Sol 24
MISSION LOG – SOL 24
Well, the cave farm project just ran into a problem. Actually, problem is the wrong word, because NASA uses the word “problem” to describe an issue that can be overcome. This is more of a “contingency”, which is what NASA calls it when the only thing you can do is sweep up the debris and begin the investigation.
The dirt doubling went well. The ponies have been watering the dirt regularly, twice a day, using their spacesuits. I’ve committed two-thirds of the stockpiled water to the soil- two hundred liters total- but levels in the water reclaimer’s tanks are rising from humidity taken out of the air. If this keeps up we’ll eventually have damp, fertile soil and full water tanks as well.
I’ve been doing a lot of EVAs recently, what with the cave and salvaging the pony ship and all, so I decided to stay indoors today. I had those soil samples from the cave to analyze, and I need to think about how we were going to turn the cave into a farm anyway.
My biggest concern about the cave was air. That cave is a giant geode, and geodes are porous- otherwise the water couldn’t get inside and, duh, you wouldn’t get a geode. The good news is, it’s not Swiss-cheese porous, and most of the cave is buried under several feet of compacted sand and permafrost. But a billion microscopic holes will leak air just as efficiently as one really big hole, and I hadn’t come up with a solution for that. Still haven’t.
But the soil samples changed my priorities. Air is no longer my biggest problem. My biggest problem, to put it in numbers, is 2.3% perchlorates. Or, to be more accurate, 1.5% potassium perchlorate and 0.8% magnesium perchlorate in the two deepest samples, with the more shallow samples tapering off to a low of 1.2% combined perchlorates.
Still: shit.
The perchlorate-eating bacteria in my Earth soil are reducing the perchlorates in the Martian soil we’ve brought in here because the soil is shallow (which allows for oxygen to penetrate through the whole layer) and because the perchlorates are comparatively low. By the time the bacteria manage to get down deep enough to eliminate all those perchlorates thirty centimeters down in the dirt, the ponies will be out of their food packs and possibly out of all the vegetarian options in my food packs. We can’t wait that long.
“But Mark,” you say, “don’t you only need the topsoil?” With potatoes that would be true; their root system is shallow. But alfalfa is just the opposite. A mature alfalfa plant sends down roots an average of five meters in depth, and can go twice that far in search of groundwater if necessary. Here in the Hab I can maybe counter for that by providing tons of water at the surface, but in the cave there’s no Hab floor to stop the roots. They’re going to go down as far as we can heat the soil, and they’re going to bring back up whatever they find- including those toxic perchlorates.
So, right this minute, the cave farm idea isn’t looking so hot. I’m sitting down now considering my non-cave farming options.
The Hab floor is already covered with dirt. I don’t want to fill the airlocks, because in case of emergency I might want to use those as secure storage areas. They all have automatic cutoff valves on their air lines in case the Hab ruptures so that whatever air is inside them will stay there. I could repurpose the bunks and worktables for more surface area at two square meters each, give or take, but that would put the ponies out, and anyway I want a clean bed and a clean worktable for myself.
I need at least one rover operating to get me to the Ares IV MAV four years from now, and for safety’s sake I need to keep both intact. Something in one or the other might break, and the only spares I have are two spare wheels with motors. Farming in them is no go, especially since the interiors are about the same as a large van- not more than three square meters each of space.
But each rover has a pop-tent in case of emergencies. The pop-tent is built to automatically deploy from the rover’s airlock in under a second, using the rover’s air to inflate. And once inflated the pop-tent’s interior is a lot roomier than the rover’s interior- with a floor that almost precisely ten square meters in size. So that’s twenty square meters more farmland.
Problem: thanks to Not Invented Here, the rover and pop-tent airlocks aren’t compatible with the Hab airlocks. I should be grateful, though- pop-tents are for emergency use only and are intended to be used only once. I don’t know if it was NASA paranoia or the contractor’s mix of genius and idiocy that made them give the pop-tents their own independent airlocks, but whatever it was, I’m grateful. They’re crappy airlocks- nothing more than two doors and a couple of hand-valves, and they’re inefficient as hell- but they’ll make it possible for me to convert them into food production.
