Happy chapter seven! Talita is getting her immunizations! She loves it!!!
Transcript
Chapter 7: Antlers
A closeup of Talita's antler shows the thin, soft coating of brown integument on the velvet skin. The bone underneath is about 30 centimeters long now. Her mouth is tight with a suppressed grimace and she is gripping her neck in discomfort.
Dr. Henriques: They grew in again, huh?
Talita: Yeah, third time this year.
A wider shot shows Talita is sitting up on a tall, multi-segmented hydraulic operation table in a white tiled room with medical posters on the walls. She is in casual clothes, and the doctor is injecting a syringe into the muscles of her mid-shoulder. She already has a patch on her fore-shoulder from a previous injection. Talita looks like she'd rather be anywhere else.
Dr. Henriques: Have you been sleeping at least 12 hours a day?
Talita: ...Mostly…
Dr. Henriques: And limiting your activity during the winter light cycle?
Talita: I walk so much for work, I don't think it matters whether or not I do weights…
80 thoughts on “Runaway to the Stars: Page 189”
kaittzie
I kind of love the way she can hold her own elbow in her hand. About that looks comfortable. I wish my wrists bent like that
kaittzie
Something about that*
Crypewstoast
Antler growing as a stress response is so fascinating especially with how most organisms on earth react to stress. Like stress is a form of flight or fight and basically slows down or shuts down certain functions and processes until your body deems you are safe, but that doesn’t mean the consequences of ignoring those processes are nullified, like some examples being dehydration, hunger, pain and more. But the long and short of it basically is it’s fascinating antler growth is a stress response when one might assume that growing antlers would take up energy trying to be conserved in the stress response
Jay Eaton
It’s not stress, it’s more like her circadian rhythm is messed up from living in a human-centric day and seasonal cycle.
Crypewstoast
Ah that makes more sense! Like how people get messed up when daylight savings happens!
Sen
Yay! The comic goes on! And being her doctor is heavy duty work ^^
Gar G
Fascinating stuff!
And dang has it really been 6 chapters already?!
Vinemaple
Why is nobody talking about Talita’s denim Gaucho jorts with the swoopily-curved cuffs and a matching denim sash and BOW?? Usually Talita has been mid at best, at adapting Human autotailor patterns into fashion she can wear, but when she gets it right, STARS, does she ever get it right!!!
HAL9000
…are you perchance a murderbot fan?
DasGanon
This is a premium ~~show~~ comic.
Vinemaple
Nope, I’ve never seen it. I don’t have any streaming services.
Enai
Now that you mention it, I wanna see what they look like with her standing up. Nice pants in any case.
pippington
i looove the very subtle detail of talita’s dental scales in the first panel. so cool
Trees
Coincidentally ‘Winter Light Cycle’ also sounds like a futuristic extreme sport. I bet the Canadians in 2333 love it.
Vinemaple
I’m just surprised to discover that Dirtball’s lighting system is programmed to mimic seasonal variations. I guess that has precedent, considering that Idrisah knows about Cheev and Ohwitiil’s “Spring flings,” and that they actually *have* them.
I guess I just assumed it’d be seasonless for practicality.
HAL9000
i think living without any kind of seasons could drive humans mad, let alone aliens with seasonal hormonal development. possibly a holdover from avian ownership
Peter Jensen
I notice in the world-building that their home planet has a modest 11 degree tilt, so they might be fairly sensitive to small changes in day length. But it also says that it’s partially an internal clock and synced with cues from other avians around them. As it can take a while to re-sync with the majority population, it would make practical sense for a place like dirtball to at least try to stay synced with whatever location they get most of their avian employees from.
TauCeti
I’m pretty certain that Dirtball is tidelocked — no day-night cycle. Also, I’m pretty sure that humans at least don’t suffer without seasons — plenty of people live near the equator where the spring-summer-fall-winter cycle I’m used to means nothing.
Now, a lack of a day night cycle? That’s hellish on humans.
Trees
If I had access to such a thing as seasonal variations controls I wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to set it to ‘spring’ and just leave it there.
Peter Jensen
But isn’t one of the main things that trigger a “spring” response in nature the rising temperature and lengthening of days? Can’t really leave it at something that’s defined by where you were and where you’re going.
JoB
> But isn’t one of the main things that trigger a “spring” response
> in nature the rising temperature and lengthening of days?
[imagines Treesball™ to be a sweltering, shadowless hellscape that has accumulated more than a week of DST offset since its foundation, complete with heated discussions about “why the [bleep] would you want to save any of it?!?”]
Trees
Oh, but sentiment is a poor audience for logic!
