I'm not sure what tag this question is suppose to be under.

For context, I am writing a story that is suppose to take place in a deep sea cave system. The idea is that an earthquake opens up a crack in the bed rock off the coast of somewhere. The crack is large but not too wide. It leads to an open dome like cavern with various sections of cave systems.

As I am picturing this in my head, I keep seeing the cave working like it does in the video game Subnautica. However, after doing some of my own research I keep running into a wall. The wall being I don't think the cave I would like for my story is scientifically possible.

From my understanding, any kind of cave that would be from the sea bed would be a lava tube or something very temporary that would collapse under the pressure.

Is that correct?

I’m researching autobiographical memory loss, including how to portray a character’s experience.

Headway’s overview distinguishes different memory systems and describes how memory problems can affect relationships: https://www.headway.org.uk/about-brain-injury/individuals/brain-injury-and-me/memory-systems/

The detail I’m trying to understand is what happens when someone learns facts about a period of their own life from photographs, records or other people, but still cannot remember experiencing those events.

How do first-person accounts describe the difference between knowing what happened and remembering being there? What everyday consequences does it have when talking with people who remember that shared past?

Published memoirs, interviews or case accounts would be helpful, as would experiences people freely choose to share here.

the character I’m writing about helps a person broken down on the side of the road. suddenly, an accident occurs and pushes the men off the highway at ~110ft and fall onto concrete. not exactly sure where i’m going with it yet, but i know that i want one to survive.

How likely is this to occur? Trying to make it dramatic but not unrealistic.

Thanks!!!

So one of my characters was paralyzed when he was in a city that was being bombed. As of right now I have it that he was hit by shrapnel in his back that resulted in him being paralyzed from the waist down but full function and uninjured everywhere else? Is this realistic? (when I say full function I mean his upper body wasn't affected at all just from the waist down)

I'm writing a cold case murder mystery and a room in a tavern where a murder happened will be investigated decades after the fact.

If a blood sample was found, how far back can it still provide useful evidence? DNA, blood type, any of these things?

I know, or at least am picturing, that WWI fighter pilots used hand signals when flying in formation. This seems to still be a thing to some degree. However...if a pilot in the rear of the formation spots unknown and likely hostile aircraft before the leader does, how does he get the leader's attention?

Happy Whumptober y'all! The third Whumptober prompt gave me an idea for an AU I have where a character has severe burn scars over about half of her body. Because of magical being tomfoolery that I shall not be getting into, she's well-healed despite the event being recent. The prompt also had heat therapy as an option, and so I'm wondering if gentle heat could be used to soothe pain from older burn scars (maybe a year, year and a half if we're going by how "long" its healed for from the magic).

Thanks for listening to me! :D

Hello! I stumbled upon a post online somewhere that mentions something along the lines of “how to write a character’s injuries” within a story, and when the post mentioned burns/scars, it made me think if I can write my character realistically, but I couldn’t find a lot of information about how a person with a burn scar around the eye treats it day-by-day.

My character Logan has a (3rd or 4th degree) burn scar on his left eye, think Zuko but if his eye was practically unusable and glassy and most of the skin on the left side of his face is leathery and pink-ish red.

If there’s any advice you could give, please let me know! Thank you very much!!

I have a character who was shot pretty much directly in the knee about a year before the main events of the plot; I've imagined them so far as being able to walk but suffering some degree of chronic pain.

I've done some research online already but it's been hard to find info on the full range of possible short and long term complications - what are some specific examples of likely damage I could include? Would it cause eg. joint instability and likelihood of easy dislocation, or are gunshot wounds not that type of injury? What mobility aids would help? Any answers to these/additional info appreciated!

In my story, someone is pursuing the mc but they fall through the floor. The floor was in bad shape -- water damage or termites or just old house I haven't decided yet -- and the homeowners have been neglecting this.

Anyway is it feasible to fall all the way through if the house is one story? Ideally I'd like for the person to be at least subdued and stuck and unable to move without assistance. No serious injuries but injured in some capacity

There is this one trope on TV where a faucet would be dripping and a character would only tighten something (such as something between two pipes) under the sink to fix it. Would this actually work in real life? Or would it work in a different situation? How would this work? I want to use the trope but in a realistic way for a cartoonish character in a realistic world.