Better yet, they come with separate air valves that are compatible with the Hab’s exterior air links, because NASA absolutely insisted that all hoses, valves and cables be standardized. That means the pop-tents can run on the Hab’s heat- no supplemental heating required. The interior lighting isn’t as good, but I think it’s good enough. Better than nothing, anyway.
The only other thing I have is the MDV. The storm, and the debris from the antenna farm, absolutely wrecked it. One of the landing legs is collapsed, and there’s four separate holes in the hull. And the space inside is tiny anyway. It was made as light as humanly possible and just barely large enough to get six human beings from Mars orbit to the ground safely, with seventy-two hours of life support in case of major problems setting up the HAB or launching the MAV. I could waste half my spare Hab canvas (6 sq. m, for emergency repairs only) re-sealing the MDV, but considering the small interior and the lack of convenient air and heat, it’s not worth it.
All that leaves is the pony ship. The engineering section has that big hole in the deck, and I can’t patch that without removing the entire outer hull in that section. Even then it could blow out at any time. That leaves the flight deck and the mid-deck. I’ll have to measure to be accurate, but call it forty meters of surface area. It has incandescent bulbs and windows for lighting. It can’t be hooked to the Hab’s air or heat, and I don’t know what heater systems it has with its main life support offline. But if it’s the difference between starving and not starving, we’ll make it work somehow.
So- if the pony ship can be made into a second greenhouse, that brings me up to a total of approximately 152 m2 of farmland. The question is: will that be enough? If not, how much time will it buy us? I’ll work on that tomorrow.
For tonight it’s more Partridge Family. Last night Starlight used her magic to ask me where the people were that were laughing now and again. I had to tell her I didn’t know. Then she asked me why they were laughing, and I had to admit I didn’t know that either.
MISSION LOG – SOL 25
Transcript: conversation between Mark Watney and Starlight Glimmer:
STARLIGHT: Good mor-ning, Mark! (note: spell is not active yet- Starlight actually said this in English! She’s picking up more words! And her pronunciation is pretty good!)
WATNEY (trying to say the pony equivalent of “good morning”: Bo-rIIIYYneduh!
STARLIGHT: (rubs head with hoof, then stands on hind legs to put same hoof on my mouth) Don’t. (Note: English again.)
WATNEY: That bad?
STARLIGHT: Yes. Bad-bad. What do morning?
WATNEY: There’s a big problem with turning the cave into a farm. I’m trying to figure out if we can do without it. (Note: This was too much for Starlight, and she turned on the translation magic. I repeated it.)
STARLIGHT (translation): What was problem? Help I possible?
WATNEY: Not unless you can get several tons of perchlorates out of soil.
STARLIGHT: Say word again. (turns off spell)
WATNEY: Per-chlor-ates.
STARLIGHT (reactivates spell): What be by-made-of-green? Why you want? (Note: Starlight said “perchlorates” in English, and the spell tried to translate it anyway, as “by-made-of-green”.)
WATNEY: Don’t want. I want to get rid of ‘em. They’re toxic chemicals. Poisonous.
STARLIGHT: Chemicals? (turns off spell, fetches whiteboard and marker, draws out chemical notation for sucrose- well, symbol-12, symbol-11, symbol-22, so I assume sucrose- a model of a water molecule, and organic molecule chains for butane and ethyl alcohol) Draw! (Note: Starlight’s favorite English word so far.)
WATNEY (signals for spell, waits): Do you know the periodic table?
STARLIGHT: (shuts off spell, spends a couple moments mumbling to herself, then brightens as she works it out) Yes! (draws a very quick and rough outline that mostly matches the normal periodic table, but no details)
WATNEY: (calls up reference app on computer, pulls up periodic table for Starlight’s benefit, then writes “K Cl O4” and draws a potassium perchlorate graph with the potassium ion hanging off the perchlorate molecule; then: “Mg ((Cl O4) X 2)” and a magnesium ion flanked by two perchlorate molecules)
STARLIGHT: (looks at periodic table, at my drawings, scribbles something in her own language at bottom of whiteboard) Yes fix! (Note: again, no translation spell.)
