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(This is in honour of all the incredible mer!Simon/eel!Simon art I've been seeing around — gotta love me a good mer!AU. I wanted to try making something that was a mer!AU but still fit into Iron Lung's canon, lets see how this goes...)

The man introduces himself as Captain David, but he stumbles over the title like it's new to him, and even Grace can tell he wears command like a hand-me-down jacket that's a touch too big. He's at times friendly and chatty, other times completely closed off. He seems to have no idea how the Hail Mary got here, either, just says that one minute they were the only ship orbiting the moon, and the next their sensors had picked up another ship nearby. Grace has his theories, each more wild than the last, but he keeps them to himself for now. All he knows is that one minute he'd been on Erid, preparing himself for another day of teaching pebbles, the next he'd been back on the Hail Mary, orbiting around a strange moon in a starless void.

He's very proud to say that his panicked breakdown only lasted a total of thirty minutes, thank you very much.

Grace feels himself go a bit pale when Captain David confirms that, yes, that red smear across the surface of the moon below them is a vast ocean of human blood. In a momentary lapse of his more stern demeanour, David admits that if it had been up to him, he would have taken his crew and ship and left the moon AT-5 far behind. Several former crew had lost their lives gaining evidence that AT-5 was more dangerous than it first appeared, and that there were monsters lurking in its depths that preyed on anyone who dared travel below the churning waves. But despite this evidence, the council that David serves has apparently ordered his ship to remain in orbit to study the moon further, so they've been forced to stay.

The only good thing, David says with a laugh that contains no humour at all, is that the worst of the monsters just recently washed up on one of the moon's shores, dead. He shows Grace pictures of a massive creature, with teeth longer than Grace is tall. Its body is so long that it rivals the Hail Mary herself, its tail a horrifying mass of human limbs where fins should be. Wrapped around its entire length, however, is a colossal tree, its roots twining through the monster's body while the trunk emerges straight through its skull. The tree's limbs spread wide over the rocky beach that the monster has washed up on, its branches full of leaves despite the fact that the moon should lack any atmosphere.

Then David explains that, somehow, the area around the tree has air, and Grace is suddenly having flashbacks to his first encounters with xenonite. Up is down all over again, apparently.

He eventually figured that stuff out, though, and his curiosity starts to take hold of him. Everything about this situation is just so strange. David and his crew have been studying AT-5 for months now, but with their limited supplies and equipment, they haven't had much luck with sorting anything out. Grace, however, has all of the Hail Mary's considerable lab space at his disposal. He needs to figure out a way to get back home, of course, but maybe he can solve the mystery of this strange moon and all of its oddities while he's at it.

He and David come to an agreement, and just like that Grace finds himself the head of research on AT-5.

The moon is terrifying, but fascinating. Grace makes a few trips down to the surface, always in his EVA suit for protection, and takes a few samples of the rocky shore nearest to the tree and monster, and the ocean itself. To his disappointment, he finds nothing exciting about either. The rocks are just rocks, like anything he'd expect to find on the surface of a rocky moon. The ocean sample is more interesting, in that it's absolutely human blood, but when he runs several tests on it, nothing particularly notable happens. The only thing worth reporting back to David is that the blood is apparently pretty clean and healthy, since it came back negative on every medical test that the Hail Mary had available. Not that he'd advise using it for anything.

David just shakes his head and tells Grace that he just figured out more about the blood ocean in two days than his crew has been able to discover in the past 2 months. They definitely appreciate any help he can give.

And despite the grim setting, Grace actually finds himself getting kind of sucked into the research. He still desperately wants to go home to Erid, but the blood ocean is fascinating. He hasn't been this enthralled by a subject since he was frantically studying astrophage, and this time he doesn't have the end of the world looming over his shoulders while he works. He can just run experiments to his heart's content, and David is happy to step back and let Grace do whatever he thinks is necessary. Things are actually going kind of well, all things considered.

There's only one problem.

Every time Grace goes down to the surface to take samples, he feels like he's being watched.

It doesn't matter where he touches down. Most of the time he lands near the tree (which he still needs to get a sample of, but he's been focusing on the ocean itself for now), but even when he lands elsewhere, he can feel eyes on him as he works. It doesn't make any sense — he always comes down alone, the rest of the crew remaining up on the tow ship to pull him up once he's finished — but the sensation is unmistakable. However, no matter how often he looks around, trying to catch the source of the feeling, he never sees anything.

He's starting to think he's losing it. Maybe this whole thing is one massive hallucination after he ate a batch of bad meburgers. Maybe he's lying on a bed in the human clinic on Erid, Armando trying to keep him alive while several frantic Eridians try to keep Rocky from losing his mind. Maybe he never even reached Erid at all, and everything thus far has been a long, slow decline of his brain as he starves to death on the Hail Mary.

And then one day, just as Grace is starting to think he really is going nuts, something changes.

He looks up from taking a sample of the dirt near one of the tree's roots, and spots a pair of eyes watching him from just above the waves.

Naturally, Grace screams.

The comms team on the tow ship start to demand if he's okay, but Grace is too stunned to speak. For a moment, right after he'd screamed, the eyes had vanished back under the surface, but a second later they'd popped back up again. Grace finds himself staring in gobsmacked amazement as what looks like a human head and shoulders appears, floating above the bloody waters. Something about the person seems off, but from this distance Grace can't see them clearly enough to know what it is. Still, despite the growing panic on the comms, Grace starts inching towards the shore, trying to get closer to the mysterious person in the ocean.

They start coming closer as well.

Grace is maybe ten feet away from where the bloody waves are lapping against the rocks when he manages to finally see the person in more detail. He stumbles to a stop when he spots the jagged needle-like teeth running up the left side of their face, the flared fins where their ears should be. They swim close enough that he can see something arching up above the blood behind him, and it takes him a few seconds to realize that it's a tattered dorsal fin, running between wicked-looking spines that look sharp enough to pierce even Grace's EVA suit. For a quick second, something long and sinuous splashes through the waves where the person's legs should be.

Their eyes stay locked on Grace the entire time as they approach, and Grace can't help but feel that he's looking into the eyes of a predator.

Grace finally speaks to the comm crew, but it's to hysterically ask if the data they'd gotten from their fallen crewmates happened to mention any merfolk living in the blood ocean? A stunned silence is his only response.

That's probably a 'no', then.

He's hastily dragged back up to the tow ship. Thankfully he had the presence of mind to snap a quick image of the mer-person before he was pulled away. Back on the ship, David demands to know what happened, but Grace can only wordlessly show him the picture he took.

David stares at it with his mouth hanging open for a full minute. But for some reason, Grace can't help but think that his surprise seems different from the rest of them. That there's something like recognition on David's face. He mouths a word at one point, but Grace can't hear what he said.

Either way, a new mystery has presented itself.

Suddenly Grace has found something even more fascinating than the blood ocean to study. He desperately starts working on when he can go down again, how he might be able to coax the mer-person to come back, and what kind of samples he might like to take.

Sorry, Rocky. Grace will come home eventually, he promises. He just has some big science to do first.

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