475 – Giving Characters Extra Senses
The Mythcreant Podcast
Exploring the Senses: Smell and Character Perception
This chapter examines how characters' ability to smell reveals personal insights and enriches storytelling. It highlights the normalization of scent perception while playfully acknowledging supporter engagement through Patreon.
A wise wizard once told us that our eyes can deceive us and we shouldn’t trust them, so maybe that’s why we’re always giving our characters additional senses. This week, we’re using narrative-o-ception to sense what this topic is about and how writers can incorporate it into their work. We discuss super powers, aliens, and just about every animal sense we could think of. Also, cats. Lots of cats.
Show Notes
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Leen. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to The Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.
[intro music]Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Mythcreant podcast. I’m Bunny. And with me here today is…
Chris: Chris
Bunny: And,
Oren: Oren
Bunny: and I’m sensing something. It’s like kind of a tingling in my brain. Just listening to both of you, I’m realizing you’re like me; you’re both podcast hosts. I thought I was the only one..
Oren: special podcast senses activated.
Bunny: Yeah. The environment around me has gone blue and red for some reason, and there are squiggly lines coming out of my head.
Chris: Do you glow blue when other podcast hosts are near?
All: [laughter]
Bunny: Rival podcast hosts.
Oren: I wonder if Sting still works if you put it inside a lead box. What is the mechanism it uses to detect orcs?
Bunny: [giggles]
Oren: Are orcs mildly radioactive? I have questions.
Bunny: I like that explanation. Maybe podcast hosts are radioactive too.
Oren: Yeah, that’s why we have so many hot takes.
Chris: [giggles]
Bunny: Ohhhh [laughter].
Today we are talking about the wild world of senses, and I first wanna give a shout out to the book “An Immense World” which inspired this episode. And I’m going to use one of the concepts it introduced, which is – Germans, forgive me – “Umwelt” which refers to the sensory world of animals; the different bubbles that we live in based on our senses.
So the umwelt of a bat is a whole lot different than that of us, or a spider or a snake. A lot of researchers have made the error of thinking about animal senses and other creature senses with regard to our own, usually in a very visual context because we are very visual animals.
So today we’re gonna be talking about how you can use the inspiration of the animal world and, in general, to give your characters unusual senses. I’ve found that usually this manifests in one of two ways:
It’s either superpowers, or it’s like aliens or a different species that have different physiology. We have Daredevil, for example, It’s the superpower, but he doesn’t have massive ears and he also doesn’t click, which is really weird because it’s supposed to be like radar.
Chris: Yeah. For echolocation or radar, you have to emit a wave and then it bounces back. And there are people who do echolocation and they click; they make clicking noises.
Bunny: Yeah. Look up Daniel Kish if you’re curious about that. But you don’t send out waves automatically. You have to do it.
Chris: I suppose an alien species could send out waves that are non-perceptible by human characters, automatically.
Bunny: Yeah, bats do that, but I don’t think Daredevil is a bat.
Oren: The human ear has to be able to hear it. Right? So by definition, other humans will be able to hear it too, unless you have very special ears.
I’m a big fan of active senses. I think those have a lot of potential because, by default, our senses are mostly passive, they mostly receive information; we have very little in the way of active senses most normally.
Although it has been pointed out, humans can and do navigate by sonar, which is one of the reasons why I would recommend not generally having that as a superpower. It’s kind of like giving your character the superpower to memorize long stories; most people don’t do that, but a human can absolutely learn to do that. They don’t need a superpower [giggles].
Bunny: You can tie a cherry stem into a knot with your tongue and that’s your superpower.
Oren: Yeah. You can learn to do it. It’s like ‘my superpower is that I can bench 200 pounds’. That’s a lot. That’s a decent bench press, at least by my standards, but it’s obviously not something that most people would need a superpower to be able to do. It would just need training.
Chris: I also get the feeling that Daredevil gets echolocation from all directions.
Bunny: Yeah, that also doesn’t work.
Chris: You usually click and then there is a specific area that your waves are in that direction, and that’s the direction that you can see in.
Oren: He’s just emitting clicks in all directions at all times.
Chris & Bunny: [laughter].
Oren: Everyone around him has just learned to tune it out.
