airstrip (thankfully private; so no reporters could catch a glimpse of him tossing his cookies) towards the row of black SUVs.
“I can only assume that last time we didn’t have the time for potentially useful but not-essential excursions,” Eva replied.
“Speaking of non-essential,” Olesya interrupted, in a tone that Stratt knew very intimately, as it always preceded her very frequent and increasingly-outlandish ‘last requests.’ “Studio Ghibli.”
Ryland perked up. “Oh, actually, yeah! Man, I wish you guys coulda seen the Eridian dub of ‘My Neighbor Totoro’. It was incredible.”
“You say the weirdest shit, man.” Carl shook his head fondly, ignoring the ‘language’ he got in admonishment.
“Don’t the Ghibli movies have a lot of food in them? How do Eridians handle that?” Ilyukhina asked curiously.
“Glad to see you’re paying attention in our lessons,” he praised, smiling brilliantly at her. “And they generally blur the food images in the texture-screens, but if you’re over 60 or with a parent then you can hear the uncensored version.”
“Even though you were not over sixty?” Yao asked impishly.
“It was more about maturity than age. They let me teach their children, and I gave them the movies. So I could see the R-rated ones. Plus, I don’t echo-locate, so blurring the texturizer wouldn’t make any difference when I just watched the screen.” He crossed his arms and gave his pilot a flat stare as they all got into separate SUVs (security).
_______
Typically, a security detail would stand outside the hotel room door, but Carl supposed he could do his job just as well from immediately inside it, and it was a personal preference for Dr. Grace to have someone watch him sleep. On the Vat as well, his security detail now sat immediately inside his door instead of outside. “It’s a Cultural Thing” he’d replied, when asked. If there was one thing Carl understood well, it was the ‘big C’. Even if it was, quite literally, alien to him, he got it on a personal level. Carl ate hoppin’ john every New Year, Yao avoided the number four with a near-religious level of commitment, and Ilyukhina would never hand over money directly, but instead place it on the counter and allow the other person to take it. Stratt did… whatever it was that Stratt did. Dr. Grace didn’t sleep well without someone watching. For all that was different, it was also sort of the same.
_______
“Come on Carl, it’s not your job to keep me out,” Ilyukhina whined, too loudly, as Carl stood vigil over the sleeping scientist. “Lemmeee innnnnn!”
“Go back to your room, Olesya; you’re drunk,” Carl scolded. “He’s asleep, you’re going to wake him.”
“I don’t wanna wake Gracie; I wanna cuddle him,” the Russian pouted. She was not going to give up.
“Fine,” Carl opened the door. “But I’m warning you, he sleeps weird.”
“I’ve seen him sleep before.”
“Yeah, during a nap after a panic attack, or after surgery. But usually when he’s sleeping, he does things a little… differently.”
Differently, Olesya found out, turned out to be under a weighted blanket that, according to Carl, Grace used to ‘simulate 2Gs’. He was also curled around a large piece of siltstone and another of malachite. It did not look remotely comfortable, but Olesya was drunk and Grace was warm, so she did not mind if two rocks were the littlest spoon. She would be Big Spoon on the other side.
Most of the scars Grace had gotten in life, he’d gotten after his first, involuntary trip to space. She knew he missed Rocky’s handprint (currently drawn on his arm with a sharpie) even if he was happy to have the rest of his arm usable again. But he still had a few- one she could extrapolate easily enough was from a belt buckle- she’d seen a few in her time even if her own family would never raise a hand against her. On his stomach, currently pressed up against one of the rocks, his new appendectomy scar was still puckered and shiny, only 8 weeks old.
The faintest trace of a small acid burn behind his left ear lobe, from a careless lab partner in undergrad. He told her once that he actually appreciated that one; it made him hyper-attuned to lab safety. He was the only science teacher at his school who’d never had to fill out an incident report for a lab accident in his near-decade of teaching there.
A long-healed knick between his thumb and forefinger from the year they’d had a class rabbit- a student’s pet bunny had unexpectedly had a litter (or a ‘fluffle’ as he’d told her they were called. She still wasn’t sure she believed him), and had begged him to take one. He was bad at saying no to little faces, and apparently the creature had been a demon in disguise. He quietly re-homed it as soon as the student in question had moved on to high school.
She stroked the drawn mark on his arm as she fell asleep.
______
Yao wasn’t sure if Dr. Grace was more excited about his new protein crystallography machine or the full suitcase of different brands of instant ramen he’d acquired. He was a bit surprised by just how spicy he took his curry at CoCo Ichibanya.
“I didn’t realize you were so into spicy food, Лисёнок,” Olesya replied, eating her own medium-hot golden curry. “You always complain about the burn of good vodka.”
“That’s different,” Grace shrugged, fiddling with his chopsticks between bites of tofu. “But I’ve always loved spicy food. You would not believe how hard I had to work to convince the Eridians to synthesize capsicin. They were all like ‘no Grace, is poison! Savior Grace like pebble, question? Savior Grace lick dangerous things, statement!’ That and caffeine- I basically had to beg for years until I wore them down, and even then, the Faux-fee was half-caf at best and the hot sauce was barely at tabasco level. I’ve missed proper chili peppers.”
