Fear of Flying is narrative webcomic (or maybe just an illustrated short story) about dragons, ghosts, monsters, and anxiety.
There are people who can turn into dragons, ghosts that make you go crazy, shady government mad science, hidden underground magical communities, queer and trans characters, racially diverse characters, social justice overtones, and discussions about mental health, identity, and trauma.
There may be some blood, but not gore, and the only sexual content might be some innuendo in conversations. This comic will try to maintain a roughly PG13 rating. There is definitely swearing, a little bit of injury and body horror, and some explicit songs linked in some pages.
Status: Inactive, paused
See the Prologue images below. Currently planning on the new format and style of this project. The previous webcomic plugin I was using is no longer available and I’m re-considering exactly how I want to tell this story – whether that means it’s more like a novel with illustrations, Ava’s Demon style single image-per-page, or something else entirely.
Prologue
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- Wouldn’t it be great if we all knew what the hell we were supposed to be doing? “Make your own path!” they say. “Go out there and find out who you really are!” Yeah, that sounds really great and motivational. So what, does that mean that ‘who I really am’ is a depressed trainwreck with no friends?
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- I wish someone would just tell me what I was meant to be. At least then I could be disappointed in myself for failing to meet that goal. As it stands I don’t even know what the goal is, so I don’t know how I feel about my lack of progress towards it. I don’t want to be in charge of my own destiny. I make terrible decisions.
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- Maybe I’ve already found my purpose and I don’t know it. Or more likely, it’s still out there waiting for me and I’m just too stupid to find it.
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- Fear of Flying Prologue – Pearls Before Swine
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- I take this path home from work every day. It’s usually pretty quiet. There’s always that fun risk of being randomly mugged but at least I don’t have to steer through crowds of people. Hey, at least if I get mugged, I’ll have a good excuse to stay home from work for a few days. Did you know Cincinnati was halfway through building a subway system in the 20’s, but it was abandoned? Really neat and creepy. I pass by one of the barricaded entrances on this walk. It’s just these big metal doors slapped over a cracked concrete tunnel. They’re always covered in fun graffiti. Every now and then the lock gets busted by someone or it rusts enough for them to replace it. I’ve always been curious and jealous of all those urban explorers on YouTube, but also way too afraid of ending up spit-roasted by a lost race of underground subway-dwelling cannibals. I, uh… I watch a lot of bad horror movies. Well, today, that big metal door was open.
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- There was an intense, cold, white light coming from something small on the ground, just inside the door. As craned my neck to look at it, my music started skipping and breaking up. The source of the light was a ball – a crystalline sphere the size of a nectarine, swirling with marbled pearly colors. Light radiated off from it in pulses, like a heartbeat. I mean, come on, I had to touch it.
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- So actually, I gave it a little kick first. Just a gentle shove with the inside of my foot. It was lighter than it looked and rolled easily, making a sort of hollow ceramic scraping against the nasty concrete floor of the tunnel. The light from it pulsed brighter as it rolled, then dimmed back down a bit. It gave me the weird sense that the ball was upset or surprised at being moved. I hovered my open palm over it. I wasn’t sure if I was expecting it be hot, or maybe electrical, or even radioactive. Can you feel radiation? I don’t think so. Either way, the air around it didn’t feel like anything, except maybe a little bit heavy, like the pressure in the air before a thunderstorm.
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- …!
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- I was suddenly a different, bigger, stranger version of myself, and both versions of me somehow existed in the same place at the same time, like a double-exposure –
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- – that was weird. My hand felt a little bit tingly, but that’s all. Also, the weird glowing ball thing was completely gone without a trace. So now I was just a weird kid standing in an off-limits area staring at my hand and possibly having vivid hallucinations.It was definitely time to move along.What was that, though? Could that have been a ghost or one of the other crazy things you might see in abandoned places? I’d never had any kind of aether sickness before. I felt really violated at the idea. Despite my social awkwardness and anxiety, I’d always thought myself to be… well, better than that. Getting your head screwed with by ghosts was for people with really poor self-care, or, I dunno, addictions and such.I could only hope that this would never come up again and I’d forget all about it soon.
