Like a lot of structures in Shikaviil Port, the mail room is a weird mashup of older avian fixtures and haphazardly installed multi-sophont accommodations, but mostly just a lot of unused space. Despite being one of only a few dozen humans on the planet, Killian somehow got assigned a mailbox he can't reach from the ground...
Transcript
Talita, Gillie, and Idrisah are in the mail room checking their boxes. In the background, an avian checks their mail on a large tiered mailbox structure. In the foreground, Killian uses a step ladder to check his mail box that is out of reach from the ground. Idrisah reacts to the contents of her mail slot with irritation.
Idrisah: (ASL) Ugh, of course all the food I bought for Ramadan arrives now. Eid was weeks ago!
The three gather their mail and leave. Killian glances at them curious as Talita signs.
Talita: (ASL) Have an Eid party again, small. Maybe?
They walk down the street towards Talita's apartment. Gillie signs while holding a bag of snacks she got in the mail: yeast curd strips with "real goat flavor."
Gillie: (ASL) Yeah, time isn't real and holidays are when you say they are.
Idrisah: (ASL) No, what makes holidays special is the fact you're celebrating at the same time as others! It's about that feeling of unity, even while separated!
They reach Talita's door and she unlocks it with the keypad.
44 thoughts on “Runaway to the Stars: Page 198”
EEF PATTIES CHICKEN
This does answer a question I’ve had in my head. I was wondering how often Avians actually flew in their daily lives. Like, most humans can climb pretty well, but we tend to avoid putting ourselves in situations where we have to.
gray--abyss
i always LOVE your panelling and layouts. its a huge inspiration to me, and feels relevant on this page where Talita unlocking a door +co being outside of a panel is such a cool looking layout decision!
Bruce Mickelson
Go check out a Japanese import market. They have all kinds of exotic and wildly flavored snack food combos. My favorite was pizza flavored corn chips.
Gar G
She makes a good point
And I love that Talita is comfortable signing!
ryttyr
I feel so bad for Kilian. Why couldn’t they have given him a mailbox that’s more accessible to him? I mean there’s dozens to choose from!
JoB
More like hundreds. Approaching a thousand, even.
But yeah, that’s poor planning and bureaucratic inertia for ya. :-3 They could have realized that having the lowest boxes of the new multi-sophont cabinets all be power-user big ones (I’d guess the spacers nicknamed them “walk-ins” 😉 ) isn’t the brightest idea before they were ever installed. They could reassign them to the lowest-tier avian mailboxes we see in the background now. But noooo …
(Ever noticed how often a clothing shop puts – say – folded trousers on a rack in batches sorted by (numerical) size, the result being that the smallest sizes end up on the highest shelves and the largest could well bite everyone’s ankles?)
No pity for Gillie, though. Order that much (eating) stuff online – note how it compares to Idrisah’s late delivery of a feastful! -, be ready to take a kneel for it! :-3
By the way, I note that her bag seems too small to hold all those boxes, not to mention that Idrisah doesn’t seem to have one at all. Did they have an unboxing session (beyond one bag of nom-noms) then and there, or bring a “junkyard workhorse” … ¬_¬
40
Talta’s clothes always have the nostril hole, how uncomfortable is it to have that covered? Like it ain’t comfortable for me to breathe through a sweater, but that’s because my oxygen intake is limited and it’s mixing with my CO2; the vibes tell me that covering an excurrent nostril wouldn’t feel too bad.
Jay Eaton
It’s not suffocating but it is kinda hot and moist. Her warmer clothes cover it but leave a moisture vent
Rose
Talita’s signing! they’re all talking together! what a sweet everyday moment <3
Light_In_The_Fog
yippee! Its fun to see how much she can do! I wonder how much of it is stuff she’s directly worked through with Gillie and how much is just her applying what she’s learned from those lessons to sign she already knew
AnormalADN
Always love Talita’s outfits
forest @ swifty's hq!
forget everything else. talita’s outfit is adorable here. i adore those pants soooo much she’s rocking them
JoB
I guess that panel three answers the question of whether the remodeling of block 1 (<) is done only on the innermost "ring" (adjacent to the street), or all three of them (all the way to the habitat's outer wall).
I can see a reason to have extra walls and roofs for housing and workplaces, where people stay for hours and hours and may want some privacy and/or noise proofing or such, but why would they put the equivalent of a Packstation inside a building within the habitat … ?
Enai
Maybe it’s an Avian thing? Cultural, I mean. They had a roof over the control panels in the Deuterium refinery, even though that, too, is inside a building.
