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Chapter: Chapter 8: Heavy Water

  • The scissor lift begins to retract for repositioning. Bip's avatar is flopped over the tops of the comic panels, looking frustrated. Bip: I don't have much time to wait, I've got a rapidly approaching appointment with the launch loop. Can you do it off the clock? Talita switches radio channels and turns to write something on a physical logbook with a pen attached to its ring binding. Adam dismounts the scissor lift behind her. SFX: clk Talita: Tod's gonna ask questions if I pull that too often. Adam hops up the radio tower foundation and begins to scale the ladder up to the tower's ring platforms. Bip: Is there a tool I can borrow..? Talita: Hm... actually, I might be able to replace the claws with something more— She notices Adam out of the corner of her eye. Talita: –ADAM! GET DOWN FROM THERE! Bip's avatar pokes down in front of the comic panel with an apologetic sweat drop. Bip: Wrong radio channel. Talita: God fucking dammit!

    Runaway to the Stars: Page 224

    Yesterday

  • In the pit with the Runaway, a frontloader positioned in front of a row of frames containing hydrogen gas tanks holds its manipulator arms as if it were a human with its hands on its hips. Bip: But the solenoids on the transport tanks have these caps with an awkwardly positioned guard ring. I can't grip them with the frontloader claw fingers, and the worms aren't strong enough. One of the frontloader claws uselessly pinches the guard ring. SFX: click click Talita: So cut the guards off. Bip: I thought we were trying to avoid hydrogen tank explosions. Talita rolls her eyes. Talita: Well, then, wait. I don't have time this week to run errands on the clock. She looks up from the electrical box on the ground in front of her and switches radio channels. SFX: clk Talita: Alright, none of those antennae are causing the issue. Let's move the lift and test the next array. She is speaking up to Adam and Yao, who are on the fully extended platform of a large scissor lift next to a short radio tower covered in dozens of mismatched radio antennae. Yao pulls cables from the side of the antenna they're next too, while Adam slouches against the platform railing, doing nothing. In the regolith around the base of the radio tower are the tracks left behind from the scissor lift repeatedly being extended, retracted, moved, parked, and extended again many times.

    Runaway to the Stars: Page 223

    Nov 11, 2025

  • Talita has a direct message exchange with Mel. Mel: Just got a message from the medbay. Clayton slipped a disc, he's off work until he gets better. Talita: Oh no! That sucks. I hope he feels better soon Mel: You and your temps will have to work harder to make up for it. No distractions, ok? ;) Talita: Of course Later in the day, Talita is testing a breaker box in the junkyard with a multimeter, while Dominic and Phoebe peer over her shoulders. Bip's avatar pokes its head up from behind the panel, looking down curiously. Bip: You around? Talita: Not now, Bip. Bip leans out over the panel to look at her grumpy face. Bip: When will you be available? Talita scowls. Talita: Later. Bip hangs off the edge of the panel, nonchalantly swinging their legs over the fourth wall and blocking some of the view with their avatar's body. Bip: Well, I've processed about 100 tons of heavy water.

    Runaway to the Stars: Page 222

    Nov 08, 2025

  • Talita stands on the edge of the dollhouse cutaway, looking incredulously at the enormous luminous Bip avatar. It leans over, considering her with a hand on its chin. Bip: Isn't the water pressure down here deadly? SFX: ping! Talita's eyes open. She is lying disoriented in her bed on Dirtball, awakened by a chime from her tablet on the bedside dresser. Spread over the top of her usual comforter is the antler velvet blanket from the Runaway. She blearily tugs on her reading glasses and picks up her tablet to squint at the source of the notification.

    Runaway to the Stars: Page 221

    Nov 06, 2025

  • Talita rolls her eyes and heaves a great sarcastic sigh out of her excurrent nostrils, pushing to get up from the floor where she had been eavesdropping to join the adults. Then, she sees outside the cross section. There, pinned to the surface of the abyssal ooze with a colossal harpoon, is the twisted wreck of a small jet airplane. Coating its peeling metal skin and choking its turbines are growths of bacterial slime and anemones, and the rotting crevices of its shattered frame play house to octopuses, fish, brittle stars, and crabs. Twining through the rotting ribs of the fuselage is Bip's avatar, hundreds of meters long and composed from billions of glowing marine snow particles, making its body shine a brilliant white in the darkness of the abyss. Its head emerges from a great hole torn in the roof of the cockpit, reclining on the nose of the plane with folded arms. The harpoon lodged against the ribs of the plane pierces its chest, as if to trap them inside the wreck. It is looking at Talita.

