Fanfic / Galactic Romance

Galactic Romance is an Alice, Girl from the Future fanfic series written in Russian by AutumnLeaves.

At twenty-one, Alice boards Cool Starship Galactiana to go to the North Star's system for her scientific studies. Once aboard, though, she bumps into her old Friendly Enemy Rat whom she hasn't seen for several years. She's All Grown Up and a whirlwind Interspecies Romance ensue as the two of them team up to hunt down a rogue A Nazi by Any Other Name mafia boss.

The series currently includes the following works:

• Murders in Ursa Minor
• A Stitch of Time
• The Terms of Life
• Starship on a Grill
• The Choice of a Group
• The Little White Crows

Tropes featured in the series:

In General

• Adapted Out: Jolly U doesn't appear at all despite being Rat's second-in-command in most of the canon installments that feature the pirates. A Stitch of Time reveals that he has fully settled down on the Pirate Planet mentioned in The War with Lilliputians.
• Age-Gap Romance: Alice is a lot younger than Rat, though the difference isn't felt too acutely thanks to his species' long lifespans and to the Galaxy's medicine being able to lengthen them (as well as human lifespans) even more. In The Terms of Life, however, they are confronted with the fact that Alice is twenty-four while Rat is already getting along in years when Rat brings up the matter of the signs of his aging.
• Battle Couple: Rat and Alice tackle criminals together, even, at one point, when Alice is pregnant.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Apart from the canon bizarre alien species, there are a few Canon Foreigner ones:
  • Grilbs are sapient aliens who look like enormous hedgehogs, live in extremely high temperatures, breathe hydrogen, and can eat molybdenum and helium.
  • Ftrils are animals who look like enormous snails, likewise live in high temperatures, and can casually travel between parallel worlds. They are herded and trained by grilbs.
  • Pleiades monitor lizards resemble your usual monitor lizards, except they are mouthless, half-transparent, lilac-colored, and survive on burning hydrogen and helium.
  • A giant planet in the system of Menkent is home to three-foot-tall, one-legged humanoids. Rat recalls a resident of Earth got in trouble there for calling the locals "Dufflepuds".
• Dead Guy Junior: Alex is named after Alexander "Alik" Borisovich and Alexandra "Shurochka", Alice's friends from the 20th century — making it a weird overlap with "Near and Dear" Baby Naming.
• Demoted to Extra: Pashka Geraskin barely appears despite being one of the main characters in canon. Justified, since Alice quarrels with him in Murders in Ursa Minor, and it lasts for two years since they are both too stubborn to make peace. In addition, in A Stitch of Time he has gone to another galaxy and therefore doesn't hear about Alice's disappearance.
• Demoted to Satellite Love Interest: In A Stitch of Time, Rat resents it happening to him In-Universe. As a space pirate, he was The Dreaded of the galaxy, while after the events of Murders in Ursa Minor, he is only viewed by the public as Alice's husband. By the time The Choice of a Group begins (about nine years later), however, things have mended and he has gained new, post-Heel–Face Turn fame.
• Fourth-Date Marriage: Rat and Alice get married just two weeks after reconnecting aboard the Galactiana. It gets a Decon-Recon Switch in A Stitch of Time where it's revealed they have to put in a lot of effort to make it work – but they genuinely make that effort, so after the first couple of years being pretty rough, they end up in a very happy relationship.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Alice gradually realizes possessiveness is her Fatal Flaw when it comes to personal relationships. In Murders in Ursa Minor, her breakup with Pashka happens due to her jealous outburst, and in A Stitch of Time, it's revealed she and Rat had an argument early in their marriage after she persistently suspected him of having affairs.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Rat and Alice's children are part human, part krokrys (in a comment to The Choice of a Group, the author states that she believes Rat is half-humanoid himself, considering how comfortable he feels in human form). Alex and Yulia have inherited Rat's Voluntary Shapeshifting abilities, but Polina hasn't.
