Web Hosting by Netfirms | Free Domain Names by Netfirms

Background	Archives	Links	Contact	Cast	Home

The background story

A long, long, long, long, long time ago... there was this little blue planet. It's inhabitants went from living in trees to living in cardboard boxes in the doorway of buildings in only a few thousand years, a new galactic record. While some were doing this, others were busily inventing all sorts of useful devices, such as automatic pet food dispensers and clip on covers for mobile phones. When they went home from work after doing this all day, these ones generally tried not to trip over the other ones sleeping in cardboard boxes. Other inventor types spent their time meddling with things that had already been invented, instead of inventing completely new things. One thing they meddled with was the DNA of other creatures living on the blue planet. One of the results of this was a wider selection of inhabitants, resulting in more people needing homes, and even more people forced to live in cardboard boxes because there weren't enough buildings. It is suspected by some that this was all a cunning plan by the marketing team for the people who made cardboard boxes. This is unlikely to be true however - no marketting team has ever come up with a plan that could remotely be called cunning, or even coherent. Some time after they had tweaked the genetics of a whole lot of other creatures, the inhabitants of the blue planet went back into space. They'd been there before, but gave it up for a while because of the expense, and also because anyone trying to sleep in a cardboard box outside the front door of a space station was in for a really rough night. When they went back this time, they took a lot of the newly enhanced creatures with them, because some of the critters had really useful skills. Some of them ended up being so much better than their developers at certain things that they effectively took over running those things. For quite a while things ran very efficiently, and very few people had to sleep in cardboard boxes on the blue planet any more. Then, one of these critters, from a species with a natural talent for thinking in four dimensions, bending time and space, and appearing whenever someone opened the refrigerator door, invented something new. It was a device which automatically detected when a refrigerator door was being opened and moved it's user there instantly. This was to save this breed of critters the effort of having to get up and walk over from the warm sunny corner they had been sleeping in. It was quickly realised that this device had far greater potential. It was quickly redeveloped into something for moving larger masses from one place to another. Originally the plan was to move the refrigerator to the cat, but several accidents with large domestic appliances appearing in places only a cat could fit in led to this version being recalled. In a desperate effort to avoid financial loss, the developers marketed it as a spacedrive instead. It was called the Kittron Transitory Lightspeed Transmission Reactor (or KiTy-LTR for short). Surprisingly, even with such a lame name it sold well, and many species from the blue planet went off to the stars. As had happened before, the critters taken into space during this exodus often proved better at coping than their creators had been, though because they were designed to be smart rather than being forced to learn how to be smart in a hit and miss fashion by evolution, they were careful about how they showed it. Eventually, they did what most children do with their parents. They helped them retire somewhere comfortable where they wouldn't hurt themselves and paid them regular visits to check they were still OK. Of course, some of their creators were still dynamic and willing to grab the universe by the throat. Strangely, many of these had ancestors who'd previously had to live in cardboard boxes. It's possible that this had enforced an extra level of evolutionary pressure on them, resulting in more "get up and go" (in the sense that their ancestors had been told to "get up and go" on many occasions by the inhabitants of the houses whose doorways they slept in). Some of these people went along with their creations, under the mistaken impression that they were still in charge. The critters carried on a long tradition of letting them believe this, having read human history and understood what humans do to anyone they suddenly realise might be in some way better than they are. Besides, even though the critters now actually ran the armed forces, they didn't want to have to use them on their creators, of whom they were quite fond. So, our story begins when one of these dynamic, "get up and go" humans actually "got up and went". In this case, he wanted to see the universe. You know how it goes - you plan a trip to somewhere that looks nice in the brochure, but when you get there it turns out the hotel is half built and the beach is a two mile walk away up a dirt road.

First strip | Latest strip

© Stu Driver