Queer YA sci-fi comics
Another piece that started out as a concept sketch, trying to figure out what Harcos look like from behind. A black & white version of this drawing was featured in the 2015 Queers & Comics Conference playing card deck fundraiser.
This particular version is ink lines printed out onto blue charcoal paper, and then hand-colored using colored pencil.
This piece started out life as a character design sketch. Later on I went back and redrew parts of it to make it consistent with the final designs for Hali and Razi, and then added color to finish it out.
This was colored with marker, watercolor, colored pencil, and acrylic paint.
These sketches are all based on real microscopes of centuries past. I wanted to start with a working microscope design instead of just making something up whole cloth, but I wanted it to look substantially different from a modern instrument. Thankfully, past humans had come up with some looks that fit nicely with the VotSS aesthetic.
You can see the final design in action on page 60.
This is one of the earliest pieces of concept art I created for Valley of the Silk Sky, nailing down the visuals for what the web structure of Pocalo looked like. There aren’t any cities or settlements visible here because I hadn’t gotten that far yet.
The web structure that spans almost the entire length and breadth of the valley is a country known as Pocalo.
Each level of the web structure is a separate province, and each province has its own distinct flora and fauna, culture, dialect, food, and so forth. There are elevators connecting the provinces that allow for travel up and down.
Muru is the third tier of the lower provinces, making it the topmost province that is still in direct contact with the ground. Muru is a bit of a rough place to make a go of things, as there are a number of predators roaming about who view humans as a tasty snack. The porous nature of Muru’s borders means that people can come and go as they please, making it a desirable location for those who wish to operate outside the law.
Most settlements in Muru are built high off the ground due to the aforementioned predators and bandits. Because much of the interior is in the shadow cast by the upper provinces, almost all major settlements in Muru are found around the outer edges. The city the arrow is pointing to is Duvane, an outpost town that is not at all flashy, but a good spot to head to if you have goods to sell or trade.
Despite being rough and difficult to navigate, Muru forms a cornerstone of the Pocali economy. It is home to many rare flora and fauna which are used to make medicines. The majority of runners spend at least some of their time foraging in Muru.
While there are several different types of Tolas, the ones who make their appearance in “Valley of the Silk Sky: Medicine; Run” are primarily Mountain Forest Tolas.
Mountain Forest Tolas spend the summers at high elevation and the winters at low elevation. They maintain permanent settlements at each endpoint, and migrate between them as the seasons change. Migration occurs over the course of several weeks, with small bands taking different routes through the mountain forests. A small maintenance group will stay on at each permanent settlement during the off-season, as will anyone who is too old or too sick to travel.
Tolas maintain large swaths of the mountain forests, planting different types of edible and medicinal foliage at different elevations. Rather than carry food with them as they travel, they follow pre-planned routes rich with fruit- and nut-bearing trees and other plants. The staggered migration allows for waves of ripening food to sustain each band in turn.
Tolas and humans have little direct contact due to significant language barriers (humans can’t physically vocalize much of the Tolas’ speech, and vice-versa). The Daraz, whose vocalization capabilities span across both language groups, may act as interpreters between Tolas and humans.
The Daraz helped broker one of the major treaties between humans and Tolas, which governs the use of forests. Humans are allowed to harvest small amounts of food and medicinals from Tola-maintained forests, but are not permitted to cut down any trees or otherwise remove plants without prior consultation.
As discussed in the article on medicine, pharmaceuticals form a major part of the Pocali economy.
Medicinals are generally available in two forms: prefabricated or compounded.
Prefabrication works best for widely used remedies that can be mass-produced on some level (not dependent on rare ingredients, and used for treating relatively common ailments). These will typically come in tubes, many labeled in Rovari script in addition to Pocali, particularly for medicines used by both Daraz and Humans.
The majority of medicines, though, are compounded: made to order from raw ingredients per the individual’s specific medical needs. Because several different types of raw medicinals might have the same or similar effects, and the rarity of various medicinals makes large scale consistency difficult to achieve, in many cases it’s just easier to make something on the spot based on whatever ingredients are available in the region.
