Roselight Outline: Part 2

The time comes for Noira to return to Orus; her family sees her off, as they take one of the older land carriages up to Eterna, the capital city and spaceport of pr’Sefone. Telma is wary. We don’t know where the father in this family is…but Telma worries for her daughter. They exchange their sincere goodbyes, and there’s an unspoken feeling that neither understands; that somehow, things are going to be different…

Noira boards a shuttle carried high over Eterna by a large, double-hulled airship. Upon release, the shuttle ignites rocket engines to power its way free of the planet, chasing down an interworld cycler. As the shuttle docks to its new home, Noira takes a moment to look back down at the world she’s leaving behind, city lights glimmering in the perpetual dusk; far below, her family watches the brilliant star of the cycler sail away, off into the deep open sky.

The trip only lasts a few days, owing to the compact nature of the Rosa system, close-packed worlds whirling close to their mother. Noira explores some of the luxurious faculties of the cycler; it’s a permanent space station, furnished on the inside something like a vast ocean liner. The cycler coasts between worlds, catching and releasing transient fleets of passenger shuttles. Other passengers are more prone to socializing and partaking in extravagant recreation to pass the time; Noira mostly keeps to herself.

Arriving on Orus involves a violent and somewhat harrowing reentry, culminating in a balloon-arrested descent. In fact, the shuttles don’t “land” at all — the deployed envelope brings them to a halt high above ground level, allowing the safed vehicles to be towed into port by tug balloons.

Disembarking is its own ordeal. Life on Orus is controlled in totality by ASMC, which views the world as one big mining village and claims the right to police it accordingly. They form a sort of paragovernment agency that, among many other unpleasant policies, maintains an intrusive transportation security force. Noira isn’t surprised by this, having been through the process before, but we note that the screening makes her very uncomfortable, and she is relieved to make it through and get on with her life.

Her life on Orus is not nearly as peaceful and idyllic as the farm on pr’Sefone. Noira lives in dense, decrepit tenement housing, the only living standard she can afford even with her pretty strong qualifications. She lives on an island named Kaldus, which is fringe even by Orus standards — it’s near the edge of the more populated island chains, serving as a staging point to mines situated far out at sea. Overall, Noira’s not too fond of her life ashore, and views Ark Royal as her home while she’s on Orus.

While we’re with Noira, she witnesses the vessel Ark Duchess limping into port, apparently after some significant catastrophe. Depending on exactly how I want to spin the narrative, Ark Duchess may have fallen victim to an air raid, sustaining significant damage from gunfire and losing many crew members in the process. Alternatively, it may be returning from an open cast mine which suffered a catastrophic seawall collapse, damaging the ship and killing many mine workers. In either case, the incident reminds Noira (and the audience) of the hazards of her occupation, and the image of body bags being carried off the stricken vessel leaves her wary ahead of her upcoming voyage.

Noira prepares for her next voyage out on Ark Royal. On the way out, the ship will carry supplies and logistical support equipment out to a number of open-cast mines; in exchange, Ark Royal will pick up thousands of tons of bulk cargo and raw materials harvested from the mines, delivering them back to port to be processed in ASMC’s various plants and facilities. As a first for Noira, this voyage will take place primarily during the long night — Orus has a lengthy day/night cycle, so darkness will last what we would call about a week. This makes the voyage inherently more hazardous than those Noira has been on before; the seas are fraught with shifting floes of ice, and Orus’ place at the fringe of the Rosa system means not even the other worlds can illuminate its midnight skies.

Preparations begin around dusk, with Rosa’s disk lingering over the far horizon. Noira brings the majority of her belongings with her in luggage to board Ark Royal. At the port, we meet her mentor from the company, Marion Montaigne.

Marion is a senior engineer at ASMC who’s been helping to represent company interests as part of their partnership with Grand Ark Aeromarine. Arcturus Meridian, the supply line operator that Noira works for, requires input from both its parents to run smoothly: while Noira helps maintain GAA’s vehicle hardware, Marion ensures the machines support ASMC’s broader logistical needs. However, Marion has considerable technical prowess, and mentors Noira as she takes on more responsibility at AM. The night voyage is a part of this, as the environmental conditions are significantly more demanding as vehicle maintenance is concerned: lower temperatures, more turbulent air conditions, and a general inability to alight on the water in emergency situations.

