Runaway to the Stars FAQ

Yes. I don't mind.

Yes. You can do whatever you want. Really. I would honestly rather you just go do that thing you were thinking of than ask me for notarized permission on every specific variation of fanwork you can possibly think of. All I ask is that you don't claim to have made the source material, and don't commercialize obvious derivatives of my work. (E.g. please do not make and sell RttS themed adoptables, or RttS merchandise). Private commissions of specific canon or fan characters are fine, though.

RttS was planned for print before it was planned to be a webcomic. The first book of a prospective four is contracted to be published by Iron Circus Comics upon completion. They let me start releasing it as a webcomic because sharing the art while I'm working on it (instead of vanishing under a rock for 5 years) is good for my morale and essentially free advertising for the finished book.

I will not answer these questions.

Those are her excurrent breathing nostrils. She breathes in through the nostrils on her face, and after passing through two air chambers the breath exits through those holes. You can learn more about centaur respiration here.

Just like how "human" and "Earth" are words specific to the English language, each of the sophont homeplanets have tens of thousands of different languages, and call themselves tens of thousands of different things. Additionally, many of these languages do not transliterate well into human vocal languages, or at all in the case of bug ferret signs. English and some other human languages refer to aliens by nicknames that reference Earth animals and mythology as a result of this. However, they are sometimes referred to by transliterations of commonly encountered alien languages' terms. Here are some:

Chew: Tiiliitian for "person." Umbrella term for all sapient avians, sometimes broadly used to include other sophont aliens. Most common loanword in English.
Teu Zi: Wiiariian for "person." Umbrella term for all sapient avians.
Chi: Tiiliitian for "skimmer avian."
Tii: Wiiarian for "skimmer avian." Sometimes excludes skimmers not native to the Tiiliitian/Wiiarian archipelago.
Tiip: Tiiliitian term for their homeplanet, equivalent to "Earth." Most common loanword in English.
Wotiip: Wiiariian term for their homeplanet.

Dwaull/Twaull/Dwar: Jngklasht (a nomadic centaur language group) terms for "person." Pronunciation varies between clan dialects.
Ngaur: Southern Coastal Shess term for "person." Was encountered at first contact site, and is the most common loan word for centaur aliens in English.
Maks/Meks: Jngklasht words for their homeplanet.
Aun: Southern Coastal Shess term for their homeplanet. Was encountered at first contact site, and is the most common loan word for the centaur homeplanet in English.

Bug ferret sign languages cannot be transcribed traditionally and their written versions tend to be too clunky for use outside of linguistic contexts. Subjects related to bug ferrets that can't be directly translated tend to be shortened into acronyms of descriptive phrases. However, human sign languages will sometimes directly borrow bug ferret signs when applicable.

[B-P-U Point-5 A Tap 1]: BFL-2 for bug ferret.
[B-X-I Grasp B Shake 1]: BFL-2 for bug ferret homeplanet.

Scud languages can be more easily transcribed but not as easily said. They are also not part of the galactic community in current webcomic time, making the point rather moot. I haven't developed their language enough to give you any transcription words.

Other sophonts often nickname humans with something commenting on either our precarious upright bipedalism, our smooth (mostly) hairless skin, or our strange artificial genetic diversity.

Centaur names for humans include things like poles, spears, balancing staffs, or just bipeds. Their homeplanet does not have any animals that strongly resemble us, and the Shess sometimes refer to humans with the name of a local tree resembling a palm with long grass-like leaves on top. Avians are often referred to either as "the small aliens" or by names referencing the largest flying invertebrates on the centaur homeplanet. Bug ferrets are often named after burrowing animals.

BFL-2 formally refers to humans as "second alien" or "third person" in reference to the order in which they encountered us. In this naming convention, avians are "first alien" or "second person," and centaurs are "third alien" or "fourth person." Informally humans may be called "five fingers," "many persons" (referencing our genetic diversity), or the names of some species of taller endoskeletal bipeds on their planet. Informally avians are sometimes referred to as bug ferrets' local terrestrial flying animals (which evolutionarily are more like mollusks than birds) or "two fingers". Centaurs are informally called "rock toes" (referencing the local clade of hooved endoskeletal animals, similar to "ungulate") or "four fingers."