All: [laughter]
Bunny: It would be really funny if his suit came with a crown that had little clickers at certain intervals, and those are just constantly going.
Oren: But that is the dynamic of active senses is that you are sending out some kind of signal, which means that you will get information when it bounces back to you.
But anyone who can receive that signal, presumably members of your species, whatever it is, will also receive it, and then they will see that you sent that out, and this is a really fun game.
You can do, if you’re in sci-fi, you can have two ships that are trying to locate each other and they have to decide whether they wanna risk sending out an active ping because it gives away where they are, but also will give them information.
So that is fun and you can do that with characters if they have that kind of active sense going.
Chris: I think the other nice thing about that is, again, there’s always situations where we want things to take a character by surprise. Whenever we have a character that can, for instance, automatically hear, even just read the motions around them…
Think about that. If you could automatically sense everybody’s emotions, you would know whenever a person was nearby, because you could sense their emotions, even if they’re being perfectly quiet and they’re behind you.
Oren: There was a D&D (dungeons and dragons) argument that went on for years in one of my gaming groups about whether or not being able to sense magic automatically let you detect stealth characters if they had magic items on them.
Logically, it sounded like the answer was yes, but obviously that was really overpowered. So we said no and came up with a nonsense explanation to try to justify it.
Chris: So anytime you have any kind of passive sensory perception, if that’s associated with people, you’ll all know where people are all the time [giggles]
So if it’s active, the character has to suspect somebody’s nearby in order to do the sensing, and then it just, oh man. So much easier for the plot. Every time you need that person to be taken by surprise, they still can be.
Bunny: I’m reading “The Parable of the Sower” right now, and the main character has, well it is a magic power, but it’s explained through drugs, which makes me feel bad because I didn’t put this in the drug episode
Oren: [laughter]
Bunny: It’s called “hyper-empathy” but I think the way it works is she has to look at someone and then she feels strongly what she interprets them as feeling.
And I think that makes a lot more sense than the Troy dilemma, where it kind of works sometimes, and when it does work, either it’s overpowered or it’s just things that you could tell by looking at the character.
Chris: And we never have Troy… Like there’s two people in the hall outside [laughter] She should be able to do that.
Oren: But she can sense cosmic being sometimes. But also, other times not so who knows?
All: [laughter]
Bunny: It’s the power of plot convenience.. plot sense.
Oren: When I try to write a character with a sense other than the various human ones, I generally end up defaulting to ‘it’s like one of our senses, but a little different’ because I don’t know how to describe a sense that I don’t have!
Chris: That’s not the worst thing as long as it has novelty on its own. It is cool if we’ve managed to break away a little bit from anything that replaces sight and is now just like sight and works exactly the same way, or anything that involves talking just becomes sound.
It is nice when we can do things differently. Like with echolocation, it doesn’t give you the same information that vision does. It can replace vision in that it tells you where things are, but it gives you different information, like how soft or hard things are, instead of what color they are.
Bunny: And the other thing that’s interesting about echolocation and bats admittedly get most of the publicity on this. Whales and dolphins also use it, and they use it to create a 3D world because the ways that it bounces off of things can construct, for lack of a better word, a different picture. And the thing about humans being so visually oriented is that our Umwelt tends to revolve around sight or our other dominant sense Probably being, hearing or touch.
Honestly, super touch is not something I’ve seen before. One could make it happen, I guess.
Chris: Usually when there’s super touch it’s like you touch something and you get visions.
Oren: Yeah. I actually really like that as a power; a character who can read the history of an object or whatever by touching it, because it’s really easy to get information to your character that they need to have that would otherwise be difficult for them to get. But it’s also easy to deny them that because they just don’t get the item.
Whereas if they can just look back in time, my gosh, that is so hard to plan around. Don’t give your character that power.
Bunny: Yeah, There was a book, I think it’s called “The Hidden Memory of Objects”, which is all about the character having the ability to touch things and then get their history, and then becoming increasingly overwhelmed by that, where the power gets stronger and then she can’t touch anything without getting overwhelmed by this. I don’t know. It was an interesting plot.
