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Jay Eaton
@jayeatonart.bsky.social
6K followers 260 following 540 posts
An organism appreciator. Working on a hard scifi graphic novel. 🌈 http://patreon.com/jayrockin ☘️ http://jayrockin.tumblr.com 🏳️‍🌈 Bizz email: jayrock5858 @ yahoo .com
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jayeatonart.bsky.social
This week on #RunawayToTheStars: Wake up Talita, back to work!

Catch up: https://runawaytothestars.com
Read ahead: https://patreon.com/jayrockin
Transcript Talita stands on the edge of the dollhouse cutaway, looking incredulously at the enormous luminous Bip avatar. It leans over, considering her with a hand on its chin. Bip: Isn't the water pressure down here deadly? SFX: ping! Talita's eyes open. She is lying disoriented in her bed on Dirtball, awakened by a chime from her tablet on the bedside dresser. Spread over the top of her usual comforter is the antler velvet blanket from the Runaway. She blearily tugs on her reading glasses and picks up her tablet to squint at the source of the notification. Talita has a direct message exchange with Mel. Mel: Just got a message from the medbay. Clayton slipped a disc, he's off work until he gets better. Talita: Oh no! That sucks. I hope he feels better soon Mel: You and your temps will have to work harder to make up for it. No distractions, ok? ;) Talita: Of course Later in the day, Talita is testing a breaker box in the junkyard with a multimeter, while Dominic and Phoebe peer over her shoulders. Bip's avatar pokes its head up from behind the panel, looking down curiously. Bip: You around? Talita: Not now, Bip. Bip leans out over the panel to look at her grumpy face. Bip: When will you be available? Talita scowls. Talita: Later. Bip hangs off the edge of the panel, nonchalantly swinging their legs over the fourth wall and blocking some of the view with their avatar's body. Bip: Well, I've processed about 100 tons of heavy water. In the pit with the Runaway, a frontloader positioned in front of a row of frames containing hydrogen gas tanks holds its manipulator arms as if it were a human with its hands on its hips. Bip: But the solenoids on the transport tanks have these caps with an awkwardly positioned guard ring. I can't grip them with the frontloader claw fingers, and the worms aren't strong enough. One of the frontloader claws uselessly pinches the guard ring. SFX: click click Talita: So cut the guards off. Bip: I thought we were trying to avoid hydrogen tank explosions. Talita rolls her eyes. Talita: Well, then, wait. I don't have time this week to run errands on the clock. She looks up from the electrical box on the ground in front of her and switches radio channels. SFX: clk Talita: Alright, none of those antennae are causing the issue. Let's move the lift and test the next array. She is speaking up to Adam and Yao, who are on the fully extended platform of a large scissor lift next to a short radio tower covered in dozens of mismatched radio antennae. Yao pulls cables from the side of the antenna they're next too, while Adam slouches against the platform railing, doing nothing. In the regolith around the base of the radio tower are the tracks left behind from the scissor lift repeatedly being extended, retracted, moved, parked, and extended again many times.
November 16, 2025 at 6:26 PM
jayeatonart.bsky.social
Today on stream I fight with bright pink 3D box models while listening to my tonally incoherent middle school music playlist. www.twitch.tv/jayrockin5858
November 13, 2025 at 2:38 AM
jayeatonart.bsky.social
This week on #RunawayToTheStars: Huh. That doesn't seem right.

Catch up: https://runawaytothestars.com
Read ahead: https://patreon.com/jayrockin
Doug: She's probably already listening. She has very good hearing. Talita looks up from where she has pressed her face against the corner wall of her bedroom with a start. She is younger, with round glasses and large baggy black hoodie. Both the humans around the coffee table and Talita in her bedroom are shown in an impossibly clean cross section of the entire building, which cuts through windows, walls, furniture, and objects with atomic precision, revealing their interior structure. Next to the break room with Doug and the others is a reception area with a desk and mailboxes. It's decorated with a banner of colorful eggs and flowers, and a large paper wall art "reading "HAPPY FEASTER!" flanked by vegetables and a cartoon chabbit holding a broom. On the floors above the break room and the lobby are the dormitories for foster teens, with hallways in the middle. Next to all the dormitory bedroom doors hang miniature decorated brooms, some doors with many more brooms than others. Each of the bedrooms is in a different state of disarray, all with multiple bunk beds and teenage residents who have decorated and arranged their belongings in unique ways. Talita’s bedroom in contrast houses only her, with a large mattress on the floor and an electronics work desk in between her dressers. The ceiling light fixture is unscrewed, with its wiring split between the light and a cable running towards the work desk, seemingly as another source of power after all the wall outlets were occupied by splitters and extension cables. Her posters and decorations feature human celebrity heart throbs and aircraft. Wind spinners hang in front of her window. Outside the cross section, even more impossible, is Earth's deep sea. The building appears to sit directly on the abyssal plain, its cut rooms open to the environment as if the surrounding water were just more air. Brittle stars and sea pigs crawl on the ground next to the floor of the lobby, while crinoids pop up outside the break room like flowers. A group of snail fish swim lazily around the bisected edge of the break room’s window, and far off in the distant dark waters, a bigfin squid drifts by. Talita rolls her eyes and heaves a great sarcastic sigh out of her excurrent nostrils, pushing to get up from the floor where she had been eavesdropping to join the adults. Then, she sees outside the cross section. There, pinned to the surface of the abyssal ooze with a colossal harpoon, is the twisted wreck of a small jet airplane. Coating its peeling metal skin and choking its turbines are growths of bacterial slime and anemones, and the rotting crevices of its shattered frame play house to octopuses, fish, brittle stars, and crabs. Twining through the rotting ribs of the fuselage is Bip's avatar, hundreds of meters long and composed from billions of glowing marine snow particles, making its body shine a brilliant white in the darkness of the abyss. Its head emerges from a great hole torn in the roof of the cockpit, reclining on the nose of the plane with folded arms. The harpoon lodged against the ribs of the plane pierces its chest, as if to trap them inside the wreck. It is looking at Talita.
