it explains so much about Rugsy’s initial refusal to take her own attraction to DT seriously when one realizes that for her entire adolescence her ideal concept of femmekind was fun, artsy, expressive, highly visible enemy of the state and recovering Glorious Warrior Cepheid delra Celsina
After many moons of talking about them with absolutely no way for new followers to find out who they are: BELL TOWN LEADERSHIP INTRO POST. (Image ID and intro blurbs under the cut!)
[ID: A digital painting of a “group photo” of several of my OCs, all of them humanoid aliens with bright white lights in the middle of their foreheads and all of them clones of each other, although there’s a range of ages and stylings, including superficial differences of skin and hair color, on display. They are:
Dialtone, seated in the center of the group, pale seafoam-green skin and hair, noticeably taller and thinner than the others, wearing a dark blue suit dress with a silver belt and lighter blue gloves,
Rugsy, perched on an unseen chair or table in the center top row of the group, bright pink skin and hair, wearing a cropped regency-style military jacket and matching knee-length pants, a red short-billed cap, and a rug like a cape,
Smote, leaning in on the left hand side of the group, late middle aged, gold skin, bobbed gray hair, wearing a heavy dark brown skirt with suspenders, a pale green sweater and knee-high boots,
Rosie, sitting on the floor on the bottom right, wearing a gray double-breasted military jacket with maroon buttons over a white dress, and a pink cap with her hair pinned up inside. She has gold skin and brown hair--the standard for cloned workers--and unlike everybody else who have long noticeable plumage where a human’s eyelashes would be, she has short eyelashes, marking her out as still an adolescent of her species,
Tuft, toward the center squatting next to DT’s chair, younger but not as young as Rosie, gold skin and brown hair pulled into short pigtails with blue ribbons, wearing a light green puff-sleeved blouse, a ruffly blue and white skirt, and boots,
Roco, sitting on a step on the bottom right, youngish, gold skin and short fluffy brown hair with a dark freckle beside her right eye, wearing a white vest over a pale violet blouse with a bow collar and dark brown gaucho pants with matching boots,
Rivet, kneeling at the right of the group, mid-50s with gold skin and graying, wavy light-brown hair, wearing a bandanna tied over her hair and brass goggles pushed up on her head, a yellowish-green puff sleeved top, and a dark blue skirt,
Bolt, standing at the back right of the group, also mid-50s with gold skin and short pale curly hair, wearing a loose, casual pink dress and a peach apron with some pens and bits of paper and ribbon visible poking out of the pockets, and with a magnetic reader--a stethescope-like instrument with a box holding a few lenses and dials where the part you’d put in your ears would be--draped around her neck,
and Shade, standing at the back and center of the group, holding Bolt’s hand, late 30s/early 40s, with silver skin and short spiky black hair, wearing a white jacket with a red necktie visible at the collar.
/End ID]
Dialtone (center), the self-described ‘founder, funder & primary operator of the best-kept secret in the inner rings’ is, as befits a former Receiving Girl of the imperial court, a highly accomplished piece of work--in addition to etiquette and ceremony, her areas of expertise include fraud, bribery, and their lawful counterpart capital finance. As such she acts as the face and primary provider of the Bell Town family and is regarded as an informal leader by most of its denizens. She’s Very Goal Oriented, which often means laying down harsh truths and unpopular decisions, working all night, doing heck all about her chronic pain, and getting bossy with her helpers. None of this makes her particularly easy to deal with and she’s the subject of reactions ranging from goodnatured grousing to outright mistrust and everything in between (and that’s just from Rugsy) but she’s also weirdly beloved, just because she’s so good at her job and so committed to doing it for them and them alone. The general community consensus on her is “she’s an asshole but she’s OUR asshole.”
Rugsnatcher “Rugsy” “the Legend”“The hot pink one, you can’t miss ’er” (top) handles training for sabotage, supply capture, and rescue missions; as well as general self defense. Before coming to Bell Town she wrote the figurative book on practical combat for decommissioned and escaped units, who are often vulnerable to being treated like pests to be exterminated wherever they wind up, and did a fair bit more than she’ll take credit for to spread the idea that they’re, you know, valid people after all. Before THAT she was an umbralis in a notably bad situation, a fact she mainly copes with by pretending she sprung fully-formed from the sewer slurry as an easygoing goofball who doesn’t take anything particularly seriously. Basically any time she’s interacting with another person she’s putting on a show, whether the main act is backflips or witticisms or shooting holes in playing cards. But beneath the facade she shows her audience lies true passionate intensity in the most Romantic sense--and if she seems a little antsy it may be because love, loyalty, vengeance, obsession and primal terror are pulling at her heels just a little faster than she can shake them off.
