Felt like making some visual notes on my personal headcanons about Grimwalker creation and growth :] I tried to just include the stuff we don’t already know or can be inferred from what we’ve gotten officially!
In my mind palace I feel like a lot of this intricate/more in depth info was discovered and catalogued by Hyacinth as he starts researching Grimwalkers + becomes a retrobiologist when he gets older…
Whumper is the only heir of a dystopian overlord. As they reach adulthood, they begin to wither of an unknown genetic disease. So unknown, in fact, that genetic screenings of every one of the planet's inhabitants reveal no matches.
Except one: a poor young soul wasting away in the planet's lower slums.
Soon, Whumpee is brought to the main palace, a guinea pig for every symptom Whumper is feeling; a guide for the doctors to use in how to save Whumper's life...regardless of whether it saves Whumpee's or not.
A scene from future at a price I was working on yesterday. Selene mentioned she didn't understand why Ed was enthusiastic about chimera research at first (in 2003) - beyond a knee jerk "it talked? cool!" - before seeing that research up close (and, you know, Nina happening).
I think I've figured out a scientific reason our little nerd could have been interested while writing last night. He's not interested in this fic, but I think he could have been if he didn't know shit he wasn't supposed to yet.
Background: FMA03 timeline where Ed is 11. He knows about Roy's history and Tucker's crimes. Roy doesn't know Ed knows and isn't aware of what Tucker has been up to. Cue miscommunication.
See wip under the cut:
Chapter 5 Excerpt
“What he did is vile, you bastard.” Ed grit his teeth. At this rate, he’d be the one with teeth ground down to nubs. “Guess I shouldn’t be surprised that someone like you wouldn’t care a wit about the suffering of others.”
“Suffering?” The bastard sounded confused. How could he be confused? “Do you mean the animals? Elric, animal testing is standard procedure in multiple disciplines. Not just alchemy.” He sighed in exasperation and Ed genuinely thought he was going to break his teeth if he clinched his jaw any harder. “Even medicine. Especially medicine.”
Ed hated him.
“I saw your cousin’s dog. You think he was the first animal to be subjected to prosthetic surgery?”
That wasn’t the same thing.
“You think scientists didn’t test the nerve connections and bone implants on pigs and monkeys for proof of concept long before the first human trials?”
They had. Ed knew they had.
“Animal testing is also foundational to alchemical research,” Bastard insisted.
Would he have a convenient excuse for his own actions, if Ed confronted him about it. Would he actually claim immolating living people somehow improved the world?
Ed hated him.
“Chimera research is primarily interested in altering and boosting physical health, endurance, longevity, disease resistance, and environmental adaptation, with the long-term goal of directing and enhancing human biological evolution.”
How was this all sounding so reasonable?
“Researchers combine different species in an attempt to mix advantageous adaptations together in the hope of increasing survival in disadvantageous circumstances.”
Why could Ed feel himself believing this bullshit?
“Tucker’s own research is dedicated to advancing communication efforts -”
--
So yeah, this is how I've solved the FMA Chimera Problem of "but why bother?"
Please take this whole thing with a grain of salt because I am not a geneticist
I just want to say that Kiri has a father. It's whoever the DNA they stole from a random Navi to make Grace's Avatar is.
I don't think anyone has probably addressed the fact that you cannot just change human DNA into Na'vi DNA. That had to come from some other Na'vi. And I know these bodies were made artificially so at least we don't have to think about that horrible potential aspect for growing avatar bodies. But we need to acknowledge that the Avatars have some random Navi's DNA in them.
Which also means that Jake not only has his DNA (technically Tommy's) but also the DNA of a random Na'vi in Pandora that he is now technically related to. Same with Grace
Which means Kiri scientifically has a Dad because the avatars were made with two sets of DNA unlike the same way a normal human person is made. And I know that technically all people have two sets of DNA and being a Jesus birth means you only have one but Grace's Avatar has a significant amount of someone else DNA because it's not just her body and her DNA like it would have been if she's humans it's also the Navi DNA used to make this body artificially
I also just want to say how awful it is that the RDA had to somehow extract good samples of DNA to give to the scientist to make these bodies. Like there are lots of different ways to do that but which method did they use? How did they pick Navi without knowing what kind of diseases they had and stuff like that!?
So i did some calculations for my sona (my sona is a dragon) and I have deducted (using previous drawings I've made, and how I see Nightmare next to Zir) how big Zir is (the figure beside them is Nightmare, who is 5ft tall)
From paws to shoulder - 16ft
Snout to tail - 55ft
Total wingspan - 110ft
And i found a funky dragon weight thing:
And found they weight - 16637.5 lbs(pounds) or 7.6 tonnes
I technically have paradox OCs! Gods who existed before creation, but did not at the same time. In my stories' world, multiverse in fact, magic works as radiation would. I developed this world building rule prior to this post I saw but here it goes because its kind of like when one writes an essay and finds more evidence for their argument!
"divinity like radioactivity, contaminating and penetrating the surfaces around it with every beat of an angel's wings, every twitch of unblinking constellation eyes, every flare of holy light, inescapable poison in your lungs as you breath in something too pure for coexistence."
My elder gods in my world, specifically the vast universe of my story Moon Of Sin, have the ability to mutate a living being's soul.
When the elder gods mutate the forms of the souls, corrupting them, they're unraveling and reshaping souls simultaneously. The souls become a little more like the gods in their beginnings: Thinking and feeling, but also having a new appearance just as the gods changed from light and essence into something humanoid. (Mostly humanoid hehe. This specific group can become abstract and incomprehensible.) Hearts and souls are so important in the universe of Sin as a whole because that is how the gods form, slowly becoming more conscious over time. *Then* they gained bodies. The elder gods came (spawned lol) before the gods of Earth, but watched as formless entities without bodies or names. The earth gods sort of evolved faster and once they learned there was more to existence, they began to form. The gods, all gods, I think are magical radiation. However, as we know with radiation therapy to fight cancer, it can be *good.* If radiation ceased to exist, the universe as we know it would instantly end. Atoms would lose their structure, all energy transfer would stop, the sun would go dark, and life would cease instantly, making matter and chemistry impossible. Gods of life are the good kind of radiation. My Star god, called His Eminence and the rest of his kind (called star gods. Please note that elder gods ≠ star gods. An elder god can be a star god but a star god can't be an elder god. An elder god must be extremely powerful and very, very ancient) are like nuclear radiation, wild and untamed.
His Eminence's 'sister', whom I've named Parastin, is in the middle. She's a goddess of life and creation, capable of creating souls, mechanical, and biological bodies but she is an antagonist character because she's fascinated by humanity but does not understand it. She thinks she is good, but she still doesn't understand her own powers, much less what really makes someone human.
The definition for souls in MoS is a something that is some form of consciousness that cannot be completely destroyed, no matter what it actually is (a soulless body, a soul trapped in an item, but not an AI, unless *given* a soul of another formerly living being). In my world I've written there are afterlifes and reincarnation exists at the same time. It just depends on what a soul believes. I'll do a part II to this post if anybody's interested! It will be about my world building in the components of the essence, not to be confused with a soul and how that all works (and where my eldritch elder god His Eminence comes in for this conversation!)