Chips with legs.
Transcript
Idrisah tosses food in a frying pan over the electric stove. She's cooking crickets, sliced garlic, dried peppers, and scallions in oil. In the living room side of their apartment's open floor plan common area, Gillie is in conversation with Talita. Bip's avatar is on her computer monitor.
Gillie: (ASL) So. Things just got more complicated. Apparently, the Runaway's SIMS code has suspicious recent activity. Namely, it appears someone has been striking trip and passenger information from the ledger.
She frowns and turns towards Bip on her monitor.
Gillie: (ASL) And been SLOPPY about it.
Bip's avatar glances away, irritated.
Bip: Well normally, so are the people checking customs papers.
52 thoughts on “Runaway to the Stars: Page 172”
TotallySomebody
Uhuh well bip you have to remember… everyone on Dirtball is BORED
Gar G
I just have to say, as someone who enjoys cooking and does so for my family, I love the sight of her cooking crickets and vegetables like that
It reminds me of cooking ground beef that way, and it just makes so much sense to me about crickets being a more efficient alternative in settings like this
Plus, while I’ve never had them myself (and probably never will), I’ve heard they taste pretty nutty, so I imagine this would make for a very tasty meal!~^^
florence
okay wait i LOVE how theres a text bubble on the screen bip is on BELOW their actual text bubble its such a nice detail
edenmachine5457
WHY IS HER COMPUTER BACKGROUND A PICTURE OF BEANS 😭
Jay Eaton
Because mine is 🙂
cinna
Actually, I just thought about how good it would smell in there, and now I’m wondering… knowing it wouldn’t taste remotely edible to Talita, what does it SMELL like when humans are cooking their own food nearby?? The times I’ve seen her depicted in such a situation, she doesn’t seem to react as if it’s particularly stinky or anything, so is just kind of a neutral smell? I’d imagine centaurs wouldn’t have had any pressure to develop a “hey don’t eat that” signal for something they’d never naturally encounter in the environment where they evolved
0xabad1dea
When I go to the dentist, they have a lot of stuff that “smells like chemicals” – not bad per se, just I get the distinct impression my nose was not calibrated with distinguishing this stuff in mind and it’s like “too much of half a real smell”. So most human food is probably in the same range as, say, fuel and paint thinner to her?
Enai
Not necessarily? I mean, perfume smells pretty good generally, but if you taste it it usually just tastes like soap (child!me was curious, and later adult!me licked a wound where I had applied perfume earlier. Do Not Recommend.), so it may smell amazing for Talita, too. Or not as the case may be: garlic is known to be controversial even among humans. But the maillard reaction elicited by roasting stuff is probably much the same for all foods. So, delicious smell with possibly pungent garlic. Utterly inedible contents of the pan.
cinna
i really could go for some garlic crickets right now tbh
ryttyr
I love that she has a bugferret inspirational poster XD
Lettuce Vervain
ohh its that bits of garlic in there with the bugs. YUMMMM
Fern
I could go for some stir fried crickets actually.
HAL9000
Bip you can’t brag about being a criminal if you’re dogshit at it.
also, sad to see the identity of mystery cricket cook will never be revealed… 😔
evileeyore
I mean they can, but it’s a pretty terrible brag.
Zuorai
What is the bg on Gillie’s left monitor?? Is that Jerma or am I going nuts
TotallySomebody
I know nothing about Jerma, but I remember the hoards of people commenting about “Sparkle on, it’s Wednesday”
Zuorai
Yeah hes the guy in that meme!
tyrone
Ouch…Bip.. U just got OWNED! By a meatbag!
No seriously, show some Pride in the Crime!
Vinemaple
Visual details to supplement the transcript: a non-diegetic “fading dots” background behind Gillie in the first panel; the panel of Idrisah’s hand tossing the ingredients in the skillet forms the background of the entire page; a handmade trivet/potholder hanging from a hook behind the stove, that’s been knit/woven/crocheted in a spiral; Gillie sitting curled up in her office-style swivel chair, one foot resting on the other thigh; Talita is still in her work coveralls.
JoB
> a handmade trivet/potholder hanging from a hook behind
> the stove, that’s been knit/woven/crocheted in a spiral
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(Aren’t those two potholders, the spiral one hanging in front of a standard-issue diamond-shaped one?)