Avians usually refer to humans as "smooth ones" or reference a specific animal from their homeplanet that resembles us (which humans ironically refer to as two animals it resembles to us, "salamander ape"). As a pejorative, humans are sometimes called "sinners" or "splitters" by skimmer avians. This references the mythic origin of multiple species of avian in local culture. Centaurs are usually referred to as "giants" and bug ferrets are referred to as "hexapods."

Unfortunately alien food is generally not safe for human consumption nor particularly appealing in taste, and vice versa. Aliens evolved from separate biogenesis events, and although they all preform sugar and oxygen based cellular respiration and use water as a body solution, their biospheres do not have compatible macromolecular structures. Many of their structural molecules do not resemble ours, or have different chirality. Humans might be able to detect some carbohydrates and salts in alien food, but other than that it's grab bag of compounds.

Eating alien food is playing a dangerous roulette game. Most often it results in indigestion, as your body cannot process the foreign material. But if you're unlucky, there will be a chemical harmless to the alien but poisonous to humans, or you may have a mild-to-life-threatening allergic reaction to one or more of the compounds. Some alien food also contains heavy metals that the human body is unequipped to handle in high concentrations, such as the cobalt found in avian animal-based food products.

As a side effect of all this, alien food generally tastes and smells like nothing, or a revolting combination of random organic compounds. Even if it looks tasty, eating it is not generally a rewarding experience.

It is a bad idea and it would not taste good. See above.

Sophont aliens count as alien food. It is a bad idea and it would not taste good. See above. Stick to intraspecific cannibalism if you want to eat a guy, this setting has so many interesting varieties of human for you to chew on.

There's way too many variables in food and basic incompatibilities in molecular mechanics for that to be a realistic goal.

Pica exists, so yeah, inevitably. It's a dangerous hobby. There are also some content creators in universe whose whole thing is sampling alien food and reporting on the experience, they usually spit it out after chewing though.

Yes, you desperate creature, that is something you could feasibly do and safely eat. There's a lot of creative wiggle room though because you're substituting literally everything in a subjective sensory experience, like adapting a novel as an orchestral music piece.

Doctors will tell you it is a bad idea and would not taste good, but facts and logic hold little power in this territory. If you're gonna do it, barrier protection between mucus membranes is definitely recommended. Before any wet contact, spot test for allergic reactions. If there is no reaction, wet contact is still medically inadvisable but probably not an immediate threat. Just, for the love of god, don't swallow.

No, because their molecular biology is too different. To get more specific: viruses are non-transferable because each of the sophonts uses a different method of encoding genetic information (humans are the only ones with our specific chirality of DNA molecules). Bacteria can sometimes survive in alien environments with compatible sugar chirality (such as bug ferrets and humans) which has resulted in rare infection cases, but they most often fail to thrive because of a lack of compatible biologically available essential nutrients or the presence of poisons. Parasites cannot survive in alien bodies for similar reasons. It's the food incompatibility again.

Interspecies relationships are very uncommon for a multitude of reasons.

First of all, unlike the within the demographic of people who read my comic, people who are romantically or sexually interested in sophonts outside their species are quite rare. Generally, sophonts are very picky about who they find attractive even within their own species. Shocking news, I know. Within RttS humanity, even interest between different clades of GMH or between typs and GMH is considered unusual.

Then comes the second hurdle: comfortable co-species living spaces just aren't common enough to let many relationships develop. Not being able to eat each other's food means that most inhabited planets only have the agricultural infrastructure to feed one species, and other kinds of food have to be imported or printed. Areas that see a lot of alien traffic, like Nexus Jovia, normally have emergency food supply lines set up for visitors in case of emergency but these tend to be more like rations than a fulfilling diet. Medical care can also be quite dicey if you travel outside your species' typical stomping ground.

Then comes the third and biggest hurdle: the different sophonts all have vastly different ideas of what a relationship even is. Humans tend to form long-term bonds with one or a small handful of people in their peer group. Bug ferrets form huge coteries of individuals which often have several generations of adults in them. Avians are only interested in sex and romance for one season a year and most skimmers prefer to not repeat partners year-to-year. Centaurs generally do not form relationships outside their clan, and between the workers of a clan, sex is sometimes taboo. Scuds and AI both have no innate interest in sexuality because of how they reproduce.

