Liquiform

Overview

A liquiform body is made of a living, mutable substance that can be solid or liquid depending on what its holder wants at the time.

Both states are equally true and equally ordinary. The being is just as alive and just as themselves in either, and moving between them is a decision rather than an event. In solid form the substance reads as unusually resilient and slightly yielding — closer to rubber than to flesh — and the impossibilities only show under attention.

The thing to hold onto is that a liquiform being is always fundamentally what they are. Everything below describes what their body does, not what they become.

The spectrum

The range is continuous. A liquiform being sits anywhere along it between solid and cohesive liquid, and holds any point on it for as long as they like.

Partial states are ordinary rather than transitional. Part of the body can soften while the rest stays solid — a limb flowing while the being it belongs to stands perfectly firm — and holding that is as easy as holding anything else. Density, firmness and flexibility all respond separately, so a liquiform being can be yielding in one place and solid in another at the same moment.

Cohesion holds throughout. The substance stays a single body however fluid it becomes, so a liquiform being who has gone fully liquid is a flowing creature rather than a puddle — all of them together, all of it still theirs, with nothing to gather back up afterward.

While liquid or semi-liquid they can reshape. Passing through openings far narrower than they are, flowing around an obstacle instead of over it, and reworking portions of the body into something else entirely are all within reach, and all reversible.

The original shape

Every liquiform being has one shape that is theirs, and they always come back to it.

It is fixed, and it holds against everything — use, preference, and any length of time spent as something else. Whatever a liquiform being has been doing, the shape they return to is the one they started with.

This is why identity comes through all of it intact. A liquiform otter who has spent the afternoon as a flowing ribbon of themselves is an otter throughout and an otter afterwards; the changes are structural, a matter of what the body is doing. They have been themselves at every point, wearing their own body differently.

Currents and rippling

Light moves beneath the surface of a liquiform body. Slow currents drift through the substance, and finer glowing veins wind through it in organic patterns, visible under the surface rather than on it.

The body also ripples. Waves travel outward across the surface, and this is natural to the form rather than something any individual learned to do.

What sets either of them off belongs entirely to the individual. Feeling drives it in some liquiform beings and has nothing to do with it in others, and there is no shared vocabulary to read — a pattern meaning one thing in one liquiform being means something else, or nothing at all, in the next. The currents and the ripples are a property of the substance. Whether they carry information, and what, belongs to whoever is carrying them.

Magic

Wild magic produced the liquiform mutation, and what it altered is the material a body is built from. The substance is the whole of it.

That substance is its own thing, and it is worth being plain that it shares nothing with the element of water. A liquiform being who carries a water affinity carries it because they happen to, and one with no tie to water whatsoever is entirely ordinary.

Beyond the substance, nothing is fixed. A liquiform being’s species keeps everything it carries, and whatever else they are tied to magically is theirs.

Field notes

Individual colouring, the texture of the substance, the colour and behaviour of the currents, and what if anything the rippling reflects all belong on their own member page.