Posts: 219
Threads: 13
Joined: Aug 2010
Reputation:
0
Shapeshifters of Fenspace
04-27-2015, 01:12 AM
I noticed there wasn't much on shapeshifters in fenspace, beyond a mention on the Crystal Millennium page of the wiki. So I started putting something together myself. I'd like input from other people on this. Don't know if this just be part of the general biomod page, or it's own page.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Shapeshifters in Fenspace are
rare. This isn't from lack of people trying, but the wave doesn't seem
to be inclined to actually product such mods normally. There are quite a
few of the Supernatural Fen stuck in one Were form or another after
attempting to do so. A lot just end up with the classic wolfman look. In
all most shifting tends to be minor things, like skin, hair colors and
minor size changes. Going onto rare, like appearance, gender and onto
full body structure changes. The last is very rare and they generally
have some sort of draw back. [[Andrew Fauho] takes days just to shift
into a anthro fox from human. It makes him sick if he tries to push it.
[[Dakota] can shift very quickly between a humanoid and quadoid form,
there are videos on Fentube of him doing so, but at the cost of having a
massive appetite afterwards. Some of the more minor shifts aren't
controlled, they are triggered by outside, mood, or subconscious action.
Not everyone risks a biomod in hopes of getting a
shiftmod. Some go with using sleaves, remotes, puppets or even in one
case, garou power armor. In order to simulate being a shifter. Others
are related, but part of their own Fendom. Some Cybers and even the rare
Transformer falls into this category.
...
[[Vesta Institute of Biochemistry] and [[Kandor City]'s STAR Labs are eager to add any such 'mod to their growing biomod database.
...
There are no known truly unlimited shapeshifters out there.*
- Notable Shapeshifters -
[[Andrew Fauho]
[[N]
[[Jeph Antilles]
[[Dakota]
*Trekkies are paranoid about someone hostile managing a truly working changeling biomod
_______________________________________________________________
Characters
Sabre Fang
Dakota
Warning:
Dihydrogen monoxide
Containment Vessel
Fentube? Why wouldn't the Fen just use youtube? Kind of a nitpick, but why waste time duplicating sites when there was an already existent one? I could see it for the first year or two, but after that google would get de-cracked down on and start hosting fen videos again, even if only because the EU told them to stop censoring or else get the anti-trust stick again.
Posts: 187
Threads: 7
Joined: Jun 2014
Reputation:
0
Because it's a 'danelaw company run by Mundanes, that's why a statistically significant number of of Fen wouldn't use it. A lot of people who went Up brought a lot of baggage with them; the Separatists, the Slans and some of the Tom Kratman fen are the most extreme examples, but they're far from the only ones. Have you read "Mr Fnord Goes To Washington" yet? Specifically the part where a well-respected faction leader is openly brainstorming a target list for punitive military action against the United States over them merely serving Mal Fnord with a subpoena? He doesn't even like Mal that much!
Posts: 4,791
Threads: 299
Joined: Jul 2010
Reputation:
8
Fentube..... because content illegal in the US technically isn't allowed on yotube. With stuff like 'handwavium use' and 'flying through crowded traffic at near transonic speeds to Iron maiden' generally being frowned upon by the authorities to the point of being deleted and having the adwords funds retained. Not to mention copyright police....
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
Posts: 1,569
Threads: 20
Joined: Dec 2012
Reputation:
0
And by the time the old fuddy duddies in both parties managed to remove their collective head from their rectal muscles it would be too entrenched to do away with. Hell it would probably put YouTube out of business.
There is also the fact that it is not clear if Google Youtube is directly connected to an Interwave node, which means it has a significant higher delay compared to some Fen servers.
