In going over material relevant to a little bit of new text I was writing last night, I realized with a shock that I had, without intending to do so, inserted an in-joke when I initially wrote the book.
One of the sample races is a carnivorous morph lightly inspired by John Carpenter's The Thing. Only after rereading their description last night did I realize that I had made their unshifted form look just like the Vermicious Knids from Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (that's the sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, aka "Willy Wonka", for those who don't know)...
I suppose I should have included a racial quirk which compels them to spell out "SCRAM" any time five or more of them see members of other races...

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Except for the Bibliography, which I continue to hack at, I believe I have gone through the last round of major input from me on the book. My editor's deadline is the 21st, which means we're mere days away from permanently putting down The Book That Would Not Die...

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Well, not specifically.
But I was browsing the Oxford English Dictionary SF project (www.jessesword.com/SF/sf_citations.shtml), and I noticed that the earliest cite they have for the word 'morph' is 1995 as a verb, and 1994 as a noun.
This seems oddly late to me, and it occured to me that if anyone would have reference material on this, it'd be Bob...
('Shapeshifter', by the way, is 1967, though 'shapeshifting' is 1884.)

Kohran pushed her glasses up her nose, never taking her eyes off the unconscious man on the cot. "It is not unheard of," she said quietly. "There are ancient words for people who could do this, who could project their spirit energy out of their body in any way that they wanted.""There are?" Ohgami's eyes snapped to hers. "What are they?""Shugenja," Kohran whispered. "Magus. *Wizard*."---------------"It's a beautiful piece of work, but you'd never find me getting into one."---------------"What are you using to generate your steam? I mean, don't get mewrong, but I don't see a coal car hanging on the back of these things. And you guys have neither the theory or the resourcesfor atomics."Kohran gave me a sly little smile, spun a couple of dogs and popped open a hatch. "Look there. See?"I frowned at first, not sure of what I was seeing. It didn't seem to make sense, like an Escher print expressed in reality.Then I had a sudden moment of double vision, as two completely different paradigms overlapped and blended. "Holy shit," I whispered. "Ah, you understand. Yes," Kohran replied. "It is what you think."I shook my head. "And I thought *my* world had a handle on magitech. I'd never have... I mean... *damn,* woman."She giggled.
(No promises... just a little fun I came up with.)

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Just a little rambling note...
Don't take this as gospel or any kind of promise, but Peggy and I have idly discussed writing some joint adventures of Doug and Shadowwalker together in various worlds. So far the two definite "that-would-be-cool" settings that we've come up with have been the early-20th-Century Egypt of Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody books, and Silent Mobius. (Peg's a big Silent Mobius fan. And I want to see Shadowwalker shred a Class 2 or higher Lucifer Hawk by screaming at it.)
Anyway, nothing's really solid here, just a lot of "it would be neat if"ing. But I've come up with a tentative name for the series and I wanted to share it -- "Drunkard's Vacation".

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Oh, yeah, almost forgot. Yesterday SJ Games officially announced that Shapeshifters is on schedule for a July release.

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

It wouldn't be Shapeshifters if the damned book stayed the same two months in a row.
I'm in what's supposed to be final edit, and over the last week or so, I've been fielding many emails from my editor; big, question-heavy, suggestion-laden emails that each take me much of an evening to get through.
The book is changing and evolving even when it's out of my hands.
If I've appeared to be off-line a lot for the last few days, that's why. It'll be going on for a while, yet, too -- I ended last night with four emails left in my inbox that I had yet to address, and overnight another four appeared.

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Being in SF this past weekend, I had to go looking for Japanese Imports. I didn't find any DVDs I was looking for, but I did find something that I had to get - The BGC Complete Vocal Collection. 3 discs with all the vocal music from the original 8 OVAs (and maybe even BGCrash, I can't read Japanese . One of these days I need to find the lyrics translations to all of these, and see if any of them would be useful for Doug besides Konya-Wa Hurricane...
Offsides
Drunkard's Walk Forum Moderator and Prereader At Large

(Doug hasn't got this song...it's quite obscure, and it'd screw up the plot.
But if he did, it'd give him the power to talk on the telephone with his wife, for the duration of the song.)
Touch Tone Lullabye, John Corning
I say hello, You say hello
Funny how I've missed you since we talked last night.
And I suppose, you ought to know
I've been thinking 'bout you nearly all the time.
All those tender words of love keep coming back to me.
And I think of all the times I've held you close to me,
so Sleep tight my darling, don't you cry,
hold your pillow close and close your eyes
In three days I'll be there to hold you tight
'til then I'll sing my love for you on the telephone line.
I say it's cold, you say it's warm
Been so long since I felt the sun upon my arms.
Work's going well, and only time will tell,
But if this deal goes through we'll surely paint the town.
With all we do our lives apart still seem so incomplete
and I wait for just those times when both our lives will meet
so Sleep tight my darling, don't you cry,
hold your pillow close and close your eyes
In three days I'll be there to hold you tight
'til then I'll sing my love for you on the telephone line.
[instrumental]

With all we do our lives apart still seem so incomplete
and I wait for just those times when both our lives will meet
so Sleep tight my darling, don't you cry,
hold your pillow close and close your eyes
In three days I'll be there to hold you tight
'til then I'll sing my love for you on the telephone line.
I'll sing this touch tone lullabye on the telephone line.

Red Cross Book
I haven't had the time to give it a full readthrough yet, but for my skimming I'd say that the phrasing is vague enough to include just about every theory that's been aired on this board so far.
For instance, 'derived from Lillith' and 'originally having belonged to Lillith' are not at all the same thing. Far's I can see, the same comment (RE: where Rei's soul came from) would hold true for the whole human race.
On reflection, my opinion of the Rei/Lillith thing is that while there is enough genetic and 'aural' connection/similarity to create the observe merging effect, their minds, or souls if you insist on being religious, have little to nothing in common... because both of those things are dependant upon free will, which (at least by what my skimming indicates) neither Lillith nor the Angels have.
Lillith turns into Rei, and previously was unable to move from the cross, because there was nobody home and she wasn't getting any orders from outside.
Rei, on the other hand, -could- have been normal enough, if Rokubungi and SEELE hadn't fucked her over from day one.
Blessed be.
-n
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."