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Comic transcript


Iskra: Good Morning!
Iskra: My name is agent Iskra
Iskra: Has General Bahin informed you about our arrival?
Major: Yes, follow me please.
Major: Do keep in mind that you are just guests here.
Iskra: I’m afraid it’s not all that simple, Major. This situation of yours is now on the international level.
Iskra: You are still in command of this base, but from now on, everything concerning contacts with the extraterrestrial organism will be our jurisdiction.
Iskra: And I’ve heard things aren’t going so smoothly?
Major: There was some chasing, the alien girl tried to escape.
Major: But I’ve orchestrated the whole situation...
Major: ...and it helped to break the ice between us and to begin proper cooperation.
Iskra: I...
Iskra: See...


Poll: Page transcripts

This site has the functionality to add transcripts for the comic pages, but I've been neglecting that. But are they even needed currently?

No, I don't need them.
46%
Yes, dialogues only.
28%
Yes, describing everything on the page.
26%

80 people have voted




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Comments (12)

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New
MrZJunior (transfer from Disqus)

Is it just me or does she look like Twilight Sparkle?

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New
Mersharr (transfer from Disqus)

Orchestrated the whole situation? So he let her escape the cell on purpose? Risking the lives of many soldiers?
Interesting.

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Regular
JoB (transfer from Disqus)

... how exactly does an unarmed escapee, with fingers too thick for a human-sized trigger guard (like on the weapons fired at her), not getting into the well-guarded shuttle nor (presumably) wherever else alien weaponry from the crash is kept, pose a risk to "the lives of many soldiers"? I'd rather be worried about (civilian) lives at risk if somebody dangerous did actually escape to where people are intentionally kept in the dark about his very existence ...

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Senior
Darth_Biomech

Have you missed the part where she bent a metal pipe with one hand?

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Regular
JoB (transfer from Disqus)

Not at all. How did that fare against armed (with distance weapons) military again? Delaying their pursuing her for as long as the pursuers' movements (and selection of weapons to use ...) were restricted by the building they were in, that's all.

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New
Mersharr (transfer from Disqus)

She may be quite capable of killing a couple soldiers unarmed.

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Regular
charles81 (transfer from Disqus)

Escape attempts as ice breakers... love it.

The Major just continues to impress me. She roughed him up a bit and threatened his life but he just kept his cool and now sees it as the opening to better communications.

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Regular
Greg C (Silence Echoes) (transfer from Disqus)

"Honestly they're very reasonable, they're in a rough situation much like we are."

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New
Delta-v (transfer from Disqus)

"So you see, Agent Iskra, you are quite unnecessary."

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Regular
Stolen Moment (transfer from Disqus)

Isn't that the "Now I have to kill all of you" phrase?

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Senior
glenn (transfer from Disqus)

Oh no. She must be a highly-trained "Expert" and the Official In Charge.

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Regular
Furinkazan (transfer from Disqus)

That poor agent clearly was not expecting that






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TRIVIA
These trivia bits are generated randomly.
Raharrs are warm-blooded creatures and are accustomed to temperature range a bit warmer than Earth's.
"Dawn" class mothership and "Lake" class tankers are the only spacecraft in the Exploration fleet that can create artificial gravity while not under acceleration.
If a space ship accelerates at the same rate as it would in a free-fall under Earth's gravity (Otherwise known as "1G acceleration"), it can reach Jupiter from Earth in just under 6 days. It would need to flip in the middle of the travel, to start decelerating and enter the planet's orbit.
Insectoids in a lot of ways are the weird ones among the Alliance members. Besides having a completely unpronounceable name of the species, they have dextero amino acid biochemistry, which makes their food and biosphere to be inedible by the rest of the Alliance, and vice versa.
The names of every species of the Alliance (besides Insectoids) are words taken directly from their respective native languages that they use to refer to themselves. They all have same translation:
"a human".
Azinarsi relationship to death is different from the rest of the civilizations of the Alliance: they do not care about it. Death would mean loss of information and experience gathered by that instance of a person's mind, though, and these two things are about the only valuables for an Uploaded mind, so Azinarsi try to avoid it when possible.
A lot of backgrounds and other elements in the comic are actually 3d models. It helps reduce the time each page takes to make.
Raharrs descended from the evolutionary branch that can be described as "apelike cats" by their evolutionary niche. Although initially carnivorous and solitary, they were forced to become omnivorous and form persistent packs during the latest of the rare ice ages of their homeworld, approximately 30 million years ago.
It takes more than a year to cross the Alliance space even with the fastest FTL drive.
Prior to becoming a webcomic, Leaving The Cradle was initially developed as a modification for Source engine, back in 2007. It was vastly different back then, much closer to the usual space opera look and feel, and the plot had nothing in common with the webcomic version, sharing only exactly two characters and nothing else.
Many homeworlds of the respective species are still divided into countries, but freshly established colonies on other planets are almost always monolithic and basically independent, since they sprawled from a single initial outpost, and time lag involved due to interstellar distances making remote management of the colony from a homeworld to be ineffective and frustrating at best.
There's no way to communicate faster than light. If you want to send your message to another solar system, your best bet is to use a courier spaceship. It can take even a month for it to finally reach the destination, but it still beats sending it as a transmission and expecting it to arrive decades or thousands of years later.
So far there hasn't been a single instance of a massive interstellar war. Due to the vastness of space, there's no territorial or economic gain from it. The presence of armed spaceships is still warranted for keeping space travel safe and for peacekeeping or policing missions since unexpected events or rogue states can still happen and might require force as a solution.
The Alliance space stretches for an impressive 16 thousand light years along the longest axis, and contains approximately twelve billion star systems. Despite that, 99.99% of those star systems weren't explored even by an automatic mapping drone yet, and the borders of the Alliance space are defined mostly by the reach of spaceships from the nearest colony or space station.