Characters
Kay Delaney
"Thorn"
The Protagonist.
Kay is a 20-something transgender man who recently moved to Cincinnati in hopes of pursuing independence from his overbearing single father. He has very little sense of purpose or intrinsic motivation and constantly looks to others to tell him what to do.
When he encounters an object that gives him the very difficult-to-control ability to transform into a dragon form, he will be forced to find his own voice and make his own choices.
Matheus Alves
"Greave"
The Mentor.
A salty, older Brazilian dragon-shifter who essentially ignores his human form.
Dion Martineau
"Solar Flare"
The Rival.
A strong-willed, motivated dragon-shifter. His parents had hoped for a girl and wanted to name him after Celine Dion.
A gifted flyer, quick learner, and socially charming, he is much more heroic and protagonist-like than our protagonist Kay.
"The Red Ruin"
A “Feral” dragon – the result of a dragon-shifter whose Pearl has shattered. This monster lives deep in the forest, watched carefully by Matheus and his clan. No one knows if a Feral dragon can be killed, or returned to normal – but we do know that once a Pearl has broken, it permanently reduces the number of dragons that can exist.
The World
Aether
Pronounced “ay-thur”, this mysterious force began to affect the Earth in the year 1997, mostly in North America . It was not confirmed to the public until 2003, and the United States Department of Aether Control was formed to study and prevent it from influencing people.
Aether is currently believed to be either a massless particle or non-particle energy form, and has altered the course of physics significantly. Aether is understood to “leak” into our reality from a different universe. In significant volumes, Aether can temporarily alter our reality.
There is no direct way to measure the Aether density in any given area, but modern Aethometers use a complex combination of factors to get a relatively accurate estimate.
Aether accumulates rapidly in abandoned manmade places and manifests as amorphous blotches of darkness that can form shapes. These shapes are typically based on the collective memories of the place it’s in, and those of the observer(s). Usually this means a dark, shadowy, humanoid shape, called an Aether Ghost. Aether Ghosts act as if they have a will of their own. They do not. Don’t worry about it.
Aether can be absorbed into the human body, causing Aether Sickness, which typically results in hallucinations, sensitivity to light, and activation/exacerbation of mental illness, especially paranoia.
Also, it definitely doesn’t turn some people into monsters that the government is hiding from the public.
Dragons
“Dragons” are humans who have gained the ability to shapeshift between their original human form and a bipedal dragon form at will. This dragon form represents a blended reality between the dimension that Aether exists in (where a version of that person exists as a full, quadrupedal dragon), and our own current reality.
Dragons passively absorb Aether and store the energy within this Pearl, and can then choose to regurgitate it as Aetherfire, a bright plasma with unique properties per individual. Dragons can also consume the Aether that has solidified into an Aether Ghost, but this usually requires physically weakening the entity and breaking it apart.
The Pearl
Dragons possess a unique, artificial organ called a “Pearl” that gives them control over the Aether in their bodies. The Pearl is also called a Dragonstone, Second Heart, or Soul Orb.
A dragon’s Pearl is a permanent part of their biology and can be detected even if they are in human form. It can be seen as a cold-white light from within the dragon’s solar plexus. The Pearl glows brighter the more Aether is currently stored/absorbed into it.
Attempting to remove a dragon’s Pearl will always result in it breaking. If a dragon’s Pearl breaks, it unleashes a massive overload of Aether into their body. If a dragon dies of physical injury, their Pearl will break. Dragons cannot die of old age or disease. Very few have ever seen an intact Pearl outside of a dragon’s body.
Most dragons do not remember how they went from normal humans to dragon-shifters. They do not recall receiving, manifesting, or otherwise encountering their Pearl.
Dragons believe they are mystically granted their Pearls as a sort of “Chosen Protector” status, warriors who “turn the dark into light”. We do not know where Pearls came from, but we do know that there are a limited number of them, and no new Pearls are being made.
Nicknames
To hide their human identities, dragons use a nickname while in dragon form. These nicknames are usually existing nouns like objects or natural phenomena.
