Here's the "orbital grandma polycule," as some people on Dirtball call them. "Grandparent" or "grandper" is probably more accurate, but tailed spacers usually don't care that much about gendered terms.
Reminder to submit any new character questions here for the AMAs I will draw at the end of the chapter.
Transcript
LOG 4.1: The Orbital Station Crew
A married coterie of tailed spacers. They live in the orbital control station above Dirtball that serves as a transfer post between interstellar ferries and ground-to-orbit boats. Everyone meets them when they arrive.
Four tailed spacers float in the microgravity of a pressured space station module. They are small humans with large ears, sparse body fur, long tails, thumbed hind feet, long torsos, and whiskers emerging from their eyebrows, lower jaw corners, and wrists.
Ranni
they/she
A smiling elderly tailer with a short thin body, dark red hair in a tight braid behind their head and dark plum colored skin. They wear a black longsleeve shirt with a Lunar flag patch on the shoulder, khaki pants with a short tail sleeve, and toe shoes.
Tyler
she/her
A taller, broad-shouldered elderly tailer with a dour expression, black hair that covers her forehead and is kept short except for a puff of a single ponytail, and burgundy skin. She wears a turtleneck sweater and suspenders.
Paul
he/him
A cheerfully grinning elderly tailer with a short fat body, and dark pinkish red skin. Their light reddish hair covers the upper half of their face as well as their scalp, and is drawn into a starburst of short floating ponytails in the back. He wears a lacey pink and white blouse, floral balloon shorts, and pink toe shoes with cartoon ducky socks.
Evaline
they/xe
A stylish elderly tailer with buzzed short brown hair, burgundy skin, and tall thin frame. They have long painted nails, a flowy top with a braided belt, and tasseled pants.
Inset panel: Ranni reprimands Killian, who looks weary of the interaction.
They have 6 adult kids, all of them except Killian have flown the coop. He's Ranni and Tyler's child.
Ranni: Brush your whiskers!
Tailed spacers (a.k.a "tailers") are a clade of small unisex humans resistant to body degeneration in microgravity. Their organs are lined with dense layers of artificial reflective pigments such as selenomelanin, which block some forms of ionizing cosmic radiation and make their skin unnaturally pinkish-purple. Their flexible spine, alternately bipedal or quadrupedal "bi-quad" body plan, prehensile tail, and thumbed feet allow them to manueuver easily through cramped spacecraft. Their long whiskers are excellent for detecting cabin airflow and air leaks. As a genetically unisex clade, tailers tend to play it fast and loose with gendered roles, terms, and pronouns; though most have preferences.
Tailers were engineered about 200 years ago as part of a corporate vanity project seeking to create ideal laborers for microgravity and generation ships. After WWIII the creation of so-called "company clades" became internationally condemned, largely due to tailer activists publicizing the manipulative practices their parent company used to trap them into exploitation. In the modern day they are the largest GMH clade at about 2 billion individuals, many living in tight-knit communities onboard space stations. Tailers are also the majority population of Luna, Earth's moon.
55 thoughts on “Runaway to the Stars: Page 135”
Imp!
It’s very cute that Ranni and Paul have their tails touching Tyler’s, such a lovely use of a prehensile tail, a way to anchor to each other so they don’t float away from one another! <3
machina
I love Paul, he’s looking wonderful with the duckie socks! 10/10 fashion on all of them honestly, you go grandma polycule o7
Zidane
paul’s duck socks are adorable
Phasma Felis
Unrelated, what do we actually *know* about Bip’s extralegal hijinks? They were carrying a load of expensive quantum phones, their graffiti boasts “we are faster than you,” and they’re very cagey about their past, but all that adds up to more surmise than fact. Or did I miss some things?
JoB
Bip openly labeled themself a “pirate ship” (page 61), the character page on Jay’s site
https://jayeaton.site/RunawayToTheStars/Characters/Bip
mentions smuggling, and IIRC blog posts suggested that, apart from Nabi-Nabu, at least *some* law enforcement would like to pick up on that. Whether it included actual *attacks* on other ships/stations/planets, what fate befell the crews/populace there, what legalese/punishment would apply, and even how cooperative/portable the law is across the jurisdictions of five sophont species¹ with at least² four independent governments, remains to be seen.