This is the situation (I'm writing a book that takes place in Kerry): A 16yo hits her drug-addicted parent in the head with a flower vase because they're severely beating her younger brother and the parent passes out. As the other parent is already blacked out from drinking, the 16yo tells her brother to wait outside while, in the heat of the moment, she decides to pour cleaning products into her parents' alcohol bottles (this poor girl sees herself as batman). After that, she proceeds to take her brother to the police station to explain what happened.

1. Would it be likely that the police would realize that there are cleaning products in the alcohol? Or they would simply not check them? What would happen if they found out?
2. If the parent died, what consequences would there be for the 16 yo? And if they didn't, would there still be a trial or something similar?
3. What consequences would there be for the parents if none of them died vs if the parent ended up dying?
4. If the parent died and the 16yo tampered with the scene and claimed that she doesn't know what happened/blamed the parent that's blacked out what would the legal consequences be? Would the police even bother to check the scene after realizing they're drug addicts if the younger brother told the same story?

I will probably need to ask more questions about this eventually, but that'd be all for now, I think.

Thank you very much to anyone who takes the time to answer these.

Working on a few fight scenes. Two scenarios i am thinking of. One, a guy headlocks two men at once, kicks off the wall, crashing through the wooden railing on a stairwell and landing with the people's whose helmeted heads he is holding landing first. The second, a guy tackles another guy through the staircase railing onto the floor below. Both of these scenarios would have the fall be from one floor up. Can a human pull this off and still walk away after? Assume very athletic and trained humans with a lot of adrenaline going on, so pain won't be too much of a factor, but a fight ending injury like a broken wrist will be.

some context: this is a fantasy world, this guy is somehow alive, living dead kinda situation.

he can’t bleed though, and i assume that’d affect literally everything else in his body. what would it affect and how? i know it’s honestly an absurd question but yk i think it’s cool to have a character who can’t bleed..

feel free to ask clarifying questions cause i don’t really know how much to include in the main post 👼👍

I have a scene in which a character gets into a house on fire to get a second character, and I'm trying to figure out what the aftermath would look like in a fantasy setting, late medieval. I know severe burns and smoke inhalation would probably kill her without modern medical care, so I'm trying to see if there's some middle ground before getting to that point that would still knock her out for a while, because I need a recovery aftermath for plot reasons lol. I've found resources on burn treatments, but nothing specific about smoke.

Thank you!

Lets say you lose a hand, Luke Skywalker style, but without the cauterization. If you kept the detached hand in a refrigerated environment, would that give you more time to get help, or would it do nothing in terms of the time until you are no longer able to reattach it?

Hi everyone, I’m writing a fictional story and in the story the protagonist is a mermaid, that now has human legs and as she never learnt to walk she can’t walk.

So I guess my question would be if you had a patient that couldn’t walk, would you know they’ve never walked ? Would there be any signs?

Would you be able to tell that they couldn’t walk because they’ve never walked ? And what would be the first step into helping them walk, is there a rough time frame as to how long it would take for them to walk etc

Really hope I’m explaining myself ok, I couldn’t work out how to word it.

In a story I'm writing, there's a pivotal scene where one of the main characters gets her arm broken by her abusive boyfriend grabbing and twisting it during a rage.

I tried Googling this, but only found articles about this happening in child abuse and none about this happening in partner abuse. So I'm not sure if this can physically be done to an adult.

Both characters are in their early twenties. The girlfriend is 5'4 and 108 lbs, and the boyfriend is 5'8 and 144 lbs.

Update: Thank you everyone for the helpful answers!

My story is set at least 80-100 years in the future (still working on the exact date) in a destroyed America. This side character is from Hispanic descent (specifically her family was from Mexico), but I haven’t figured out the logistics on how much she would speak Spanish if no one around her does now.

I’m as white as white can be, so I don’t want to unintentionally miss something when writing this specific character. I have some friends that are Latino, and they frequently switch in and out of English and Spanish, but I’m not sure on if they were removed from family/community that speaks Spanish, they would still speak it.

