Hey look, it's an actual confirmation of Metacarpolis' location!

I HAVE A LOT OF THINGS TO TALK ABOUT ON THIS POST!  Mostly research things, so feel free to skip to the bottom if you're like Becca and hate the past.

I had to refresh myself on a little research to try and figure out who specifically would've been living in this area in this time period, which would've been sometime just around the end of the 16th century if we're talking Roanoke people.  I had mistakenly thought that it would've either been Karankawa or Caddo territory, but it seems that the Caddoan territory started a bit further east and the Karankawas were more coastal, so they would've been in the southwestern area around the Bay of Houston down to the Corpus Christi area but not really in the main Greater Houston area.  Due to the European settlement history in this area--in which Spanish settlers came quite early but did not see extensive settlement attempts until the early 1800s--accounts are quite hazy, and by the time more written accounts (aside from the accounts of early conquistadors captured by native peoples) were kept, most of these people had suffered from nearly complete population decimation due to disease and their original social structures had basically dissolved by the late 18th century.  

The main group found in this area and stretching east along the gulf coast into Louisiana were the Atakapans (side note: the "Atakapa" name, like many tribe names, was taken from the language of a competing tribe, in this case the Choctaw--which are one of the two tribes I have ancestry from, so by living in the Houston area I am a DOUBLE COLONIST). More specifically, the Akokisa subset of this tribe claimed a territory that pretty closely matches the current area recognized as the Greater Houston area.  Like I said, accounts of the original Atakapa and Akokisa cultures are very limited, and they were ethnically distinct from the more well-documented Karankawas, Choctaws, and Karankawans that surrounded them, so it's hard to reconstruct anything very faithful.  I did my best but also wasn't very specific, but my purpose was to depict the native people here as Akokisans.

Given this more intensive contact between Europeans and Native Americans in this area in my stupid alternative history, I like to think the Hispanic population of Metacarpolis is largely native to the area and representative of intermarriage of the Akokisans and European settlers, rather than the Akokisans suffering cultural annihilation over the course of two centuries due to a horrifying epidemic of infectious disease.  But in reality, it's hard to convey how total the decimation of the native cultures of this area was.  In the south, there are quite a lot of white people that have some small percentage of Native American ancestry, but I've found that most of that ancestry is derived from the Five "Civilized" Tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Seminole) and related tribes, which were consistently pushed south and west from the area east coast.  Predictably, European intermarriage with these tribes seems to have followed the forced migrations the tribes
made.

OKAY THAT'S ENOUGH HISTORY!  One other note on this page, concerning the last panel with the meteor-light-thingy: did you know I saw a meteor fall once? I mean, not like a shooting star way up in the atmosphere, like, a meteor right before it became a meteorite.  Unfortunately, it was when I was out at a field station in the middle of nowhere in the Appalachian mountains so I wasn't able to go out and find the meteorite, but it was pretty interesting to see what that looked like.  Wasn't as fast as I would've thought, and I'm sure it was quite small so it wasn't loud and it actually kind of sparkled.  It was nifty.

ONE LAST NOTE I'M SORRY TO NON-NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKERS FOR THE CONVOLUTED NATURE OF SOME OF THE SPEECH ON THIS PAGE AND ALSO IN THE REST OF MY COMIC, I AM SORRY.  SO MANY IRREGULAR VERBS.