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The fact that *someone* saw fit to hail the Runaway with lethal weaponry and that Bip nonetheless tries to keep that obscured is not too calming, though …
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¹ if I may label AIs a “species” for short
² the descriptions of pronouncedly different cultures within the *home systems* of three of them promises a much higher count, I guess
Tarith
Paul has a smile of great mischief potential
JoB
> serves as a transfer post between interstellar ferries and ground-to-orbit boats
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So it is in fact *not normal AT ALL* that an interstellar ship like the Runaway ever makes a *departure* from Dirtball’s surface, unless it’s in *parts*, like Mel imagined the Runaway to go back out, or fully smelted down.
Now I wonder how much of a procedure it must’ve been to get Calcery from Dirtball all the way to the bug ferret ship, hauling all those racks in small-ish dinghies …
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Wait, is the implication that there’s a fixed, stationary, *limited* fleet of such ground-to-orbit vessels to serve Dirtball’s needs? That would *definitely* be quite undersized to easily haul a passenger like Calcery in a speedy way … or *all* those bug ferrets we’ve seen at that occasion …
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> Everyone meets them when they arrive.
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Except involuntarily-powered-down AIs, obviously. 😉
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> all of them except Killian have flown the coop
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So the polycule (as well as Killian) *does* consider station and habitat to be somewhat like “next door”. It’s what I would have expected, seeing how closely the ground crew doing the loop schedules has to work with the teams in space, but when Cheevwut mentioned the grandmas lately, I was under the impression that there was a bit of emotional distance …
Talita is delightful
ser, you appear to be a relentless picker of nits.
dokki
PAULS SOCKS!!!!
creetur
All of the outfits here are fashion goals to me, I wish I could wear em :[
Green Heron
Orbital station grandma polycule! I love tailers!
Ranni’s got a Luna patch!
Rad Internet Stranger
Grandma polycule!!!
torque
i love paul’s ducky socks so so so much
Origamigryphon
Tyler looks done with your shit
JoB
My guess is that Tyler’s the one who has to find out “the hard way” that the current client got their ATGS code
https://www.runawaytothestars.com/comic/rtts-page-118/
from some “FREE launch Windows licenses!!” site again. 😉
Vinemaple
It’s nice to see that, while most of Earth’s historical cities are underwater in this timeline, there is, at least, an upper limit to what late-stage hypercapitalism can get away with, and that limit is noticeably a little less than IRL.
SheTheTDE
I’ve no idea if this is true but I’ve heard that with whiskers you want them to look wirey and messey because you get more sensory information from the that way while thin straight ones… actually typing it out it’s probably exactly te other way around.
Trees
I really appreciate that you decided to commit to drawing and colouring in each individual tassel on Evaline’s shorts.
Claire
I love how the jewelry is oriented differently with the microgravity! Without gravity, why have earrings that just go down? Tyler’s jewelry is especially cool!
JoB
> Without gravity, why have earrings that just go down?
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… because orbital stations usually are cramped and having an *earring* catch onto something while you float along a corridor with no handle within immediate reach to stop on a dime is a memorable experience?? 8-*
Red
I can’t stop hearing “orbital station grandma polycule” to the tune of teenage mutant ninja turtles
Planetfall
Oh no. Now I can’t either. Curses!
Hubert
its fucked they still make animal human hybrids, youd think a world war or such a dark history like the creation of tailers would change perception. But maybe hardship after war or simply frog-in-the-pot status quo changes shifted priorities.
fen
they’re not hybrids of anything, they’re fully humans. just in a new shape
Hubert
Like how a glowing mouse remains a mouse. But, jellyfish DNA was still inserted into it.
Jay Eaton
“Hybrid” tracks in colloquial usage of the word, but not the typical reproductive sense of “my dad was a weasel and my mom was human.” If you want to get very technical, they are transgenic organisms.
As for fully human, eeehhhh….? Not sure how you’re defining that, but “human” is more of a cultural convenience term in this setting, since most GMHs qualify as a different species than Homo sapiens under most of the ever-changing definitions of what a “species” is. So “human” is more synonymous with “Homo.”
gigithebear
where does evaline get xer nails done in space? they look amazing!
hirsch
makes one wonder how much of a hurdle it would be to paint and file them in low gravity or especially within a spaceship
theplushfrog
Nail polish is pretty goopy and sticky, most are made to “self-level” which I assume means it uses gravity to smooth itself. I’d assume it’d be sort of possible to use modern nail polish in low gravity except that it wouldn’t end up very smooth, and that you’d need to be very still until it dried so it didn’t become misshapen. I’d bet it’s formatted differently in their universe, or that there’s a device to apply it in thin sheets, possibly directly to the nail. I’d imagine press-on nails or nail stickers are would be much easier to deal with in space.
