Yeesh. Here we go!
Which happens to be a really big part of the rebuilding process. Along with, y'know, finding ways to make an airtight seal across your throat that can resist high pressures (such as those generated at depths, which force you to expel the air from your lungs leading to you swallowing water and shit going haywire)...
Either copy sperm whales, expel the air and suppress various reflexes, or don't go deep if you're not designed for it.
That is indeed possible. If he knows that sperm whales exist and such a solution is viable. But really, what's the point in being able to breathe underwater if you can only go down a couple of feet?
...finding a way to make the oxygen exchange across your gills efficient enough to support the high rate of oxygen consumption terrestrial mammals use...
I'd say lowering oxygen consumption rate would be easier. That, and not needing the gills much.
You have no idea how much oxygen mammals in general need, do you? Dolphins have several hundred million years headstart on Thuun and they can only take in enough oxygen in one go to stay down for ten minutes or so. Mammals are incredibly complex creatures. We have dozens upon dozens of systems and subsystems going non-stop and at a much higher rate than fish or reptiles. It's why we needed to eat at least twice a week as hunter-gatherers, but crocodiles only need to hunt once a week or once every two weeks if they caught a big meal. Everything about mammals is designed to be moving rapidly.
Slowing that down would mean, essentially, becoming more reptilian. For a start, Thuun would have to disable his body's internal heating, since that's one of the largest drains on oxygen. All active forms of temperature control would probably have to go, actually - as would most of his higher brain functions. Critical, rational, logical thought takes a lot of energy, which means in this case a lot of oxygen. To conserve oxygen, Thuun would have to find external heat sources like a sunny rock and sit there and just do nothing but bake for a while. Basically Thuun would be a potato.
(Okay, there
are a few species of endothermic fish, but they're the exception.)
He would also have to have extra channels in his mouth so as to swallow water to direct across the gills (The gills are the site of water expulsion, not water intake) and that's a whole other kettle of fish.
Why would water intake need to be in the mouth? It would make sense to have it be a slit or something in the neck or collarbone area, near the natural area for gills to be placed (the chest, near the heart). This also (slightly) lowers the difficulty of finding a pathway for it.
And the gill slits are for water expulsion. The gill filaments are for oxygen exchange.
(Point: Yes, I know the difference between gill slits and filaments. I wanted to ensure that bystanders were aware that water didn't enter through the gills.)
The percentage of oxygen in water can be measured in parts per million. He'd need to take in a phenomenal amount of water to sustain a normal human-sized body. One of the reasons that sharks, for example, cannot stop moving - they need to constantly be on the move to ensure that the volume of water going in is of a high enough rate to provide the oxygen they need.
Tidal volume of the average human male: 0.5 L per breath.
Volume of oxygen inhaled with each breath: 0.1 L (Oxygen ~ 20% of our atmosphere)
Average breathing cycle: 7 seconds (At complete rest)
Concentration of oxygen in water ~ 20 degrees C: 20 mL/L
Therefore, for Thuun to take in the same amount of oxygen through his gills as through his lungs (and thus maintain all higher order functions), he'd need to 'inhale' just under litre of water each second while he's underwater. The opening would need to be quite large to ensure that the water inflow wasn't basically a high-pressure jet, and his gills would need to be pretty big to ensure that the oxygen was rapidly extracted. And this is all assuming Thuun's just floating along merrily in the water; the second he starts moving, up go his oxygen requirements.
I suppose that the best point would be gigantic openings on his shoulders or something, but then you're disrupting muscles and blood vessels. The shoulder joint and general region is an extremely complex anastamosis of blood vessels, since flimsy tubes of blood and moving parts tend not to mix too well.
Ultimately, wherever Thuun decided to put the gills he would have to sacrifice something of great importance to functioning as a terrestrial mammal or as a human.
Long story short, no, you can't have gills.
Not contesting that, just some bits of your reasoning.
Hopefully I can answer your questions.
-snip-
I said depending on the change and the method.
He'd still have to do it
exactly right. One fuck-up and stuff would go terribly wrong, since he's futzing around with very delicate and rather important processes. And given Thuun's proclivity for disasters, I'm going to go ahead and say he'd die.
Long story short: Thuun is now a potatofish.
Non-mages can't always find useful things, but if Felice was of a mind to learn psychic abilities then he might find something useful.
((I'm assuming that psychic powers fall under the light category, yes?))
What I love is how you paid absolutely no attention to what Kidzuku was
doing.
I'm going to tell you straight up, because I did an absolute shit job of explaining it in-universe: The design on Kidzuku is a central character (That being the titular
kidzuku, which means comprehension). It looks a little like:
Carved lines run out from that to other lesser signs, governing its power and whatnot. The page that you read is the same page that Thuun read; you recognised it because the information was written in the same way as it was on your bracelet; a central idea with lines running to connected themes and meanings - whereas he recognised it as describing the angel Nathaniel, who's sphere of influence covers Light and Fire (and he found the exact same diagram in the centre of the Fire manual, too).