Chris: The other thing I like about touch related powers is that it gives an excuse for your character to have to go somewhere or put themselves in danger, even, because they have to be in close enough proximity to touch something. It’s like ‘Hey, maybe I could see what’s going on in the villain’s head, but I have to go and touch the villain’ [laughter]
Bunny: Yeah [laughter] that’s awkward. Trying to get close enough to hold the villain’s hand.
Oren: Yeah. But makes for a great reason to do fake dating which is one of my favorite tropes. So, yup, more please.
All: [laughter]
Bunny: That’s a good trope. Touch also involves one sensory organ that’s often involved in touch and with seismic sense, which we can talk about later, is whiskers; which can be extremely sensitive.
For example, we usually think of whiskers on cats and that makes sense, cats do use their whiskers.
But whiskers on seals and sea lions? Aren’t they really powerful hunting tools? They can be just completely blinded and still function just fine because their whiskers are so good at that, because fish leave ripples and then the seals can follow the ripples maybe even as far as like a hundred meters away,
Chris: That seems like it might be more powerful in the water.
Bunny: Vibrational senses tend to be stronger in water, just because water conducts that more. But cats do a similar thing where they can sense airflow with their whiskers. They also can’t see very close to them, so they use the whiskers to get sensory information that way.
Oren: I’m a big fan of good old electro-reception.
Bunny: Oh yeah! Electro-reception.
Oren: Electro-reception is very fun because it’s specifically used for finding the electrical signals generated by living creatures so you can snack on them, which I find fun.
I don’t know how to describe it though. I wanna give my aliens electro-reception or a superpower or maybe through some kind of gear. At least if it’s through gear, I can assume that whoever made it is already gonna try to translate it into a picture because, presumably, the person using it will be able to understand that.
But if it’s a superpower or a magical ability or something. I don’t know how to describe that. What do you just, you get a vibe? like how does it work?
Bunny: You just get the feel of it, you know?
Oren: Tell me what your Umwelt is like, good friend, hammerhead shark.
All: [giggle]
Bunny: Electric sense is cool, also because we were talking about active and passive senses, it can be either depending on the animal; like there are some fish that just have it on all the time, and other fish that can turn it on, which is pretty rad.
Oren: Although active electro-reception is like you’re shooting electricity out. That’d be interesting. ‘Hang on. I gotta get a look at you… Boom’ [laughter].
Bunny: [laughter] It’s like they generate an electric field and then when it gets distorted, like if something enters it, they know there’s a thing there and they can take a bite.
Oren: Did not know that. Learning all kinds of fun things today [giggles]
Bunny: It’s interesting. There’s a particular type of fish, and I’m forgetting what kind it is, but they did tests on it and observed that it could swim backwards just as easily as it can swim forwards.
And the reason for that is that it has electro-sense all along its body. And so when something impacts the electrical field, it knows not to hit it.
Oren: Yeah. Although it does make that annoying ‘Beep beep beep’.
All: [laughter]
Bunny: Oh, that’s right. It was the dump truck fish.
Oren: [laughter]
Chris: Probably one of my favorites is when a character senses something that is technically in a different realm, but they see echoes of it that are creepy.
So, for instance, in “Lockwood and Co”, they have characters who have ghost sensing powers and they split it up between the regular senses; So some people can see glowy ghost trails if they have really sensitive sight, others hear voices, but then at one point they actually go to the realm where all of the ghosts are hanging out.
And so you see that in that realm they can see them regular, and what they were seeing before was just an echo.
That happens a bit, at least in the Lord of the Rings movies too, because when Frodo puts on the ring, you can tell that his perception is changed; he saw dark, creepy shadows before, he puts on the ring, and now they’re like glowing and white because he has moved through space and his perception has changed, and I find that having two different versions of the same senses for the same item to be interesting.
Bunny: I think to some extent you do always have to translate it into a human Umwelt just because it’s mostly humans reading this, I assume. For things like the electro-sense and senses that are pretty hard to translate into those of us that don’t have intellectual sense. It’s probably easier to put that on other characters and see how they use it. Or for example, like alien creatures or non-sapien beings that also use electro-sense.
Like maybe you have a sidekick who is beeping their way along the story.
Oren: I also am a fan of, if you’re going to do the whole ‘it’s a normal sense, but it gives extra information’, which I always do, so I’m not judging. I do think you can still spice it up by having it be something other than sight.
