Sky’s been there, too.
↓ Transcript
Jaz
But, wasn’t her skin green before?
Sky
She can be just about any color she wants. So can shipsuits. That’s how I could change my uniform and make my arm look more realistic when I want.
Jaz
And you’re not worried about getting your arm wet?
Sky
I have extras. At worst, a short hurts like hell before the cutouts kick in. It’s not like electronics are my whole being. Rusty’s being pretty brave by coming in here. But she’s always sought out company for as long as I’ve known her. Even before we realized she was a person.
Jaz
That was when you lost your arm in the first place? May I ask how?
Sky
I was crawling around the guts of the enemy module when I came across an old auto-defence turret. I don’t think anyone even knew it was there. Fortunately it’s targeting must have been a little off, but it still shredded my arm. There was nothing left of my hand. I’d have bled to death on the spot if my shipsuit hadn’t gone into stabilization mode.
I understand you’re no slouch in the hero department, either.
Jaz
Am I?
I really don’t remember anything after the first explosion.
Sky
(whispers) Listen. I was a real mess, physically and emotionally, after losing my arm. I tried to hide it, too. But I was only fooling myself. You can’t get over an obstacle if you don’t face it.
I’ll be here for you. And I know I’m not alone in that.
Jaz
Yeah. I know.
But, wasn’t her skin green before?
Sky
She can be just about any color she wants. So can shipsuits. That’s how I could change my uniform and make my arm look more realistic when I want.
Jaz
And you’re not worried about getting your arm wet?
Sky
I have extras. At worst, a short hurts like hell before the cutouts kick in. It’s not like electronics are my whole being. Rusty’s being pretty brave by coming in here. But she’s always sought out company for as long as I’ve known her. Even before we realized she was a person.
Jaz
That was when you lost your arm in the first place? May I ask how?
Sky
I was crawling around the guts of the enemy module when I came across an old auto-defence turret. I don’t think anyone even knew it was there. Fortunately it’s targeting must have been a little off, but it still shredded my arm. There was nothing left of my hand. I’d have bled to death on the spot if my shipsuit hadn’t gone into stabilization mode.
I understand you’re no slouch in the hero department, either.
Jaz
Am I?
I really don’t remember anything after the first explosion.
Sky
(whispers) Listen. I was a real mess, physically and emotionally, after losing my arm. I tried to hide it, too. But I was only fooling myself. You can’t get over an obstacle if you don’t face it.
I’ll be here for you. And I know I’m not alone in that.
Jaz
Yeah. I know.
My leg stayed attached in the wreck, barely, but here are days when I would gladly trade it for one like Sky’s arm. For one thing that leg used to be 6 mm longer than the other leg, now it’s 18mm shorter. That’s almost an inch missing from the femur that nobody can account for. I will leave it to the reader’s imagination does to the alignment of your spine, and the resulting muscle pain. Let’s just say if I had the budget I would be getting a massage every day like I did when I had a massage therapist GF. She even commented I should not have that much tension in my back 24 hours after a deep tissue massage.
Opus I have nerve dmg from an accident. Medication just makes me out of it and dislike the physical dependence. It causes extreme muscle tension which my whole body has an issue with due to childhood abuse. I’m almost always in fight or flight so it jacked me quite a bit.
Anyway I can’t do massage due the abuse. Just makes the tension worse. I take Kratom for it and it helps me a ton and even helps my PTSD. It’s a member of the coffee family. More information can be found at the American Kratom Association website including Dr. Jack Henningfields factor analysis.
Have a good one.
Never lost a limb or broken a bone (unless you count a broken tooth) but I did lose to gravity and the unknown one day. It was the day before winter break was going to start when I was still in school. Exactly seven days before Christmas.
I needed to get home faster that day for something, hell if I remember what it was, and we didn’t have school transportation in our area so we took public buses. I brought my bike with me and chained it up outside so I wouldn’t need to wait for the bus. Sometimes it deviated from the after school route depending on the driver which made us completely miss the bus. It had been raining all day and the bike rack was not covered at all so my bike was soaked by the end of the day. Wiped off my hand brakes, brake pads, wheel rims, handlebars seat, double wiped the brake pads and rims again then started my way down the hill. Our school was perched in the middle of a tall hill and we had naught for bike lanes with poorly maintained sidewalks. I started down fine, but once the real decent began I quickly realized I was in trouble. My brakes still had a little too much moisture on them and more was flipping up off the pavement to my brakes and rims. Zero braking power, dodging car fenders in driveways, trash bins, and mailboxes was only helping me to gain speed. A speed meter on the hill clocked me at going 34 when I passed and when I looked back it had rose to 36. Bottom of the hill was a 4-way intersection with school and afterwork traffic. I would hit that in 45 seconds to a minute at my speed. Drainage ditches were out. They had scrap metal, broken glass, and sharp rocks in them. I’d hit the opposite end too fast and catapult. After just having gone down a sidewalk ramp and made my way to the next I was out of time. I was going to fast to make it around the curve of the walkway after the ramp. Hit a tree, or go into a yard?
