2.1.24
on March 18, 2024
at 3:00 am
the food pyramid is a different shape if you’re maybe kinda biologically immortal
Aurora
A fantasy webcomic. Updates M-W-F.
the food pyramid is a different shape if you’re maybe kinda biologically immortal
For mobile readers.
Alt-text: sorry for making you manually breathe by reading this
Image source: dragon
joke’s on you.
whenever someone tricks me into breathing manually i just hold my breath
Do you forget about breathing manually before you run out of air, or do you just pass out from oxygen deprivation and when you wake up, you’ve forgotten about it?
Now that I think about it, either way would work. You sir are a genious!
Tumblr text: theorizing!
Twitter Text: thinking about breathing and stuff
Twitter text: thinking about breathing and stuff
(sorry, this just feels important to me)
yall remember that first excerpt about constructs? somewhere around erins introduction? how they could eat, but not digest? about how they *couldnt heal?*
well i do, and im pretty sure it said that constructs took stuff from other parts of their to “heal”, which would make them lighter. among other things.
I enjoy manually breathing, for some reason, it’s calming!
Our trio of amateur scientists will try an bust this myth wide open!
A chemist, a biologist, and a physicist walk into a bar…
I just love them all!
Nothing like talking about the interesting biology of your friends.
Scientific analysis on the effect food has on the natural healing capabilities of a demigod.
-A Research paper by Dainix, Falst, and Tess.
BA Hons right there!
Erin and Terren trying to claim co-author credit
The paper is just published by “Ruunaser et al” and Tess and Erin are arguing over which of them it is
That gets me thinking. Has Erin ever actually gotten anything published, that we know of?
I mean, probably. He has some kind of academic status, and if that’s connected to publishing things it’s sort of implied. But if not, we have the opportunity for something extremely funny.
Maybe in supplementary material, but I’m sure nothing in the comic itself by this point has given a definitive implication either way. I have the unsupported impression that he hadn’t published anything unless you count coursework, and reaching the heart of The Storm was set to be some kind of graduation thesis.
Let’s gooo! the group is here and putting together some theories. Aside from that, I see we will see more food. Man it’s neat hwo thsi group of stranger sis coming together.
I think my favorite part of this conversation is the fact that all three of the people who’d have *any* clue as to the accuracy of their guesses are missing it.
Is food a need only when Blondie’s hurt?
And other needs, so let’s a theory assert!
Gods, it’s been ages since I called him Blondie last.
Yess, detective skills at work!
I wonder just how funny Red thought Friday’s comment section was… we talked about the exact same thing that this page is about.
“Drowning isn’t particularly restful,” cautions Dainix
Kendal was by a Chimera choked,
Quick Falst points out, and on the next day
He slept, his exhaustion provoked.
“Erin said Kendal’s got no Dragon in him,”
Muses metal-caste Tess, so perhaps
The need to consume comes from the Void
And likewise the need for naps.
But pure-made Kendal seems self sufficient,
Except when he is hurt.
When Falst points out that he’s injured now,
Tess and Dainix act in concert.
They plan together to test the hypothesis
On Kendal, hurt by the fight.
Angrily Falst complains, “It’s gonna take
SO LONG to see if we’re RIGHT!”
Imagine if after careful testing, their hypothesis is disproven.
Also, first four-stanza page of volume two.
This is so impressive. Genuinely how do you write these every time. This fan base is crazy.
Also, this is the lame spelling of Chimaera.
Tosh! It reads well I think @Ballad! Have faith in your pace! I thought your Rhyme went well!
reddddddd you have cursed me with manual breathinggg
Okay, this is cool as hell.
Anonymous Aurora Question #49: If breathing, sleeping and eating were optional for the floof squad, who would sleep, eat and breathe how much and why?
erin would not do any of those. at all. alinua’d probably at least breathe and eat? tess’d do all of them. idk abotu the others
Falst- never and the squad would have to force feed him when he’s injured
Dainix- he’d do it anyway trying to set a good example that gets completely ignored by the rest
Alinua- she would but I think she’d forget to some of the time
Erin- would do none of these things and use this ability to use night for free reading time (hello night owl bookworms)
Tess- doesn’t, just because she can, but breathes really loudly when she does sleep purely to annoy Erin, who is trying to read
Maybe Alinua would sleep to make if easier to talk with Life? She’ll also eat foods she finds interesting like the blue melon from an earlier chapter
Falst would never sleep/eat but the others will force him too
Tess would still eat cause foos delicous
Erin would not sleep to avoid the risk of giving Walter a opening to take over while unconscious
I feel like they would all cut back on breathing, eating, and sleeping, each according to their own self-destructive tendencies:
Kendal clearly already doesn’t do these things, mainly because he doesn’t understand how to continue living.
