Chapter Text
✦ OPENING SCROLL ✦
Sorry.
Chapter One is a whole-ass author’s note.
I know. ILLEGAL. Unfortunately, this fic requires a little paperwork before the eel nonsense can begin. You are sci-fi fans. You can handle it. Put on the Star Wars theme. Imagine this crawling up the screen in big yellow letters.
The actual story starts in Chapter Two.
But lowkey, this shit is important.
The following fic is based on one very important biological fact:
No one has conclusively observed where eels mate in the wild.
This is not me being cute, even tho I am very cute. This is an actual scientific problem. European and American freshwater eels spend years in rivers, lakes, estuaries, and coastal systems, then transform into their ocean-going “silver eel” stage and leave for the Atlantic.
Based on larval distribution, the leading theory is that Atlantic eels spawn somewhere in the Sargasso Sea, a region of the North Atlantic associated in popular imagination with the Bermuda Triangle.
BERMUDA TRIANGLE, YOUR CHILDHOOD IMAGINATION WAS RIGHT.
You did have to memorize that location for a reason.
Anywayyy.
Johannes Schmidt’s early twentieth-century larval surveys are the classic basis for this theory, because the smallest eel larvae were found there. Later tagging studies have supported oceanic migration toward that region. But even now, no one has directly witnessed wild Atlantic eels spawning from start to finish.
To be clear, the scientific consensus is not:
“Eels jump dimensions to breed.”
The scientific consensus is also, unfortunately, currently not able to prove that they don’t.
Which is where I come in, with a shovel and no respect for reasonable extrapolation.
For the purposes of this fic, space eel migration is not only a biological drive but a navigational phenomenon that operates partly outside normal space.
Real eels disappear into the Atlantic.
Fictional space eels disappear even more.
They do not merely return to the space version of the Sargasso Sea. They locate a reproductive threshold. A wee pressure point. (British accent.) A weird little cosmic backdoor that biology found before physics did.
Enter Simon.
Y’all know him… right?
Simon, formerly human, formerly Brother of Eden, formerly prisoner of the Consolidation of Iron, and currently having the worst possible afterlife, was exposed to the blood ocean of AT-5, the Monster/Eel, radiation, the Eden seed, and enough body horror to make a grant committee ask follow-up questions.
So in this fic, Simon does not “learn” to dimension-jump.
That would imply intention. Planning. A seminar. Maybe a little slideshow.
No.
Simon’s mutated eel-blood-tree-whatever body develops a migration instinct. (Yeahh biology baby.) The eel part wants the impossible breeding ground. The blood part knows how to survive where it should not.
When that instinct activates, it searches for the nearest compatible life-bearing vessel.
Not a river.
Not the Sargasso Sea.
Not even, technically, the correct universe.
It finds the Hail Mary.
This is not because the Hail Mary asked for this. The Hail Mary did not ask for anything. The Hail Mary was busy being a respectable science vessel.
But it has life support, biomass, heat, water, stress, and one extremely unlucky/lucky human aboard.
Close enough, says the eel.
Sorry, Grace.
✦ RECEIPTS, BECAUSE APPARENTLY I DID HOMEWORK ✦
- Schmidt, Johannes. “The Breeding Places of the Eel.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, vol. 211, 1923, pp. 179–208.
- Aarestrup, Kim, et al. “Oceanic Spawning Migration of the European Eel.” Science, vol. 325, no. 5948, 2009, p. 1660. DOI: 10.1126/science.1178120
- Abumrad, J., and Krulwich, R. “Silky Love.” Radiolab, WNYC Studios.
✦ ON THE MUTATION ✦
second note, before anyone asks why Simon does or does not have certain features: I am leaning way more into freaky eel mutation than “radioactive nightmare mutation” like in the movie. Mostly because, lovingly, if I kept the radiation logic exactly the same, everyone on the Hail Mary would simply be dead. Like. Immediately. So for the purposes of this story, the eel biology is doing more of the heavy lifting than the radiation is. The radiation still matters. It still fucked him up, specifically his brain and memory….and it still changed the conditions of what happened to his body (you will see). But the specific features I’m giving Simon are coming from the eel side of things
ripping off the big bandaid first. I am not giving him external cheek teeth from the movie.
