TUMBLR ADS ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO AUTO-PLAY AUDIO! THAT IS A BUG AND YOU SHOULD REPORT IT!
"This ad is auto-playing audio" is literally on the drop down menu for reporting an ad. Tumblr isn't trying to implement this! Don't protest this "new policy", cause it's not one.
They are not supposed to automatically redirect you without you clicking them, they are not supposed to cause a pop-up, they are not supposed to freeze your screen.
This is all bugs or malicious advertising which is also against tumblers ad policy. You should report all ads which do this.
Letās get rid of those horrible monopoly ads, together.
honestly? abandoned/on indefinite hiatus/very slow to update fics, even and especially AUs and longfics, are often some of my absolute favorites. and people who refuse to read them are missing out!
for one, stories donāt have to be finished to be enjoyable and worth reading. but also? an unfinished fic is a whole little universe that just keeps on existing in my head! their world stays alive for me in a way that doesnāt always happen with fics I binge read and finish, and i love it. i donāt know how their story ends, so it just keeps going! and even when those stories DO update and finish years later, theyāve been in my head for so long that they stick around like old friends.
so to any author with unfinished works: thank you SO much for sharing what you had without waiting to finish it first. youāre just giving me the gift of getting to spend more time with your story and your idea. if you do update again someday, iāll be delighted to jump back in! but if you donāt, just know a little piece of your world still lives on in a beloved tiny terrarium in my brain. i promise iām taking good care of it :)
i donāt normally ask this, but if this resonates with you please reblog it, so it can reach the authors who need to hear it <3
1/?, Coltlandgentry, bloodymary, adrocky. Fluff with some tiny amounts of angst and action.
POV Ryland Grace, Colt Seavers and Courtland Gentry.
~~~
Ryland Grace had not ever, and likely would never experience a pain just as much as reentering the atmosphere of Earth with very little heat shield.
Colt Seavers had never had a brother. Let alone two. Standard procedure, they had said, to alert the family when a returning astronaut came home. When they woke up. Colt Seavers had grown to be alone.
Courtland Gentry did what he had to, to save his younger brothers. He hoped they didn't remember him. He knew that Ryland was gone. Colt would never hear of him. And this was the price he paid for their happiness. And then, it was feasible again. Sierra Six could be Courtland.
~~~
Aka the coltlandgentry + bloodymary + human-ish adrocky + action but mostly fluff fic.
if we post too fast, we get accused of using ai (no, you don't know how fast someone can write. you don't even know if the "too-frequent-to-be-human updates" you see are something that have long been finished and sitting in an author's drafts for god knows how long. just because it's recently posted, doesn't necessarily always mean it's recently written too. a lot of writers finish the whole thing first before they start posting it chapter by chapter).
if we take "too long to update", we get people pressuring us to "update faster" even though fanfics are our hobbies and we write for ourselves first and foremost.
if our works are grammatically correct, we get accused of using ai (some of us just love correct grammars).
if our works are not grammatically correct, we get insulted/criticized (mind you, not everybody writes in their native language. kudos to writers who write in their second, or third, or fourth language ā I'm willing to bet a lot of people who criticize fanfics because of poor grammar can't even speak other languages besides english).
if our paragraphs are "too long and too detailed", we get accused of using ai.
if our paragraphs are "too short", we also get accused of using ai.
if we are autistic and we write in ways some deem "too robotic", we get accused of using ai.
some people just don't use their brains to think "ai was trained on human-made works, it was trained to look human-made. ai writes this way because the way it writes is the way real humans write ā real humans whose works it was trained to mimic". instead they somehow disregard this logic and think "hmmm this work looks ai-generated. I will engage in witch hunt, be a bully and harass writers whose works I don't vibe with".
after my post gauging interest and the second update on the server, I can now announce that the bloodymary server is opening its doors. woohoo!
we have spaces for discussion, fic, art, things you might not want to open at work, and general chatter. *please note that you have to be aged 16 or older to join and 18 or older to participate in the nsfw channels.
updated March 30 2026. finally sorted the Sci-Fi section! Heavily debating on separating the angst prompts because the list is so much longer than the rest of the batch.
