An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Rating: General Audiences
Archive Warning: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Category: Gen
Fandoms: Project Hail Mary (2026), Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir, Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary - All Media Types
Relationship: Ryland Grace & Ryland Grace's San Francisco Students
Characters: Ryland Grace, Ryland Grace's San Francisco Students
Additional Tags: Angst, Hurt No Comfort, Drabble, Inspired by Music, Songfic, Memorials, Ryland Grace Haunts the Narrative, do you ever think how his students loved him?, Implied/Referenced Character Death, but he's not actually dead but the school thinks he is, no beta we die like dubois and shaprio and li jie and ilyukhina, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Lowercase
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
a lot of human gods and mythology center around the sky and the stars, moon and sun and star gods, wishing upon stars, these kinds of things, but eridians cant see stars, so i wonder what their mythology is based on?
we know Erid has seas, so maybe most of their mythos and legends are based on that? they cant swim, so large bodies of water must be terrifying and facinating to them the way the endless night sky is to us
the phm book rules because if youre paying attention rocky is just oozing ptsd at every turn (slaps the top of his carapace) this bad rock can fit so much trauma in him
No, actually, I'm taking it out of the tags: can we talk about Rocky trying to send Grace back to Earth after Grace says that taking Rocky to Erid means that he's going to starve to death? Can we talk about "Then you go home. Go home now. I wait here. Erid maybe send another ship someday."? Can we talk about this alien who is a part of a very social species, who is scared to sleep alone, who has spent 46 years alone stranded in space already, who has a mate maybe possibly he's not sure waiting him home, who is tasked with a mission to save his people, who is currently the only one able to save his people — and who is ready to risk it all so that his leaky space blob friend can go home safe? Can we talk about that? Because I'm losing my mind every time I think about that.
As funny as it is that rocky sees grace and complains about grace and humans in general as a terribly inefficient blob of water and fluids and teases constantly...
I REALLY think this should be a relatively rocky-exclusive perspective. He's watched this incredibly stressed human drip all kinds of tears and goos while they were floating around in space, and grace let down basically all of his guard around rocky personally, have discussed and understood eachother over life threatening missions. To Rocky, grace is Grace!
But grace does have some naturally combative push to him (see, the commentary that got him stonewalled in the scientific community in the first place, and being able to keep up with and handle Eva stratt) and further more, when an eridian is Not Rocky, i.e. not incredibly socially withdrawn and traumatized and maybe on their own spectrum of divergence before his ill fated mission and was very susceptible to latching onto a strange and unusual creature in just as much crisis as him...
That is to say. The eridians are going to meet grace with wildly different priorities and expectations. And what they're going to get is a human dangerously close to deaths door, and cornered and dying humans aren't always the most friendly or cooperative and friendly, even the Nicest Humans You Can Get.
So they get a dying human. And as tumblr loves to say, humans are terrifying to aliens, and fuck do they persist. Rocky's so-described "pathetic space blob" grace is terrifying to most eridians, especially the scientists studying him.
He drinks solvent and breaths combustion. Instead of simply dying when his body runs out of nutrients and calorie stores, it has begun to Digest Itself. His body is pumping chemicals they do not understand and every chemistry panel they run shows new levels of new chemicals and hormones. The human body replaces most of its cells constantly because even breathing, especially at a higher atmospheric pressure, is destroying their own lungs.
This thing "hears" things they cannot comprehend and he is unable to describe beyond "color" and "brightness" which are things you can not contextualize, and calls the strangest things beautiful. It has no entirely discernable traits you can understand ecologically as a predator- no armor, no weapons- and yet it eats meat and that is one of the many nutrients it needs to survive. You as a resident of erid do not have many creatures with "eyes" and so have no idea that the strongest mark of a predator is neither claw nor fang, but forward facing eyes, all the better to catch your prey, to meet a foe head on and fearless. You just know it "sees" and that it eats meat, and many other complicated things.
