Comic Strips

See, this is why you've never been invited to The Pit. Any real pitter can see from a mile away that you wouldn't get it. Just complaining the whole way, asking what's the point. Killing the entire vibe. If you're falling forever why try to fall forever faster? Huh?

I see that you've never played The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe

Read those while listening to this song

Thank you for the recommendations! The short story was fascinating and I'm gonna start the book tomorrow!

How wide is the pit? I feel like I'd hit the wall before I dehydrated.

I suspect dehydration would be a bigger issue, rushing through the air like that would make you lose moisture quickly, and the air would keep getting denser (and maybe hotter? I don't know that much about bottomless pits).

You'd be cheese gratered from friction skimming the sides long before.

That parachute looks comparatively tiny, but the typical wing loading for a newbie will have you descending at 15-25mph (20-40 feet per second, approximately). I think I remember an advanced canopy instructor mentioning that with his high wing loading, he could hit 100mph or so (150 feet per second, give or take) in a diving turn. Interestingly, if there is no landing with the bottomless pit, you could give newbies advanced canopies without too much worry. Sure, there's a chance they fuck up the lines and ruin the experience, but they could just cut away and then enjoy the freefall.

Let's just say this fella was given an appropriate newbie-sized canopy for his weight, and is at the lower end of the spectrum. A typical fall rate for a belly-to-earth orientation (which is the beginning orientation taught, as it's the most stable and easiest to manage) will be between 100-125mph (150-180ish feet per second). That's a difference of ~1:4, which means if your fastest decomposition occurred, our freefaller would be a week in his fall already, and probably dead himself... IF the canopy dude had died immediately upon entering. That would make sense, seeing as how it's a bottomless hole, not an entire world. He's probably bounced off the sides a few times. Hitting a cliff face is the beginning of death for most base jumpers, so it could be our friendly pilot's cause of death here.

BUT let's not jump to conclusions too quickly. If this dude is decomposed, that means quite a bit of weight is gone. My search history has probably just gotten mildly spicy for an investigator somewhere. A quick search showed a graph of decomposition reducing weight by approximately 70-90%. That means our pilot here might have gone from a conservative wing loading of 0.8 to something like 0.2. That's going to be suuuper floaty. The vast majority of the weight comes off after bloating stops and the active and advanced decomposition sets in. So let's say by day 15 (to make the math easier), the canopy pilot is only falling at a rate of 8 feet per second. I don't want to actually break out the calculus, so simple arithmetic and algebra here. We'll take the difference between 8 and 20 feet per second and multiply that by 15 days worth of seconds, then see how long it takes our freefaller. So by day 15, canopy-man is at 18,144,000 feet in the pit. He's now descending at 8fps, compared to the fastest 180fps of the freefaller. The freefaller gets to 18,144,000 feet in 28 hours. The canopy is another 806,400 feet down. In another ~1.3 hours, the freefaller catches up. I think our comic is a possibility now.

We could also say that our freefaller is quite experienced, or very inexperienced, and is vertical more often, which typically sees speeds closer to 180mph, or around 250-300fps. That changes things again (and really makes the scenario easy), but meh. Do the math yourself, nerds.

We can safely ignore the acceleration time, so the distance is just terminal velocity times time. Catching up means equal distance for both, so

v1*t1 = v2*t2

Substituting t1 with t2+T, where T is the headstart, we can solve for t2:

v1*(t2+T) = v2*t2
v1*T = v2*t2-v1*t2
t2 = (v1*T)/(v2-v1)

v1*T is also the distance of the first jumper when the serving jumper jumps. So it's headstart distance divided by the relative velocity.

Minutes, actually, due to the flying piranhas.

The friction from the wind would push apart the weakening decayed flesh, no bugs needed. But cleared to the bone? That's more a year than a month.

Every couple minutes they throw a flashlight down.

You develop your aura senses in the eternal descent, that's why the background is black and only their bodies are colored in. The dead person's spirit is, of course, trapped in an perpetual prison of decomposing flesh and bone.

Yes, but then you need to climb up the bungee.

Maybe he meant the 118? Kinda comes close.

I can jump for $10 or I can push someone else for $5? Neat. But naw, it's probably [get pushed] $5

Same. Also what's that giant burger doing there?