Bear Ribs
Well-known member
Biology Overview: General Monstergirl Physiology Notes
Monstergirls are ultimately derived from human stock and our systems are largely human except as noted otherwise. Most modifications are unique to a specific phenotype but a few things are universal.
The GeneCaste did not modify the brain directly in any way. All monster girls have a human brain as making modifications to it was deemed too difficult and likely to have catastrophic unintended consequences, potentially unnoticed until it was too late. Monster girls that do have an altered brain structure, such as the enlarged visual cortex of the Cyclops, are accomplished by the brain's own innate ability to form new connections and grow larger sections of itself in response to use, and in a few cases hormone treatments during prenatal and early development.
The head does have one significant modification in all cases, the back of the skull has several reinforced ridges and an absolute minimum of nerves and blood vessels pass through these areas. A number of nerves branch off the spine immediately below the brainstem that are not connected to any muscles or sensory organs. These extra nerves and the ridged rings of bone in front of them are designed to connect to cybernetic systems and provide an easy Direct Neural Interface system. Typically these nerves are stimulated repeatedly during prenatal and natal development, causing the brain to automatically adapt to accommodate them. This allows most Monstergirls to accept these cybernetics without the pain and mental trauma baseline humans suffer from adding circuitry to their brains. Additionally, a subgland attached to the pituitary secretes compounds similar to X3-A that further reduce any central nervous trauma, allowing monster girls to adapt to cybernetic systems with ease. All of the monster girls with installed memories from previous lifetimes require a DNI installed through which their past memories were downloaded into the brain during prenatal development.
As an additional nervous system modification, most varieties of monster girl possess “processing nodes” which are extra ganglea attached to our sensory organs. The human brain has a limited ability to handle sensory data and much of our brains are already devoted to this, because monster girls tend to possess enhanced senses of balance, hearing, or vision, these ganglia do a sort of pre-processing to ease the load, similar to the way the spinal cord can give limited commands in the form of reflexes without consulting the brain first. Conceptually imagine that each monster girl has a graphics processor attached to the back of her eye and a. . . yeah not sure there's an equivalent for sound but our ears have them. According to Dr. Witch, this is the most complex and difficult part of engineering a monster girl by two orders of magnitude; twenty-foot snake tails, wings, and color-changing skin are apparently child's play compared to building these ganglia.
To increase toughness, all monster girls have bones based on iron compounds instead of calcium. This causes our bones to have an orangey-yellow color and hardness is dramatically increased. This stronger bone structure allows a certain level of gigantism not easy with a calcium skeleton, making large species like the Wyverns and Mermaids possible. It also allows for tremendously increased muscle attachments without the risk of snapping the bones from sheer tensile shear, which is required to produce gargoyles. The tradeoff for this is that the skeleton is slightly heavier and, because the bones contain less calcium, the body cannot harvest emergency calcium from the bones to maintain brain functions or power the heart's muscle tissue. The weight issues are minimal and the allowance for significant extra muscle mass without risking breaking the bones easily compensates. To compensate for the lack of calcium reserves, monster girls have enlarged pouches on their gallbladders designed to deliberately generate and store “kidney” stones and the body harvests calcium from them as needed instead.
Because of the huge requirement for iron when building the skeleton, along with the muscles and blood supply, an infant monster girl cannot survive on human breast milk and requires supplements to give them sufficient supplies when growing, in large quantities. Monster girls in general tend to require a much richer diet than a baseline human and cannot easily survive in the wild simply due to massive protein, vitamin, and mineral requirements. Needless to say no monster girl has ever suffered from iron overload. . . ever.
Monster girls are created with self-regenerating telomeres allowing for an extremely increased lifespan. They also have a regeneration factor allowing them to eventually regrow limbs and organs if the initial trauma does not kill them, scars from injuries fade more rapidly than in baseline humans but still linger several years. Couple with advanced healing optimization genes this leaves them healing at only a somewhat higher rate than a baseline human would, but with minimal scarring and no permanent loss of function even in the case of severed limbs or highly invasive surgery.
The exact lifespan is uncertain at this point because no monster girl has died of old age, however even the lower estimates put it at mid tens of thousands of years and the limitation is not the monster girl's body but the eventual overloading of the brain with too many memories, which could take centuries.
Monster girls also have a dramatically enhanced immune system. Drugs and diseases of a baseline human simply have no effect, and even incredibly potent diseases such as Galax can be fought off by a monster girl's superhuman immune system. Our digestive systems contain cell structures and enzymes that cut out the middleman rather than relying on microbiota to assist digestion allowing for a far more aggressive immune response, and our livers are large and powerful. The GeneCaste have derived drugs capable of affecting them but the dosage tends to be massive and the drugs so potent that baseline humans cannot survive such a dosage. Caution is advised if any baseline human is being treated by a monster girl medic who hasn't been given specific training in human biology.