    Runaway to the Stars: Page 219 and 220

    Nov 04, 2025

  • Doug: She's probably already listening. She has very good hearing. Talita looks up from where she has pressed her face against the corner wall of her bedroom with a start. She is younger, with round glasses and large baggy black hoodie. Both the humans around the coffee table and Talita in her bedroom are shown in an impossibly clean cross section of the entire building, which cuts through windows, walls, furniture, and objects with atomic precision, revealing their interior structure. Next to the break room with Doug and the others is a reception area with a desk and mailboxes. It's decorated with a banner of colorful eggs and flowers, and a large paper wall art "reading "HAPPY FEASTER!" flanked by vegetables and a cartoon chabbit holding a broom.  On the floors above the break room and the lobby are the dormitories for foster teens, with hallways in the middle. Next to all the dormitory bedroom doors hang miniature decorated brooms, some doors with many more brooms than others. Each of the bedrooms is in a different state of disarray, all with multiple bunk beds and teenage residents who have decorated and arranged their belongings in unique ways. Talita’s bedroom in contrast houses only her, with a large mattress on the floor and an electronics work desk in between her dressers. The ceiling light fixture is unscrewed, with its wiring split between the light and a cable running towards the work desk, seemingly as another source of power after all the wall outlets were occupied by splitters and extension cables. Her posters and decorations feature human celebrity heart throbs and aircraft. Wind spinners hang in front of her window. Outside the cross section, even more impossible, is Earth's deep sea. The building appears to sit directly on the abyssal plain, its cut rooms open to the environment as if the surrounding water were just more air. Brittle stars and sea pigs crawl on the ground next to the floor of the lobby, while crinoids pop up outside the break room like flowers. A group of snail fish swim lazily around the bisected edge of the break room’s window, and far off in the distant dark waters, a bigfin squid drifts by.

    Runaway to the Stars: Page 217 and 218

    Oct 31, 2025

  • Doug: By the time we had arrangements for her here, it was easier to just– He rubs the back of his head, gesturing with the other arm helplessly. Doug: –Keep doing it, than find a clan with a matriarch willing to adopt. Mel: Well, I hope I can provide her with some stability going into college. The panel background is absent. A school of lanternfish flicker past in the inky blackness over Mel's head. Mel: It was a hard enough transition for my two bio kids, but with her circumstances… Doug: We’re thankful for your help. Jovia cuts foster sponsorship on her 18th birthday. The window of the room no longer shows sun and leaves, but open black water. A deep-sea ray swims past. Otília checks her phone and frowns in irritation. Otília: It’s been ten minutes. Should I bang on her door? Doug smiles as Otília gets up from her chair. Doug: Isn’t her room just above us on the second floor? Otília: Oh– yes. Why? The abyssal plane lurks behind the comic panel, sea cucumbers and brittle stars crawling languidly over the ooze.

    Runaway to the Stars: Page 216

    Oct 30, 2025

  • Mel: Do you think she's a trafficking victim? The comic panel background dips away, showing a black void behind Mel's head. A gulper eel swims by. Doug: Hard to say. Otília: There wasn't a note, right? Doug: Nothing. Our youth care facility was not equipped to deal with a non-human infant. The first couple weeks were a scramble for food, medical care… Mel: So… They rub their thumb along the top of their mug awkwardly. The panel background of the brightly lit break room dips away again. An abyssal plain can be faintly seen, a lone squid drifting slowly over it. Mel: …Why wasn’t she returned to the centaur homeplanet? Doug: We tried. Otília's brow furrows. Otília: Centaurs don’t really do foster care, do they? Doug: The embassy told us that most clans choose to cull unclaimed infants.

    Runaway to the Stars: Page 215

    Oct 28, 2025

  • The view pulls back to show three people seated around the coffee table in a kind of break room, with a sink and cabinets in the background. An e-panel on the wall with a mangled pen cord shows smiling human children and the name "Garriton Teen Village." Mel is younger, with less grey in their hair and no beard. Otília is a middle-aged tabby catgirl, with striped hair in a loose braid over her shoulder. The other person is a bald man with a thick white beard, black metal band shirt, ear piercings, and sparse eyebrows. Mel: Yes, I’d love to talk more with her. Otília: I texted her, but she’s still in her room. Even alien teens are moody, apparently. The man looks over his shoulder out the window and mutters to himself in Portuguese. The man: Hm. Ela está nos espionando… Otília: Mel, anything you'd like to ask before your prospective foster arrives? Mel: Well… Is it true she was anonymously surrendered in a pet carrier? Otília turns to look at the man on the couch. Otília: Ask Doug. We only got her at 15. Doug: Yes. She was six months old, recently pupated. Only this tall. Doug gestures with his hands, showing a height of about 30 centimeters. Inset panel: A pet carrier shows two familiarly round eyes peering out of the darkness behind the wire door. Mel: Wow. Doug: Could run, though. Like a little cat. Doug smiles, Mel strokes their chin incredulously. Inset panel: A little naked creature covered in a coat of wiry spotted feathers runs out of the pet carrier on six long knobby legs ending in tiny four-toed bird-like paws with hooves, with round staring eyes above dark eye-stripes, a tiny tucked trunk, and two tiny spinnerets where a tail might be on an Earth animal. It is familiarly Talita-shaped, but of infantile proportions.

    Runaway to the Stars: Page 214

    Oct 25, 2025

  • Chapter 8: Heavy Water A closeup of a coffee table fades out of blackness, showing three different people's hands. A hotpad sits in the middle of the table with three normal sized mugs around it. On the far side of the table, next to an empty seat on the couch, is a four cup glass measuring jug full of water. The jug has stickers on the outside of a helicopter, an airplane, a flower, and a cartoon quailicorn; along with rectangular labels reading "TALITA ONLY." Otília: Tea, Mx. Derringer? Mel: Thank you, Otília. Otília pours tea from a teapot into a mug held in Mel's hands. The other seated person rests their hand on the table. It is an older hand, with scars on the fingers. Other person: Shouldn’t Talita be here for this?

    Runaway to the Stars: Page 213

    Oct 23, 2025

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