An apothecarist’s egg is basically a portable mini-pharmacy. A typical egg will contain raw ingredients, tinctures, extracts, and tools for mixing medicines or forming tablets.
Pocalo doesn’t have electric lighting (or electric anything, for that matter).
Their interior lights are instead made of tiny ecosystems of bioluminescent fungi. The fungi have been domesticated to produce a brighter, whiter light than their wild counterparts.
The fungi survive by eating their own dead cells, so a well-balanced light can shine indefinitely. In practice, most lights don’t last forever: the glass gets cracked and throws the ecosystem off balance; the fungi reproduce too quickly (sometimes overgrowing to the point of bursting the glass); or they reproduce too slowly and die off. But a light made with a high level of craftsmanship may well last for hundreds of years.
There is no way to turn a particular light “on” or “off” (the fungi are either alive and glowing or dead and dark). In rooms where one wishes to achieve periodic darkness, like a bedroom, the lights will have some kind of hood which can be opened and closed.
A popular style of dimmable light is colloquially called an “eyelight,” as it has two adjustable lids which can allow for modulating both the intensity and the direction of the glow.
The country that occupies the Valley, Pocalo, is divided into provinces, and each province is stacked on top of the other. The massive structure that houses all these provinces was built up slowly over the course of thousands of years. For most of that time, the only way to get from one province to another was to take a long trek up or down the mountains that anchor the structure.
The safest way to go was via mountain tunnels. These tunnels were dug and maintained by the Daraz, who build their cities inside the mountains. They leased the tunnels to the humans in exchange for various goods and services.
A scant couple hundred years ago, humans perfected the technology to move elevators between the provinces. The early elevators could only connect two provinces; later technological advances brought elevators that could connect 3 or 4 provinces. As elevator technology improved, the need for the tunnels waned in favor of the much faster vertical transportation.
The Daraz had little incentive to maintain the tunnels with no one using them much, and shifted to other forms of trade with the humans.
Getting on an elevator typically requires going through a checkpoint, though, and may require an official passport for boarding. What to do if you are perhaps interested in avoiding any sort of official scrutiny in the course of your travels? Like, say, maybe you deal in goods you might have obtained under less than legal circumstances?
Well, it’s certainly slower going, but here are all these old tunnels no one uses anymore, cough, ahem.
Yes, there have been many attempts to seal off the tunnels over the years, but somehow or other they always get unsealed, and the resources just aren’t there to guard them 24/7. Hence the tunnels tend to be left alone much of the time, should someone wish to slip from one province to the next while attracting minimal attention.
I know what you’re wondering: how the heck does plumbing work in this weird world?
While there are a few different means of collecting and distributing water in the Valley, let’s focus on the one most relevant to the main comic: the plumbing of the Cashel Waystation. which is located in the interior of the province of Muru.
The Cashel Waystation receives most of its water via a large pipe from the provinces above (who get their water mostly from rainfall and snowmelt), and holds it in a reservoir.
“So, wait, they’re drinking and bathing in the runoff from the upper provinces?”
Technically yes, BUT. At the bottom of the reservoir is a filtration system, accessed via the topmost room of the main building, where those two little slit windows are. One of the many duties of the waystation attendant is maintaining that filtration system so the water stays clean.
“So, wait, the waystation is basically a giant Brita filter?”
Ahem. Kinda sorta yeah.
The bath is left running all the time to provide some humidity to the air, and to keep the water flow going to the provinces below. Gravity provides the water pressure.
Drinking water is filtered more thoroughly and piped separately from bathing water or toilet water. The Cashel Waystation has pit toilets that use only a tiny amount of water to flush waste down a pipe leading to Eradu, the province directly below. Eradu is nicknamed The Swamp for various reasons, of which this is one. It tends to be the last stop for a lot of the waste from the provinces above.
“Surely the residents of Eradu don’t care for living in what is basically a giant sewer.”
Correct! They do not. Which is why most people who live in Eradu actually live on the hillsides around the edges of the Valley, and not inside the web structure of Pocalo itself. Humans mostly try to avoid venturing into The Swamp itself if they can.