PLEASE reblog if you use any of these/wanna share with your writer friends!!
Saw everyone hop on this trend and thought Iād try it too! Except I thought itād be fun to draw them in the style of saint statues. Also they look blurry because of a noise filter, so just click to see them clearer!
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 2/?
Fandom: Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary (2026), Iron Lung (2026)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: The Convict | Simon (Iron Lung)/Ryland Grace, Ryland Grace & Rocky
Characters: Ryland Grace, Rocky (Project Hail Mary), The Convict | Simon (Iron Lung)
Additional Tags: Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Touch-Starved, Recovery, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Getting to Know Each Other, No beta we die like nearly all of humanity
Summary:
It didnāt make sense.
It didnāt make any flipping sense.
Up is down, left is right, xenonās a gas, and apparently THEREāS ANOTHER FREAKING SPACESHIP IN TAU-CETI.
Tags: Post-Canon, Fix-It, First Meetings, Healing, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, First Kiss, Touch-Starved
Summary:
An Eridian mining crew find a human welded into a stranded ship on the surface of a moon. They bring him back to Erid, to the only other human they know.
ā
Something in Grace's chest flickered into life. He had buried it so long ago that he hardly knew what it was anymore, and so he took off his glasses and cleaned them on the edge of his cardigan, as if Rocky's words were a smudge he could clear away before finding the will to hope.
āAhā¦ā his words failed halfway out of his mouth. Rocky chittered at him, a little sound of encouragement. āThereās another human? Here. Andā¦ alive?ā
Ended up writing another Iron Lung fic, this time a crossover with the game Dredge. Please check it out if youāre interested! (And also please talk to me about Iron Lung oh my god I want to talk about Iron Lung-)
The Teacher and the Astronaut [ Drabble which may become a longer fic ]
WARNING: Spoilers for both The Martian and Project Hail Mary. I did this thing in one sitting with some quick research here and there, but with the book fresh in my mind. I'm seeing the movie on Sunday, so if anything's a bit off, I'll refine it later.
Inspired from encouragement by @llamasocks-lou after I did a tag commentary to their post suggesting that Watney and Grace would be drinking buddies. I didn't quite get that far, but hey it's a start?
Story under the cut.
First it was Mark's twenty-year-old grandson sobbing that he'll never meet his cool science teacher who saved the Earth again. Then it was the news running clips of the information sent from the Tau Ceti system.
He had to admit to being mightily interested after his high security clearance got him the full picture. Aliens. An alien and a human worked together to save both their planets? It was almost too beautiful to be true. But you need a little beauty and light amid the frozen war-torn ugliness of the last thirty-plus years.
He'd come out of a five-year test of the new long-term hibernation system and had just been settling in at his new underground apartment complex when everything metaphorically turned into a mushroom cloud. There'd been a few ways to stay alive past the worst of the dimmed sun's cold and the fighting by rogue bands subsisting on meager food and housing supplies out in ice-covered continents.
The Global Survival Treaty's members had all retreated underground, tapping into geothermal vents and other heat sources, supposedly inspired by a science-fiction movie from the 1990s. Tests of new means of surviving were a common occurrence as scientists worked tirelessly to keep Humanity going, one way or another. One of those had been the heavily overhauled coma system the Hail Mary's astronauts had been sent on.
Thanks to the successful survival of all but one out of five hundred testers, they'd just begun offering five-year breaks for the public to sleep off the cold and the limited food supplies when Dr. Grace's information arrived with the beetles.
Mark had watched the steady news updates with the same quiet relief he'd felt on his long journey back Earthward from Mars, marveling as he had over the last several decades as Humanity had taken what had once been his monumental rescue from Mars and surpassed it in every way possible. He'd helped with some of these initiatives, developing a steadily growing respect for Eva Stratt and her bold efforts.
