Improvements and Builds
General Improvements:- Increased baseline resistance through improved resilience of flesh
- Increased baseline strength through strengthened and compact muscle fibers
- Increased baseline mental capability through thickened corpus callosum
- Increased durability and sharpness of teeth and fingernails
- Increased thickness of bones, especially skull, enough to deflect most calibers if hit at an angle and lower calibers head-on
- Additional redundant organs/Adapted organ functions, including altering of circulatory system and nervous system to be more shock-resistant and have alternative mechanisms of function
- Changed color and increased durability of hair
- Gills in neck and torso (lining ribcage) - released underwater as external gills
- Lateral line sensory system (analogous to that of fish) for sensing prey in water
- Electroreceptors (also analogous to that of fish) for sensing prey in water, range of 5ft
- Magnetoreceptor (Under development) -- only capable of vaguely sensing direction
- Increased capability of senses, including touch, sight, sound, smell, taste, proprioperception, and interoception
- Bones incorporated with mineral content and designs ripped off from nature, increasing resilience (Under development)
- Currently experimenting with increasing metal content of bones to provide resilience, still working out issues with excessive toxicity when in large amounts and strength-to-weight ratio
Calculations:
Here is a list of % mass each body part is in a human:
Head: 6.810%
Trunk: 43.020%
Arms: 9.43%
Legs: 40.74
Total Percent: 100
Since her regeneration rate is simply 4% of her mass per second, it will always take her about 10 seconds to regenerate her legs in human form regardless of her size.
Prime Forms:
Requirements: - prototyped and currently in a functional state
- expected to stay working in the field
Caveats:None of the changes can truly be said to be combat-ready, as Metanoia has avoided conflict with capes and people in general.
All “time to change” times are rough estimates based off starting at her 50kg base form mass, with the times decreasing as she increases her mass.
Naiad
Description:
-sleeker form, suited for water, still mostly human
-thick tail emerging from base of spine that tapers into a flattened dart shape at end
--tail is scaled and spined, can lash to spear fish
--swimming mostly powered by tail, undulating motion
-increased flexibility
Development Notes:
-Closest to base form
-Most time spent in this form due to time spent in water
Time to change: ~10 seconds
-Mass of tail: ~20kg
Asuran
Description:
-Four additional arms emerging from shoulders
-practiced enough to be mostly coordinated
-allows for increased speed at tasks requiring manipulation with hands
-mostly superseded in favor of Nephilim for defending self
Development Notes:
-Development when extra hands needed for fine motor skills
-Branched into Nephilim form after starting from this
-Turns out it’s kind of hard to throw a punch with three arms at once
Time to change: ~3 seconds per set of arms
-Mass of arms approximately 5kg
Armored
Description:
-Carefully sculpted and filigreed armor, emphasizing sleekness and aiming to look delicate so the strength of the armor will be underestimated
-Comes with helmet, of course, with small flared wings or horns on the side valkyrie-style
-Usually a pure, milky white, sometimes decorated with feathers or streaks of pigment
-May come with weaponry
-Armor can be adapted to other forms, basic is just over humanoid form
-Can protect against bullets reliably, even up to potentially higher calibers (see real-life cases of even higher caliber bullets bouncing off larger bones in human bodies, the density of this bone is over twice that of normal human bone)
-Issue is the strength-to-weight ratio, a fully-armored form adds significant weight that will slow Zinerva down, even if she compensates by adding more muscle mass
-Can decrease thickness of armor for less protection but greater speed
-Can be armored in scale-like patterns over joints/tails to allow for flexibility
Development Notes:
-Still working on improving strength to weight ratio of armor, potentially by incorporating metals and other minerals
-Still working on designing the fashion/look of the armor and the colors, looking for sources of inspiration
Time to change: ~36 seconds
-This describes a basic armor of 2cm thickness of 5g/cm^3 density of compressed bone
-Average area of adult woman: 1.6m^2. 2cm layer of compressed bone at a density of 5g/cm^3 is a total volume of 32000 cubic centimeters for a total weight of 160000g or 160kg
-Time to change increases or decreases upon size of form and changes in armor density or body size
Naga
Description:
-Lower body of a snake, ivory scales cover skin to belly, slit pupil eyes, fangs
-Slightly larger than normal form, tail about 2.5ft in diameter at widest
-Not really useful for anything other than slightly increased speed in water and while burrowing
Development Notes:
-created on whim, mostly just experimentation with snake-like form to see if power would give anything juicy
-potentially a base form to alleviate square-cube law for Goliath-class forms
Time to change: ~18s
-Lower body + tail is about 50kg at base size
Nephilim
Description:
-Two pure white wings, sometimes dyed with color, usually armored with compressed bone
-Mostly for gliding, human body plan doesn’t work so well with flying
-Can be grown to immense sizes (8m+ wingspan) to allow for short bursts of flight
