Each animal "bite" represents a transformation on a word. The output of a transformation should always be another English word, but common first names are allowed. I make the rules!
- The rat "chops off the tail" of the input, which is to say, deletes the last character. For example, RATE becomes RAT.
- The spider deletes letters in odd-numbered positions. (My brain says this is thematic because it makes the output "all even," and spiders have bilateral symmetry???) So, INSECT becomes NET. (WHOA)
- The duck adds a C right before the last letter of a word. So LIE becomes LICE.
- The bat, with its inaudible squeaks, devoices the initial consonant of a word, so BAT becomes PAT. (You can also see this as devoicing all the consonants in a word, because I'm pretty sure I only used words where the only devoice-able consonant is the first one.)
- The cat transforms a word into its opposite: It turns NEAR into FAR, or BOOK into MOVIE, or FRASIER into THE BIG BANG THEORY.
- The wolf takes the "X" in a "X in the Y" phrase and outputs the "Y." So it would turn WOLF into FOLD, or MONEY into BANK, or LOVE into TIME OF CHOLERA.
So the second-to-last chain represents AMBIENCE getting "evened" into MINE, which gets its tail chopped off into MIN, of which the opposite is MAX. The final chain starts with FILL, whose "in the" partner is BLANK, which gets devoiced into PLANK, and then the duck inserts a C to make PLANCK. The solution, the "mad scientist" of the flavor text, is MAX PLANCK.
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