Author notes

156 - Awake

El Cid

on June 3, 2017

And with that somewhat hamfisted opening out of the way, we now find ourselves on a freighter headed for Triton. I'm not sure how clear any of what's happening on this page actually is. That second-to-last panel is a shot from inside one of the cargo bays, and that last panel is a scary space robot emerging from the dark recesses. And no, it's not a face-hugger! I call her “zombie bot,” for reasons that will become apparent soon enough. When I designed my zombie bot, I was focusing first and foremost on function… and it just ended up looking like a robot face hugger… and it does actually hug faces, sort of… so I guess it *is* a face-hugger, technically. Sort of.

And here's some snazzy bonus pics of the space freighter. As always, I've tried as much as possible to make my spaceship models look like real spacecraft rather than something you might see on a sci-fi show. Of course, since I'm not actually a rocket scientist, that probably doesn't count for much.





The ship spins to generate artificial gravity through centripetal acceleration in the crew habitats, which are attached by tethers. It's been pointed out to me by someone much smarter than myself that this is actually a bad way to design a spaceship, because the spinning puts a lot of stress on structure of the craft. It's probably smarter to “tumble” the spaceship into its trajectory rather than spin it like this, because for various nerdy engineering reasons it's easier on the spaceship. Whatever.

As you may have noticed, these pages are coming faster than I usually like to update. The reason for that is twofold: (1) I'm trying to get as much as possible posted before the Drunk Duck Award voting begins, and (2) the chapter takes a few pages to get going, and I like to plow through the more tedious parts of a chapter by rapid posting. This is actually a fairly action-packed chapter (actually two mini chapters), so hang in there! It does get better. I conceived of this as a short sci-fi horror/space disaster vignette introducing our main villain in grandiose fashion. As mentioned before, even though this does in the end tie back into the main story, you don't need to have read the previous two chapters in order to follow this one. It is for the most part a standalone piece.

More pages to come next week, most likely starting on Monday. I may skip the weekend postings in future, though; it's almost always a bad idea! (Hmm, maybe a Monday – Wednesday – Friday update schedule? Why am I typing everything I think? Bye, folks!)