It’s like a magic trick!
Thanks as usual to Raptie for handling the character coloring and shading on this page!
Out-of-Placers
A story of inconvenient changes
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Is that scribble over Brakka’s head in the third panel supposed to be an EKG (like a representation of his heartrate? I mean I doubt EKGs even exist in this world). ‘Cause as an RN student that’s all I can see but without a grid (& not even knowing what a yinglet’s baseline would be) I can’t make sense of it but every time I look at it my brain keeps trying uselessly to decipher it (I need sleep).
If it is, then judging by the anguished screaming he’s lucky it isn’t flatlining.
I’m pretty sure it’s a visual representation of a record scratching to a stop.
ooh, that is much more satisfying. Thank you.
*record scratch*
*voice over* That’s me. I’ll be you’re wondering how I came to be in this position. Well, it all began…”
My thought is that it would be that all lines are assumed to be straight until proven otherwise. Brakka’s mental state is to a calm mind what that line is to a straight line.
It’s like that lil warning flash used in cartoons and anime, usually used in moments of revelation of how fucked a person is or a flash of insight to warn of danger.
Looks like Afib with two big beats with widened QRS complexes.
so, if im googling this right, he’s having a heart attack and a stroke at the same time?
No stroke unless he develops a blood clot and it goes to the brain. Probably not a heart attack, more likely a heart block, pacemaker issue, hyperkalemia, or ventricular preexcitation.
I believe it’s more of an EEG, or whatever the brain activity readouts are called. Medical acronyms suck until you’re used to them. The spikes in that case would represent a near-seizure from this information. Stress-induced seizures seem like something Yinglets might suffer from.
THAT makes a lot of sense. Never occurred to me as a mere volunteer EMT & nursing student with no EEG knowledge at all. Studying EKGs right now & just latched onto that.
It could also be a seismograph showing the intensity of the mindquake generated as the two hemispheres of his brain grind against one another with the revelation.
…whatever it is, he’s not happy right now.
i see it more like a string snapping
Can’t wait for the moment Brakka finds out what zat zhing did to Kass (and who/what Kass actually is).
His poor little brain is gonna melt.
Just like the artifact!
If it does exactly the same I expect a huge mess…
well that’d certainly put an abrupt end to that storythread
Then reallise he is so beyond fekked he makes the seer look like a virgin.
Scavs are all the byproduct of genetic engineering, and artificial race created by a long forgotten civilization. Rediscovered artifacts have been transforming people for decades but due to their new social status and shortened life span public knowledge of these events have been easily suppressed.
But why? Engineering should improve the usefulness, not decrease.
Alternative theory: Scavs were created by wizards who concluded that turning people into frogs wasn’t a bad enough punishment.
It depends on what you consider useful. Humans without the benefit of all the technology built up over millennia wouldn’t last too long in the kind of environment Yinglets will naturally thrive in.
Word of god says that there is no magic in this setting, so its probably tech Imho
I don’t think that Val ever stated (as an author) that there is no magic, only that powerful and educated people do not believe in magic (so when Viracroix asked “What is it then? Magic?” he was being sarcastic). Magic still may exist.
However given how much he pays attention to the biology and the like nanotech or something weirder sounds more likely than magic, that much is true.
Given the complexity of changing an adult’s species(in under a minute no less), I find the technological requirements to be extreme, even by fictional standards. Keeping them alive during the process with no external life-support is difficult. shifting their genes without causing immune responses is, well, one of the easier things honestly, but still requires simultaneous reconfiguration and suppression on a very small scale and also on a ludicrously massive scale compared to that. The brain requires a great many very specific things in order to function, and is ridiculously complex, almost all of it and its support mechanisms will be changed. Keeping the brain viable during this time is an inordinately difficult task, keeping it functional and having the resultant personality remotely resemble the former (and apparently match it aside from the intended changes while seamlessly adapting the brain to operate the new body) is, well, a significant achievement. And then there is the largely harmless but still body-horror element of Yinglets being significantly lighter than humans and conservation of mass, not to mention the issue of heat dissipation.
It is reaching the point where insanely advanced nanomachines might be less convincing than aetheric waves directly modifying reality according to a pre-instilled intent, or some mad yinglet hermit somewhere mixing together the blood of a seahorse with a severed human head, yelling at it until it yelled back, then grinding it down to a powder and having that just work for no consistent reason. It would be technology that is of a level that makes it pretty much futile to speculate upon what technology it is. Nanomachines is an obvious choice, but speculating that this the result of nanomachines is not much different from speculating that a cabled telephone operates on the same principles as two cups with a string between them. Nanomachines is almost less likely than something really absurd, like an analogue to memory-foam that reconfigured into a device that generated a field of virtual matter in the form of an automated medical facility larger than the building complete with computer arrays and life support and teleportation devices and that it existed and performed actions while possessing no mass or energy as we would understand it and not existing upon the x, y, or z axes.