November 4, 2025 at 9:53 PM
jayeatonart.bsky.social
This week on #RunawayToTheStars: Chapter 8 begins. Is anyone else getting a sinking feeling?

Catch up: https://runawaytothestars.com
Read ahead: https://patreon.com/jayrockin
Chapter 8: Heavy Water A closeup of a coffee table fades out of blackness, showing three different people's hands. A hotpad sits in the middle of the table with three normal sized mugs around it. On the far side of the table, next to an empty seat on the couch, is a four cup glass measuring jug full of water. The jug has stickers on the outside of a helicopter, an airplane, a flower, and a cartoon quailicorn; along with rectangular labels reading "TALITA ONLY." Otília: Tea, Mx. Derringer? Mel: Thank you, Otília. Otília pours tea from a teapot into a mug held in Mel's hands. The other seated person rests their hand on the table. It is an older hand, with scars on the fingers. Other person: Shouldn’t Talita be here for this? The view pulls back to show three people seated around the coffee table in a kind of break room, with a sink and cabinets in the background. An e-panel on the wall with a mangled pen cord shows smiling human children and the name "Garriton Teen Village." Mel is younger, with less grey in their hair and no beard. Otília is a middle-aged tabby catgirl, with striped hair in a loose braid over her shoulder. The other person is a bald man with a thick white beard, black metal band shirt, ear piercings, and sparse eyebrows. Mel: Yes, I’d love to talk more with her. Otília: I texted her, but she’s still in her room. Even alien teens are moody, apparently. The man looks over his shoulder out the window and mutters to himself in Portuguese. The man: Hm. Ela está nos espionando… Otília: Mel, anything you'd like to ask before your prospective foster arrives? Mel: Well… Is it true she was anonymously surrendered in a pet carrier? Otília turns to look at the man on the couch. Otília: Ask Doug. We only got her at 15. Doug: Yes. She was six months old, recently pupated. Only this tall. Doug gestures with his hands, showing a height of about 30 centimeters. Inset panel: A pet carrier shows two familiarly round eyes peering out of the darkness behind the wire door. Mel: Wow. Doug: Could run, though. Like a little cat. Doug smiles, Mel strokes their chin incredulously. Inset panel: A little naked creature covered in a coat of wiry spotted feathers runs out of the pet carrier on six long knobby legs ending in tiny four-toed bird-like paws with hooves, with round staring eyes above dark eye-stripes, a tiny tucked trunk, and two tiny spinnerets where a tail might be on an Earth animal. It is familiarly Talita-shaped, but of infantile proportions. Mel: Do you think she's a trafficking victim? The comic panel background dips away, showing a black void behind Mel's head. A gulper eel swims by. Doug: Hard to say. Otília: There wasn't a note, right? Doug: Nothing. Our youth care facility was not equipped to deal with a non-human infant. The first couple weeks were a scramble for food, medical care… Mel: So… They rub their thumb along the top of their mug awkwardly. The panel background of the brightly lit break room dips away again. An abyssal plain can be faintly seen, a lone squid drifting slowly over it. Mel: …Why wasn’t she returned to the centaur homeplanet? Doug: We tried. Otília's brow furrows. Otília: Centaurs don’t really do foster care, do they? Doug: The embassy told us that most clans choose to cull unclaimed infants. Doug: By the time we had arrangements for her here, it was easier to just– He rubs the back of his head, gesturing with the other arm helplessly. Doug: –Keep doing it, than find a clan with a matriarch willing to adopt. Mel: Well, I hope I can provide her with some stability going into college. The panel background is absent. A school of lanternfish flicker past in the inky blackness over Mel's head. Mel: It was a hard enough transition for my two bio kids, but with her circumstances… Doug: We’re thankful for your help. Jovia cuts foster sponsorship on her 18th birthday. The window of the room no longer shows sun and leaves, but open black water. A deep-sea ray swims past. Otília checks her phone and frowns in irritation. Otília: It’s been ten minutes. Should I bang on her door? Doug smiles as Otília gets up from her chair. Doug: Isn’t her room just above us on the second floor? Otília: Oh– yes. Why? The abyssal plane lurks behind the comic panel, sea cucumbers and brittle stars crawling languidly over the ooze.
