Archive of Our Own

After getting settled and the biodome is adjusted to Grace’s needs and preferences - more foggy days than sunny, more clear skies than rain, never a day above 85 degrees Fahrenheit or below 60 - Grace starts to get a little bored.

Which is a crazy thing to think about. He’s living on an alien planet! Or, well, he guesses he’s the alien in this situation. He’s learning all this new science and has confirmation of the existence of God, or, well, gods.

That was...a lot and he's probably never going to get used to that. He actually tries to think about it as little as possible. Grace grew up as a Christmas/Easter kind of person and never really went to Church. The Sacred Thrum was very nice about the whole thing, which was comforting. Grace still kind of wants to throw up if he thinks about it too hard, but the Sacred Thrum said that they weren’t going to take that personally.

So the point is that Grace is bored. Rocky and Adrian are away visiting Rocky’s parent cluster and they’re going to come back to the city center to meet Grace and see the biodome, but they’re not coming back until the evening. He’s finished up all of his consulting work and there are a few experiments he’s running, but they’re all in that in-between phase where all Grace can do is wait for something to happen. He’s already gone for a swim with Laika today and there’s nothing he feels like watching on Stratt+.

He’s scrolling through the books available on StrattPrime - which is every book that's ever been published in every language on Earth - when he comes across something he genuinely hasn’t thought about in a while.

DuBois’s Spellsheet.

Dancing Lights.

The phosphorus is easy enough to obtain. He could ask the Eridians for pretty much anything and they’d bend over backwards to get it for him. Part of it is a kind of grateful hero worship that makes Grace extremely uncomfortable and part of it is sheer curiosity. The alien desires something. What the hell is that? Why does it want this extremely reactive element? Can it…can it eat it?

At least, that’s what Grace thinks they’re thinking.

Bert and Ernie - who Grace named because the orange one was wide and the yellow one was tall and they kind of acted like a gay couple from the 80s that were trying to hide it, but not very well - deliver what he asked for after about half an Eridian hour.

“This should be very reactive with oxygen,” Ernie says after depositing the canister on Grace’s coffee table. “Are you sure? 15 protons, you said? What could you possibly need this for?”

“Ernie,” Bert honks. Bert had ignored Grace completely when they first arrived to play with Laika. She snuffled at them and Bert dissolved into incomprehensible Eridian baby-speak. “If the alien wants to kill itself, just let it. It was very nice to let Bert and Ernie observe its demise.”

“The process you used should make it relatively safe to handle long enough for what I need it for,” Grace assured Ernie. “You can watch if you want, but it’s probably going to be really boring for you.”

After the fifth minor, tiny, insignificant explosion that caused zero damage to anything or anyone, Grace takes his experimenting outside - signalling to Flint from the climate team to cut the wind.

Then, after about four hours of focused study, and an hour break for lunch, something clicks in brain and he thinks he’s got it for real this time.

Bert and Ernie are still hanging around. They had to leave during his lunch because ew, gross, nasty, come on, Ernie, Bert doesn’t want to see that and also they needed them to make more phosphorus for him.

“Okay, guys, I think this is it.” Grace stands. His cheek is smudged with soot and he had to cast mending on his clothes maybe one or two or ten times but he thinks he’s got it now. He was using too much phosphorus in the beginning and Bert and Ernie weren’t wrong about it being too reactive to oxygen. Then he was using too little. His hands were unsteady, he was too unsure about what effect he wanted to produce, but he got it eventually. He should probably change his middle name from Emerson to Trial-and-Error at some point, but he always gets it sooner or later.

He places the phosphorus in the palm of his hand - he didn’t need palm prints anyway - and blows on the phosphorus, letting out a brief whistle as he did so and lifting his hand up towards the sky.

Little globs of light, like the lava in a lava lamp, float gently in the air. Each emit light in a 10-foot radius. Bert and Ernie huddle together, their light detectors registering the light blobs, but they’re still nervous. Grace has gotten to this stage before and the last time he got here, the blobs blew up and that was the eighth time he had to mend his pants.

When Grace confirms that they’re stable, he starts trying to shift the colors. This means nothing to the Eridians, but it kind of reminds Grace of messing with LED lights. He settles with them on a nice, friendly yellow and then it’s time for the final test.

He brings the lights together and they meld into one ball of light smoothly. He’s not the best artist, but he pictures just a basic stick figure in his mind and the lights form into that shape.

“Uhhhhhh, what the [swear word] is that?” Bert asks, voice shaking.

He tries to imagine what the Eridian equivalent of a stick figure would be and just goes with a circle with five legs sticking out.

“I…I don’t know how to feel about this.” Ernie says.

“I do,” Bert announces. “I am offended. This is a depiction of an Eridian, yes? Very symmetry-normative.”

“Oh, sorry, guys. I didn’t realize that was a thing. Should I -?” Make the shape…lumpy? What if that’s an insult or something?

Grace separates the lights back into four separate orb blobs. Without Grace directing them into a specific shape or formation, the lights dance in the air, shifting colors all willy-nilly. They’re beautiful and now this way, Grace will always have light when the Eridians forget that he needs light to “hear”.

Laika jumps and chases after the lights, yipping joyfully at her human’s success.

Just then, he hears frantic scurrying behind him.

“Grace! Biodome security team says you are blowing yourself up, question?”

Aw, nuts.

Misty Step.

Rocky thinks they’ve gotten used to this whole “magic” thing.

No, that’s a complete and total lie. They’re not used to this at all.