WATNEY: You mean you can fix this?
STARLIGHT: Slow. (another favorite of Starlight’s in the last couple of days)
WATNEY (spacing words out carefully): You-can-fix-this?
STARLIGHT: Can-fix-this. Yes.
WATNEY: You can remove perchlorates from tons of soil?
STARLIGHT: (turns spell back on): Idea I have. Need work time on it. Done be it can, don’t worry!
(Starlight’s looking tired at the point, so I signal to end the conversation.)
I should have asked her about the air problem. That’s almost as urgent, really. I’ll have to carry air in tanks to the cave and release it, and then I’ll have to bring Mars air into the Hab for the oxygenator and atmospheric reclaimer to make breathable.
I have a plan to do that. The MAV spends years on the surface of Mars making its own fuel by combining hydrogen brought from home with carbon from Mars's atmosphere. The fuel plant is in the landing stage, so the crew left it behind when they launched, and it survived the storm intact. That means I have a machine that will compress Martian air into liquid and store it in a tank. If I want oxygen I have to release the air in the Hab and let the oxygenator work on it, but that's doable. The problem is, it’s a slow process, and if we plug the cave and air still leaks out faster than we can bring it in, there’s no point.
But obviously Starlight has a magic solution on her mind. I’ve noticed that her first reaction to any major problem is to whip out the old Box of Sparkly Lights and Shit. I especially noticed that the other day when she accidentally turned a pebble into a bullet and came within twenty degrees of aim of putting a hole in the Hab canvas. I have no clue what kind of “science” she was trying, but I’m glad she didn’t try it twice.
It’s pretty obvious that her crewmates already know about her magic-mania. A lot of their arguments are making a bit more sense in retrospect. The gauge on those batteries barely rises overnight, and I’ve seen myself just how fast that charge can be burned off. Obviously they want her to save the magic for really important things.
“Aw, but all the other unicorns back in Pony-land get to have neato magic all the time!” “We’re not in Pony-land now, are we? Now eat your gruel and get back to scrubbing the dirt!” “Aw, you never let me have any fun…”
Yeah, I know that’s not up to the usual rapier wit you’ve come to expect from intrepid space explorer Mark Watney. The truth is, I’m not in the mood. I just finished crunching some numbers, and the news is even worse than I thought.
A mature stand of alfalfa, under normal proper care, will produce about three and a half short tons of fodder per acre per harvest. The four ponies, being a lot smaller than Earth horses, only require about two pounds of food per day. (I’m counting Dragonfly, even if she almost never eats. How is she not starving? She looks just as energetic and healthy as the day they arrived. Must ask Starlight.) I did the math, and if I don’t allow for any safety margin whatever, 220 square meters would be enough to feed the four of them from one harvest to the next.
Note I said them, and not them plus me. I can’t eat alfalfa. Oh, I could eat the leaves, but not the stems. My gut can’t digest the cellulose. I’m assuming theirs can, and so far none of them has done anything to discourage me on that point. No, for me it’s potatoes, potatoes, and more potatoes, once the food packs run out.
But the thing is, remember yesterday’s math? If we convert everything that will hold air and carry dirt except for our bunks, our tables, the airlocks and the rovers, that only gets us to roughly 152 square meters. That’s not enough even if Dragonfly turns out to be a magic bug that lives off of sunshine and hugs. And even then, that would leave a grand total of no square meters for me to plant potatoes in.
So, what happens if I go the other direction, abandon the alfalfa, and plant nothing but potatoes? Sure, the plants and non-tuber roots are all poisonous, but I’ve seen the ponies shove their noses into mashed potatoes with gravy from my food packs with no problems. (I haven't told them how the gravy is made.) I’m assuming the tubers are safe for them.
