Webcomic / Runaway to the Stars

Runaway to the Stars (often shortened to ''RttS'') is a hard sci-fi story developed by artist Jay Eaton about a ragtag group of Starfish Aliens, a genetically modified human, a non-GMO human, and one snarky criminal AI. But more than that, it's an entire sci-fi universe containing multiple stories spanning multiple planets and time periods. These stories are:

• Runaway to the Stars, the main story. Follows Talita, a centaur alien who was adopted into human foster care after being left inside a cat crate at a human habitat. Talita and her two human friends, Gillie (a genetically-modified "Cat Girl") and Idrisah are working at a dead-end recycling plant in the middle of nowhere when they discover that one of the spaceships to be scrapped, The Runaway, still has a working AI inside. This AI, a Space Pirate named Bip, makes them a proposal: help repair The Runaway and fly it off-world without being detected by the authorities and the ship is theirs.

• Terranaut: Set on an ocean world populated by "Scuds", who are sentient aquatic aliens who make heavy use of Organic Technology. Chkbrr, a Scud scientist who studies landmasses, has a fight with their sibling Rzzt-tt that leaves them both stranded in the desert. Chkbrr and Rzzt-tt must survive in this inhospitable enviroment until the next train can bring them back to the ocean, and grow to understand each other along the way.

• Airsled: Set on the home planet of the bird-like Avians during their equivalent of the industrial revolution. A group of Avians must make a risky cargo run over the ocean using an airsled, a glider pulled by flying livestock.

• The Scientific Method: A much older side-story about the first chimeric genetically modified human made in the US. Originally the main story, now abandoned.

The project can be read for free as it comes out here, or in its entirety on Jay Eaton's Patreon here. The website for the project can be found here, and Jay Eaton's tumblr can be found here.

Tropes in these works include:

