RttS Reader Questions 30

Yum, raw hairy skin covered in blood!

Transcript

Anonymous asked: Bip, what do the symbols on the antler velvet blanket mean?

Bip: This blanket is mostly demographic and travel record keeping. For instance, these are pupations, these are marriages, these are departures, these are deaths. 

Image: PUPATIONS, MARRIAGES, DEPARTURES, DEATHS

Bip: There are not usually personalized symbols for individuals other than matriarchs. Other “name” symbols on the record refer to clans and locations.

Image: MATRIARCHS, CLANS, LOCATIONS

Slzzpy Peachez asked: Talita, would you ever be interested in making something with your velvet?

Talita: Haha, I don’t know anything about tanning. I think my attempts would just result in hazardous waste.

Anonymous asked: Talita, have you ever tried to eat your own velvet in the past?

Talita: E— eat it??

Bip: Most people eat it.

Talita: ...I…

Bip: It’s easier than tanning it!

Talita: ...I’m good.

 

RttS Reader Questions 30

Yum, raw hairy skin covered in blood!

Transcript

Anonymous asked: Bip, what do the symbols on the antler velvet blanket mean?

Bip: This blanket is mostly demographic and travel record keeping. For instance, these are pupations, these are marriages, these are departures, these are deaths. 

Image: PUPATIONS, MARRIAGES, DEPARTURES, DEATHS

Bip: There are not usually personalized symbols for individuals other than matriarchs. Other “name” symbols on the record refer to clans and locations.

Image: MATRIARCHS, CLANS, LOCATIONS

Slzzpy Peachez asked: Talita, would you ever be interested in making something with your velvet?

Talita: Haha, I don’t know anything about tanning. I think my attempts would just result in hazardous waste.

Anonymous asked: Talita, have you ever tried to eat your own velvet in the past?

Talita: E— eat it??

Bip: Most people eat it.

Talita: ...I…

Bip: It’s easier than tanning it!

Talita: ...I’m good.

 

72 thoughts on “RttS Reader Questions 30

  1. Plunge into the vast universe of EVE Online. Become a legend today. Create alongside millions of explorers worldwide. [url=https://www.eveonline.com/signup?invc=46758c20-63e3-4816-aa0e-f91cff26ade4]Begin your journey[/url]

  2. free self generating snack at vicinity of mouth tho

  3. This is only semi related, but I feel like centaur charcuterie is really good. A shame I can’t eat it.

    1. man youre right. I need to make centaur inspired charcuterie now to scratch this itch

      (hi angel)

  4. The Opossum Witch

    congrats to that commenter who’s husband eats his own calluses, we got an answer!

    1. But at what cost

      1. Madame Thunderbone

        At the cost of y’all having to know that my husband eats his own calluses.

    2. it has to be a bit right…they have to be joking. ..right??? (seeing other people taking it seriously has me doubting myself 😭😭)

      1. Eh, we can only read the posts, not the poster(‘s husband)’s mind. 🤷‍♂️
        At least there was no mention of kitchenware being involved …

      2. Madame Thunderbone

        You will be happy to know that I finally confronted him on how gross and unhealthy that is and he agreed to find a better way to deal with them.

        1. Tan them and make a blankie

        2. Gross, sure, but what about it is unhealthy? It’s just skin, it’s not like it’s a waste product. If the area is clean I can’t imagine why anything bad would happen to you from eating a callus. Has no one in this comments section eaten one of their scabs before? Or bitten off a hangnail?

        3. to ?? its unsanitary and also bad for the skin hes getting at imo. its like chewing fingernails and not good for the same reasons. there are are ways to treat calluses that are healthier and kinder for the body like rubs, scrubs, lotions and more. and one can always chew on something thats supposed to go in the mouth and is clean (hopefully and ideally) and is not a body part if that oral stim urge is still there! -w-👍

        4. Madame Thunderbone

          @?? It’s not good for the delicate “fresh” skin underneath, I think. Also, as far as I’m aware, mostly keratin, so basically non-digestible, so probably not good for guts either.

        5. The Opossum Witch

          Honestly good for you!

  5. Interesting that they document pupations specifically and not necessarily the births. Freshly born larvae seem very fragile, so getting to the pupated stage is probably more reassuring that the baby will continue to survive childhood

    1. Viashino_wizard

      iirc most centaur cultures don’t consider larvae people until they’ve at least pupated

      1. Talita was donated after pupation. The thing I keep noticing is that Talita is singular, yet most centaur imagos come in a set, usually of six, sometimes of five, from what I’ve seen of the blanket, and so on. So my question is this: Was Talita a solo larva? That seems…. unlikely? So where are her littermates? Is there a long lost set of four or five sibs who don’t know they’re her immediate sibs?

