1 {scene: the Legacy is landing on Rubilith. A large city can be seen through the forward ports}
1 Paris: Rubilith is highly tectonically active.
2 Paris: To make a stable building platform they use giant motion-damping rollers, which rest on the unstable bedrock beneath.
3 Iki Piki: You mean...
4 Paris: Yes. They built this city on rock and roll.

The city image in the background may actually look familiar to some of you.

It's a photo of New York City, from Wikimedia Commons, taken by Paulo Barcellos Jr. and released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licence. Which means this strip is also licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike, removing my usual "Non-Commercial" clause. (That's right, you can print copies of this strip and sell them for money - good luck! - but not any of my other strips.)

Check out the full sized version. It's a very cool photo. It won second prize in the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year for 2007.

It's meant to represent an alien city on the planet Rubilith, of course.

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2024-08-04 Rerun commentary: The inhabitants of Rubilith use the fact that their cities are built on platforms on giant motion-damping rollers to actually move their cities around the planet throughout the year, to seek out better climate as the seasons change.

Some locals protested against this wholesale relocation of entire cities as a massive waste of resources. They built an environmental hippie commune, based on the principles of environmentalism and free love, directly in the path of one of the giant moving cities. But the administrators of two cities were determined to stick to their plan of moving their cities to a warmer location for the winter, and barrelled right over the commune, killing all of the protesters who were holding a peaceful love-in at the time.

Unrepentant, the administrators of the two cities declared: "If this world runs out of lovers, we'll still have each other, nothing's gonna stop us now."