I popped a wheelie at the edge of the sidewalk where a garden was lower, thinking I would dismount off the back and make it safe with a bruised bum… but as fate would have it there were solidly placed rocks hidden under the grass at the edge. My back wheel hit first, front wheel axe handled down from the abrupt full-stop and bounced. A mid air cartwheel ensued and I fell off my bike. As I impacted the ground, I thought I dodged a wood dowel sticking up from the grass… I was wrong. Bike landed 6 feet away. I picked myself up bleeding and unaware of the actual damage. My bike was unusable, as one wheel was doing an impression of a taco shell.
I knew I was hurt from the blood, but it didn’t really kick in. I picked my bike up and began walking home.
An instructional assistant from the C.L.C. who drove the same route passed me smiling and waving, then slammed on his brakes. He thought I was eating one of the school pizzas… Piling my bike into his tiny car, and me in the front we hit the gas station at the bottom of the hill for some napkins and he took me to my doctors office a few miles away. I walked in on my own, battered and bleeding. They thought I’d been hit by a car and when they called my mother that’s what they told her. My doctor didn’t trust his surgical skills or anyone’s in the office and we were sent to the local hospital. My mother and brother met us there and the teacher made his way home after.
My mother was eating a lunchable next to me and my brother… was so shocked by the blood and the atmosphere of the hospital, he walked out of the room. Moments later: “Mom, why is laying on the floor?” He had fainted.
A crying infant on one end of the room and an elderly woman on the other end singing to calm the baby down, my plastic surgeon arrived, took some pix and started sewing my face back together.
200+ stitches inside and outside my mouth, under my tongue, across a small section of my lip. My bottom lip was hanging by a thin thread of skin, nearly ripped completely from my face. A chipped tooth, some bruises but nothing else really wrong.
I will never forget his parting words as he finished: “If you can survive something like this, you may just survive about anything.”
Late into the evening I finally made it home. Reasons for making it there faster that wet afternoon completely forgotten.
If I hadn’t been wearing a helmet, it’s highly likely they would be scraping me up into a body bag.
Ouch! (Again?)
But it could mean a time for the completion of inner healing.
I honestly love how nuanced the writing of characters can be in this comic.
Sometime it needs to be said. [Thanks Sky.]
It would appear that I was both right and wrong about Rusty’s shipsuit. She is wearing the same shipsuit as in the episode that introduced us to Stormy, i.e. none. Her gynoid epidermis is as configurable as a shipsuit for color and so on. I should think a combination of the technologies, if possible, would improve her flexibility. Or maybe her epidermis is more powerful.
Is Jaz still in denial? Or does she truly not remember what happened?
It is not uncommon for there to be amnesia around a traumatic event, especially when there has been head trauma. I would say it is likely that she was not trapped by the first explosion, and responded to the need to help others and got caught in a collapsing building.
After my wreck I gave my (wrong) address and phone number and told two jokes before regaining consciousness the second time halfway through the third joke. It’s amazing how much you can do without your brain fully engaged. BTW the third joke was “did anyone get the number of that truck? It’s too late at night to be a bus”
Ooo, finally, a little more detail to hat happened all those years ago (meant with Skyclad, Jaz’ story is still to come)
Wait, it was an auto-defense turret? Thought Batshit knew Lil Sky was crawling through the vents and purposely targeted her! Or was Batshit just aware of what happened after the turret fired?
[Guesticus]:
We know what “LB” said at-the-time, but it’s uncertain whether this was the truth, or an attempt at misdirection. My ‘take’, back then, was that a mutilated Sky was more useful to “LB” than a dead Sky, for the purpose of putting pressure on Ace, so she chose to be less lethal.
Nah, fairly sure Batshit believed Lil Sky to have been killed, not just injured
This information simply shifts it from being a deliberate targeted attack to an accidental automatic incident