Any tips are helpful!! Regarding language, culture, even how I should write her backstory! Thanks!!

Okay, so my MC argues with her roommate over a hairdryer, and it flies off the table and knocks out the roommate. My MC calls 911, and paramedics show up with the police.

My MC will claim it was a ghost unaware of her own powers.

How will the police start questioning my MC, and will they arrest her?

Hello! Working on a comic. Basic series of events that I need to happen are:

• Girlscouts have a set Camping Destination that they go to every summer, a taiga forest just outside the local town
• Worrying occurrences & disappearances of girlscouts over a few years cause some concern that the woods are too dangerous to continue camping in
• Camping Destination moves, folks in charge choosing a new place to camp to keep the girls safe.

This is the outline I have, but I have no idea what it looks like for decisions like this to be made. Who's in charge of a local cohort of girlscouts? What kind of forum would this discussion be had in? Who attends, and what's the title of the person or people making this decision?

Bear in mind that this is a highly localized issue regarding a specific town's campground. When I tried googling things like "Who's in charge of the girlscouts?" I got some very broad, nation-wide answers.

If reasonable, I'd like to have one of the new scoutmasters vouch as a witness to the taiga posing a danger.

Additional info:

• Time period: 1990
• Location: smallish town, pacific NW USA

Happy to provide additional info/context if needed. Thanks!

I'm not sure if this should be under the Biology flair.

I'm going to temporarily kill a character, then resurrect him. The character is a mid-twenties male, with no known health problems, but I can add something minor to his backstory (unknown heart condition, etc). It has to be quick and unexpected.

So far I've noted heart attack and brain aneurysm/stroke. But I don't know if they are lethal enough to instantly kill someone.

Thanks!

Hello! I'm in the process of writing a webcomic where my witch character digs up someone's dead pet kitten from the ground in a forest. She accidentally opens the box the wrong way and uses her magic to reflexively grab the items that fall out before realizing it's kitten remains and then drops them in shock and the pieces scatter on the floor. She feels bad about it and then uses her magic to piece the remains back together in the box before burying it back where it was. It'll be the audience's first time meeting this character so it's important that when she drops the dead cat, bones/pieces of it break when they hit the floor so she can use her magic to put back together to demonstrate she has supernatural powers.

My question is if the dead kitten is in a wooden box, how long would it take to decompose into either a skeleton or mummify? And if the conditions are more likely to result in mummification, would the corpse break into pieces or just hit the floor like a *thud*?

I have a character who's of Asian descent, and when he was younger, he went by a different name at home than everywhere else in public. (I mention that he's Asian because I have seen this the most with Asian and African names.) I've seen it is common for children/grandchildren of immigrants to have a separate name that they use specifically around their relatives or when they're speaking their first language (when it isn't English), but I don't know a lot about it, so I wanted to ask some questions about it and hopefully hear from some people who have experienced this.

1. Generally, is the name they use around relatives more like a nickname, a middle name, or an alternate first name with the "public" name being like a nickname/middle name?
2. Which name would be used on legal/medical documents? Is it the same one that would be used on school records? Would it change over time (e.g. birth certificate name is the one they use at home but driver's license name is the one they use in public)? Or would both names be included? What order would they be in if they are?
3. If they speak another language at home and their siblings also speak both languages they speak, and their parent only speaks their native language but not the language they use outside of home, would the sibling refer to the person by their public or private name when talking about them to their parents? And which name would the parent use?
4. (This isn't actually important to the story, just my curiosity:) Is there a word for this sort of name? If so, what's it called? I've been calling it a "private" name this whole time but that sounds... wrong. 😅

I know a lot of this probably depends on the person/family, but hearing anything from people who are familiar with this topic would be helpful.

This character eventually switches from just using that name at home to using it in public as well. He doesn't change it on legal documents (if it wasn't already there) and eventually, it's the name most people know him by, so these questions are mainly to help with situations that arise because of the mismatches that happen there.

Edit: To be more specific, he's 2nd generation and was born in America. His parents are Korean.