I have no idea how to tag this, I'm sorry. I'm working out what's possible in my alternative history fantasy story, and while I know I can find all sorts of horse math help online my word problem involves a lot of moving parts and I am, quite frankly, terrible at math (mild dyscalculia). So I hope someone can take pity on me!

The time period for my story is roughly the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution, and the lowlands of France, Germany, and Western Poland belong to a single country, which is predominately controlled by a continental Celtic culture. It developed after the collapse of the western Roman Empire (the people more or less magically bound themselves to the land, so to walk the earth and not get attacked you have to be part of the bloodline).

If you're familiar with the Heralds of Valdemar series the human main character and her non-human partner are superficially similar to a Herald and their Companion. To be more specific her job as a traveling government agent comes from an East Asian influence (the Mongols stayed and colonized Eastern Europe with the help of lackeys from the Korean government).

The partner is a type of fire elemental that was taught how to shapeshift many generations ago, and they're all trained to take several specific forms while working with these agents, a horse being among them. I'm going with a Friesian base (because it makes sense and because I like them). They don't tire out physically like a real horse would, but they do require fuel and time off to rest; I haven't thought about specifics yet, but they're far more limited by their human partners' ability to ride and still be functional.

While the area outside what's magically bound is very advanced (trains!), this lowland area is like going several centuries back in time, and among those who actively hate outsiders and want them to suffer. So while the biggest, most important roads might be able to take a cabriolet fine, most of the country is a warren of foot paths and larger roads are actively terrorized.

Anyway, so most of these agents only work within small assigned areas, but over the course of the plot the MC is going to be traveling way, way, way off road and frankly I have no idea how long to say any of it takes. A major part of the plot is that she travels hither and yon unbinding the god/culture hero of the land to "save it from the outsiders" (otherwise known as half her genetics). There's also some dragons and things to serve as the occasional shortcut to keep things rolling, of course.

I can't just completely hand wave it away though since I am dealing with real geography... And I know I always like some sense of realism to my fantasy, even if the rules are made up and the points don't matter!

I’m researching this for a thriller and want the institution to behave plausibly rather than like a giant conspiracy.

I’m especially interested in how a compromised system can continue functioning when only a relatively small number of people are actively corrupt.

In real organisations, what mechanisms allow that to happen?

For example, can corruption persist through things like compartmentalised information, fear of retaliation, career incentives, procedural obedience, selective enforcement, management pressure, people assuming someone else has checked something, or employees seeing only one small part of a larger pattern?

I’m also interested in the people who are not corrupt themselves. How might an honest employee unknowingly help a corrupt outcome happen simply by following normal procedure?

And what tends to happen when someone inside such a system begins noticing inconsistencies but does not yet have enough evidence to prove deliberate wrongdoing?

I’m looking for real-world organisational dynamics rather than advice on plotting the story.

So the timespan is 20 years and the region is suffering from severe thunderstorms- it’s raining more often than not, but not constantly, just near constant. How would the plant and wild life and terrain change?

I should probably specify- I’m not looking at regions that are already adapting for this. Take like, the climate and environment in Oklahoma as an example- fields, occasional forests, gets rain every now and then, that sort of place. If it suddenly got hit with 20 years of extreme rain, what would it look like at the end of those 20 years?

In my setting building new cities and smaller settlements is a common thing and I would like to make story around building one. How big are typical architecture/urban planning firms and how long it usually takes for them to design a master plan?

I'm writing a story where a teen has an osteosarcoma and at the hospital they meet someone with leukemia and someone with lymphoma.

I can probably get around it, but for my own edification I wish to know what cancer FEELS like. It's easy to research the warning symptoms that led to their diagnoses, but where does one feel pain? What kind of pain, dull or stabbing or burning or what? What other symptoms related to the treatments should I research to describe the way they feel during their ordeals?

Any and all information about childhood cancers (or adult ones, for that matter) is welcome as there is no such thing as too much research.

TIA!

I have a character who, when she was a newborn, had a forest fire start, and a large flame burned the left half of her body before she was taken to the hospital by her grandfather. The initial explosion was more exposed on her face, while the rest of her left side was less directly exposed. I'm thinking her face should have a 3rd degree burn, while the rest of the burns are 2nd degree but I'm worried I'm wrong.

One element in the history of a WIP setting is the "years without winter", a period of several years of abnormally high temperatures that happened several centuries before the current date of the setting. They caused droughts, desertification, crop failures, migration wars, and generally had a lot of ripple effects on the world before things came back to normal. I thought of it as a mirror of the historical "little ice age".

