If deer had hands I bet they'd greatly enjoy peeling their antler velvet off.
For those who aren't familiar with the extraneous lore, centaurs have red blood with an iron-based oxygen carrier compound like humans do. However, their blood tends to be a lighter and more translucent red than humans'. This is because their blood has a lower ratio of respiratory pigment to plasma than ours, as a knock-on effect of their respiratory system being more efficient at gas exchange but less efficient at water retention.
Avians have a yellow-to-magenta cobalt respiratory pigment, and bug ferrets have a mixture of transparent-to-blue copper pigment and green iron pigment.
Transcript
Talita grips the loose skin on her antler.
SFX: RRIIIP
She tears it away from the newly grown bone, blood dripping from the shredded flesh. She grins in satisfaction. Idrisah looks on in surprise, while Gillie jumps towards her wife in horror, tail poofed up.
Idrisah: Need a towel?
Talita: If you don’t mind getting blood on it…
38 thoughts on “Runaway to the Stars: Page 197”
Jackie
I wonder if centaur antlers could be perminantly ‘shut off’ (if theres a word for this it eludes me) like how livestock animals get their horn buds burned. Or if that wouldn’t work the same for antler buds/bases/pedicles?
S0g
YES BONE TIME hell yeah
Boxthing
LOL Gillie’s cat tail going poofy! XD
Stray Cat
Going to praise a very specific detail here: the fact that because of the blood, we can see that the antlers aren’t a smooth surface. Good texture work and attention to detail here!
I also love how nonplussed Isidrah is about this. Wonder if she’s seen the velvet-shedding before; they have been co-workers for years, after all.
Momo
rip and tear!!!!
Sparky Lurkdragon
That must feel SO good. Like popping a really obnoxious pimple. Except even better because you’re supposed to do it.
Cugz Arui
some people here wondering where the skin ends up. i imagine talitas waste is basically treated like plastic (possibly the kind with very toxic additives) since thats what organic material is closest to in terms of physical properties and they dont have much facilities to process it here. this also means theyll probably have to burn it or use some special fungi turn it into something usable. but probably just burn it (or maybe throw it outside). yes this will be wastful but theres probably no other way to handle her bio-waste.
the other species might have more facilities for processing their waste so that it can be recycled instead of just thrown out but talita is of course a special case.
Peter Jensen
My first thought was “why a towel, and not something disposable”, but it hit me that in this setting you don’t really do “disposable” if you can avoid it, because it’ll have to be imported over interstellar distances. I doubt the park grows enough trees to support a paper mill and associated processes, to make paper napkins.
Gheesfellow
I can see why she cuts the little buggers.
pilcrow
I had a bad face-picking episode the other day and look like hell, so I gotta say that I’m jealous of Talita’s antler velvet…it probably feels so satisfying to rip off.
TotallySomebody
I was wondering if that hurts, but the I realized I get so itchy that I draw blood scratching to get some relief. I imagine it’s the same thing here, except it’s supposed to happen instead of a me, a human, having really dry skin.
Talita Fangirl :)
I think she can digging in the ground for tubers.
/reference to a tumblr post
I love her expression for finally ripping away the itchiness 😭
gigithebear
as someone who has been dealing with a skin condition flare up, i bet this feels soooooo good
pedro5414
the panel of her removing the velvet its giving me bersek vibes for some reason lol
Sabella
There’s the money shot.
I’m both surprised and kind of not that Idrisah is the least perturbed.
Trees
Uh oh!
.
Uh oh!
.
Welp. I hope all of those commenters who have been looking forward to this moment over the previous few pages are getting what they want out of it.
.
See you all on Saturday.
Vinemaple
The antler has been peeled, the tail has been poofed!
For the last few days, I’ve been hoping that this moment (which Jay shared a preliminary drawing of in 2022, which is part of why we’ve been hyping it) will not just happen, but lead to a lovely moment of support and acceptance that will help Talita deal with her species dysmorphia even more… and from the little smile on Idrisah’s face, I think it just might happen!
Enai
The poofy tail delights me.
Lilac
I love how gillie’s super freaked out and idrisah’s just like “oh!” incredible…..
Lilac
Also wait, question, where does trash go here? Like do they burn or is there à storage facility, or does it get dumped in space, or would that last option be littering? Is there the technology to derive material from everything, so everything is recyclable,/is the system in any way more efficient than our current one? I wonder….
Lilac
Didn’t mean to have an accented a lol
Peter Jensen
Energy generally has to be decently cheap in a setting that has spaceflight, so I imagine waste is not so much burned as pyrolysed. Any organics get gasified and the resulting syngas can be used as chemical feedstock. It’s not particularly energy efficient, but it definitely makes the waste safe regardless of biological origin. Anything non-organic that isn’t worth the effort to recover elements from is probably just dumped in the slag-heap. That place is gigantic and there are not very many people to generate waste.
JoB
> where does trash go here?
