Wondering what’s going on? Hey, I don’t blame you! 
For a quick fix you can jump to the first page of this chapter, or if you’re feeling completist you can start properly right at the beginning.
Er…yikes? Thank goodness we only have to wait until Tuesday for the next page!
Yikes, indeed! (Trying to keep my mouth shut.)
DARN CONVENTION KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN!!!
Didn’t you SEE the sign saying “Lord of the Rings tours THURSDAYS ONLY? And absolutely NO Star Trek landing party LARPing and/or cosplay in the ‘crashed starship’ set?” Well it’s RIGHT THERE. Sheesh. I got work to do, y’know? This virgin tract of New Zealand forest doesn’t rake ITSELF, you know!
And what IS that in your shoulder bag? Is that an iPad or the new Kindle? It’s ugly man, looks like something off of Enterprise. “I got faith of the heart…” Arrrgh you reminded me, that horrible song is gonna be in my head all day now, I’m gonna have to hit you with this rake again just for that.
Well at least you’re not all bloody vampires. Twilight, man. I’m still flushing Goth kids outta the cemetery.
AND STAY OUT!
Damn… This guy obviously attended the Jim Kirk “Kick their ass, then make friends” seminar.
Or maybe he’s all “caveman get woman”.
Very nice action sequence. Did you take reference photographs for it?
I can’t *quite* tell what’s going on in the second panel … Is Patty getting raked to an off-screen death here?
@Nate: For your sins, smart guy, you will now have to Photoshop those dialogue balloons into this page.
@John: Thank you! Most of my pages to date have been variations of people walking around in corridors, so trying to do this bit was pretty difficult for me, working outside my “comfort zone”. No photographs, but I did make liberal use of a couple of mirrors and a broom handle!
@Kev: Yes, I know, it’s a little cruel of me, but the second panel is deliberately ambiguous.
The “steadicam” chaos works for me here!
Is .. is that a RAKE being brandished there? And the thingy’s broken! ACK!
GREAT action page, Tara. The last panel is my hands-down favorite.
It didn’t occur to me to ask the first time, but what exactly is going FFSSHH in the first panel?
@John: I think thats the sound of him rushing throu foilage.
@Dwight: Yay!
@Samantha: Yeah, the rake is indeed the weapon of choice. And thank you!
@John: Hm, now I look at it I guess I ought to have made it more clear. The sound is supposed to be the rustling of the leaves and branches as the Mystery Guy crashes through them. EDIT: Right, like David said!
GAH! I’m all caught up and I need to know what happens next!
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
@Tara: Thank you!
So, a rake implies a 20th century tech-level industrial civilisation. And time and energy for gardening. It’s not a tree trunk. It’s not a super spacey collapsible bit of survey kit like you’d find on a spaceship. It has an ordinary handle, not a super spacey one like Aria’s magic survey pole that just got smooshed.
If you’re a subsistence-level survivor, you’re probably not going to care too much about how exactly level your garden is. You might fashion a spade or digging stick. Knives, definitely. You might have a hydroponics kit dragged out of the bay and set up. You might have a robot doing stuff. But a rake? It’s the sort of fussy thing built for suburban lawns or small house gardens. They’re really hard to build and they don’t add a whole lot to productivity. They’re for prettiness and imply lots of spare energy budget but not yet high-tech enough to automate home gardening.
So my guess is it belongs to this Earth, which means we’re near suburban 20th C tech level civilisation, and one which hasn’t diverged much from British/American norms.
Which means NASA or UNIT or the local mall cops or janitors should have been crawling all over the starship crash site for years, yet they’re not.
So… yeah, I’m confused.
@Nate: If you had rakes already around when civilization collapsed, they might well make a handy weapon…
I’m still a bit shell-shocked that Galaxion is back. (Yes, obviously I was four years late getting the news.) Also gives me hope that there might be time for a bigger creative life again once my little boy is a bit older…
Tara – So glad you posted the mirror site link on the Girlamatic site. I had wondered why you skipped two weeks worth of updates and thepage from two weeks ago was broken. Something is hosed with the Girlamatics site and I am very happy to have bookmarked your mirror site. Particularly as we are now getting to the action bits
Look out! He’s got a RAKE! A RAAAAAAAAAAAAKE!!!
This is the part where your sidearm comes in handy. Wait… Oh. Oh…
I guess this is the downside of being a purely scientific organization. Hopefully Patty will not end up having her brains splattered all over the countryside as a result of this, as she was one of my favorite supporting characters.
Frickin’ yes dude with a rake! Dude with a raaaake!!!
(Dude with a rake who bears not a slight resemblance to Scavina’s husband with longer hair? It’s all in the eyebrows…)
In any case, we need guy-with-rake on a t-shirt, I think. You’d get lots of crossover buyers from Neal Stephenson fans who are besotted with his mammoth Anathem. There’s a principle in that named Diax’s Rake which is named after a (in the story) historical event where a philosopher/theoretician got angry and beat people with a rake.
Tomorrow’s the day… come on, Patty – pull through!