Grace had called Rocky over to the biodome, which is unusual for him to do. They have a routine and this is not part of it. Rocky usually goes over to Grace’s at least once a day, but often twice. Rocky walks him to his classroom in the “mornings” and walks him back in the “evenings”.

Eridians do not have “schools” in the way that humans understand them, but the concepts are similar enough. Parents would drop their children off at the learning thrums, led by a designated elder who would guide them through age-appropriate Standards. Through this, they would learn essential knowledge and practice how to thrum with each other. After a few hours, they would return to their families to make sure they knew how to function as an individual. The young ones had trouble with that. It was hard for them to sync with others and it was equally difficult to desync. Rocky still has a memory of something that his parents swear up and down happened to a classmate instead of Rocky, which is just what two people who lost their pebble at a museum for twelve hours would say.

After a few decades of learning the basic Standards, the young ones would be given problems they needed to solve together using their knowledge. That is also when learning became a little more specialized. After another decade or so of that, students are ready to graduate.

Grace’s classes are not like that because Grace cannot thrum. Even so, he is one hell of a teacher, in Rocky’s unbiased opinion, and even with his strange and alien methods, all of his students are leaps and bounds ahead of others in their same age cluster. It helps to be learning of human knowledge straight from the source.

Grace tried to teach Rocky human magic, but even a teacher of Grace's skill cannot teach  magic. Maybe no one can? Apparently, magic is knowledge that resists learning, somehow, so that is already making things difficult. Also, the thought of performing magic feels like a borderline heresy. Rocky is not particularly worshipful, but there are some things that are difficult to unlearn.

Still, they were on the Hail Mary for quite a while and Rocky has been described as “recklessly curious” so Grace did attempt to teach Rocky that mending spell. It seems the most useful of the “magic” that Grace knows.

“Rocky is doing what Grace is doing. Why is it not working, question?” Stomp, stomp.

To which Grace had said, “You can’t do it the way I do it. Casting times, spell components, and durations are consistent across the board, but the actual process of casting varies from person to person. It’s one of the reasons it takes so long to learn. You can teach the ingredients, but not the recipe.”

Rocky shuddered at the food metaphor, but they understood. Kind of.

“You could copy what I do exactly, but magic is unique and personal. This is how I cast mending, but you are not me. If you want to learn the spell, you need to figure out how you do it.”

“This is annoying. And impractical. And illogical.”

“You’re preaching to the choir, buddy. That’s why I’m a science guy. I just know the basics because it was a requirement for my degree. Magic and science are seen as complementary disciplines. I’m not against that idea, but it doesn’t change that it’s inherently frustrating to study.”

“How does human society function when they have to do this, question?”

“That’s a great question, Rocky. But, listen, magic can be pretty incredible. Do you think you could make a brazier, I’ll show you an example, out of xenonite? I found, haha, a pretty interesting spell.” And then a couple of months later, Grace created Laika - the most special-est and beautiful princess in the whole universe - out of apparent nothingness so Rocky has to at least accept magic as a thing they have to deal with in their life.

So Grace can’t really teach magic to Eridians - no one seems to have the knack for it - which sends Grace into a spiral muttering about “Implications” that he cannot begin to understand.

There’s probably a 50/50 chance Grace called Rocky here to show them the results of some experiment or a new spell he learned. If it’s an experiment, Rocky hopes it’s the garden Grace has been trying to cultivate. If it’s a spell, Rocky has no idea what to expect. Rocky doesn’t ask for updates on the magic as much as they ask for updates on the science. Maybe Grace will finally learn how to fly and Rocky will learn what a heart attack feels like. They hear its bad.

Rocky approaches Grace’s front door and knocks. All Eridian houses are built of a solid material that all except the most sensitive of Eridians cannot hear through. They do have some concept of privacy and it seems like something that is very important to Grace.

Still, Grace always takes forever to get to the front door and open it for Rocky. It’s especially rude since Grace is the one who invited Rocky over so he should be expecting them and WHAT THE FUCK!!!!!!

“Ta da!” Grace cheers, appearing quite literally OUT OF NOWHERE. Rocky’s not proud of it, but they scramble away from Grace. “Check it out. This spell is called ‘Misty Step’. It allows me to disappear and reappear a short distance away as long as I can see where I’m going. Like Laika!”

“Arp!” Is the sound that Laika makes as she appears next to Grace, winding through his legs like the absolute adorable and majestic baby that she is.

Rocky has about a million questions and that’s only barely hyperbolic. Why is the spell called ‘Misty Step’? What happens to Grace’s body when he disappears? What determines the range of the spell? How can he be sure that he is going to reappear? HOW THE FUCK DO YOU CAST A SPELL? AND DO NOT EXPLAIN IT THROUGH METAPHOR. HOW THE FUCK DO YOU USE MAGIC?????!

But Rocky’s stopped asking those kinds of questions because Grace doesn’t have answers.

Rocky is never going to get used to this shit.

Fireball.

I wonder, Grace thinks, like an idiot, like a fool, if I could use astrophage as a spell component.

The science team - especially Bert and Ernie - have been really helpful in synthesizing the components he needs. He still had the stuff that was sent with the Hail Mary, but they only accounted for how much they would need for people who already knew how to cast the particular spells they were needed for. People who were learning spells blew through spell components like nobody’s business because they’re just throwing stuff at the wall until they figure out what sticks. That’s something Grace finds kind of familiar and comforting about magic - just how many notes he has to take so he can replicate certain effects.

