People used to live here.
Transcript
A close up of Talita's hand goes through a breaker panel, flipping and switching things. At the end she pauses, seeing a carved figurine of a winged animal dangling near her hand. She turns to her side and looks wide-eyed at the wall illuminated by her headlamps. The utility corridor is covered in alien good luck charms, woven art, beaded strands, and messages in the same pictographic written language as the text on the outside of the Runaway. A pictograph that looks similar to Bip's face is scattered throughout the artwork and messages. She glances further down the hall, looking at the bundles of stowed luggage with its unreadable labels and fiber artwork depicting what may be centaur faces and bodies.
She flips the final breaker and turns back to the utility panel. A deep hum starts flowing through the structure of the ship.
Talita: Power's back on.
Bip: Oh, wonderful!
76 thoughts on “Runaway to the Stars: Page 105”
Tyrone the Miner
So..much…Lore!….Cant….breathe!!!!!
Whoagh
I love this page. Ominous in a “unknown culture” way but the irony of Talita “coming” from that culture but its just as unknown to her as the other sophonts on the planet. Man i love this kind of representation. When you’re visually associated as from group A but you’ve never been part of A, but actually part of Group B…
cain
I wonder if <:= is a symbol for Bip's name. I bet at least 1 of those labels on a bundle says "BIP KEEP OUT"
Tyrone the Miner
Some of them looks like patches or drawings made by children which just makes the implication of what happened even more horrible.
holly...!
i can’t even imagine the mix of emotions talita must feel seeing all this centaur stuff…
foca
ouch.
JoB
Erm … why is this corridor *curved* like that? The Runaway’s outer hull should curve *up-/downwards* WRT Dirtballs vector of gravity, if at all, and the ship’s spine is straight … 8-?
Adrienne
What do you mean a curve? Looks more like a slight widening to me, mixed with perspective. Otherwise it looks straight.
JoB
IIRC the Runaway was avian built, and the latest crew was centaurs, so … how did the breakers get *human* (English) writing on them? Was the centaur pirates’ knowledge of spaceship technology *so* far above the homeworld level that *they* could install stolen Terran hardware? (“Exploited as workers, then ran away to become pirates” doesn’t sound like a lot of them could hold a candle to Talitas formation.) Or … does phone-Bip exist because they needed directions to do that, and mainframe-Bip had to be shut down while the breakers were being replaced?
Jay Eaton
The Runaway’s origin is deliberately mysterious but I can guarantee avians had nothing to do with it and it wasn’t built by its last crew lol
JoB
… oh? So it’s no clear match to the _Formensprache_ of one of the space-faring species, either? Kudos to Talita for doing a repair job on a ship screaming “here be unknown technology”, then …
Jay Eaton
Not what I said :y
TauCeti
From this page alone, I’d guess human origin. The ladder has a rectangular cross section, with vertical poles as hand holds. That fits pretty well with a human body plan, and the natural orientation of our hands. I expect the ladder spacing is too far apart to be comfortable for (skimmer) avians, and in any case from everything I’ve seen they have less “wrist” mobility than humans, and I think the poles are 90° off from what would be comfortable for them (?). I have no idea what the centaurs would use to transverse vertical spaces, and am simply assuming that it’s not one of their ships due to lack of space infrastructure. That it wasn’t built for bug ferrets is obvious to the most casual observer.
(Also, given the orientation of the tassels, I expect that the breakers are on the ceiling of the ship’s spine, just under the habitation section. Honestly, at this point I’m just gawking at your attention to detail).
JoB
(… found the blog post again:
https://jayrockin.tumblr.com/post/163809492663/sketches-of-various-types-of-ships-and-space
“The Runaway is a modified *human* ship, FYI,” it says, so I remembered the wrong shipwrights. She’s definitely *not* using *chemical* reaction engines anymore, though.)
Septemberdale
Alternatively, some spare parts are simply easier to finagle a way to wire in than others, and there’s a few things that, uncomfortable shape aside, are (probably thanks to the bugferrets and their spaghetti of a government putting regulations on parts sales across borders) more-or-less universal if you know what the buttons say.
Bree
I LOVE all the little details in this page, all the fabric and beading 😍
Bear-on-a-tricycle
I bet seeing artifacts from her home planet is somewhat bittersweet for Talita. She never got to see her planet or know her people. I read that as a orphaned baby, the foster group tried to reunite her with other Centaurs but they basically said to unalive her. Like total rejection.
I hope the clan that inhabited Bip were rebels from her home planet. If Talita could have only met the clan and Bip under different circumstances, maybe they would have accepted her.
Sorry, sorry, just feeling melancholy today. ^_^;
oodl
at first i saw a lot of visual mess, it looked like stuff hung on the walls overlapping, but on second look its all nice and neatly stowed with belts. i was expecting mess, maybe, but the neatness feels very different.
Peter Jensen
As I understand it, spacer centaurs are mostly from the nomad clans, and if there’s one thing nomads need to do well out of necessity, it’s neatly packing things up for travel.
bitty
im interested as well as everyone in the bip iconography! i initially thought it was a sort of centaur self pictography (centaur equivalent to “man/human being”?) but the bip ears say otherwise. tangentially, i like that bip has an avatar that is mainly bug ferret, but the eyes are centaur or human, sorta cluing into their personality a bit imo….
