Work Text:
"This place does have a panel in the wall for laundry." Grace explained, "It seems to just be storage. No cleaning thing hidden in there."
Rocky made Grace show him where, not taking Grace's assessment as necessarily accurate. He swarmed up to as close as he could get on his side of the xenonite wall.
"Storage," he confirmed. "Disgusting clothes leaked on, in there. No machinery behind."
Gross compacted clothes that Grace had been stuffing into that spot in the Hail Mary for months. He wasn't looking forward to salvaging those, but only had so many jumpsuits, fewer yet of those that properly fit.
In science fiction stories, Grace complained, one could just put dirty clothes into a slot in the wall. "Sometimes there aren't buttons! You just say "Clean this."" He was put out that the Hail Mary's systems had somewhere for him to put laundry without doing anything.
"Will you help me make the machinery?"
Rocky was eager to fix the problem. Preliminary to solving it, he insisted on endless (so it seemed to Grace) description of Earth's machines for the washing of clothes. Common dimensions, arrangement of buttons and little screens... Rocky wanted models to work from, clicking complaint at fallible human memory when Grace admitted he couldn't just make something at an accurate scale.
Grace sung a few, out of tune notes of the tinny song the ancient laundry machine in his dorm had played at the end of a cycle. The undignified things he did for his friend.
The obvious not-mechanical solution, to Grace's mind, was immersing the clothes in water and soap and shoving things around by hand. But Rocky wanted to build something, a mechanical aid to the task if not an entire washing machine. An engineering solution. Grace couldn't be surprised.