The Sunday Project

TOO LATE I'M ALREADY A FROG EXPERT THANKS TO SLATE. XD Ok maybe not an expert but I know some weird stuff. For example, frogs absorb water through their skin.
That's how they drink.
Slate can't do that though, his frog DNA is minor. Well, all his DNA is minor, there's just a lot of different kinds.

My sister is always amused by the amount of weird, random things writers know about. Like, some writers probably know tons about nanites, others about horses, others yet about space, and more about Mount Everest or something, all depending on what they write about.

I tend to know a lot about a variety of animals, all kinds of things about the immune system and the body's cells and medicine and cancer and aging stuff, some things about government and laws, cultures and language, and then psychology and human torture and experimentation.
I also know a lot of random things just from what I read in books in my free time. It's kind of neat to think that writers can pass their random knowledge on to other people by the stories they write. For example, I know a decent amount on microtechnology and quantum technology thanks to books Michael Crichton has written.

Anyway. LAY IT DOWN, FIRA, WHADDYA WANNA KNOW ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH STUFF? I AM 90% SURE I COULD ANSWER ANY OF YOUR QUESTIONS ON ANY OF THE THINGS I MENTIONED KNOWING A LOT ABOUT.

As for human experimentation, one of personal interest were a few done in concentration camps under Nazi reign - they did experiments on twins, injecting things into their eyes to try and change the color, and also sewing them together to try and create conjoined twins. They would also try and recreate warwounds on prisoners by cutting their legs and rubbing dirt, wood slivers, and glass into the wound to get it infected so they could try and treat it. There were a lot of cases of giving people diseases just so they could track the disease and learn more about it. They would also freeze people and body parts, then try and warm them up quickly to learn better ways to treat hypothermia.
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Ooh, there was also a case of a man who was trying to depattern his subjects, erasing their memories and minds and stuff to reduce them to the mental state of an infant, then rebuild them up into the person he wanted them to be.
So he would give them tons of drugs and put them in comas and give them high voltage shocks, then repetitively play recorded statements through speakers implanted into football helmets he had them wear, like, "You are a good wife and mother, and people like you." (Or something along those lines.)
I think one of the people was forced to listen to the same thing non-stop for 101 days, but for others it ranged from like 22 hours to weeks.
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There was also a guy who, for no reason that we know of, injected cow blood into a bunch of test subjects.
I was really disappointed because I did a lot of digging around, but couldn't find much else on the guy, or the results of the experiments.

There were a lot of ones I read about, but couldn't find the results to, and that was definitely annoying.
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Also, Fira, is Zahra partially or completely immune? Like, how... uh... much immune is she, how far does the statement 'immune' extend to her? Does it affect her aging, her healing wounds outside the body, etc.? Or is it just a sickness thing? Is she just a lot healthier than other people or is she actually completely immune against things? Wow I probably could have worded all that better...

Hmm... you know, I've been thinking guys....

First of all, James Patterson did not have his shiz together when he started this story, because there's a lot of details that bug the crap out of me, but I'm not sure how to iron them out myself, thanks to the weird things Patterson did with his story.

Example: Why is the School called the School? Why did they call the whitecoats 'whitecoats' when they could have just called them scientists?
I mean, the fact that all these buildings are referred to as something as stupid as 'the School' really drives me crazy, because if I wanted to make a fake document from 'the School', writing 'the School' at the top of the page seems stupid, but I can't put Itex because it's technically not from Itex.

URGHHH.

CAN'T WE ALL JUST STEAL THE BASIC HUMAN-ANIMAL-DNA-GRAFTING FROM PATTERSON THEN START FRESH WITH THE OTHER STUFF AND CHANGE THE COMPANY AND EVERYTHING SO IT'S LESS ANNOYING?

LIKE. PIKK ISN'T EVEN A PRODUCT OF THE SCHOOL HE'S A PRODUCT OF ANOTHER SCIENTIFIC COMPANY. WHY CAN'T WE JUST USE THAT FOR EVERYTHING BECAUSE PATTERSON IS REALLY PISSING ME OFF RIGHT NOW WITH HIS STUPID NAMES AND TERMS.

