Lifelda

Lifelda is a compact, warm-hearted vulperin who meets the world at full volume. Her affection is open and loud, offered freely and often, and laughter is never far from her. She is playful through and through, and beneath all that brightness sits something solid and grounded, a steadiness that stays put however lively the rest of her becomes. A guardian’s readiness lives in her too, carried lightly and seldom spoken of, and her small frame holds a great deal of power.

She stands a little under four feet tall, toward the low end of vulperin height, and she is built stocky without a trace of heaviness. Her chest and shoulders are powerful, narrowing to a compact waist, and muscle runs firm through her arms and legs. Those legs belong to a runner, made equally for covering long distances and for pouring on speed in short, fierce bursts, and the spring in them carries her into leaps far higher than her height would seem to allow. She sits low and square on her feet, with a centre of gravity that keeps her steady through almost anything.

When she draws on her bioforged strength, her body answers by growing. The swell builds gradually with how much power she calls on, muscle and frame filling out together so that her proportions hold true while she becomes larger and denser all over. She can take a measure of that strength without the full change, and at its height it carries her up to five feet. The way it works in her is hers alone: wild magic merged her two mutations into a single, flowing whole, and the size that most bioforged beings live in as a fixed frame arrived in her as a strength she grows into when it is called for.

Lifelda is both liquiform and bioforged, and the two have run together in her so completely that she can choose what her body is made of. Any part of her can slide between fur, bare skin, bone and living machine, and any of those changes can carry through the whole of her. Her plush form, furred and vulperin, is her original shape and the one she always returns to. Her sleek form is bare skin, her frame form is bone, her forged form is living machine from end to end, and her pliant form is a yielding flexibility. She is wholly at ease in all five, and she moves between them by feel: playfully, practically, or simply because she wants to. Sometimes she changes entirely, and sometimes she mixes several forms across her body at once, each one fading smoothly into the next or meeting it at a natural end, the way any body meets itself. She reshapes portions of herself as freely as any liquiform being.

In her plush form her coat is thicker and plusher than most vulperin carry, dense and velvety like every coat of her kind. It runs slightly coarser along her back and softens toward her underside, and it is softest of all at her chest and throat, where a hand sinks deep into it. Its colour is a deep, warm chocolate brown that darkens down her legs and over her paws, while her underside lightens into golden brown.

Across much of her body wind the nebula spirals of her guardian line, inherited through her family and drawn from the magic of the sun and the moon. Crystal blue, violet, gold and silver all live in them, and the mix is entirely random, the way colour falls in a true nebula: gold beside silver in one spiral, violet and blue in the next, three or four of them swirled together somewhere else. At rest they lie quietly in her coat. When the sun and moon magic is in use, or when she is roused, they glow, each spiral shining in its own mingled colours. They stay with her in every form she takes.

Her face is broad and strong, wide through the skull and cheeks, narrowing to a fine-boned muzzle. Her fur lies smooth over her head. Her eyes are crystal blue, streaked with violet that runs outward from the pupil, and in low light they take on a soft glow. Her ears are large and upright, tipped in black, and almost never still, turning and lifting with everything going on around her and everything she feels.

Her tail is long and full, heavily furred and tipped in black, with her spirals carried along its whole length. She carries it low and stretched out behind her, and it works constantly as she moves, sweeping or holding steady to keep her balanced. Its motion is powerful and graceful, like the rest of her.

Like every vulperin, her hind limbs are digitigrade and her hands are plantigrade, made for grasping, lifting and holding. Her palms are broad and her fingers long and slender, so her hands are strong and long rather than large. Her pads are thick and cushioned, slightly rough to the touch. Her claws are luminous, glowing violet with streaks of red and blue flashing through them, and when they extend, the layered plating of her people unfolds along her forearms.

In her sleek form her fur falls away to leave smooth, bare skin of the same deep brown, golden at her underside as her coat is. It is warm and smooth to the touch, and it carries a faint silvery sheen, as though she has been dusted with moondust, most noticeable in low light. Her spirals lie across it exactly as they lie in her fur. Her tail becomes slender and bare, and the black tips of her ears and tail disappear altogether, the brown running unbroken to their ends. Her paws keep their pads, slightly rough as they are in her plush form, and the rest of her hands and feet are as smooth as the rest of her skin.

