Chapter Text
Rocky and Grace are on their way to Erid. Grace only has 2 weeks of coma slurry left.
Rocky’s asleep and Grace is “watching”. What he’s really doing is playing minesweeper on the laptop. He’s bored. There’s nothing to do when Rocky’s asleep.
“Mep mep mep mep,” Grace says random stuff to combat the silence.
Suddenly alarms blare. Grace runs to the control room.
“Okay, Mary, what do you have for me today?” Grace asks, exasperated.
Mary says something’s clinging onto the hull. Great. An EVA.
Grace turns off the engines, quickly puts on his suit, and heads into the airlock.
He leaves and spots a… creature(?) grabbing at a handle, shivering. It’s yellow with two hands not attached to the rest of it (how?!), two stumps on one side of its body, an apron, and a strange blue oval on its face(?). It’s maybe 3-3.5 feet long on its longest axis.
It holds its free hand and makes 2 symbols. A circle and a peace sign. What could that mean? Well a peace sign probably actually means two… zero two? What could that mean- oh it’s O2.
Grace quickly comes to this conclusion that this thing breathes oxygen. Hopefully.
He carries it into the airlock and slowly pressurizes it to see if this thing will implode under one atmosphere of pressure or it’s not nitrogen resistant. As soon as there was a decent amount of air, the thing took a deep inhale and sighed, catching its breath.
“Thank you, I thought I was a goner,” It said somehow. Also, on top of being an alien that spoke English, it spoke with a weird eccentric kind of regional American accent that he couldn’t quite pinpoint.
”AAAAAAAAA!!!” Grace yelped, dropped the thing, and put his hands up.
It screamed back.
”HOW CAN YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?!” Grace screamed at it.
”HOW CAN YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?!” It asked back.
“I’M AMERICAN! YOU’RE AN ALIEN! I’M THE ONE WHO SHOULD BE SPEAKING ENGLISH HERE!” Grace cried.
”NO! YOU’RE THE ALIEN- wait,” it seemed to dawn with realization “You’re the thing Lime warned us about. YOU’RE ANOTHER ALIEN THAT’S REAL AND LIKES TO KILL!”
”What’s Lime- AAH!” Grace’s questioning turned into screaming as it pounced and clawed at his face like a cat without claws. Well his helmet but his face is in his helmet so close enough.
”I PROMISE I DON’T LIKE TO KILLLLL!” Grace cried (he cries out things an awful lot).
“Oh, you don’t?” It said, getting off his face and proceeding to just… float around, “Why didn’t you just say that?”
”When you save aliens from dying in the vacuum of space you kinda assume that they know you have good intentions?” Grace responded.
“Oh. Well sorry about that,” it shrugged, “Anyways, I’m cold and possibly suffering from radiation poisoning, can I go inside?”
They go inside. Grace takes off his suit. Rocky is still asleep. That’s for the better. This new friend seems to be awful paranoid about killer aliens. Grace begins to drape a blanket over its shoulders before pausing.
”Wait, blankets work on you, right?” Grace asked.
“Yeah? Why wouldn’t they?” It responded. Grace placed the blanket around them and didn’t answer its question.
Grace was getting real tired of calling this thing “it”.
”Hey, uhm, would you have a name?” Grace reckoned that probably was a phrase that he could use.
”Yeah. It’s yellow,” Yellow said.
”I’m Dr. Ryland Grace, but call me Grace,” Grace said.
Does this thing have a gender? It seems… really human so maybe?
”Uhh… you got a gender?” Grace asks.
”What’s a… ‘gender’? I don’t got any, sorry,” Yellow replied.
So that’s a no. They/them pronouns, Grace guesses.
Grace has a million questions right now, but he guesses he should probably get Yellow acclimated to the ship and make sure they’re comfortable and what not. Annoying. Whole new species’ anatomy to dedicate his life to studying and he has to do a bunch of trust building first. It’s not that he doesn’t want his new friend to be comfortable but… he’s also really curious about this guy’s biology. He can’t even tell if they have fur or an exoskeleton or skin.
“Are you feeling okay? Can I get you anything to eat?” Grace pauses,” Can I get something for you to eat? I don’t know what you can eat…”
”Oh, no, I stole like half the supplies to make pizza from my old ship before they ejected me out of spite. I can make like… 500 pizzas with all I took,” Yellow replied.
How?! How do you carry the ingredients for 500 pizzas with you?! The weight alone… Geez! And where? Yellow doesn’t seem to have any carrying space…
”I- just how?!” Grace asks.
In response, Yellow opens a backpack that now suddenly has straps around their body and pulls out some dough, premade sauce, cheese, and salt. There seems to be quite a bit of what he hopes is flour in there as well.
”Pocket dimension backpack,” They explain.
Grace isn’t sure if he wants to know how that works. Who is he kidding, of course he wants to know, now just sadly isn’t the time for questions so he just makes a bewildered face and moves on.
Yellow makes a yawning sound. Grace isn’t quite sure where that sound came from, but okay.
”I’m getting tired,” Yellow says tiredly, “I’m gonna go to bed.”
”I’ll watch,” Grace says off instinct. He prepares for Yellow to look(? he’s still not sure if they have eyes or the oval is the eye or what) at him strangely, but they look at him like this is a normal thing can do.
”Can you turn out the lights?” They ask.
Okay. They can probably see. Good to know.
”Alright,” Grace says, turning off most of the lights. He needs a bit of light to know when Rocky wakes up.
He probably should be checking if those pizza ingredients are safe for him to eat so he can stop eating the taumoeba coma-slurry mixture, but he wants a break before Rocky wakes up.
to be continued.