#jayart
ALMOST REAL 5 HAS BECOME… REAL! Thank you so much for your support in bringing this “legendary” issue to life, now it’s onwards to artist bonuses and stretch goals!
https://zoop.gg/c/almostrealvo
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Cetásereio/Cetasers:
Average adult height (at hip): 110cm
Average adult body length: 210cm
Average adult weight: 150 kg
An aquatic clade of genetically modified humans designed for exploration and reconnaissance in flooded regions of Earth, funded by the Republic of Brazil after the 2144 Climate Reparation Summit. This had mixed reception politically— supporters were eager to see gene technology used for post-WW3 recovery, and critics weren’t convinced that increased regulation on the natal lab industry solved the inherent ethical issues with creating a new human species. Although GMH are legally free to pursue any lifestyle or career they want, their body plans and systemic social and political forces often push them towards their “intended” purpose.
Cetásereio are much more common on Earth than in space colonies like Jovia, and have settled some regions that typ humans can’t tolerate without mechanical cooling due to extreme heat and humidity. Although they have gills, Cetties cannot breathe underwater indefinitely due to the high caloric demands of their human brain and mammalian physiology. In well-oxygenated cold water, they can submerge for maximum of about 4 hours.
PATREON|STORE|Runaway to the Stars
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This year’s issue of Almost Real: A Speculative Biology Zine is mythology themed, so I wanted the cover critter to be a weird take on an extremely recognizable legendary beast.
The marsupial griffin is my shot at that, a large flying carnivore with a rear-facing pouch like a thylacine. Its unusual front incisors are continuously growing like rodent teeth, but exposed like a beak— nursing young have a gap in between them, but as they wean into sub-adults the gap closes and the teeth grow to a sharp hook for tearing into meat and carrion. Their thumbed hind feet somewhat resemble a primate’s, but with a set of sharp talons for capturing and gripping prey.
Our cover for this volume was illustrated by @ibenkrutt, who really knocked this design out of the park. If you’d like to support our contributing artists and acquire the zine, you can check out the campaign over here!
https://zoop.gg/c/almostrealvol5
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Androtherians
An extremely diverse clade of genetically modified humans, not all androtherians are equally compatible. In the medical community, they are usually divided into several subgroups based on medical care requirements, cross-fertility, and natal lab origin. Most mammalian modifications on the catgirl to anthro scale fall under this umbrella, including Gillie.
The majority of androtherians were modified for aesthetic purposes, though some have augmented senses (usually smell and hearing) or physically excel at running, weightlifting, or other athletic activities. They were first popularized in pre-WW3 Martian-American culture and many of the larger subgroups can trace their lineage back a couple hundred years.
Modern natal labs, despite tighter regulations, still produce new androtherians on commission— most often for androtherian parents with out-group partners who want to have genetically similar children, but typ parents may also commission GMH children. Sometimes it’s because they are looking to flaunt their wealth or personal taste, but many parents going to a natal lab for unrelated reasons (infertility, heritable disorders, not being able to gestate a child) are incentivized by corporate benefits and scholarships to take the more expensive designer option. New androtherians commissioned by typ parents tend to have a different relationship with their identity than those commissioned by androtherian parents.
PATREON|STORE|Runaway to the Stars
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Centaur matriarchs are responsible for bearing and nursing larva, but after the litter pupates child-care usually gets passed off to the entourage who sired them.
PATREON|STORE|Runaway to the Stars
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Talita helping out with something in Shyam’s heavy equipment workshop.
PATREON|STORE|Runaway to the Stars
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Misccentaur hand tools requested by a patron. Centaur society (particularly the Shess ethnicity) had electricity before first contact, but not sophisticated handheld electrical tools.
PATREON|STORE|Runaway to the Stars
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Some outfit designs for Sirawit. Taking some inspiration from Chinese street fashion because that was the primary human cultural influence in the ice tunnel city Sirawit grew up in with their human adopted dad, Jing.
Still have to give the city a real name, but it’s a borehole in the icy crust of a gas giant moon similar to Europa. The city being long and narrow helps distribute the heat of the habitation more evenly and prevent catastrophic melting of the surrounding substrate.
PATREON|STORE|Runaway to the Stars
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Homeplanetcentaur characters from a short story I’ve not yet had time to work on. Maulu is a young adult male of the nightchaser nomad ethnicity and Wintle-Layliv is a adult female from an urbanized region the Shess peninsula.Wintle has made one previous appearance.