Now we get to cultural preconceptions. Attraction to or romantic desire for sophonts of another species (called xenophilia colloquially, and exophilia more specifically) is generally considered a paraphilia or fetish. As with most paraphilias, it's subject to its own unique set of stigmas. Public opinion of intersophont relationships ranges from "huh, well you do you," to "that's not immoral but it's dangerous, you shouldn't do that, you can't have a fulfilling relationship like that," to "I don't care as long as I don't have to acknowledge people like that in any way because yucky," to "that's immoral." Legal protections for those in a relationship with a different species of sophont tends to be sparse, even in permissive cultures. Jovia is generally socially permissive but lacks legal marriage or other relationship protections between non-humans and humans. In some places with less permissive cultures, sexual contact with sophonts other than your own species is illegal, or falls under the same jurisprudence as bestiality laws. Bug ferret jurisdiction tends to have pretty harsh legal barriers and even harsher public opinion of exophilia. The Dominion of Tiiliit has essentially no laws pertaining to exophilic relationships, but it is generally very socially stigmatized. Centaur clans follow their own internal rules but because of how clan structure works, most find little use in marrying humans in, and flings outside the clan structure are usually taboo.

As a result of all of this, ill-fated online relationships and sex tourism are far more common than stable, mutual interspecies partnerships. Avian and human pairings tend to be the most common, because of mutual legal permissiveness and relatively compatible concepts of what a relationship is.

I don't have any voice samples I could point to for my human characters... Gillie and Idrisah both went through estrogen puberty (Gillie after puberty blockers) so they have that vocal register. Idrisah is high strung and a motormouth. Gillie doesn't speak English but occasionally makes some noise (she has a hyena laugh). By default, unisex GMH like Shyam go through a puberty involving both sex hormones, and when it comes to the voice box testosterone usually wins. Shyam is a soft-spoken tenor, with a noticeable Hindi accent from her bilingual upbringing.

AI voices vary as much as their avatars, but the trade off with synthetic voices is that more "realistic" sounding voices have less expressive flexibility. Calcery has a realistic masculine-register voice, which can sometimes come across as emotionally flat with less authentic sounding non-word vocalizations (like laughing and interjections). Bip has an extremely flexible voice that can mix unique tones, laughs, and interjections on the fly but it sounds obviously synthetic. Their voice is like something in between Bill Cipher from Gravity Falls and Phil Hartman's performance as Jiji from the English dub of Kiki's Delivery Service (but more crunchy and synthetic).

Tonally, I would say the natural voices of centaurs resemble a trumpet or a rhinoceros? Higher pitched than you would think, their entire vocal apparatus is contained within their head. Talita's first language is Jovian English and she has about as flawless of an accent as a centaur can get, but she doesn't sound human. Her voice resembles a cis human woman's, but it's very buzzy and cracks in a high register (definitely a soprano). Some of her tongue-consonants sound kind of off, because the vocal ridges in her trunk aren't quite structured like a human tongue. The closest voice match that I think I can give you is the digitally altered vocals in this song, Assuredly, Albeit. I also took a shot at voice acting both her and Shyam in this animation.

Avians can speak human languages pretty well, but not quite as well as centaurs can. I would describe them as kind of like a yowling or "warbling" cat, but with a syrinx. Duns have deeper voices than brights, and larger avian subspecies have deeper voices than smaller ones. In human terms Turii is a soprano, and Sirawit is a baritone.

Bug ferrets can't comprehensively speak alien vocal languages without cybernetic vocal implants. Many spacer bug ferrets have them, but the quality of their implants varies wildly. Higher end implants will essentially turn unvoiced mouth movements into synthetic speech, lower end (and far more common) implants only grant them the oral flexibility to say specific vowels. Bug ferrets with these implants generally to talk too fast, and substitute lip consonants for other ones. They tend to have deep natural voices, like a bear or a large dog.

