Story & Media

The Meteor.

It fell in the deep dark, with Byron's "Darkness" still ringing through it. A meteor with a core of pink crystal, carving the great crater outside what would one day become the river town of StarFell.

It did not die. It slept. It converted. It waited. It was patient in the way only very old, very wrong things can be patient.

The Town.

For generations the town grew up around the wound in the earth: a postcard-pretty main street, a concrete bridge over the Coosa-like river, eggs at Franks' Grocery, sermons on Sunday. Bikes on the bridge. BB guns in basements. Grocery deliveries to the strange family up the hill.

October 20, 1962 is "the most perfect of Saturday mornings." Levi Levins eats breakfast with his grandma. Johnny Gale breaks a boy's jaw over an insult to his dead mother. A fisherman pulls a stringer of bream from a backwater and starts to sing "In the Pines."

The Sleeping Giant Wakes.

Out at the astrobleme — one of the rarest above-ground impact craters in the world — a well-meaning scientist named Dr. Maitland runs current through the crater's crystals. His twelve-year-old son Miles cranks the amplifier. Gamma waves convert into something else.

The crater erupts in a pink shockwave. The town's natural history turns against it.

"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant
and fill him with a terrible resolve."

What StarFell Becomes.

Fishermen mutate mid-song into clawed things croaking "In the Pines." The river's legendary giant catfish — Fat Lance — grows tentacles and frog-legs and walks on land. The endangered local snail swells into a monster. Pale ghosts drift down Main Street at noon.

And above it all, in a transplanted French chateau called Fleur Du Ciel, sits the Voltaire family — the town's ancient, moneyed landowners, whose lineage is not of this world and whose patriarch has waited a very long time for the meteor to wake up.

A Handful of Kids.

Homemade weapons. Nothing left to lose. An orphan with his father's courage and a meteor-infused BB gun. A greaser the town wrote off as trash. A twelve-year-old prodigy who blames himself for all of it. A little girl whose scrapbook now makes pictures come true.

StarFell is a story about human resilience and youthful camaraderie in the dark — about a Saturday morning, a small town, and the sky finally answering back.

Levi Levins

The Heart · Age 12

An orphan with his father's courage and a meteor-infused Red Ryder BB Gun. Levi delivers groceries for Franks' — a job that sends him through the gates of Fleur Du Ciel on Day One.

Levi carries the weight of profound loss: his mother died in childbirth and his father Jack, a StarFell firefighter, died on September 18, 1956 saving a baby girl from a burning building — leaping from a window with her in his arms and breaking his neck on a parked car.

Raised by his grandmother, Levi relives that day in his dreams. Tender-hearted but stubborn, with grief that occasionally flashes into bursts of anger, he is determined to defend his town.

Shaggy brown hair, red-and-navy striped tee, jeans, black Chucks; later a leather aviator cap and goggles.

Johnny Gale

The Rebel Turned Leader · Teenage Greaser

The town menace with a hot rod, a switchblade comb, and a rap sheet — and the truest moral compass in StarFell. When the invasion hits, his defiance becomes heroism.

His mother drank herself to death; his father shot him last summer. The "moonshine run" he's blamed for is actually a delivery of comfort to a lonely widower.

When the shockwave hits, Johnny pulls men from rubble, takes in the town's kids, and forges them into the World Shakers. "Okay! World Shakers!... Let's go shake the world."

Romantic tension: Delilah Voltaire watches him through her telescope every morning.

Black leather jacket, white tee, pompadour, Lucky Strikes, black '46 hot rod.

Miles Maitland

The Brain · Prodigy, Age 12

Son of Dr. Maitland. Miles arms the youth of StarFell with gadgets forged in the crucible of his genius — including his homemade high-tech gauntlet.

He helped his father run the amplifier experiment at the astrobleme that woke the meteor, and the guilt of it shadows everything he does.

When his father is taken — first by a mud-creature at the crater, then by the Voltaires' green-skinned servants — Miles straps on the gauntlet and goes into the woods alone: "I hope you're okay... I'll find you, Dad."

Best friend to Levi. Black, glasses, orange-and-blue chevron sweater.

Lina Jane

The Wildcard · Age 7

A small girl with an exhausted mother, a cat, a love of monster movies, and a scrapbook that flares with pink light. What she pastes inside can be conjured into the world.

The night the "In the Pines" monster broke into her home and grabbed her mother, Lina Jane's eyes blazed pink — and she brought the movie robot GROM to life to blast it apart. "Grom is unstoppable!"

Grom now shadows her as a child-sized companion between battles.

Small blonde girl in a green hooded cloak, clutching the spell-book-like scrapbook.

Dash Jackson

The Scout

Elder of the Jackson brothers — a flinty, freckled redhead in a badge-covered scout vest, built for woodcraft, first-aid, and not flinching.

In Issue 4 he and his brother Lucas come face to face with the mutated catfish — Fat Lance himself.

Red flat-top, scout vest with patches, rolled jeans, white Chucks.

Kristy Leigh

The Runaway · Age 16

A turbulent escape from a life of crime strands her in StarFell mid-invasion. Haunted by a troubled past, hardened beyond her years — and ready to fight.

Her full arrival story lands in Issue 5. She crashes into StarFell from the outside, and the World Shakers absorb one more lost kid.

Blonde ponytail, pink bomber jacket with black racing stripes, saddle shoes — '60s tough-girl.

Alistair Voltaire

The Patriarch · Primary Antagonist

An ancient alien wearing the life of a Southern land baron. He owns the bank that holds half the town's mortgages — including Levi's grandma's.

The Voltaires have held the land "one hundred and fifty years, or so," built on a French gunpowder fortune that armed the Creek War. Weathered by time and confined (publicly) to a wheelchair, Alistair hungers to harness the meteor's energy to reshape Earth in the image of his home world and restore his own youth.

The wheelchair is theater: at the end of Issue 3 he stands, walks, and commands living vines to snare Miles. He spits on Levi's shoe rather than shake an Earth child's hand.

Delilah Voltaire

The Wildcard Heiress

StarFell's most charming nightmare. Pale, raven-haired, she teleports, talks to spirits, keeps live bats like pets, and collects locks of hair with scissors and zero warning.

She sings "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" through gloomy family breakfasts and knows everything about everyone — including exactly how Levi's daddy died.

"I've only practiced on my dolls and the cat."

Torn between her family's dark allure and a rebellious affection for Johnny Gale, her manic energy makes her an erratic, unpredictable ally to the children.

Screams the family's quiet part out loud: "I am sick of the family treating me like Rapunzel!"

Lilith Voltaire

The Operator

The cold, calculating daughter who manages the family's dark dealings with merciless precision — hush money, threats, and collateral damage be damned.

More at ease with mutants and aliens than with human warmth, she aims to usurp unseen thrones and rule through dominance and despair.

It's Lilith who presses fifty dollars into Levi's hand: "If any word gets out about what transpired here, it will result in more than a pained ear."

Severe gray suit, black hair, perpetual contempt; her back-matter pinup shows her carrying a wooden briefcase with tentacles spilling out.

Horace

The Gardener

The Voltaires' hulking groundskeeper at Les Grands Jardins de la Fleur Du Ciel — a gentle giant with dirty bare feet who cleans Alistair's spit off Levi's shoe.

One of the only warm presences on the estate. How much he knows is an open question.