Jaux
Do i spy a chain of centaur “salt egg” currency to the right?
Green Heron
You can also see the Nomad Sister deities in the same panel!
evileeyore
That’s it, from now on I’m not trying to use Bipmojis, only Centaur Biptographs!
..|.|
\**/
..\/
evileeyore
…|..|
\**/
…\/
Second attempt… fingees crossed…
creetur
=:>
JoB
∠⠡\
JoB
(Also, ⩢ for a *single*-(Unicode-)character variant? Approximating the *ear* shape – whether orthogonal or diagonal – seems to be the *real* problem.)
feesh
Biptographs is now permanently entering my vocabulary, thanks
Cam
Oh, I spot the sister gods of day and night! Since Bip was a pirate ship, I wonder if their crew was an all-female bandit clan…
Zuorai
THE ENVIRONMENTAL STORYTELLING. JAY YOUVE DONE IT AGAIN
TheMushroomInside
The next few pages are going to be heart breaking, for i already know.
But for now, people used to live here, they remain not in body but quite figuratively, we only know them from what the left behind, their tapestries, weavings and drawings, their nick knacks, a shadow left behind.
Bruce Mickelson
What an evocative scene, and a haunting vista for a character cut off from her native culture! Your artwork is beautifully done, like a museum of native designs! Reminds me of the museum ships that I have toured, looking at the galley equipment, laundry machines and crew bunks – ships are homes, as well as moving towns of people long gone.
forest@swifty's hq!
this is sooooo cool. it almost feels like looking at cave drawings from modern day, but much less distant. echoes of people (centaurs) who lived there…
it also kind of feels like walking through something you programmed and reading the commented code!
Ruby
Look at all those proto Bips.
I suppose those are the equivalent of centaur stick figures?
Ruby
Just realised that I got it the other way around (centaurs don’t have “ears” :v).
These are about Bip themself.
AnaKaye
So… I look at this and see bolts of fabric and soft goods, embroidered with artistic motifs, and similarly-decorated boxes, chests, etc. It appears to be a cargo hold filled with goods that were being smuggled. possibly even stolen cultural artifacts. This is all conjecture on my part, obviously, but certainly a pirate ship could be carrying a cargo like this. What I wonder is, if this IS the cargo hold, where are the living quarters? Or are they one and the same?
Of course, I could be entirely wrong about all of this. I guess I will find out as the chapter progresses.
feesh
The transcript for this page may shed a little light on that!
blythe
I wonder when we’ll ever address the obvious ghosts left behind… If it was a direct shot to the habitat module, they probably wouldve all died. But we also dont see any organic material left behind, so maybe the clan wasn’t in there at all when the shot happened. The clan could still be alive, somewhere out there. And either they or Bip abandoned the other, or something else to separate them. Maybe Bip was escaping something.
Aries
It’s likely that they all got vacuumed out into space when the hull got breached, hence no organic matter
JoB
Nah, the Runaway’s habitat has *several decks* and the hull was breached in only *one* place; we’d see at least bloodstains and maybe a wedged and ripped-off limb if they had been violently flushed around that many corners, not to mention that the Bipphones etc. would be gone as well, and the storage on this page in some disarray. My guess is that the scrap collectors didn’t want Ixion to realize that the former crew had gotten terminally disowned, but I admit that that still needs an explanation why they wouldn’t have nabbed anything else, in particular the *expensive* quantum phones *right* behind the new entrance …
Green Heron
My current theory is that the old crew was arrested, and Bip escaped by splitting themself into the phones. So the old crew is still alive but in prison, no centaur corpses here. Still, this leaves a hole as to why the authorities didn’t take the phones.
JoB
> why the authorities didn’t take the phones
… or pretty much the *entire* ship, for that matter, as the pirates likely took it from some *legal* owners as well … unless the fact that there was no “registered owner” in the authoritative(?) listing
https://www.runawaytothestars.com/comic/rtts-page-76/
wants to tell us something … ?
oh6
“Crunch”? Yikes.
I thought the tapestries or whatever they are were some bug ferret display at first, because there was so much detail,until I noticed the bits hanging off the bottom. I suppose actual bug ferret displays are even more busy than that!
JoB
> “Crunch”? Yikes.
Coked contacts. Bip’s a power-hungry one. 😉
(Or maybe it’s just Talitas imagination of what it *would* sound like? The scene’s still in near-vacuum, after all …)
Martin
I love the font changes for the onomatopoeic noises, very evocative.
I think other people have already said about the art…. YEOUCH. The mystery of what happened to the crew becomes more pressing.
Common Handle
How to kill me in one shot: “People used to live here.”