General Worldbuilding Tropes

• Alien Arts Are Appreciated: Sophonts tend to be at least fascinated by other species’ art. Avian sky-dancing is noted as especially beautiful.
• Alien Blood: The avians, bug ferrets, and scuds have orange, green, and blue blood respectively. That is due to the different oxygen transporting molecules that each of them have ^note coboglobin, a mixture of hemocyanin and chlorocruorin, and hemocyanin respectively. Averted with the centaurs, which have red blood like humans as both species have hemoglobin as their main oxygen transporter.
• Androids Are People, Too: Sapient AI is rare in the setting, but those that appear have just as many quirks and positive traits as other sophonts.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The aliens have very, well, alien cultural norms.
  • Avian sexual norms are built around the fact that they are only interested in sex during a brief mating season and usually part ways after mating. As such, they somewhat romanticize "duns" not knowing who the parent of their children is and consider formalized marriage to be a form of prostitution.
  • For more traditional centaurs (who, as a nomadic herd species, are always walking), using any kind of vehicle is seen as pitiful at best and dishonest at worst. Killing a newborn is seen as a regrettable but acceptable form of population control.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: There are multiple examples. One is that centaurs actually possess two brains: a larger "main" brain in their body that manages cognition and vital functions and a smaller "secondary" brain in their head for sensory information and fight-or-flight response. They also have a one directional respiratory system where they take in air from their head and exhale from orifices on the side of their body.
  • A Tumblr post from Jay Eaton establishes that from a taxonomic perspective, centaurs (and likely all other aliens in the setting,) aren't even considered eukaryotes because they all evolved from different trees of life than that of Earth.
• Bizarre Alien Psychology: Aliens don't tend to think like humans.
  • Bug ferrets have something like race-wide ADHD, and absolutely no sense of personal space. Everything from beds to bathrooms are communal on the Bug Ferret homeworld. Soap operas are overstimulating nightmares (normally consisting of things like producer commentary, character asides, and audience reactions all at the same time). A bug ferret deprived of contact with fellow bug ferrets can Go Mad from the Isolation within just over a day.
  • On a milder note, centaurs process visual information very differently from humans — for example, all centaurs are compelled to track small moving objects. It's also stated that matriarchs will instinctively become violently hostile towards any babies that aren't their own. Something that becomes more pronounced in ones who reproduce more frequently.
  • The avians only have an interest in sex and romance during their species mating season in the spring. This can cause friction with individuals who start relationships with humans as they'd only be romantically interested in their partner for part of the year.
• Bizarre Alien Sexes: At first, the avians appear to be similar to many Earth animals in reproductive dynamics, with the brights being analogous to males and the duns females, with the former being the ones who fertilize their partners and the latter the ones who bear the young. However, looking closer reveals that it's a bit less straightforward than that, as it's actually the bright who produces the egg and the dun who fertilizes it, they just simply keep it in a pouch afterwards to develop.
• Colonized Solar System: Humanity has colonized most of the Sol system, with Mars and Jupiter as major economic and cultural centers.
• Contagious A.I.: The first sapient AI was created by accident and all subsequent AI have been created by copying an existing AI, but most newborn AI delete the majority of the memories inherited from their parent so they can differentiate themselves. Normally, an AI requires a dedicated server room to run but Bip saved their data on a crate full of quantum phones after their old ship was wrecked.
• Crosscultural Kerfuffle: Talita was raised by humans, which means her body language reads "wrong" to other centaurs. In particular, her habits of widening her eyes and baring her teeth to imitate smiling mean that she seems perpetually manic and on edge. A comic from Tumblr demonstrates how both humans and centaurs can really misunderstand her.
• Dreary Half-Lidded Eyes: This is the default facial expression for centaurs, as, unlike humans, they don't use their eyes for conveying emotion aside from fear, shock or anger, and this tends to make them look perpetually grumpy from a human's perspective. The exception to this Talita, who was raised by humans which means that she picked up their use of expressions.
• Exotic Extended Marriage: Polyamory is common among Spacer humans, while centaur matriarchs usually have a harem of husbands and bug ferret marriages often include upwards of thirty spouses. Inverted with most avian cultures, where the sexes only get together during mating season and they consider "marriage"◊ to be a form of prostitution.
• Explosive Breeder: The centaurs give birth to large litters and the scuds are a "wind-pollinated" carrier sex with no real way to prevent (or encourage) fertilization. This sets them apart from the other intelligent species who tend to only have an average of a single offspring at a time. This also means that both species view the killing of unwanted infants or, in the case of scuds, destroying their eggs, as acceptable.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Averted for the most part, but flightless avians resemble Victorian aristocracy more than a little.
• Fantastic Racism: Skimmer avians are known to look down on the other avian species and see their own culture as superior and more enlightened thanks to their history of colonialism on their homeworld. They are also sometimes racist towards genetically modified humans due a skimmer creation story that states that the other avians are flawed deviants of their original form, which leads them to essentially see the GMHs as this occurring to humanity in real time.
• Foreign Queasine: Intercultural version, since no species can eat another's food. Spacer centaurs are notorious for getting 'creatively desperate' in supplementing their food printer fare.
• Hermaphrodite: Both the bug ferrets and the spacers possess fully functional male and female reproductive organs. This was specifically engineered in the latter as a way of more quickly building up their populations in emergencies.
• Higher-Tech Species: Bug ferrets invented the wormhole technology that ties the universe together and were the first to discover all other organic life in the setting.
• Human Subspecies:
  • Humans in the future have modified themselves into myriad forms, including spacers adapted to low-gravity environments and amphibious mermaids.
  • They're not human, but the avians are a genus of five closely related species — pigmies, divers, skimmers, polars and giants. Most avians can interbreed, although some produce mules.
• Intelligent Gerbil: The Avians superficially resemble earth birds, hence the name. Scuds, too, resemble some species of crustacean. Bug Ferrets are, well, ferrets.
• Life in Zero G: "Spacer" refers to both a major human space political and cultural bloc and a Genetically Modified Human clade (GMH Spacers) that comprises a large fraction of their population. GMH Spacers have Handy Feet, Prehensile Tails, whiskers to detect air flow, and hirsutism (don't call them monkeys), but they have issues living in Earth-like gravity, with one GMH Spacer character who chose to live planetside needing a back brace to walk upright.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: The centaurs are this, as they look superficially like horses, with a head very unlike that of a horse. The head itself has a tapir-like trunk, the large eyes and facial disk of an owl, fused teeth like parrotfish, and two antlers on the lower jaw that look like tusks.
• Mole Men: The bug ferrets live in super-dense underground cities.
• Multi Cultural Alien Planet:
  • Centaurs are divided into nomads and settlers, which are further split into several ethnic groups each.
  • Avians are a genus of five species, dominated by the culture of the skimmer species but still each having its own distinct home regions and traditions.
• No Biochemical Barriers: Played straight for atmospheres, although bug ferrets can tolerate lower oxygen concentrations than humans, occasionally causing problems. Averted for food, as the biology of each species' home biopshere is distinct enough that eating each other's foods is not an option — the avians, for instance, come from a planet where life uses cobalt instead of iron, making eating anything from there highly hazardous for everyone else.
• Off with His Head!: Because centaurs and bug ferrets have their primary brain based in their bodies, they could theoretically survive decapitation. In practice, the shock, massive blood loss, and loss of the majority of their sensory organs usually does them in. Medically forcing one of these species to survive a decapitation is viewed as a war crime.
  • It does mean that they can and do survive and thrive after receiving head injuries that would kill another species, as this centaur proves.
• Our Centaurs Are Different: In-universe, "centaur" can refer to one of two things:
  • Some genetically-modified humans are created to possess taurine lower bodies based on odd- or even-toed ungulates.
  • Centaur aliens are distinct species from another planet — "centaur" isn't what they call themselves, but like all other species their languages' native endonyms aren't reliably pronounceable for other aliens — with six limbs, hoof-like digits, and short trunks. On their homeworld, they are divided between sedentary cultures that raise livestock and nomadic ones that make endless, year-long circuits of their planet's single supercontinent.
• Organic Technology: Being an aquatic species, this is the scuds' best option for stuff like cell phones. One consequence of this is that since nearly all their tech are living organisms, they end up producing waste, meaning that cords meant to "charge" their devices also transports waste out of it.
• Portal Network: FTL travel is accomplished via a network of wormhole gates invented by the bug ferrets.
• Running on All Fours:
  • The spacers can move on all fours so as to more easily fit through the tight corridors of a spaceship. It's also stated that they have traits specifically designed to allow this, such as short limbs and a long, flexible spine.
  • This specific genetic modification in humans is referred to as being a 'bi-quad'.
  • The centaurs and bug ferrets take this even further by being capable of running on all six when they need to, with the centaurs in particular being capable of reaching great speed while doing so. They also have physical traits that make this more practical as well, such as a centaur's second set of limbs being splayed partially so as not to get in the way of their first and third pair of limbs when running.
• Space People: GMH Spacers are humans genetically modified to live in space, with traits like whiskers and prehensile feet to better exist in zero gravity.
• Winged Humanoid: Genetically Modified Humans from the Chinese Magpie Bridge Project are modified to have birdlike wins and be capable of flight, which also required some dramatic restructuring of their other anatomy. A character, Min, is one of them.
• World War III: Endured by Earth sometime between the colonization of Mars and first contact with the bug ferrets. Much of North America is covered in craters from Orbital Bombardment and many GMH clades were engineered to help rebuild in the aftermath.