If you’re gonna give a character the ability to sense electro-fields or magic or whatever, they don’t necessarily have to sense it as a vision overlay, which is a standard. They can sense it as pressure in their skin,now you’re using an enhanced sense of touch, it’s really more where it’s coming into play where as you get closer to a magical item, you can feel more pressure on you as you move closer to it.
Bunny: That’s a good idea. Oh, just quickly, I wanna mention that common knowledge is that people have five senses. It’s sort of true, but it really depends how you define senses.
The classics are sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. But then, some people argue we have over 30 senses depending on how you define that, but sticking with shorter numbers, smaller numbers here, there’s two other ones that often get put in with the five.
One of them is proprioception, which is where your body parts are in relation to each other, even when you can’t see them. If you put your hands below the desk, you still know where they are relative to each other, and there’s actually been a case where someone lost the sense and had to completely relearn how to walk and navigate by sight alone, like having to have visual contact with his limbs at all times. This is the case of Ian Waterman, or IW as he is sometimes called.
And then there’s vestibular sense, which is where your body parts are in space. Just generally, if you have your arm out to the side, you can know where it is.
Oren: What about my sense of fashion? Does that make 31?
All: [laughter]
Bunny: Yeah, that’s 34 I think. Some people say up to 33, so I guess yeah, it would be 34.
Chris: Can I just say what the worst sense has ever been? In the original Buffy, the Vampire Slayer movie; before the show, Buffy gets menstrual cramps when vampires are near.
Bunny: That’s terrible. Does she get her period too?
Chris: [laughter] Not as far as we know, but it’s like ‘does she have to fight with cramps?’ [laughter] It’s just the worst!
Bunny: That’s like getting a migraine every time you see the color blue. Don’t be a creep, Whedon.
Chris: [laughter] That’s what answers that. It’s like nobody, that’s not wish fulfillment. Nobody wants to have menstrual cramps when they’re…
Bunny: Right. There are so many other routes you could have taken with that.
Chris: Yeah, and it’s not just that they’re painful, they’re painful and distinctly unpleasant in a number of ways. It does not work.
Bunny: No. It’s like getting a migraine when you see the color blue and then you have to fight the color blue.
Chris: [laughter]
Oren: I get a sore throat whenever dragons are around.
Bunny: [laughter] Yeah, I get the flu If there’s a fairy nearby.
Oren: That was one of the things that was weird about the first season of “Vox Machina”, they were struggling sooo hard to explain how the ‘Rangers sense favorite enemy’ thing works because Rangers has supposed to be able to sense whatever their favorite enemy is, and hers was supposed to be Dragon, and every once in a while she would get this weird look and we could never figure out what was going on.
And for some reason she couldn’t tell that there was a dragon shapeshifted into a human with them in the room.
Chris: Didn’t she get headaches or something?
Oren: Yeah, she would get headaches.
Bunny: Oh wow. It’s just literally the color blue.
Chris: And she would just randomly get them and we’re like ‘okay. So that character is secretly a dragon, isn’t he?’
Oren: For some reason they never put that together. It was very weird
Bunny: and she never knew. Despite having a headache.
Chris: Just having a headache. You think about that for a while if you had to punish a headache every time. But yeah, it still brings up the question; when she fights dragons, does she always have a headache then? because that doesn’t sound like a favorite enemy anymore.
Bunny: You always gotta keep some Tylenol on you.
Chris: As opposed to like spidey senses, which I think are supposed to be like tingles or something where Spider-Man knows when to dodge just in time, except for when he’s not supposed to dodge because that would be plotting convenient.
Oren: The spidey senses are weird because they’re pretty vague. I actually assumed that the new Marvel movies didn’t have them because we see a couple of scenes where Peter, like the hairs on the back of his arms stand up or whatever, but often he wasn’t in immediate danger when that happens, what is he sensing when that happens?
And then there are other scenes where he can get surprised just like anybody else. So I just assumed he didn’t really have spider senses in this version. But then suddenly one of them made his spider senses a huge plot point, which was because he was fighting mysterio who can trick your visual senses very easily and ‘wow, wouldn’t you know it? This hero just happens to have a non-visual sense he can use’. Solved, I guess.