But he’s learned a lot about magic and science in his time on Erid, much more than he would be able to learn on Earth. It helps that Grace doesn’t have to worry about things like needing money or having a job or, you know, government regulations over how much of a certain material component someone could have at any time.

But some things are impossible to replicate. Like, he’s really going to need to horde feathers in case he ever finds himself falling off of the large structure. He’s still got a pound of them, but it’s kind of scary to think that he’s got a limited amount of what he needs to prevent himself from going splat.

But the idea of using astrophage came to him while he was sitting in on a meeting about how to increase their fuel efficiency because somehow he is still the leading expert on the little jerks. Eridians are still using astrophage as fuel, which is expectedly controversial since those things were eating the sun. However, the situation is pretty stabilized and the taumoeba are still doing their job so the risk is minimal at the moment. These things could change, of course, but the bulk of the danger has passed.

Grace turns the idea over in his head. He’ll need to read up on the theory of it all, but he can think of one particular spell component that would be difficult, nay, impossible for Bert and Ernie to synthesize and it wasn’t packed on the Hail Mary. What components work to bring about certain effects seem to have both physical and thematic connections to the desired outcome. Phosphorus is needed for Dancing Lights because of the element’s chemical properties and also because it is named for the Greek god of the Morningstar. Mending needs two lodestones because you are trying to attract the broken pieces of an object back together.

And, well, here’s the thing: Grace has always wanted to learn Fireball.

It’s, like, the classic wizard spell. There are way more complicated and impressive spells out there, but Fireball has cultural connotations that, frankly, other spells don’t have. Like, is Legend Lore a far more complex and useful spell? Yes.

But it’s not Fireball. And Grace may not be able to get his hands on bat guano, but it’s the easiest thing in the world for Grace to requisition astrophage. They don’t even question what he wants it for.

He’s got a lot of things cooking, pardon the food metaphor, at the moment, but he takes a break from them to work on learning the Fireball spell and seeing if astrophage is a workable substitute for bat guano. In theory, it should work and the preliminary tests seem incredibly promising, but he’s got to move them out of his home lab if he wants to continue to have a lab and a home.

After the Dancing Lights fiasco - which was barely an issue, Grace has no idea what Rocky is worried about - Rocky insisted on being present for Grace’s magical studies of more…volatile spells. They’ve had some disagreements about that and they need to come to some kind of consensus of what they mean by “volatile” because it seems like they’ve got different definitions, but Fireball definitely fits under any definition of that word.

“This is a spell to make things explode, question?” Rocky asks and Grace has to resist the urge to bow his head like he’s being scolded by his grandmother. “And you are using astrophage? Astrophage already makes things explode. You do not need magic to do that. You do not need this spell.”

“Well, it’s not the spell itself that’s important,” Grace lies, marking out distances to make sure everyone stays clear of the expected blast radius. “It’s a proof of concept really. I wanted to see if I could substitute spell components with astrophage. I think some people back on Earth were working on that, but all the astrophage we could make went to the Hail Mary so it was mostly theoretical.”

“Right. And there’s no other spell that you could try to use astrophage?”

Honestly, Grace could probably try to use this for Dancing Lights. “Nope.”

“Rocky does not believe you.”

“I’ve already done the preliminary research. The theory is sound, at least. I’m taking safety very seriously. I have enough astrophage left for three trial runs. If it doesn’t work after, I’ll mark this down as a failure and move on.” To doing these experiments without telling you, Grace finishes in his head.

Rocky isn’t happy about it, but they don’t stop Grace so he’s going to go ahead and count that as a win.

During the first test, Grace is able to make fire, but it’s more a circle than a ball. Still, it’s the appropriate size.

Grace never really knows what to do for the verbal component when casting spells. He’s gotten away with just clapping and going “Ta da!” which he can admit is pretty lame. He knows of some people who just said the name of the spell and pointed where they wanted the spell to go. Usually, the people who got to cast like that avoided any spelling that was hard to say. Poor suckers were missing out on prestidigitation. Other people had to do a whole song and dance to cast Mage Hand. Ilyukhina never seemed to need to do any of that. She’d just need to snap or wiggle her fingers and magic would happen. There was one day that she was so hungover she communicated solely through magical Sendings and she never seemed to run out of metaphorical juice, pardon the food reference, either.

For the second test, he feels safe enough to use slightly more astrophage. He copies the same gesture he used for earlier tests - creating a circle with both hands, touching finger to finger to create a loop - and for the verbal component, he just says, “Boom!”

And boom it does! This time the fireball is spherical, but not the right size. It was a little too small, a 15-foot radius rather than 20-foot, but visually, from where Grace was standing at least, it fit perfectly between the circle created by his hands.

“This is the last trial,” Rocky reminds him. Adrian and Bert and Ernie have joined his audience.

“You can do it, Grace!” Ernie cheers. Bert leans over and jabs them in one of their legs.

“Don’t encourage him,” Rocky hisses, leaning against Adrian’s larger form and Laika loafing between Rocky’s legs.

“Be calm, my dear,” Adrian soothes. “Or do you have no faith in Grace?”

Rocky says nothing, which probably means they're complaining at the sub-Grace frequency. Laika hates that frequency and bounds towards Grace.

“Alright, better make this count then.” This time, he does everything else exactly the same, but spaces his hands further apart until they frame a space that has a 20-meter radius, more or less. He hopes it doesn’t affect the shape too much. Grace sends Laika further back. He takes a deep breath, imagines what he wants, and says “Boom!”

Good news first: it works! Grace feels that warmth in his bones that signals that he’s figured out a spell properly.

