Beneath the Dragoneye Moons

Chapter 368: Operation: The Improved Elaine V

Internal changes to my skin were a different story. The skin had quite a few layers, and the epidermis was the main layer people saw.

The dermis was a different question, and something I could play with.

For Iona, I elected for tightly packed hexagonal shaped ankylosaurus plates. She’d lose a little bit of flexibility, in exchange for practically having a second layer of armor. It was the only major modification I was making to her body, outside of the norm.

I spent a fruitless afternoon digging into honey badgers. Their skin was amazing on the defense. It was like a quarter-inch of rubbery defenses.

Careful examination, and a trip to the Museum of All Things, proved an unfortunate truth.

It worked well because of how thick it was. If I tried the same thing myself, I’d lose a ton of flexibility, definition – I’d look crazy fat – and I’d practically be relegated to waddling around, like a penguin.

Instead I investigated my plan B.

Rainbow serpent scales. I’d seen them up-close with Galeru, and they were striking. Sadly, I could only show them off if someone was peeling the skin off my body, but they weren’t there for their looks. Less defense, more flexibility. Like a layer of gambeson, instead of heavy plate.

I couldn’t replicate Iona’s wyvern-blood infused skin. I could bribe Fenrir like hell to get a few liters, heal him back up, and bathe in that.

Nobody said getting wyvern blood had to be hard.

Skin was also where I could be [Pretty]. Also known as surgical hair removal.

It was a permanent look, but I was happy with it. A fleeting thought went to makeup – I could make my skin permanently have something like ‘natural’ makeup going on.

Intellectually, I decided not to – it would make applying a different style of makeup harder, and I never knew when my tastes would change down the line – but I still caught myself making small modifications to my face.

The math around photosynthetic skin didn’t work out again, and I was getting frustrated with all these cool things in nature that I couldn’t stick into my body. The surface area to time in the sun to energy produced and carbon dioxide broken down just didn’t end with happy numbers, not when I needed to kill all other functionality in the parts of the skin that were photosynthesizing.

Given how many different functions I could possibly cram into the skin, I put aside my diagrams, and started sketching an entirely different set.

Set 2.0 had no armor layers, but went hard on the iridophore/chromatophore cells for full-body active camouflage. In short, I could always blend into my surroundings.

Assuming I was entirely naked.

I’d also need a new way of triggering vitamin D synthesization… which happened in the kidneys, which I would need to loop back around to see if the kidney I’d selected would work still for that – and I’d want to be naked often enough to use the ability, and for some reason didn’t want to use the greater invisibility rune I’d carved into my sternum.

Skin 2.0 was looking like a bust. I put aside the half-completed design, with a reminder on skin 1.0 that it existed. There was a chance I’d circle back to it.

While I was on skin and hair, I had a few vanity items I wanted to address. I toyed with changing my hair color. What would I look like as a ginger? A blonde? Blue hair? Pink hair? Silver hair?

A full rainbow of every color?

The possibilities were amusingly endless, but at the end of the day, I liked my current color. I’d never dyed it before, and I always could dye it in the future.

I did make it silkier, and fixed it so it’d tumble down in a wavy way without ever having to curl it into that style. I tweaked the growth rate as well, and tightened up how hard my scalp held onto hair.

There was no way to make my hair not knot. I blamed the gods for making hair work like that.

I did make a few minor body shape modifications here and there, studiously ignoring the source of my inspiration.

The last vanity item I tackled was smell. Sweat was an important cooling mechanism, and I had no intentions of stopping it. However, I could mitigate how I smelled to a certain extent. Sweat smelling came in two parts – the actual sweat itself having trace amounts of waste products in them, and bacteria interacting with the sweat. With my waste handling, I didn’t need to smell bad. I could modify the composition of my sweat to kill most of the extraneous parts of it, not giving anything to the bacteria to eat, along with axing the parts that smelled bad. I didn’t want to ruin my love of mangos by constantly smelling like them, so I picked a few flowers.

When I sweated, I’d smell vaguely of lilacs and roses.

Perfect.

Everything tied into each other. Speaking of smell, it was time that I finally tackled my senses.

Eyes were bluntly the most important sensory organs to humans, and I recognized I was being biased by placing so much importance on them.

