All 31 days of Inktober 2026 in one place: every drawing and every log, in order, from the last fresh apple before launch to two robots flexing on the grass back home.

Day 1: Apple

Mission Log, Day 1: Last Fresh Fruit

One apple, already bitten, sits on the console beside the launch checklist. It’s the last fresh fruit aboard before we leave the ground behind. After launch it’s freeze-dried and foil pouches for the duration. The cables are strapped down, the gauges are alive, and the ship is ready. I’m giving the apple a few more minutes.

Inktober 2026 31, Flex

Captain’s log. We are home. All of us, hero, survivors, SOSi, even the two robots, down the ramp and onto solid ground, and I don’t mind admitting my knees gave way.

The dapper man walked us to the edge of the landing field, tipped a gloved hand, and went back aboard without a word. We stood there breathing real air. That should have been the end of it.

Inktober 2026 30, Cookie

I only touched it to steady myself. A bulkhead console in the corridor outside the machine hall, bolted down like everything else on this ship: a squat screen in a scarred metal frame, a slab of keys beside it, a pair of sliders, a row of tiny lamps. Behind it, a glass valve glowed amber in its socket and a fat cylinder hung from the ceiling cable like a sleeping animal.

Inktober 2026 29, Tusk

The dapper man collected things. I should have guessed. Somewhere aft of the passenger deck, past a door that had not been there the day before, he had a long, quiet room lined with trophies, and he invited me in as though I were a guest rather than a captain without a ship.

Most of it I couldn’t name. But the piece he stopped at, he lifted from its stand himself: a tusk, ancient, yellowed to the colour of old piano keys, curving up to a split and weathered tip. It stood in a banded collar of pale metal, ribbed like a barrel hoop. Down its length, cut with a needle’s patience, ran a whale. Heavy-lidded eye, deep furrows along the head, the tail curling away round the curve of the ivory, every line as fine as a hair.

Inktober 2026 28, Trophy

They gave us a ceremony, of sorts. No crowds, no speeches. Just the silver ship settled somewhere quiet, the survivors ranged along the ramp, and the dapper man stepping forward with something held in both gloved hands.

A trophy. Not gold, not glass. A squat grey box on a round pedestal, scuffed at the corners, a cassette sitting in its window with two white hubs and a strip of handwriting across the label: MIX TAPE. Along the front, in blocky letters, a single word: WALKMAN. It was around the same age as the machines in the dark corridor, and it looked as though it had been loved.

Inktober 2026 27, Dumb

Nobody told us not to look, so we looked. A hatch left ajar, a corridor we weren’t meant to find, and beyond it the machines that had ripped space apart.

They were ancient. That was the shock of it. Vacuum tubes, actual valves, glass bulbs glowing amber over their sockets like something out of a museum. Dumb terminals with blocky glyphs crawling across small screens. Reels turning slowly, feeding out ribbons of punched paper tape, row after row of holes.

Inktober 2026 26, Zip

We watched it close behind us. Through the viewport the fracture no longer looked like lightning. It looked like a seam. Far back along its length the ragged edges were drawing together, tooth meshing with tooth, a line of dark links running away across the folded skin of space. Somewhere at its head a single bright slider hauled itself along, and the universe zipped shut after us without a sound.

Inktober 2026 25, Fracture

Somehow, everyone fitted. Survivors, hero, robot, even SOSi, bolted down in a corner with its dish still ticking. The ramp sealed with a soft sigh, and the dapper man lifted a hand to a panel we couldn’t read.

We didn’t feel a thing. No shudder, no thrust, no pressing back into the seats. Through the viewport the wreck simply slid away, as though the plain were being pulled out from under us.

Inktober 2026 24, Bake

Nobody had eaten properly in days. Ration bars, warm water, the dust in everything. So when the robot ducked back into the silver ship and came out carrying a loaf tin, we just stared.

It set up in the lee of the wreckage, using a slab of torn bulkhead as a counter, and went to work with those blunt pincer hands, surprisingly delicate. Dials ticked on its chest panel. Something warm hummed inside its torso. The dapper man stood by with his hands behind his back, looking quietly pleased with himself, as if this had been the plan all along.

Inktober 2026 23, Dapper

Out of the dust sky it came. We had stopped looking up. Hours of waiting under that bruised yellow haze, SOSi still chirping away on its hilltop, and then a shadow slid across the wreckage and the dust began to part. Something was coming down through it. It had answered our beacon.

Clean lines, smooth, silver. No flames, no roar, none of the howling engines we’d braced for. It settled onto the plain with barely a noise, as though it had all the time in the world, and the dust drifted back around it like nothing had happened.