Filing your nails would be the same but you’d need a vacuum as you file to make sure the nail bits didn’t end up in everyone’s lungs.
1d4Nadg
I’m pretty sure the self-level is a surface tension thing, not a gravity one. There are probably many challenges to doing your nails in 0G, but it shouldn’t be one of them.
JoB
> Filing your nails would be the same but you’d need a vacuum as you
> file to make sure the nail bits didn’t end up in everyone’s lungs.
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More likely to end up in the filters covering the ventilation system’s intake port. But yes, it should be pretty much the same setup current-day human astronauts use when cutting hair in zero-g (note the very much oversized-for-a-power-cable hose):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Achc5LSKGLI
Jay Eaton
As a regular nail painter I think nail polish would probably be one of the least problematic fluids to work with in microgravity. It’s viscous as fuck. The fumes that off-gas from it would be pretty overpowering in an enclosed space so definitely do it next to a vacuum hood
Machine
My guess would be press-ons 🙂 I would certainly go for those in a micrograv situation.
Marcie
Press-on nails maybe?
Adrienne
I’m glad that Paul is he/him and still counts himself a grandma. Gender is a game and the polycule is winning
redsquidz
Ya I was wondering if Paul/Tyler’s pronouns got accidentally swapped based on their gender rep, but could be either way 🤔
Kaamos
I mean the text does state that tailers play fast and loose with gendered terms, so. I assume that’s what’s happening here :>
Clemmy
Ahhhh Tyler’s earrings are just so cool, I love how they float! Thinking about fashion designed to be worn in zero-g environments is really interesting.
Arcstone
At some point some little kid stuck a bunch of clothes pins to their ears to be silly, and some fashion/jewelry designer was like 😮
Phasma Felis
Big Granny Weatherwax/Nanny Ogg vibes from Tyler and Paul.
Trees
Perfect. I suppose a ‘coterie’ is sort of like a ‘coven’.
I think it’s the addition of the duck themed socks that successfully achieve ‘Ogg’ level chintz.
Arcstone
I’m sure she brings her bright red boots whenever they need to go anywhere.
J
These are my favorite of the human clades. Love them and glad that they’re thriving.
Hanroz
Are each of the six kids from a different “pairing”?
Adrienne
I was just wondering that myself. A family made up entirely of half-siblings and unrelated siblings just to get funky with it
JoB
There are exactly six different *pairs* out of four people, and exactly twelve different “pairings” when you take the exact *roles* (sire vs. birth parent,
https://www.runawaytothestars.com/comic/rtts-reader-questions-9/
) into account. If the six kids were from six “different pairings” per the *former* definition, I’d strongly suspect that that had been arranged *on purpose*.
Jay Eaton
I haven’t written this coterie’s geneology chart, but it’s pretty random and the pregnant and sire parties are mostly determined by interpersonal dynamics and health concerns (pregnancy’s a lot of work).
Lilac
It’s the orbital station grandma polycule!!
Also i wonder when there’s gonna be a log for centaurs… that’s probably getting saved for until way later huh…….
Lilac
Also their shoes are cool…..
Varyon
They are indeed, although Evaline’s keep throwing me off. At first it looked like the sole was detached for some reason, but now it looks like xer foot-thumb is on the wrong side (that is, that leg looks to be the left one, but the thumb’s position looks like it would be on the right leg). I’m guessing it’s a trick of perspective (although a “two right feet” mutation may not be out of the question).
Bramble
I think their foot is kind of… cupped? So that the thumb is bent down and visible past the rest of the foot, not attached on the near side. We’re seeing the palm/sole of the shoe on the thumb, so it’s turned toward us.
Planetfall
I do wonder why they are all wearing shoes in freefall though. Surly their feet wouldn’t be more stressed than their hands right? None of them are wearing gloves. Is it a fashion thing? Are their feet worse at gripping so need help with grippy soles/footgloves? Or is it just seen as weird/taboo to go barefoot? Not shirt, no footgloves, no service?
Planetfall
*No shirt
Is there no way to edit comments? I gotta remember that. My go to is look for typos after posting.
Jay Eaton
It’s mostly cultural. Rules about shoe wearing vary, some tailers have shoe and glove areas of the station, barefoot areas, and transitional areas; some differentiate between footholds and handholds; some go bare everywhere it’s not a hazard to do so.
Gar G
So cool