Scuds do not have vocal cords. They speak scud languages using the stridulatory joints in their antennae and by clicking their beak. They can't speak human languages for the same reason one cannot play a saxophone solo on a drumset, or vice versa. Rudimentary communication can be established with a translator box, or by mutual language understanding.

Talita (Tah-lee-tah) /taˈli.ta/
Gillie (Gih-lee) /'gɪ.li/
Idrisah (Ih-dree-sah) /ɪˈdɾi.sɑ/
Bip (Bip, rhymes with ship) /bɪp/
Shyam (Shee-ahm, but it's a one syllable diphthong) /ʃjam/
Guiomar (Ghee-oh-marr, hard g like 'goat') /ˈgio.mɑr/
Min/Mǐnwén/敏文 (In Chinese: Mǐn-wén. The Jovian English speaking characters call him "Min" like the first syllable of 'minnow') /mɪn/

The avian character names are just, made up, AND contain double tone sliding that's impossible to pronounce without a syrinx. So don't worry too much about accuracy here. The Jovian human characters pronounce them like this:

Sirawit (Seer-uh-weet) /sɪər.ʌˈwit/
Turii (Too-ree) /ˈtu.ɹi/
Cheevwut (Chay-vwuht) /tʃe:vwət/
Ohwitiil (Oh-wih-teel) /oʊ.wɪˈtil/
Wiwiip (Wee-Weep) /wiˈwip/

The names of the scuds from Terranaut are unpronounceable stridulatory noises and that's why they don't have vowels in them, but when I talk about them with my human mouth I call them these:

Chkbrr (Chick-burr) /ˈtʃɪk.bɛr/
Rzzt-tt (Rizz- tit) /ˈɹɪz.tɪt/
Zzp-tp (Zip-tip) /ˈzɪp.tɪp/
Brr-kt (Burr-kit) /ˈbɛr.kɪt/
Tk-tk (Tik-tik) /ˈtɪk.tɪk/

If you're wondering about a character's name and it's not on this list, ask me and I'll tack it on.

Runaway to the Stars is an alternate universe that diverged from us in the year 2000, and it's over 300 years in the future. Even in the digital recording era of history, the vast majority of media gets lost into the void of irrelevance and only a handful of things have the luck and sheer impact to remain in popular consciousness for hundreds of years. While some things from the early 00s are commonly known, they are not being actively consumed in their original context, they ARE cultural context. For us, stories like Shakespeare's Hamlet and music like Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor aren't actively forming new subcultures or being hotly discussed by the media circuit and the Youth, they are being referenced as a Thing Everyone Knows in other media. The same is true of Dungeons and Dragons, hip hop, Minecraft SMPs, and etc. in RttS. They are the beginning of the telephone game that resulted in RttS's modern media.

Also, I can't, like, include copyrighted shit in my comic. So I can't reference a lot of modern media in my comic directly, nor do I derive joy from individually confirming whether each of my characters would enjoy [insert media property here]. Sorry, but you will have to decide for yourself whether Talita would enjoy Warhammer 20k based on your personal reading of her character traits.

I'm not sure why this is one of my most asked questions, nobody ever asks whether they read books or watch movies. I guess it's because videogames are a relatively new medium right now and thus are associated with a specific type of enthusiast? In RttS they have hundreds of years of history and are a ubiquitous part of the media landscape.

Anyways, the only consistent gamer is Gillie, who plays FPS and action adventure games. Talita mostly watches other people play games, but enjoys crafting and system building type games. Idrisah plays mom-core games like hidden object and Sims/Animal Crossing-type life sims.

Our modern furry subculture is ancient history. There are a handful of semi-related subcultures in RttS but they do not wholly resemble the modern furry fandom, and tend to be either active transhumanists, or fans of specific kinds of speculative fiction.

Only humans have our version of DNA, so trying to add genetic material from aliens would be like trying to hybridize an iphone with a frog. Making GMHs or GMOs that attempt to resemble alien species using various sources of DNA from Earth is politically...inadvisable and you are unlikely to find a competent gene lab that is willing to take that heat for your aesthetic pet project.