This page is gorgeous. The little signs, all the writing, the little bip symbols all over… oughhhh. They must’ve cared about bip so much. I’m gonna go cry
creetur
Bip must’ve cared for the crew, too. I remember the pages (72-73, I think?) where Talita asks them about the clan they lived with. Felt implied that Bip probably misses them, at least to me
Guest
This page made me feel so sad, in a good way.
ghostwhitehorse
Oh. Gee. Bait for linguistics experts. *glances at the cast page*
Origamigryphon
I never realized that all that stuff was luggage owned by the previous centaurs living here. As sad as that is, I still wonder what kind of stuff it is, and if Talita will be able to make any use of it, or if it will just go to waste.
Picsa_con_Pinia
I love the picture of the gaping centaur!
Greenjoe
Ooh, is that some centaur tactile writing strings on the wall?
Cam
Good eye!
Arcstone
I love all your tribal designs, jay.
Arcstone
I say while having no real knowledge about tribal patterns at all. 🤣
Carmenifold
… i wonder what grief is like for AI
Gar G
Whoa…
syollandre
Damn, imagine how strange this must be for Talita. Cause like, she’s much more familiar with human culture and iconography than centaur. And of course there’s multiple centaur and human cultures in existance, so this might not even be super familiar to her even if she had grown up with a centaur family. But still, there’s a lot of images of centaurs, made by centaurs, to communicate with other centaurs. And it is about as foreign to Talita as it would be to a human. Damn
Kage
the crew wrote about bip a lot! I wonder if the entire wall is all informative signs, since talita’s at their breakers? the sign next to the cute “keychain” certainly looks like a “this is the lever to power bip up” to me.
I also like how big they are. since centaurs can read farther than humans, in order to be able to read something this close to their faces they had to scale it up. it looks like a mural. beautiful!
Cam
Omg you’re right, for once everything is the right size and height for Talita…
Lilac
I wonder, is that the history of their ship/travels (due to all the what appear to be mentions of bip) or something else? There’s the sunchaser and nightchaser deities too, it’s very interesting. Interesting and cool and sad and strange, to see all that these people who are probably very super dead left behind, and not understand most or any of it. Must feel like being watched by a bunch of ghosts. I wonder what sort of thoughts are going through talita’s head right now. Or even bip’s for that matter. Wow…..
Lilac
Also it must be neat for talita to walk inside a Spaceship actually designed/modified for specifically centaurs to walk and even live inside! Though of course all the other stuff and her strange awkward unfamiliar distant relationship with her own species’ culture are probably more forefront in her mind right now. Auughhh the characjters and their situations are so complex yet understandable this is so cool and well written!!!!!
Chrysalis
Lots of Bip pictographs, but not many other repeated symbols, which makes it look like someone was writing to/about Bip specifically, not about crew members in general. We still don’t really know anything about the centaur crew. What level of technology did they understand? Were they involved in maintaining and operating the ship, or did Bip do it all and seem like some kind of magical being? Did any of them survive?
I’m also fascinated by the layout of the writing. (Looks like the nomadic pictographic language?) The way it extends in multiple directions, the lines drawn between symbols… It looks like a challenging language to digitize.
topHatSurgeon
another interesting thing about the bip pictographs is the “context” in which they’re placed? I wonder if we’re looking at “ship system signage” tapestries?
All the “Bip” pictographs seem to be on their own fabrics/tapestries with a small set of recurring symbols.
The fact that it’s a small set of symbols, and that most Centaur writing is tactile, not visual (as far as i remember due to their poor short distance vision); it might be that these tapestries are effectively signposts of sorts.
Furthermore, given that Bip is an integral part of the ship/vice versa, i’d be willing to suggest that these signposts may be for different ship subsystems (I.E, controls, propulsion…)
Two of these repeating symbols i find interesting are a “box with button” and “flashlight/engine” symbol.
An example of the “box with button” can be found on the second panel; left most tapestry; the Bip pictograph is encased in an open square with a “button” on the outside of the square. The “flashlight/engine” motif is to the immediate right of this “box with button/Bip” feature.
I may be making assumptions as to the meaning of those pictograms based on visual appearance; to me they look like a “button/box” and “flashlight”, however there’s no guarantee that’ll be true for a Centaur with a completely different cultural background. However if they do represent ship components; i think we may be looking at simple signs for different ship subsystems.
topHatSurgeon
addendum:
also, the “box and button” and the other “line with button” motif show up on seemingly all of these small tapestries.
This combined motif also appears on the side of the ship on page 7 of the comic.
This may suggest that the “”box and line with buttons” motif represents the ship/clan as a whole? whilst the other pictograms represent various “components” of the ship/clan?
Again this is speculation; i may be entirely off the mark with these
Septemberdale
Chrysalis, you appear to be displaying similar biases to the human temps in the story. Centaurs are not savages, they’re just a recently-contacted species. And even that is like 70 years ago recently. The ones in space, at least, almost certainly know what science is.
Skrymer
Oh, oh, poor Bip, they must have loved you. :c
Translunary_Animus
=:> Loving the little Bip iconography all over the ship, they look so cute.
Apollo235
The centaur’s drawing of Bip has the same energy as this
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/591871576047595467/
Phlosioneer
That’s a lot of “bip” symbols……..
Tumorhead
I noticed that too =:>
the nonyer