WHERE THE HECK DID ERASERS COME FROM WHY ARE THEY CALLED THAT. THEY DON'T ERASE, THEY GUARD AND CAPTURE. GOOD LORD DID HE THINK THROUGH THIS AT ALL.

*rages around for a while*

YES THANK YOU FIRA. THAT (THE FIRST BIT) SERIOUSLY SUMMED IT UP PERFECTLY. You know, that is actually why Michael Crichton is hands down my favourite author. He can get a bit technical sometimes, but in a good way. You can tell he's done so much research that he really, truly knows what he's talking about. He takes possibilities of science - traveling through time by utilizing quantum foam to hop through pocket dimensions like the pages of a book, recreating dinosaurs by using the blood sucked from prehistoric mosquitoes that were preserved by amber, nanotechnology evolving too quickly thanks to the technological coding that gives it ways to learn and remember, etc. - he takes all this, theorizes the heck out of it, researches until there's no research to be done, then proceeds to write scarily realistic sci-fi books using all this.

He's a genius and it's a real shame he's dead. >:I

What Patterson wrote was not sci-fi. What he wrote was fantasy. You cannot conceivably hide 14 ft long wings under a simple windbreaker. You'd have to use a large trenchcoat and even then it would be bulky, if it even fit them at all. People cannot magically attract metal to themselves or fly high speeds or whatever without any reason.

Powers in sci-fi should not just be magical without any given cause other than the vague 'er, well, they ARE mutants...'

That's why I've been meticulously creating scientific basis for how Crystal is immune and how she has her black energy abilities. And something else I won't say for the sake of spoilers.

I know about the whole whitecoats thing and yes that makes sense AS A MUTANT. But it appears that whitecoats and the School were terms used by the employees themselves. No scientist on this planet would go as low as calling their company/buildings the School.

You know what I think? Ok, so there have been some minor successful animal-human mixing experiments of various sorts (DNA, blood, platelets, plasma, etc.) and sometimes I think the only reason there hasn't been further results in the field is because of all the moral and ethical grounds. Laws are going up or being considered that goes against it, and all that jazz.

That doesn't mean there aren't companies who would do it anyway and cover their tracks to keep it hidden.

I don't know about you guys, but I'm sick and tired of trying to clean up Patterson's messes in an effort to make my characters and their histories more realistic. Screw Maximum Ride OCs, I'm branching off on my own. I could do what he's done, but differently, and better. So I'm going to. I may be a total amateur at writing, but at least I know the definitions of false documents and verisimilitude; which I highly suspect Patterson does not know.

Unless I'm writing fantasy, where you can make up whatever you want because all rules of anything go out the window, I don't believe in writing what's convenient, I believe in writing what's real, even if it restricts your possibilities a bit. It's better than having the whole thing unconvincing and nonsensical.

You guys can join me in this venture or help, because I would love it. I've been researching for hours on end daily lately, until my eyeballs can no longer focus on the screen.
The more help the better in my mind, but you can really do whatever you'd like, this is just my personal opinion.

I'm not letting Crystal, Slate, Quinn, etc. be attached to something that aggravates me so much and practically offends me as a writer because they're frankly too good to be wasted on that. I think that a lot of your guys' characters are too good for that. Maybe it's just me.

That's why I'd already planned to have Pikk be related to another science group entirely.

But anyway. Just wanted to get all of this out there.
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And Metal - try looking up inhumane human experimentation or just human experimentation. There's the Wikipedia page with certain cases and operations, and then you can look those up separately, and it all kind of goes from there.

OK OK NO, THAT'S NOT REALLY WHAT I MEANT, IT JUST CAME OFF THAT WAY BECAUSE I WAS FRUSTRATED AND TRYING TO MAKE A POINT. I just meant that less rules apply in fantasy - you can make all sorts of weird creatures and no one can tell you that they can't exist because maybe it's a whole new planet that has no gravity and stuff, you know? You aren't necessarily restricted by the laws of earth.
It all depends on what you're writing, but generally, it's a much more open genre than sci-fi. There are still basic rules that apply to everything, but it's just.. well, like I said, more open.