Falst would actively choose not to. Because FALST. Because apprently needing to eat, sleep, and breathe makes him a liability.
Erin would keep reading, working, and studying through the night.
Dainix would keep training through the night as well.
Alinua would stay up trying to make everyone else go to sleep.
Tess would eat, sleep, and breathe just because she wants to.
If he could Erin would not sleep so he could discover more interesting information. Tess, energy bunny that she is, would go without sleep to travel more places. Falst would not eat so he never get poisoned or starved out. Dainix would not drink so the fire inside him would not go out. Alinua would want to eat to give back to the soil, sleep to hang out with Primordial Life and breath to take in air Kendal breathed out. I sure hope remembers to those things so she can keep writing and drawing for a long time!
Red that is.
Falst in the last panel is me whenever the teachers are slow grading my stuff
And when you finally get the test back you forgot you wrote it in the first place, or you never get it back
(Theres a test I wrote at the beginning of LAST SEMESTER that I never got back)
Oh my god my English teacher literally takes a month to grade EVERYTHING and it’s the worst thing ever
On the flip side of the manually breathing thing, this page DID remind me to grab a snack and some water!
So he only breathes when fighting in talking. Talking makes sense since thats essetially vibrating air to produce noise, you need to breath to do that, thats why you cant talk when you’re choking.
Maybe Kendal normally has enough ‘energy’ to sustain himself during everyday life, but as soon as he’s injured the body needs extra energy to fix the injury. Hence why Kendal might need to eat and sleep after fighting (or specifically, getting injured. That would also mean breathing needs to happen to get in extra oxygen needed to break down the calories from the food via respiration. (and also to release the product from that process CO2 afterward). Thats why he breathes while fighting.
TLDR The last 2 pages scratched the biology part of my brain the right way
I’m being pedantic about this but your body doesn’t turn O2 into CO2, that would take way too much energy. You turn O2 to H2O to transport electrons and you turn Biological fuel into CO2 during various digestion processes as a byproduct of breaking down the fuel. You also retain a portion of CO2 to maintain blood pH to keep the oxygen affinity of the hemoglobin functioning optimally, which is why when you are hyperventilating you pass out, your hemoglobin suddenly can’t grab oxygen since there isn’t enough carbonic acid because you’re breathing out all your CO2. We just equate the two functions because they happen to use the same orifice in opposite directions.
I never said O2 gets turned into CO2. I just said he needs to breathe so respiration could take place when energy is needed.
I admit in my comment I heavily simplified the process of respiration for the sake of brevity
I also absolutely misread your comment and apologize heavily for implying you didn’t know how the body works.
No problem heroic lich, i was afraid i miss communicated my thoughts for second
This is really interesting…and if these three start mother-henning Kendal, that would be both adorable and hilarious. Meanwhile, Erin’s “someone-is-doing-science-without-me” senses start tingling XD
What are friends for if not to test scientific hypotheses?
-Erin, probably
Oh my gosh I love the Kendal care team <4
Me too! Also, I feel like Alinua, Tess and Dainix will probably be the “mums” of the group, reminding the others to eat and sleep (and helping them breathe if/when they have a panic attack), but would need reminding themselves from the other “group mums”.
Also, love your user name! PJO has been my main fandom obsession for a few years now
They should ask their resident Life expert to take a peak into Kendal’s innards and see what the food is actually doing in his stomach and intestines. Is it being store there for future use, or is it being drawn into the rest of the body and being stored as fat cells until it’s needed? How, EXACTLY, is the ‘fuel burning’ happening, and how does it compare to a standard human like Erin?
Awwh they’re taking care of their boy!
Is that in comic or out of comic, Falst?
With the current pacing, the former usually also constitutes the latter.
i love the three newest party members trying to figure out their pseudo-leaders weirdness within like a day of knowing him. ali and erin are both just “that’s our friend :)” and these three are clawing at the walls trying to figure him out…
nice to know Aurora people don’t do cellular respiration
There once was a boy of steel
Who didn’t need to eat a meal
Unless he gets hurt.
But his friends are alert
And get what he needs to heal.
This whole page is so fascinating and heartwarming and I am here for it! Also, there’s a whole lot more talking in this one than usual.
College lowkey (I have to bug my friends till they remember to eat)
So does the food just kinda chill out in his stomach when he eats it and only get used when he’s fighting or…?
That’s the other reason Kendal feels so much lighter now. Somebody taught him to poop.
Gad, what if Argist has some form of indoor plumbing? Can you imagine Falst and Kendal trying to figure out what a toilet is, like Crocodile Dundee in the first movie?
