Tod, the internal mechanics manager. Talita is technically the same managerial rank as him now, but still thinks of him like a superior.
Transcript
The talking figures are Ohwitiil and Mel. Their dialog bubbles are small and greyed out with parts cut off.
Mel: — to six stories tall to preserve the window layout and some of the floor infrastructure.
Ohwitiil: — ght work fine. — ou'd still need — o remodel the — doors, plumbing. — Add thickness — o upper floor.
Mel: — s of course! There would — quite a bit of fabrication — eded to. I talked to Tod — ier and he told me it shou — stly be possible to keep in — e with the plant equipment.
Talita stares at them uncertainly, then walks on the other side of the loop to the plant doors. Tod is there, opening the door wirelessly with his tablet.
Talita: Morning, Tod.
Tod: Something like that.
Talita: Do you know what Mel and Ohwitiil are up to by the guest housing block?
Tod: Mel’s on about co-species housing upgrades. Like my crew isn’t spread thin enough.
Talita: Need help?
Tod: You got enough on your hands these days.
52 thoughts on “Runaway to the Stars: Page 81”
Sen
I love the top outer panel that shows how even massive Talitha is tiny compared to the machinery. It also shows how lonely it can be in a dome designed for a multitude of individuals.
Callahan
I don’t think this is exactly an out-there theory, but I’m guessing Mel is planning on using the plans Talita drew up for improvements to her accommodations and just…doing it without asking her permission or whether she even wants that. Only this is going to backfire, because Calcery (and others to a lesser extent) have planted the idea in her head of leaving her job. Let’s face it, nearly ten years of the same job can make anyone a bit bored, and Talita clearly isn’t enjoying being a supervisor for people who have some uh…xenophobic hurdles to jump. But Mel has a habit (that we’ve already seen with Calcery) of not particularly listening and just doing what they think is the best course of action. Which isn’t going to end well….
That’s my best guess. It sucks that it took nearly a decade for them to get the funding for infrastructure changes for Talita, so maybe this will be the straw that breaks the camels back?
Electron Kaleidoscope
That last point is especially odd to me too- why, if Mel cares to make these modification, did they wait an entire decade to do them? Either that’s some Pro level Procrastination (which I can kinda relate to on unimportant personal things- but something like this? geez!) There was some weird blockage preventing it (which seems kinda far fetched given the situation and timescale)…or worse- it was somehow *conditional*, and Talita somehow “earned” it recently.
It’s more weird the more you think about it!
Callahan
That point you made about her “earning” it is what I was thinking – her getting improvements could be conditional on her being there a certain length of time or getting a promotion or more responsibility, which is uh… questionable! To some extent the delay on improvements makes sense when you consider the costs of doing so in this terrarium, plus how few centaurs there are in space to begin with: any accommodations would’ve been costly if she’d quit after only a couple of years… but someone who’s been there for nearly ten years? At that point it’s almost negligent. If Mel does go ahead and make accommodation improvements after so long when Talita already doesn’t want to work there anymore, I feel like a lawyer could have a field day with the results.
Rad Internet Stranger
Counter thought: It may not be Mel being a douche that’s the “earning” thing but rather the company that everyone on Dirtball was hired by. Either way, It’s gonna be soooo awkward lol
Feather
I wonder how Talita will feel about the plan to use more centaur labor, given her complicated relationship to her species… I’m not sure she’ll be as straightforwardly excited about it as some people might expect her to be.
JoB
Hmm, if the plan/plot really is that it’ll take a FUBARed meetup with other centaurs to make Talita seal the deal with Bip … then I guess we’ll have *quite* a number of pages to go through before the R will actually take ttS again. :-3
(Of course, the *in-story* delay is largely determined by the time she needs to single-handedly get the Runaway flight-worthy again, but *that* would likely collapse into just a montage sequence from *our* PoV.)
