#original sff

[starsailorstories]

Everywhere we've gone we're home

[starsailorstories]

Can you hear me callin’ out your name

You know that I’m fallin’ and I don’t know what to say

I’ll speak a little louder, I’ll even shout

You know that I’m proud and I can’t get the words out

Oh I

I wanna be with you everywhere

- RIP Christine McVie. Could never have got this one done without you.

Pt. 2 of Long Song of Fate is available now for $3 patrons and up on my patreon! Click through the image to read ‘er and reblog to spread the word!

[starsailorstories]

Lunch break doodle

[starsailorstories]

She didn’t need anyone to like her, hadn’t since the day she realized the traders praised an empty shell. Realized a door, a vase, and a safe were all the tools she had to break the padlock on the world. She knew what her fellow lockbreakers needed–safe haven, reliable air, central heating, an income valued at fourteen thousand six hundred and ninety exchange points each, by her calculations–and she was the one who was going to get it.

That was who she was. Not the dream or the dreaming girl anymore.

Blackmail, intrigue, Dialtone before her various morality chains and arguably before the full development of her class consciousness but boy HOWDY with her penchant for controlled chaos going strong. She would call this the story of the initial investment that housed the first Bell Town residents, but it’s also the story of baby’s first solidarity and coalition building. Part 1 is up now on my patreon!

[starsailorstories]

experimental painting of a vol. 1 scene that i’m probably not gonna finish 

[starsailorstories]

That afternoon the storm broke at last, overflowing the desert in a matter of minutes. By the time the sun kissed the sentinel towers at the crater’s edge, the clouds had parted and double rainbows were spreading over the land. High above the white city, on the grassy crests of Aya Loropa, Cepheid stood like a stone but for the cool downdrafts moving her hair.

Lux took one step toward her, but she felt like she was interrupting something.

“I guess I don’t owe them anything now.” Speaking the calm, oh-well sentence, she fell beside the edge on her knees. “I’m free.”

She laid her head in Lux’s arms and shook with grief.

Cepheid’s last look at her motherworld after being exiled, from Sweet Chariot vol. 2

[starsailorstories]

This began as a warmup and then got EXTREMELY out of hand…4 months later I’ve decided to call it done

[starsailorstories]

If any of you readers are ever like “man, astraea cultures sure are big on cleanliness considering they don’t sweat or bleed or eat like humans do”...don’t worry! They have completely new and unfamiliar ways of being gross :)

I’ve said before that one can imagine the need to get trapped dirt out of an entire body covered in basically fingernails but there’s also the fact that they’re hard and smooth and ambient temperature on the outside but have normal like...living thing temperature homeostasis processes on the inside--and more often those are actually cooling them down because their lights obviously generate heat, especially so if they’re excited or stressed or sick or doing physical activity. So an astraea who’s worked a whole imperial standard day (which is close to 30 earth hours), especially somewhere like Altamai where it’s already super humid, is probably a lil soggy and looking forward to clean clothes. Bodily dirtiness is much more associated with like, mildew, although there’s certainly still concern about germs (having evolved in the vacuum of space and being built like living HEPA filters anyway astraeas don’t have super great immune systems compared to humans because they usually just don’t need them, but when they need them they REALLY need them)

Clothes can usually go a few weeks before they need to be washed (due to just incidental outside dirt) as long as they’re hung up to air dry between wearings, so most people, even fairly well-off people, have just two or three everyday outfits, or a work outfit and an at-home outfit (work and school uniforms designed to be worn daily for years with minimal repair are ubiquitous for exactly this reason). Special occasion clothes in a lot of cases literally never have to be laundered over their lifespan and so there’s historically been space for them to be extremely impractical, which is fun.