• Happily Married: Surprisingly for everybody else, Rat and Alice are an example from the second fanfic onward. Even in the more troubled early phases of their marriage described in A Stitch of Time, they care deeply for each other and don't hesitate to make it clear.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door: Rat recalls how he "quit piracy several times before quitting it for good".
• Jack of All Trades: Alice is an elite Intergalactic Police agent and has a doctorate in biology.
• Like Parent, Like Child: Alex is every bit as wilful and adventurous as his parents.
• Like Parent, Unlike Child: Meanwhile, twins Yulia and Polina are quiet, shy bookworms, and everyone is surprised that such children could ever be born to Rat and Alice. It gets subverted in The Little White Crows where it turns out they do take after their parents, only when it comes to less obvious traits.
• Long-Lived: Medicine in the Galaxy can do wonders to establish a long life. In The Terms of Life, Rat confirms that, thanks to his prosthetic heart, he has at least sixty more years to go (not accounting for, of course, the hazards of working at the Intergalactic Police).
• Love Redeems: Slightly downplayed. Rat's love for Alice is certainly the thing that cements his Heel–Face Turn, but he makes it clear in The Choice of a Group that his first attempts to leave the life of crime happened long before a romance with Alice was even a possibility.
• Master of Disguise: As per canon, Rat can shapeshift into any living creature.
• Named by the Adaptation: The pirate queen, whose name was never mentioned by Bulychev, is called Maelta here.
• No Antagonist:
  • The Terms of Life is a bittersweet oneshot with Rat and Alice contemplating the future of their Age-Gap Romance.
  • Turns out there are no bad guys in Starship on a Grill – just a bunch of kind-hearted but irresponsible grilb children.
  • The Choice of a Group is a Slice of Life oneshot about Alex thinking about his future profession, without any external conflict.
  • The Little White Crows is a Slice of Life oneshot, about the different paths of Yulia and Polina.
• Retro Universe: Many planets are at much earlier stages of civilization that Earth, Fiks and suchlike; the Galactic Federation's policy is to let them invent space travel by themselves before inviting them to join.
  • Kog, like in canon (it appears in Alice and the Monster), hasn't even reached Bronze Age. In A Stitch of Time, the fact allows Perenn to use it as a secret supply base, since without telescopes, the locals never notice spaceships flying close, and since the supplies are stored in an uninhabitable desert, there is no risk of the locals finding them.
  • Invoked on Emerald, a small Earth colony and home to those who prefer a quieter and slower life. Its spaceport is almost always empty, robots are barely used on it, and it only sparingly interacts with the Galactic Federation.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: Rat is pardoned for his past crimes due to marrying Alice. Many people are very angry about that, and many more believe that he only married her for the pardon.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Cherry jam for Alice. In A Stitch of Time, it becomes a minor plot point when she buys the last cherry pie in stock at the railway station's cafe, leading to the bartender remembering her when Rat comes to search for her two days later.
• Trust Password: Rat and Alice develop one that references their adventures in The Planet for Tyrants.
• What Does She See in Him?: Almost everyone in the galaxy is shocked that Alice, a Loved by All heroine, decides to marry space pirate Rat. Many are convinced she does it for the publicity.