Tropes for the Runaway to the Stars storyline

• Adopting the Gender Binary: Shyam identifies as female rather than non-binary like most GMH Spacers.
• Big Girl: Talita is quite big, and performs most of the manual labor in the Runaway.
• Cat Girl: Gillie is an "off model" genetically modified catgirl — some quirk of genetics has left her with traits like whiskers and a shorter tail than most members of her clade.
  • Guiomar is similarly "off model" as a feline bi-quad with gigantism, he physically cannot stand, let alone walk bipedal.
• Cunning Linguist: Gillie and Idrisah work as inter-species translators. They specialize in bug ferret and avian languages, respectively.
• Doorstop Baby: Talita was left in a cat crate at a human habitat.
• Fiery Redhead: Name-dropped by Gillie (who dies her hair red).
• Happily Married: Gillie and Idrisah.
• Homosexual Reproduction: Gillie is a Designer Baby with two dads◊. The lab threw in Cat Girl genes as part of a promotion◊ but screwed up somewhere.
• Interspecies Adoption: It happens.
  • After being discovered, Talita was taken into human foster care. She was eventually adopted (informally) by the human Douglas.
  • Avian Sirawit was adopted from foster care by a human (Jing), and Jing was apparently raised by an Avian dun as well. Sirawit jokes that if they adopt a human, they would keep the pattern going. Neither of them are nearly as imprinted on the other species as Talita is.
• Interspecies Romance: Talita the centaur develops a romantic relationship with Shyam, a tailed spacer.
• Onion Tears: When Idrisah tries making koshari while the ship is underway, she discovers that: 1. grating onions in microgravity is a bad idea, 2. avians are susceptible to onion fumes like humans, and 3. centaurs aren't due to their eyes using oil for lubrication instead of water. She convinces Talita to finish grating the onions in exchange for cleaning out her food printer.
• Parental Substitute: Talita was lucky enough to have Douglas, her primary foster carer. He couldn't afford to formally adopt her, but to quote Eaton, "He's not her dad and she would not call him that. But he's like... you know... not NOT her dad."
• Sapient Ship: Bip controls the Runaway, and thinks of it as their "body".
• Silicon Snarker: Bip; the AI of the Runaway has a deeply sarcastic streak and will turn it on anyone they feel like annoying.
• Vehicle Title: "The Runaway" is the ship that lies at the center of the plot.

Tropes for other storylines

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