- Scarlet: What’s that, daddy?
- Gavin Carolus: That’s an Arcadian rainbow disk.
- Gavin Carolus: If you hold the disk against Lavarel’s Star, it glitters in all the colors of the rainbow.
- Scarlet: Wow, it‘s sparkling like crazy!
- Scarlet: May I keep the disk?
- Gavin Carolus: Sure. But you must be careful. They’re very fragile.
- Gavin Carolus: The last batch!
- Gavin Carolus: Do you want to accompany me to Karsth?
- Scarlet: Yes, daddy.
The Machine of Eternal Summer 004
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16 thoughts on “The Machine of Eternal Summer 004”
BlackDragonSlayer
What is Mr. Sneaky Fox up to, I wonder? An ambush, mere curiosity, or perhaps he is readying himself for a sales pitch…?
Vicious Sand
No second update? It’s breaking down already?
Lavarel’s Star? Either they’re not on Earth, or something like Bernard’s Star or a space station is very visible that daytime. You might have named the planet Lava-Rel just after several complaints about the cold. I wonder if we’ll get to see how these kaleidoscope disks are made? A filler-strip education film someday?
Ah, horses. They aren’t talking (yet), but the foxes look like they’re doing alright for themselves. I wonder how much fight the chickens can put up?
Icarus
Lavarel is the planet they live on. Calling its sun by a possessive rather than just “the sun” or some other name, however, implies that there may be other human-inhabited planets in this setting and space travel is either forgotten or prohibitively expensive.
Dilandu
Well, space travel IS expensive. Most interstellar colonization efforts would most likely be one-way expeditions with only very limited subsequent support. Lavarel seems to be “written off”; impossible to evacuate, too expensive to help.
Dilandu
Horses instead of machinery in the world, where food sources are limited and situation grew progressively worse? Hardly practical.
HKMaly
Maybe they are afraid that if they would use more fossil fuels they would trigger global warming? 🙂
… ok, most likely, they don’t HAVE enough fossil fuels. They have some sort of coal, but besides being impractical for machines, they probably don’t have enough and are mostly using it for heating.
Dilandu
Erm, coal impractical for machines? Most of XIX century all machinery run on coal, you know. And if you prefer fuel in liquid form, you could always use coal slurry.
Sekhmet
Horses eat grass. They do not interfere with the other crops. You need to store grass from the summer to feed your horses for the winter, but that seems possible. After all, grass is probably more resistant and grow faster than crops, as long as there is no snow on the top of it. And it can be a serious help to do everything on a farm.
HKMaly
Can’t be THAT fragile if they found it on field.
Vicious Sand
Never tell a child that something that _can_ be broken, _cannot_ be broken.
Sekhmet
I would add, never tell a child that something cannot be broken. Even if you truly think it is unbreakable. Believe me.
Because they will test it. And test it. And either the thing is finally not unbreakable, either there are breakable things around…
Wu_aka_Bahamuttone
Hm it’s… strange, calling the sun of the planet as Lavarel’s star… in the sense it’s not practical as it’s cumbersome, and it would not have evolved naturally due to how people would call things with simple terms. The sun of a planet while a star it’s unlike the others stars by being next to it. For that name to be used commonly it needs a lot of psychological work…
Novil
People give prosaic names to very important things all the time. Exhibit A: Our planet is called “Earth” in several languages, derived from earth/soil. That’s not exactly a very inspiring name.
I didn’t want to call Lavarel’s Star “Sun” for two reasons. I considered terms like “Lumina”, but then settled for “Lavarel’s Star” for the reason above.
Graybeard
Presumably this is all going on in a language that is neither English nor German, so the translation into the two languages we use here can go on however it needs to. However, there is a narrative trap of sorts here. There will probably be times going forward when the flow of conversation calls for a shorter name, e,g, if Gavin says to Scarlet at the market, “Get out of the , sweetheart, you’ll get burned if you’re in the light too long.” We may not see this exact line, but there will be others where a terse word serves the characters well.
Graybeard
Weird; that line from Gavin was supposed to read “Get out of the [foo] or {foo} or **foo** or some such. Any chance we’ll see a lexicon of editing marks, with instructions on how to use them and how to make them appear in text?
Graybeard
I must say, I’d be happier if Ariana was going along with the guys here. She is a very likable character, and a basic rule of webcomic adventure stories, not immutable but true too much of the time, is that if the protagonist is in a party of three that splits up so one character goes with the protagonist and one does not, the solo character is _screwed_.
Characters
Ariana Carolus Athamas Baako Bolin Clara Graybold Cyril Darius Leyh Elwin Flammt Evelina Ferrus Gale Nenawa Gavin Carolus Iona Jehona Shardyk Julius Mirkning Kala Silverspring Kenan Orege King Protos Lauro Levon Goldwood Leyton Wayt Ludis Graybold Luitpold Marik Marton Princess Elodie Raymond Reto Mirkning Reva Rodar Rosetta Greenleaf Scarlet Carolus Severin Silvana Mirkning Tibor Frey Vidal Viola Vreni Xaver Yerim Zach Ilkin