Murders in Ursa Minor

The one that starts it all, with Rat and Alice meeting aboard the Galactiana and finding themselves in the midst of a murder investigation.

• Ascended Extra: Ella, the First Captain's wife, only appears for a handful of scenes in one book in canon. She is a prominent supporting character here.
• Evil Is Petty: Even after Volsen is found out and caught, he tells Professor Seleznyov that Alice sleeps with Rat, for no reason except to spite the latter.
• Let's Wait a While: Alice is firm about putting sex off until marriage. Rat finds it weird but respects it.
• Master of Disguise: Volsen is able to pull off a number of disguises, even though he isn't a shapeshifter like Rat. Since he is also a Master Actor, his disguises are extremely convincing.
• Romantic Fake–Real Turn: Rat, disguised as Michael Vernon, and Alice pretend to have an affair so that Volsen doesn't grow suspicious about them spending too much time together. However, it turns into an actual romance very quickly.

A Stitch of Time

One year and some months after Rat and Alice's marriage, the Institute of Time on Brastak is robbed. But before Alice can leave to investigate the crime, she is kidnapped with the use of a Brastak-made time machine and gets dragged to the year 1976.

• Back to the Early Installment: The canon early installment in this case. After Alice is kidnapped by a time-traveling criminal, she finds herself in 1976, right within the timeline of One Hundred Years Ahead.
• Brains and Brawn: Siblings by adoption Valery, a specialist in crystal chemistry who graduated cum laude, and James, who takes guard and bouncer jobs. The contrast is downplayed, however, as Rat notices that Valery is clearly able to defend himself physically too, though he isn't as heavily-muscled as his brother.
• By-the-Book Cop: Zzzzh is very insistent about following the rules during investigation and questioning.
• Canon Character All Along: The resident of the planet Samora who kidnaps Alice is revealed to be the winner of "Do You Know the Solar System?" quiz game mentioned in passing in The Voyage of Alice.
• Elective Broken Language: During her encounter with past!Rat, Alice pretends to be a local thief and bursts into a long tirade in an absurd mix of criminal slang and various Russian dialects, all to get past!Rat more confused. It works.
• Emergency Temporal Shift: When Perenn realizes he was discovered, he dashes to the freshly-repaired time machine to escape. Rat holds him back in a fight, and Alice sends the Valapas grass snake to sabotage the machine.
• Et Tu, Brute?: When Alice marries Rat, Rrrr views it as a personal betrayal (due to the pirates' occupation of Brastak in A Million Adventures). It takes many months for them to mend their friendship.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Eful Perenn kidnaps Alice when nobody of her relatives except Rat is in the vicinity. He is certain that the latter only married Alice to get a pardon for his crimes, and is flabbergasted when he learns that Rat raised an alarm immediately after she disappeared. Ironically, despite wanting to ally himself with the tyrant from A Million Adventures, Perenn thus ends up making the exact same mistake.
• Fauxreigner: In 1976, Alice pretends to be a tourist from Alofi, Niue, who has been robbed. She wants to ensure that checking up her fake backstory would take as much time as possible and therefore picks a place as far away from Moscow as possible.
• Fire-Forged Friends: While calling it a full-flegded friendship is probably a stretch, Ffff and Zzzzh noticeably warm up to Rat as they investigate Alice's disappearance together.
• Food Pills: Discussed by Alice and Shurochka. Alice assures the latter that food pills are used as dry rations at best and never replaced actual food, and Shurochka admits she had always thought the idea unrealistic.
• Get Back to the Future: After being stranded in the past with no time machine and no way to contact the Institute of Time's rescue services, Alice searches for a way to get home.
• Half-Truth:
  • Alice convinces Shurochka to sell her footwear as a pair of Swiss sneakers (anything foreign could fetch a very high price in the Moscow of 1976). The boots are Swiss all right, but they are waterproof and fireproof moonshoes produced in the late 21st century.
  • As part of her other disguise, that of a "high-ranked Party member's relative", Alice casually mentions that her father took her with him when he had a meeting in Amsterdam. Which is absolutely true, with only the details omitted: Professor Seleznyov had a meeting with a Dutch biotechnologist, while Alice took the opportunity to give some lectures in several universities of the Netherlands.
• Happily Adopted: James and Valery love their adoptive parents very much and call them "Mom and Dad", even though they got adopted at thirteen and fourteen respectively.
• Has a Type: Valery dates sportswomen. It may have something to do with his school crush on Alice...