Give me the crisp and bracing clarity of spring where the days and nights are both a nice, sensible length and the temperature is just the right side of neutral so you don’t even notice it.
My Celtic constitution lives in horror of the summer. Soggy, over-bright, hot-fart air, wetwipe-on-skin feeling, bastard Scottish summer!
$ilverware
oooo fuzzy
cinna
Amazing texture work, truly. There’s a lot of effort in differentiating different surfaces both close up and in the full shot, I can really vividly imagine how everything would feel to touch.
OfAllTrades
my favorite thing about the backgrounds of this series is seeing things that are common place right now irl and havjng the realization of “fuck yeah [x thing] persists into the future!!!” and this time it’s comic sans i love it
JoB
Well, I can’t say that I’m enthused by seeing NEMA-style wall sockets, but I get what you mean. 🙂
(And of course they do fit the in-universe history of Nexus Jovia.)
Argon
There’s a bonus comic on their website that shows Talita fixing an overhead light with wire nuts, and I just keep thinking, those must be so fiddly if you have hooves… Please get her some wago connectors, she deserves them
TotallySomebody
Wait which one is that?
JoB
> Wait which one is that?
First panel of Oil and Water.
Now imagine doing some soldering in zero-g. ;-P (Now I wonder, do the folks on the ISS and the like ever try to repair electronics themselves, or do they just plug in a new, ready-made subunit with already-installed connectors delivered from the surface … ?)
Vinemaple
That’s _italic_ Comic Sans to you.
Phasma Felis
Aaaaah we’re back!! Hooray!
Fallingfeather
Geez, I wonder if getting her antler growth cycle triggered three times in a year (as opposed to the presumably normal once) is bad for her health? Like, that’s a whole extra set of “bones” that her body is growing pretty regularly, that can’t be great for her calcium/iron levels.
betsumei
Magnesium, I think. But it seems like something that supplements could help with.
Peter Jensen
Yep, she takes magnesium carbonate as a supplement. Specifically in the form of gym chalk:
https://www.tumblr.com/jayrockin/655643386760593408/the-one-thing-that-both-homeplanet-centaurs-and
https://www.runawaytothestars.com/comic/rtts-page-139/
HAL9000
i love that her shots are spread out over her limbs instead of just rapid fire into one arm. wished it worked like that for humans… I’d rather a somewhat painful arm and leg than one an arm like a human pincushion and no feeling
Stray Cat
I’ve had days where I got a shot in each arm. Maybe it’s done differently depending on where you are?
JoB
Or possibly on what you get? IIRC my GP suggested different arms unprompted when I had a flu and a measles shot on the same visit …
pippington
it might be for absorption reasons. there’s different amounts of muscle and fat on your body that makes them uptake and distribute medications differently. maybe one of her injections worked better for her first shoulder, and the other for her second shoulder.
Tentament
Wait a minute…
Where does Talia go to the bathroom?
Tentament
*Talita
Like does she have to awkwardly use the human/avian sized restrooms?
Teod
Species all have different bacteria and “wrong molecules”, so septic systems are separate just like food production. So Talita has a separate septic tank near her… house.
Tentament
*Talita
Like does she have to awkwardly use the human sized restrooms?
Phasma Felis
There are human biomods that are nearly Talita’s size, so it’s probably less awkward than it might be. And there are *some* space-travelling centaurs, so there might be centaur-specific facilities in some places.
But yeah, probably not nearly as many as for humans/avians/bug ferrets. And even human centaurs aren’t usually quite Talita’s size. And we don’t know how their septic systems would handle centaur waste…
maskteeth
There’s a page on Jay’s tumblr that explains the toilet situation for all the individual species and forms.
https://www.tumblr.com/jayrockin/632732260625465344/the-old-runaway-to-the-stars-comics-onslaught?source=share
thing
if I recall correctly, there are universal bathroom systems that can be adapted to any sophont? but that COULD be from some other place that isn’t dirtball
Marcie
Probably depends on how much cross-species traffic the complex originally had. I wonder how expensive a Universal model is, presumably it would have to be programmed to send waste to different treatment systems. Or maybe it treats the waste itself instead of sending it to a plant? I’m surprisingly curious about alien toilets now
AnormalADN
I immediately thought where do they get Talita’s immunizations from and how expensive is it to ship to dirtball zamn
40
They had to ship a whole ecosystem to feed her!
nick012000
*Are* they giving her special vaccinations, or just human/avian vaccinations that dont contain any chemicals that’d cause adverse reactions? Presumably they’d be immunising her against diseases she might catch from humans or avians, since there aren’t any other centaurs around to catch centaur-specific diseases from.