Vinemaple
Yes, but the comment was running a bit long
Teod
What kind of stove has dials on the top surface? They’re supposed to be on the front!
Their apartment had a light switch where up is off too. Who built this place?
Rubicon Art
My hob has dials on the top lmao.
starryspelunker
Mine does! Also about half of the light switches in our house used to be backwards like that. The hallway and the dining room are still backwards. No reason to fix them yet.
Adrienne
My stove also has dials on the side lmao. What a curious criticism
Adrienne
Also if you have more than one switch connected to a light source, on/off can change around depending on which switch you previously used. My place also has that feature
JoB
> What kind of stove has dials on the top surface?
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Well, mine does. It’s a ceramic hob that doesn’t have an oven or anything else to occupy any part of “the front” below, though, and they’re not dials but integrated touch buttons, so that’s neither here nor there, I suppose.
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More to the point of
> Who built this place?
, the entire habitat was converted from avian housing to multispecies, presumably mostly by the local avian workers in the first days. I wouldn’t be surprised if they slapped a shipped-in standalone human-style hob (with dials on the only, read top, surface) and an oven together. Note that the switchpanel’s iconography suggests that the hob has five plates, and seems to house only their five dials, none for the oven(?) below.
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(And the two frontmost dials seem to be both marked as controlling the same plate, front right, if we’re getting nitpicky :-3 )
DasGanon
Right but other point: Wouldn’t avians have similar cooking equipment?
Like, the stove/hob/hotplate is derived from “oog. Have fire. Put thing to cook over fire. Am cook” with high control but only heat from one side, and the oven is different (but the same) all around the world because putting things in ambient heat (but low control to cook) being perfect for breads and other baked foods (and it’s not “just” the oven as a big hot box, but also the “oven” as in “Dutch Oven” where you’re using the cooking implement as a surface as well.
Anyways, the bigger “it’s a human cooktop” is that it’s at “human counter height” than that it’s a stove with latches like that IMO.
Daedalus
My stove has dials on the top surface. Not a big fan of it though.
My house also has light switches where up is off. Although sometimes that’s just because there’s multiple switches for the same lights.
AnaKaye
The house I grew up in was built in the mid-1960s with state-of-the-art (for the time) appliances. The kitchen cooktop was built into the counter, completely separate from the stacked dual ovens which occupied wall space next to the cooktop. Our cooktop had its controls on the horizontal surface, as it was completely surrounded by countertop and had cabinets for storage underneath. My parents helped to design this custom kitchen themselves.
Enai
Whe I grew up, my parents’ kitchen had a similar setup. The controls for the cooktop were to the right and back towards the wall, to ensure the children wouldn’t mess with the dials. The oven was elsewhere in the kitchen, also coutertop height. I think the childproofing was a good choice, and not having to bow down to get heavy and hot stuff out of the oven is easy on one’s back. Don’t understand why that’s so rare *shrug*
Thisfox
Could be worse. I can’t seem to find an induction electric stovetop without a touchscreen style interface on the top, which is DUMB when heat is involved so nearby, it just doesn’t feel safe. Dials would be a considerable improvement. I like dials and physical switches and stuff instead of what seems to be available at the moment.
I expect the person who built this place was the lowest bidder, honestly. It’s probably all prebuilt stuff shipped in cheaply at some point and installed by the same people being employed to make all the noise next door making a centaur-appropriate space.
JoB
> I like dials and physical switches and stuff
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You’d like a typical French kitchen, then. (The French prefer their stoves to run on bottled gas, which gives you mechanical main valve + security valve for every burner that you need to work by a physical dial.) I can vouch that keeping the horizontal recesses underneath both dials and burners clean is a constant hassle, though; liquids, dust etc. accumulate and stay in them and you have to partly disassemble the stovetop every now and then to get at those deposits.
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Having the interface (dials or touch controls) physically distant from the heat sounds appealing, but it’d require to put them into a separate sub-panel with a notable cable/pipework to connect the two parts. Where’d you put all that in a standard kitchen, where the wall above+behind the stove tends to be, in fact, a massive wall? I can see why the manufacturers are reluctant to offer such models …
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Having the stove controls join those of, and in, the hood well above the stove sounds good, but that’d be a long cable/pipes that you’d still need to run somewhere.
Apollo235
Ok but why was Bip doing that? very much seems like a needless risk. What is that dude (gender neutral) so desperate to hide??