• I Hate Past Me: Rat is absolutely horrified when he realizes his past self has threatened his wife with tortures and caused her to leave Moscow, the only city of 1976 she knows well. Unbeknownst to him, Alice didn't leave: she did buy a ticket to Leningrad to throw past!Rat off the scent, but got off the train at Kalinin and came back to Moscow by the end of the same day.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Alice tells Alik Borisovich that 1) her younger self will soon get almost kidnapped from the hospital by two criminals, one of whom is a shapeshifter 2) he and Shurochka mustn't go to the police about it 3) one of the criminals will later make a Heel–Face Turn and marry her. Alik Borisovich and Shurochka need several cups of coffee to calm down, and the former remarks he would have drunk something stronger if he hadn't had work the next day.
• In-Universe Factoid Failure:
  • Brastak, apart from the central region, is a sparsely-populated planet, so when Zzzzh learns Alice in 1976 is probably in Leningrad (actually Rat was Entertainingly Wrong in figuring it out), he happily says it's all for the better since it's not the capital and there would be few people. He is astonished when Richard tells him that even in 1976, Leningrad's population was around four million.
  • Although Rat is somewhat acquainted with the Moscow of 1976 thanks to the events of One Hundred Years Ahead, he knows very little about the Soviet Union's history in general. In particular, he doesn't realize that St.-Petersburg wasn't the only city to go under a different name at that time, so he wastes hours searching for a railway station called Kalinin before finding out it's really the Soviet name for the major town of Tver.
• Interquel: Takes place between the last chapter and the epilogue of Murders in Ursa Minor, and the epilogue is set between the epilogue of Murders and the start of Starship on a Grill.
• It's Personal: Among the four burglars on Brastak, three are merely looking for a quick cash grab, but Aa-uu-dd-lll agrees to take part in Alice's kidnapping since he views her marriage to Rat as a betrayal of the Brastaks, especially considering that he was badly beaten up by Rat thirteen years prior.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Rat mentions that there are a book and movies about "the mielophone case".
• Make Wrong What Once Went Right: Perenn's plan is to free an alien tyrant in around 300 BC and conquer Earth.
• Makes Us Even: When Aa-uu-dd-lll scratches Rat so badly he ruptures a vein, Rat decides not to press charges about that, since he gave Aa-uu-dd-lll a horrible beating thirteen years ago. He adds that should Alice come to harm, though, the four burglars will pay.
• Meanwhile, in the Future…: In Chapters 3 to 23, the story alternates between the points-of-view of Alice (stuck in 1976) and Rat (investigating her disappearance back in the late 21st century). In Chapter 23, Rat goes to the past too.
• Mr. Smith: The children who attended the school for young criminals in The Star Dog were later given widely-used last names to protect their anonymity, resulting in Jimmy and Valera getting the surnames Smith and Kuznetsov (the Russian counterpart to Smith).
• My God, What Have I Done?: Valera is shocked when he learns he was tricked into assisting with Alice's kidnapping.
• Never the Selves Shall Meet: Alice is determined to prevent herself from meeting past!Alice to avoid messing up her mind.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Rat notes that he used to be just as power-hungry as Perenn, which probably contributes to Rat being the one to correctly figure out his chief motivation.
• Obfuscating Insanity: Rat suspects his mother's senility is largely faked in order to invoke Amnesiacs are Innocent should the police try to apprehend her.
• Oblivious to Love: Alice never once suspected Valera was in love with her.
• The One That Got Away: Alice for Valera, who planned to ask her out after finishing Besf's school, still remembers her with wistful fondness, and immediately agrees to a mind-reading procedure to help catch her kidnapper.
• Plot Magnet: Richard lampshades it when he tells Rat and Alice to stay as put as possible until Alice can be evacuated.
  Richard, to Alice: You'll want to at least visit the library, and suddenly in the library there'll be a wormhole leading into the 19th dimension.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Discussed. Zzzzh and Richard suspect that Perenn might be planning a Time Crash. However, Rat points out that Perenn doesn't look like an Omnicidal Maniac – he values power, wealth and influence too much to just destroy it all. It turns out he was right – Perenn's goal in traveling to the past was to achieve even more power.
• Save the Villain: Downplayed, since the character in question is a Dirty Coward Jerkass rather than an active villain. Alice rescues Ishutin from past!Rat.
