#nacranswered

[nacricissa]

I made another vampire....

He likes to chew on bones...

I-....THis is so horrible of me 😮‍💨

Do you by any chance know if he could get some nutrition from the bone marrow?

I'm so sorry 🙁👎

I gotta continue.

When does it disappear?

I am trying to figure out the timeline for its decaying.

Any who this novel might end up darker than I thought I mean I knew it was going to be dark...But damn...The thought organ is thought organing.

I'm so sorry if this is too far 🫠

The straightforward answer is probably. As I'm assuming you know since you asked this question, your blood is produced in the bone marrow. However, most of it pretty immediately goes into your bloodstream, though there will still be some residual proteins which have been made but haven't been shipped yet. The main cell type that actually stay put in your bone marrow for any length of time are the immune cells responsible for keeping a record of invaders that your body has previously faced (B cells). There are also a lot of things in your blood at any given time that are not produced in your bone marrow (hormones, oxygen, medications, alcohol, bloodborne pathogens, etc.) so depending on what is the essential part of your blood a vampire actually needs for nutrition, it may or may not be found in the bone marrow, and may or may not be in any relevant quantity. Would probably still taste good, though, even if it wasn't nutritionally beneficial. And according to Procopio Et al (2018), the timeline is very dependent on environmental conditions (the drier the bones, the better the preservation, this is why we have so much evidence of what the Egyptians were up to 6000 years ago, the place is just really dry so things don't decompose much). They note that the rate of decay is generally most noticeable in the 1-4 month range, with levels reaching their minimum at about 9 months, and their experiment was conducted in England so it was pretty rainy. The methods they used were measuring the proteosome, so really interesting to me I'm glad you sent me in this direction.

#nacranswered #vampire lore #vampire biology

[nacricissa]

List 5 things that make you happy, then put this in the askbox for the last 10 people who reblogged something from you! get to know your mutuals and followers. 💖

1 Exams are almost over

2 The air smells like springtime

3 There was a cat in my yard.

4 Playing Magic: The Gathering with my friends

5 Methods of locomotion that require up front effort and then allow me to glide with no effort at reasonably high speeds for a while after I stop putting in effort e.g. biking, skating, rowing

#nacranswered

[nacricissa]

asking as a scifi writer myself: how do you avoid the scifi trope of "OHHHHH THE A.I IS EVIL NOW BECAUSE OF A BUG OR PARADOX OHHHHHH"? I don't want my broken a.is to be evil! I want them to be more or Less..just broken, both literally and emotionally

not sure if this is really my question, since I don't think of myself as an authority on sci fi, nor have intended to portray myself as one, but

I do love answering questions. So!

I think the most important distinction is defining a.i. Whether the a.i. in your story is meant to be a conscious intelligence with an experience of reality at least comparable to our own, or whether it's a series of commands being executed with methodical precision with no conscious choice and thus no moral imperative.

In the first case, the way is simply to do a bunch of research/ exploration of disability rights. So depending on how the bug is seated, it could be impairing your a.i.'s cognitive function, in which case learning disabilities would be worth checking into, or it could make it harder for the a.i. to communicate, in which case finding autistic advocates for autistic issues might be a compelling path, or it might make your a.i. struggle with differentiating false returns of their code from reality, in which case you want to find out what kind of problems and solutions people who experience psychosis have found, or maybe your a.i. has an experience similar to people with memory loss or dissociative disorders. The key with all of these is to highlight the ways in which they are the same and also the ways in which they are different. Bad news to say an autistic person is directly equivalent to a robot, but many autistic people do find that robot characters are as close to genuine rep they've seen. In this case you should also check into resources about how to delicately handle coding in media, to avoid putting your foot in your mouth unnecessarily.

In the second case, the key is to highlight the fact that the a.i. has no choice. You could have a paradox leading it to try to execute to mutually incompatible commands and it turns out the harmful one only got executed over the helpful one because of a quirk of how the internal machinery assigned processing power, or because it required fewer checks to a given function. The a.i. could be spending the whole story trying to execute a command to for example send water to aid in a draught, but a broken gear or lever means that all the water spills into waste instead of making it into the aqueduct, to the despair of the people who have made the trek up the aqueduct to see why their evil a.i. overlord has allowed them to go thirsty. A faulty sensor, a bad input, something that means that the rest of the a.i. is functioning properly, is trying to help to accomplish the task for which it was meant but simply can't and it's not the fault of the a.i.

#nacranswered #on writing #a.i.

[nacricissa]

what do you think, and I haven't rotated this idea yet. But it's just begun. *Cracks knuckles*

What if the raising the deads price is memory loss on a massive scale?

Ok so that could mean a few things.

