Adagio 22 – Outpost Demographics Analyzed by a Genius
I, Googol Marou, am the most qualified person in the universe to break down for you the basic facts about Tron Blastarr’s pirate-base home world. If you want a basic genius-level analysis, you naturally turn to the scientist who invented a telescope that could visually reconstruct events of the past gathered from planets viewed from my little telescope at sometimes thousands of light years of distance, thus looking thousands of light years into the past. And of course, I had twelve years of exile to work with in compiling the data from our little corner of the Orion Spur of the Sagittarius Spiral Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy.
You see, Outpost was an airless planet on the frontier of the Galtorrian Imperium. It was unique in that it had been settled entirely by disgruntled privateers from the Coreward War with the Faceless Horde in the two short years between the end of the Horde War and the beginning of the fulfillment of the Prophecy of Shan, heralding the beginning of The White Spider’s new web of interstellar civilization.
I bet you can’t read that paragraph aloud at high lip speed. At least not without breaking a tooth. I dare you to try it.
The planetary system went from a world of zero population and zero Medium-Class Earthlike worlds to twenty billion intelligent beings and over 450,000,000 space fish of various species in only five standard planetary years (gauged from the orbits of both Earth and Galtorr Prime, two very similar Goldilocks-zone worlds of the Imperium.)
It began with the surviving members of the Pinwheel Corsairs, Tron’s highly successful space force of warships. They built the initial installations for crew habitats, a starport, and shipyards. They were soon joined by many other survivors of the Horde War, looking for someplace to be after being thoroughly beaten and betrayed by both the Faceless Horde and Admiral Tang’s Imperial Space Navy.
Outpost had its own source of hydrogen fuel in the two gas-giant planets in the system, each of which had multiple moons. Then they stole an Ancient artifact made so long ago that we couldn’t even determine if the Ancients were actual people, or maybe sentient mushrooms battling to fill the universe with mold spores… but sentient mold spores, that made life everywhere. (Okay, I admit it. That is all just a conspiracy theory.) But the Crown of Stars could do something really Ancient science-y. And then Trav Dalgoda stole it.
Tron and Maggie tracked the Goof down to a new planet recently liberated and reclaimed by the Aero Brothers. And the Goofy one had, in the meantime, discovered another Ancient thingy called the Hammer of God. This thing could build whatever you could think of (as long as you were telepathic enough to tell the Hammer what you were thinking of.) The Hammer could make whole cities instantly using nanobots and sentient energy beams. And so, Tron and his people used it to build cities all over Outpost.
And so, the pirates of Outpost needed people to come live in their new cities. They found Lupin space pirates willing to live on Outpost in return for help with their rotten spaceships. They also found massive flotillas of Nebulon space whales, living spaceships that breed on gas giants and contain cities full of little blue Nebulons. Although they were unwilling to live on Outpost itself. Instead, they wanted to live with their space whales and other space fish around the gas giants with their various moons and plenty of space for the breeding of even more space fish.
And then Arkin Cloudstalker not only brought his Lady Knights with their White Sword Corsairs to Outpost but also the weird alien Lazerstone who was made of intelligent rocks. And there was a wealth of psionic crystals in the sands of Outpost that Lazerstone could turn into numerous clone copies of himself, complete with a hive mind. Millions of Lazerstones came to life on Outpost and started wearing the special armored suits invented by Tron’s boy sidekick, Hassan the Space Elf of Djinnistan.
And so, that is the crucial insight into the reasons why Outpost was the key to the war between the New Star League and Admiral Tang’s Galtorr Imperium.
Mickey Makes Manga Art
I always loved this song. When I was a boy, it was the song I would sing when I was alone in the darkness. It made me feel better, able to march toward home in spite of potential spooks and brain-eating zombies. The weight of the invisible future world could not drag me down if this tune was in my head, filling it with helium and good spirit; it allowed me to fly.
And when I listened to it playing on the radio… I always paused and listened to at least a couple of verses no matter what I was doing… I never once thought of Johnny Nash as a black man. I didn’t know he was black until I first saw a picture of him. But even then I didn’t think, “Oh, he’s a black man.” I thought, “Oh, he’s a man like me.” But, I, of course, am not black. I’m not really white either. I am a kind of pale pink to mauve mottled color with dark pink psoriasis spots in random places all over me. It is the man on the inside that is like Johnny Nash, full of uplifting things, and goofy grins, and… hopefully, hope.
But when I was young it wasn’t only singing “I Can See Clearly Now…” in my goofy farmboy voice that filled my head with air and allowed me to float away from the troubles of the world. I also learned to draw Manga style, in the tradition of Osamu Tezuka’s Astroboy , filtered through hours of practice copying Walt Kelly’s Pogo characters and various Disney cartoons.
I copied the over-large eyes and big-headed cutsieness that informed the Japanese idea of the world after the atom bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I tried to capture innocence and wonder and adventure in drawings that took my mind off the terrible things of my childhood, being sexually assaulted, the assassinations of JFK and his brother RFK, and Martin Luther King Jr, the Viet Nam War, and Nixon with Watergate. You can reclaim innocence and peace of mind, if you get the lines just right, and the proportions are good, and the character has just the right expression on their sweet little faces.
Okay, maybe not always so sweet and innocent. This is not the Dorothy I would want to mess with. This girl is cocky, sure of herself, and more than a little impish. A destroyer of wicked witches, that one.
But that’s what Manga Art is all about. You whistle away the darkness one drawing at a time. And there’s plenty of darkness to whistle away anymore, isn’t there? What with Tronald Dump taking on the NFL over the American Flag and National Anthem, Tronald Dump taking on Jim Kong Oon in an insult war backed up by ICBMs, and Congress busily trying to take away all our access to health care. (I know I misspelled some names there, but I am tired of talking about that guy that Dorothy told me I should call the “orange-faced poop sack.” No, Dorothy, I can’t call him that. Using language like that robs my head of its helium.) So, what do I do now about the state of the world? Well, here is the Manga Art I drew last night.
Catgirl and White-haired Snow White with a ping pong ball in her mouth.
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Tagged as manga-style art, Osamu Tezuka, Walt Kelly