what.

autothysis

inspired by this post

Unfortunately for her students, she does adore her idol to bits. So for the class project, she had everyone working on a single output: a presentation on the life and works of Doctor Captain Ryland Grace.

Easy peasy, all forty of her students think. He's probably one of the most— if not the most— important man of modern times. They won't run out of material to pull information from. None had the hindsight that it might just be their downfall.

Forty students split up: a group for Dr. Ryland Grace, the molecular biologist. A group for Mr. Ryland Grace, the science teacher. And a group for Cpt. Ryland Grace, the astronaut.

Already the students are starting to see absurd shit with this man. Dr. Grace stripped of his title in the academe for calling a fellow academic a 'staggering waste of carbon'— woah???. Wait, what else did he say? 'You don't need water for life' um okay. 'The goldilocks zone isn't a requirement either... Well at least he got that right? Yeah, he should. He kinda discovered it. Really? Yeah but it's under the Cpt. Grace part of the presentation.

The second group seemed to enjoy their version of Mr. Grace to research on. He seemed like a chill guy after his stint with his infamous dissertation. There's barely any information on the internet though. The kids reach out to the other students under Mr. Grace, with Ms. Olivia's help of course. They get the email replies. Mr. Grace loves his solar system models, it's how we were taught of the Petrova line. Aww. He also loved his demonstrations. He did one with methane bubbles and forgot to soak his hand on cold water. The lab was out of order for a few weeks after that. Aww??? There are thirty-three more emails of various incidents.

Cpt. Ryland Grace's part has to be the most extensive one, so much that half of it falls under the Dr. Grace group of the presentation. He came back to being a Doctor! He... worked with the person he called a waste of carbon all those years ago. He named the star-eating bacteria. He bred the star-eating bacteria? They made it rocket fuel???

The third group is pulling their hair out. He made friends with a rock alien, old news. He built a translator for the said friend alien, old news. They went to a planet where astrophage gets eaten, cool. They literally surfed that planet's atmosphere, with the Hail Mary as humanity's biggest surfboard. What. He did all that with amnesia. What.

At this point the kids are reams deep in paper. Wikipedia calls the guy the Father of Astrobiology. Xenobiology. Xenolinguistics. Light-Year Travel. First Contact. First man to ingest an alien. What. There is no way this is all fitting in a powerpoint.

Except, he looks around. And sees that he's.. on a beach. A rocky beach (sand would've hurt less, probably), but a beach nonetheless. Is he in Earth? Maybe a planet similar to it. He dusts himself and tries to stand up. Woah. It's a little heavier here, or is he just tired from the chase?

So he's probably in a weird version of Earth with twice the gravity, and his portal device is broken. He doesn't spot any hostiles from anywhere around him though, and he takes this moment of reprieve to pull up his locator instead. And he reels back.

This planet is not supposed to hold life— or at least, human life. But he's not suffocating from ammonia, nor is he burning to a crisp for the past.. five minutes he's been here. He must be mistaken, he must've hit his head, his device must've been shaken from the fall and is betraying him.

There's a sound from behind him, a series of notes that sound like a whale call, a bird trill, and a low hum of a woodwind all at once. Stanford whips around with a gun poised, and the creature shrieks. A five-legged rock encased in a glass body suit. Two of its arms raised in surrender.

Stanford, of course, doesn't lower his gun just yet, although he plans to interrogate this creature who seems to be a relative of the beast that had been chasing him just a dimension ago. He doesn't get to pipe up a single question though.

There's a battle cry to his other side, and before he could turn to see what the hell it is, he's tackled to the ground with a very human man who has already grappled with the gun and chucked it towards the sea. Now he's armed with less of a gun and one more question: How in the multiverse is it possible for a human to be in a planet like 40 Eridani?

Cue shenanigans, nerding out, and multiversal/multidimensional/multiplanetary geniuses doing fuck all. Rocky, Stanford learns, is one hell of an engineer. With one hell of a material that would've been impossible to create anywhere else (Stanford ends up spending way too much time studying xenonite). But it did get him a nigh-indestructible components for the gun he lost— correction: thrown to the sea by the only other human around. Ryland Grace seems to be very apologetic about it. He doesn't apologize for defending Rocky though. Stanford thinks it's alright. For one, it's nice to know he's not the only human with an alien friend; and two, his gun got an upgrade. This is probably the best vacation he'll have before he inevitably has to leave.

Pirate Queen Stratt docks somewhere, sees this nerdy mofo walking down the street and decides "hmm. yeah. bring him in." And they drag poor seasick Ryland where there's no land in the horizon for miles. But this nerd is so obsessed with the stars and they need a new navigator after the one they had fell overboard or something. Ryland is good at it too. They feed him lemons. That's how you know he's important.

Anyway, Stratt is searching for something, as pirates do. But she's rich enough! Exactly, she wants something else. Something lives in the deep and Stratt wants her hands on it. Whatever it is, no ship has ever come out in one piece, and the area its eating ships at is growing in size. They'll come across it in one of the major trading routes at some point, and Stratt doesn't really like that. They go towards the storm.

At some point, Ryland Grace who has rarely left land and never really planned to, gets thrown around during a particularly rough patch. He gets thrown overboard, probably. Aw, shucks. There goes our second navigator. He's probably left to die, or so he believes. He can't even swim.

Grace in Erid with his students in a conga line.

Grace playing classical music and there's a group of Eridians going in a circle like those orchestra raves.

Grace trying to teach YMCA to the Eridians.