Bunny: Which is funny. It seems like there should be, given how much super senses are a thing in media and superhero media, there’s not a single character like Daredevil with super-hearing, who can hear Mysterio putzing around.
Oren: Nope. Can’t do it. Look, the Avengers were all on vacation that day. Okay. Don’t ask where the Avengers were.
All: [laughter]
Bunny: I think it would be fun to talk about if you do want to either ‘superify’ the big five senses, I’m not really sure how to superify proprioception or vestibular sense; feeling like your limbs are in the extra right place doesn’t work.
Chris: I suppose if you attune an item, it could feel like a limb and that you always know where it is. That sounds very creepy to me though, but maybe it would be okay if your story was creepy. It might fit.
Oren: Actually, I think this could be a really interesting idea. You could have someone whose ability is if another person is close to them or they’re concentrating on that person or whatever, they can sense where those person’s limbs are. That would be really helpful in a fight, like in a fist fight. You could do some really interesting stuff with that.
Bunny: Okay. I like that. That’s a good direction to go with it. Someone take that, that’s a good idea.
Okay. Here’s one thing you can do when you’re thinking about how to design your alien species or your superpowers as well. Draw “the Beasties” in our world and think about the reasons that they developed the senses that they do.
So humans, as we’ve talked about, are very visual animals, and we’re good at pinpointing where things are in space, we can get up really close to something and see it clearly, or you can be really far away from something and if your eyes aren’t crap like mine are, you can see that thing pretty clearly as well.
We can also see the color red, which is unusual in the animal kingdom, and, due to that, we’ve put social weight on things like blushing, which is interesting. If you didn’t have that sense of red, you wouldn’t be able to see blood filling someone’s cheeks.
I wanted to think about, when you’re talking about unusual senses in the visual realm are things like where the eyes are on your creature. Like cows, their eyes are on the sides of their head which makes them look kinda dopey and tired. But what that gives them is a huge panoramic view of the horizon.
Dragonflies have those big compound eyes, which gives them 360 degree vision, including above and below. A really interesting thing with some, I think mostly bugs is that they experience time differently and I’m pretty sure this has to do with how close their eyes are to their brains.
Like they have a really fast track from their eyes to their brains, and so, things that look really fast to us are pretty slow to them.
Chris: Bunny, when you were reading that book, did you find confirmation about how predators have their eyes in front?
Bunny: I don’t know if they discuss that a lot.
Oren: Well, actually I can answer that. The answer is usually yes, but with enough exceptions that you can’t always tell.
This is a thing that gets brought up in a lot of popular archeology communities is because, generally, predators have forward facing eyes and prey animals are much more likely to have wider set vision, but it’s not universal.
First of all, many animals are predators and prey at the same time.
Bunny: Your typical house cat is both, but they have forward facing vision because they hunt.
Oren: But even animals that don’t hunt sometimes have forward facing vision for a number of reasons. And occasionally animals that do hunt have more spread out vision.
So it’s not a guarantee, it’s an indicator. But you can’t just find a fossil and be like ‘look, it’s got forward facing vision. obviously a predator’. It’s not that direct.
Bunny: Interesting. I don’t think I knew that, but I guess that makes sense. Even predators can benefit from a 180 degree view, and while dragonflies are predators, in fact, they’re some of the most efficient predators there are, and their eyes are just bulbs, they’re not forward facing or sideways.
Chris: I think another thing about us being very vision oriented that is easy to take for granted is the fact that it’s not just that we have a good ability to perceive light, it’s that we have brain mechanisms for understanding what we’re seeing and that makes a huge difference.
When we look at things, we can see what is a distinct object and process that information. For me, it was always weird this idea that, for instance, zebras with stripes would hang out together because it’s hard for a predator to pick out an individual, because when we look at it, it’s extremely obvious what an individual zebra is, even though they have stripes.
But for a creature that can’t process visuals as well and tell what visuals create mean, a distinct object, then yeah, it might be hard to pick out an individual zebra in a herd.
Bunny: So there’s something interesting I learned from this book and that is that zebra stripes might not actually have something to do with camouflage. There’s some research suggesting that they have something to do with avoiding biting-insects of all things; the insects are too confused to land on them so I guess in a way that is camouflage.