One, the dead person has no memory. They must learn everything, from how to breathe to what a car is from scratch. This is pretty "normal" such as it is for necromancy, though few enough stories actually commit to the angst and will capitulate by having the person remember something anyway, like cowards.

The second is that it results in memory loss for the caster, but not the risen dead. This is a really compelling price to pay. You can never have your loved one back, but you could give them their life, and everyone but you. Great tragedy payoff if the caster thinks incorrectly their love is unreciprocated. Also a great comedy thing if you want to play it like that. The senile wizard doesn't recognize anybody, but seems pretty mentally whole otherwise, and then someone from outside the village comes in and doesn't seem to think it's fine when Timmy breaks his back over the fence: of course he'll be fine in the morning, it's only an issue if they stop breathing overnight.

The third option is the one I use to resurrect Elise, actually. You are only dead because people remember you being a thing that can die. So, escaping the afterlife gets a lot easier if no one remembers you. At all. Anywhere. To regain your life you must lose everything that was left of it. Fun stuff.

The last option is random memory loss. At scale. Around the world, people will just forget things ranging from where they left their favourite pen to the fact you shouldn't put water on an oil fire. It's untraceable, really, hard to say what was taken to fuel the spell and what was just normal human forgetfulness. You'll never really be able to quantify the harm you did to bring them back. But you would have let worse happen, and it makes you sick.

#nacranswered #fantasy worldbuilding

[nacricissa]

so, question how do you feel about if vampire royalty is only allowed to feed off youth/vitality. While the rest of the vampires feed off blood. Could it be as something simple as that the ancients of the vampire world just were built different while the rest evolved differently. As in that's the lie that's told to them. What do you think?

This is just a random question, nothing I am considering putting into my wip...But I was just curious.

Interesting to say "allowed to feed" as opposed to "feeds". This implies that they would be capable of feeding off blood in the same way "regular" vampires do, but some force prevents them. The easiest explanation for that would be to maintain the myth, that they are some greater more evolved species. In this sense it would be fairly interesting if feeding off youth is simply an advanced technique, something royal fledglings must learn before being weaned off of blood, to prevent the general populace from learning of the artifice.

This could make a ruling class that lives forever off of stolen youth and vitality, immune to age an disease, but not injury since they deprive themselves of blood, with an underclass which ages and is vulnerable to decay and disease, but which can recover from many otherwise life-threatening injuries and have greater physical strength and speed. A class war should a new fledgling refuse to properly join the family after being turned could thus be quite interesting.

#vampire lore #nacranswered #rebellion #free idea for anyone should they be interested in writing it

[nacricissa]

the unfollow must have been pretty recent??? i feel like i've seen you in my notes

Scrolling back through your blog my current theory is that when I sent you an ask last month I must have missed the ask button and hit the unfollow button by accident on the first go. You might have also gotten some illusory notes from my seeing your posts when Square reblogs them

#nacranswered

[nacricissa]

how do you feel about a vampire that could turn anyone into a skeleton if they wished? Horrifying? Creepy? Aesthetic?

This comes from an old wip I deleted the writing for on Web novel you can't delete books on web novel.

There's two ways you can be a skeleton. One, all your other bits are gone. The only thing that remains is bone, a memory of you, but nothing of you. Only your least changeable parts remain after Skeleton Vampire smote you, because they were bored or you offended them or were about to stake them or whatever. This version is pretty cool. It would work as a logical extreme for vampires who feed by stealing vitality, or youth, causing the victim to age. The nth degree of that is ageing thousands of years in a moment, until all that remains is the skeleton. Metal, good wordlbuilding, works very well.

The other option is that you become a spooky scary skeleton. You're still alive, after a fashion. At least animated towards the vampire's will. This one is very creepy and horrifying if you lose both your readily identifiable flesh and human identity along with your free will, but are still conscious. You lose some of the creep factor if you become a living skeleton with a human-ish mind, but are free to comport your own business now that you have been skeletonized. It basically reverts to the same as the first one if you are totally dead but Skeleton Vampire also, separately, has the ability to puppet around dead bodies, cause at that point you're dead you're gone you don't care that it was you that got turned into a skeleton unless you somehow got reanimated and have to deal with how thoroughly your corpse got desecrated but that would be an issue if you'd died of natural causes too.

#vampire lore #nacranswered #amazing piece of software that must have been

[nacricissa]

You sent me an amazing ask and I really wanna send one back but I am struggling to come up with a good question so, here is your opportunity to rubber duck. If there is something you are stuck on in a WIP feel free to talk it through here until the solution comes to you. I can also read it and see if there is anything I can do to help, if you want. Maybe there's is a prompting question I will think to ask you (or three), to return the favour<3

Happy WBW!