They both know Noira is ready to shoulder the additional responsibility, even as she’s a bit nervous about the new situation. They talk about this at the gangway as the ship is prepared for its long voyage….

Roselight Outline: Part 1

I've got a lot of notes I've written on the general storyline for Roselight. So far they've only been maintained as a vague bulleted list, but I think a good exercise will be to convert this to prose. This isn't like proper written novel format, but will help organize my thoughts better, while introducing you, my dear blogreaders, to the story. So here goes!

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Noira comes from a Sefones family who’ve been sustaining themselves on a small farm for generations. Small, family farms like these are starting to be outcompeted by growing industry; unsustainable practices mean creeping desertification further threatens smaller farms that can’t afford to repair and maintain the land. Noira’s family’s future is uncertain; her mother Telma presses her to follow her own path and pursue a career to support herself, to escape the worsening situation on pr’Sefone. Noira has many younger siblings, who are needed to help keep the farm alive. Although Telma hopes to help them all succeed, the proverbial eggs are sort of in Noira’s basket.

Noira learned some mechanical work from maintaining farm equipment. She got her first job beyond farming at Wollstone Air Freight, the operator of pr’Sefone’s ubiquitous airship lines, shipping passengers and cargo simultaneously across the plains. She deliberately shied away from working for the big industrial farming corporations, since they directly threaten her family’s livelihood.

Eventually, Noira’s connections at Wollstone landed her a more promising position working for Arcturus Meridian: a joint venture between Arcturus Steel and Mineral Company (ASMC), the preeminent mining corporation on Orus, and Grand Ark Aeromarine, the manufacturer of enormous airborne ground effect cargo ships. Leaving home was difficult, but she’s found her work enjoyable and made something of a home aboard the bulk cargo carrier Ark Royal. She’s been working this job for some time now, having participated in several week-length voyages servicing open-cast mines across the planet.

The main line of the story picks up when Noira visits home on pr’Sefone between voyages aboard Ark Royal. We see vast farms cultivating hardy crops which are, in a fantasy sort of way, vaguely recognizable but rather distinct from what we’re familiar with on Earth (the idea being they’re genetically engineered for the environment and output). Much of the world consists of small homesteads linked by long roads, although aerostat travel is common, creating a role similar to earthly sailing ships for transporting goods. However, those enormous corporations are carving roads and rails into the landscape, wearing out the soil and subjecting the world to ever-worsening dust storms. This only furthers the struggle of small farms which can’t afford to fight through the difficult conditions.

Noira spends time at home with her mother and siblings, admiring/envying the simple joy and purpose with which they work the farm. She has a conversation with her mother about how she struggles with a sense of belonging; she doesn’t have much in the way of “family” on Orus, and feels very lonely a lot of the time. These ideas of family and belonging will be major themes throughout the rest of the story…

As a keepsake to help remind her of home, Telma gifts Noira the old wooden kalimba on which she used to play lullabies for her daughter. She also gives Noira an heirloom —  a small, beautiful moon-shaped necklace, carrying a relic gemstone from the old world…

Eterna sketches - aircourt & airships

 Eterna is the capital city and primary spaceport of pr'Sefone, the innermost planet of the Rosa system. Situated near the world's north pole, Eterna serves as a hub for interworld trade, particularly the agricultural exports the planet is best known for. However, there is also significant passenger flow between worlds; the system's compact nature means even low-energy Hohmann transfers take just a few Earth days to complete.

A staple of the fantasy genre, especially when connected to steampunk influences, is the presence of airships. The Rosa system is generally pretty low-tech - although we do have spaceflight and some computers, a lot of our infrastructure has been rebuilt from the ground up. At some point I just chalk it up to rule of cule cool, but there are some practical reasons to use them - they're relatively low energy (good for when your society spends a ton of energy recapturing materials for synthetic fuels), and their moderate payload capacity makes them useful for "shipping" relatively low-density agricultural cargo on a sealess world like pr'Sefone. Their simple VTOL capability is appreciated throughout the system; Orus is incapable of supporting runways. Heavier-than-aircraft are being phased in as society industrializes, but they are less sustainable both in construction and in fuel consumption. Land trains are also being introduced to pr'Sefone, but they threaten to dust-bowlify that delicate sliver of habitable land.

