Episode Description

Pirates of the Coal Sack Chapter 32 by DangerousLines. The Age of Sail and the Old West have some common themes. They romanticize wanderers, especially wandering outlaws, making their fortune in an untamed and uncivilized wilderness. For this arc, we’ll touch on some of that crossover. “Doggies” in cowboy parlance are orphaned cattle. Yippie ki yay!

And so, here we go a-pirating again, this time more by chance than planning. There’s a price to be paid for not planning, and that’s going to be felt for a while.

New Yellowstone is the creation of Dialup Hero, who posted it onSlushe a couple of years ago. We talked about doing a crossover (after he posted a crossover image). The Pirates universe is rather different from his, so it’s probably best to consider this an homage rather than a crossover. Still, if cowgirls with ginormous boobage are your thing, check out the original.

Under Terran law, rights are human rights–aliens by definition have no rights. They have the legal status of animals, pets at best, livestock at worst. For economic reasons, they’re given more autonomy than one would give, say, a herd of buffalo, but in the view of Terran law, they don’t even own their clothes. Rigellians can put a price on anything. So none of our people sees anything wrong with a shipload of non-human slaves; it’s certainly not strange. Slaves are also not unskilled labor; automation is cheaper. Slavery is a way to ensure that the cost of training a worker doesn’t walk out the door to a competitor; the slaveowner gets the full benefit of his investment in his property.

So what does Starbase 9 need with 250 alien shipwrights?

Harding has picked up enough Aenean culture to treat Avar as he expects during the interview. Patronage is the parallel social system that runs alongside the Aenean house structure, providing a well-defined(and very harshly socially enforced) set of obligations that allowsAeneans to have some trust in people they’re not related to by blood. Historically, on desert Alfheim, the first patrons were those who controlled access to reliable water supplies; the sharing of water became symbolic rulership.

Phoenix was named Eihss’dhael, literally “Sunbird,” in Aenean. The eihss’dhael is a mythical bird that carries the souls of the dead to the sun, where both are consumed in elemental fire. The bird is then reborn from its ashes and returns to the land of the living, sometimes bearing messages from the afterlife. All of this was mentioned way back in issue#3.

Captain Ngo’s been drilling Relentless for this moment. He lost Phoenix at Vritraand again at Earth, but this time he was the one with the plan and the initiative. Phoenix is a tough bird, but no ship can stand up to concerted assault without her shields. If he’d been more aggressive, or more confident that he had Phoenix targeted, it could’ve been all over. Harding is kicking himself.

Translations for the Aenean (Rihanna) language are provided by the Imperial Romulan Language Institute.

The P-class destroyer is based on the Reindeer byCitrullux. The Music-class transport is based on the Baker-class model by Brad R. Torgersen.

DangerousLines is the Publisher of this Comic Book Episode.

Click On Any Image To Read The Pirates of the Coal Sack Chapter 32.