With potatoes the math gets worse. Sure, I can cram potato plants on top of one another until there’s more spud than dirt underfoot come harvest time- it’ll destroy the soil after a few harvests, but I can do it. But absolute best case scenario, I figure, is about 2200 potatoes every sixty to seventy days. That’s about 5500 calories per day between harvests, as long as the soil holds out. It would work fine for just me, and maybe all right for three people if we tightened our belts and spent all day in bed.
But 1100 calories per person is sub-survival levels. It’s starvation. And after a week at that level we wouldn’t be strong enough to tend the plants. So that’s no good.
And, by the way, all of these estimates are based on the most optimistic yield. It’s based on the total absence of parasites or diseases and on constant daily attention to the plants. If I can’t convince the alfalfa to grow properly despite the shallow soil, or if the potatoes refuse to grow tubers because the soil’s too crowded, or if any number of other things go wrong, all the numbers I just threw out there go down, not up.
The goal of all this has to be to grow food faster than we can eat it, so we have a reserve when the food runs out or something happens or, eventually, when the soil depletes itself. That’s the biggest long-term problem. The alfalfa will help with that by fixing nitrogen, but it sucks up loads of potassium and phosphorus. The dirt around the Hab has both of those in abundance in the form of billion-year-old volcanic ash, but it’s not an infinite supply. In deep soil, bacterial action will bring some replacement minerals up from below, but the Hab can’t hold deep soil. When this dirt goes dead, we have to have enough food to last us the rest of the way to rescue.
The Hab won’t be enough. Perchlorates or not, we need that cave.
I just noticed something: Dragonfly can do magic, too. I just saw her levitating a marker like Starlight sometimes does. Her magic is green, not light blue like Starlight’s. Weird.
They’ve taken over the privacy curtain by the shit-box and are sketching out diagrams on it. Looks like they’re working on a procedure to remove the cargo airlock from their ship. Obviously they think they can make the cave airtight. Starlight certainly doesn’t seem to think the perchlorates will be a problem.
I just hope they’re right.
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I can't help but think some of his numbers are going to be thrown off by earth pony magic.
As little of it as Cherry Berry can use proficiently at any rate.
Replace old soil with new soil.
Also, just have to wait for someone to rescue them... not necessarily Earth.
Also, NASA has looked into ice domes. I haven't looked into it, but mixing water with dirt to create new permafrost might help seal up the cave. (Will need something to help insulate inside edge). As for heating, a certain rtg power plant could help.
8674041
permafrost for sealing the cave fails because of the heating required to sustain plantlife.
Can we get a look into how the equestrians are reacting to the disappearance of their ship?
8674039
replacing old soil with new soil fails because they cannot afford to wait as the new soil is de-perchlorate-ed without a food reserve to tide them over.
Real pity they couldnt grow potatoes or other crops on like strawberry towers or pocket tapestries, as in multiple verticle walls. Suprising just how dense cascading algae reactors can get, especially with the efficincy of algae.
For the geode, they could do with a sticky gas? hits the pores, sticks and closes the, eventually it all forms a layer? Then again, they aint going to get ethylene off potatoes?
Are bunk beds possible?
Nice to see Starlight (et al?) progressing with learning English, but what word was Mark trying to say (pony good-morning)?
Very curious to see what solution Starlight has for the perchlorate problem.
What they need to plug up the cave holes is a bunch of those tubes of flat tire goo.
Just spray it into the cave and presto! It'll get sucked into all the tiny holes and plug them right up!
(But they don't have that stuff...)
THAT'S NOT MY PROBLEM, NARRATOR ALONDRO!!!
Everything I know about learning a foreign language tells me that if it was just incorrect it would have led to a giggle. Starlight maybe serious, but humans (And pony's who are even more carefree and light hearted) tend to find mispronounced words or the wrong word in the wrong place funny.
So a part of me thinks Watney just said something insulting or discriminatory. Or am I barking up the wrong tree? And if so...what did he say?
