Strip 732 -- First Seen: 2011-06-24
Escape From Terra is updated with new pages every Monday through Friday.

What Comes Next

The war is over, but This Means War has a ways to go. Novo Paolo/Bubbleopolis is still in a nebula/stellar nursery, no one knows what happened to the planet Sharen (center of the Intergalactic Council), and the status of the now-surrendered Invaders is yet to be resolved. What will they do when they learn their homeworld is basically destroyed? Will Alyss and Li be re-united? How about Diana (the real one) and Otto?

These questions will be resolved in the next few weeks, before This Means War part 3 wraps in late May.

After that, I plan to go BACK in time about 400 years, to when Alyss and Li left their home in the Sol System to colonize a new world on the far side of the galaxy. As one might expect, hijinks ensue. New subtitle yet to be determined, start date sometime in around the start of July. Stay tuned!

A Little House Cleaning

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The Transcript For This Page

Panel 1
Very large panel, about 1/2 of the page. Centered is Black Sky Station II, a floating transfer-station between interplanetary and local modes. Its design reflects that of the V-ships – five thick tube-shapes spread starfish-like from a central vertex. Like the V-ships, each tube is flattened in cross-section, 400 meters wide to 200 meters tall. Each tube is 5 km long. Underneath each is a small framework of walkways, cart-ways, and conduits connecting docking portals for the various ships transferring passengers and cargo, some of which are other V-ships like Variable Star, and some others are local runners, also v-shaped airships but only a fifth the size of the interplanetary craft, and with v-legs at a sharper, 30-degree angle. The Variable Star enters the frame from a high angle on the left. One of the smaller dirigibles is departing to the lower right. We see Venus below, black sky above.
See http://jpaerospace.com/atohandout.pdf for reference.
Caption: Black Sky Station II was an aerostat floating 100 kilometers above Venus' blast-furnace surface. At that altitude, the sky was indeed black.
Caption: It was a transfer station between the V-ships, which could not enter the lower atmosphere, and the sturdier air buses which could survive down to the 60-kilometer level, where the air-pressure is equal to that of ground-level Terra.

Panel 2
Tall panel, 1/3 page wide. Sort of a diagram of a slice of Venus' atmosphere, from space down to the surface. The upper fifth of the area is black – where very thin thins out to vacuum at the top. The bottom half-inch of the panel is the surface – a jumble of volcanic rock. The air in the next inch above the surface is very hot and super-dense – use wavy lines pointed upward to indicate the extreme environment. Above that, up to about halfway to the top, are dense, swirling clouds. At half-way point the clouds thin out a bit, so that by about an inch above the half-way mark, there is almost as much open-air as cloud. The clouds continue thinning going upward, and are gone by the ¾ mark and the sky darkens gradually up to the black area. Just where the grey turns black, we see the Dark Sky Station I, which looks a bit like Black Sky Station II, but not exactly. Leave a black strip about 3/16' wide along the left side where I will slug in an altitude scale.
Just above the 1/3 high mark, have a tiny silhouette-figure of a man, falling, and blazing as he goes down.
Caption: The temperature at the Venusian surface is 460°C – hotter than Mercury -- and the pressure is 92 times as dense as Terra's.
Caption: During the construction of Dark Sky Station I, a worker fell many kilometers to a most grisly death from heat and pressure.


Panel 3
Middle row, right 2/3 page wide. Kind of a futuristic version of a scene from one of the 'CIS' shows, where someone in worker's gear is seated at a table being interviewed by someone in a suit, and we see all this through a glass with two more detective-types looking on from our side of the glass.
Caption: Though the accident was suspicious, an investigation failed to find any hard evidence of sabotage.
Caption: But many blamed the Theodorians … 'Teddies' for short.

Panel 4
Bottom row, right 2/3 of page. A scene with a bunch of people at a meeting. We see a few dozen people from behind, seated auditorium-style, and three figures on an elevated platform seated behind a table. People are mostly in shadow, we don't really see any recognizable faces, and the scene should look sinister and foreboding.
Caption: The Teddies were extremely violent primitivists.
Caption: Paradoxically – or perhaps hypocritically – Teddies used the most advanced technology to carry out their deadly attacks against technology, its developers and users.