In her frame form she is pale bone, partly or entirely, cool and smooth to the touch, with her spirals traced faintly into its surface. Her tail becomes a full chain of vertebrae. Her claws keep their violet glow, with the red and blue still flashing through it, and her pads are gone. A violet glow lights her eye sockets and the other openings of her skull and stays there, touching nothing else. Her joints soften as she moves, so she keeps every bit of her grace. She speaks, hears and smells in this form as well as in any other, and how she does it is a mystery; wild magic gave it to her and has offered no explanation since. When only part of her turns to bone, it meets the rest of her naturally, fur, flesh and muscle ending where the bone begins in the way they would on a body that had grown so.

Her forged form is deep red with a metallic sheen, living biotechnology from end to end, alive and wholly hers. It keeps her vulperin shape closely, with muzzle, ears and tail all plainly there, refined into something more streamlined while staying every inch a vulperin. Her torso and head are smooth and slightly cool beneath the hand, and her limbs and tail are ridged. Wherever she bends, at the limbs, the jaw and along the tail, she is plated and segmented, and everywhere else she is seamless. Her pads turn velvety, and she can set their firmness wherever she likes. Her eyes glow crystal blue from within, clear of their violet streaks. Her spirals burn in full colour here, as energy moving beneath the surface.

Her pliant form is flexible and slightly yielding, black from end to end and pliant inside and out. Its surface is soft and matte, smooth and warm to the touch, and it gives softly under pressure before springing back. Her pads become soft and squishy. Her spirals show faintly through the black. Her eyes look black at a glance, and closer inspection finds them a very dark violet.

She can go fully liquid from any of her forms, and the liquid keeps that form’s colour: deep brown, pale bone, deep red or black, completely opaque in each. How much of her shape she holds depends on how far into liquid she chooses to go. Her spirals and currents stay with her, their colours blurring and running together as the liquid moves.

Beneath her surface, light moves in slow currents and fine glowing veins, and its colour follows her form: silver in her plush form, gold in her sleek form, blue in her forged form and violet in her pliant form. Her frame form carries none. The currents are faint and easy to miss, and they drift on their own, following nothing in particular. The rippling every liquiform body carries shows most clearly when she changes form, spreading across her from the point where the change begins.

When she needs it, her bioforged armour comes up from beneath her surface in a smooth slide of interlocking plates, silver with red accents, covering her whole body. Protective lenses close over her eyes, and smaller plates settle along her face. It rises the same way and looks the same in every form, whether it comes up through fur, bare skin, the black of her pliant form or from between her bones. Her vulperin plating layers on top of it: when her claws extend, the forearm plates and their contained energy unfold over the bioforged armour already covering her arms and hands.

Her body holds a great deal more, concealed until it is called for. Silver blades extend from her forearms, each about the length of a shortsword. Energy emitters in her palms and paws glow the same crystal blue as her forged eyes, letting her strike with blasts of that blue energy or lift into flight on it. Electrical coils run through her tail, an ultrasonic cannon rests inside her right arm, and deep crimson cutting lasers lie within her eyes. All of it works in every form she takes, and all of it is at its strongest in her forged form. Within her chest is the living control chamber every bioforged being carries, opened by her chest and shoulders parting, and she opens it to the people she trusts.

Her feelings show plainly. Her tail is the clearest sign of them, sweeping, swaying and curling with every change of mood, and her ears turn, lift and flatten alongside it. Her whole posture opens up when she is happy and squares off when she has set herself to something.

She moves lightly for her build, with powerful, driving strides and the near-silent tread of her people. Something of the liquid in her is always present, a fluid ease running through every motion, so that even her quickest movements flow.

The atmosphere around Lifelda is warm and lively, full of energy and easy laughter. Beneath the cheer runs a guardian’s steadiness, solid as a wall that will not fall.

She smells of honey and of cool night air over stone, with the faint, clean tang of iron in the air running beneath it.

Lifelda is a hearth fire on a cold night, a shield held up with a smile, and the sun and moon sharing the same sky. She is the fire that spares, and the warmth that stands guard.