Here we see some sketches of a place I've called an "aircourt." To provide streamlined access to an ornate (spiky!) city, airships are afforded a series of high-altitude mooring platforms to spare them the trouble of navigating low amongst buildings. The linked towers enclose the eponymous "court" space. I imagine a steady stream of ships from all over the planet continuously feeding through the rows, some odd combination of the slowest airport in history and the most graceful aerial ballet ever devised.

What do these vehicles actually look like? I had originally envisioned grand sailing ships taking advantage of the continuous wind, but it turns out that's a bit too physically impossible for me to suspend disbelief. (If it only worked in real life, we'd probably have been flying them for decades.) Instead I pivoted to a cyclorotor design that approaches the original aesthetic and also provides a unique alternative to boring old props.

I'm pretty happy with the general aesthetic here, and the functionality is nice - cyclorotors (or, as they may be named in-universe, "rotor-sails") can produce a thrust vector in any direction within the plane normal to their rotation axis. In other words, airships with these installed can translate with immense precision and responsiveness, great for fighting those pesky winds or performing careful approach maneuvers.

You may be wondering with growing apprehension about the vehicle in the lower right. The catamaran airship above, with smaller rotor-sails, is an airlaunch platform. Smaller planets and a healthy dose of fantasy physics make airlaunched SSTO shuttles the most common passenger transport in the system. After being carried to their target altitude, the shuttles are released and power their way into orbit and beyond, chasing down big interworld cyclers (space stations on permanent transit paths, with accommodations like ocean liners). There they roost during the journey, detaching at their destination to reenter and land on their own.

Except, naturally, they actually deploy a stowed lifting gas envelope to "land" in midair, as illustrated by the sketch near the top there. That vehicle is shown being towed by a small tug balloon. Rides on these shuttles would be harrowing, but they're certainly the cheapest, and thus, most accessible, option for many people.

I have some older, more polished artwork that's relevant here:

This one depicts roughly the same vehicle as above. I may 3D model the design to codify some features; I shied away from the pointy winglets in favor of a stumpier, sturdier design. Also, I'm definitely avoiding naming a fuel type for anything anymore - these are certainly not hydrolox vehicles, and I'm not about to calculate mass fractions for these things.

Here we see a much older airship concept launching one of the shuttles. I'd like the vehicles in Roselight to have this level of whimsy; I'll just need to re-flesh them out beyond just the functional basics. Expect the end result to look pretty similar to this.

One of my favorites I've done, depicting a cycler sailing over Eterna on its way past pr'Sefone. The shuttles shown earlier would be dwarfed by this great liner, serving more as ship's tenders than spaceships on their own. The cycler is spacious and luxurious (results may vary by social class), although nobody stays very long...

I think it's about bedtime tonight, but hopefully this was somewhat interesting! I have a bit of a break coming up so I may try and get a few more posts in then.

Sketch: Eterna

I'm probably going to take a bit to figure out how I want to format "content" on this blog. For this first post, I've obviously started with a quick intro. After the piece there'll be a bit of director's commentary where I talk more about the process & my ideas behind the content. So without further ado, here's one of the first pieces I ever wrote for the story!

Here goes

Well, I'm doing it. Blog time.

As you can glean from the header, this blog is about a story I'm writing, drawing, and producing other assorted content for. I'm going to try and keep this pretty regularly updated, primarily with actual content, like sketches and snippets of prose. I may also post a significant amount of my thoughts and musings about the plot, its themes, and other stuff as I flesh things out.

I'm already extremely prone to rambling, and this content format is absolutely an enabler for that. I just wrote a miniature essay on like 2% of the influences on this story and its setting, as proof that this is going to suck away large amounts of my time. If you'd like to validate this behaviour, that miniature essay is at the "about Roselight" tab.

The "pages" function on Blogger is neat because I can have a few permanent tabs with standing info, sorta like a wiki....although I should probably invest in a proper one of those in the future. Hurghrhghrgh. I'll have to see what works best for my brain.

I do think it'll be fun to talk a bit about my thought process and ideas for each piece I write/draw/etc., so I may divide each post into the actual content and then like a director's commentary about it. Who knows. I now have 5.5 hours before that 8 AM so maybe I should quit writing this and let the future content speak for itself. Whee! See y'all later.