With nothing else to do, Dylan looked down at his hands. Interstellar dust played at his fingertips, the cosmic rays illuminating the remains of countless in a brilliant array of colors and values. Muted greens mixed with burgeoning yellows and purples in an enigmatic performance that served as a pure feast for the eyes. Dylan had to wonder where all these colors were coming from, that they could make such a spectacular illusion. He could see the Sun right beside him, making its slow, elliptical orbit around his massive head. It was possible that was where the light was originating, but it was just as possible that it was coming from elsewhere in the universe, from all the stars that were shining their bright, pinprick light upon him.
Heh. He was starting to ponder again. Mom had always been insistent of making sure Dylan was an avid learner. She had been a university professor, mathematics specifically, way back before the Nephilim came to dominate the Earth. Even during those days where Dylan and his family would spend most of their waking hours cowering under the shadows of these giants, she made sure to teach everything that she could to him and instilled in him a sense of ever-burgeoning curiosity and desire for experimentation. He devoured as many textbooks and articles relating to subjects as varied as math, biology, chemistry, physics, and more.
With all the knowledge he managed to retain over that time, and with little else to do other than to watch the stars float around him, Dylan had been spending most of his time thinking about the science behind the Nephilim. It was a good way to pass the time, thinking about how all of this was even possible - after all, science would argue that having a boy be as big as a solar system would violate the square-cube law and then some, and yet here he was. He had all the time in the world, and no obligations he owed to anyone; he might as well try to probe the enigma using whatever tools he had. Right now, they amounted to his bare hands, but it was still something. One way or another, he would find out the source of the Nephilim phenomenon, and then...
Maybe his dream of having his parents here with him one day wouldn't be so far off after all.
He had to be careful about how he approached this, though. Just in case there was a chance - an absolutely minuscule chance, but a chance regardless - that Earth was still out there, he didn't want to do anything to disrupt whatever orbit it may have formed around his body, which was its most likely fate aside from, well, crashing into him. For all that Dylan defied several mathematical principles just by himself, he couldn't produce nearly as much heat as the sun on a good day. Earth would have to be really close to him in order to make up for that, but at the same time, it couldn't be so close that his gravitational pull would send it careening straight into the folds of his skin. He didn't want to do anything that would risk that, even for a second, so that meant keeping himself as still as he could possibly manage. It was a bit irritating at times whenever he got the urge to stretch to deal with cramped muscles and he abruptly got the image of the blue-and-green marble meeting its end from a stray brush with his fingernail, but he persisted nonetheless.
Dylan didn't know why he bothered, really. The chances were absolutely minuscule that his speck-sized home had managed to make it through everything he had inflicted upon it. Still, he kept on doing it. Any chance, no matter how small (even if it was smaller than the Earth) was a chance he couldn't allow himself to dismiss. It was the least he could do to keep his dream alive, assuming most of humanity hadn't already grown into Nephilim on his body.
Right, he was getting distracted. Time to review what he'd already gathered from his own observations.
For whatever reason, even though his very existence - really, the very notion of giants themselves - went against what conventional mathematics said was possible, he still seemed to obey certain laws of physics. For example, under Kleiber's law, for a vast majority of animals their base metabolic rate scales to the 3/4 power of their mass. This meant that the bigger you were, the less food you needed compared to your mass in order to maintain it at rest - which would explain why Dylan only needed to eat a few dozen speck-sized asteroids once in a while to maintain himself. The fact that bigger animals also lose relatively less heat than smaller animals through their skin could also go some way to explaining why he'd been able to survive in the cold vacuum of space - since there was way more of him, and thus more area for his body heat to radiate from, most of it stayed inside his body. That would explain why he hadn't frozen to death yet.
However, in turn, the bigger you were, the more energy you needed in order to do much of anything, and for certain animals like bears, they still had to go through periods where they needed to drastically reduce their body temperature and metabolic processes in order to conserve energy in extreme, unfavorable condition. Which sucked for Dylan, because that meant he basically spent most of the time sleeping for who knows how long. He only woke up barely a few minutes ago and he already felt like he was about to pass out!
It did track with what Dylan could recall of the days where he still feared the Nephilim. Most of the time, they lay sprawling over the mountaintops, languid, their fingers curled over the cities while their eyes glazed listlessly up at the sky. It gave them all a little bit of respite to gather whatever resources they could, time to run and find hiding spots somewhere deep in the cavity of any nearby mountains before they woke up and terrorized them all once more. Now he actually felt kind of bad for them - living your life in a perpetual haze was absolute hell! He didn't know how he managed to truck on for as long as he did when he started surpassing countries. Maybe it had something to do his body storing up a lot of energy for more growth spurts?
That was all Dylan had gathered so far. It wasn't much, and it was far from being sufficient to explain all the bizarre oddities of his biology. For starters, he still had no idea why, in an environment where there was absolutely no oxygen, he was still able to survive as he was with no complications. Even with how frustratingly hazy his knowledge was, though, there was still enough to provide a basis for some deductions. Namely, that there was this massive wellspring of energy that seemed to originate from out of the ether, which served to power a Nephilim's initial growth spurts before tapering off, forcing them to take extensive breaks as a means of compensation. It was possible that this energy, whatever it was, also served as a substitute for the oxygen that normally went to the cells, explaining why he was still able to breath.
All of this was frustratingly still in the realm of pure hypothetical. So long as he had no way to test out and experiment, he only had his speculation to go off of for any real conclusions. That just wasn't going to do - there was no way Dylan could call himself a scientist if he didn't even attempt to verify his theories. If only he had an means to find out where exactly that energy was coming from, let alone if it even existed, he could actually get somewhere.
The astronomical 10-year-old looked down speculatively at his chest. Maybe there were some Nephilim on his body that he could see? It was extremely unlikely, given how drastically he'd grown in comparison to every other Nephilim in history, but it would give him something to study. Alternatively, he could just wait until a Nephilim grew large enough for him to observe without too much fuss, but what were the chances of that happening!?
The third option would be for Dylan to finally bite the bullet and head out beyond his tiny little corner of the galaxy into the great unknown. He already had most of the solar system orbiting around him anyway. He might as well go out and see if there was something out in the great expanse of the cosmos that had all the answers he was looking for.
Was he ready to say goodbye, though?
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