spnanonhaven

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#84

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ayrt

Presumably! The story of him being found by his human adoptive parents involves an adult member of his species who was dying, but I (and the Collinses) don't know what it was dying from. I don't know if Misha is vulnerable to old age, but you could incinerate him, for example. If you killed both brain tentacles, either the whole hive would die, or it would persist as a nonsentient collective, or it would persist as a nonsentient collective and eventually produce some new brain tentacles and essentially become a new person, with a mixed selection from Misha's declarative and procedural memory and potentially with a substantially different personality.

This is one of those areas of the worldbuilding where I'm aware of the possibilities but don't have strong preferences, and nobody in the story will know any of the answers, so it isn't important for me to make up my mind.

Misha can send his tentacles off to do things, but individually they are pretty stupid. To him this feels like your foot falling asleep.

sa

Misha is as smart as an extremely smart human who is constantly using 20-30% of his attention to perform complex life-or-death tasks that don't come naturally to him (looking and acting human), which leaves him about as smart as a smart human who is kind of distractable and doesn't want to talk to you. Each of his two largest brains, taken individually, are about as smart as a frustrating human who displays flashes of cleverness and insight but is crashingly ignorant of half the things he thinks he knows about and takes forever to elucidate a point.

So if he's spread out, he doesn't lose consciousness or forget who he is, but the "worker" tentacles are basically dumb animals and the brain tentacles would be confused and scared.

... I just made myself sad for Misha's poor woobie distributed thought apparatus. Christ.

da

... I just made myself sad for Misha's poor woobie distributed thought apparatus. Christ.

Everything about this AU so far delights me. I don't know how likely it is that you'll be able to elucidate this to degree of detail in the story proper, but know that I am totally enthralled with what you have devised here so far. Hopefully it won't come to Misha getting scattered around and all his tentacles being confused and scared and probably cut off from some of their usual sensory inputs (unless the tentacles are uniform in receiving different kinds of information?).

To that end, do certain magnetic, auditory or radio waves (like microwaves) affect him at all? And/or does he have perceptions that perfectly overlap human perceptions or does he say, have no sense of taste or something?

da

Given that most of his sensory apparatus seems to be by contact and/or located on his surface, I bet his sense of taste is way better than ours. Ditto smell and touch. OTOH, sight seems to me like it would be a less natural sense for him to use. Maybe he's near-sighted. Maybe he wears glasses.

WHERE THE FUCK ARE HIS ACTUAL EYES?

da

I bet he has photoreceptors everywhere.

(not the OP, so it's just a guess, but damn, this thread is the best thread on meme for a LONG LONG TIME I had to participate. XD)

ALSO, WHAT IS HIS REACTION TO PESTICIDES? CAN HE MANAGE SPEECH IN TENTACLE FORM? HOW THICK AND THIN DO HIS TENTACLES GROW? DOES HE HAVE ANY MUCUSY TENTACLES? DOES HE HAVE EYE STALKS?

WHAT ARE THOUGHTS ON HENTAI????

Man, hentai could really frell with your self-esteem if you had tentacles.

/drive-by Farscape love

sa

/gets home from work, naps, wakes up, naps, comes back to conversation

I'm just going to reply to you all like this subthread was a single comment, because I don't know how to tag myself in this conversation (worldbuilding!anon?). :)

I don't know how likely it is that you'll be able to elucidate this to degree of detail in the story proper, but know that I am totally enthralled with what you have devised here so far.

A lot of this is never going to make it into the story. It's way more detail than the reader wants, and sciencewise it's over the head of Jensen, my perspective character. And I've been having a lot of fun talking about it, so thanks, all you enablers!

To that end, do certain magnetic, auditory or radio waves (like microwaves) affect him at all? And/or does he have perceptions that perfectly overlap human perceptions or does he say, have no sense of taste or something?

You know, I hadn't even thought about his relationship with the parts of the electromagnetic spectrum we can't perceive. This is a really important bit of thinking to do about his homeworld, too. Let me get back to you about that. Misha doesn't distinguish between tastes/smells and he's drawn to different smells than we are -- sugars attract him, but so does compost.

I bet he has photoreceptors everywhere.

Give that nonnie a cigar. He might actually receive visual information on multiple tracks, like luminance data from organs near his tentacles' central nerve clusters and color data from the entire surface of his skin, or something less overtly based on a recent theory about cephalopod vision. Seeing with his skin means that he has a massive field of vision and also a massive light-capturing array, but also that he can't do things like focus the way a creature with lenses; his neurology probably assigns a very different significance to visual data than ours does. I'll need to think about this more. He may be really bad at some sight-related tasks like reading at a distance, while on the other hand being able to get around unerringly in extremely low-light conditions; he probably explains this as some uncorrectable vision problem. Or maybe he requires braille and just presents as blind.

CAN HE MANAGE SPEECH IN TENTACLE FORM?

He has to construct a speech apparatus to speak, but doesn't have to be humanoid to do this, necessarily.

HOW THICK AND THIN DO HIS TENTACLES GROW?

The ones with his primary brains in them are thicker than the arm of a weedy college student. The narrowest ones are in the region of a few millimeters.

DOES HE HAVE ANY MUCUSY TENTACLES?

Some, but he doesn't ooze all over the place all the time.

DOES HE HAVE EYE STALKS?

Nope!

WHAT ARE THOUGHTS ON HENTAI????

Tentacle porn, which overwhelmingly involves monsters not actually that much like him (lots of gnashing teeth and deliberate grotesqueness) raping crying women and, much less frequently, men, makes him profoundly frightened and ashamed. Positively-portrayed tentacle monsters are vanishingly rare in general. He gets stirrings of instinctive recognition and response when he sees them, in the same way you or I would respond in a hardwired way to a photograph of a smiling person even if we'd never seen a human before in our lives, and then they go around killing and raping people and being blown up and it's deeply alienating and horrible. He is aware intellectually that these depictions were created by people totally unaware of his existence and don't reflect on him in any way, but emotionally, he has trouble totally excluding them from his self-image. His adoptive human parents were smart and kept him away from most science fiction until he was relatively mature.

I've got a bit in my notes in which he catches Jensen trying to ramp up to propositioning him for sex by fearfully investigating tentacle porn, and it turns into an argument because both of them were freaking out about various sex-related things anyway and Misha is terrified of being perceived as a toothy rapemonster.

I've got a bit in my notes...

AWWW. Woobie!tentacled!Misha just wanna be loved. And Jensen wants to love him! And isn't sure how, always! Nonnie, you have no idea how much I want this scene now.

da

oh nonnie!!!! I LOOOOOOVE that response to hentai. This Misha is so real I can taste it!

(See? when meme is good, it's REALLY FUCKING AWESOME!!!!)

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#84

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