#the urge I have to just.... cut apart a copy of Nona to isolate the John narrative and bind to read as a single chunk

[mayasaura]

I’m interested in your thoughts RE John Gaius & the gifts given to him, and how they manifested, and how the like, situation he was defined his powers to him. By this I mean, because they had been using cadavers to experiment on, and that’s what John was around all the time, he notices that he is having an effect on the dead bodies & slowly zeroes in on thanergy. But I wonder, had John’s experiments had to do with living things, say, plant matter & figuring out decarbonisation or something, whether he might have instead zeroed in on thalergy instead. Like, it feels like, because situationally with what their project already was & then the timing of the events with the trillionaires, he just never stopped to take in the full scope of the powers given to him (like his ability to heal for example—how else could that have been applied on a macro scale?) because vengeance became the name of the game. I hope we get to hear from Alecto WHY she chose John or if everyone to give these initial powers too, providing she can remember…

Yeah!! I have been thinking about this! Like, it's not even just animal tissue; he grew flowers for C— and N—'s wedding! Yes they ended up with teeth, but practice could have fixed that.

If he can grow plants, he can grow forests. If he can grow forests, he can trap excess carbon and cool the atmosphere. This works; it has been proven to work. But it was not John's area of study. What John knew was biology and human anatomy, and he is very much not a flexible thinker.

But let's leave that aside and baselessly assume for now that the flowers were made of meat (not saying anything) and he can't actually do plants. He squishes cows around like playdoh. If he hadn't been so laser focused on human bodies he could have restored the biomes of bays and rivers. There's a bacteria being engineered in India that breaks plastics down into organic compounds.

He's worried about the next climate famine? John, you can produce animal matter without so much as a nod at the law of conservation of mass. People eat animal matter.

And yeah, most of these projects he doesn't have access to, and he doesn't have a mode of distribution. He would need help, and the world governments wouldn't give him the time of day. Maybe he did try networking, and aide organizations and so on turned him away, too. Bit funny how he never mentions trying.

I say this with love, and I don't mean it as an insult: John was not a sane and rational person at any point in this process. Before any of the magical girl transformation started, he had favourite cadavers that he talked to and felt an obligation to. He was so manic after losing his project that his closest friends thought that he was taking Class A stimulants, and he never really pulled up from that spiral.

I would love to know, too: why John? Why then? Did she reach out to other people, and only John was in a state of mind to take her up on it?