Page 558
on November 8, 2021
Colors aren’t foods until they are.
Fairies vs Tentacles
Silly webcomic about sexy fairies and naughty tentacles
Download the comic archive!
Download the bonus content!
Colors aren’t foods until they are.
Before Europeans discovered oranges, orange wasn’t a color. There was no name for the color between red and yellow, but oranges were so consistently the same distinct color that people started calling stuff orange colored.
Do Nihallaks convert high plane energy to mass? If they can regrow tentacles with out absorbing matter, they must, right?
They do. And they can convert nihillium back into high plane energy as well. That’s how they survived until they managed to find this new universe and the draigjibies, by cannibalizing themselves. Shrinking in numbers but surviving.
That is seriously dark…. and strangely realistic.
Does that mean they can do something similar to Ex in page 520 and dissolve monsters. Or can they only do that with undamaged Nihillium. Because that seems like a great food source for them, visit the dark forest and vacuum up all the nasties and “disolve” them.
… the chapter image might suggest they will JUST decide to try.
It’s grimdark if you picture nihallaks hunting each other hunger-game style, but think about more like generation ship. A human generation ship destined to travel between stars for, like, a thousand years would actually lose mass over time as raw materials, spare parts and fuel get consumed and turned into energy, heat, and blackbody radiation unless they catch rogue asteroids on the way. It would get “skinnier” as it migrate and eventually certain functions and restrictions would have to apply in the last stretch of the trip since you can’t possible account for every possible issues at the launch of a thousand years trip.
So for nihallaks, at first unessential system would get turned off or scraped, eventually smaller ships would get scrapped and their individual transferred to the main ship, etc at some point, they would promise X individual to be stored as data on the onboard system until they get the ressource to bring them back, and would recycle their bodies, just as they did on the current nihallak ship. It would keep going until they finally reach their destination, the Dreven system (where fairies currently live.)
As for whether they can recycle the damaged nihillium. Yes, but it’s not cost effective past a certain point, a bit like us recycling paper vs recycling plastic. At some point the process to separate the organic stuff from the nihillium cost more energy than it can give. Until they can figure out how to use regular matter for energy, it’s a bit moot.
The point that the nihallaks who get eaten are not actually dead but stored in computer is kinda important. They are, after all, closer to machines than living beings. Also, they seem to have rather strict hiearchy, I don’t expect much infighting between them …
But wait: Nihallaks were created only in Dreven system weren’t they? The ships traveling from the dead universe was filled with Kulthmam. Who were much closer to organic …
Organic-ish. At that point the kulthmas already had converted themselves and their entire civilization into nihillium. But yeah, they were not war machines, they had culture and art etc, but in the face of extinction, compromises must be made.
That is also why gingers are called “redheads”, despite their hair colour being more orange than red. The term is older than the word “orange”.
Also gold-haired or something, as during ancient times, due to impurities in the smelting process, gold frequently turned a reddish color. This is why many Greco-Roman texts, and even many texts from the Middle Ages, describe gold as “red”.
WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT, HOLD THE PHONE! DROP EVERYTHING! THIS IS IMPORTANT!
…what do they call oranges in they’re universe then?
Maybe basketballs 😄
My guess there are no oranges there – different world after all
My guess is there are no Fragaria × ananassa there either. Sure they have strawberries, but it’s in best case some different Fragaria species, more likely something which is, on genetical level, further away from our strawberries than strawberries from us.
Oranges? Hybrid between pomelo (Citrus maxima) and mandarin (Citrus reticulata), made by Chinese probably AFTER they already had iron? Unlikely. That would be about as likely as alien mothership computers being vulnerable to Mac-OS viruses.
Most of the fairy fauna and flora naming is very literal, as their culture is too small, recent and stagnant to have claimed words from other places and languages over time. The few “new” words and names they have was leftover from the draigjibies who’s culture was much older and complex.
As an author who wanted some creative space but not the burden of recreating an entire ecosystem from scratch, this allow me reuse some existing things with new purposes, like strawberries. In the real world that name is possibly a corruption of “strewn berries” because of how they grow they could seem strewn over the ground. But in the fairy worlds it would be more literal as those fruits seems to grow from straw-like shoots. As for oranges, they call them sunfruits.