Smote (furthest left) is a retired corporate trade scandal: when she lost her leg in an industrial accident, it didn’t grow back, revealing a chronic disease of her tissue-repair system and a possible grift on the part of the factory that manufactured her, which had presented her as a first-rate unit worth a full workweek’s product. There was a lawsuit, Smote was decommissioned, and the rest is history--with her fellow decommissioned units behind her and a crowbar strapped to her thigh, she led a mutiny on the ship bound back to her factory of origin and steered them straight for Bell Town. Now she serves as a regular sentry but also leads a department that matches disabled (or sometimes just very young or very old) Bell Towners up with roommates and/or collaborators who have “complementary” disabilities, partly inspired by her use of her Very Loud prosthesis to guide her blind girlfriend Shadow; and in tandem with that provides eldership to the committees that help new residents settle in generally. While she comes off as a very no-nonsense Tough Old Broad, she’s one of the most philosophical of the informal leaders, keeping everyone grounded in the reality of their interdependence as a community.
Rosie (bottom left) has been organizing lux workers to fight against the dire conditions the cloning industry has standardized for them almost since she was first assigned, at fourteen. Now, two quinturns later, she’s the de-facto leader of Bell Town’s infiltration specialists, who--because of the general industry turnover rate--must necessarily also be teenagers to avoid detection, and she leads them like a beloved high school club president; energetic, charismatic, everybody’s best friend and toughest coach. Rosie is both a pie-in-the-sky daydreamer and furiously single-minded, which is a dynamo combination in a revolutionary, and her older sisters respect her for it. That said, they’re also intensely protective of her and deeply invested in her happiness, and there’s a sense that she’s relaxing into a found family at last at the tail end of a hard childhood. She will never be an ordinary girl, but she’s no longer the only one working to save her.
Shade, Boltie, & Roco you know already from their vol. 1 intro posts...once in Bell Town they head up security & mission strategy, medical stuff, and literacy/education projects respectively.
Tuft (center left) is a former jetty girl (basically spaceship loader/unloader and bag carrier for passengers) and, maybe because of her unsheltered and cosmopolitan past, possibly the most salty and combative lux you will ever meet. As the informal captain of the Bell Town sentries, she spends most of her time working hard and keeping her ear to the ground to protect the settlement from potential threats, and the rest of it (together with other strong personalities like Roco) making sure no central or group decision goes unquestioned or unanalyzed. Her ultimate goal is consensus and the common good of all, but because of her suspicion of anything that remotely quacks like authority, she often appears in vol. 2 as a bit of a thorn in DT’s heel--and she kind of considers that her calling in life. Her deep loyalty to the cause, soldierly camaraderie with all the sentries and rescue squadron folks, and general sense of fun and adventure make all that absolutely worth it.
Rivet (bottom right) was a receptionist/assistant in a machine shop before she and the younger unit who was being transitioned in to replace her made plans to run away together and were summarily caught and decommissioned. She managed to slip off by herself before reaching her home factory but was pressed into service by some smugglers who, while they didn’t treat her very nicely, trained her as a ship’s carpenter (which, despite the name, in the age of radius drives basically means an electrical engineer). After an adventure too long to recount here she ended up in Bell Town, where her bailiwick is building whatever needs built and fixing whatever needs fixed, from appliances to weapons to relationships. She also prides herself on being the resident bastion of old-fashioned civility and hospitality, and oversees possibly the only mechanic’s shop on the capitol orbiter with a meticulously clean “tea room cubbyhole” and seasonal floral decorations (even if they are made of copper wire and component packaging).
super rough sketches of a moment in vol. 2 that makes me emo (rugsy rallying the troops(TM) on the radio in the lead up to the battle of bell town while DT looks on like “oh no I’m in love with this goof ass freak”)
Glaring security floods disrupt the black, one after another, following sensored footsteps. But the silhouette moving across the low-gravity field on the upper level is always just barely ahead of them. Her boot soles hit the skid-plated vitruvol with the barest of squeaks where the artificial atmosphere begins and she straightens up slowly, riffling the silence for any sign of a further alert. No alarms are sounding yet. Just a little bit of space-flotsam, she wills the security guard on duty to think; imagining the suggestion radiating out from her head, tripping receivers ominously across some ominous control panel like something from a spacefarer’s ghost story.
What’s the moral of a ghost story? That power drops the knee to chaos.
The second in my series of four vol. 2 excerpts, available to patreon supporters at any tier, is finally here! In this chapter we meet some new friends, and some old friends who’ve found new purposes.
Click here or through the image to read, and sign up if you haven’t yet!