I know. I know. It sounds cool. It looks so fucking cool in fanart. Unfortunately, external teeth growing out of the cheek is bad biology to me. I AM SORRY I KNOW.
But if hes going to use his teeth like I'm sorry they need anchoring. They need bone, sockets or some equivalent support, blood supply, nerves, and a jaw structure. A tooth sticking out of soft cheek tissue is not a useful weapon. It is a face injury its gonna get caught on shit and make sex difficult.
I want Simon to be able to bite.
So no cheek teeth.
However.
>:)
Eels do have crazy cool teeth, and they are awful in a much more useful way.
Depending on the eel, you can get small, sharp, backward-curving teeth meant for grabbing slippery prey. Morays, because apparently one mouth was not enough, also have pharyngeal jaws: a second set of jaws in the throat that helps drag food down.
I am not giving Simon a clean cartoon monster mouth.
I am giving him a mouth that still used to be human, which is worse.
His front teeth stay recognizable enough. His back molars are where the mutation gets ambitious. The broad crowns narrow and split into hooked, inward-angled points. Sort of like his jaw tried to grow fishhooks out of the teeth he already had.
The rear bite becomes less about chewing and more about holding. Maybe holding something down, ifykwim.
There will also be tooth-like growths farther back, around the throat, because morays had one good nightmare idea and biology kept it.
Now. Reproductive anatomy.
Real eels do not have penises. They are teleost fish. Spray and pray baby. External fertilization. Absolutely elegant, if you are a fish. Deeply inconvenient for me, a person writing smut.
So I am stealing from snakes, which are land eels.
No they aren’t. Not at all. But shush.
Most reptiles have hemipenes. Soo in my brain, his body develops paired reproductive claspers, like if a snake and a skate merged reproductive organs. Sea creature plus land eel. It works. Please please it works. Stop yelling at me.
They are usually retracted/protected, because exposed delicate tissue on a damaged amphibious organism would be a terrible design choice.
Sorry about that.
But yay. Two penises.
And finally: gills.
I keep reading about gills. Gills. Gills. Gills need surface area and blood flow. Exposed gills would dry out in air and bleed easily.
So Simon does not just have open decorative gill slits.
He also still has lungs. That work. Idk. Making this work is strange, so I am going with covered gill structures.
Slits or vents run along the sides of the neck, extending lower toward the ribs, protected under folds of slick tissue. Slick for sure. Eels are mucusy af.
In air, they stay mostly closed. His lungs still do the main work. Underwater, or when submerged in the blood ocean, the folds open and his throat/jaw muscles start forcing fluid across the gill beds.
✦ MORE RECEIPTS, BECAUSE THE MONSTER BIOLOGY HAS SOURCES ✦
- Mehta, Rita S., and Peter C. Wainwright. “Raptorial Jaws in the Throat Help Moray Eels Swallow Large Prey.” Nature, vol. 449, 2007, pp. 79–82. DOI: 10.1038/nature06062.
- Tesch, F.-W. The Eel. 5th ed., Blackwell Science, 2003.
- Helfman, Gene S., et al. The Diversity of Fishes: Biology, Evolution, and Ecology. 2nd ed., Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
- Nanci, Antonio. Ten Cate’s Oral Histology: Development, Structure, and Function. 9th ed., Elsevier, 2018.
- Berkovitz, B. K. B., and R. Peter Shellis. The Teeth of Non-Mammalian Vertebrates. Academic Press, 2017.
- Dowling, Herndon G., and Jay M. Savage. “A Guide to the Snake Hemipenis: A Survey of Basic Structure and Systematic Characteristics.” Zoologica: Scientific Contributions of the New York Zoological Society, vol. 45, no. 2, 1960, pp. 17–28.
✦ FINAL NOTE ✦
We are also suspending disbelief around the idea that animal mating behavior maps neatly onto human consent, because I am not writing assault.
I do not care what real eels, snakes, fish, sharks, or whatever else are doing in the wild. This is fiction. The monster biology is weird.
The consent is NOT optional.
I am here to write freaky consensual nonsense, not assault, because assault is not sexy to me.
#fuckin-hate-that-shit