When a robot lady is dragged outside of reality by her ex-boyfriend, she’s got to pull herself back together across four parallel worlds… before a hive-mind can take over the entire planet!
Decrypting Rita is a PG-13 science fiction comic by Egypt Urnash, produced almost entirely in Adobe Illustrator. Update frequency is currently “attempt to post two pages a week, don’t stress when life makes that impossible”.
This comic is kept ad-free during its creation by the generous donations of my wonderful fans. If you don’t feel like giving me money but want to support the comic, consider telling your friends about it – word of mouth is the best promotion!
The Characters.
Rita
A woman of few words. She prefers to let her incredibly graceful chassis speak for her; life is a dance, and she has the choreography backed up to the cloud.
Rita
A woman of the here and now. She used to be a dancer. Now she’s just drifting in a smoky cloud. Improvising, even.
Rita
A dragon, pretending to be something like a human, right down to the name. She’s got two elves in her bed and a modest hoard.
Rita
A Hat Lady under her last Hat, taking a journey to the source of all her world’s magic. A notorious flibbertigibbit.
Barrett
He doesn’t seem to be a very nice guy. He’s pretty busy heading the Sunrise Foundation but that’s really no excuse. If he was a furry, his fursona would totally be a squid.
Barrett
He’s kind of a jerk sometimes but Rita seems to like him a lot. He’s got some baggage he’s carrying around. If he was a furry, his fursona would totally be an octopus.
Barrett
He’s a snarky dark elf who worships a spider goddess. If he was a furry, his fursona would totally be a tentacled horror from beyond the stars.
Barrett
He’s the despotic ruler of a small, slightly-psychotic skyland. If he was a furry, his fursona would totally be an octopus-bunny hybrid.
Carol
Netrunner extrordinaire, the Theora Jones to Rita’s Edison Carter. And maybe more, if she has her way. She doesn’t know everything, but she sure knows where to go to find it out.
Carol
[ NULL POINTER ]
Carol
A cleric of an unknown deity, who seems to know Rita’s True Name. Her variation of “Bigby’s Unmentionable Fist” is bit of a legend amongst her sect.
Carol
[ ?CORRUPT POINTER ]
Tom
The best terrible ex Rita has ever had. A speed demon and a frequent respawner, he lives and dies for the thrill. Co-discoverer of the DeMoyle-Kirteen effect.
Tom
He has good hookups and throws fun parties, but his sysadmin day job is eating him alive. Nobody’s ever seen him entirely sober on his own time in years.
Tom
A foppish elfin archer who’s seen more than a few battles. His overconfidence is matched only by his luck… and his capacity for elderberry wine.
Tom
A dandified bard whose instrument of choice is an electric guitar and weaponized Frippatronics. He’s all grins and manic energy, as long as those little octagons hold out.
Kim
l337 hacker, with a very finely pruned streak of megalomania and a plan to remake the world. Barrett is her co-conspirator and her “It’s Complicated”.
Kim
She stared the Matrix delusion down one too many times and decided to find out what’s after GAME OVER.
Kim
A high elf with a taste for the monstrous. If you met her in a club in this world you might call her a “perkygoth”.
Kim
A lava-lamp boy of mysterious origin and uncertain agenda. His variation of “R=gby’s Uprai*%ª•µ ΩfG
[ ### DATA CORRUPTED ]
Gary
[ NULL POINTER ]
Gary
Art director at a casual game studio. Like his boyfriend Tom, his job is kind of eating him alive. He’s been saying he’ll “quit and follow his own muse after one last game here” for the last three years.
Gary
A fifth-level fighter who’s definitely gotten the hang of this “adventurer” thing. Eminently sensible, except for the part where he’s been teaming up with Tom and Carol for the past three years.
Gary
A Hat Lord who has forgotten more about unarmed combat than you will ever know. Laconic and wry, he could kill you with his eyebrows alone but he’d rather argue you into submission.
The Panopticon
???FILE NOT FOUND
Setting
One hundred and twenty minutes into the future – humanity’s mechanical children are largely accepted as full members of the society; the asteroid belt is a thriving frontier.
Setting
The here and now. Well, the here and now if you live in an affluent city in the West Coast of the United States of America in the teen years of the twenty-first century.
Setting
GreyhawkThe Forgotten RealmsYour teenage brother’s AD&D campaign, after he took that PoliSci class and learnt about the plight of the oppressed native monsters.Setting
The Skylands, a swirl of rocky islands orbiting the head of a Sleeping Goddess. A dizzy dream of Mary Poppins as Blackbeard.
Glossary.
- Beep:
- A contraction of “Biological Person”. A human who is inhabiting a mostly-biological body.
- DeMoyle-Kirteen Effect:
- An as-yet-poorly-understood side effect of gongoozling at precisely the right distance from a gravity well; it seems to link one’s mind with analogs in parallel realities.
- Espie:
- A contraction of “Software Person”. A human who is inhabiting a machine body.
- Gongoozler:
- One of several competing interplanetary-scale hyperdrives. Even before the discovery of the DeMoyle-Kirteen effect, gongoozling was generally considered to make you a little crazy. It’s also the fastest, of course.
- Hat Ladies/Men:
- A semi-immortal school of wizards. Prone to whimsey, foppishness, and distraction, they are able to return from the brink of death several times over their extended lifespans with new bodies and new Hats. yes they are totally my fanfic gallifreyans shut up
- Hat:
- Not just an ordinary hat, a Hat is a Hat Person’s pseudo-familiar. It channels their powers, and may be a receptacle for their soul. Details are few as they tend to eat investigators they’re not bonded with, and the Hat People just giggle and change the subject when pressed for details.
- Hive mind:
- What you get when you cross-link multiple intelligences. Currently rare; synchronizing thoughts across brains is much more an art than a science, and whatever passes for a local government tends to put a stop to them once they go public.
- Sunrise Foundation:
- An organization dedicated to force-assimilating the entire Earth into one hive-mind.
- Vespuline Mining Concern:
- An artist’s colony deep in the Belt. Rita and Tom both used to be members. Now a very flighty hive mind.
Frequently Asked Questions.
What OS is Rita running?
A third-generation descendent of Urbit. The particular revision she’s implemented on top of is the tenth major release, Flippant Jamicenis. (2024 note: This joke was funnier before Urbit’s creator came out as a total right-wing lunatic.)
The Artist.
Egypt Urnash lives in Seattle, where she draws comics. She was born in New Orleans in 1971, and spent the later half of her twenties in the Hollywood animation industry. She refuses to comment on how many of the Ritas are Mary Sues.
Safety tip: Rita is a highly modified cyborg/AI/upload with tons of training and an onboard system that plots out spectacularly death-defying routes for her; you are not! Don’t try any of this at home, kids.