#tl;dr

I spent a lot of my life post puberty always feelings.... off. I never felt like I fully fit in with other women. I always did the wrong thing, said the wrong thing, was too boisterous, too rough, too much. I never felt fully confident in feminine clothing, no matter how much I pushed myself, how much of my skin I expose, how much glitter and sparkle and I plastered on my face. It never felt right.

When I was about 14, I tried using he/him pronouns for the first time. I only ever told one of my sisters, who has and always will be a proud and out lesbian. She supported me immediately, and this emboldened me to start wearing masculine clothes, "acting masculinely" (if there is such a thing lol), and participating in typically masculine activities. Things were alright for a while, until the fear set in. The deep fear of being judged, of never being taken seriously, of never getting to be a "real man", of being hurt by everyone that wanted to hurt me. And it scared me so much, I forced myself back into the closet.

I took this part of who I am, this part that felt genuine joy from being around other boys my age, being "one of the guys", experiencing manhood as an outsider, the euphoria I felt when I managed to get my large chest to look extra flat, and shoved it so far down inside of myself and refused to ever look at it again.

Then COVID happened. We were all locked inside with nothing to do but think and scroll on TikTok. It was the peak of the E-girl aesthetic. I saw the attention these girls got, the praise, the romantic attention, and I figured if I could do that, I would finally be happy. So I tried it. I wore dark clothes, dark hair, dark makeup. I dressed provocatively, showed my body off like some prize, sexualized myself in an attempt to make up for the fact that I still never felt right as a woman. And it destroyed me.

It wasn't until after moving in with my husband that I felt I was nonbinary. It was the only thing that made sense to me at the time. I didn't fully relate to women outside of the trauma most of us experienced just existing in life. Most of my favorite characters, actors, and creators were male. I was terrified that this meant I was secretly a misogynist. I felt like I was "betraying the sisterhood". I worried that it would only be a matter of time before I betrayed my fellow woman and sold out for the approval of men.

Well, turns out I'm actually not a horrible person with internalized misogyny! I'm actually a man! I've always been a man! I related to men so much because I'm a man who's been looking for healthy male connections my entire life! I'm a man who spent his whole life struggling to find the right words to describe who he is! I'm a man who once was a little girl who couldn't keep her hands off the kitchen scissors to cut her hair. In a way I think little me always knew who I was inside. I feel like she knew that there was something off about her body that didn't match how she felt inside, but didn't let that stop her from trying to have fun.

I don't want to forget the little girl I was. This isn't a death, it's a pupation. I'm finally turning into the man I always was and I can not WAIT to fully embrace myself!

As Earth races to save itself, as Eva Stratt pulls Ryland Grace into her orbit along with so many others with the goal of saving their species, the residents of Earth are not the only beings invested in Earth's fate. You and I don't need to know the details of exactly who else is watching; in fact, it might be safer for us not to know. For the purposes of this tale, all that matters is that they are very powerful, but they are not permitted to outright deliver Earth's salvation on a silver platter -- Earth must stand or fall by its own merits.

But they can put a finger on the scales. Just a little nudge. Depending on how things turn out, no human might ever even notice anything amiss.

In this universe, when Rocky and Grace first meet and start sharing information, Rocky grills Grace for much longer with questions about Grace's ship. Something about it seems to... almost unnerve him? Grace just chalks that up to the whole idea of "traveling in an aluminum ship filled with oxygen" for an Eridian, and carries on.

Much of the plot of PHM as we know it does not change. Rocky acts a little twitchier when he first moves into the Hail Mary, and he sets up one or two odd-looking monitoring instruments inside his xenonite enclosure that Grace can't make heads or tails of from what he can see from outside. But in the end, Grace and Rocky are both aboard the Hail Mary and headed for Erid, modified Taumoeba and all.

One 'evening' by the Hail Mary's clock, Grace and Rocky get into an argument. The details aren't especially important; the two have been friends and shipmates for long enough now to figure out pretty quick that the disagreement is just a product of stress over Grace's steadily-decreasing food stores. Grace had spent the whole 'day' in fruitless attempts to coax new generations of Taumoeba into producing anything remotely like a vitamin or human-essential mineral, and he is just grumpy grumpy grumpy.

As the argument is dying down, one of those strange little devices sitting on Rocky's side of the xenonite walls suddenly goes nuts. Rocky instantly hurries over to prod and fuss over the little machine that's rattling and whistling and shrieking at him, while Grace claps his hands over his ears. He has no idea how that sound can get through the xenonite and still be so piercing that it feels like it's driving a spike right into the side of his head.

Seeking a bit of distance from that terrible noise, Grace shuffles quickly out of the lab and makes his way into the Hail Mary's storage compartments. The sound is a little more muffled in there -- enough to be bearable. As he lowers his hands and looks around, he reflects that maybe he hasn't been quite as organized in here as he should have been. Rocky's xenonite tunnel system only extends into a small corner of this area, which Rocky mostly uses for his own storage -- so although Rocky might badger Grace about keeping the lab and the dormitory tidy, Grace's part of this space receives no such bossy oversight.

Just as Grace goes to sit down cross-legged on the floor and wait out whatever Rocky's instrument is doing, something odd catches his eye. Okay, so maybe he's a bit messy when left to himself, but he DOES at least know what's supposed to be in here. It is, after all, rather important to the joint "Get To Erid" mission that Grace keep track of his vital supplies. And that box, that one right there? It looks just like every other storage box around it, but Grace would swear that it wasn't there before.

Grace walks over and unseals the box. He flips open the lid, picks out one item from within, and stares.

This container is packed to the brim with rectangular jars full of all kinds of vitamin gummies.

Slowly, Grace feels his legs give out beneath him and he drops to the floor, eyes darting between the jar in his hand and the inside of the box in disbelief.