Chapter 4, Page 32

Something seems different about you LEVi! did you… get a new haircut????

Sorry for the pause, a lot is happening behind the scenes… getting basically the next 3 years of publications ready this season, some of that will be announced soon! And the stuff that isn’t, well, at least you know it’s in the works.

I’ve also got a literary agent now B] I feel like a grown-up. Like 20% grown up at least. That’s a lot for me.

For Patrons, a new tutorial about story pacing went up! The worksheet is slowly getting finished and will be up in a day or two. And for non-Patrons, fulfilling my self-imposed community service by making a new tutorial in the archive free-to-read: the worldbuilding tutorial. Thanks so much again to Patrons, I’ve been trying to update as much as I possibly can and am feeling so much more productive in the last month or two than I’ve been since November. Just, thank you very much for your support and for helping me create all of these projects to share with you!

And nearing the end… 9 days left on this guy! I just placed my orders for everything yesterday, so I’ll likely be fulfilling this KS ahead of schedule, yay :]

Okay, next page later this week, see you then.

50 Comments

  • Kit

    Oooh, now that’s interesting. So Levi was always talking, but for some reason Fish and Kalla can’t understand him? I assumed the talking thing was new after they all got separated. Bex, when did you take Thrip-as-a-second-language?

    • Pylgrim

      I’m guessing that as result of the fall, Bex died and Michael did not (that’s why he was still injured when we first saw him afterwards). Bex was rebuilt by the Martian ecosystem gaining the capacity to understand every other Martian organism.

      • DukeBG

        False. Bex is going to see The Processor for the first time. If she was rebuilt, she wouldn’t have her spacesuit.
        Her language skills are akin to Mike’s underwater breathing and toaster-on-the-face, but we don’t yet know what source of mod she had. Maybe breathed something in.

        • Alyanna

          Also, if dying & being rebuilt gave you that ability, Kalla would understand Levi too.
          I agree that Bex probably got some sort of mod that helps her. Or maybe it’s an innate ability of hers???

          • DukeBG

            no, she was unable to understand angular fluffyworms before, their interaction with her depicted in the comic was the first she was able to understand them, but not the first time they tried. So something was definitely done to her…

          • CharlesW81

            It’s likely she was altered after she was pulled into the ocean while trying to call Mike back. She was immediately able to understand LEVi after that and seemed surprised by it.

            I wonder if Bex would understand Kalla if she spoke in her native language… Actually I wonder if LEVi would. It’s possible she also taught it her language just as it taught her English.

  • HyruleSymbol

    Levi is trying so hard to say hat he’s glad to meet her it’s too cute!

    Also i love the way Kalla coils back her neck when she gets surprised

    • chyro

      and how she turns her head sideways to get a closer look

    • Bennett

      small reminder: Kallakore talked to Levi back when he was still a giant floating drone and not a tiny lobster. He went off to try to find one of the “processors” and was later found at the bottom of a lake (note: synced with a processor by virtue of touching the water). Then he was “transmuted” (to use the word of one of those ginger-root looking aliens Bex encountered earlier) into mini lobster form.

      • Sheridan

        And notably, at the bottom of a lake but *on top of* a Kallakore corpse.

  • chyro

    I just wanted to say, your artistic and storytelling skills are extraordinary. Looking forward to more!

  • ObservantWolf

    So it was Threvi all along, how interesting! But now we wonder why Kalla is blocked from understanding him, hmm… Fascinating!

    • BigDogLittleCat

      But Bex can understand both of them. And the two guys who kept trying to get finger samples.
      Neither Michael nor Kalla can understand Threvi, to the point that they can’t even recognize he is speaking.
      Is Threvi’s voice so high that only dogs, bats, and Bexes can hear it?

      • Zinc

        Bex can understand Kalla because she is talking in plain English, which she learnt from LEVi Original Flavour. How and why Bex is able to understand Threvi is still a mystery, as you say.

  • PositronicGirl

    Aww, Threvi Kalla reunion! :)

  • Spark

    Now all we need is Fish

    • PositronicGirl

      As soon as somebody gets rid of that elephant in the room.

      • shingworks

        that’s a rude thing to say about kalla

        • Alan

          Besides, shes a cat, because,

          “The cat came back, we thought she was a goner
          But the cat came back; it just couldn’t stay away.”

          Video:
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW9f04Dctz4

          • PositronicGirl

            She does have nine (thousand) lives!

  • DanialArin

    You went through the trouble of writing that text wall, but then covered it up with Rebekah and her quote balloons. Could you please post the text in either the description or the comments? (Unless that’s reserved for Patreon folks…?)