He and Ily were both covered head-to-toe in Ghibli merch. Yao was a bit more understated, but he had a Kiki’s Delivery Service T-shirt and a Calcifer plushie. Carl had a hat with the studio’s logo on it. Even Stratt had been gang-pressed into putting a Ponyo button onto her black turtleneck.
______
Besides Earth food, one of the things Grace missed the most on Erid was nature. He was never a huge outside guy besides enjoying his daily bike ride and just walking along the beach, but he still enjoyed nature, a passion that had only grown after being trapped in a small spaceship for so long and then living in an (albeit very nice) terrarium on Erid for two decades with only the occasional excursion out into the planet itself. Erid had built lots of tunnels for him, and he had his xenonite EVA suit for places there weren’t any, but it wasn’t the same as feeling a breeze on your skin. And while they’d expanded the biodome multiple times and had gone above and beyond in simulating a variety of different natural landscapes for him, nothing beat the real thing. So he was dragging his friends up the Inariyama trail of Mount Takao.
“Slow down, Gracie,” Ilyukhina groaned, once again hung over from sneaking out of the hotel and taking full advantage of the Tokyo nightlife scene.
“Why don’t you speed up?” Grace called back. “There’s only one G here, lazybones!”
“Ugh, we should have put him on a leash,” the Russian grumbled.
“You do know he’s our commander and not actually a golden retriever, yes?” Yao raised an eyebrow at her, strolling along at a leisurely pace.
“Be careful,” Carl called, as the scientist whooped and hollered, sprinted ahead, tripped on a rock, then got up and proceeded further up the trail in the same manner.
“I was starting to get zoochosis on that aircraft carrier,” Grace informed them cheerfully a few minutes later, once he’d apparently burned enough energy to be content matching their more sedate hiking speed. “I haven’t gotten to run like that since I had to start using the cane.”
“You run on the treadmill at least three times a week,” Stratt argued, fully aware of his self-imposed training regime to prepare his body to live under double gravity again.
“Yeah, but it’s not the same. I’m not going anywhere. At least in my dome, I had miles and miles of trails to hike. Beaches, forests, even a mountain trail until they blocked that one off after I broke my ankle that one time. And I’d take my pebbles on nature walks at least three times a semester.”
He crossed his arms when he noted their dubious expressions. “What? I didn’t stop exercising just because I used the cane. Even on wheelchair days, I still went out, I just had to go slower. But the pebbles were great kids, and they didn’t mind keeping to my pace as I hobbled along. Which, by the way, I think was faster than you guys are going now, seriously.” He took off again, stopping every so often to take polaroid pictures of whatever caught his interest.
“Oh Боже мой, he has the zoomies,” Olesya giggled.
“Don’t infantilize him. He has a doctorate in molecular biology,” Stratt replied, unamused.
“Two things can be true,” Ilyukhina responded, unconvinced.
“Carl, hurry up- you’re his security detail; you need to be near him,” Stratt ordered the man, and he groaned but broke into a jog.
At the summit, Olesya took the camera from Grace to take a group photo, the two of them smiling brightly, Yao making a silly face, Carl looking slightly winded, and Stratt looking entirely unimpressed with the whole venture. It was perfect.
“Oh, I cannot wait to hold this baby up to the texturizer so Rocky and Adrian can see it,” Grace declared, agreeing with her. Even if it meant that Rocky was going to post the thing on Echogram and he was, once again, going to go viral on Eridian social media. At least it was a much more positive and supportive place than human social media. He even made his own educational audio recordings on RockTube, which was not something he would have ever done on any equivalent earthly platforms.
Not only did he hate the idea of being perceived on social media in general, but the thought of his kids finding his accounts, even if they were set to private, made his hands feel clammy and his heart rate spike at even the hypothetical. He deleted his barely-used Instagram the day he started teaching, and he only used his Youtube account to consume media and never commented or posted. But Eridians were very supportive and didn’t really get the appeal of ‘trolling’ or ‘rage baiting’ others. Well, except for Rocky, towards Grace, but he could do that well enough in person.
Adrian, on the other hand, loved posting family ‘pictures’ on their Echogram, and Grace could never deny them or Rocky anything, so he’d already accepted that the current photo in hand would eventually go viral. Sure, his family didn’t know him yet, but he knew what kind of people they were, and so he was pretty sure that the Eridians would re-invent social media within the year he landed and that Adrian would once again be curating their lifestyle blog. He missed it, if he were honest. For someone who couldn’t see color, Adrian had killer home decor ideas.
“Ready to go back down, question?” he asked his friends, shaking himself out of his longing.
“Nein,” Stratt replied. “We’ve had enough unproductive time. The helicopter is going to meet us here. The jet is waiting and our bags are already on it. It’s more efficient this way.”
“Eavie, I adore you, but sometimes I really wish you could stop being so German for like, 5 minutes.”
“You’ve used up your allotment of last wishes for the week, Dr. Grace. Now drink some water,” she declared, handing him a thermos.
“Uh, that’s not water,” he declared, taking a sniff and reeling back, eyes watering.
“Oops, sorry,” Ilyukhina replied. “That one’s mine. Опохмелиться.”