Wonder if they will sustain themselves until ARES IV arrives. I kind of find myself hoping they keep Macgyvering for a few years until it arrives as opposed to getting off earlier like Mark did in the book. If only for the sake of this story being longer. Seriously I could read about them figuring stuff out on mars for ages!
8674130 Very possible. The book has very few details about the construction of the Hab, and the movie's more for looking good than practicality, but I know how I'd do it, given the book's premise of magic radiation-stopping, heat-insulating Hab canvas.
All the furnishings for inside the Hab would be in the form of interlocking carbon-fiber cabinets, wardrobes, etc. Setting up the Hab, the crew sets up the flooring first, the unpacks the cabinets and sticks them in their proper positions around the exterior of the Hab, and then erects the canvas on top of that. Of course the cabinets can't be removed again without cutting the Hab open, but why would you want to?
Of course, that's not how the book does it- the bunks are apparently free-standing and not more than two beds tall. But it's how I'd do it.
That’s not enough even if Dragonfly turns out to be a magic bug that lives off of sunshine and hugs.
8674087
Yeah, could we please get a scene of the Equestrians freaking out?
It'd be interesting to see.
Are changeling hive walls airtight?
8674189
Changling goo. Now there is an idea! I can see Mark's reaction to being told to start hugging Dragonfly more so she can make some goo.
8674085
Only if the permafrost is on the inside.
I actually think something like this might be doable. Seal off the cave, heat it up, and then boil a massive amount of water inside - enough to raise the pressure (since it's sealed). The pressure will force the steam through the microscopic holes, at which point the temperature and pressure will drop and it will freeze into the soil. Keep boiling water until the pressure in the cave stops going down. And since the ice would have several inches of cave wall between it and the warm cave, with the far subzero Martian soil next to it, it shouldn't melt (if it does, just boil more water).
I have no idea if that would work (you'd probably need a complex computer model) but it's the first idea that occurs to me. You'd need a massive amount of heat, though... might be a job for our old friend the radioisotope thermoelectric generator.
Edit: If they bring in the RTG I hope we get a scene of Watney standing between it and Dragonfly brandishing a shovel.
8674157
Interestingly enough, IIRC a major contributing factor to the reason Watney couldn't wait in the book was the Hydrazine explosion, so they might already be on course for better long term survival.
8674217
"If they bring in the RTG I hope we get a scene of Watney standing between it and Dragonfly brandishing a shovel"
Dragonfly is a smarter changeling. She wouldn't crack open a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator... Right?
I'm pondering those suits that are magically delivering water from Equestria. And we can control the flow. . . Somebody on the other end is maintaining and monitoring that water supply. Why can't they switch the flow on and off in a pattern, like Morse code, and send a message home? And if they could communicate, couldn't they arrange for a substitute fluid to be sent through instead of water? Like, say. . . milk or juice?
I don't want to see the story ruined with a too-easy magical solution, but even if this can't work, it might be interesting for them to explore why not, and exactly what the limitations are.
8674263 You're about the dozenth reader to come up with this idea, and it was in my original notes. It's coming.
But not milk or juice. The teleport handles air and water all right, but a percentage of the organic molecules tend to... violently disassociate. Milk or juice would come out as steaming hot puke... at high velocity.
That’s not enough even if Dragonfly turns out to be a magic bug that lives off of sunshine and hugs.
I wonder how much he'll freak when he finds it is exactly that?
If changeling magic is refueled by love he'll hug the stuffing out of that bug. As all the equestrians will, too.
"regularly, twicea day, using their spacesuits"
"regularly, twice a day, using their spacesuits"?
I had a thought today, and I feel the need to share it. You have been warned.
