Aaaaand that concludes our animated mini series. 21 animated clips. I think that may be a record for my longest series to date. Hope you enjoyed it!
Um, this page… yeah… it feels a little unnecessary and tangent-y. Like, this all should have ended a couple pages ago but instead it's… still… going… on! Arguably this and the next two pages could all be removed from the comic and all would be well. The reason I added these pages was because initially Ozzy was supposed to have a bigger role in the story but, after I wrote him a smaller role, I still needed to include some elements from Ozzy's storyline. So things that originally weren't going to come up until later in the story, all need to be squeezed in somehow into this scene. Namely, the conflict between Rana and Ozzy (and by proxy between Rana and the government of Neptune) needed to be brought up. That's why this is happening. That's why you're going to suffer through two more pages of seemingly pointless plot elements being introduced. Sorry 'bout that. But adding these few pages here will eliminate dozens of pages later on, so it's worth it. We'll just need to hold our noses and trudge through this together, people.
Hey, at least I finally caved and started adding sound effects.
REFERENCE * The conversation Jetta alludes to in the last panel was on page 92.
My main goal for the upcoming Chapter 3 will be drastically speeding up the pace. A lot needs to happen in not a lot of pages. So, as much as this chapter errs on the side of moving along too slowly, I expect the next chapter will move along too quickly. So you get to hate both chapters for completely different reasons.
Before I close out my 'Know Your Neighborhood' series of science blurbs, I thought I should take a moment to highlight a snazzy program you can use at home to explore neighboring star systems. It's called NASA's Eyes and it's from (you guessed it!) NASA. It has a neat feature called Eyes on Exoplanets that pulls up an interactive 3D map of every nearby star with confirmed planetary companions. You might find it useful if you find yourself writing a science fiction story and want to use a real exoplanet for whatever reason.
One of the coolest features is that it can actually superimpose the stellar system over our own solar system, and even brings up the habitable zone so you can find planets capable of supporting life. Unfortunately, after a bit of amateur planet hunting, it becomes apparent that solar systems like our own are very rare.
Probably my favorite system I discovered here was the Mu Arae system (49.8 light years away) because, at first glance at least, it seems to mirror our solar system in so many ways.
After a closer look though, it's more like a dark window into our solar system's desolate future than anything else. Mu Arae is a G type main sequence star just like our sun, but it's much older (6.34 billion years old), on the verge of going subgiant. And though it has planets in almost the same orbits as Earth and Mars, they're gas giants. Just as will be the case in our own solar system will in a billion years, the Earth-clone (Rocinante) is baked too hot to have liquid water, and the Mars-clone (Quijote) is still too cold. But I guess if you were a sci-fi author, you could envision that life might have evolved on one of Rocinante's moons earlier on before the sun started going subgiant, and then migrated to Quijote to escape the coming stellar apocalypse. It could happen. I guess.
Stay tuned. Unfortunately, next week will just offer more pointless sex and nudity, but after that it starts getting interesting, I promise!
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