No canon info yet AFAIK … read: speculation time! 😉
The likely best use they could make of this bit of trash would be to keep it in Talitas nutrient cycle, i.e., feed it to the centaur ag. But, unless they have near-AI waste separation bots, Talita dropping it into a nondescript bin in the humans’ area means that that’s not going to happen. Other kinds of “recycling” would be similarly hindered by that, unless we’re talking about breaking the waste up into atoms (or even further) and running Star Trek Replicator™ level fabbers with it – which we haven’t seen any evidence of.
Having that said, in general, they have every interest to cover their needs by means of recycling, if at all possible. We might not see much of that, because a lot of the technical stuff they need can easily be taken from the spacecraft they disassemble, rather than their own refuse. And, of course, their ag plants have “recycling” (of water and biochemicals) written all over them.
Burning trash would eat up a large amount of their limited stock of oxygen, in exchange for the energy released by the fire. Shikaviil Port is supposedly powered by solar panels, to the point of letting a stash of fusion fuel sit around unused, and they’re running a smelt from that, so I can’t imagine they’d consider the extra energy worth the expense.
Having stuff dumped someplace on Dirtball’s surface is entirely possible. Let’s be frank, the unused mining infrastructure and the materials dropped into the slag field are dumps, and with almost no atmo- nor any biosphere on the planet, there won’t be any bad surprises à la environmental biohazard. Dumping stuff into space – as in, orbit – is entirely unnecessary effort, and would present more of a danger to their operation.
More exotic methods, anyone? I don’t think that they can wormhole their waste straight into a star to get rid of it, because if they could, the plasma the same wormhole can extract from the star would make even the solar panels superfluous as an energy source …
Vinemaple
Your theories made me realize that… Okay, Dirtball-aka-Shikaviil was built originally by skimmer Avians. It would at the very least be “on brand” for them to have a specific massive trash dump, possibly a nearby ravine, cliff, or less-weathered crater, and roads, or even a rail stub, leading right to it, just throw every thing over the cliff and not really think further than that. And in the present day, since they’re running with a skeleton crew, and using Jovian concepts of sustainability, the facility might be producing an absurdly low volume of refuse compared to what it’s capable of crudely getting rid of.
hurgaburga
CALLED IT
K
LOOOL Gillie is so freaked out and Idrisah is so unbothered
Varyon
Yeah, it’s a good contrast. I wonder if she’s so chill because she’s seen it before, or if she’s just thinking of it like her own cyclic bleeding (which Gillie wouldn’t have had to deal with herself). Or is she just generally chill about wounds and the like?
Enai
I dunno… We have actual, forreal, uterus transplants right now, so in the “genetic manipulation available for all” space future, I would be surprised if Gillie didn’t have a bespoke uterus-and-ovaries-and-all-the-fixings reproductive tract. Or she was at the very least offered the option, because homemade hormones are usually better for you than pills.
Yuppi
considering how giving her a bespoke ear structure (cochlea and whatnot) is said to be quite risky because of Gillie being off model, i can’t imagine a uterus would be much easier.
Enai
I’m rather sure a uterus is easier, because uterus transplants exist, and in 80% of cases do what they’re supposed to: produce babies. It is also unclear what exactly makes it risky to give Gillie auditory implants, but I’m guessing the problem is that her non-standard skull (there’s a combination of words to make you shudder) cannot accommodate standard implants. Unlike the skull, which is rigid, the inside of one’s belly is squishy and easily accommodates rather startlingly large additions, such as a baby shortly before birth. A uterus with ovaries and vagina is much, much smaller than a near-term baby and easily fits the abdominal cavity without having to remove any of the other organs. I just think that a world where people evidently transition every which way pretty easily (see Mel, for instance) would probably have a standard solution for the “my flesh prison looks like a boy but I want it to look like a girl and also be able to do everything girls do, menstruating and getting pregnant very much included” situation. We’re pretty close to reaching that, after all, political bullshit and horrid billionaires notwithstanding. Well, except ovary implants. I don’t think we have those yet.
Jay Eaton
In spite of being a horror fan and used to fictional gore, Gillie is way more icked by real bodily function stuff than Idrisah. Gillie would hate to change a diaper, Idrisah would do it completely unbothered.
7arty
Maybe it’s Gillie’s face providing a contrast effect, but Idrisah looks outright fascinated in that first panel
Hunter
Oh, poor Gillie XD
JoB
IIRC the antlers have been depicted as being, in and of themselves, light-colored, if not outright white. I guess that Gillie will have in the order of 15-30 minutes to watch bright red ones slowly turn brown in front of her face. If she chooses to continue the conversation / ASL lessons, that is. >:->
Teod
She’s doing it right in front of somebody’s windows. I wonder whos and I wonder if there are other witnesses. It might be just Gillie and Idrisah apartment, but it could be some of the temps too.
JoB
Given the development of the number of residents (and the lack of curtains, wall decorations, furniture etc. visible through those windows), chances are that that flat is unoccupied, and has been for quite a while …
Tentament
So basically centaur blood looks like kool aid.
Hubert
I need eye bleach