Bad news second: Grace kind of underestimated how powerful of a spell Fireball or the astrophage provided a little more firepower, so to speak.

Fortunately, it doesn’t look like anyone is hurt. The Eridians are pretty sturdy and all of them are out of range of the spell, even if that range was slightly bigger than what Grace was expecting, but the blow back is strong enough that it knocks Grace - so light, mostly fluids, so insubstantial the most Eridians are worried that their claws would just go right through him like he’s a jellyfish or something - right off his feet and over the edge of the cliff.

Oh, whoopsie.

Feather Fall.

After everything that’s happened, Grace thinks he developed pretty good control over his panic response. He only screams for three seconds, clutching onto Laika for dear life, before remembering the feathers in his pocket. He grabs them in his fist, hopes really, really hard, and opens his hand. A strong gust of wind blows up from underneath them and Grace and Laika begin floating sedately in the air, almost like they’re in zero gravity, before they gently begin descending at a much more survivable rate.

“I’M OKAY!” Grace yells. He can see the little forms of Rocky and Adrian peering down over the edge of the cliff. Rocky is scuttling around, jumping up in the air and on top of Adrian and back down on the ground. Grace can’t hear them from here, but he has a pretty good guess about what Rocky could be saying. Adrian, on the other hand, is worryingly still. And that’s even scarier.

“I’m sorry, buddy,” Grace scritches Laika’s neck in apology. She accepts the pets and cuddles, but he knows he owes her some nice raw meburgers. Grace had some qualms about feeding Laika meat that synthesized from his own flesh, but if it’s good enough for him then it’s good enough for Laika. Besides, Laika’s not a real animal, per se. She’s a spirit made of light so she doesn’t actually need to eat. The meburgers are just a nice treat for her. Also, magically-speaking, Laika is also Grace? Kind of?

Either way, it’s fine.

By Grace’s estimations, he and Laika will land in the water in about a minute. The waters aren’t too deep and they’re not too far out from the beach. It’s not his favorite thing to do, but he can send Laika back to her pocket dimension and then swim back to shore easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.

“What the [swear word] is wrong with you!” Rocky honks at him once Grace is back on dry land. Rocky’s anger is kind of undermined by how he’s gently drying Grace with a towel, but tone is a powerful thing. “I swear to the Gods that if you do this [swear word] to me again, I’m going to kill you myself. Why do you even need this spell? An explosion spell? What’s the point? Idiot idiot idiot! Heheoekdbekdjuxvwhakwjdv!!”

“When you were falling, we could not hear you, only your screams,” Adrian says, worryingly calm. It’s the kind of calm that reminds Grace a little bit of serial killers he’s seen in movies or on TV. Adrian is going to lock up Grace in a little room and throw away the key. “When you stopped screaming, it was like you were gone.”

Adrian steps closer to Grace, looming over him, blocking the light until his field of view is just Adrian’s hulking form. “You will not do this to us again.”

“Yep, no, for sure,” Grace stammers out and he’s not even lying, probably. “Never doing that again.”

Sending.

“Motherfucker!” Rocky shouts.

It’s a really interesting, but ultimately kind of trivial, coincidence that there are a lot of human swear words with a very clear Eridian equivalent. Rocky learned this without Grace’s help because he has this very weird thing about swearing.

Rocky learned about human swear words from the movies they would watch together, but Grace refused to enter them into Rocky’s translation software. So, one day, when Grace was dead asleep, Rocky went to Mary and said, “Mary, teach Rocky the swears!”

To which Mary replied, “Invalid command.”

Rocky figured it out eventually and has a special fondness for any of the fuck-derivatives. There’s just something satisfying about it. “Motherfucker” or, rather, “Perverse-parent-warped-lover” was a rather outdated Eridian swear. You only ever hear it in old-timey recordings of theater performances. But, you know, in the name of Eridian-Earthling cultural exchange, Rocky will bring it back to the common parlance.

This present moment, however, was probably not the best time to do that.

The other people in the meeting - on funding for the biodome! it’s always about the fucking funding for the biodome! - pause their discussions to shift their attention to Rocky.

In his defense, Grace has apparently learned a new spell and is testing it out. On Rocky.

Hey, Rocky! It’s me, Grace! I learned a new spell! I will be able to send messages to anyone. You can even reply! Handy, right?

Some part of Rocky recognizes the usefulness of the spell. Adrian has seen Rocky go on multiple anxiety spirals. What if something happens to Grace’s dome while Rocky is sleeping? What if Ramsay got careless in his and Grace’s joint pursuit to recreate whatever the fuck a Baja Blast is and they give Grace mercury poisoning? What if he’s been practicing that stupid explosion fire spell in secret and falls off a cliff again?!

The majority of Rocky kind of wants to throw up. Eridians don’t even do that. That’s what magic does to them. It makes Rocky’s insides want to be outside.

It’s not even a physical reaction, typically. It’s mostly psychological. It’s difficult for Rocky to wrap their mind around and that makes them angry.

Don’t do this to any other Eridians besides me and Adrian, Rocky sends back. Ugh, what a weird sensation. Rocky can’t do magic, but they guess talking to Grace like this is the closest they’re going to get. You will send them into a religious psychosis. Some Eridians are already starting to-

Somehow - HOW???? - Rocky can tell that the spell has ended and Grace didn’t get the rest of their message. Rocky shudders. “My deepest and most sincere apologies, esteemed members of this committee.” If this causes them to lose funding for the dome, Rocky is going to blow up the moon. “I, uh, was startled by something. It has passed. There is no need for alarm. The model you are showing has some similarities to the one on…” And then Rocky lets their words trail off before they get caught in a lie. Eridians can’t really lie. Any falsehoods have the risk of being revealed during a thrum so it’s better not to do it. Still, you can get away with a lot if you just imply certain things.