-Includes leg modifications to allow for running/jumping start
-Mostly useful as another limb to shield self with, deflect projectiles, hide self underneath to prepare other actions
-Can be grafted onto other forms
-More wings or larger wings can be grown with additional time, added colors to avoid association with Simurgh when multiple sets of wings are out
Development Notes:
-One of her first ideas, angelic wings/flying was an obvious fantasy
-Turns out increasing wing size also increases weight, increased weight means larger wings are needed, larger wings lead to increased weight, and so forth
--hard to outpace weight increasing faster than flying capability
Time to change: ~5s (Basic feathered wings) ~10s-40s+ (Light armor to fully armored)
-Base wings are easy, low mass
-Armor of compressed bone is heavy and takes similar time to armor herself, longer if the wings are larger and thus have a larger surface area
Dire Wolf
Description:
-Very big fluffy ivory-cream-white wolf-like creature with pale blue eyes
--size of a large elephant, around 6000kg, 11ft at the shoulder and 20ft long
--can grow larger, largest elephant on record at 11000kg and 13ft at the shoulder
-Large poofy tail, like a golden retriever
-Covered in bone armor pieces like plate armor
-Lots of armor underneath skin as well
-Internals are rearranged so that Metanoia is at the center of the creature
--Surrounded in a thick shell of bone
Development:
-Deliberately avoiding association with Crawler
--Was hexapodal earlier in development, changed back to quadrupedal upon learning that Crawler was hexapodal
-Things start breaking when moving fast when going above the 11000kg size
--Currently working on developing alternative forms that can withstand the stresses of sprinting and jumping while being heavier than this form
Time to change: ~120-135 seconds
-Two minutes needed to reach 6000kg
-15 more seconds needed to reach 11000kg
Tentacles
Description:
-Thick tentacles covered in overlapping white dense bone armor scales
-Each has up to 300kg of lifting capacity, increasing with size
-based off elephant trunks
Development:
-Inspired by need for developing limbs that aren’t as constrained as human limbs
-Great for digging into lakebeds
-Coloration and form, once again, deliberately avoiding association with Crawler
Time to change: ~10-30s per tentacle and faster after the first
-Requires increase in base form size to utilize multiple tentacles
-Each tentacle in base form weighs 10kg, increases up to 140kg and 7ft long (size of elephant trunk)
-Can grow larger but more unwieldy and untested
Arcology
Description:
-Full defensive mode, almost completely immobile
-Consists of living densely compressed bone that adds onto itself in successive layers
--Metanoia is like a onion: she has many layers
-Will constantly grow larger as Metanoia adds onto it over time
-Due to the square cube law, the surface area of the defensive structure will grow more slowly than the mass/volume of the structure
-Default color is ivory, color may be added as layers are grown to display messages or indicate friendliness
-Can project objects from the surface, grow armaments on the surface
Development:
-Cleanup is a hassle
--Lots of pyramidal bone-shaped objects buried in Standley Lake’s lakebed
Time to change: Variable
-Metanoia has never allowed this to grow too large after realizing she’d have to clean up after herself
Form of a Cat! (and other animals)
Description:
Metanoia, briefly, has experimented with turning her body into shapes of other animals. If the shape is unpracticed, it’s a bit...horrific, as her power doesn’t help her much in constructing an animal shape that actually looks like the animal.
So far, she’s got a dog and a cat form down passably.
Development:
Metanoia has always liked cats.
Time to change: Variable
-Depends on mass of the animal in question
-Requires Metanoia to shed her excess mass if going to a smaller size, which can leave obvious bits of flesh behind unless she cleans up after herself
Developing Forms
UNDER CONSTRUCTIONMetanoia is still working on these, and thus these forms will likely not see the light of day unless specific or dire circumstances occur.
Roc (aka literally a bird)
Description:
-Form of a giant white raven
-Literally just a giant birb
-Can be scaled to smaller sizes to be a more normal-sized birb
-Flies at normal bird speeds
-Can be used to deliver payloads
--E.g. drop compressed bone kinetic projectiles (bone darts), poison sacs, dust
Development:
-Still need to work out...actually flying
-Turns out learning to fly without actually being bird is a hard
-Currently only capable of gliding, then flapping
--Will quickly spiral and crash
-Power helps but still hard to have form mimic a bird correctly
--Esp because have to adjust anatomy as size increases
Time to Change: ~5s - 25s+
-Refer to A. Magnificens for a real-world example
-Can easily reach 6m+ wingspan, ~70kg(154lbs)
-Can also scale to smaller sizes
Quetzalcoatlus
Description:
-Based off largest-known flying animal of all time
-Weight: ~200-250kg (440-550lb) Wingspan: ~11m
-Theoretically capable of bursts of powered flight and gliding
-Enormous deadly beak
-Also adapted to terrestrial locomotion
Development:
-Literally everything still unfinished
-Nowhere to practice without being discovered
-Side note: this form doesn’t swim very well
-Issues with not knowing how it was actually built since there’s only a fossil record to go off of
-Can currently produce facsimile of form that doesn’t have flight capability
-Very clumsy with this atm
Time to change: ~40s?