Maulu has a congenital weakness in his hind legs and uses a uniwheel support to get around. He’s very interested in alien technology and is traveling around the settled clans, trying to record their books and oral histories onto the galactic web. Wintle-Layliv is the historian of a large clan, and is not very enthusiastic about helping the nomad twerp with an ipad who’s trying to digitize their library.
PATREON|STORE|Runaway to the Stars
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Everyone’s favorite feral horse kitten, 6 month old Talita.
PATREON|STORE|Runaway to the Stars
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The main cast of Runaway to the Stars walks to the left. Members of my Patreon will know I’ve been hammering on this one for quite a while, maybe in 10 years I’ll have a whole anime opening.
Non-layered gifs below, if you want a better look at the walk cycles:
Idrisah, Gillie, Shyam, and Talita. Talita can be seen breathing from the nostrils on her face and sides.
Turii and Sirawit (bonus nudity, so you get to see what the hell is going on under their clothes).
Brownie and Pinkie. Bug ferrets generally prefer to walk on all sixes unless their arms are occupied.
And of course, who could forget dear little Bip.
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Due to marketability concerns about a non-human protagonist, Runaway to the Stars is now a college drama comic instead of science fiction.
…
Just kidding check the date
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Tiiliitian is an avian alien language where any vowel can form a two-note chord pattern. To speak it, Idrisah the xenotranslator uses a keyboard device that records her voice and plays it with an altered pitch pattern. The Tiiliitian alphabet has 16 distinct tonal forms for each of its five vowels.
(Finally taking the plunge on making this an actual conlang. Grammar is next. Wish me luck…)
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(unmodifies their genes)
Everybody on twitter demanded I draw “proportionally accurate” non-GMO Shyam so here’s this awkward butch beanpole
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Brainstorming for the national symbols of Runaway to the Stars. Flags are a human-only thing. Avian polities are represented by written characters, and bug ferret groups use something more like coats of arms. The BFGC (Bug Ferret Galactic Community) crest pictured here is the outermost layer of the bureaucratic matryoshka doll of bug ferret politics. Neither centaursnorscuds have enough globalization to have a “standard” political symbol format (and scuds don’t really have nations, but that’s a different topic).
Luna gained independence post-WW3 and features a tailed spacer hand holding the exhaust plume of a fusion engine like a dart, a symbol of their essential role in transit between Earth and the rest of the inner Solar system. The flag has a vertical format by default, because there is no wind on Luna.
Martian flag not final. I am still deciding the fate of Mars post-WW3 but there is definitely more than one nation on there. The SRoM are the biggest proponent of Martian terraforming, though.
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Tailed Spacers
Average adult height (bipedal): 120cm / 3.9ft
Average adult weight: 30kg / 66lb
Tailed spacers, aka tailers, are the oldest successful clade of GMH. They were engineered about 200 years ago as part of a corporate vanity project seeking to create the ‘ideal’ human worker for life in micro/low gravity environments and generation ships. The Martian hypercapitalist state that created them did not survive WW3. In modern RttS there are about 2 billion living tailers, many living in tight-knit communities onboard space stations. The largest ground-based community of tailers is on Luna, where they outnumber typ humans 20 to 1.
The primary pigment in their skin is selenomelanin, a reddish artificial pigment that’s effective at blocking most forms of low level cosmic radiation. It expresses much more uniformly over their body than melanin in a typ human, and can even be found lining their organs. Their skin tone ranges from red to purple-brown to dark purple depending on the amount of eumelanin and pheomelanin they have in addition to selenomelanin.
Much of their body has been altered for their intended microgravity lifestyle. Tailed spacers have a bi-quad bauplan, because moving through spaces in microgravity is usually done head first. Their thumbed feet and muscular prehensile tail allow them to form a stable tripod grip on surfaces, and their hyperflexible lumbar spine allows them a huge range of access for their arms and upper body while gripping to a surface. Their supraorbital, genal, and carpal whiskers give them greater spatial awareness in cramped quarters and detect airflow in spacecraft compartments. Their diminutive size means less fuel mass needed to push them through space, less food and water weight needed to sustain them, and less room needed on spacecraft to keep them sane.
Tailed spacers also have genes that prevent muscle and bone density loss and cranial pressure buildup from life in microgravity… but, modern gene therapy regimens have made it so that most typ humans, especially in space-dwellers, have these genes too.
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Shyam’s passive hydraulic back brace. She wears it while working on-planet to support her hyperflexible lumbar spine. I’ve written more about tailed spacer GMH joint issues living under gravity here, and drawn Shyam’s skeleton here.
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