Right now, Rocky is implying they just experienced a bout of Space PTSD that he got from SAVING THE STARS. They play that card. A lot.

They seem to accept that half-explanation and fill in the blanks just as Rocky wanted them to and the rest of the meeting goes by smoothly. The fundraising efforts seem to be going well and, while Grace probably wouldn’t be happy about this, increasing the ticket prices to visit the dome will probably keep them covered for a while. The scientific knowledge that Erid gained from the process of building the dome and keeping Grace alive in the first place is priceless, genuinely. Erid is experiencing a scientific boon unlike any they have ever seen before, but, as the humans say, they “need to keep the lights on somehow.”

“Wow,” Grace said once. “I can’t believe you guys have capitalism too. That’s nuts.”

Rocky scuttles back to Grace’s dome as soon as the meeting is over. They’re pretty sure that Adrian is on their way too, if they’re not there already. Rocky really hopes that Grace heard the part of the message where Rocky said not to use this spell on anyone else. The sound of Grace’s voice in Rocky’s mind is deeply, uncomfortably similar to the sound of the Sacred Thrum communicating with your soul and they really don’t need any more people thinking that Grace is another god come to Erid to save them all.

Rocky and Adrian have done their best to keep that particular conspiracy theory away from Grace. Rocky was almost comforted by Grace’s reaction to meeting the Sacred Thrum for the first time. They felt a real connection there. Grace feels about the Gods the same as Rocky feels about the magic. In a similar vein, Grace feels about magic the same way Rocky feels about the Gods. So Rocky knows any sort of implication that Grace is somehow divine would send the human spiraling. He’d probably start muttering about the Implications again, whatever that means.

Rocky is going to be honest. They, maybe, had a similar thought. They were quickly disabused of that notion when they saw Grace trip over their shoelaces in zero gravity somehow.

Still, there are still a lot of - ultimately trivial - coincidences that the people of Erid must never, ever know or else that weird cult devoted to Grace is going to get a lot more members. And then maybe the Sacred Thrum will get involved.

The first coincidence everyone already knows. Grace’s name has a very neat translation into Eridian. It typically means moving easily, but it also has a religious connotation meaning the “mercy and benevolence of the Sacred Thrum.”

Secondly, there is the name of the Hail Mary. Grace mentioned it once during their trip to Erid when Rocky asked about the construction of the ship. “It’s an English idiom,” Grace said. “It comes from a sporting term. A ‘Hail Mary pass’ is a move done in a moment of desperation. A player throws a ball as far as they can, purely in the hopes that someone on their team will catch it.”

Rocky’s not a poet, but the meaning behind the name is very clear to them. Privately, Rocky thought that humans are really good at naming things. The Eridians never bothered to name the Blip-A. They usually just referred to it as the “space train” and moved on with their lives.

“Well, actually, the term actually originated from a prayer.”

“New word.”

“Oh, uh, a prayer is kind of a message a person has for the, uh, supreme being? Like, the creator of the world? I guess.”

Oh, right, the Sacred Thrum. Yes, Rocky was familiar. “I understand. How does the prayer go?”

“Oh, well, I think it’s Hail Mary, full of -” and then Grace stopped talking for a little bit and wandered off to the Don’t Go Crazy Room mid-conversation. Rude. But then Grace came back and explained the third coincidence that Eridians aren’t allowed to know and that that his entire life was a cosmic joke.

So, anyway, an impossible creature beyond Eridian imagination, named after the Sacred Thrum’s benevolence, appears at the Undying Star just when their lone Savior is about to lose all hope. They return to Erid in a ship that was the alien planet’s final prayer that also names said alien by, well, by name.

AND ALSO HE CAN DO MAGIC.

If any of that became public knowledge, someone was probably going to kill Grace to release him from his physical form so he can return to the Sacred Thrum! Or they were going to try to elect him to be supreme leader! Or they were going to try to figure out how to create human-Eridian hybrid demigods!

The magic thing was a whole other can of worms, pardon the reference to food. Most people don’t really want to touch that because of its similarity to the divine, but the similarity to the divine is a real big deal to people. Luckily, for the most part, the magic Grace isn’t too dissimilar from advanced science and most people assume that humans have some kind of advanced technology that Grace is using. As long as no one thought too much about it - and there is an active effort to prevent people from knowing or thinking too much about it - the religious conspiracies remain relatively niche.

Rocky enters Grace's dome and sees that Adrian is with Laika, taking a stroll down Grace’s beach (they really are fond of the sound of crashing waves). They tell Rocky that Grace is in his study.

“Did he use that spell on you?” Rocky asks.

Adrian shudders. “Yes. It was a bit uncomfortable, but I do think it will be useful. Apparently, there is a word limit. Neither person can communicate any message longer than twenty-five words.”

“Human words or Eridian words?”

“That is what Grace is trying to figure out.” Before Rocky can leave to visit Grace in his study, Adrian says, in a hushed tone like Grace would be able to hear them with his feeble ears. “He’s, um, he’s trying to see if he can use the spell to contact Earth.”

Rocky enters Grace’s study super casually.

“Where’s the fire, bud?”

“Hmm, what?! There is no fire! Everything is fine! Adrian said that you were working on the communication spell!”