Thank you so very much for your kind thoughts! I shall ramble about my most recent issue in the Forever Project.

How fancy should secondary protagonist Eric be? More fancy would make him a better foil to Elise, in some ways, and allow me to do more bullshit with him on his own, and make him less dependent on Elise. Less fancy would make it the story of an essentially random guy becoming the chosen wielder of a catastrophically powerful human weapon told from the perspective of the weapon, and I could do fun chosen wielder "who am I without my weapon" shenanigans.

Because I have no clue which of these two is better, I've been coming at it from a question of probability. The option where Eric is so fancy as to be on par with Elise in his own right, a weapon made to kill a different type of God, is compelling, but the notion that Elise would happen to break out of her proscribed timeline to find him on pure coincidence feels contrived in a way I don't like, not when so many other things have come to fit so well.

He can't be completely human though, because first of all then he would die before Elise, in a way I don't really like, and also it's harder to imagine them meeting using the plot point I currently have which I very much like. So, we're sticking to some kind of immortal being, who has enough power to wield Elise without too much difficulty.

I have come to the conclusion he should be a Nihil, a perfect balance of the two gods that are kinda sorta at war over his world Darkness and Faith, in a somewhat human vessel. The question is how does this sort of thing arise. I've come up with several answers over time, but most of them have been cut off by later worldbuilding.

There are versions where Nihils are Darkness's guards, heavily inspired by the Sherrilyn Kenyon's Malachai. The faith side in this version usually comes from humanity, built up through centuries of nurture and genetics, but in recent revisions of the amorphous blob in my head, Darkness and Faith only arrived in this world recently, and so such a long-running history couldn't work.

There are versions where these guards are more numerous, and are made by Darkness and Faith having it on, which requires Eric to be smuggled into the human world of the plot by some machination. This is accomplishable, but requires me to flesh out some extra characters to do the smuggling, and figure out what happens to them.

The most recent idea I've had ties in very well to the plot. The plot hinges around a vampire/wraith hunting society, that was started as a scam, but then it turned out some of the bullshit they were spouting was close enough to true that they got more than they bargained for. Anyhow, in this recent version, a Nihil is essentially the combination of a vampire and a wraith. I really like this, as a vampire is a creature of faith lacking darkness, and a wraith is a creature of darkness lacking faith, but I don't know how common to make them, how they should come about to ensure this. Do I make Eric the only one? The only one in his position? It's really hard to say.

#wbw #nacranswered #thank you again very much for the question

[nacricissa]

So, regarding worldbuilding, I have made the scary choice to write involving magic (notoriously not my favorite element…But I wanted to perhaps find better appreciation through doing.) I was wondering if you had tips 😭

Hmm...

For worldbuilding specifically, I like using as few base things as possible, then thinking of fun ways to combine them, because I like hard magic, which is to say magic where you can easily guess based on certain base principles whether a given task can be accomplished with magic, and if so how much time and effort it would require. Soft magic is like Harry Potter, where you can do magic if there's a spell for it, and whether there's a spell for it is pretty much random. This video essay is independently very good, spooky season appropriate, and has a solid explanation of the difference in there. There isn't one that's better than the other, but you should know which one you're writing before you go for it. Honestly, most of the advice I might give is in this video, which is an excellent summation of magic in fiction. You probably will find it easier to make a coherent system if it lives in your brain for a while, as opposed to trying to do it for nanorimo, not that I'm trying to foil your ambitions, it's just if you're doing something complex like I am, well, I've been thinking about these rules for almost a decade now and I'm still finding contradictions I need to resolve.

#writing advice #nacranswered #on writing

[nacricissa]

Hi! Umm I don't know if you remember but a while back you tagged me in a Joy List tag game. And I really appreciate it, but I didn't make a post in the end. Well, I kinda did, but I got anxious about posting so I left it in my draft. Then recently, I came across the post in my draft and it made me happy because it reminded me of good things from when I made the post. And I have you to thank for it. But in the end, I only posted it privately, because I'm still shy about it. But I wanted to let you know I'm grateful that you tagged me, even though I didn't play the game the way it's supposed to be played, it still made me happy. So yeah thanks haha

You played the game correctly cause you got joy then you spread joy cause now I'm real happy too!

#nacranswered

[nacricissa]

how do you feel about energy vampires

Referring to the concept of a vampire that feeds on some nebulous energy, or perhaps a more specific energy, instead of blood, I like it. However, vampires are best when they still need humans, to contrast off them, so if your energy vampire is just a space alien that feeds of solar radiation that's not really a vampire anymore.