… aaaaand now I’m wondering whether the sudden influx of centaur co-workers might be due to someone finding that the administration’s “security program suuucks”, too …
Feather
It could even just be Mel sticking their foot in their mouth when telling Talita about the plan – IIRC think in-universe stereotypes about centaurs are either that they’re violent or that that they’re technologically backwards manual laborers, and I can see ways the plan would be communicated that could end up leaning in to that (centaurs would be so useful given the machinery problems etc). Add in the human temps being weird about her species, and yeah. I could see this adding to her willingness to run away (to the stars) with Bip.
Jay Eaton
Yall are awful confident about this theory huh
Feather
The “they’re planning to hire more centaurs” theory? Or the Talita might have complicated feelings about it part? Interesting, I thought the first was less of a theory than this implies…
Phlosioneer
I agree, everyone here is forgetting how rare and unusual Talita is. Mel isn’t hiring more centaurs. He’s giving his pseudo-adopted-daughter who was just promoted to management a custom penthouse room.
Apollo235
I do hope we get to see Talita interact with other Centaurs though. I’m pretty sure the only comic of her interacting with other Centaurs is First Contact where she’s 5. In the AMA we heard that Talita is awkward around other Centaurs (and vice versa), so I’m very curious to see an interaction happen
fen
(mel’s pronouns are they/them!)
JoB
Which theory? Mine, that either way, it’ll take a fair deal of (in-story) time to get the Runaway flight worthy (pun intended) again?
Well … even if the hints towards her (already present) motivation I stumbled on in last night’s binge reading hold true, she can’t just throw three cans of polyurethane foam at the hole in the hull and blast off the ramp with a “Space Cowboys”-style manual thrust control … can she??
Martin
Man I loooove Talita’s design. She’s so owl and I adore it.
TotallySomebody
Talita’s owl eyes might be my new favorite expression of hers
Gar G
Those eyes <3
And if only he knew…
Liza
Aha, called it. Though not a difficult deduction at all really. Mel keeping all this secret as a surpeise for Talita is going to blow up in their face. <- not a difficult deduction either, lol.
Zuorai
The light in her eyes whenever something piques her interest or is implied to be centaur-related. The subtle visual, internal storytelling. So beautiful
Gar G
I hear people’s eyes dilate when they see something they love, and that definitely feels like the case here
sklerbo klerbo
i can physically hear tod’s voice
Redacted
This is awfully specific but I’m hearing his voice as the “boiled in oil” guy from Avatar the Last Airbender.
eden
10 bucks says the new housing doesn’t include centuars
eden
I bet it would be because of costs
A
They’re talking about adding thickness to the upper floor, Centaurs are the only species that would be necessary for
JoB
Hmmm, that’s assuming that they are indeed talking about a floor that’s serving for “guest housing” *right now*. Converting a crawlspace-type roof into *anyone’s* housing would require the same type of work – as would adapting some run-of-the-mill floor for heavier machinery …
JoB
… then again, Tod effectively confirms that in the penultimate panel … say, I get to cancel my own rambling rather often with this webcomic … :-3
Gar G
Well there’s only one of them… so would be impractical
Phlosioneer
I don’t think “impractical” really applies here. Talita may be the only centaur, but she’s upper management now, she’s bern living here for a very long time, she has a ton of company loyalty, and the habitat has already made huge investments for her. From small things like painting a centaur icon on the walking lane, to big things like the food production for centaur biology.
You also need to keep in mind that she can do things no other species can; she’s effectively a person/forklift combo.
evileeyore
And refitting some housing to accommodate Centaurs in general, not just Talita individually (they are redesigning all the floors of one building) means they could hire other Centaurs looking to off-world as deconstruction/salvage crew and have a whole team of “forklifts” in the salvage yard.
They’ve already got the set-up to provide for one, they just need to expand on that to provide for more.
Phlosioneer
How good is Talita’s hearing? She seems to have the earth-avian style of ear-holes/flat lobes so we can’t tell from ear size how far she hears. And how directional is it?
zaratustra
Ridiculously good. Plus, it doesn’t seem to be a very noisy place.
hal9000
her disk shaped face funnels sound straight to her ears, like an owls! there’s some stuff in centaur biology about it (no spoilers in there), but she has very good hearing
Phlosioneer
There’s actually nothing about that on the centaur biology page. It may be somewhere else but it’s not easily accessible.