Bug ferret gene mods and cybernetic implants tend to be boring invisible functional things, with the greatest differences being body size. Bug ferrets are generally not driven by the same impulses humans are to physically differentiate themselves and their kids from the crowd beyond small tokens of decoration that they share with family members. They find the aesthetic GMH phenomenon weird and unethical, an opinion they share with a considerable portion of humanity.

Avian biomedical technology is kinda shitty and not advanced enough for doing the same kind of extravagant modifications humans do. And as far as skimmers go, there is somewhat of a cultural taboo against the creation of new species of avian. Something about an apocalypse, or whatever.

Centaur medical technology is not quite there yet.

Scuds have straight up transhumanist (transscudist?) body transformation via successive molts. This technology has its own limitations but gives scuds a degree of casual body plasticity as adults that's completely unheard of in other sophonts.

Listen, buddy. Come here. I am very disinterested in the robot limbs genre of scifi. I am so tired of looking at cyberpunk augmentation style metal chunks grafted to a human body, and even less interested in drawing them. So it's not gonna come up much in RttS. Here's a handful of excuses:

For most sophonts, cybernetic implants tend to be IMPLANTS... as in, you don't generally see them, and most are medical in nature. And for both humans and bug ferrets, limbs and body parts can be grown in a lab with whoever's genetics you want, meaning limb and organ replacement can easily be done with much less risk of rejection than a synthetic option. Human biomodders tend to have some cybernetic bits and it's sometimes preferred for adding limbs to the body, like tails, horns, and (non-functional in 1g, sorry) wings. And I'm sure some of them lean more into the robotic aesthetic than the bio aesthetic. They're just um, over there somewhere, where I don't have to draw them. Got it?

To preface this: I am very disinterested in doing worldbuilding for war and combat in science fiction, generally I leave it to people who are more passionate about it than me. Does that make the setting less "hard?" I don't know, and I don't particularly care. I'm much more interested in spending my time figuring out alien ergonomic chairs than rail guns. That's my lot in life.

That being said. Generally in RttS, space combat is the nuclear option– whoever fires first 'wins' because projectiles are so powerful and accurate and spacecraft are so fragile. There is no ship dogfighting, tension between polities tends to escalate more like cold war than anything else. Bug ferret politics are also a large contributing factor to this because the BFGC (Bug Ferret Galactic Community, the outer layer of the communist matryoshka doll of bug ferret politics) has a lot of bureaucratic control over space politics and they tend to withdraw vital technological support (wormholes and other advanced tech) from explicitly warring factions, regardless of what the conflict is over. Bug ferret philosophy tends to hold physical violence as a taboo, often while letting other forms of violence and control slip under the rug... There is a lot of ire towards the BFGC in galactic politics, but they're so powerful it's hard to contest them.

Person to person combat on planets remains largely unchanged. There's no handheld laser pistols in RttS, guns shoot bullets. In space, firearms tend to be heavily regulated and barred from many stations because of the incendiary content and potential for puncturing vital life support systems and hulls in craft. Chemical weapons are even more heavily controlled and blanket banned– tear gas and pepper spray deployed on a planet eventually dissipates, in spacecraft it goes into the ventilation system and spreads everywhere and soaks into everything. Security personnel tend to use electrical weapons more than anything else, which can often cause issues in co-species spaces– the same voltage that incapacitates a human can kill an avian and would be shrugged off by a centaur.

The reason is entirely non-diegetic. First of all, I'm not great at imaginatively designing technology, it's a personal weakness of mine that I've been struggling to improve basically since I committed to drawing a science fiction comic. Second of all, I try to keep the technology in RttS as realistic and practical-feeling as possible. This often involves defaulting to depictions of real technology.

As a microcosm: I have seen a lot of other scifi use hologram screens as an aesthetic shorthand for Future, and I hate this for a variety of reasons... first of all holograms as they are commonly depicted aren't physically possible (cough), second of all, who in the goddamn wants their screen to be see-through? It's sure convenient for the audience of visual medium to see what someone is doing on their Scifi Device as well as the character's face, but why would you want your computer screen to be transparent, and why would you want someone looking at the back of your device to know what you're up to? I'd rather draw solid screen devices. I whole-heartedly accept the 2020s-flavored zeerust that will inevitably come for RttS, as zeerust comes for all science fiction projects.