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Description
Lost? Out of order? Have some valuable background.

About a year ago now, I decided that an old character of mine, Angel the Fox, had no real place with me. I only ever used her for the occasional RP with an anthro character that really liked skydiving; to me, that was her niche, and I wouldn't have had it any other way. The best way I knew to get her off my hands was not to scrap her and say she never existed, but to hand it off to another person; I didn't want what potential she did have to go to waste, as there was bound to be someone who could look at her and say, conclusively, that they could do something for her.

Against all my reservations, I succeeded.

Angel now resides with as a background character for his G4 stories. While not much has been done with her, I still look forward to seeing her take her first tentative parachute jump over the Rupian Federation in earnest. In the meantime, though, I was character-less, which, on paper, should have enabled me to work on such stories as the Hierarch trilogy me and a FanFiction.net author known as Lithos Maitreya have been hammering out these past four years.

In practice, however... I found Freefall.

Freefall, for the non-initiated, is a webcomic set about 700 years in the future, if my conversations with artist Mark Stanley are to be believed. It's an optimistic science fiction work that's not afraid to explore issues like artificial sentience, the rights of the synthetic lifeform, and, yes, even the morality of thieving. It's also hard, in that zero-g is commonplace in space travel as opposed to artificial gravity, and in that 'terraforming' is not the magical process we make it out to be, as it requires many minds and engineers to turn a rock into an Eden for humanity.

Oh, and its main protagonist is a female anthropomorphic wolf living on an entire planet's worth of humans, robots and one space squid.

This did not keep my imagination at bay for long. One of the very first strips I read gave me the impression that the main protagonist, a Bowman's Wolf by the name of Florence Ambrose, was an assembly line product from EcoSystems Unlimited, similar to the synthetics of Alien fame and infamy, leading my mind to ponder the very origins of this species. It didn't take me long to drift back to the 21st Century, and from that an alternate universe was born--and with it, the newest face of Digolgrin.

This second reference sheet, another product of the esteemed (Hartseeker on FA), features Balto Stilson wearing his NASA flight suit as well as some futuristic, presumably 2030s era civilian clothes. He's even got an Apple iWatch! Or Samsung Gear, whichever sounds better to you.

As promised, a formal bio:

Name: Balto Able Stilson, number 029
Age: 18
Species: Bowman's Wolf
Nationality: United States of America
Birthplace: Manchester, Great Britain
Birthday: October 9th, 2015
Birthmother: Starbright, a Golden Retriever whose owner volunteered to have Balto's embryo added to her own litter of puppies
Residence: Medford, Oregon
Siblings: Biological older brother, Buster Danvers, Wolf 028; adoptive younger brother, Sam Stilson
Occupation: Terraforming Engineer, EcoSystems Unlimited

Short bio: Balto is just one of one hundred Bowman's Wolves--an artificial cross between a red wolf (to aid recognition), a human, and a bear--created in 2015 CE by a fast-growing environmental engineering firm known as EcoSystems Unlimited to serve as mankind's partner in space exploration and planetary colonization. While born as ordinary dogs, with birthdates ranging from late 2015 to early 2017, they age about as fast as an average healthy human being--roughly ten times as slowly as a canine normally would--and, thanks to their human DNA, eventually learn to speak cohesively and walk on two legs, just as a human would, even growing just as tall as the average human. However, their canid instincts and inherent flaws, such as colorblindness, carnivoric tendencies, and a desire to chase and kill anything that so much as looks tasty cannot be overwritten, so as to not spark a debate over whether or not EcoSystems is playing God.

Balto is the twenty-ninth official member of this species, living a comfortable life as the family dog and older brother to his human compadre, Sam--he's spent just as much time on four legs as he did on two. This idyllic life is threatened when his adoptive father takes him to a company event that turns out to be a public press conference revealing his species to the world. Now, this doesn't affect him too much; the entire pack, as he and the other Wolves have taken to calling themselves, is not up for sale, as none other than NASA wasted no time buying up the whole lot while it was still a private effort for the purposes of devising a means to terraform Mars, allowing EcoSystems to secure its dream contract.

When the pack is presented to NASA not a month later, Balto, his love interest Jennifer Grey, and his older brother Buster, among others, are chosen to be astronauts, specifically payload specialists, thereby marking the first time that EcoSystems property has been deployed outside the Earth's atmosphere. When presented with the option to go to Mars with Jen as part of Ares 7, the long-awaited first manned landing, Balto is concerned for his family and respectfully declines, instead opting for a place on a Skylab II crew, where he'll at least be able to stay in contact with them, while at the same time demoting himself to part of the back-up crew should something happen to one of the other Wolves, at Jen's insistence. This goes 'tails-down' very quickly when Buster breaks his tail in a training accident and personally requests that Stilson replace him on the flight crew...