October 31, 2025 at 2:53 AM
jayeatonart.bsky.social
Streaming sexy catgirl intimate moments www.twitch.tv/jayrockin5858
October 25, 2025 at 4:22 AM
jayeatonart.bsky.social
Finally caught up on crossposting these, aiieeeee. The "tertiary" here mostly refers to the recombinations of 3 different digit states to reach 8, as the combinations are ordered in a way that feels mechanically intuitive to an avian and not by typical base-overflow rules.
October 24, 2025 at 11:05 PM
jayeatonart.bsky.social
The square cube law is not in the reader's favor here, sadly. Mars has a huge battle mech scene. They can get away with heavier bot designs at 0.38 g, and have thousands of kilometers of uninhabited desert on which to stage battles far away from structures that could get obliterated by shrapnel.
October 24, 2025 at 10:58 PM
jayeatonart.bsky.social
Man-made horrors beyond comprehension, and an extremely deep lore callback. Readers of this comic often ask the characters about their favorite animals, likely because they are Creature Enthusiasts, but Idrisah is the only one of the main cast who is a fellow Creature Enthusiast.
October 24, 2025 at 10:55 PM
jayeatonart.bsky.social
Tod uses this story to scare the internal mechanics team interns into traveling in pairs and logging where they're planning to go in the plant at the beginning of the work day.
October 24, 2025 at 10:54 PM
jayeatonart.bsky.social
One straightforward answer and one much more complicated one.
October 24, 2025 at 10:53 PM
jayeatonart.bsky.social
This isn't the primary reason Gillie wanted Talita to sign for her, but it wasn't helping.
October 24, 2025 at 10:52 PM
jayeatonart.bsky.social
Yum, raw hairy skin covered in blood!
October 24, 2025 at 10:51 PM
jayeatonart.bsky.social
Electrowetting screens are real, by the way: youtu.be/Bf1GjCaYzYg
October 24, 2025 at 10:50 PM
jayeatonart.bsky.social
The tail on the speech bubble there looks (to an avian) a bit like a lip corner. Or, if the whole thing is interpreted as a super cartoony earless head, the tail is a neck.

The "meatballs" menu symbol in web design also looks like eyes to avians. Ohwitiil probably thinks it means "look inside"...
October 24, 2025 at 10:48 PM
jayeatonart.bsky.social
Dr. Henriques is used to centaur patients who may not be fluent in English or Shess, may or may not understand what a vaccine is, may or may not be used to injections, and may or may not be cooperative. Caring for Talita is EXTREMELY easy in comparison, even if she's a bit of a whiner.
October 24, 2025 at 10:45 PM
jayeatonart.bsky.social
Sensitive hearing can be quite a curse at times.
October 24, 2025 at 10:43 PM
jayeatonart.bsky.social
By "40s" Talita is referring to the 2240s. I refuse to do biochemical worldbuilding for RttS, but generally speaking, the sophonts all use water as a solution in which to dissolve sugar and oxygen for performing cellular respiration. Everything else is ehhhhhh (hand wiggle).
October 24, 2025 at 10:43 PM
jayeatonart.bsky.social
Idrisah's religious attitude is a bit eccentric. Her extended family is a mix of secular and orthodox. She's a woman in conflict between her desire for the stability and connection of tradition; and her magnetic draw towards the strange, challenging, and subversive.
October 22, 2025 at 2:08 AM
jayeatonart.bsky.social
At least she wasn't trying to dye her tail brown.
October 22, 2025 at 2:05 AM
jayeatonart.bsky.social
Talita is pretty resistant to the idea of going to the homeplanet or seeking out centaurs to talk to, and at this point it's partly motivated by spite. Is that attitude beneficial? Ehhhh......
October 22, 2025 at 2:02 AM
jayeatonart.bsky.social
Cheevwut thinks humans are cool the same way humans think bears and sharks are cool. We are a big, physically intimidating animal. This kind of attitude can contribute to prejudicial fear of humans among avians, though.
October 22, 2025 at 2:01 AM
jayeatonart.bsky.social
I don't normally answer AMA questions addressed to "everyone" or about extremely broad topics, because these are supposed to be lower effort than book pages. Unfortunately this one nerdbaited me because I like color science and wanted to nail down the visual ranges of the aliens.
October 22, 2025 at 1:51 AM
jayeatonart.bsky.social
AI hobbies and downtime. Sorry to the people asking Bip questions that they are extremely bitchy...
October 22, 2025 at 1:43 AM
jayeatonart.bsky.social
I gotta catch back up with these ahhhh. Here's questions for Clayton, the only character more evasive than Bip.
October 22, 2025 at 1:40 AM
jayeatonart.bsky.social
Readers LOVE my mummy! 🥰 www.runawaytothestars.com/comic/rtts-r...
"Oh. Uh, oh….." "//opens RTTS.com// Oh, that’s a petrified avian corpse" "yk i didnt think this would be the kind of comic to actually show a dead body huh" "Was not expecting to see a dead guy wow. What an awful way to go!" "Wow, that’s… Horrifying."
October 14, 2025 at 9:51 PM