OH GOSH FIRA I FEEL INCREDIBLY HONORED AND I SWEAR THERE'S NOT A DROP OF SARCASM IN THAT STATEMENT
HAVING YOU, WHO IS QUITE PARTICULAR ABOUT THINGS (IN A GOOD WAY) SAY THAT TO ME, WHO OFTEN FEELS LIKE A FAIL OF A WRITER, IS LIKE REALLY AWESOME SO THANKS

Go ahead, Metal. I'd be honored also if you used that. I'd also be incredibly curious to know how that was received so seriously, use it if you want, copy it, tweak it, I don't care about getting credit for it because all I care about is getting the message out there.

Seriously though. If we're going to 'redo' this, I don't even say we should like, have it in our minds that we're changing what Patterson did. Because if you totaled up the time I've spent dwelling, researching, creating, planning, all the time and effort and energy I've invested into these characters? No doubt there would be months of it. Easy.
Forget about tweaking what he's done, or basing it off of it, or do what he's done - I say we just start completely and utterly over, going off of the animal-human DNA splicing alone; nothing else.

There don't have to be any evil, mad scientists like Patterson describes, there are simply scientists who honestly think that mixing human and animal DNA could improve our world and genuinely think that they're doing the right thing.

Evil scientists are stupid and overused - most people generally start out doing awful things because they personally don't think it's that awful. They don't grin evilly and cackle over the thin, pale forms of their test subjects. They don't deprive them of learning because why the heck would they want their physically superhumans to be mentally stupid??
No, they'd teach them basics, enough so they'd be learned enough to survive in the world, for future reasons.

It's just logic. No Erasers either - if we want something 'evil' or whatever, we can just create something else entirely. We don't need werewolves for this to go well.

Forgetting Patterson existed is the first step. Don't let him influence it.
Forget about him, forget about Maximum Ride. They don't matter.

This is original.
We don't need him lurking in the back of our minds, influencing and tainting what could be a totally different, amazing thing, ya know?

Also, this means we'll have to drop wings. And lots of 'em. I'm sure most of us gave most of our characters wings because it was the Maximum Ride thing to do, right? But how many of our characters actually use their wings on a regular basis? How many would be unable to thrive without them??

Putting it into perspective, most of them don't need wings.
I know I wouldn't mind dropping a bunch of winged additions to characters (except Slate, but he's like, an exception, and maybe another or something, I haven't like, sorted through my characters, but, Crystal, Switch - these two, plus many others, don't really need wings, to be honest) and, while I don't want Patterson influencing it, we don't want to be leeching off his idea either, by having 90% of our characters winged and stuff.
Right?
I don't want to be bossy or anything but I'm just going to have to be blunt here if we really are doing this, because I proposed the idea, I kind of feel like that means I should take charge, I supposed... but please tell me if I'm stepping on anyone's toes...

So the first step would be creating a general plot - who the scientists are, who they work for, their goal, what their jobs entail, what the experiments entail, etc. All the basic important stuff.

Then we pick the most important characters we would want to have in this (because let's face it, we would have far too many with everyone) and revise these characters - change and tweak their histories to fit the new plot, get rid of some overused things (the main problem, as mentioned before, being the massive amount of wings), figure out why they're all out of the labs (because they can't have all just escaped... I mean, really, you think they'd have better security measurements so there weren't 50+ mutants running around, so there'd have to be some sort of massive explosion/escape all at once or something along those lines for it to be possible), and also figure out how they all ended up in one group (the chances of them all meeting by incident - even being all in the same freaking country seems a bit to convenient if you ask me, so something has to be responsible for that), and then also figuring out what THEIR goal is - who the enemy is (the scientists or someone else entirely, both??) and what they're fighting against and how they plan to deal with it, etc.

All the normal important stuff in a book.

But... it's a start, I guess. We should gather some of the others and get their opinions on this whenever we can. Like Questy and stuff.... >.> I dunno. I'm really tired and have a splitting headache so if none of this makes sense... ask me about it when I'm more awake? XD

Here, Fira, this is where I had pretty much gotten started.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t…ifQ&bvm=bv.53537100,d.eWU

(Sorry, I can't grab the actual link, so that link will redirect you, I think.)

Also, this is totally random... well, kind of random, but did you know that scientists successfully grafted spider and goat DNA together? They're trying to make goats that don't give milk, but give spider silk instead.