Description
Lost? Out of order? Have some valuable background.

About a year ago now, I decided that an old character of mine, Angel the Fox, had no real place with me. I only ever used her for the occasional RP with an anthro character that really liked skydiving; to me, that was her niche, and I wouldn't have had it any other way. The best way I knew to get her off my hands was not to scrap her and say she never existed, but to hand it off to another person; I didn't want what potential she did have to go to waste, as there was bound to be someone who could look at her and say, conclusively, that they could do something for her.

Against all my reservations, I succeeded.

Angel now resides with as a background character for his G4 stories. While not much has been done with her, I still look forward to seeing her take her first tentative parachute jump over the Rupian Federation in earnest. In the meantime, though, I was character-less, which, on paper, should have enabled me to work on such stories as the Hierarch trilogy me and a FanFiction.net author known as Lithos Maitreya have been hammering out these past four years.

In practice, however... I found Freefall.

Freefall, for the non-initiated, is a webcomic set about 700 years in the future, if my conversations with artist Mark Stanley are to be believed. It's an optimistic science fiction work that's not afraid to explore issues like artificial sentience, the rights of the synthetic lifeform, and, yes, even the morality of thieving. It's also hard, in that zero-g is commonplace in space travel as opposed to artificial gravity, and in that 'terraforming' is not the magical process we make it out to be, as it requires many minds and engineers to turn a rock into an Eden for humanity.

Oh, and its main protagonist is a female anthropomorphic wolf living on an entire planet's worth of humans, robots and one space squid.

This did not keep my imagination at bay for long. One of the very first strips I read gave me the impression that the main protagonist, a Bowman's Wolf by the name of Florence Ambrose, was an assembly line product from EcoSystems Unlimited, similar to the synthetics of Alien fame and infamy, leading my mind to ponder the very origins of this species. It didn't take me long to drift back to the 21st Century, and from that an alternate universe was born--and with it, the newest face of Digolgrin.

This second reference sheet, another product of the esteemed (Hartseeker on FA), features Balto Stilson wearing his NASA flight suit as well as some futuristic, presumably 2030s era civilian clothes. He's even got an Apple iWatch! Or Samsung Gear, whichever sounds better to you.

As promised, a formal bio:

Name: Balto Able Stilson, number 029
Age: 18
Species: Bowman's Wolf
Nationality: United States of America
Birthplace: Manchester, Great Britain
Birthday: October 9th, 2015
Birthmother: Starbright, a Golden Retriever whose owner volunteered to have Balto's embryo added to her own litter of puppies
Residence: Medford, Oregon
Siblings: Biological older brother, Buster Danvers, Wolf 028; adoptive younger brother, Sam Stilson
Occupation: Terraforming Engineer, EcoSystems Unlimited

Short bio: Balto is just one of one hundred Bowman's Wolves--an artificial cross between a red wolf (to aid recognition), a human, and a bear--created in 2015 CE by a fast-growing environmental engineering firm known as EcoSystems Unlimited to serve as mankind's partner in space exploration and planetary colonization. While born as ordinary dogs, with birthdates ranging from late 2015 to early 2017, they age about as fast as an average healthy human being--roughly ten times as slowly as a canine normally would--and, thanks to their human DNA, eventually learn to speak cohesively and walk on two legs, just as a human would, even growing just as tall as the average human. However, their canid instincts and inherent flaws, such as colorblindness, carnivoric tendencies, and a desire to chase and kill anything that so much as looks tasty cannot be overwritten, so as to not spark a debate over whether or not EcoSystems is playing God.

Balto is the twenty-ninth official member of this species, living a comfortable life as the family dog and older brother to his human compadre, Sam--he's spent just as much time on four legs as he did on two. This idyllic life is threatened when his adoptive father takes him to a company event that turns out to be a public press conference revealing his species to the world. Now, this doesn't affect him too much; the entire pack, as he and the other Wolves have taken to calling themselves, is not up for sale, as none other than NASA wasted no time buying up the whole lot while it was still a private effort for the purposes of devising a means to terraform Mars, allowing EcoSystems to secure its dream contract.

When the pack is presented to NASA not a month later, Balto, his love interest Jennifer Grey, and his older brother Buster, among others, are chosen to be astronauts, specifically payload specialists, thereby marking the first time that EcoSystems property has been deployed outside the Earth's atmosphere. When presented with the option to go to Mars with Jen as part of Ares 7, the long-awaited first manned landing, Balto is concerned for his family and respectfully declines, instead opting for a place on a Skylab II crew, where he'll at least be able to stay in contact with them, while at the same time demoting himself to part of the back-up crew should something happen to one of the other Wolves, at Jen's insistence. This goes 'tails-down' very quickly when Buster breaks his tail in a training accident and personally requests that Stilson replace him on the flight crew...