Tod uses this story to scare the internal mechanics team interns into traveling in pairs and logging where they're planning to go in the plant at the beginning of the work day.
Transcript
Anonymous asked: Adam so, how come you're having trouble with finding a job as a pilot? Is it just too competitive of a landscape?
Adam: Corporate types only want suck ups, I guess. They’ll ask you to waste your time doing the dumbest shit and then blow up when you question them on it. It's just a powerplay. Petty middle managers get mad about not REALLY being in charge, then take it out on their minions.
Anonymous asked: Tod is it a common occurrence for wrecked ships to arrive for processing whilst still containing... "biological matter"?
Tod: Haha. Is that your way of saying "corpses?" This job is less interesting than you think it is. But... we did have an incident over ten years ago... Cal was cutting open a decommissioned station capsule and found a mummified avian crammed into the outer paneling. Apparently they’d been a missing person for decades... we
immediately got swarmed with Dominion investigators. The story I heard from them was that our mummy had been performing station maintenance, gotten stuck, and died of dehydration. Pretty grim. Once in a while we get vessels that were obviously part of some crime scene or horrible accident, but it’s long after the cops have blown through and picked most of the gore out.
128 thoughts on “RttS Reader Questions 33”
Gheesfellow
That mummified skull rocks! That upper lip – chin hook situation reminds me of some awesome monster designs I encountered way back!
Plasmatic Shrimp
WOW okay, that avian mummy is spooky.
First comment by the way, and I just wanted to say how absolutely amazing this webcomic is. I adore the worldbuilding and the ability for the characters to just act so casual about it – that shows a LOT of hard work and passion.
Chase Wanderstar
Ah yes, everything is everyone else’s fault. Truly, the words of Chucklehead Prime.
glazeliights
did the upload break again?
1d4-nadg
more probably Jay is busy. Doing those AMA takes less time than a regular page but it still takes *some* time, and there is little to no queue to allow for new questions being asked on each chapter break.
We will see!
Kumquatq
I just always assume uploads every 2 to 3 days anyway but im insanely patient
1d4-nadg
I’m usually so impatient, but I know good stories take time. I’ll wait as much as needed and I’ll be here when the next page comes out!
The Foolish Maker of Worlds
What got me about the mummy the most was the (implied/assumed) expression on the avian’s face. I know that avians mostly use their ears to communicate, but the way their mouth hangs open with their teeth so clearly visible reads to me as… almost agonized.
blythe
tbf i think most of that is the mummification shrinkwrapping the skin
petshopper
yeah, something like the dinosaur death pose
The Foolish Maker of Worlds
*communicate emotions
Hydok
oh did you ALSO as a child read a story about a construction worker who accidentally got sealed up in the titanic’s hull during construction and people heard him knocking on the paneling and that stuck with you for decades as a horror concept
also from a storytelling perspective i do love that even in the space future, guys like adam still exist. humanity might be bopping around among the stars but unfortunately people are still Like This
Thisfox
Is there a reason you like to copy other people coments, in your own words? It seems an odd habit. Can’t contribute your own observations?
Vinemaple
^found Adam
thegriffin88
He’d say he had it first and blame Dirtball delay.
Hydok
I’m guessing this is a misfired comment, since it’s a weirdly aggressive thing to say to a stranger. I didn’t bother to read through the comments before I posted, so idk what you’re talking about.
Vinemaple
Your comments didn’t actually copy anyone, and one is not expected to read every comment before replying. Whatever this was, you’re fine.
blythe
i scrolled down, they mentioned the same titanic story in one sentence lol. imagine copyrighting a historical event…
Adrienne
Wow this is so embarrassing! I’ve seen you in the comments a lot but Hydok not so much. Way to just come hot out the gate accusing someone of plagiarism. You usually seem cool so I hope these aren’t your true colors! Yikes
thegriffin88
😧 *cue Amon US sfx* That’s creepy. Only creepy thing I read about as a kid was The Red Legged Scissor Man.
We’re part German and reading that you get to see why Germany is the way it is.
JoB
… yyeeeeaaaahhh we get <a href="https://www.skindeepcomic.com/reader-questions/february-2020-reader-question-12/"a tad weird with ’em old stories …
JoB
(And with proper HTML syntax. :-/ )
JoB
(… let me try for a working link again …)
Vinemaple
Hey, Elwetritsch! One of many, many German-Austrian cryptids you tell the new guy that you can only see while drunk!
The Opossum Witch
I do medevac dispatch and Adam is a very common personality that comes in as a trainee. They don’t usually make it past trainee, let alone to pilot.
Hunter
I get the feeling Adam got in trouble for doing shit recklessly and got fired when his bosses had enough, considering how he behaves on the work crew.
thegriffin88
He thinks he’s above his station in life. Someone to drag his overinflated ego back down to the ground and kick some sense into it would maybe be the best shot at fixing him.
I’d love a job like that. Adam is what you get when non-affluent people try to parent. That’s why kids suck here.