Can you imagine how Erin would give them an unnecessarily detailed explanation of the technomagical engineering involved?
I notice that Falst nommed like an entire Pastry inbetween the last two panels
A growing boy
My silly prediction of the next page:
Kendal: “Why are you swaddling me like an infant and spoon-feeding me soup”
Falst, Tess, and Dainix: “For science”
Ok, having studied biochem I have some serious questions about Kendal’s body. How do his muscles work if they aren’t using ATP to move? How does he maintain homeostasis without NADH to activate thermoneogenisis? Does is body put a kabash on his cell reproduction until his body needs new cells? That seems like there would be serious problems? How does his eyes reset the light receptors after they get activated? Does his body stop free radicals? How does his body move around electrons? Which of these functions are even necessary? He clearly has red blood so he’s getting oxygen into his body, but does that mean he’s using the oxygen only when needed? In that case how is he maintaining proper pH levels when he exhales out CO2?
I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS!
Well, this is a world where fire and lightning are physical substances, so we can’t go too in depth with real world science. If I had to guess, his body is somehow tapping into background soul energy, since gods are consciousnesses composed of that energy. He can use that power in place of whatever processes normal organics do (since Oxygen and CO2 don’t exist here) but if he needs to do strenuous stuff or replace missing parts of himself his body has what it needs.
Metaphorically, he can generate ATP with zero point energy and so respiration is switched off until he needs more than that can supply.
Yes it’s fantasy but the comic can’t simply drop “at a constant homeostasis that doesn’t require outside resources” and NOT expect me to get needlessly theoretical about how on earth that’s possible.
Keep in mind also that Kendal is, biologically, not human— it’s entirely plausible that the explanation for all that is “Vash didn’t make him like that”. One of the defining characteristics of gods, after all, is their supernatural nature. Who says that first extend to Kendal?
*doesn’t extend
Sorry for being a grammar ****, but shouldn’t it be “I didn’t use to!” rather than “I didn’t used to!”?
Maybe he’s powered by that blue fire ability?
In which Tess, Dainix, and Falst invent Auroran Mythbusters: Our Weird Pal Specifically Edition
I love this, where we actually see characters talking about other members of the party and legit trying to figure out how they work.
Its also a masterful way to throw in some exposition, or mislead us if they are wrong!
I do love how quickly everyone got distracted with planning experiments to do on Kendal. It’s a good thing Erin doesn’t know otherwise Kendal would be undergoing a very strenuous testing regime over the sea voyage.
I will now Manually breathe every time I look at this page. Thanks Red.
I relate with Falst
Wait, but the void Dragon only created humanoids, becouse he wanted to control them, the Twins made all the flora and fauna, basically for fun, and all animals, plants need good top?
But we don’t know much about the Twins, but we do know they’re very meticulous (ecosystems are complicated irl, so probably are in Aurora), so maybe they included the biological processes to keep energy and resources flowing through the various ecosystems? Idk, just a thought
Ah the scientific process strikes once again
Erin would be proud :,)
“It’s going to take so long to see if we’re right.” You’re about to go on a long sea voyage. It’s good to have a hobby to fill the time.
It’s really funny to me that this is going on while Erin isn’t there XD
The way that Falst looked suspicious of the bun in panel two XD
“yo dawg, you got that dragon in you?!”
So the void dragon is entropy and everyone who’s not divine is affected? Fun way to give real world physics meaning in the fantasy world without all that pesky math. The heroes get to literally fight Entropy!
Falst’s pastry keeps disappearing and reappearing. Is he just constantly dropping it into the hammock? So frustrated, he can’t hang onto food. Lol. XD
TL;DR: But that’s just a theory… A demigod theory!
Sorry for being out so long, balancing college and a job has been more stressful this semester than last and to say it’s taking a toll on me would be an understatement.
With me it’s grad school/work, but a similar deal: it’s a lot. It is so much. You have my utmost sympathies. Hang in there.
Thanks.
Casually fleshing out the lore, combined with healthy concerns for the friend who doesn’t seem to remember they have limitations? Wonderful!
does this mean that erin consumes more due to,,,,, the entire dragon in him?
I think this kinda makes sense. If Kendal has zero Void, then he’d only need to consume to replenish any matter lost. He would need to sleep, though, because just existing costs energy. But maybe because his body doesn’t have the whole constantly-metabolising thing going on, he doesn’t spend as much energy daily?
Just some brain food.
Consider this an upvote, you just laid out exactly the point I was going to
Re: apology for causing manual breathing: I Actually hadn’t thought of it and started manually breathing. I was totally detached from the thought…till you said something in the tooltip!! 😉