Referring to the concept of human people who are draining to be around, I don't like the term I think it's a dramatic and dehumanizing way to describe a real thing that should be handled with a more proportional attitude, as that is more likely to produce a response that will actually reduce the harm in the relationship.

#nacranswered

[nacricissa]

do you enjoy symphonic metal???? 😇🪽

I need an excuse to rec. this new album I'm listening to...🫠

Probably not, sorry. Can't sing metal very well. (me, personally, that's not where my talents lie)

#nacranswered #music

[nacricissa]

I'm giggling and blushing. hehe. Is "Square Trickster" my new nickname? I like<3

I think of it more of a title. Something you earned not something you were just given

#nacranswered

[nacricissa]

If Jalice's kid had a kid with Marcus x Didyme's and it has to be some combination of their parents' gifts (from what it seems that's how hybrids are) would this gift just be useless 😔

{The ideas are ideaing but I have no concept of logic.}

So since Alice's gift deals with an amplification of her ability to predict people's decisions, and Jasper's comes from his ability to predict people's emotions, I imagine their offspring would be able to trace people's motives. Everything that is pushing them towards one decision or another would be visible, whether that be love, obligation, or reckless adrenaline-seeking. This would be less broad then their parent's gifts, but would allow similar levels of manipulative behavior, especially if they mastered the gift well enough to be able to manipulate which of the influences on a person's decision they actually followed.

I imagine Marcus x Didyme's kid would end up with a gift not dissimilar to Chelsea's. Putting joy into a relationship, basically making it more like Edward and Bella's; essentially an opiate, regardless of the actual quality of the relationship otherwise, prompting withdrawal symptoms if they are separated.

This would make the grandkid... Able to change who people respect enough to make decisions to please? Kind of like a more broad version of the gift the big meta blogs say Carlisle has, except they would never be able to have themself be the person listened to.

#team edward #twilight #twilight renaissance #this is a meta? #nacranswered #nacricontent

[nacricissa]

What is so interesting about biology?

The cool thing to me is that millions of years of pure random trial and error have produced chemicals and processes more complex than we can even really model well. Technically, we never invented antibiotics. Every antibiotic that we use was invented first by a fungus or other bacterium that evolved to better defend itself, and then we figured out which was the important part and started isolating that. We didn't invent genetic editing, genetic editing was invented by bacteria that lived longer if they could edit the genes of viruses back out of their DNA, and now we can use those same proteins to make more efficient crops. The balance between the simplicity and complexity of biological systems that have evolved to take advantage of anything in the environment that could conceivably be a resource.

#nacranswered

[nacricissa]

We know vampire venom won't kill a vampire...But...like...what if it did?

Well, we know it hurts them, by making their bodies more vulnerable to damage, and inhibiting the process of healing {it leaves scars}. If you are using a liquid to kill someone, it is probably going to be a poison, or a venom, but we'll stick to venom. It's easy assume it wouldn't work particularly well as a venom, as a vampire's body is already saturated with their own venom. However, many of Jasper's scars are from vampires also turned by Maria, implying that the venom is not highly conserved, even within the same vampiric line. It's different enough that Jasper's own venom doesn't hurt him, but other vampire's venom does.

There are two ways we can imagine this. One is an immune response, and the other is direct chemical attack. If you get a bone marrow transplantation, your body will probably get very angry at this new stuff in your bones, because the donor's bone marrow looks that teensy bit different than your did, and so it doesn't have it one file not to attack as a threat in the same way it does the rest of your own tissues. This leads to nasty rejection responses if you aren't taking immunosuppressants. Assuming that a vampire immune system is hypercharged in the same way everything else about them is, there would need to be essentially a constant supply of foreign venom entering their body. Your body will ramp up the grade of the weapons it is using against an attacker, until there is none left. The higher grade weapons hurt body tissues just as much as invader tissues, but, well, you have more cells than a bacterium so you can spare a few. If the presence of invaders never lets up, the body will keep ramping up until it destroys itself. So venom dialysis would kill a vampire.

The direct chemical method is simpler. We know that vampire skin breaks more easily when saturated with foreign venom, hence why they can bite each other but not claw each other, even though their teeth are not particularly different to their nails. So, it is reducing the extent to which the body cells are attacked to each other. Hence, you could dissolve a vampire in enough venom. This would be equivalent to burning, in the case that eventually all their cells would lyse from the same chemical effects (which are interestingly opposite to their healing effects on humans). However, if it is just that are their cells are whole, floating around in the venom, in theory they could be reassembled, though it would take a very long time in a non-venom solution for the right cells to hit up against each other at the right angles.

#team edward #twilight #twilight renaissance #nacricontent #this is a meta? #nacranswered