The only real blemish on that respect had been her treatment of Dr. Grace after his refusal to go on the Hail Mary mission.
He'd heard rumors and then confirmations through his sources that she'd drugged him and shipped him out without his consent. People had described him running terrified or screaming in hushed tones. It had made Stratt even more mythical than before, but had won her numerous new enemies.
Mark had been one of them. He had promptly quit supporting any of her initiatives after that, quietly and coldly retreating to lend aid elsewhere with his quick problem-solving skills. When pressed, he hinted between the lines of his official replies at what had happened to Dr. Grace.
So it was with more than a little shock that he found her on his doorstep, looking haunted and small. She'd even acknowledged up-front that she was not going to repeat what she did to Dr. Grace with him, as his departure had cost her. How she didn't say.
That had gotten Mark's attention.
She quickly got to the point: The Eridians had sent a message that Dr. Grace had fallen severely ill and they couldn't figure out what had gone wrong. There was still too much to learn about how Human bodies worked.
This was, shockingly, not a new development. The warning signs of his condition had surfaced five years ago during the beginning of their long-distance radio conversations. The Eridians and what remained of Earth's United Nations held a careful dialogue, trading information about how to keep Astrophage in other systems from heading back towards the Sun and Erid's home stars and reinfecting them. Taumeba would work fine once the Astrophage got to Venus and its Eridian counterpart, but the problem was how far their infection spread to other systems that didn't have what was coined The Solution.
It was the one concern that had prompted all governments to agree to work with the Eridians - and Stratt's last act had been to codify this initiative permanently before quietly disappearing in case somebody warmed up to put her in jail again.
The other data transmitted had been anatomical and molecular biology on the Human body, nutritional knowledge, and various chemical formulae for broadening his diet. As far as Stratt or anyone else knew, the Eridians had kept him in as good health as they could.
But now the man who had saved two worlds was ill beyond the Eridians' ability to manage. The only way anybody was going to treat him was to go there. The new hibernation system's schematics had been sent on to Erid. It would allow slightly faster travel as crewmembers' bodies wouldn't be so easily crushed by higher gee-forces. Hail Mary II would have vastly improved tanks and propulsion systems to prevent the problems Grace and Rocky had struggled with at Tau Ceti.
Even so, Stratt had been called out of retirement to find the crew who knew how to handle any crises that would come up. At least now with the new hibernation technologies, they were less limited. An astronaut only needed some of the coma-resistance gene's expression rather than the full kit-and-caboodle.
And now that was why she was standing here, quietly pleading in her blunt way for Mark Watney to put on a spacesuit and climb back into a ship. Hail Mary II would fly directly to Erid, since Tau Ceti was in the opposite direction.
She'd used a simple blunt appeal to how he had been stranded and an entire planet came together to help him, and now they were getting ready to do the same for Dr. Grace.
It was the one thing that would've worked.
--
"How did you arrive so quickly, question." The Eridian's tonal speech was overlaid by the digital voice. Grace's old laptop had provided much information to the Eridians, and their translators were now small portable devices secured to the ambassador's body by what looked like a small strip of tape.
Captain Mark Watney sighed, glancing around the dome-shaped chamber with its gold and brown mottled surfaces. The airlock to his lander stood behind him. Erid's higher gravity was oppressively strong, pulling him towards the ground. He was still wrapping his head around meeting actual aliens on an alien planet.
"It's a long story. But at least the trip was actually routine for once. With the exception of Dr. Kardin's death. The new hibernation systems work well enough but clearly there are uh, some issues." She was my friend. Why didn't the emergency systems work correctly? A question he would have to answer later. He had a job to do.
"That was your doctor for Grace, question." The Eridian's tones sounded higher-pitched as if in panic.
"Fortunately, no. Kardin was our molecular bio-specialist for studying some new Petrova lines in the other star systems. It looks like Astrophage populations are spreading faster than they should be, dimming other stars even more quickly. Scientists on Earth think they might've developed an adaptation of some kind that might endanger our Systems again."
