Author notes

187 - Faith

El Cid

on Sept. 21, 2017

A rather dark and brooding page, but I had to work in some sort of mini character arc for Nascha. Her time in this comic is short (very short, actually!), so this will all play out over the next several pages. Our next update kicks off the Big Climactic Action Sequence which takes us to the end of the chapter. Good stuff ahead. I may end up posting that on Saturday, so be sure to check in over the weekend or you might miss it. (it's also entirely possible that I don't end up posting over the weekend, so… yeah, who knows!)



REFERENCES

In the fourth panel, Nascha makes reference to her “un-altered” eyes. Like most mooners, she does not have cybernetic implants in her brain and sensory organs for viewing and interacting with virtual (“meta”) reality and holograms and such, the way most humans do. So the fact that she can see and interact with Osprey, who is apparently some kind of spirit or deity, is convincing evidence that Osprey is in fact real and not a hologram of some sort.



Q: What is a mooner?

A: This was laid out in the Kuiper Belt Bestiary bonus page, but hasn't been explained in any real depth within the comic. It's been introduced in a manner in which you can mostly figure out through context what's being talked about, but again it's only been explicitly spelled out in the bestiary. Mooners are human colonists who have modified their bodies to be better suited for living on moons and asteroids, or other non-traditionally “earthlike” environments.

It's a blurry line between where you would start considering someone a mooner as opposed to a standard (“substrate”) human, or a “spacer.” The easiest way to understand the core difference is that there are primarily two ways humans can adapt to living in space: You can either change your environment – by terraforming or living in habitable artificial environments – or you can change yourself to better survive an alien environment. Standard humans tend to favor few major overhauls on their bodies but rely heavily on technology, cybernetics, and artificial habitats. Mooners try to change their environment as little as possible and tend toward heavy body modification instead. That's basically it. Oh, and they hate each other, the humans and the mooners. Like, Israel v Palestine level hatred. Lots of bad blood between the two factions.



See you all next update… which should be Saturday… but might not. Yay! Three or four cheers for uncertainty!