Chrysalis re-read the caption. Then she turned it upside down and read it again. She turned it right side up again. She blinked, hoping that her eyes were deceiving her. They weren't. On the cover, prominently attached to the caption stood a cartoonish image that may, at one point, have been based on the loose idea of CSP's lead pilot. Unfortunately her proportions were better likened to an exaggerated supermodel in a suit that made Wonderbolt uniforms look positively baggy. She stood, holding a
fishbowlhelmet under one leg, on a cratered and rocky surface somewhere in space. Behind her stood stylized versions of CSP's more prominent members (and a few she didn't recognize). Precisely none of them had vacuum appropriate gear on."OCCUPANT!!!"
A moment later a buck-toothed changeling poked his head through the door. "Yes, my queen?"
"What. Is THIS?!?" Chrysalis slapped the comic book down on her desk.
"A, um, a comic book? Cherry Berry: Astromare issue one, I believe."
"And why, pray tell, does it even exist?" the queen snarled.
Occupant fidgeted and did his best to hide the edges of a rather familiar comic book back under his vest without actually acknowledging its existence. "Well... you see... there was this contract, and um, it payed well and didn't require any expenditure on our part, and the other changelings all thought it was the best thing since the Fun Machine and I tried to not let word get out, but Lucky Cricket got past me with a proof copy and now they all want their own copies and then Goddard saw it and hasn't stopped cackling for two days and please don't tell Cherry."
Chrysalis held a level glare at the smaller changeling the entire time. She didn't even twitch when he nearly passed out from lack of breath. "Do you know what you've done? Every drone in the hive is going to want do do every half-baked, irresponsible, insane, impossible thing depicted in this wholly fictitious rag of lies! We get enough of that already! We don't need someone actively thinking up new ideas for them! At least it's just the one."
"Well... um... about that..."
[1] Tirek won. It sucked.
[2] Her home-built biplane.
[3] The CSP prototype crew module had failed to meet some9 of her expectations.
[4] Chrysalis had not been as prepared for her first ride in the centrifuge as she had hoped.
[5] Several members of non-pony species within the CSP management hold more more changelings under their authority than Cherry does as a pilot.
[6] Rockets: barely controlled explosion in a tube.
[7] Comments made after her return suggest that she felt additional testing of the Sparkle Drive should probably have been performed before use on a crewed flight.
[8] Moving at 33 times the speed of sound does impressive things to the air.
[9] All of them, even a number of them she didn't even realize she had.
I wanted to work in a joke about Chrysalis secretly loving the comic book, but couldn't figure out how to make it work in the context of this single scene. Ideally, she'd occasionally be spotted reading them surreptitiously.
8674152
The difference between a person messing up another person language and a person messing up pony language is simple: it's really, really hard to imitate horse noises with humanoid vocal chords. Imagine trying to speak english without moving your tongue, and that's probably the closest equivalent to a human trying to speak equestrian.
8674309 Dragonfly gets two hugs per day and the best thoughts each crew member can muster. Mark hasn't commented on this yet because, so far as he knows, group hugs are just a regular pony thing. And he's not entirely wrong.
8674337 God, that made me laugh. Excellent work.
8674136
Solar wind in general is much weaker than it used to be when the sun was younger. If Mars were suddenly regained an atmosphere... it would be substantial until around the time the sun is in its expansion phase started swallowing up planets.
8674085
Yeah. As I said, the inner layer would have to be insulated... thermal blankets or something to keep the cold side cold and warm side warm....
Heck they probably would have to use thermal blankets to even have a chance of heating the area... basically inside a giant heat sink.
If nothing else could use the ice to seal it up airtight, then... I don't know, can the changling make construction gunk in this fan-canon? Apply that on the inside, while temps are still freezing, but have atmosphere so buggy doesn't die.
Dude I just realized you're only a little over two weeks into this and you're already at roughly half the word count of the original book. You're an absolute madman!
8674471
Ikr! Its at this point gonna be a straight up novel (once its done he/she needs to get it published as an actual book)
8674391
Glad you liked it! The caption ran through my head early this morning, but I couldn't get to a computer to type it out until I got home and then the following scene with Chrysalis and Occupant just grew in after. Feel free to make use of it, should the occasion arise.
Mark needs to show Starlight the chemical formula of that super-epoxy used to seal suit breaches.
