Screen 1
ONE:
Looking at the oncoming FLYER, the BOMBARDIER/GUNNER in the front, the PILOT just visible – barely – behind him.
The GUNNER is flinching, jerking his head to the side, reacting as Drum’s SHOT punches through the TOP of his seat, narrowly missing his head.
1. SFX: THWICK
2. GUNNER: HA!
TWO:
The GUNNER reacting, as the PILOT, behind him, slumps forward, dead.
NO COPY.
THREE:
Angle, DRUM and GISELLE, on the mainmast. DRUM has drawn his rifle in slightly, working the action to reload.
Both are looking at the FLYER, still heading toward them. If we can make it out, the GUNNER is scrambling, trying to push the PILOT back.
The FLYER is beginning to roll, nose starting to cant down in response to the pilot falling forward on the stick.
NO COPY.
Screen 2
ONE:
The FLYER closing on PEGASUS, now having rolled almost ninety degrees, it’s NOSE now stabilizing, because the Gunner has pushed the Pilot back, and the Pilot still has the stick in a deathgrip.
This puts the FLYER pretty much online with DRUM and GISELLE, atop the mainmast.
The question is whether the FLYER is going to smash into the Pegasus or not.
1. GISELLE: Huh.
2. DRUM: Hmm?
TWO:
Atop the MAINMAST.
GISELLE has turned to face DRUM. She’s very calm in the face of impending doom. Her expression is more serious. She still holds his HAT in her hand, by the way.
DRUM has turned to face her, curious.
The FLYER is still closing in the background, still rolling. The GUNNER, frantic, is trying to undo his harness and maybe bail out.
It really looks like the FLYER is going to plow right into them.
3. GISELLE: Nice shot.
4. DRUM: Thank you.
THREE:
Closer on GISELLE and DRUM.
GISELLE is putting DRUM’S HAT back on DRUM’S head. They’re intimately close. GISELLE has a slight smile. DRUM is looking at her with muted curiosity.
The FLYER is dominating the BG, screaming towards them. The GUNNER is panicking, bailing out, which means he’s pretty much dropping straight out of the FLYER.
5. GISELLE: I’m Giselle.
6. DRUM: Keyton Drum.
7. GISELLE: Mhm.
Screen 3
ONE:
Gone With the Wind style pose. GISELLE has dipped DRUM, and is kissing him ardently.
DRUM, while surprised, doesn’t seem to mind this.
The FLYER is passing just over the top of the MAINMAST, so close the prop is splintering the masthead as it passes.
NO COPY.
*three cheers*
Drum surprised at last! Huzzah!
Dang, but that girl knows what she wants! I hope she has a private room, for later.
Not on board a fighting ship she doesn’t.
And damn, I was expecting her to be forward…but that was way faster than I expected.
Thank you.
I forgot to say, awesome 3 panel day. I was surprised and pleased to see the bottom one. And I was wondering where our straight and level flyer was going to end up…
Thank you all for a great day!
Delightful juxtaposition of action and romance!
This is what happens when you smile, Drum. Putting Drum’s hat on his head instead of handing it to him is a somewhat intimate if largely innocent act, but Giselle certainly took the short road from there.
This is why Drum doesn’t smile that often – he knows the power of that grin! Men and women alike melt!
Actually… I thought of this far more from Giselle’s POV. They’ve no idea if that flyer will miss them. Worse comes to worse, she went out on her terms.
She seems the type to take all things in life on her terms or not at all. 🙂
Yes .This long fight in the sky above us . I hope our crew runs away with it
Love it. Another excellent post gentlemen.
This…MIGHT…be my favorite screen so far. Thank you guys again for just plain putting a grin on my face with every update.
Incredible double pronged pay off!
Drum looks surprised. What… he didn’t see that coming? The rest of us did.
A magnificent moment on so many levels. Sabre and Drake better step up their game — Drum and Giselle are now my favorites.
Panel 8 background music: “You Can Leave Your Hat On” (Randy Newman).
OMG, *hee!*
I’ve been wondering, and maybe I missed it previously, but is Giselle also of Earthwalker descent? She and Drum seem to have the same complexion and hair, seem to be equally at ease in less that stable rock-solid footing, and seem to be veritably made for each other.
BTW….YOU GO GIRL!
Giselle is not from the Tanitin, in fact, but from another Land entirely.
So, when you fall in the ether, where do you fall to? There is obviously gravity there, but where is it oriented, some distant black hole? Some central large mass?
Great comic, btw.
I was going to try and be cute and bluff through this, but the fact is, we haven’t yet determined this answer. Rick, Eric, and I have gone around on this one a few times, and we’re each of differing thought. There is demonstrably a “down” in the Aether, you are correct, and in fact that comes into play later this chapter. I’m personally most in favor of a black hole – a very small one – but the second we open that can of Physics, things get… well, even messier than they are, now. I like the black hole idea in particular because it’s a mass that isn’t, if you know what I mean, and I prefer that to the idea of an actual Land or similar.