JoB
Considering that sophonts’ biochemistries are incompatible down to the level of molecules, finding something not-made-for-centaurs that interacts specifically with a centaur immune system in any desirable way sounds rather miraculous. If this is a vaccination (I sense a bit of snark in the author’s comment …), I’d expect it to use a proper centaur vaccine.
And frankly … if Gillie and Idrisah can get a multi-kilogram piece of centaur food delivered to Dirtball, a hundred-or-so gram vial of medicine should be vial-ble as well. 😛
Last not least, about the things she might contract, and from whom and how: If there’s a batch of centaur workers incoming, someone in Dirtball’s management might have had a flash of wit to go “better get her immunization up to centaur standards beforehand” …
Enai
I think the snark means “We all just looove to be poked with needles, don’t we? Don’t we?!?” an yeah, no, I agree: while I do love the effect vaccines have had on me (no Polio! Smallpox? Never met it! Measles? No viral encephalitis for ~me~, thanks ever so! Diphteria? Zero people I ever knew even got sick with it, much less died! Same for Tetanus. Covid? None for me! Mask & regular boosters have so far kept it away! Andsoforth..) I’m not a fan of getting needled and I especially don’t like that the rest of the day and possibly a few days after find me on the couch with exhaustion and mild malaise. But the fact that Talita always got horribly sick whenever a group of Centaurs visited Nexus Jovia tells me that a) Centaur diseases are extremely airborne. Like holy moly they must have air filters and CO2 scrubbers just to keep the station halfway habitable, it’s huge and she probably didn’t even usually see the visitors in person, which tells me the germs must stay viable over long periods of time to reach her and the infectious dose must be very low, so if there’s a vaccine she’s wise to take it.
Enai
There was supposed to be a b) there, but I forgot what it was
-_-
Greebus
I wonder if asking for hours so that she can get enough sleep is an accommodation that she is too anxious to request. Also, I love the two different electrical sockets. Yay!!
Vinemaple
The circular socket looks like some kind of American-style high voltage socket, a 220V or something (there are a few different types). Definitely something you’d need in a hospital, to run heavy machinery like an MRI… or an exam table capable of lifting an adult Human taur, or a Centaur.
Jay Eaton
Talita actually does work shorter hours than some of her human colleagues, she just stays up late anyways.
Greebus
Oh, that’s pretty awesome! And relatable, haha.
Koumori
That high-detail closeup of Talita’s facial anatomy is absolutely fantastic, and quite possibly my favorite panel you’ve ever drawn. The verisimilitude is such that I could almost believe it’s a sketch of a real creature!
hurgaburga
the peach fuzz of the velvet!
her feathers!
the patterns on her teeth!
OH MY!
Stray Cat
What stands out for me, aside from the antler fuzz, is the hoof-nail – that close-up hits that strange middle point where it’s not quite a hoof and not quite a nail, but somewhere in-between.
Gheesfellow
12 hours a day?! Sure glad I’m not a centaur then, I’d be COOKED!
Hang on, what constitutes a “day” here?
Paul
Also, what constitutes an Hour? 😛
As they are living in an artificial environment, I guess that both would be a ‘standard’ year and hour not based on the lump of rock they’re living on. I don’t remember if it’s been mentioned before…
Paul
day and hour, not year and hour. Eh, you knew what I meant.
0xabad1dea
it’s been mentioned that their local calendar is a bit of a compromise between the home planet rhythms of humans and avians, I think the hours are human hours but there’s not 24 of them in a day.
glazeliights
idrisah said at some point that dirtball runs on avian/human 23/7 standard time, so 23 hours a day, 7 days a week
JoB
> what constitutes a “day” here?
Strictly speaking, two bing bongs. 😛
(But yeah, 23 of their hours, which are at least close to our pre-space-age hours in turn, like glazeliights said.)
Redacted
Ooh wait I just noticed the extra large examination table. I wonder if it’s standard protocol for large GMHs, or if they had to order one especially for Talita.
Light_In_The_Fog
Based on the way its set up I’m guessing its for GMGs, it looks like it’d be really uncomfy for talita to lay down in?
Jay Eaton
It’s a scaled up version of a table used for larger taur GMH. The design is based on equine operation tables, which have those hydraulic side flaps to keep an enormously heavy patient in the correct position during surgery.
Redacted
Ooohh I like the radiation sickness chart, checks out that they’d need one in space. Also man Talita looks so uncomfortable, makes sense medical exams wouldn’t be fun for her, just a big fat example of her body being a “problem.”
Eux
welcome back Jay! hope the move went good! Talita feeling awkward about being honest with a doctor how relatable