        1. Dogs also typically have a litter of 6 but occasionally only have a single pup. It’s rare but it happens. I can imagine that would be the case also in litterbearing creatures of extraterrestrial origin.

          I can also imagine that if such an unfortunate thing were to happen to an “untested” new matriarch for her first litter, she might be ousted by a power-hungry sister and forced to either dump the imago at the next stop as soon as it pupates or leave the clan and raise the child on her own.

  6. If it wasn’t for the whole “organisms from Talita’s planet are likely dangerous to eat” thing, I’d totally try eating centaur velvet.

    1. Light_In_The_Fog

      Her teeth are prolly wayyy better than ours for eating leather tho lol

    2. You can eat your velvet, your clanmate can eat their velvet, but you can’t eat your clanmate’s velvet

    3. You could probably find deer velvet somewhere, and it’s probably real nasty!

  7. I have a sneaking suspicion that the pair of triangles under Locations is representative of the Runaway, but I need a free minute before I can check. These little details make my brain go nuts though haha

    1. Where would you check that? If there’s a Runaway clan – English dictionary, I wanna know. *grabby hands*

      1. [imagines Enai trying to chase down the Runaway and rip Bips server farm out]

        1. Are you picturing me chasing the Runaway online hacker-style, with my hoodie hood up in front of my computer, lines of code projected into my face, or like a person running after a train that’s just departing a station yelling “Stop, stop! An entire clan’s legacy is on that train! A record of it belongs in a museum!”?
          .
          In reality, I’d politely ask Bip if they would send me the database file in the interest of conserving a part of centaur culture that now, regrettably, has ceased to exist. Does the galactic civilization have an equivalent of archive.org? I’d upload it there…

        2. Also, absolutely no ripping out server farms of sapient AIs. That’s murder.

        3. > Are you picturing me chasing the Runaway online hacker-style

          I have to admit that I did not associate your “grabby hands” with poor posture while operating a keyboard. 😛 (Nor with “ripping out” Bips hardware.)

          > In reality, I’d politely ask Bip if they would send me the database file

          Now I have a clear visual (final panels) of what that’s going to look like …

          > Also, absolutely no ripping out server farms of sapient AIs. That’s murder.

          Only if you fail to restore their operation later. Otherwise, it’s battery and Bipnapping. 😛

  8. I remember being blown away by that fact when I carefully reread the Centaur lore pages on the website, recently… The antler-velvet blankets stand out, and it’s clear that only “some” clans do that, but previously I had entirely missed that “most” Centaurs eat their velvet!

    I suppose it doesn’t help that most things that come off of or out of Human bodies are either unsanitary, inedible, or both.

    1. The fact that ~all human children eat their own boogers at least occasionally, to the point that it’s been hypothesized that, despite being really gross, it’s an important part of the normal development of the human immune system, begs to differ.

      But, given that we naturally stop at some point (reinforced but likely not exclusively caused by cultural taboo), I will grant that there’s not something that comes off the human body that’s near-universally eaten at all life stages that produce it.

      1. The only exception I can think of is breast milk.

      2. Most. I said “most.”

    2. i mean a lot of people will eat skin tags, hangnails, scabs, blood… it’s gross but it happens. placenta eating is a bit less common but that happens too

  9. i’m not the squeamish sort when it comes to food, but even i balked at the thought of eating velvet. then again, that’s because i wouldn’t even know how to prepare it (that is if centaurs go beyond consuming it raw.) it’d be neat if there are indeed recipes involving velvet… ppl are creative & inquisitive by nature. if humans figured out ways to prepare placentas, why wouldn’t centaurs do the same with their velvet?

    1. im sorry plachentas?

      1. Yeah.. pretty sure you can get them dried and ground into a powder, then put into a pill
        In terms of antler velvet though, I wonder if frying them would be akin to pork rinds with a layer of peach fuzz

      2. There are a few cultures that encourage birthing parents to eat the placentas, some even have traditional/religious recipes for it. However most it’s pretty rare nowadays due to other cultures’ taboos against it. Supposedly it’s pretty nutritious, and not unlike the many other animals that eat their baby’s egg shells or whatnot to gain back nutrition and recover from creating new life.