Dartz Wrote:Fentube..... because content illegal in the US technically isn't allowed on yotube. With stuff like 'handwavium use' and 'flying through crowded traffic at near transonic speeds to Iron maiden' generally being frowned upon by the authorities to the point of being deleted and having the adwords funds retained. Not to mention copyright police.... Issue being that the EU would tell the US to knock that shit off, as they did IRL. Hell, if Islamic terrorists can put up recruiting videos and propaganda on youtube, and only the absolute worst gets taken down, I'm pretty sure google will either move out of the US or set the EU on the US to shut them up about 'illegal' content. For all that Google is a money-grubbing megacorp with delusions of grandeur, they're also not going to let a future market like Up get away from them, if only because they do have enough vision to look up and realize that the future was coming and start taking steps to prepare for it. I'd give them a year, tops, to try and start catching up to the fen again, if not putting out relatively interesting products for the fen, as google's been a pretty major 'hey, what happens if we do this!' company. Give them a LITTLE bit of credit, guys. I mean, yeah, I can see fentube happening, but not nearly to the success you seem to think it'd be.
Of course, I can also see Google reverse-unreal-estating, ripping a crater out of the moon and flying it down to hover in the south pacific to host the ultimate handwaved server cluster with a global satalite constellation with interwave downlinks to strategic centers around the world just because they could. Only then to accidentally develop Skynet due to the memes around them, which then proceeds to do it's job politely while watching cat videos in order to confuse the hell out of the people watching. And their supervillain lair would also have a giant skull carved into it, because if they're going to go mad science, they might as well do it in style.
Posts: 2,217
Threads: 167
Joined: Sep 2002
Reputation:
1
I'm sorry, but Elon Musk has dibs on the James Bond supervillain fortress.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information
"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
M Fnord Wrote:I'm sorry, but Elon Musk has dibs on the James Bond supervillain fortress.
There's no reason they can't share. Plus, I'm sure he's busy boring a mohole down into Mars in order to create an active volcano for his supervillain volcano lair on mars. (which is shaped like a giant pirate flag) And also possibly busy exploiting Handwavium to build his Falcon 9 spaceships.
.... You know, I just realized he's fen as HELL. Because that's totally a thing he would do if he could.
Threepony Wrote:Of course, I can also see Google reverse-unreal-estating, ripping a crater out of the moon and flying it down to hover in the south pacific to host the ultimate handwaved server cluster with a global satalite constellation with interwave downlinks to strategic centers around the world just because they could. Only then to accidentally develop Skynet due to the memes around them, which then proceeds to do it's job politely while watching cat videos in order to confuse the hell out of the people watching. And their supervillain lair would also have a giant skull carved into it, because if they're going to go mad science, they might as well do it in style. Maybe we need a second part for this one http://drunkardswalkforums.yuku.com/top ... te-bloomer ? 
Anyway, putting this back on track: seems reasonable. Shifting is a crazy process, and it makes sense that the 'wave woulddo anything it could to avoid such a biomod. It'd be hard to engineer a system to make more than superficial changes safely. Meat is a lot squishier and less tolerant than metal. Something like classical/modern werewolves would just be hard to design safely, and just wouldn't make sense for the sheer number of changes and the dangers involved.
I'd wonder about pony biomods, though. I could see a 'shifter' biomod for them that goes for minimum changes necessary between full quadruped and an ananthromorphic form. Shifting forehooves to hands, adjusting muscles in the back and waist slightly, that sort of thing.
Eh, anyone got any other reasons why the wave might want to avoid changer biomods?
Posts: 1,427
Threads: 51
Joined: Sep 2003
Reputation:
1
Quote:Threepony wrote:
Eh, anyone got any other reasons why the wave might want to avoid changer biomods?
They tend to be resource intensive, so to speak. The more changes that need to occur, the more it's going to take to achieve them.
As a "for instance", while Jeph Antilles does change gender (he's learned to control the process *somewhat*, but is still prone to unwanted transformation), he retains his weight and height (the former is, as these processes go, only mildly redestributed), and medical exams have shown "shadow structures" of the other gender are present (whichever gender he's in at the moment), mostly minor anatomical "oddities" of where organs are placed and how muscles and tendons are grouped.
