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20130915, 22:47 – Remembered I had a page to post during the morning walk, then totally forgot about it again until the evening walk. Then I got lost in get-paid-a-month-after-the-work-gets-approved work until a quarter after ten. Information design, data cleanup and filtering early in the week, template architecture during the later part of the week, major CSS and rich media work yesterday and today. Wrapped the straggler templates after sunset. Will probably get paid in late October if I’m lucky, which gives me two weeks to manifest this months bills and next months rent out of the ether. Total poverty has a way of really screwing with contract fulfillment in ways that drug and alcohol abuse never could. Work is done. Blazing through pre-constructed data that I’d been thinking at off and on throughout the year was almost fun. Web work occupies my mind in ways that illustration work never can. Drawing and photoshopping frequently prolongs horrible moods – when I’m on a web development roll I cease to exist as a conscious entity until the last problem is solved, after which my Self slowly reasserts from the ashes of total mental exhaustion.

Not dwelling on the teetering Jenga of busted bullshit I call my life is a thing I really like to do, and web development is the cheapest, legalest way I’ve found to do it.

Naturally, the rest of the month is drawing and client site maintenance and refining the work to bring it in line with client feedback and all the Work parts of existence. If things go modestly non-horribly I’ll be blabbering about moving ATC to wordpress in a few weeks. If things go badly I’ll be talking about something else entirely.

Panels two and four aren’t awesome, and remind me that I need to get artier with shot comps in TV.3. Panels one and four have some perspective funkiness going on, and panels three and five turned out pretty good – West looks good, and Raven would as well if there were fewer convergence issues with the background. Panel seven is the only indication in this scene that Raven’s shirt has words on it – Obscure Reference. An Occulted Obscure Reference. Hah.

Raven’s weight loss between Dead City Radio and The Dualist is due to the thyroid implant mentioned in panel five. I’m not sure if it’s a completely artificial thyroid or if it’s a tube-grown replacement – SCIENCE! can go either way on that one. I’m assuming it’s organic, and either a flat-out compatible off-the-shelf organ or sequenced from Raven’s DNA with the defect corrected.

If this thing had been written in order that bit of exposition probably would have happened in chapter one or two of The Dualist. As it stands, chapter one of Transitional Voices was complete before major work was done on The Dualist and before Dead City Radio was completed, and both of those projects had their own agendas. This is literally the first chance I’ve had to mention it.

Next week: less backstory, more foreshadowing! LONG SHOTS! PLOT!

Mastering notes, 2016.12.07 – Removed the logo from Thad’s shirt, tweaked dialogue in panel six.

Cast

  •

    Thaddeus Gallahad

    A traumatic Awakening in the summer of 1997 was just the beginning of Thad’s emotional problems. The disappearance of most of his Pittsburgh friends a few weeks later compounded his issues and, while he...

  •

    Ornix Khan

    Ornix doesn’t let trivial things like ethics and morality get in the way of his loyalties or sense of reality. A longtime friend of Thad and a fellow “victim” of the Templar Waking God...

  •

    Raven Lockheart

    A South Jersey punk with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a Templar-forged Master’s degree for field work, Raven posed as a high school guidance councillor during the early stages of the Waking God...

  •

    John West

    The first extraterrestrial human to be born on Terra. Home-schooled by Templar, he left the organization in 1997 citing management issues and took the Daedalus with him. John is an incredibly talented Navigator, having...

  •

    Xand

    A pink-haired mechanical genius with a full complement of prosthetic limbs (one “bolt-on,” three high-quality synthetics) and no memory of her first twenty years, Xand is the Daedalus flight engineer. A non-terrestrial human with...

Glossary Articles

  • Compartment A1

    Compartment A1

    The bridge of a Javelin-type spacecraft, Compartment A1 contains four modular command stations for crew and two folding jump seats for crew or passengers. Aboard the Daedalus, the stations are configured for engineering, co-pilot,...

  • Daedalus

    Daedalus

    A Javelin class Am-capable high speed cargo transport, the Daedalus is the property of ex-Templar Captain John West. The workhorse of a shady courier service run out of the Australian outback in a nearby...

  • Relay GLF-4728

    Relay GLF-4728

    One of thousands of automated refueling and relay stations scattered across known space, the ICG Combined Refueling Station & Telecommunications Relay in high orbit above GLF-4728 is officially at the very edge of explored...