#mycreature

I'm assuming you're talking about the lizard in my profile pic. If so, the answer is yes!! Her name is Penelope, and she's a bearded dragon. Pics and videos below

so, in project hail mary, moreso in the book than the movie but it's still a logical extension of the movie, there's that whole "panspermia" plot thread going on. that idea that all known life, regardless of the planet that that life now calls home, could go far enough back in the family tree and find some common ancestor.

we take this and we wring it for all it's worth.

astrophage is a microbe that consumes electromagnetic radiation, such as that expelled from a star. when grace is figuring out what they are and how they work, the only time it's possible to see into an astrophage cell is when it's dead- implying that the pitch-darkness is something it only does when alive, presumably (at least as far as I can tell) as some sort of side effect of consuming as much electromagnetic radiation as it can manage.

okay, you got that?

now imagine some kind of being that could trace its family tree back all the way to astrophage, but that has, in addition to eating any light that comes by and making itself pitch-black, also specialized in a specific range of electromagnetic radiation: the electrical impulses, flashes of light, and so on from the minds of sapient beings experiencing fear.

it can't really do much to peoples' bodies, though for the purposes of extending how long its prey can create fear to feed on, i might make it able to put some of that energy back into its prey's bodies so they don't die immediately of like. starvation or whatever. but the vast majority of the Creature is devoted to getting into its prey's minds and devising a nightmare that won't kill the prey immediately and will cause the steady (or immediate!) ramping up of their fear.

for grace and rocky, their worst nightmares- or at least, their best-tasting nightmares by vaguely-eldritch fear-eating #MyCreature standards- are "what if none of the events that happened at tau ceti actually happened, i'm still alone on my ship, and the alien ship that shows up is hostile to me with The most body-horror space alien known to mankind/eridiankind out for my blood bc fuck me i guess." because they're grace and rocky and im lobve them, they will manage to figure out this isn't reality, shatter their nightmares, and escape…eventually. however, they'll still need to Physically Get Out before they can consider this incident over and done with, with a nonzero chance of running into some other person who got preyed upon by #MyCreature and is living through their own nightmare world in what equates to #MyCreature's digestive tract.

which is where we get potential for an iron lung xover.

it's gotta be pretty big. probably multicellular. for my original non-xover idea i needed to have it large enough to envelop the entire hail mary, but for the purposes of bloodymary xover fun times in space, it would also need to get its nonexistent appendages on at least simon. the details of How this would happen are still fuzzy to me because i do Not want to be the dude who goes "i havent even seen canon but im still gonna screw around w/fundamental parts of it w/o knowing the full importance of literally anything," but the end result would be that at least the events of iron lung, with the blood ocean and the creepy-ass eel and the welded-shut submarine, would be simon's "i got preyed upon by #Rho'sCreature and all i got was this severe PTSD and the weirdest body dysmorphia known to man" nightmare world.

which grace and rocky come across during their own escape from #MyCreature and yank him out of. >:)

i even thought of why a Creature that feeds mainly on the fear of sapient beings doesn't just go around eating planets all the time: would you sate a craving for honey by going out into the woods and finding a wild beehive and just jamming your arm into that thang? no! because the teensy weensy little creatures that live there and make the tasty food would mobilize to try and kick your ass and it would just suck extremely bad even if they aren't actually able to Kill You! you wouldn't even be able to enjoy your meal. sure you could squash some bees but there's just too many that'll attack you to bother with trying to squish 'em. it's best to go find your honey where you won't get swarmed. one or two bees at a time, or even a bunch that are completely contained, are significantly easier to deal with.

Be unfortunate if something were to

Eat it