Murnau uses Raven’s “nosy” comment as a springboard to move away from Ornix’s little bombshell. There’s four pages left of the chapter – we’re not going to stop and have another scene-length chat about this new information, we’re going to KEEP MOVING and come back to it at an appropriate time. Somewhere in ATC Book Four, probably – anything medical between here and there is taking place aboard the Sabrosa.
There’s only one Pecora class freighter in the story, though there’s no reason for Inga to know it by name.
November’s a big month for ATC. This is the first of five (!) Sundays of the month, and there’s a page for each of them. This chapter ends on the 30th – between now and then is the Ceremony Reunion, for which I have prepared material. Material I still need to formally announce here. I’ll do that soon, I promise – I’d kinda like to know how the test article ships before I commit to a price for shipping and handling. After that – roughly a fortnight from now, give or take – is Alias‘s 20th birthday, which is also – technically – ATC’s birthday as well.
Goth night’s getting preferential treatment for a couple of reasons, the big one being that Ceremony is in the comic, a fact that multiple current-and-former members of The Night Shift are aware of. The fact that the scene in Dead City Radio features the only DJ that isn’t coming out for the reunion means he’ll be there on paper, if not in spirit.
Them’s the happy things – November’s full of a lot of other things as well, like figuring out how to pay this month’s rent and last month’s bills, finalizing content for and finally rolling out my portfolio site, getting rolling on the TV.4 script, a high probability of some serious mental ghost-busting at (or as a result of) goth night, “going out” for the first time in eighteen months (guest-listed and broke enough to prevent a relapse, fortunately), cleaning the apartment for the first time in quite awhile, doing a truly epic amount of laundry… and whatever else. My calendar is full and I still have to route around paying work that has either disappeared or rescheduled itself so far in the future that my maps, projections, and general planning are no longer valid.
Normally I’d be absolutely losing my shit right about now, but I’m not – in large part because every single time I’ve done that in the past it’s lead directly to malformed decisions that have failed to resolve the immediate problem while screwing me over hard in the long term and I have had ENOUGH of that. I’m still working through the damage done by desperate decision making in 2011 and 2012 (and arguably 1997, 1999, 2000, 2008) and I figure if repeated short-sighted errors are going to be my leitmotif I’m at least going to get something out of it this time. It helps that there’s no single, direct external antagonist to hang the damage on. I’m near the end of a very long, detailed, semi-complex list of huge projects that have required total focus to progress and complete, none of them involved money, and most of them are things that would have been done five or ten years ago had I been a functioning sober adult at that time. There’s a non-zero probability that this could be the last week of an 18-month sober streak – the subconscious desire to keep things that way is up against the need to actually have real four dimensional smell-o-vision enabled non-internet people in my life, if only to remind me of why I minimized my exposure in the first place.
Technical fact: All of the reflections on helmet glass in this chapter – the semi-rigid suit helmets, anyway – are tweezed out of the reference render with minor touch-ups to fit the render into the drawn helmet surface. I tried image manipulation the first couple of times and quickly realized that re-using work generated in the course of creating the page not only saved time, it looks better.
Next week: time picks up the pace!