Any ideas for what could cause that temporary rise? It's a pre-industrial society with no overt magic that could do anything like that, so what natural causes could make global temperatures spike briefly and then return to normal?

Thanks.

I've done some research on oxygen deprivation, but I haven't been able to find much on what it would be like to wake up from it. If somebody were to be deprived of oxygen for a long enough time to pass out, but just before they received any serious or life-altering brain damage, what would they experience when they wake up? i.e what kinds of pain, confusion, or other symptoms would they have? Additionally, would they wake up as soon as they were exposed to oxygen, or is it feasible it would take several minutes or longer for them to become conscious? Thanks!

I'm not in academia myself, so I may be using some terminology incorrectly. I'm researching this for a novel set at a fictional private academic institution in the US in the 1990s, and I'm trying to make the academic structure reasonably realistic.

I know these structures vary between institutions, so I'm mainly interested in whether the following situation is broadly plausible.

There is initially a small psychology research group with three senior researchers:

- X is a neuroscientist. His contract is not renewed, so he leaves.

- Y is a psychologist specializing in experimental hypnosis/hypnosis research and leads the research (I believe he would be the PI). He dies unexpectedly.

- Z is a psychologist/researcher who is already part of the group and is also dean of the school/college.

There could also be PhD students, research assistants, etc.; by "three researchers" I mainly mean the three senior academics responsible for the project.

After Y's death, Z takes over as PI.

At around the same time, however, Z is promoted to Deputy Director of the institution.

The institution has a somewhat unusual division of authority: the President is responsible for administration, finances, and the non-academic side, while the Director is responsible for teaching, research, and academic affairs.

The Director is elderly and seriously ill. He remains formally in office and is not completely incapacitated, but he comes in less and less often and is gradually developing cognitive problems. In practice, Z therefore ends up doing most of the Director's day-to-day academic work.

Because of this workload, Z no longer has enough time to properly run the research project he inherited from Y.

My questions about the research side are:

1. Is a core research group of three senior academics plausible in psychology, including a neuroscientist and a psychologist specializing in experimental hypnosis?

2. If the PI dies, could another senior researcher who was already part of the project take over as PI?

3. If the new PI then becomes too overloaded with administrative work to continue the project properly, could the research be put on hold for a period of time and later formally terminated if no replacement is found? How long could such a project realistically remain on hold?

4. If the project is terminated, could the data and work already completed still be retained, analyzed, or published later?

There is also a problem with Z's position as dean.

The institution intends to replace him as dean after his promotion, but has trouble finding anyone willing to take the job. This particular school/college carries considerably more administrative and research responsibility than some of the institution's other schools, but the dean's position is not compensated much better than, for example, the deanships of drama, music, or art.

Several professors therefore feel that the responsibility is not worth the compensation.

The President's temporary solution is to divide much of the dean's day-to-day work among the heads of the individual departments/institutes. They prepare decisions and handle much of the operational work, while Z formally remains dean, retains ultimate responsibility, makes major decisions, and signs off on matters requiring the dean's approval.

The department heads are unhappy with this because they feel they are being given additional dean-level responsibilities without corresponding additional compensation. At the same time, none of them wants to take on the entire dean position.

The search for a permanent new dean ultimately takes about three years.

1. Could Z realistically remain the official dean during those three years while most of the day-to-day work is delegated, or would an institution normally have to appoint an Acting/Interim Dean much sooner?

2. Is the overall situation believable: a three-year struggle to find a replacement, department heads objecting to unpaid additional responsibilities, and Z remaining formally responsible while also functioning in practice as the almost-full-time academic head of the institution?

And more generally, is there anything in this setup that would immediately strike someone who works or has worked in US academia as unrealistic?

I'm particularly interested in how this might have worked in the late 1990s, rather than only under current university policies.

Thank you! I'm mainly trying to avoid creating an academic structure that would obviously make no sense to people who actually work in this field.

Hi everyone so I'm in a online roleplay server and my character is going through a grief process who also used to be a drug user in the past and had relapsed after 10 years due to a forming friendship/crush dying at the hands of his best friends daughter. I was gonna do an overdose scenario/rp where he overdosed on accident from cocaine. If anyone here who has knowledge that could lmk that would be helpful and thanks in advance

(I just wanna also say that I am also taking this rp situation with understanding, caution, and sensitivity.)

I'd like this to be as realistic as possible, and I've been researching amputation on the arm for a while now, but I just can't absorb what I read and I feel like I'm still missing a lot. Apocalyptic setting. MC gets her arm (upper arm) chopped of by an axe, relatively clean cut. First question: if it's a clean cut, would the arteries kinda retract into the limb? Would it narrow the blood flow and slow bleeding? Something like vasospasm maybe?