Come on, NASA. You send a dozen supply rockets to Mars ahead of the mission, but you don't include a barrel or two of Loctite?
Stuck on a Glacier With Macgyver
"We got belt buckles, and shoe laces, and a piece of gum. Build a nuclear reactor for crying out loud"
Starlight speaking English is adorable
I haven't seen it, but i "assume" that there is nitrogen in the martian soil and maybe air? I also "assume" that nitrogen fixing bacteria hitchhiked on the seeds of the alfalfa.Perchlorates can probably supply the K. Is there an abundant source of phosphorus? Are the trace minerals there, or really trace and not toxic? My brain cramps thinking about it. They need any and all mcguffins they can get and I'm still curious as to why they haven't thought of at least pulsing one air supply in an "sos" over a period of time. Something to let the folks back home know what happened. Also, the source of air must be monitored as telemetry and the home planet, ergo Twilight, should know they are alive. I would disable anything that would automatically shut off the air supply, even if the recipients had no way of knowing.
Too many variables for this back seat driver... º¹º
8675031 Mars's atmosphere is about 2.7% nitrogen. Mars's mostly volcanic soil is chock full of phosphates and most other minerals needed by plants; it's mainly lacking in organic compounds and nitrates.
On the farming - then grow alfalfa in the hab and potatoes in the cave. Two different farms with two different crops is both safer and healthier.
8674085
That is why you get it very hot and steaming. That way the steam pushes further out, creating the seal at a distance. With cooler temperatures for plant growth, the permafrost is hopefully far enough out to stay frozen.
I hope Starlight knows about the porousness problem. Especially if that has some bearing on the magical de-perchlorination. Still, better to try and fail than to play it safe and starve. With the first option, it's only uncertain death.
8674212
What did he call her before? An adorable nightmare xeno alien pony?
Kinda surprised the idea of using changeling slime to seal up the cave isn't suggested. Or maybe it's considered, privately by the ponies, but no one wants to say it out loud because it's so gross. Are we past that point? We already have the communal crap-box and no one's had a shower in weeks... what's one more thing on the gross-out pile?
This fic increased my iq by 200
8675263
Changeling goo has to be made with physical material - Dragonfly would need to eat a ton of food in order to seal the cave so that the cave can grow a ton of food. No tons of food, no tons of goo.
A Swiss cheese problem needs a Swiss cheese solution.
Changling spit.
8675404
Magic bug ponies who feed on love and next to no food need tons of food to spit? How does that make sense?
Not even humans need food to spit. It's hydration that generates spit for us, which they have in spades. Even spider webs exist off of a liquefied diet.
8674869
Starlight is just adorable in general.
8675495 Changeling goo isn't just saliva. It's a number of compounds that leave something behind when dried, like wasp nests, bee hives, etc. Water isn't enough to make any of those, either.
To make material you must have material.
No, no sunshine required. Just hugs. And maybe some nookie.
8675561
It's already been said that Changlings can survive without any food or water and that Dragonfly was only taking small amounts of food to appease the Mark.
You say you can't get something from nothing I already know that, but the emotions Changlings feed off of are something to them. It generates energy to move, speak, and think. All things that food and water does for us. It generates energy to use magic, fly, and change shape.
Bees take nectar (their primary food source) store it in their honey stomach (secondary stomach for storage only) bring it to the hive and chew on it until honey is made, dry it with their wings and store it in bee wax honey combs, the wax is converted from the sugar in honey and excreted through their pores then chewed to make it moldable and dried to make the wax. Bees eat honey and use it as food and produce wax from it.
It's not hard to compare that to a Changling eating love as food and producing a physical excrement from it. An excrement mind you that in liquid form is shown as receptive to absorbing and storing emotions in Changling pods.
About that.
Just finished reading this chapter, saw the next one is out now. YUS!
If the cherries get planted, I will crack up so hard.
It's not MacGyvering, it's
MarkGyvering!
Also, it's time to dig up the big box of plutonium Mark.