Jay Eaton
Easier to keep dirt and moisture out of a building, the habitat doesn’t experience unexpected weather but it’s not a terribly sterile environment and structures are occasionally hosed off to remove dust accumulation. Walls and a ceiling also allows easier control over who has access and when, this place used to have over a thousand people with a high turnover rate.
Eux
aw hi killian!! this is such a great strip. <3 talita is signing more! the musings on holidays! THE REAL GOAT FLAVOR
the Inmara
EXTRACTED FROM REAL GOATS
Fallingfeather
I love the detail of the multi-tiered avian inboxes! And how Talita’s grammar is a little shaky but still “legible” in meaning. :3
Boolah
The tiny Letter in Talita‘s hand lol
Boxthing
I only have eyes for Gillie’s snacky snacks… P;
Lamprey
cheese jerky,,,
Jay Eaton
It’s more like goat meat flavored mushroom jerky.
Enai
Sounds delish. When will your line of RttS-branded snacks be available in stores?
JoB
> When will your line of RttS-branded snacks be available in stores?
Assorted “extraterrestrial cuisine” chemical-ish tastes for the daring customer? :-X
Enai
There’s a large range of undesirable flavors known and named in wine-tasting alone, and I believe they’re all reasonably non-toxic. “Alien food flavors” could be some combination of those in soybean chips or something. So, eminently doable, but I think they’d not sell well.
.
Mushroom jerky with real meat flavor, however? I can see a lot of Alpha-Gal sufferers who became vegan out of necessity as customers. Or anyone who wants to reduce their meat consumption but misses the taste.
Boxthing
CHEEEEEESE!!
Seriously I would do several illegal things for some good cheddar. Or a cheese substitute that’s indistinguishable from cheddar, because milk protein is bad for me. 🙁
whirly
i love the design of those tiered avian mailboxes. its very clever to have them stacked on top of each other at avian height where they can stand on top of the lower row. i think its awesome how much thought goes into alien ergonomics in this comic, even small details like mailboxes in the background become really inspiring and interesting
fluffy
What does it even mean to celebrate things at the same time when you have to worry about the speed of light?
Enai
I wonder how the Theory of Relativity changes with the availability of ftl-travel. Sure, light still travels at light speed, but information, including, say, the time signal of clocks, can travel instantaneously. Doesn’t that invalidate the entire premise?
JoB
“Celebrating things together” can be done by video call, made possible by wormholes reducing the signal delay to a couple minutes.
(I would really like someone doing exposition on what prevents putting wormholes in series so as to make information travel into the past, a la Roman ring, though.)
ryn
when will we get the lore on Moor Liam…
Trees
Have you ever heard the phrase ‘Don’t go out on the moors!’?
It’s because of Moor Liam.
Vinemaple
Aargh, I’m so disappointed we didn’t get any direct follow-up to the -bone peel- velvet pull, but I do notice that it hasn’t been very long, because Talita’s antlers still have texture and coloration!
Jay Eaton
It’s the same day. I just didn’t think Talita wiping blood off her face with a towel was interesting enough to draw and needed to move them to the next scene across the dome
junkverse
Really tickled that the mailboxes are basically the same as the mailboxes I deliver to in the here and now.
Claire
This comic has been getting me and my family to get into learning ASL! Little bits and pieces for the moment, but we’re trying to build up something of a small vocabulary.
Greebus
I’m imagining that whatTalita got in the mail were more googly eye stickers.
Comito
Yooo, real goat flavor! This really is the future!
Nerdanel
I wonder what “real goat flavor” means in the context of a future where humans are so good at genetic manipulation and hybridizing. Were any goats actually directly involved in the production, or has the yeast been engineered to produce goat proteins? I’m guessing the latter.
Vinemaple
I’m guessing this will forever remain a Noodle Incident
Jay Eaton
“Real” goat flavor in this case means goat muscle tissue was involved at some point. Whether that muscle was ever part of a living animal depends on the price point.
Peter Jensen
In the context that these are yeast *curd* strips, I have to ask if the flavor is meant to invoke the meat (as in these are jerky analogues) or that of goat cheese curds.
Septemberdale
“Yeast curd” does call to mind “cheese curd”. I like to imagine it’s got the texture and appearance as basically any other Generic Fungal Future Food but is *exactly* goat cheese flavored because of added flavor molecules bioidentical to those in real goat’s milk.
Jay Eaton
They are kind of like the child of fried tofu and mushroom jerky, with a goat meat flavor. If they were goat cheese flavored they’d just be called cheese flavored, because goat is the default dairy animal for spacers (though the cheapest dairy is produced from goat lab tissue…).