14 replies »

1. An island seen from an airplane above cloud level

2. Nice guess, Rho. Or one sick-looking cloud. I confess, though, that my first guess was a yeti snow angel. Only yeti don’t know what snow angels are so he forgot to stick out his arms.

3. Thanks Russ, I guess we’ll just have to wit for the definitive answers from Dawn and Ubertramp.

   😉

4. At first, I agreed with Rho that it was an island. Perhaps one of the 10,000 islands on the vacation planet Lytton IV that I described a few weeks ago. Or, more likely, the floating Sea-Star Island made famous by the impeccable work of Dr. Dolittle over 160 years ago. But, then I thought, that’s too obvious. So what else could look like this?

   The exoskeleton of Dawn’s starship, of course. Immediately before jumping the gravity shock wave, over the wall into hyperspace, the surface of a spacecraft becomes, for all intents and purposes, fluid. I don’t really understand the physics, but it has to do with the intense electric and magnetic fields generated around the craft to protect passengers and cargo. These fields result in a plasma-like buffer between the craft exoskeleton and the wall of the warp bubble. At the hull-buffer interface, what would normally be solid in real-space becomes highly viscose in hyperspace. It was the “clouds” that threw me. But, then I remembered that Dawn has been known to take some rather unconventional risks in her travels. It is entirely possible that this is a micro-impact crater on her starship hull and the clouds are imperfections in the plasma buffer.

   A second possibility is that this is part of a TI alchemical study. Since the beginnings of what we call science, the TI has been interested in transmutation. Clearly, they don’t really need to dabble in the occult because they have access to technology that makes such transmutations child’s play. But the tradition is there and, apparently, Dawn is an avid practitioner. The image could be a lump of recently mined lead in a mercury bath. It looks like she’s using a combination of sound waves (hence, the vibrations in the mercury) and very cold temperatures (hence, the clouds). Very possibly, the “sound waves” are actually intonations designed to open a gateway to another plane (or dimension), thereby summoning an imp or other demonic underling (which, coincidentally, may be another explanation for the clouds).

   • Or maybe it was a micro-impact crater that resulted from her letting the summoned imp drive?

5. Haha. Well, that could certainly be it, too. Imps are notoriously bad drivers. Especially in hyperspace.

   • It’s not that they’re bad drivers, exactly. They’re actually pretty good drivers, in that they tend to hit exactly what they’re aiming for. The problem is that they treat a star cruiser the way you might treat a bumper car.

     • Especially when the imp is summoning a celestial dire badger.

6. That would explain why you have a car-goyle in your truck. 🙂

7. Malignant melanoma! Lop that shit off!!!

8. Definitely an island, but which one?

   It can’t be very large given the relative size of the wave action on the water, but it’s not Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket or, that I can tell, a Hawaiian island.

   Inquiring minds wanna know! It looks like a lovely place to be.

9. Excellent eye Rho, and Russ – maybe the yeti is hiding on the island… resting after his/her long swim from the mainland.

   And for the record, you get more than a micro-crater when you let an imp drive and never let a celestial dire badger near your space ship. No matter how they beg and plead. 🙂

10. Mr. Cargo – how gruesome!

    Karen Marie – I’m sure it is a lovely place as it’s somewhere in the chain of islands between Cairns and Brisbane Australia. 🙂

11. I’m not as witty as the rest of you, to me it just looks like a opening at the North Pole. 🙂