Oren: I actually have the answer to this, I’ve done some research and the answer is that zebras used to be plain gray and then they were painted in that black and white during the first World War to hide them from German submarines.
Chris: [laughter]
Oren: Wait, hang on, I’m thinking of freighters again. I’m think that’s not zebras, ships is what I was thinking of.
All: [laughter]
Bunny: Ships need to be painted like that so they can avoid the lions.
Oren: Yeah. Please look up dazzle camo, I love it, It’s my favorite thing.
We don’t know if it works or not. There was not enough data gathered to say
All: [laughter]
Oren: One thing I wanted to mention real quick, since we’re coming up on the end of our time, is a surprisingly powerful thing to give your characters is super-smell.
Bunny: Yes.
Oren: Because again, we as humans are pretty much used to the idea that if a person or whatever it is we’re looking for is not in our immediate vicinity, then we can’t perceive it.
But smell is a weird one because smell leaves a trail and our sense of smell is not really developed enough that we can track most things by scent unless the smell is really strong.
But a lot of animals can, and they have a much better ability to follow things. If you give a human the ability to do that, it becomes very hard for them to, for example, lose a suspect if you need a scene that depends on them seeing someone and then losing sight of that person in the crowd, it’s like ‘hang on, I’ll just smell them It’s fine, I got this’.
Bunny: Smell is very interesting because most senses keep track of where things are in space, but smell has the additional dimension of time -how recently was the smell emitted-, It can also travel in weird ways, like it can get dispersed in a plume or in a stream.
Chris: This reminds me of Wolf Pack, where we have this group of teenagers and we’re pretending that there’s nothing they can do because they’re supposed to spin their wheels for most of season one.
But one of the teenage werewolves has super-scent. We established that she has super-scent, and so there’s a big werewolf killing people out there. She has superset, I don’t believe that she couldn’t find it.
Oren: I had one player in one of my burning wheel games take the special ability “nose of the bloodhound”. I don’t know why that ability is in there, but it’s in there and wow, it was suddenly really difficult to structure a mystery.
Bunny: That’s the thing, super-smell would be so helpful in anything involving crime or mystery. There’s a reason we have a lot of dogs that sniff corpses or identify missing people, I think they also sniff mines. So if you had a character who had the super-scent, they could find drugs, corpses, mines, missing people, anything like that.
Chris: Admittedly, I was in one of Oren’s games with a character that did have enhanced smell, and by then I think he’d gotten some practice because he came up with a variety of reasons why my character… there’s like ‘there’s too many people in here. The smell gets lost. It’s been too long. You can follow it up to this point, but at that point you think maybe they changed cards’
Oren: I got some practice by then. I knew I was wise to your ways.
Bunny: Yes, I recall this. It’s definitely the most maligned scent. People call it ‘primitive’ and ‘it came from like our fish brains’ and stuff like that.
But no, it’s extremely helpful. I think the only place I’ve seen super-scent really is Hench, where a side character has super smell and has to wear nose plugs most of the time.
And I think that might be the main reason that super-scent isn’t more common is because it’s just not very cool for a character to be able to smell a fart really well.
Chris: I think that we’re a little self-conscious about the idea of smelling each other. It’s like, oh man, you can smell everybody’s BO (body odor) and it’s not necessarily what we wanna think about.
Bunny: but just think of all the information you can pull from someone’s BO
Chris: Honestly, you got a character who always smelled everybody’s BO and also all of their scented products because if you could smell that, you could smell their scented skin cream or their scented shampoo or all that stuff. I feel like after a while it would not be a big deal.
Bunny: We see a lot of colors and we don’t get overwhelmed when there are a lot of colors around. You can, but your head’s not going to explode. You can get used to it even when purple and brown are side by side and it looks really ugly.
Well. Now that you’ve listened to this podcast with your super-hearing, you should head on over with your super-touch and click on our super Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons;
First, there’s Ayman Jaber; he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. And finally we have Vanessa Perry, who is our foremost expert on the works of T. Kingfisher.
Thank you all so much. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro]This has been The Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Johnathan Coulton.
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