I was a greedy guts, and I wanted everything. I couldn’t have everything in my eyes. If I packed more rods into my eyes to improve my night vision, I’d have to shove cones out of the way. If I used an eagle’s pupil to zoom in on far away sights, I’d lose the broad side-view that deer had. If I made an eye capable of seeing in the deep, my flying vision would be terrible.

If I crammed fifty different eyeballs into my skull, I’d have mobs with pitchforks and torches trying to burn me at the stake. Not at the School, of course, but in the broader world. No fifty-eyed abomination for me!

It did remind me of Night, and him telling me the story of Creation.

I wanted to find him again.

I needed to find him again.

I had faith, backed by no reason at all, that he was still alive and out there somewhere. He’d survived since Creation. He’d survive the few years I needed to find him.

Back to eyes.

Form followed function, followed form. I was sticking with the standard human design, which meant a pair of close-set eyes facing in the same direction. A predator’s eyes. Something like a herbivore’s wide-vision would be largely wasted as the fields of view overlapped with each other.

I started to write eye pro-con lists, along with annotating eyes with ways I could improve them. Eagles for flying and distance vision, deer for a wide field. Predators to spot movement, grazers to scan through fields.

I had a minor breakthrough when I realized how many creatures gained massive benefits from a third eyelid. Humans even had vestigial remains of a third eyelid! I didn’t need to make complex changes.

The breakthrough let me axe huge chunks of my eyeball list, and one family in particular rose to the top of the list.

Cats.

Fantastic prey and movement vision, excellent color, able to see in the dark and mildly underwater, cats had some of the best eyes in the animal kingdom. Somehow, the performance stats were better than an elf’s. Why the gods hadn’t given elves cat eyes, I’d never know. What was nice was how they saw in the dark. They didn’t cram more rods into their eyes. No, they had a reflective layer called the tapetum, which acted a bit like a mirror, letting them focus better.

It’s why their eyes shone back in the dark. The first clear sign I’d have that I wasn’t strictly human, the first sign that anyone could see.

In the dark.

Looking right at me.

With a light.

Ehhh… it was acceptable. Even though Auri was a perpetual light source.

I did modify the pupil back to a human look, and I did manage to squeeze in two more modifications.

The first was restoring the third type of eye cone that humans had, and tigers lacked, then adding a fourth ‘flavor’ of eye cones, which humans rarely had. It’d make the world richer in color, for lack of a better word.

How did one explain blue to a blind man?

How did one explain super blue, to one who could only see normal blue?

The second was borrowing inspiration from eagles again. Humans had one foveae. Cats had zero. Raptors and other birds of prey had two.

My eye diagram was looking a little cramped, and I suspected I’d need to make sacrifices down the line when I polished it all up.

After the eye was adding in a third eyelid. The question was – frogs, or camels? Frogs were better for underwater, while camels were better for a desert and sandstorms.

I elected for the clarity of being able to see well with my third eyelid closed, and figured I’d try to thicken it as much as possible, to allow for high speed flight and the like.

I also needed to dig into why I shouldn’t keep it closed at all times… seemed useful.

Smell should’ve been easy. Too many darn rabbit holes.

I started with bloodhound, and went digging.

Sharks had better smell than bloodhounds did, but going through notes and reference books, elephants had an even better sense of smell.

Looking up the mechanism was disappointing though. Their sense of smell was better because they packed so many receptors into their nose. It was a sheer size issue, as opposed to a quality issue.

A note on the elephant reference page on their sense of smell had me looking up the male silk moth. They could smell a single pheromone source from seven miles away.

Their scent organ was a gigantic antenna though, annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd I looped right back around to sharks. I was happy enough with their sense of smell. Assuming their sense of smell worked as well on land as it did in water – it had been designed to smell fish in the ocean, not mangos in a forest, or cookies in a dorm.

While I was on sharks, I wanted their extra sense. In particular, their ability to sense electrical fields, finely tuned towards the ones living creatures gave off. I did look at mantas, who shared the sense with them, but sharks had a more developed and refined electrical sense.

That was easier than I imagined to include! I wondered if it would give me the ability to detect Artemis. Probably not, since she’d need to be using the Lightning for me to sense it.

I had two last notes on smell.

The first was taste.

I wasn’t touching it. I liked how food tasted as-is, and I didn’t want to mess with it more. What was the point? Plus, smell and taste were so closely linked already. I toyed with the idea of making titanium ‘tasty’, but that was mostly in the brain, not in the receptors.