Enai
Wow, what a thing to say. Adam’s problem is that he can’t distinguish between reasonable and unreasonable authority, along with being a reckless and abrasive bully, not that he’s ~~uppity~~.
.
What even.
Adrienne
You’re not really saying with your whole chest that you think Adam is an egotistical loser because he came from a family that wasn’t rich. Because that would be a level of bigotry generally reserved for cartoon villains and corrupt politicians
Kyrean
There is so much wrong with your statement that I can only state: if you are indeed part of the upper-class you sneeringly imply to be better than the common man, you ought to have learned better manners.
Adam is a garden-variety jerk with an over-inflated sense of his own competence. I’ve seen more of that personality archetype come out of affluence than I have the working class.
Heck
So they ask you to waste your time doing the dumbest shit: “Adam, don’t stand within 3 Meters of the grinder blade”
And when you question them: “I’m not in front of it”/”Isn’t that what the suit is for”
They blow up as a “power play”: “shrapnel can fly in any direction”/ “Your suit is made for breathing”
Just a fun observation! ✨ Also Mummy Avian
Felixscout
To Adam and his ilk it’s never their fault but the other person’s.
Sigh…
thegriffin88
Tali’s too nice. My headcanon character probably would have ended that with “but hey, ignore me and see what happens. I’m curious too. I’ve never seen a liiivvveeee depressurization.”
She’s a GMH griffin, which is complicated and they have a lot of worldbuilding and lore and stuff just making it fit into Jay’s world.
Gar G
Some things never change….
And yikes…
mustarjil
Yay, my question for Adam was picked. When I learned that someone as reckless as him was aiming to be a pilot, I just had to ask him why does /he/ think he can’t make it into said field. It’s such a concerning answer given his current job… Thank you for the good food, Jay.
AceiestArtist
The comments continue the tradition of dunking on Adam every time he opens his mouth.
Not that he hasn’t earned it XD
mossrabbit
oh adam for SURE has multiple harassment and safety violations on his record huh
JoB
“Let me tell you how that #§$%!! supervisor made someone I have never met file a ‘reckless flying’ complaint against me …”
[never reads passenger manifests]
mossrabbit
hell i mean, in adam’s literal second appearance (p85) he assaults yao (grabbing someone’s prosthetics without their consent is assault, regardless of if theyre decorative) and makes fun of xem while employing literal schoolyard bully tactics. then he IMMEDIATELY turns around and starts asking invasive questions to phoebe after talita scolds him. and his first appearance he’s like the third or fourth named character because he had to be told off. this is a man with multiple “asshole” ratings on megaforum mf/amitheasshole
Enai
For sure. He also never seems to learn from being corrected. The dude’s a walking facepalm-demic.
Vinemaple
One learns from zero percent of the mistakes one doesn’t admit to making!
xobe
SNAP INTO A SLIM JIM
Corbin
Is the avian’s name Slim Jim now?
McFrugal
The story the authorities gave about the mummy rings false. If someone’s doing maintenance, there’s a maintenance log. Anyone looking for a missing person would look at what they last did and check there. Also, how did nobody ever do maintenance in the same area after that and notice the body? If they died of thirst then that means the area had an active supply of oxygen, and that also means the body would rot afterwards which would spread into the ship’s air supply and everyone would notice, plus it wouldn’t leave a mummy behind. There being a mummy strongly suggests the area was exposed to vacuum, which also puts the cause of death into doubt. Most likely they were murdered at some point, then their body dragged out into space and sealed behind the outer paneling to hide the crime. The authorities keeping it quiet would make sense if the perp was a flight risk and they didn’t have enough evidence to make an arrest before they had to put out that story. Or maybe they just didn’t know who did it and didn’t want to foster paranoia? Or maybe they discovered the only way the body could be there is if they got sealed in while the capsule was being constructed and the construction company paid them off to keep it quiet. Real hard to say without more facts.
Vinemaple
I wouldn’t be surprised if maintenance logs are optional in the Dominion of Tiiliit. Also, it sounds like the mummified tech was working in a sealed, nonpressurized void space.
This kind of thing happens on surface ships far too often, even nowadays. I can imagine the worker not being properly logged as having entered the space, the only door not being tagged open, nobody monitoring them while they’re working in there, and then getting “stuck” through some accident, probably a fall. Everyone assumes someone else made sure the worker got back out, the void is sealed back off, and the worker dies, slowly, of dehydration, while everyone looks everywhere else for them… or assumes they’ve skipped work and are out partying.
Why nobody *heard* them, well, there could be a few reasons… noise, nobody around, too much insulation muffling the sound, that awkward feet-over-head position making it hard to shout…
We get told stories like this in safety training, specifically to make sure we don’t leave someone to die in an uninhabitable space. Just like Tod tells this story to his crew. On real cargo ships, those void spaces sometimes deplete their own oxygen due to chemical byproducts of corrosion, and zero ventilation. They’re not built to be lived in, and they’re dangerous to work in.