    • shingworks

      It doesn’t need 100% translation I don’t think XD It’s basically Thrip telling Rebekah who Kalla is and the last time he saw her, you can probably see the word “needle-faced fishes” and how he had to walk on the bottom of the passage to reach the shoreline, etc.

      Mostly not transcribing because for aesthetic reasons the sentences aren’t all complete, I shifted words around so they are semi-readable in places.

      • DukeBG

        I have no idea what word and context precedes “kill” though

        • DukeBG

          Ah, “get killed”

      • DukeBG

        > It doesn’t need 100% translation I don’t think

        You know me, though…

        • DukeBG

          For anyone interested in reading what could be deciphered: http://i.imgur.com/PuZGmjE.png

          this is a proof that i got the top row correct:
          http://i.imgur.com/IHuK4kw.png

          • DukeBG

            (now noticed few errors here and there, but not gonna make a new version, not important)

          • corvideye

            Thank you for providing close captioning for the compulsively curious…

          • shingworks

            lol Duke you absolute madman

        • shingworks

          lol, true

  • AGV

    Now I wanna see an emmotional Kalla
    “Oh my gosh, LEVi, I nearly turned you into a canapé”

    • shingworks

      lol, he wasn’t there for that convo, and she doesn’t remember it, so it’s all good~

      • AGV

        Which means that she doesn’t remember her last moments with Mike…
        *sad*

      • AGV

        But hold on a sec, how does the system know that it have to revive something if it died on land?

        • DukeBG

          Maybe Kalla’s blood that Bex had on her when she was dragged into the lake by a pinky ribbony lake friend (after chasing Mike)

          • NorthBayJ

            I think this is also why she can understand most mare internum characters.

          • Solanuma

            I imagine the System gave her the ability as a subtle suggestion to talk it out instead of killing it’s inhabitants all the time

  • Luces

    It’s all very fine, but what happened to Michael? He had just found a resemble of peace, even happiness, when his world was shattered by Bex. Let’s hope he isn’t devastated beyond help!

  • Kat Serapha

    Kallakore tilting her head to get in close and eyeball something is my favourite shit. Wollarian “looking at something” body language is so obvious, it’s delightful.

  • JJ

    Next up: Kalla realising she’s been low key bitching about her best and (until recently) only friend.

  • Saberbeam

    Kallakore: “Dr. LEVistone, I presume?”

  • Ria

    I bet you, Kalla probably has a way is say “!!” vocally

  • Royco Cup-a-Soup

    Okay, so, for the record, each character’s languages:
    Kalla speaks English, and presumably Wollarian.
    Fish speaks only English.
    Bex speaks English and her native language (the name of which escapes me), and as of recently, she somehow percieves ‘arthropodian’ as coherent English.
    Levi spoke English and taught it to Kalla.
    Threvi speaks ‘arthropodian’, but seems to believe he’s speaking English.

    • Royco Cup-a-Soup

      With this in mind, my theory is that the Processor distinguishes between true, independent lifeforms and ‘tool entities’. Levi, being a machine with a mechanical intelligence, was identified as a ‘tool entity’ and therefore was rebuilt with the body of a native martian ‘tool entity’ – thrips are normally cleaning drones, if I recall correctly. As such, his communication uses the Mare Internum’s inter-‘tool entity’ “language”, as do the spindly wormbros from before. Kalla understands the language of her own species and that of humans, but was seemingly unaware that pieces of the Mare communicated with each other using a sound-based system, nor that a human (bex) could interpret that system as English speech.
      So something happened to Bex that now causes her to interpret Mare Internum machine-speak as English. Threvi still understands English, but seems to think he’s speaking it as well, so he clearly has the exact same pretranslation gimmick going on even for his own speech. This would seem to imply that other ‘tool-entities’ posess a similar mechanism. Fish hasn’t been eating, as far as we can tell; maybe when Bex ate one of the other ‘tool-entities’, the endemic communication interpreter was passed on to her?

      • Elliot Schmidt

        Doesn’t she have that translator implant? Maybe it made it a part of her and expanded it’s capabilities to the other organic tools. Maybe Dr Fisher didn’t have one and so doesn’t get a translator node

      • shingworks

        Just a clarification, we don’t know that she’s interpreting it as English necessarily, as she speaks a few languages. But yeah she’s able to directly translate Thrip’s little assclappers as something that makes sense.

    • Bradford

      I was going to do a post like this. What about spider bros? Bex understood them, but Threvi didn’t. Does that mean Threvi can’t understand the same language he’s speaking

  • Horrybull

    It definitely is Kalla.
    I am not so pissed off now that Kalla is alive

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