“Oh, right!” Grace does a poor job at hiding his deflated enthusiasm. “It’s called ‘Sending’. We have plenty of the necessary material components - copper wire - so you don’t have to worry about me doing something ‘stupid’ with astrophage. The interesting thing about it is that DuBois listed its range as ‘unlimited’ but I guess the original creator of the spell didn’t really think that anyone would need to communicate with someone on another planet about 20 light years away.”

“You,” Rocky starts slowly, carefully. “Want to communicate with Earth?”

“Well,” Grace shrugs, trying to be casual and failing as badly as Rocky. “Yeah. I’m curious, you know. If they got the beetles. If they figured out how to send the taumoeba to Venus. If…how many people…?” Grace fidgets. He doesn’t look at Rocky, poring over his notes.

Well, of course Grace wants to communicate with Earth. All Rocky wanted while he was orbiting Tau Ceti was to talk to Erid. Eridian scientists are also still working on preparing the Hail Mary for a flight back to Earth. It’s not a top priority at the moment, but people are still invested in improving the technology for interstellar travel. Grace knows of the project, but he doesn’t seem to be particularly interested in it. He’s admitted to Rocky that he finds the thought of another multi-year space flight to be daunting and Rocky isn’t too eager to launch Grace into space again. Just with his health still being so fragile, you know?

And, well, it’s haunted him. Grace does not know the Earth he will be returning to.

If that was all it was, Rocky wouldn’t be so nervous, but Grace is an expert at talking around the things he truly means. Fortunately, Rocky is an expert in Grace.

“You want to talk to Earth, question, or you want to talk to someone on Earth?” Stomp, stomp.

Grace freezes, stops breathing even, which was a frightening thing to learn was something humans could do.

“It doesn’t matter. It didn’t work.” Grace says. “Which could mean a lot of things. It could mean the spell doesn’t actually have an unlimited range. It could mean I’m still doing it wrong. It could mean that…that she’s…”

Rocky understands that Grace’s relationship with Eva Stratt is complicated, but Rocky’s is very simple. Rocky wants to tie her to a missile pointed at Earth’s moon and hit launch.

Grace told Rocky the story in bits and pieces, but Rocky got the full picture eventually. In some respects, Rocky understands why she did what she had done, but mostly Rocky is convinced that Earth is not worth saving.

Grace is a better person than Rocky, though. Grace is a better person than everyone on planet Earth and instead of dooming Earth for all eternity, he chooses to save them all.

He doesn’t do this often, but Rocky can tell when he is thinking of her, remembering, and he always gets a little sad and a little tender. He doesn’t hate her and he never has. That’s okay. Rocky will hate her enough for the both of them.

“...What would you say to her, question?”

Grace doesn’t say anything for a long time. Rocky let's him think. A moment passes, and then two. “I don’t know,” he answers eventually. “Whatever I want to say can’t really fit into a conversation that can only be said 25 words at a time. It’s mostly questions I have for her, but I’m not sure what I want the answers to be.” Grace leans back in his chair and sighs. He claps his hand and Butler, his unseen servant (Rocky hates that fucking thing), starts cleaning up the mess in his house.

Grace stands, stretching, and Rocky can hear how his joints crack. It’s a satisfying sound for both humans and Eridians alike. “Let’s go join Adrian and Laika on their walk.”

Rocky doesn’t argue. They just follow close by Grace’s side, almost getting underfoot the way Laika does.

When Adrian and Rocky return to their own home so that Grace can sleep - by himself, oh the horror - Rocky feels the touch of Grace’s voice in their mind and they handle it much better this time.

Goodnight, Rocky. See you tomorrow! Love you, buddy!

“Gods above!” Rocky shouts, startling Adrian from their radioplay they were listening to.

Goodnight, Grace, Rocky replies. Sleep safe. I hope you have pleasant dreams. Are you sure you don’t want one of us to watch you sleep, question? And -

Polymorph.

Grace had been working on this spell on and off for a couple of years. He’d learned the basic spell described in DuBois’s Spellsheet in about a year, but Grace had a specific goal in mind when he decided to learn this particular magic. Achieving that goal took a bit longer.

Of course, he didn’t tell Rocky or Adrian about it. He wanted it to be a surprise!

So, when Rocky and Adrian come to Grace’s biodome at their usual dome and sense an unfamiliar Eridian making a mess of Grace’s home - stumbling over their limbs so clumsily that they must be in some kind of altered state - with no Grace in hearing range, they have a completely reasonable response.

“If anything bad happened to Grace, I’m going to pull you apart segment by segment, eat you, and shit you out, you motherfucking-”

“Yeah, you tell ‘em, babe!” Rocky cheered, holding a big boulder over their head. Grace’s home was a mess. The coffee table was broken completely in half. Grace’s spell notes were scattered all over the den and that stuff did not come cheap. They had to invent paper that Grace could write on so that he could take notes and study his magic shit. When Grace first described paper, the Eridian scientists thought Oh, it’s just matted fibers? We’ve got a mineral that might suit your needs!

That mineral was asbestos. That kills Grace.

Speaking of killing Grace…

“Wait, wait, wait!” The strange Eridian said. They- they’re in Rocky’s ball! The one that Rocky made at Tau Ceti so they could move into the Hail Mary. Oh! Oh! This guy is one of those psycho fans, aren’t they? Laika’s body was beneath the Eridian, almost being crushed by the ball and Rocky is going to shove a bomb up this guy’s hole! Their voice sounded so…weird. Uncomfortably toneless and flat. “Rocky, Adrian, it’s me! Grace!” Laika slips out from underneath the stranger and boops her perfect little snoot against the surface of the xenonite.