Any shipyard will have a story like this.
zaratustra
Fun fact! The room inside a ship that stores the anchor chain can become untenable for human life in as little as 24 hours if there’s no air circulation, because all the oxygen combines with the iron in the chain!
malmo
A new reason to fear anchors! Thanks!
Enai
Also, people are really f’in stupid sometimes. I read a story in the newspaper about a tech and his apprentice doing maintenance in an automated storage space. They’d properly removed the fuse and hung a tag that said “work in progress – do not remove” or something to that effect. Some genius came along, removed the tag and reset the fuse, triggering the auto calibration run of the picker. That thing is fast.
…
Cue mincemeat in the storage unit. Makes you consider bringing back public floggings or the stocks, it does.
IncompleteMachine
…Jesus Christ…
Min
Yeeeep. If there’s anything I’ve learned researching engineering disasters, there is no safety system so foolproof that someone tired, untrained, or thoughtless can’t get through it.
JoB
… and that’s why every electrician uses his personal padlock that nobody else has a key for on a LOTO …
rustbird
Yeah, you can have strict guidelines around maintenance logs or LOTO, but one dumb mistake is all you need to end up with a dead body.
Entguarde
Mummification doesn’t necessarily need to occur in an environment totally devoid of oxygen, but it can happen in areas of low oxygen! There was a case a couple years back of a man who died of a heart attack in his own boat and was found mummified.
Bright
IIRC mummification mostly depends on there being a lack of moisture. For example dead organisms in places like the middle of the Sonoran Desert are frequently mummified despite having remained on the surface because there’s so little atmospheric moisture.
JoB
> IIRC mummification mostly depends on there being a lack of moisture.
There are several routes to “mummification” = absence of decomposers and detritivores. Those mummies found in, e.g., the Atacama desert were preserved by lack of moisture, and look dehydrated for it. Swamp mummies, on the other hand, were cut off oxygen (air) – and usually look a lot more lifelike because their flesh turned into adipocere instead. And then decay can also be stopped by chemicals (including outright embalming, hello Egypt), cold, and (my guess) a couple more “novel” ways.
(I suppose that the day we find the mummy of a missing worker in a Radura plant, “radiation” will officially be added to the mummifaction factors list …)
Eux
god, i love the amas.
Min
Bite. Bite Adam. Bite.
That mummy is really cool, and has made me wonder what the other sapient species would look like mummified. I can see JUST enough of that skull to be interesting!
petra
yummy avian jerky :))
Light_In_The_Fog
<ōōōC
(concerned avian emoticon)
Joysweeper
adam you’re just right enough to totally maddeningly be wrong. management can be like that! if you had any power, *you’d* be like that! but your assuming it’s the case from the jump is probably more the cause of your troubles than other people are.
friendly spacer
These AMA intermissions continue to provide some brilliant worldbuilding on the side. Did Cal receive/need counseling in the aftermath or are they expected to process the trauma on their own terms? We’ve seen some of Bip’s coping strategies (MAINLY avoidance), so I wonder about the cultural expectations around AI grief and (psychological) shock vis-à-vis other sophonts.
cabbage
This makes me wonder…the dominion of tiiliit is an intergalactic government with well established ties to humans and the BFGC. Centaur governments rarely extend beyond clan level (according to what i gathered from the neocities)
Would there even be birth certificates for most centaurs beyond clan records? Like the antler velvet blanket is a good way to store geneological records, but how often are those archived? Would a centaur government even report them missing?
Mitta
A homeplanet centaur embassy does exist, the one they contacted when Talita was first found in the foster home. They did not have any records of missing children in the area and there were also no records of any spacer centaurs passing through when Talita was surrendered, indicating there is some form of citizen documentation but its probably very few and far between. On homeplanet I bet its nonexistent in most areas except for really large powerful clans. Something I believe makes going off planet even more risky for centaurs, on top of their expensive cost of living and stigma.
bisexual
all this talk of the avian mummy which is a very weird and specific circumstance. Nobody talking about the real horror, which is Adam. I think most people have met someone like Adam, and they tend to continue to Adam all over the place. That’s real. And that’s terrifying.
malmo
The real horror was learning Adam is a pilot. I bet he doesn’t follow checklists
Vinemaple
Agreed! And likes to say, “Hey, watch this!”
IncompleteMachine
That’s some of the ‘dumbest shit’ he was talking about. He’s going to get himself killed; I just hope he doesn’t take anyone out with him when it happens.
hessian
“adam all over the place” i’m stealing that
Bright
Adam is the sort of person whose disregard for safety leads to things like a mummified corpse behind a wall that’s not found for decades. The thing with him is you hope it’s him and not someone else who was doing the right thing, but had the misfortune to be paired with someone who does not.
Professor Aggressor
Avian Jerky!
thegriffin88
Sure Adam it’s never YOUR fault.