• Selective Obliviousness: When he's shooting a film, Nitkin is Fantastically Indifferent to anything that isn't related to 1) the shooting process 2) money (...In That Order). This is why he isn't in the least shocked that Rat apparently Took a Level in Kindness overnight (for Rat, of course, twelve years have passed).
• Shady Scalper: Past!Rat trades Alice's wedding ring for an old, falling-apart spaceboat worth a thousand credits at most. Then his accomplices resell it to a museum for twenty-five thousand.
• Shallow Cannot Comprehend True Love: Eful Perenn only cares about money, power, and getting away with his crimes, so he assumes that Rat has the same mindset and married Alice just to get a pardon. Perenn is so certain of it that his entire plan of kidnapping Alice hangs on the presumption that Rat wouldn't raise an alarm, at least not until much later. When he learns that he was wrong and Rat began searching for his wife immediately after she vanished, Perenn is completely flabbergasted. By his last appearance, he still hasn't figured out what his mistake was.
• Spanner in the Works: Of all people, Alex at barely four weeks gestation plays the crucial part in foiling Perenn's plans. Due to krokrys embryos changing shape reflexively in danger, he begins shapeshifting in the time machine. Since the machine is programmed to remember the shapes and sizes of its passengers, it goes haywire and disintegrates in April 1976, still more than two thousand years away from Perenn's goal.
• Stable Time Loop:
  • Alice persuades Alik Borisovich and Shurochka not to do anything about her attempted kidnapping from the hospital – because they didn't do anything about it in One Hundred Years Ahead... because her 23-year-old self persuaded them not to.
  • Alice steals past!Rat's grass snake while the pirates are busy eavedropping by a fence near the school – because she recalls her husband telling her that it went missing on that very day.
• Stepford Smiler: Downplayed. Alik Borisovich is a genuinely kind man, but a lot of his Big Fun personality is a pretense he keeps up as a children's doctor, while in reality he is too overstressed with work to be truly cheery and boisterous.
• Super-Senses: The Valapas grass snake has an extraordinary sense of echolocation, far superior to the bats of Earth. It can detect small objects which are an hour's walking time away.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Rrrr, quite understandably, absolutely hates Rat, but is willing to work with him to rescue Alice after she is kidnapped.
• Temporal Duplication: Two versions of Alice end up running around in 1976 – the 11-year-old one and the 23-year-old one.
• Temporal Paradox: During her encounter with past!Rat, Alice gives him her wedding ring to convince him to let her go unharmed. Past!Rat, after getting back to the 21st century, trades it for a spaceboat, and his accomplices in turn sell it to a museum to a small planet, where it is discovered twelve years later.
• Temporal Sickness: Unusually, Alice finds herself in terrible pain after getting kidnapped on a time machine. She suspects it's due to the fact that this particular time machine model has only just been developed and some of its flaws may have gone unnoticed so far. As it turns out, the reason is her Surprise Pregnancy.
• Time-Travel Tense Trouble: Happens big time. Not only is Alice dragged into 1976, but the period she ends up in already contains her past self, for whom 1976 is likewise the past. When Alice talks about her 11-year-old self's adventures, she switches between past, present and future, and sometimes gets completely confused as to which tense to pick.
• To the Pain: When past!Rat thinks Alice is spying on the pirates and holds her captive for interrogation, he decides to start by threatening her with wooden horse, asking if she knows what it is. Fortunately for her, she knows it very well since she and his present self use a milder version of it in more Safe, Sane, and Consensual activities, and she says as much, sending him into a long enough stupor for her to free herself.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Eful Perenn who kidnaps Alice is outwardly a thoroughly respectable citizen of the Galaxy.
• Vocal Dissonance: Zzzzh, a police chief from Brastak who is quickly revealed to be very competent at his job, speaks in an extremely squeaky voice, and Rat muses on how unexpected it is to hear it from a prominent authority figure.
• Write Back to the Future: Alice believes that nobody even knows she was kidnapped into the past (actually, thanks to Rat's quick reaction to her disappearance, the kidnapping itself gets discovered fairly soon, but nobody knows where in the past she might be). She plans to send a Covert Distress Code via past!Rat by telling him something that would seem meaningless to him at that point and that he would understand by the time she was kidnapped from. Turns out that the thing that does make it to the future via The Slow Path is her wedding ring.