Sorry for the confusion.
Anyway, some psychic stuff
might be in the Light book.
And his regeneration spell would destroy all of his hard work and revert him to 100% pink-skinned, fleshy human.
((Why would it work that way? Is the default for healing spells keyed to Thuun's genetic code or something? Cuz if that's the case then everyone I ever heal will turn into me. Which is AWFULLY exploitable 
But in all seriousness, why would we assume that Thuun wouldn't just automatically change the spell slightly to account for his changes? I mean we ARE talking about MAGIC. As in a force that can best be explained as "hey reality, go fuck yourself"
I know I know, "game balance" but I like watching you squirm to try and come up with In-universe justification. Kinda important for turning shit into book form.))
You didn't pay attention to your regeneration spell's flowery, overly long description. It's okay, I knew you wouldn't. There's a reason I spent so long describing it in plant metaphors - it works in the exact same manner that sunlight and warmth do on a plant. You didn't heal your legs, you literally grew them. From scratch. For a while, you had tiny little zygote-legs, which grew into a newborn's legs and onwards and upwards until it hit your current age. Same thing for Baldur's eye. Eyes are complex, but they don't grow much once they've fully formed, so his eye didn't need thirty-odd years of growth on top of the nine months - which is why it regrew so much quicker.
For smaller wounds, again it doesn't heal them - it massively boosts the body's inbuilt regenerative capabilities (and pushes them a little further to eliminate scars because fuck tracking scars). So basically, you grow back into what you were. It strips everything away and rebuilds from scratch. You would have to alter your genetic code so that the changes are the norm. But, as I mentioned before, Thuun doesn't know about genetic code, since Maskan scientific progress is best defined as still being in the 'poke shit with a big stick' stage of the tech tree.
Also, Life magic won't appear anywhere in the books. Your entire existence is going to be somewhat edited; you'll keep the cool stuff like volcanoes and epic reforgings, but Baldur tearing your legs off? Not so much.
((Yeah that's the cliché answer, but Niccolo never explicitly stated that that's how Life magic works in this universe.
In fact the consequences of its first successful usage all but eliminate that explanation That mayor wasn't a hulk BEFORE Thuun came around))
((Ah, but that's only when it goes wrong. If life magic reverses changes, then errors in its practice would naturally do the opposite and introduce changes. The question, though, would be what would happen if somebody healed the mayor - would he regain his original form, or is his new form is also the new shape that healing magic returns him to?))
The mayor was turned into the Hulk because shenanigans.
If you
reeeaaaaally want a more in-depth explanation: you healed his body and then shoved it full of so much Life energy that it had to do
something with it, so it does what any organism with a vast excess of resources does: it grew. And he is now eating twice as much as anybody else in the town to make up for the fact that although he's so much bigger, he's not all that heavier; Life magic temporarily filled in for missing muscle filaments and bone mass, but with that dissipated he's currently in terrible condition.
If somebody tried to heal the mage, his body would immediately start using the Life energy to fill in the gaps where he was still missing mass like some sort of terrible magical spackle. He'd then probably turn into a rage-monster again. or, y'know, they could carefully compress him down to a normal size. They'd have to be damn good at what they were doing. Thuun's regenerative spell wouldn't have a freaking clue what to do, though, since as far as it's concerned he
is perfectly normal. Just a little big.
Before you ask, yes you COULD have made glowing green energy-legs. They would have been a bitch to design and you'd probably leave a trail of grass wherever you walked like some kind of fertility goddess. But too bad, no take-backs. And if you cut your legs off solely for ferti-feet I swear to God I'll designate the next source of evil as being Thuun's bollocks.
((That wasn't a REVERSAL, that was an OVERLOAD. So I would assume that's his new permanent form, no matter how much healing magic you use.
Just like I assume that I can spawn a swarm of wasps inside your lungs AT ANY TIME.
Note: never piss off Life mages.))
((You should actually try conjuring wasps. Otherwise you'll look really silly when you're making the defecation expression I imagine mages make when they're magicking and nothing happens. Or worse, when you manage to conjure complex life out of nothing and your brain turns into paste and shoots out of your ears (which would be pretty hilarious, but I digress). You know what they say about assuming things, after all. Assumptions are the noose that a vengeful GM constricts around munchkins' unwitting throats.
No, this is stuff you should research. Do science and shit. Magic has become the unpredictable, undiscovered country now, and those who do the most testing are the new archmages.
Also, you don't know if the overload wasn't actually a reversal. Overloads have varying side effects, after all.))
No you can't spontaneously create life. And you certainly can't induce death by lungwasp. Can you imagine the fun coroners would have with
that particular corpse? Yeesh. If you beat up a bunch of devilwasps and somehow convinced them to be your little summoned pets, you could thereby launch wasps at Lyu and hope that he inhales one or two, but that's decidedly less impressive.
Author
Topic: Roll to Go Mad: Turn 44 - The Markets (Read 133395 times)