Transformation

The Art Of Consumption

You are what you eat.

The basis for all transformation is consumption. Flesh and bone, blood and marrow, carapace and chitin - the transformation uses them all as fuel for the furnace. Transforming requires raw quantities of material to take place, and the various strains of transformation need different types of essence to take hold. Quality has a quantity of its own, and the flesh of those who have already transformed is the greatest prize of all, rich in essence.   For most denizens of Prosperity, this type of consumption is small and ritualized. Agriculture, husbandry, and hunting brings food to the general citizenry, and allow everyone a degree of transformation. Farmers and gamblers both find great use from having additional limbs, artists split digits infinintisimally small for precision work. Pure aesthetic or restorative transformations are common.   But not all prey are created equal. Some food requires more preperations than other to allow them to be consumed safely.      

Evolution

Once the transformer has feasted, they can begin their change. It is a rapid, but not instantaneous process. Flesh and bone sprout forward and bloom, nerve-bundles search and crawl, or meat twists into new shape. Nor is it certain to be complete without further consumption, if the scope of a transformers imagination has outstripped their available resources. Novices often bite off more than they've chewed, and are left stranded with half-finished mutations until they can find more food. Ascendants have a more accurate internal account of their stores and what might be required, earned through countless experiments and failures.   Skilled Ascendants learn to make minor transformations on the fly, adapting to whatever danger that face them. From sprouting blades from arms to shielding themselve from damage, all manner of small but life-saving transformation make Ascendants unparelleled combatants and survivors.  

If using D&D, assume a transformation takes one short rest per level of change.

  More extreme changes take longer and render the transformer immobile, incased in molten flesh and rearranging bones. Many Ascendants consider it a sacred duty to care for those incapacitated by the chrysalis of their evolution. The less faithful consider them easy prey.   In cities and settlements, there are typically rooms and entire establishments dedicated to making such transformations as comfortable as possible. The wealthy can endure their change in perfumed rooms, doted on hand and foot (and whatever additional appendages) until they can stand in their new form.    

The Strains of Transformation

 

Strain of Flesh

The most basic and widely used strain of transformation, Flesh is the art of altering the basic form of mortalkind. From adding or splitting limbs to adding strength or speed, it is the first step to shedding ones innate weakness. It combines with every other strain to limit the Ascendant only by their imagination and their hunger.   For people of the Engine, it is an integral part of daily life. Not only does it make work easier, and take care of injuries or disease, it has just as much aesthetic as practical use.   In the hands (or their equivilent) of an expert Fleshsmith, meat is molded like clay and bones grow like flowers.  

Strain of Ossification

Bones, keratin, and chitin fall beneatht he strain of Ossification, as crucial to basic transformation as the Strain of Flesh. Not only for crafting new limbs or altering existing ones, but evolving plates of bone, horns and quills - not to mention setting broken bodies right again.   Ossification and Flesh are strains almost always taught together, and the lines blur where one begins and one end. Some Ascendant disdain it as a crutch, preferring to find more imaginative solutions to bones.   Ossificators specialists are skeletal things, encased in bone and bristling with spikes. They can turn their bones into instruments of murder as easy as others breathe.  

Strain of Chimeric

Primordial and wild, Chimeric transformation is the strain of beasts. It allows the user to splice the aspects of animals onto themselves and steal their strength, mixing and matching to create something greater than nature ever could. When combined other Strains, it creates otherworldly monsters out of mortalkind.   Chimeric transformations are used by almost everyone to a degree. The creatures of the world has countless abilities that mortalkind lack, and so they take it.   Those who delve deep into the Strain of Chimeric are more animal than mortal, often running on all four (or more) and acting like a wild beast.  

Strain of Metabolic

The Strain of Metabolic turns inwards, changing organic chemistries and internal organs to better suit the task at hand. They can add or alter organs, change their blood and marrow, transforming their inner world into something alien. With enough change, those internal changes start to show on the surface, because nothing remains static.   Metabolic transformations are less common in every-day life. They demand a greater understanding of the mortal body, and that only increases as they move further from the baseline. It only matches with a few other strain, such as to match the metabolic process of monsters and animals or create entirely new ones.   Master Metabols know their own bodies down to every fiber, and how best to utilize them. No matter how they appear, they function beyond any mortal form.  

Strain of Entropy

Rot is just soil for more life, and the Strain of Entropy embraces constant, roiling decay as a part of their being. They become hives for parasites and carrion-crawlers, bloom with fungal infections and followed by the sickly-sweet stench of living death. Though horrific, they are in a constant state of regeneration - they rot and grow, then rot and grow again.   Entropy does not play well with other Strains, limiting its use to co-existing rather than combining. It is rarely used by everyday folk, and those who stray deep into the realm of entropy are shunned and feared.   Expert Entrophists are walking terrors, shambling towers of decaying flesh and fungal spires. Their numbers are few, for only the boldest flirt so close to death.  

