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Happy summer, all! Mezzaverse Beta will be back with the continuation of Chapter Two in September. I know I originally said August, but life caught up with me for a while and I’m a little out of sync. Still on track, but out of sync. Take the time to catch up on past strips, or get outside and enjoy reality. – Cheers, Brad
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the blog-like rant...[From the deep, dark files of Whereabouts We Wander.] I’d be the first to admit that we hail from the middle of nowhere. A few hundred bugs living away their little lives tucked at the furthest edge of anything remotely important. The Valley is all the but the last stop of a handful of prospectors headed into the endless wilderness oustward of our small hive. And when those same prospectors step into that wilderness rarely do we see them pass back our way. Lost forever or benefactors of a better life beyond, who can say. But few come back. Bugs in nearby Dimmnaut will tell tales of the lands beyond, but those tales are often little more than vague rumours magnified into grandeur beyond their true worth. And Quin has always discouraged mixing with those kinds of bugs, anyhow. I once made the trek sudward with Paps to Swtichaven. He had needed some very particular supplies — the exact details of which escape me at the moment — and none of the traveling merchants who occasioned the Valley stocked for his specific needs. On foot we walked for nearly ten days before we arrived in that hive, a bustling place with thousands of bugs and an entire street of shops and vendors selling more kinds of wares than I’d ever imagined. We stayed for three nights in a two-story hex run by a family of bees and overlooking the nearby conduit before we began our travels back home. Stan hadn’t led us much further here than I’d been on that trip. A few days of walking along the edges of the wilds until his announcement that we would be tapping the wires and seeking our fortunes — answers, goals, artifacts — within a short walk into the wilderness. You know the rest. - Telo [From the deep, dark files of Tales to Be Elaborated Later.] I want to tell you a bit about the Valley. Home. Grim and I didn’t leave because we HAD to leave. We left for the same reason most folks leave home: to escape the ever-present pull of tradition that digs us into the same place as much as any weight around our feet (or in Grim’s case, foot) might do the same. You understand. There were expectations. Plans made for us before we were old enough to plan at all. And I wasn’t ever willing to settle for that. Who could be, really? After all, what is certainty in life but the understanding that fate herself doesn’t care to ask for your opinion on the subject. And maybe it was never so cut-and-dry for the likes of Grim, who could have used that certainty so much guaranteed to me, but then so what? His sense was ultimately the same as mine: get out — at least long enough to loose a few fingers from the uncaring grip of fate. We wandered for a while, our destination ultimately the collective, not-so-much-colony-as-hive collective we knew as Dimmnaut (where I was certain we could hire SOMEbody to lead us SOMEwhere interesting). Of course, on the way, it was tough not to fall into those old habits: patching up broken conduits, mending leaky caps and and restringing bits of loose and new-growth wires not yet discovered by whoever was tending it locally. It was so simple, but it seemed so right. Out there on the open trail, and far from the reach of Paps and the reproaching stare of Quin and her drones. Funny, I didn’t even know what I was looking for. Answers, I suppose: whatever that meant. - Telo |
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