--
"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor
Posts: 27,148
Threads: 2,253
Joined: Sep 2002
Reputation:
21
The wave, for all its ingenuity and apparent creativity/playfulness, does try to do things in an efficient manner, with the least effort for the results it gives. That's why a waved craft has to have, in general, something approximating most of the systems it needs before waving, and why Handwavium can't just create something out of nothing. Attempts to make handwavium create something with nothing but itself as its working materials probably forces it to shfit into solid 'wavium, which only acts as a power source IIRC. There's probably no even half-way efficient way of doing classical "quick change" shapechanging as a biomod (transforming mecha don't count at all), and as Jeph's case illustrates, even radical changes are slow and require a pre-existing framework on which "build" them.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
Posts: 3,314
Threads: 306
Joined: Feb 2004
Reputation:
0
I never really wrote enough with Joe Corcoran to establish any bona fides for his shape shifting. I wound up establishing more about catgirls than anything.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''
-- James Nicoll
Posts: 219
Threads: 13
Joined: Aug 2010
Reputation:
0
Shapeshifters and changers are rare.
This isn't do to lack of trying in some circles of Fenspace. So why are they rare? Well this is do with the Wave itself. That wonderful grey goo is little too efficient for it's own good in this case. A lot of said Fen also make the mistake of trying to feed it the change aspect. The Wave IS change, it's what it does and does so with efficiency. Wave also won't create something from nothing, that is also Wave 101, It also usually doesn't make mass go away ether. You could build a werewolf costume of the right size for the Wave to work with, but you run the very great risk of it simply locking you into that appearance.
As the most common of changer mods then to be changes to minor things. Like as skin, eye, hair color and length, even their voice. Sprout 'fangs', claws, tails, and such. You see quite a few among the supernatural Fen that settled on simply being able to manifest monstrous traits at will instead of a full body change.[1]
More complex changers are rare. You start to get into things like size and shape changes. Then into actual major body changes. [[Jeph Antilles] can change gender, but remains the same height and weight. He also suffers the issue of not being fully in control. Issues like these crop up the more complex of 'Mod. [[Andrew Fauho]'s takes days to actually shift between human and anthro-fox. Trying to force it makes him flu like sick. Slow changing is actually the norm for most. [[Dakota], can quick shift, but at a cost. It takes a toll on his body's energy reserves and has to eat heavily to replenish. What renders him a Joker-ace is that he can only hold humanoid form for a limited time. Even then he retains his size, weight and animal appearance.
Very extreme end would be something like Star Trek's Changelings, which there aren't any known.[2] Some may point at [[N], but she is limited only to appearances close to her own body mass, shape, and size.
Not everyone risks a biomod in hopes of getting a changer mod. Some go with using sleaves, remotes, puppets, holograms or even in one case, garou power armor. In order to simulate being a changer. Others are related, but part of their own groups within Fenspace. Some Cybers and even the very rare Transformer like [[Wave Convoy] falls into this category.
- Notable Changers -
[[Andrew Fauho]
[[N]
[[Jeph Antilles]
[[Dakota]
[1]For vampire Fen this is perfectly fine.
[2]Doesn't stop the Trekkies from being paranoid about it.
_______________________________________________________________
Characters
Sabre Fang
Dakota
Warning:
Dihydrogen monoxide
Containment Vessel
Posts: 1,326
Threads: 111
Joined: Mar 2006
Reputation:
0
I've never really been able to put into words how A.C.'s morphing works. Some people have called her a sapient strain of the wave, Rob (back when I asked for his opinion on the initial Forge crew) called her a liquid metal cyborg. Both are true, for certain values of true. Biomod quirks stop her from being fully N like (and she uses disguise makeup and prosthetics more than her abilities), but she can be less restricted in other avenues (her prehensile hair, for example). Not that she used those publicly outside the Gauntlet run (and that was after some items that leave things up to interpretation).
But she's not really a shapeshifter as defined. Might call her a succubus of the Darkstalker type if called on it, there are enough rumors about A.C. out there already.
|