        1. It’s also not done as often any more for a completely different reason: the placenta is a filter, and the toxins that we humans are exposed to tend to be stuck in there. So modern human placentas are full of nasty things, from things we think of as benign such as microplastics to things everyone fears, like heavy metals. And a whole lot of complex molecules, too. It is no longer as safe to eat the placenta after birth.

  10. Hmmmm, so growing up in a world where other people’s food could kill her, she was never that desperate for safe to eat protein.

    1. IncompleteMachine

      well she also grew up in a world with print-on-demand protein, so it was never that bad to begin with xD

  11. Finally, a third menu option!!

    1. Do centaurs fry stuff i can imagine it fried and all crunchy

      1. see the centaur culture food page. both fried dough and a fry pan are mentioned, so yes!

  12. Pupation? Was baby Talita a cat-sized-caterpillar?

    1. a bit smaller, I guesstimate …

      1. I dunno, Centaurs are really big. Newborns might be the size of a smallish housecat? 3-4 kg does not seem like an excessive weight. If you have six or even eight larvae, that’s still at most 32 kg. A newborn horse foal weighs between 30-60 kg depending on breed, so it doesn’t seem excessive to me. The size of the larvae on the picture also seems to be in the right ballpark.

        1. I mean [url=https://jayrockin.tumblr.com/post/668264116406845440/douglas-do-you-have-any-funny-stories-from-when] here [/url] talita is snack sized, [url=https://jayrockin.tumblr.com/post/723257042089934848/anonymous-asked-question-for-douglas-did-talita]here[/url] she is human baby/tot sized so her pupal form is likely similar to the smallest of these. give or take a little

        2. > here talita is snack sized

          Hmmm then again, even before she came to Douglas, she was rather appropriately sized for the pet carrier she was found in …

          [expects plot twist revealing that Douglas is, in fact, a hrímþursar GMH]

        3. Conservation of matter being what it is, a centaur larva close to pupation would weigh the same as the newly hatched imago, give or take, just in a more compact shape.

        4. > a centaur larva close to pupation would weigh the
          > same as the newly hatched imago, give or take

          … at least if you weigh the larva after it pupated (Earth larvas usually excrete material to create the pupal case around themselves, no idea what the weight ratios may be) …

  13. Saying most *people* eat the velvet seems like such an odd word choice to me, as someone who of course lives in a world where the only sophonts are humans. But even though I know in this universe that “people” includes all sophonts, it still feels like the logical choice to say “centaurs” in this scenario – but I bet Bip is using the language they know Talita prefers, which is a nice detail if my assumption is correct : )

    1. Also Bip hangs out around a lot of centaurs.

    2. I just thought it was funnier.

      1. The Opossum Witch

        and you were right

    3. Bip’s crew having been centaurs makes this make sense. They’re used to “people” meaning centaurs!

  14. i imagine it being like eating a slice of salami with one side covered in peach fuzz. and of course the blood

    1. sounds kinda like a texture nightmare, but yummy at the same time

    2. The Opossum Witch

      honestly it may be closer to raw chicken skin with a metallic flavor similar to liver (due to the high vascularization (and centaurs have hemoglobin)) with down feathers still on (centaurs have feathers not fur). probably not very appetizing to humans raw but could be good fried.

      1. The Opossum Witch

        *i am aware it would be poison

        but i absolutely would if i could

    3. No salt though.

      1. man then that takes like half of the potential appeal away!!! I wonder if there r ppl that eat elk/deer velvet…like do u think places sell it

        1. Not exactly the velvet, but.

  15. If I were a centaur I would eat the velvet. I think it would have the texture of firm peach skin. Or maybe you can take off the hair and turn it into jerky. Or powder. I remember reading that centaurs also eat their antlers, but Talita eats sticks of chalk or something?

    1. I imagine it being the texture of kiwifruit skin, which I cheerfully eat but many people don’t. Not sure I could eat my own velvet though. Especially not raw, and I do like some raw meats. But not that.

  16. Talita’s expressions and body language are fantastic like always

    1. Bip’s stance in the lower first panel is so cursed XD

      1. Extremely cursed, especially the way they choose to hide their avatar’s back half offscreen…

        Never change, Bip, never change.

  17. The knots on the velvet are tactile right?

    1. I imagine centaurs use their trunks or fingers to feel it, because they can’t see very well close-up

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