Ultimately it doesn’t much matter. The means existed for this to happen, so it did. The source of those means is most likely some sort of conspiracy. This conspiracy might be archaeologists messing with stuff they don’t understand, could be super-advanced aliens, could be scientists that discovered something that waddles like magic and quacks like magic, could be a particularly focused hivemind directly reshaping reality, or it could be a bunch of lesser yinglets dancing in a circle and howling at the moon. The only thing that wouldn’t be plausible is that it is within the understanding of the general population… except… they DO have religion…
another big issue i see with the transformation being tech is the sheer amount of mass that disintegrated into nothing, seeing as human Kass had a lot more then ying Kass, you cant attribute it to breaking down the molecular structure because even the base elements that make up a human body are solids, and dispersing a large amount through the air is nonviable, breaking down the elements even further or annihilating them would output energy in dangerous levels, including generating ionizing radiation, or if your annihilating the mass altogether, creating an explosion comparable to nuclear detonation.
you just cant really explain where the lost body mass went without it being even more far-fetched then magical properties
unless anyone is willing to prove me wrong, point it out if you do, i would rather be called out for being wrong then not knowing
Not a “prove wrong” stance so much as “I have read crazy stuff” sharing;
Shunting mass into a higher physical dimension (note that time is not one) while creating a local quantum decoherence that would allow an enforced perception to lock in a quantum state that perpetuates onto the macroscopic scale utilizing a fractal matrix (which can affect quantum entities as discovered with electron studies). The mass venting can actually be accunted for by either utilizing localized wormholes harnesing suspended antimatter (see potassium-40 positron studies), or a simply well-calibrated magnetic helix maintained on the quantum scale using nanites.
The inherent state locking of the Quantum Zeno effect is normally limited to an entanged pair, but would you be able to artificially induce entanglement while adgitating the dimensional membrane (see M theory or String theory), then Kass’s mental retention can actually be attributed to their self observation as seen in the Quantum Eraser Experiment studies. That is; their observation of their own identity state-locked it while outside observation was subject to less stable locking from multiple sources, allowing the quantum fractal matrix to perpetuate the new Scav biology.
Just remember that neurons arn’t memory, the energy through them is.
;p
I did not argue that it is a plausible science (that is why I said ” something weirder than nanomachines”), just that technobabble explanation is more likely than magical (idealistic).
P.S. Are you, perchance, rphb from Deviantart?
Nope, just Voidbane.
I hope the technobabble was amusing. Keeps leaking out of brain holezzz
I was asking a Guest. They share certain rarely used words. I am not seriously counting on answer one way or the other but I wanted to try anyway.
My appologies, I find this comment alignment is a bit difficult to identify.
Not rphb, assuming that I am the same Guest *oooeeeoooeee*, but I will look into them.
…
Huh, can’t say I agree with them(or are they trolling?), but it is nice to see people being open about political views. Stifled conversations rarely lead to comprehensive actions.
Oh, thank you for you answer (assuming you are not deceiving me ಠ_ಠ). I still tend to be somewhat annoyed when people try to preach\push a political agenda in comments to fiction, even when I agree with agenda itself (which is not the case for rphb). In any case it was not an attempt to shape further conversation, just to see if my hunch was right and satisfy my curiosity.
Third law of conservation of energy was violated turning a 160 pound human into a 24 pound yinglet. It’s definitely magic or tech on a level where they’re indistinguishable.
Not to mention the subject in transition would most likely drop dead of a massive heart attack from the strain of said transition.
So like Dragonriders of Pern, but gene edited by an idiot.
How do we up-vote comments?
You don’t because WordPress.
One of my favorite book series as well.
Man, this comic is a fuckin *goldmine* for reactions.
Hello yeah it is!!
Damn auto correct.
Wow people are writing entire papers on the subject. O.o I’m impressed.
So I just got finished binging this web comic. And I have to say I like where the plot’s been going so far. Lots of cute scenes. Just the right amount of humor. And I look forward to what happens next!
How is the scar on his cheek visible? it looks like if fur is at least half an inch there and the scar is cross grain.
I’ve always imagined that the fur on their bodies are similar to mice or rats. Thin, but a little scruffy on the cheeks, elbows, and knees.
It looks like the scar tissue is big enough so that there’s a noticeable gap in the fur
What you said.