Monstergirls are ultimately derived from human stock and our systems are largely human except as noted otherwise. Most modifications are unique to a specific phenotype but a few things are universal.
The GeneCaste did not modify the brain directly in any way. All monster girls have a human brain as making modifications to it was deemed too difficult and likely to have catastrophic unintended consequences, potentially unnoticed until it was too late. Monster girls that do have an altered brain structure, such as the enlarged visual cortex of the Cyclops, are accomplished by the brain's own innate ability to form new connections and grow larger sections of itself in response to use, and in a few cases hormone treatments during prenatal and early development.
The head does have one significant modification in all cases, the back of the skull has several reinforced ridges and an absolute minimum of nerves and blood vessels pass through these areas. A number of nerves branch off the spine immediately below the brainstem that are not connected to any muscles or sensory organs. These extra nerves and the ridged rings of bone in front of them are designed to connect to cybernetic systems and provide an easy Direct Neural Interface system. Typically these nerves are stimulated repeatedly during prenatal and natal development, causing the brain to automatically adapt to accommodate them. This allows most Monstergirls to accept these cybernetics without the pain and mental trauma baseline humans suffer from adding circuitry to their brains. Additionally, a subgland attached to the pituitary secretes compounds similar to X3-A that further reduce any central nervous trauma, allowing monster girls to adapt to cybernetic systems with ease. All of the monster girls with installed memories from previous lifetimes require a DNI installed through which their past memories were downloaded into the brain during prenatal development.
As an additional nervous system modification, most varieties of monster girl possess “processing nodes” which are extra ganglea attached to our sensory organs. The human brain has a limited ability to handle sensory data and much of our brains are already devoted to this, because monster girls tend to possess enhanced senses of balance, hearing, or vision, these ganglia do a sort of pre-processing to ease the load, similar to the way the spinal cord can give limited commands in the form of reflexes without consulting the brain first. Conceptually imagine that each monster girl has a graphics processor attached to the back of her eye and a. . . yeah not sure there's an equivalent for sound but our ears have them. According to Dr. Witch, this is the most complex and difficult part of engineering a monster girl by two orders of magnitude; twenty-foot snake tails, wings, and color-changing skin are apparently child's play compared to building these ganglia.
To increase toughness, all monster girls have bones based on iron compounds instead of calcium. This causes our bones to have an orangey-yellow color and hardness is dramatically increased. This stronger bone structure allows a certain level of gigantism not easy with a calcium skeleton, making large species like the Wyverns and Mermaids possible. It also allows for tremendously increased muscle attachments without the risk of snapping the bones from sheer tensile shear, which is required to produce gargoyles. The tradeoff for this is that the skeleton is slightly heavier and, because the bones contain less calcium, the body cannot harvest emergency calcium from the bones to maintain brain functions or power the heart's muscle tissue. The weight issues are minimal and the allowance for significant extra muscle mass without risking breaking the bones easily compensates. To compensate for the lack of calcium reserves, monster girls have enlarged pouches on their gallbladders designed to deliberately generate and store “kidney” stones and the body harvests calcium from them as needed instead.
Because of the huge requirement for iron when building the skeleton, along with the muscles and blood supply, an infant monster girl cannot survive on human breast milk and requires supplements to give them sufficient supplies when growing, in large quantities. Monster girls in general tend to require a much richer diet than a baseline human and cannot easily survive in the wild simply due to massive protein, vitamin, and mineral requirements. Needless to say no monster girl has ever suffered from iron overload. . . ever.
Monster girls are created with self-regenerating telomeres allowing for an extremely increased lifespan. They also have a regeneration factor allowing them to eventually regrow limbs and organs if the initial trauma does not kill them, scars from injuries fade more rapidly than in baseline humans but still linger several years. Couple with advanced healing optimization genes this leaves them healing at only a somewhat higher rate than a baseline human would, but with minimal scarring and no permanent loss of function even in the case of severed limbs or highly invasive surgery.
The exact lifespan is uncertain at this point because no monster girl has died of old age, however even the lower estimates put it at mid tens of thousands of years and the limitation is not the monster girl's body but the eventual overloading of the brain with too many memories, which could take centuries.
Monster girls also have a dramatically enhanced immune system. Drugs and diseases of a baseline human simply have no effect, and even incredibly potent diseases such as Galax can be fought off by a monster girl's superhuman immune system. Our digestive systems contain cell structures and enzymes that cut out the middleman rather than relying on microbiota to assist digestion allowing for a far more aggressive immune response, and our livers are large and powerful. The GeneCaste have derived drugs capable of affecting them but the dosage tends to be massive and the drugs so potent that baseline humans cannot survive such a dosage. Caution is advised if any baseline human is being treated by a monster girl medic who hasn't been given specific training in human biology.