Note that this still leaves us with the light source problem to resolve, ie, the sun.
This is one of the many instances in my writing where I really wish I was much more clever than I actually am.
A black hole could work with light being produced by an aether accretion disk as aether falls into the black hole to be consumed.
You would have to fine tune it to get visible spectrum radiation but at least you have something.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accretion_disc
If you presuppose a black hole and the aether “world” existing between two gravity bands somewhere above the event horizon where life would be possible, the light could be the light streaming in from nearby stars trapped in orbit with the black hole. The light may well appear to those in the aether as a single point origin or sun. I haven’t thought that out, though, nor how one might have night-times.
One advantage of this scenario is that the size of the aether would be huge when compared with the volume of the earth’s biosphere, seemingly endless in fact. Room for as many land masses as one could want for a story.
I think this subject is easy. The Aether has light generating characteristics. The more it concentrates, the more it may …or may not …make light. It is ineffable, after all. That should get you out of a lot of writing jams. And if you actually want to build a Star Trek style science for a web comic, then the light all comes from friction of Aether flows working against other flows. Plus the bigger the flows, the larger the potential for storms as predicted by the map.
What if there is no ‘top’ or ‘bottom’ to the Aether? I always assumed it just goes on forever.
In the case of a vast expanse of aether there are various possibilities that come to my mind, some of which have a modicum of physical basis (though probably not in this universe.
1) An infinite plane produces a constant gravitational pull at *any* height. The inhabited portions of the aether could be tens of thousands of miles above such a plane, so that a fall would be close enough to forever to make no neverminds. What is on the surface of this plane?? Who knows, but the atmospheric pressure is probably something fierce.
Note that this means that Lands have some inherent anti-gravitational force which keeps them from falling, but we already knew that, and the ships also are able to harness this force.
2) It might be that the gravitational direction is just an inherent interaction between the aether and the forward direction of time. Sufficiently large masses or those small masses that have been treated with the proper frequencies or elements are immune to this force, as their time is fixed to themselves.
3) Other.
As far as light is concerned, the physical surrounding are ineffable aether. This interacts with the luminiferous aether to produce light. See how easy it is when one applies the proper scientific viewpoint?
— Odo
(For Science!)
I am loving this discussion!
So much passion
Man, my prediction was WAY off!
Great, great page.
Whoa. She kissed the smile right off his face!
Now all that’s left is a big grin… 😀
You guys have just gone from “just another webcomic ” to one that I WILL think about throughout the day ( like I need the distraction ) , or in other words wOOT!.
( you may wanna take a boo at L.Niven’s ” The Integral Trees ” )
I can’t wait for tomorrow
We have 125 pages lol that is a lot of work .Thanks guys for this bulk work done for the past few years for us the every hungry fans of steampunk adventures.Damn i can’t wait for tomorrow .
You think it’s a lot to have read, try laying it out in a book sometime!
It’s not as Wheel of Time series mate .Huge reads if you ask me ,but classy staff 🙂
I don’t know why you guys are struggling with this. It’s “ineffable”, right? So you don’t have to explain what’s down there, or where the light comes from, or where the nearest convenience store is for God’s sake.
Well, I suppose there’s that….
How about throw out the physics:
The aether is any number of overlapped currents to which all objects are normally subject.
Gravity is aether-0. At any point it can be in any direction. Lands and starwood counter and orient against aether-0.
Aether wind is aether-1. It pushes air so can fill sails, and pushing air can move one around relative to aether-1.
Time flow is aether-2 it is another current. Things normall move altogether with aether-2. Mess with it and you get the storms. And cross time flow events.
There are connections betwen -0,-1,-2 especially at storms and vortices. But normally they just flow seemingly independently.
Bravo, bravo!! But what about the light? Is it aether-3 or is it a byproduct of the interactions of the three basic aetherial forces? We know that the mass of the Lands holds back the aether so that there is a barrier that must be penetrated by a ship leaving a Land. Is mass, then, an aetherial property or is it a physical property outside the aetherial realm? (I.e. is mass just anti-aether(0) or is it an independent force?) There is so much more research to do, comrade.
It’s ineffable turtles all the way down.
Drum still missed. Yeah, he got one of them fellas, but he did miss the gunner, which was who he was aiming at. I suppose, since it did the job, he still got the snog. But he still missed.
I have to disagree. The gunner was bonus–the pilot was always the target. No pilot and the flyer goes away for ever. Keep the pilot around and you get more firebombs.
I’d say hitting anything on a tiny fast moving object counts as a hit!
As John Cleese said in Silverado,
“He’s hit everything he’s aimed at.”
I can’t wait to see how you top this page XD
That was a movie moment, if ever I’ve seen.