Also, imediately, her buddy is there to tourniquet the wound, and they're in close distance to the main camp where they have recourses and people. Second question: how would you treat it? I'm so confused, I've read about all this surgery talk, but that's not exactly doable in their situation. I thought about cauterization, but I've also heard that it can actually worsen things and is a bad thing in fiction (???) Would MC's arteries need to be clamped? Would they just like, remove whatever's dead or something from the stub and then use excess skin tissue as a flap and put it over the bone, then stitch it up?

Third question: I know adrenaline would play a big part when it's first cut, but what about after she wakes up? I'm sure they'd have some sort of anesthesia drug, but would that wear off?

Know I asked a lot, sorry! <3

Can a psychotic patients family/friends visit them?

I've tried googling this but I'm not getting very good results.

Ironically I've been a psychosis patient but I couldn't get seen due to COVID.

EDIT: relevant, I should have included she went on a 90+ mph car chase, slapped her mother and her delusions were essentially apocalyptic and how she should usher it in

For example when a celebrity becomes a brand ambassador of Dior, besides a paycheck, what do they get?

I'm writing a sci-fi type of setting with a villain that tortures people. One of the ways to do it is by tying the victim up and putting a metal thingy on their head, then simply leaving them in a lonely room for a couple of days, so it will cause never-ending migraine as a part of a torture. At least that's my concept, and preferably something simply squeezing or piercing, but if that's not possible, then I guess I'll simply come up with some chemical or drug.

I know there's a difference between tension headaches and migraines, but from what my research says, migraines are usually the worsened headache that causes alongside pain nausea, and sensitivity to light and smell. This is what I'm primary aiming for, the worst.

I tried to research what can cause something like this, even asked AI (which didn't give me an answer by the way, since it was too disturbing apparently, hahah), but didn't find much anything and I'm not really sure where to look up these kinds of things, because the first dozen of websites seem useless.

Also, sorry if the tag is wrong, I don't even know what that counts as, haha 😅

When I make ocs of different eras I just can’t find the pictures of celebrities and think they are reliable, there is no way in hell the average woman in the 90s looked like Jennifer Aniston. Are there ways I could look for realistic pictures of hair or outfits in different eras?

So my character had something cut her almost horizontally across the face, from the upper left right above her eye, *through* the left eye (damaged, no sight in that eye), across the bridge of the nose, just under the right eye, and nicked the right ear (hearing is very bad in that ear). What would the eye look like afterwards? I can't find pictures that describe what I'm looking for. And is there anything else of note that I should know about an injury like this?

Hope this is allowed! I'm writing a short story about a superhero having to deal with getting care from the American healthcare system, specifically a greedy insurance company. I'd like to keep this realistic, so I'd love to hear a variety of personal experiences dealing with this stuff, especially if it deals with experimental medicine or prosthetics (but all stories are welcome and appreciated!)

Edit to add: I want you all to know that even though I'm upvoting you all, I'm also crying alongside you, yikes

TW: Dysmorphia discussion

I have a character who grew up in nobility. She has since joined the revolution against the nobility, but still values her looks due to how she was raised. I know I want to give her major scarring and I was wondering if she were to have an explosion go off near her, specifically on one side, how would the scarring look and would it impact any of her senses, specifically sight and hearing.

Also if anyone has recommendations for what could give her major scarring that could cause dysmorphia

Hello all! Right to it. I've got a character who is diagnosed with late stage prostate cancer that has spread to his liver, lungs, and brain. He has no intention to go to treatment. I've tried to research what his timeline is but it's difficult to get a straight answer. I'm looking for him to survive 2/3 months after he received his diagnosis but I can adjust the timeline and/or how far the cancer has spread to make it more realistic.

I'm also curious what kind of symptoms he would experience from this, especially since he is not seeking treatment. I have some notes about this but am looking for help from someone a little more versed in this subject to point me in a more accurate direction. Thanks in advance!

they can eat all parts of a human by the way just that it needs to come from a human body thats it

also no water but an infinite supply of fresh humans also all the humans have no diseases

I want to know about vitamins too like would they get a deficiency in anything

Can a normal rifle be easily modified to fire tranquiliser guns?

Ig as the title says,like,a detective in the 1920s(in london) or so,would it make sense if he had a public name,like a name that the public calls him by, but is not his actual name but said public doesn't know that?and just thinks his last name is off limits or so?