Reavers
POSTED BY: RochesterBrowncaot
UPDATED: Wednesday, January 3, 2007 19:55
VIEWED: 12889
PAGE 4 of 4
Hostilities? Bit touchy are we? Just have no time for smart asses.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Sic:Quote:
And no, it's not just a Buffyverse thing, it was in Stoker's novel too (Dracula cut his chest and forced Mina to drink).
... and in Anne Rice's novels as well.
Call me a snob, but I like to consider Bram Stoker as a bit more authoritative than Anne Rice.
Y'know, what with having pretty much invented the genre.
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We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.
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You snob!!
I'm not saying anything against you, snob, I'm just delivering even more evidence to the notion that this is in fact very much the essense of vampirism.
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There are a lot of questions still surrounding prions, their transmission, incubation, mutation, etc.
I think this to be the most plausible candidate, personally, since they are the culprit in “Mad Cow” and other such diseases/conditions.
And also because there are still a lot of questions about the mechanics of it, leaving a lot of leeway for sci-fi to build on. Genetic links, suggesting transmission through birth etc. and “mutations”.
Given time and research funding, such could be turned into quite nasty weapons, or altered to try to produce beneficial effects, in much the same way that viral-gene therapy is being used/researched.
Though I agree that most seem to have a fairly long incubation cycle, designer “tailoring” could alter this considering that non-threatening prions are considered to be present in large quantities in the body, in quiescent state. Thus, certain “catalyst” prions could be used to mutate these large quantities in quite a short time-frame, hypothetically speaking.
This would arguably alleviate the need for a continuous pumping of a chemical agent in order to keep a population pacified, as a “one shot” dose could do it, depending on actual transmission between potential hosts, etc. With what we know, or don’t know about prions, there is even the potential, though small, for an airborne transmission between hosts. If tailored, I would think this potential could rise.
Assuming for the most part that the statistics on Miranda hold true, then if Reavers were infectious, there would still only be 1/10th of 1 percent of the population susceptible to their particular mutation of the prions and it could be, that this particular mutation means that all trace of the previous “pacifying” nature of the prions was gone. So, you either become infected as a Reaver, if you fall in the percentile, or the prions are simply harmless to you. One of the two.
Since the brain regulates endocrine activities, it could even be that after initial infection, one of the first things to alter is pheremone production. Meaning that Reavers would be able, like other animals, to “sniff out” those who have become infected and thus, leave the “seed” or take it with them as they continue on.
Since rape seems to be the first assault the Reavers make (“for hours and hours”), this would give time for transmission, rapid incubation and preliminary alteration. By the time they were done and before they settled down to their meal, they may already know which ones have been infected and which ones haven’t by smell alone.
Just my thoughts on this.
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Wow just read through all the responses, lots of really interesting science based ones and nothing I could add save the one thing that struck me and creeped me out when discussing it with a friend.
300,000 Reaver population? I wonder how many of those were children to start with? Struck us as a slightly creepy thought since all the 'dead' scenes on Miranda had adult corpses in.
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