If y'all could stop arguing about books that'd be great. I don't want this to be known as "the RtD where they argued about loot for several pages"Thank you.
You have no idea how much oxygen mammals in general need, do you?...
I do. I said easier, not easy.
And you have some facts...off. Firstly, dolphins don't have terribly long breath-holding times, but sperm whales can go an hour or so, without extracting additional oxygen from the water. And all that complexity you cite isn't really the issue; that would be from high metabolic rate, which is almost entirely due to the constantly high body temperatures mammals keep. Brain activity is a pretty big sink, a solid quarter, but it's not entirely enormous. And, remember, these are with normal creatures; with sufficient biological knowledge, because body-modding wouldn't work without at least a subconscious understanding of it, I have no doubt one could find a way to exceed the record-holders of real-world biology, without even considering magic.
..............
The percentage of oxygen in water can be measured in parts per million...
((You're assuming baseline human metabolism. I can't find any sources, but I'm pretty sure you could reduce it significantly if you had to.))
I specifically used dolphins because they are of a comparable intelligence to humans and are closer in size to a person than a sperm whale is. And yes, I am assuming baseline human metabolism. All of those processes occur for a
reason - to maintain our bodies and minds. If you start reducing energy flow, the entire system is thrown into haywire. Secondary processes such as immune systems, digestion and a couple others can be temporarily shut down (as during fight or flight response mode), but long-term that's a really bad idea. Body temperature can be decreased through manipulation of the thyroid gland, but that just sends the body's enzymes into utter chaos. And since those enzymes are
heavily involved in the process of producing and using energy, altering them would be bad. Short term, the effects are minor, since we do have limited enzymatic function - it's why people with fevers or hypothermia don't immediately drop dead - but in the long term it's deadly.
So I'm assuming that if Thuun has gills, it's because he wants to be able to operate underwater for long periods of time without incredibly essential functions being disabled. That means maintaining a humanlike metabolic level and core temperature. Ultimately, with everything that he'd need (gills, much bigger heart, four times as many blood vessels, water intakes as well as everything normal humans have) he'd have to sacrifice something and it'd end up being muscle mass, since that's the only thing not dedicated to keeping him alive.
To have a physiology suitable for extended periods of either aquatic or terrestrial use through a wide range of biomes (and maintaining humanlike cognitive ability, probably the most important point) would require building a creature entirely from scratch, because if you're going to alter that much genetic code you may as well just tear it all into bits and play lego. I have no idea of how to even begin mapping out such a creature. You might be able to start with a human, but the result would be as closely related to a human as the common banana is, I suspect. We, with our several thousand years of scientific advance on Maska, are only just beginning to touch the possibilities of genetic engineering. This kind of thing
might be possible for us in twenty or thirty years time.
Thuun
could just give himself extra-strength neck and chest muscles and increased lung capacity along with webbed feet. Then he could make like a seal. But he'd still be limited by his human form; he'd never outpace a shark or outmanoeuvre a dolphin. The human body is simply not designed to operate underwater and a lot of the reasons are really small, fiddly reasons that are just part of being human.
(Okay, there are a few species of endothermic fish, but they're the exception.)
And this fishman wouldn't be?
The exceptions are pretty much exclusively sharks and a couple of fish which are large, oily and eat a shit-tonne. The sharks that pull it off dine on dolphins, seals, penguins; good red meat with plenty of energy. Fish flesh is not exactly energy dense, y'know? The oily fish that do... couple of kinds of tuna, mostly. But they also pretty much just constantly eat.
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.
((Fair enough.))
We agree on something! Awesome!
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?
Without any kind of diving gear, people commonly dive to a dozen feet or more, without even expelling air from their lungs. Some people manage to (briefly) achieve depths in the hundreds of feet without significant problems (and what problems there are have more to do with eardrums than sphincters.
And rereading...why would depths lead to air being forced from your lungs?
When you have a container at pressure X and the surroundings are at pressure 5X, what happens? As those divers sink, they expel the air from their lungs. It's not entirely voluntary; the water pressure compresses their chest and literally forces them to exhale. By actively exhaling they can at least control the rate to a degree.
((Ok so what I got out of that first part was pretty much "NO GILLS EVER" which is fine, I was actually just using gills as an example.
What I REALLY want to do is grow 2 extra arms and get claws on all my fingers, because QUAD-WIELDING. Then I can level Force magic and Telekinetically sword people while quad-clawing them as well. Ah MAGIC.
Fuck your goddamn munchkinry.
Also about the ferti-feet, go back and look at the wording of the action I posted. I was trying to grow dragon-reptilian legs. Because you said "Thuun could do things even MORE impressive then the rock-hand" so immediately I thought "oh hey, lets grow super-awesome dragon legs, because awesome" and you either dismissed it as impossible (More impossible then ferti-energy feet? SERIOUSLY?) or just ignored it completely. So in the long line of people not paying attention to shit in this RtD, the GM is also in on it, have no doubt
It's quarter past one as I'm reading this. Which turn am I looking at? I want to answer this properly but I'm kinda tired.
From the Kidzuku stuff does that mean Kidzuku is an angel as well? Did Felice just FIND A GOD-ANGEL LYING IN A BUSH? I mean yeah I got mine from a poison-induced hallucination but JEEZ. I mean, one angel is just hanging around in drugland, one is napping in a bush as a bracelet, and the chick one is A FUCKING STALKER
Oh for fuck's sake.
It's a way of displaying information: a central theme with radiating points around it. You learned about it in junior school, probably called a brain-cloud or mind-map or something. This is the bronze age, they're simplistic like that.
I am now upset that like 90% of Thuun's character is just out the window for the novelization
Not really. There are ways.
And why COULDN'T I just spawn life? You specifically stated just now that I GREW legs. Granted apparently that's because genetics, but whateves, I could just grab a wasp and run some "detect" style Life magic through it and discover, if not what genes are, at least the general idea of how to grow one. Then its just "change piece of lung into wasp-cancer"....oh god, wasp-cancer is like the worst thing possible in all worlds.
But yeah, failing that, the summoning thing works too. But couldn't I summon them INSIDE someone? It just kinda loses that sadistic edge if they aren't eating them from the inside out.))
I didn't mention it before, but Thuun is looking kinda wasted away right now. Plus a lot of the mass came from the lovely, fertile soil you were so dutifully rolling around in.
Summoning is a possibility. You could, if you were
really good at summoning and thus able to do it where you couldn't actually see.
But you couldn't twist their lungs into wasps. Each magical element takes a state of mind - have you watched Avatar? You need stubbornness to master earth, drive to master fire, and so on. Life magic comes from your desire to heal. It is literally sourced from that. So the very act of trying to fuck nature in the ass and give someone lungwasps is impossible with Life magic. And no amount of rationalising will save you. This power is sourced directly from a Goddess and it is by Her will that the constraints are set on the elements. If you test your will against the Goddess you lose.