That earned him a very long silence from the five-legged alien who sat in his gleaming xenonite ball.
"That is bad. Bad bad bad. We need Grace."
Did they send Rocky himself? Watney wondered. It'd make sense. He's their top diplomatic expert on Humans now. I like him. He got to the point faster than Stratt ever did.
Watney nodded. "Yep. We need Dr. Grace. Dr. Liao will be examining and treating him. Were there any difficulties putting him into hibernation besides what was reported?"
"No. He is alive. Please help him."
--
"So what was it?" Grace asked, pinching the bridge of his nose with long-fingered hands. His hair was almost completely gray and he looked closer to eighty than his sixties even with time spent in the hibernation bed.
"A very long collection of medical terms which boil down to malnutrition, a body worn down by living at two gees, and faster aging from that strain. I'll let Dr. Liao give you the full rundown. Fortunately the Eridians're pretty good at keeping the local pathogens at bay and spared nothing in keeping you safe from what's out in their atmosphere. We've seen some of it. It's a miracle this planet isn't where Astrophage came from."
Watney motioned with one hand around him. This gold-and-brown room, like all the others, had no windows. The Eridians didn't need them, and with a pitch-dark sky bearing no sunlight, why bother? It was lit by spheres he suspected were Erid-engineered incandescent bulbs, since their glow felt familiar to him from his childhood.
"So, you came back to get me?"
"Naaah. You can stay or go. Whichever you decide. I made Stratt promise to leave you here if you insisted. My connections made sure there weren't any shenanigans."
Grace's vivid eyes locked sharply onto him. Any sign of illness had abruptly faded under a keenly aware mind's sudden tension. "Good." His tone had become very wary.
"I don't blame you. Word got out about what happened. I heard." Watney sighed. "Not my first rodeo. I don't know if you recognize me..."
"Sure I do. You're Mark Watney. The guy an entire planet banded together to get home from Mars. I was fifteen years old. Part of why I got into science in the first place. It was cool, and even cooler that you came back alive."
Grace's boyish grin faded as he paused a beat. "Please tell me you didn't come with an entire truckload of potatoes."
Watney stared at him, then chuckled wryly. "Ah no. We can barely grow 'em, at least when we left. Just as well. But what you've got to see is what we've done with food printing. Straight from chemical slurries. We brought one of those for the Eridians to feed you along with a full garden of plants. Well, cryo-frozen seeds they can turn into a garden. Knowing them, they'll probably reverse-engineer that printer a thousand times better than what we built."
"Ah, it'll take them some time or I'd've been living off one of those things by now. They're not perfect, but...they're up there." He shrugged. "Did you meet Rocky yet? I haven't seen him."
I'm surprised he isn't more shocked at seeing another human, Watney mused to himself. Everything I read from psych analyses of his recordings say he wasn't expecting to see anybody again for the rest of his life. Just the Eridians. Maybe it was just that it was me, and not some stranger?
"Oh, yeah. He's their ambassador since y'know, he's the one Eridian with the most experience in dealing with humans. He got to the point." Watney rose with a sudden grin, knowing what was coming.
The door to Grace's room opened, and a bowling ball of xenonite and one overjoyed Eridian sped inside.
"GRACE. YOU'RE AWAKE. AMAZE. AMAZE. AMAZE!"
Watney barely had enough time to get clear before Rocky thumped his hamsterball into Grace's bed. The Eridian was practically hopping inside.
"Hey buddy," Grace replied, resting one hand on the ball's gleaming surface. "I'm here. I'm not done yet. Clearly not."
His gaze slid up to Watney. "So this was Stratt's idea?"
"More or less." Watney shrugged. "So when you're done reuniting, I could use your help with something else."
"Astrophage. Has to be. Earth wouldn't've sent a whole mission just for little ol' me." Grace's expression was serious.
"Yeah."
"Okay. I'll be up in a little bit, and we'll see what we've got."
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