What the fuck?

“What the fuck?”

“Rocky! Language!” Okay, well, that is a very Grace-like thing to say. But obviously Rocky and Adrian aren’t believing this. How on Erid could this Eridian be Grace?

“I learned a new spell!”

Oh.

“It’s called ‘yiasnnlksadkasasdk’. Oh. Hmmm. I don’t have a word for it in Eridian, obviously. It’s a spell that lets you change shape. It took a while to get the spell to recognize an Eridian as a ‘shape’.” The Eridian, who may or may not be Grace, lifts two of their arms to do air quotes and then somehow falls over onto their back, their arms scrambling in the air and all pointed in the singular, same direction. Laika startles back as the ball starts to rock back and forth uncontrollably.

Holy shit, this thing might actually be Grace.

“Noooooo,” the Eridian whines. “I just got myself upright.”

Adrian and Rocky turn to each other. Adrian nods. Rocky sets the boulder back on the ground.

“Tell me something only Grace would know, command,” Rocky said.

“On the third year of our trip back to Erid, I crocheted a little doll of you out of string that was meant to be a component for unseen servant and I carried it around everywhere. You got jealous when Laika started sleeping with it and threw it out of the airlock.”

“Okay, okay, okay, you can stop.” Rocky can feel Adrian turning their full attention to them because they know without a doubt that Laika wasn’t the only thing Rocky was jealous of. “That’s Grace,” Rocky confirms.

Rocky and Adrian help Grace right himself. “This is really disorienting,” Grace said, his voice still nauseatingly flat. Rocky almost wants to break the translation software out after its years of disuse just so they can hear a human voice saying Grace’s words. “I really don’t know what I was expecting, but I’m learning so much! The paper I write about this experience is probably going to be my greatest contribution to science and magic!” Probably not, but Rocky does not have the time to deal with Grace’s baffling underestimation of himself. “I really wanted to go to your house, but this spell only lasts an hour and I barely understand how to use my limbs. Do you think we could go for a walk on the beach?”

It’s quite possibly the longest, shortest walk Rocky’s ever gone on in their life. It takes several minutes to even leave Grace’s home. The doorway is just big enough to fit Rocky’s ball, but only barely. There’s something extremely uncanny about this Eridian Grace. Thank the Gods this spell only lasts an hour. Rocky doesn’t think they can take much more of this.

Because they can’t even say that Grace is walking like a newborn. Grace moves in his new body like nothing Rocky’s ever seen before. He keeps trying to get up on two legs and falling over, which then leads to the ball getting knocked off course. It also doesn’t help that Grace has no sense of direction, causing Adrian to take the lead while Grace and Rocky follow behind.

“The 360-degree sense is something I need to get used to,” Grace yaps. Laika sticks close by, but not too close. She’s been accidentally run over by Rocky’s ball enough times to be careful around the thing. “When I first transformed, I had to look through Laika’s eyes so I could orient myself. I know this doesn’t really mean anything to you, but I’m mostly yellow. The same color as my hair.” Of course that would be the feature that Grace would pay the most attention to.

“How did you get into Rocky’s ball, question?” Adrian asks. “And how are we going to get you out? You said this spell only lasts an hour? If you transform back into yourself, you are going to get crushed.”

“Don’t worry,” Grace says. “Laika is holding the timer.” At this, Laika turns and shows off the stopwatch around her neck that was hidden by her fur.

“What a good girl!” Rocky cheers. She preens.

“It’ll go off once I have ten minutes left. And to answer your question about how I got in here, I used one of the rapid emergency PPE suits. They were stretchy enough that I could fit into one as a human and then when I transformed, Laika was able to shove me into Rocky’s ball.”

Ah, that makes sense. Any workers or scientists who have to enter the dome of course have to wear the xenonite suits that Rocky designed, but in case of emergency, they also came with the rapid emergency suits. They provided minimal protection, but they could be deployed extremely quickly. When he first learned of the suits, Grace likened the material to cellophane on Earth in terms of thickness and flexibility. Really, all they did was limited contact with oxygen until someone could get help or they could enter a safe environment.

“I assume your plan was just to use another rapid PPE right before you transformed back.”

“Bingo!” Grace says, which is a reference to some game that Rocky doesn’t really understand, but typically means that someone just said something correct. “Actually, I know I said I wanted to go for a walk, but I’m exhausted. Can we just sit here?”

“Of course.” So then Rocky, Adrian, Laika, and now Grace all ‘loaf’ down to experience the waves crash against the shore. Well, they have to help Grace figure out how to arrange his limbs, but he figures out loafing successfully enough.

“It’s like learning how to walk all over again,” Grace complains. “Or maybe it’s worse? It’s not like I remember learning how to walk, but I imagine having all the limbs I’m supposed to have made it a little easier. Is this really how you guys see the world? It’s incredible, but I’m a little overstimulated. Oh wow!” Grace exclaims, probably at something he noticed that all Eridians take for granted.

“It’s a shame it only lasts an hour,” Adrian says. “There are so many parts of Erid that you can’t see because you’re so weak and fragile.”

“Wow. Okay. Even though I kind of understand what you mean a little better, it still stings a little when you say it.”

“But you can cast this spell again, right? You can come to our house next time!” Rocky says. “And now you can finally fully appreciate Adrian’s art!”

“Yeah! And I want to try Eridian food!”