Strain of Psychogenic

The strain of the mind, Psychogenics mutate and transform the psyche, with every changed mirrored upon the flesh. As their brains bulge and grow grotesquely distended or multiply, synapses fire and writhe, the Psychogenic art bestows eiditic memory, towering intellect, or parallel thinking. With other Strains, the Ascendant rewrite nerves to luminous fiber that crackle beneath the skin or consume instinct and memory.   While Psychogenic does not often combine with other strains, the imaginative Ascendant can find ways. Limbs that move on their own accord, internal processed controlled, and sensory organs require additional brains to process the informations are all possible fusions.   Psychogenic transformations make for a specialist caste of tradesfolk. Mathematicians, priests, living libraries, and merchants are all routes one can take from the sprawling options provided by the evolved mind.  

Strain of Arboreality

Arboreality involves the change of consumed plants and vegetation of all kinds, from the greatest oak to the deadliest nightshade. These transformations grow upon the flesh as if it was soil, with blooming flowers and leaves of every kind. As farmers across the Engine change and alter their crop, the Strain is never short of novel material to draw inspiration from.   Despite that, most prefer the strain of Flesh instead of bark and vine and ivy. They discard the potential of Arboreality, using the consumed matter as raw material for other strains instead. Farmers and experimental al-chef-mists are the exception, sampling and becoming more like their creations to better understand (and improve) them.   Incredibly adaptive, Arboreality mesh well with most other Strains, sometimes unbidden. Like a flower, it blooms true when merged with other kinds of transformations.   Those who do become Arborealitiis lose much of what were of their baseline, becoming walking miniatyre gardens or small, wild jungles on legs, constantly growing and regrowing.  

Strain of Arthropody

The most removed from baseline mortals, Arthropody is the transformation of insects, spiders, centipedes and wasps. This alien strain armors flesh with carapace and chitin, split jaws wide with mandibles, or shatter their eyes into thousands componds. There are more insects in the world than anything else, with near countless mutations to consume from them.   Though powerful, it is one of the least used Strains among everyday citizens. Few find the idea of consuming insects on that scale appealing, and no matter how much mortalkind change, there remains that stirring of primordial revulsion at the creeping, crawling horrors of insect-kind.   Arthropody mutations fuse with most Strains in wild and horrific (but useful) ways.   For those who do take to the Strain, it is often an all or nothing affair. They shed old mortal flesh and identity like a rag, becoming something utterly transformed - something that frequently puts them in places of great, spiritual weight. They become ascetics, monks, scholars, and esoteric advisors.  

Strain of Symbiosis

The Strain of Symbiosis fuse consumption, creation, and change, turning parts of their bodies and evolution into separate entities that attach themselves to the transformer. They can perform tasks on their own, leaving the transformer free to focus on other tasks. Symbiotes like Gut-worms consume poisons and clean consumed matter, and spore-strikes launch themselves as parasitic missiles at the enemies of their host.   Symbiotes fall somewhere in the middle of common use, being neither particularly wide-spread or shunned. They are useful, but many can just do the thing themselves. It fuses with other strains mainly to expand their functionality; sometimes required if a body is altered more than the parasite-to-be could recognize.   Symbiotic masters are veritable nests, symbiotes and parasites making their skin roil and bulge. No matter what they seem like they are up to, Symbiotic masters always have some foul trick up their parasitic sleeves.  

Strain of Abyss

The abyss abandons the land in favor of the dark, unfathomable depths of the ocean. It is the strain of all creatures beneath the waves, that swim and crawl and die. Pseudopod tentacles, scales, gills, and more alien mutations mark the Strain of Abyss.   It is popular in coastal places, and does not see much use outside of that. Still, the crawling city-scape of the Prosperity Engine contain entire oceans within its hungering domain, and Ascendants always find it useful.   Though from a different world than many other strains, it adapts well to them and combines to create mutations that goes beyond either.   Abyssal specialist spend as much (or more) time under the waves as they do on land, dvelving into places where pressure would crush titans and the dark would choke the hope out of all but the bravest. They are, by large, considered strange by everyday folk and more than a few Ascendants.  

Strain of Chymistry

As all things change, so too does the Art of Transformation; Chymistry is a recent discovery, a scant decade old and all the rage. It turns the body into an alchemical laboratory, altering it to generate and ignite chemical processes. Chymistry transformations allow to create compunds within themselves, secrete medication, or vomit napalm. Just its discovery has ignited a great thirst to expand the horizons of the possible, with Ascendants searching for new and more ways to change.   Chymistry is being heralded as a revolution of daily life and industry. Complex alchemy can be performed within the gullet of a Chymist, and spewed out for general consumption. More than a couple of Chymist make a pretty coin by secreting potent narcotics for customers.   Although internal, the changes made by the Chymist inevitably rises to their surfaces. They need the other Strains just to survive the alchemy that takes place in their organs, or the components generated in blood, spit, and marrow.