The Galaxy Tales - Dirk B. (Page 32 of 49)

I don't see any benefit for Spirit of Wind. It reminds me too much of Star Trek Voyager with the Indian second in command with the tattoo. Like you said, he is faceless and the backstory serves no purpose in the overall plot.

How about Captain Maya?

Will look. Just gotta find some energy...

careful... he's Canuck now. "Cooked food" means poutines and beavertails

My freezer is full and I will tip the earth to the left. Challenge accepted

My next chapter, Apollo Gets Spanked, is up. This is mostly new unless you were around for my aborted v1.

Quick, go read!
Dirk

P.S. Counting my short story, I'm actually 2-3 posts ahead of some of you. How cool is that? Amy gets a pass because she's on chemo. As for the rest, I owe some reviews, so write something!

Not me. Mostly caught up in the marketing engine. And this current series is so very hard to write

4017 human cell replication problem:

As you may recall, Apollo burns off his arm in Act III and orders the doctor not to reattach the nerves when she regrows his arm, which takes only a few days. I can stretch the regrowth indefinitely timewise, since the arm is useless without the nerves, so he doesn't really need it right away for story purposes. However, I'd like him to have a normal working arm eventually, which means nerves can be regrown under the right circumstances.

The problem arises in my latest chapter, Apollo Gets Spanked. Apollo is forced to undergo an excruciating procedure to rapidly treat/heal many scourging wounds on his back without anesthesia. The procedure uses rapid cell replication to fill in and bind the wounds together like a zipper. But what makes it excruciating? Tentatively, I have the procedure burning away at existing nerves in adjacent healthy tissue.

These two forms of cell regrowth strike me as inconsistent. The first can regrow an entire arm, including nerves, whereas the second destroys nerves. The only reason I destroy nerves is to make the procedure painful. Can anyone suggest a different/better reason why treating the scourging wounds would be excruciating?

Thanks
Dirk

Caligula convinced Nero to forbid anesthesia for Apollo. He either has to live with the scourging scars or undergo the procedure while conscious. I even added a medication he has to sip to protect his vocal cords while he's screaming. The doctor tells him the medication is referred to as sewage by patients and that the stomach rejects it, causing the patient to vomit as much as they drink. Seabrass thought the medication was over the top. :-)

Now I just need a way to reconcile the two aforementioned medical procedures (one creates nerves while the other destroys them), all while making the scourging treatment excruciating. One option would be for the scourging treatment to cause pain by some other mechanism than burning existing nerves in nearby healthy tissues.

Amy, help!

Did you make that up, or is it based on science? Either way, it's good.

When you say all the pain receptors trigger at once, what is 'all' in this case. Assume an instrument like a dental drill, maybe 1/4 inch in diameter at the tip. Given the size of the instrument, I would assume it's comparable to being burned non-stop with a candle flame. Although I've never experienced that (!), I wonder if a 1/4 inch steady burn would cause pain so bad that you're screaming. I could have there be a lingering burning in the new tissue.

Your suggestion leads me to think I should replicate nerves as well, since that would allow for additional pain triggers. That would be consistent with growing the arm, too.

Personally, I like the foul-tasting medication, vomiting, etc. for his vocal cords. It's a bit of a nonsense chapter.

I'm going to put some of that in. The biggest improvement is that I now have consistent growth of nerve cells across both medical scenes.

Thanks, njc.
Dirk

Interesting. I'm going to wave my space opera wand and ignore that bit. At least until everybody reads it and tells me to get rid of it. :-)