The Terms of Life

Rat and Alice's toddler son Alex develops a lot faster than a human child would, and Alice asks Rat about his species' biology.

• Insecure Love Interest: For once, Rat gets really worried whether Alice would want to stay with him for several more decades, considering there is a risk of him getting stuck in his Eldritch Abomination krokrys form for good.
• Living on Borrowed Time: A lot of borrowed time in this case. Rat has a prosthetic heart, as per canon, that he installed long ago to extend his lifespan. In this fic, he ascertains that it will definitely keep him going for about sixty years more.
• Monster and the Maiden: Rat tells Alice there is a possibility of them ending up like that ten or twenty years later, if he gets stuck in his scorpionish shape. Alice doesn't let it discourage her.
• Out of Character Is Serious Business: Rat is being melancholy, which is extremely unlike him. Alice is immediately alarmed.
• Rapid Aging: Krokrys children have accelerated mental development, thanks to the extremely harsh conditions on their planet.
• Shapeshifter Mode Lock: The krokryses' ability to shapeshift weakens with age until they lose it completely and are stuck in a single form. Rat warns Alice that eventually, it will be his fate too.

Starship on a Grill

Rat and Alice, with Alex in tow, are called to deal with mysterious aliens who consume the helium of Betelgeuse.

• And the Adventure Continues: Soon after returning from Betelgeuse, Rat and Alice are assigned a new case. In the epilogue, Milodar orders them to leave for Palaputra on the following day.
• Anger Born of Worry: After seeing that Alice has followed him to the mysterious planet where the star-eaters seem to come from, Rat bursts into a long angry tirade in several languages.
• Didn't Think This Through: The grilb children want to get some helium, so they come close to the portal between worlds and set the ftrils loose on Betelgeuse. However, they haven't mastered ftril-training fully and have no idea how to get them back, so the ftrils would have gone on consuming Betelgeuse if it hadn't been for Rat and Alice putting a stop to it.
• Free-Range Children: Rat and Alice both used to fit the trope, but it gets pointedly deconstructed as they realize it stops being fun when your own child vanishes after wandering off on his own into a parallel world.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: When Alex has vanished without a trace in a parallel world with high volcanic activity and seemingly no sapient life, Rat thinks that him losing his child is a delayed punishment for his own crimes. Thankfully, Alex is found safe and sound.
• Mythology Gag: Rat is an excellent chess player, a reference to a deleted scene from Guest from the Future.
• Skewed Priorities: The grilb children aren't too frightened by Rat and Alex's shapeshifitng, but they are terrified about the adults finding out about their misdemeanor. Thankfully, they later realize the direness of the situation and call the adults themselves.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Rat and Alice are only briefly surprised when they realize they are in a parallel world, and even then most of the surprise is caused by the fact that they were dragged into it thanks to an irresponsible group of kids – that's because both of them have already been to parallel worlds, including at the same time in Ghosts Don't Exist. Cnarbr, who is unaware of their history, is astonished at their Fantastically Indifferent reaction.

The Choice of a Group

Alex, now eight years old, needs to pick his specialization for the following years of school, and he isn't so sure about the choice.

• Famous Ancestor: Played for Drama with Alex, who is tired of only being known as the son of Rat and Alice.
• Lighter and Softer: It's a Slice of Life oneshot with no crime storyline, unlike the previous entries.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: Alex decides against either specializing in biology or preparing to go into law enforcement, since he'll inevitably be compared to his brilliant Living Legend mother (plus, in the former case, to his grandfather, who is less legendary but still well-known in his field, and in the latter case, to his father, who is a more controversial but neverthless very famous figure).
• Shout-Out: Yulia, Polina and Alex discuss Treasure Island and ask Rat how much of its info on piracy is Truth in Television. invoked
• Sibling Rivalry: Discussed. Alice is worried that there would be resentment between her twin daughters since Yulia is a shapeshifter but Polina isn't; however, the sisters are thick as thieves, and Yulia doesn't really enjoy shapeshifting anyway.

The Little White Crows

Another Slice of Life oneshot, this time focusing on Alex's little sisters, fraternal twins Yulia and Polina.

• Creepy Child: A downplayed Black Comedy example in Yulia, who is fond of destructive experiments such as testing gemstones' reactions to various acids and is inspired to pursue a career in law by And Then There Were None. Luckily for everyone, she has a firm moral compass to go with all that.
• Do Wrong, Right: After bringing a criminal gang to justice, Rat scoffs at it for being uncreative.
• Establishing Character Moment: The first time when little Yulia and Polina aren't The Dividual is when they are brought diamond bracelets as gifts from the pirate queen. Polina loves how bright her diamond is, and Yulia begins to think of finding out just how diamond and coal are made of the same thing.
• Everything's Sparkly with Jewelry: Polina, similarly to the pirate queen, absolutely loves jewelry and has assembled, according to Yulia, an impressive collection of jewels from all over the galaxy.
• Feminine Mother, Tomboyish Daughter: Inverted. Alice is an Action Girl with Boyish Short Hair who almost never wears dresses, while Yulia and Polina both wear their hair long and prefer skirts and dresses to trousers.
• Field Trip to the Past: Like in canon, historians use field research in their work. In the end of the fic, Polina prepares to go to her first university practice in early Sumer.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: invoked Polina reads an Aldebaranian book called The Adventures of a Lazy Zigl, a beloved children's classic on Earth that had a Chilly Reception in the system of Aldebaran.
• Grandparent Favoritism: The pirate queen is much more loving towards her grandchildren than she ever was towards her son, even giving her jewels to her granddaughters.
• Jacob and Esau: Downplayed, since Yulia and Polina are very different from their parents in general, but Yulia resembles Rat and inherits the shapeshifting gene (and some penchant for destruction that she thankfully keeps firmly in check) while Polina favors Alice in looks, isn't a shapeshifter, and becomes a historian (history is Alice's next favorite subject after biology).
• Light Feminine and Dark Feminine: What the sisters grow up to be. Polina is a sweet, bubbly blonde who prefers frilly dresses and adores jewels. Yulia is pale, serene to the point of often being an Emotionless Girl, and prefers blouses and narrow skirts.
• Time Skip: The first part of the fic shows the girls when they are four, and the second describes them in their first year of university.