The second was an interesting little organ, called the vomeronasal organ. It was a vestigial… extra sense of taste?

I was curious about turning it ‘on’, but I just plain couldn’t find any notes about how to turn it into a functional sense, and I didn’t have a great interest in adding another ‘dimension’ to my taste buds.

While not smell, the human sinus cavities were poorly designed, and could use tweaking. Specifically on drainage patterns. It was the small things in life.

I had two plans for hearing.

The first was echolocation. I’d started with bats, but as I went digging, I realized that they were finely tuned towards hitting small, fast moving creatures, and required large ears on swivels.

Until I’d taken the marine biology class, I’d thought dolphins would be a good source of echolocation-related hearing. Except they didn’t do it with ears, it was more a large fat-filled cavity that they used to take inputs, and processed from there.

Echolocation would limit the rest of my hearing somewhat.

Hearing version 2.0 was going wide. Combine elephant hearing of some of the lowest frequencies with the greater wax moth’s ability to hear the highest frequencies.

Sensory overload was a significant concern. I’d be able to hear everything, like I was always in a crowded room trying to pick out a conversation. I should adapt with time, it wasn’t a good reason to axe the design.

Hearing version 3.0 was a disorientation-oriented choice. A simple chimpanzee inner ear would let me always know which way was up, and I’d never be disoriented. I wouldn’t have hearing that was the envy of the world, but it couldn’t be weaponized against me, nor would I ever get lost flying in a storm. Worse hearing than an elf, but better at knowing which way was up.

The pro list wasn’t thrilling me, but it was a valid option.

I tentatively marked down hearing 2.0 as my preferred design. If I couldn’t adapt after my initial biomancy design and pass, I’d stuff cotton in my ears, cast [Shush!] on myself, and try again.

I was adding extra senses with an electrical sense. Pit vipers had a heat sense that let them sort of see in pure darkness, and that was relatively easy to add.

I did want to cross-check it against my visual sense, since I wanted to see in infrared as well. There was no point in duplicating organs. My initial look said that pit vipers had a much stronger, much deeper heat sense than what little expansion of my infrared vision could manage, but the range brought me up short.

Roughly a meter. That was nothing. A sense that only let me know if something was practically on top of me when there was no light – so no Auri, no Radiance, no wizardry – wasn’t as useful as I thought. My stats would improve it a bit, but the initial distance was so pathetic it wasn’t worth making sacrifices and rearranging nerves for. I could use that space for other things.

All that work, probably down the drain.

My sinuses were getting a little cramped, but my eye structure was something of a mess as well. I might shift the sense to where it made the most sense.

I toyed with a few more ideas.

I currently had no allergies, and the paring down of my immune system should entirely remove that concern.

Poison – and venom – was off the table, and I reluctantly axed the ability to give a small electrical shock like some eels did. The difficulties managing it, just to lightly shock people, wasn’t worth it.

Similarly with becoming spider woman. It was a full-body commitment to have multiple large-scale spider spinnerets that I could shoot on demand. It did look technically possible though…

I cleaned up that section of my notes and explained what I was thinking. Perhaps, one day, a new bright-eyed and bushy-tailed biomancer would come across my notes, and be inspired.

[*ding!* [Anatomical Drawing] leveled up! 29 -> 30]

Geckos could stick to walls easily, but how they did it wasn’t replicable at larger sizes. Part of it was due to their small size, like how water bugs could skate on water. Runes could copy the effect, but I was running out of bones to engrave. How often would I want to stick to the ceiling of a room, or climb a cliff, instead of just flying? It didn’t feel worthwhile.

There were a dozen, hundreds of other considerations that I needed to get into my initial notes that didn’t have clear and obvious locations like the rest of my organ systems.

Most creatures had an anti-choking mechanism. Elvenoids had a voice box instead, the ability to speak more important than avoiding choking. Well, I was here and making changes and fixes, and the two weren’t mutually incompatible.

Humans couldn’t make vitamin C on their own, they had to get it from fruits and vegetables. Most other creatures could make their own vitamin C, and at first blush I didn’t even need to make modifications to make my own vitamin C. My organ substitutions had done it for me already!

Some things I just couldn’t change, and I had to sigh and accept them as terrible flaws.

Who put a recreation center next to a waste processing plant?!