Rocky and Adrian both recoil. It took a long time for Rocky to be okay - not comfortable, just okay - with eating around Grace, but Grace’s unselfconscious relationship with food is still jarring.

“Oh, right. Sorry. Well, the food discomfort is a cultural thing, not a biological one. I knew that, but it’s nice for that to be confirmed.”

They start making more plans for what they can do with Grace. It doesn’t take too long to get to the city center. If they time it out properly, they probably could catch a play or some improv show.

Grace was delighted to learn that Eridians had improv, but when everyone has an eidetic memory, you really begin to value new and novel experiences.

“I wonder if my memory will retain this sharpness once I turn back,” Grace muses. “But probably not. It’s wild how I can already notice these differences in my memory. It’s only been 44 minutes, but my memory of just after casting the spell is remarkably clear. It’s like I can go back in time in my mind to when it actually happened. Is this…is this how it’s like for you all the time?” Rocky can’t really understand Grace’s tone of voice anymore so he has to read his emotions from his body language, but even that is difficult. Grace is attempting to translate his human body language to his Eridian body. He tilts his full body around like it’s his head. He’s somehow chosen to think of two of his legs as his arms and is fidgeting with the sand with them.

Rocky slumps into Adrian’s side. “Yeah,” Rocky says, suddenly feeling very heavy. “Yeah, it is.”

“Oh.” Grace shuffles, another coincidence in how humans and Eridians express awkwardness. “Um.”

But the timer goes off and they have to get Grace ready to turn back into himself.

“This is a lot easier with three people to help me instead of just Laika,” Grace chuckles. Laika huffs and has a look on her beautiful, adorable little face that says Yeah, I told you so.

And then, when one second turns into the next, Grace is back.

He takes off the PPE and stretches his arms above his head, groaning in that perfectly Grace, perfectly human way.

“Jeeze,” Grace sighs. “That certainly was something.”

“Welcome back, Grace!” Rocky says.

“He’s been here this whole time, statement.” Adrian says.

“Yeah, but it was different.”

“When should I get tickets for the improv show, questions?”

“I don’t think I’m going to be doing that spell again for a little while.” Grace says, summoning his unseen servant to help him clean up the mess he left while he was in the ball. “And I think I’m gonna need a couple more practice runs. I guess I never really thought about how that would work. I’ve cast Polymorph before and when I was a fox or a mouse or a bird, I was able to move pretty naturally, but I guess the spell wasn’t originally designed to let you transform into a sentient creature.”

“You can turn into a fox, question?” Luckily, Grace’s ears cannot hear most of the frequencies Rocky just spoke with. If he did, or if he was actually an Eridian, he would recognize it as the tones used to speak to babies.

“Yeah. Oh! This means I can show you Earth animals! Gods, this spells is going to open up so many possibilities! And I guess,” Grace smiles kind of wryly, “This place will be turning into even more of a zoo.”

“Uhhhhh,” Adrian says, probably thinking along the same line as Rocky. One of the traits of the Sacred Thrum is that They can take many forms, some of them strange and fantastical creatures that exist only in the imagination. “You know, if you’re not comfortable with that, you don’t have to show the people anything.”

“Yes yes yes!” Rocky jumps in. “You don’t have to perform for anyone! We don’t need to save anything anymore! Magic and science should just be fun now!”

Rocky can hear Grace sitting on that idea for a moment. Then, after a second moment, Grace's face breaks out into a smile. “Yeah, bud, I guess you’re right.”

They help Grace clean up for a little bit and chat about their days before Grace says, “Welp, time for me to eat!”, which is Rocky and Adrian’s cue to skedaddle out of there.

They rush out of the dome and to their home faster than usual because they need to debrief.

'Cause, well, somehow, Grace was quite possibly…one of the most attractive Eridians Rocky has seen in real life?

He had a lovely shape, not too big or small and mostly symmetrical with just one or two irregularities that make him interesting to listen to. He has a good texture, sound bounces off of him in a lovely way. His voice is very…nice, even with how emotionless it sounded. It’s smooth with some nice grit to it. He could be an actor! A star!

They, well, they’ve talked about romance and beauty standards before, just for cultural exchange, curiosity purposes. Grace never mentioned having romantic partners besides that one ex of his who is now with that horrible, disgusting Mark thing. Rocky point blank asked Grace if he was ugly and he stammered,” Oh, I don’t know. I think I’m normal looking? I don’t know. That’s not why I don’t have a mate or anything. I’m just not interested in all that…stuff.” And, well, it’s not like Rocky would be able to tell one way or the other if Grace was appealing to other humans. Rocky’s best friend is a leaky space blob alien thing. They don’t care if Grace is ugly. That’s Rocky’s best friend!

So here’s the thing, right? Because the same is true for Grace. He has no clue what Eridian beauty standards are and if he did, they would be meaningless to him. He doesn’t seem to have enough control over the spell to make specific adjustments to his appearance. So, did the magic…translate what Grace’s features would look like as an Eridian?

And here’s the other thing. Eridian!Grace is kind of…weird. There’s something deeply uncanny about him. His voice, his body language, it’s all so wrong. He doesn’t act like an Eridian at all. He acts like some entity was taking control over an Eridian’s body and puppeting it. Which, Rocky guesses, is exactly what was happening.

Still, in spite of all of that, Grace is…wow.

WHAT THE FUCK IS ROCKY SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THIS INFORMATION, QUESTION?!!! HELLO???

Eh, that is up to you to decide, our child.

NOT NOW, GODS!!