Ok, here''s a new forum game, as per Moe''s request. My ingredients: Shapeshifters who gain their abilities by drinking the blood of various animals, extracting their dna, storing it in their own cells, and using it to reshape themselves. This creates wierd sexual politics because all bodily fluids contain all the dna a person has collected, which the sexual partner can easily take copies of for their own use. A few weeks as a whore would give one the foundations of becoming a powerful warrior. Also vampirism is a common form of assault and robbery. Also, if one can change one''s species, surely one can change one''s gender. How do apeople of constantly changing appearance recognize each other? Shapeshifting must interfere something terrible with the normal process of judging attractiveness and selecting mates. The shapeshifters breed fancy flowers, birds, etc. because they can sell these to other shapeshifters who eat them to gain their lovely color patterns. It is a major social coup to have a unique new colorscheme on the night of a big event.

There was one of these shapeshifters, a lurker, one who wouldn''t always take other shapes. The other shapeshifters thought he was wierd because he didn''t follow thier style. He had only ever shapeshifted a few times, mostly when he was learning how. He didn''t tend a garden or birds, like the others. There was something different about this shapeshifter...

Why not make this a comedy? That would make a funny introductory scene to our world.

We could also have:
Girl1: I''m jealous of Shawna!
Girl2: Why?
Girl1: She''s foxier than me!
Girl2: So go out and hunt down a fox.
Girl 1: But I don''t know how to be a bitch!

These creatures are very artistic, and place a great deal of value in beauty and form. Most are strongly attracted to mates who can display a wide range of forms, particularly those forms which are aesthetically pleasing. Some are more interested in less conventional forms of art however, and take on strange 'impressionistic' forms based on several different species or genders merged into one. Some consider ugliness itself to be a form of art.

They have no real form of their own, their offspring appear as whatever species their parents took when they were concieved, and of a random gender - since they do not learn to shapeshift until puberty, their sexuality is usually determined by the time they learn to shapeshift. This is not always the case however, some prefer to live as the opposite gender to that as which they born, others have no preference and change freely. Furthermore, their birth species has a fairly major influence on their adult personality - a shapeshifter born as a wolf would be social, instinctive, aggressive, whereas one born as a cat might be independent, inquisitive, etc...

Edited by - Sandman on July 4, 2001 1:20:50 PM

"A few weeks as a whore would give one the foundations of becoming a powerful warrior."

I was laughing my ass off when I saw this sentence thinking: I never thought I''d here those words or concepts put together quite like that! ROFL!

Back to topic:

The shapeshifters know one another pheromonally(you know the scent thing). So, as Sandman said, shapeshifting becomes more a function of art and sex and expressing ones sexuality and artistic sides. Also, since shapshifting takes a great deal of energy, SS''s (shapeshifters. gott shorten it ) have some kind of restriction on how often they can shift. The one who tends not to shift, our protagonist it seems, has some pshycological problems that stem to sexuality. He also creates art out of objects that are not himself, something unusual for artistic expression in this specie. For instance, her crushes certain kinds of oils to create images in 2d form on a blank canvas.

I accidently read that "blank" as "black" and I think it''s cool that way - our protagonist begins with a black canvas and paints colors and white on top of that.

Psychological problems about sexuality is good - I''ve never seen a computer game do that before. So we can commically play off this by putting him (did we decide he''s a him?) into situations that freak him out but wouldn''t bother a regular ss. Maybe the other sss even express envy at the adventures he goes through, and he just gives them a pained look... Hmm if the others raise birds and flowers (i.e. life) and our protagonist doesn''t... Maybe he somehow has a phobia of creating life? Which is also why he doesn''t want to be female. Maybe his mother died or left when he was little and he feels she abandoned her responsibility to him, and he''s afraid of doing the same to his children? I dunno, can anyone think of anything better than this?

Maybe he''s afraid of overpopulation and looks down sneeringly at "breeders"? I dunno, help me out here.