JoB
The Knowledge Base™ doesn’t have much to say about their *hearing*
https://jayeaton.site/RunawayToTheStars/Sophonts/Centaurs/Biology#Hearing
but makes it quite clear that she should be able to follow their conversation remotely if only she’s capable of some *lip reading* …
Teod
Unrelated to the current page, but could you change the Archives page of this site? Only the first page of each chapter is not a particularly useful set of links.
A big list of individual pages would be much more useful, especially considering all the extras mixed in there.
Jay Eaton
I wanted something else but this WordPress theme wouldn’t let me do it with the current combination of settings. I considered doing it manually but frankly the last thing I need is another continuously updating web thing to forget about and add typos to. I need to ask my coding guy if anything can be done
Verc
Seconding that I think this would be useful if available!
Greenjoe
reducing the number of floors and making floors thicker.. certainly sounds like it may be adapting some of the buildings for centaurs.
JoB
[warning: architecture nerdgasming]
If they plan to only *take out* every other floor, they have to be referring to the outermost third of the complexes; the innermost has eight (above ground¹) floors now, every next-outer one adds one apparently double-height top floor (judging from the windows seen in the pp. 32+33 spread), and they talk about getting six floors in the end.
Current-day first RL world human housing typically has rooms ~250cm high, giving a ~300cm total height to floors. Knocking out one and reinforcing the other gives 500-some cm room height, which seems rather appropriate (*tad* much) for centaurs:
https://jayeaton.site/Art/RttS/AMA/1/talitastand.png
… waaaaaaiiiiiit a golden second. Shikaviil Port, and apparently the now-human housings as well, were built by and for *AVIANS*. Why didn’t those buildings have to be adapted for humans before? Are avian regulations designed to fit the flightless ones as well
https://jayeaton.site/RunawayToTheStars/Sophonts/Avians/avianheightchart.png
or do they routinely keep proportionally more “headroom” than us due to their ability to fly (thus occasionally making use of extra space in the 3rd dimension)?
If, thanks to their avian origin, the floors were to have something like 200(net)/250(total) cm dimensions (still viable to most typ humans), the remodeled floors would have rooms 400-450 cm high. Which would be an *even better* match for centaurs, I guess …
¹ … so, are avians in the habit of building residential housing with *cellars*? So much so that they’d still try in an entirely artificial habitat sitting on a regolith-covered atmosphere-less planet … ? (As a human technician, I’d want to start building such a habitat by pouring a *level* slab of ferroconcrete (or similar) up to the task of remaining airtight *long-term*, adding the (more accessible for servicing) dome next, and leave all the details to when I can work on them *in a breathable atmosphere*, which effectively discourages having sub-level cellars, no matter how popular they’re with human housing *on Terra*.)
SIGSTKFLT
The framing of the last panel is so silly
evileeyore
It’s the “Talita Cam”, everyone is just the tops of their heads to Tall-ita.
JoB
Quite good that bug ferrets tend make their presence noticed in *non*visual ways, hmm? 😀
Doubloon
Love her silly little owl eyes. Tbh creature type of expression.
hal9000
i smell foreshadowing… Mel you have great intentions but this seems like a lot of work
hal9000
also panel 3 talita looks so much like my cat when she’s mildly concerned lol
evileeyore
Mel might also have tentative word on Centaur crews wanting to come there, which means they’d need to get ahead of the demand for housing. Or maybe Mel wants to also be able to advertise they have Centaur housing to attract a Centaur workforce.
Ara
Talita’s big round eyes are so cute.
cassowary
OvvO is a good look on Talita.
Phlosioneer
I think it’s closer to OyO
Apollo235
Its definitely OyO
ImJustaTourist
ಠ..ಠ
°\|/°
~J