what

It's been months, stranded on this planet. 
At first, it seemed like a good idea to land on this pure white gray planet with the last drops of fuel, but this planet turned out to be fully covered in ashes, not snow. 
It is rather warm than cold. And the dry hot air makes breathing impossible. 

We should have picked a different planet, but we were too far off, they were all out of reach. 

I’m not even able to explore the surroundings, the layers of ash are too high to move far out and I am not risking to go out and just end up running out of air. 

Atleast I don't have to worry about Kiwi. 
No need of edible food or needing to hydrate much. 
Just no mind of it's own. It feels the same as talking to a corpse. 
Or a lavalamp in its case, but with the difference of it moving around, going out and retrieving rocks and stones like it used to do for the team it worked for. 

I tried retraining it, changing its behaviour to look for usefull things instead of useless rocks. 
I am no researcher, I can't use rocks for anything. 

I built a course made of empty cargo boxes, I hid things in them and tried to tell it to find it, I followed a book I found back then from the old ship on how to train these. 

Jellheads they called them, a bit of a stupid name but it describes them perfectly. 
Better than whatever I called them before. 

Training them is the same as training any regular animal. 
Reward them after they did a good job. In this case, rocks? 

It retrieves rocks constantly, carrying them in both Jell and backpack and just empties them infront of me. 
But if you give them back, it just stands tall and dissolves them like snacks.  

So I figured, rocks would work as a reward. 
But also as a bait. 

I kept hiding useful items like sticks, food, bottles of water beside the rocks. 
And if they brought me the rocks with the items, even if it's probably always accidental, I reward it.  

And at night I released it to explore the area in hopes to retrieve something useful.  

Some mornings, it retrieves bubbles instead of rocks, which is a sign that it worked, but also I figured out it was bubbles of air. 
Air? Clear clean air? 

Air! No idea how it could get a clean bubble of air, but it was a greater discovery than pebbles and rocks! 

Did it find an area with clean air, or did it maybe even filter the air with the jell? 
Either way it was great to have a better source of air, than constantly relying on filters and the slowly dying machinery. 

Though I hope we can get further with training, as it is the only hope I have. 

At times, it even lured out local fauna to the ship that were curious about kiwi. 
A big win at times, as they are mostly big and rich on meat and would last weeks until unedible. But at other times, those can be hostile ones. 

But one time I thought, it was the end for both of us, as I saw one gobble up kiwi with ease and came running towards the ship. 
But then just slowed down and fell over. And finally died shaking violently on the ground till its last moments. Horrible sight I guess, Kiwi also just crawled out and dropped off fragments like nothing happened. 

I sure won't plan on eating Kiwi, but also just hope the training pays off well enough to finally leave this cursed place.