Enai
And why are they sofa-king careless about it? If they keep at it like that, they’ll be caught quicker than that interstellar object obliterated their hull, their central cabling, and their old crew.
Gheesfellow
Well, the Runaway IS a pirate vessel. You don’t choose Blackbeard Airlines if you don’t have dirt on you and want to go somewhere illegal, illegally, to do some illegal stuff. Any name or route would probably be more incriminating than the removal of the info itself.
Plus, it doesn’t help earn the trust of your new friends for them to learn you used to work with Cleaver Bill and Methamphetamine Jones as you dropped them off to planet M-Bezzle.
Chrysalis
I was hoping this page would reveal who the mysterious garlic cricket smuggler is, but instead we’re back to well-behaved law-abiding Idrisah doing some perfectly innocent cooking. Guess we’ll just have to keep wondering.
Vinemaple
OP, this absolutely sent me. You made my morning!
Enai
Yes, it’ll remain a mystery for sure. Also, I want some. I even looked it up: locusts (which I think crickets count as) are halal. Basically every other insect isn’t, though.
Jay Eaton
Idrisah and a lot of spacer Muslims favor an interpretation of the Quran that broadly permits eating insects that have been raised by humans for consumption, not just locusts/grasshoppers. Islamic scholarly opinions against eating insects rely on an interpretation of two ayah that don’t explicitly denounce eating insects, just “unclean” animals. Scholars in spacer cultures tend to agree that insects raised for human consumption are not unclean. However, eating bugs off the ground generally remains haram.
Enai
Thank you, I was wondering about that. There is also the general principle that if you have to eat $UncleanThing to survive, not only is it allowed, it’s mandatory, because you’re forbidden from causing your own death. Given the general problems of feeding humans in space without a convenient planet-sized ecosystem as life support, I figured chabbits and weird gm chimeras of various kinds count as that, if nothing else. But it’s nice to see that more sensible heads prevail in the spacefaring future muslim community.
Tentament
Alright, let’s hear everyone’s guesses at what “SIMS” stands for.
JoB
Snazzy Inaugurated-by-author Magitech Shorthand.
Jay Eaton
Well, if you consider vehicle identification numbers and radio transponders to be magical….
JoB
I’ve had more “interesting” exchanges with our DMV than the average (strictly domestic) person. I can assure you that the effects of having a VIN to recite to them are downright magical. 😛
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(Yes, seriously. Popped that one re-re-imported car straight from “you can’t prove that it was ever built, much less to national specs” to “oh, we still have the data of its back-then domestic immatriculation on file, we can re-issue the documents for it right away”.)
Greenjoe
small note about the transcript, it doesn’t note Gillie’s dialogue as ASL as it did in previous pages
Jay Eaton
Fixed.
Pathfinder42
Bip, we’ve accepted you’re a pirate, but I can’t excuse you for being a bad pirate. Like come on…
Arcstone
In a land of thieves, the only crime is to get caught.
JoB
Untrue. In terms of Thievistan, what Bip’s done is to beg to get caught. ;-D
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(… which might have been been done so as to get the unsuspecting crew-to-be implicated as well and thus forced to Exit Stage Up™ as planned, so …)
Enai
Huh. That hadn’t occurred to me. Wouldn’t that be redundant, though? Talita and Gillie’s actions are plenty illegal on their own (or just against their presumed employment contracts), and Bip certainly knows about them. And when someone puts the Runaway on the loop to be skyhooked out of there, there’ll be no denying that a) she got repaired with company resources b) those resources were stolen as well as c) which employees did that, because Talita is the only person remotely qualified to repair spaceships and Gillie and Idrisah do the paperwork and the scheduling, respectively.
Vinemaple
Early on, I wondered if there wasn’t some other reason Bip and the Runaway seem to be completely zeroed… but this sort of implies that, no, Bip zeroed themself. And it actually wasn’t as perfect as it seemed at first.
I had initially wondered if Nabi-Nabu was involved. I find everything we know about Nabi-Nabu to be vaguely suspicious. There’s something more to that dynamic than “law-abiding parent AI disapproves of offshoot AI’s criminal behavior and flippant attitude, but keeps quiet about it.” Bip’s hard to read, but them being slightly… scared… of Nabi-Nabu seems possible to me.