And in place of not receiving all those nutrients, it's body will litterally digest itself and keep going without them. Oh, this new chemical in it's latest blood panel allows it to ignore it's own pain to the point it won't realize it's injured. It can wake up from a dead sleep if you are too loud or too "brightness" around it. It speaks in an archaic graveling noise and is capable of imitating the strangest things, including a haunting near-vocalization of the eridani language of its own, which it calls "singing" and it does this at the strangest of times, when happy and when nervous. It is neither fast nor slow, but over time and observation, you realize this strange towering bipedal creature expends an entirely minimal amount of energy to walk, a process of controlled falling turned mobilization. You hypothesize that for lack of predatory weaponry like claws or sharp teeth, this thing simply evolved to follow you. To "see" you with it's forward facing eyes even in total stillness, total silence, and follow for as long as it takes: it won't spend much energy, and it won't starve waiting for you to exhaust. It'll start digesting *itself* while waiting for it's prey to lay down and have to sleep. It will "watch" you sleep with "eyes." You cannot wake up the way it can, and it will eventually catch up to you.
Also sometimes it cries excess amounts of saline rich solvent when you compliment it's latest research paper. Rocky calls him an idiot and the overseeing eridian scientists watch on with a sense of morbid eldrich horror. Right, right, just a "leaky space blob", sure.
They're kind of terrified of the future delegations with this planet. They litterally get to space by explosion. Not only are they scary- they're INSANE. And they're told the one they have is "a push over".
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
it's really really funny to me that eva stratt's list of crimes canonically includes piracy. do movie only fans know they tried to take her to court for pirating everything ever published and she ron swanson'd her way out of it. i need you all to know this.
eva stratt makes me so fucking unwell because. imagine months of making hard call after hard call because you gotta, because someone's gotta, and this time it has to be you. and she keeps strong despite it, she keeps going. then the fucking pit in her stomach she must have felt, when she realized that Grace was her only option left. the horror of that realization. having to steel herself for the task. only to have him beg and plead and cry. her friend. how did she not throw up. how did she manage it. eva stratt the woman ever, how many people out there would have the sheer force of will, to be able to pull the trigger on their friend to save all humanity. and she didn't even know if it would work. she didn't know. for years. she didn't know if murdering her friend was worth the gamble. she just had to believe in him. fucking hell.
Just finished rereading Project Hail Mary again and it’s really interesting that Stratt is not a scientist. She’s an administrator, a politician, a leader. Not a scientist. She’s surrounded by some of the smartest people in the world, and they’re speaking in very science-y terms, and she has no idea what is going on. So what does she do? She turns to Grace and asks him to explain it to her. And he does, he explains the very complicated stuff in a way she, a non-scientist, can understand, because he’s a teacher. That’s what he does. It works very well from a narrative perspective because you, the reader, also don’t know what all this stuff means, so Grace explaining it to Stratt also explains it to you. But I also think maybe this is part of the reason Grace became so important to Project Hail Mary, why Stratt dragged him around everywhere- and she really does take him everywhere with her- not in spite of the fact that he’s a junior high school teacher, but because of it.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Stratt is the funniest bitch in the project on purpose. When she makes a joke she 100% meant to do that and she knows that it's the funniest shit ever, even if everyone is too intimidated to laugh.
Grace is the funniest bitch in the project by accident. He's used to being around kids so he's forgotten that filters are a thing and just says the first, dumbest joke that pops into his head. He has no control over it. Nobody makes him feel bad about it because they're afraid of what Stratt will do if they hurt his feelings.
Rocky is the funniest bitch on the Hail Mary because he's been alone in space for years and has probably gone insane, sane, and then insane again. He's 10-20% worried that Grace is just a vivid hallucination and treats him accordingly.
Apparently Eva Stratt at the end of the movie on the ship had a prison tattoo on her neck that meant something along the lines of "life without parole." So, parallel to Grace and Rocky's adventure, there was a whole subplot where Eva Stratt
- Was eventually trialed by governments of the world as a scapegoat and sent to prison
- She somehow BROKE out of said prison and currently commandeers a rogue paramilitary faction of Project Hail Mary loyalists who believe in her over world governments, who presumably are still hunting her down
- She currently is on the run and staying mobile on an ice breaker ship like some kind of james bond villain base (but you know, good) while STILL working on project hail mary the whole time
- Her rogue loyalist faction controlled enough resources they could go to space and collect the beetles Grace had sent. Alternatively, it was the world government that collected the beetles, and Stratt had a whole ass heist movie to steal them, which is why she had the little xenonite figure at the end of the movie. Either ways she was running circles around them.