-Likely longer due to unfamiliarity with form
Goliath-Naga
Description:
-Theoretically titanosaur-size animals are possible, a la argentinosaurus (80 tons)
-But very slow and joints prone to collapse past certain sizes
-Elephants can sprint at 15mph+, those big dinosaurs moved at maybe 5mph
-Overall, flesh holds up poorly under square-cube law
-Strength increase versus time spend shifting is not efficient
-At a certain point the “strength increase” is just having more mass to throw around
--Instead it would be better to, for example, make tons of tentacles
-Attempt to remedy this issue with inefficient giant forms by imitating snake, might help by allowing body to be supported against the ground
--Would be able to snap tail like whip
-This is mostly a theoretical exercise to see if power gives any goodies for trying it
--little use in combat or anything, really, at the moment
Development:
-Most success in water so far
-Still harder to support self on land
Time to change: ~132s+
-Greater than 10000kg in mass
Holy fuck, there’s an Endbringer in my city
Description:
This form consists of multiple parts.
- A large mounted steed to serve as a wall of flesh to soak damage and regenerate from, this is also the main source of increased biokinetic range and allows her to safely participate from a distance. Takes Dire Wolf form.
- Humanoid form that rides the steed, provides a “human” presence and small mobile form to detach as needed. Nephilim form, to allow for gliding off the steed, plus other additions as necessary.
- Masses of smaller, mobile forms equipped with biological weaponry to harry the Endbringer, provide search and rescue, and generally support other capes as needed
The smaller mobile forms aren’t autonomous, so Metanoia needs to add brains to each one and take control herself, as otherwise her multitasking ability isn’t up to controlling dozens of minions through biokinesis at once. Metanoia’s core will be in the Dire Wolf.
Development notes:
This is under heavy development, as working on this requires a significant time investment of generating and sculpting large amounts of flesh. For the foreseeable future, the greatest benefit of this form is survivability and the ability to contribute to something like an Endbringer fight while giving Metanoia a chance to survive. Otherwise, it doesn’t really increase her combat effectiveness, and is much too resource-intensive to upkeep and use otherwise.
Emergency Stash
At the bottom of Standley Lake resides slowly accumulating masses of flesh. All are composed of quiescent cells, each a different form of “flesh suit” that Zinerva can integrate herself with. All must be tended to and have their nutrients replenished every few weeks.
Effectively, this serves as an emergency stash of pre-crafted material that Metanoia can access if she can get to her lake. There’s a smaller collection at her apartment, mostly consisting of things such as armored flesh and less wholesale creations—there’s not nearly as much space in there as she has at the lake.
Other things are stashed as well, listed in subsections under
Armaments.
Therapeutic Uses
While Metanoia cannot directly heal people, she can alter her blood basically be equivalent of O- blood, allowing her to be a universal blood donor.
Currently, she’s working on creating organs, muscle tissue, and other miscellaneous body parts that can be implanted into other humans. By stripping her tissue of surface molecules such as major histocompatibility complexes (MHC), she can create transplantable tissue that has a much lower chance of being rejected from the host. Of course, she lacks human subjects to test this on, so this is mostly a power exercise at the moment.
Armaments
General Description:These are practiced, all-purpose changes utilized for defensive (and sometimes utility) purposes.
Electrical Insulation
-Response to electrical shock, creates insulating layer around the origin of the shock and attempts to mitigate the effects of the shock to facilitate faster regeneration and repair
-includes some level of heat resistance due to possible electrical burns
Burn Resistance
-Reflexively create heat-redistributing and heat-absorbing chemicals to protect self from burns
-Eventually creates layers of material in body that act as heat sinks and can be ejected after absorbing heat
Poisons/Venom Resistance
-If possible, the foreign material is immediately removed from the body through physical means by sectioning off the tissue and removing it
-If not possible, tissue is contained and the poisons are neutralized with heat-producing chemical reactions
-All circulation to and from the area is immediately shut down
Emergency Armor
-Simply sheathes self and reinforces organs with modified compressed bone-like structures
-Will gradually sheathe entire body in armored plates
-Sheathes head first
-Can be prepped for by preparing plates unnoticeably underneath the skin
-Basically a less structured version of the “Armored”
Prime Form.
Bombardier Adaptation
-Mimics bombardier beetle’s chemical reactions
-Very exothermic reaction, releases sprays of boiling liquid
-Also an irritant aside from the heat
-Consists of glands under skin, sprays liquid from pressure and also muscle contraction
Projectiles
-Combination of physical mechanisms and buildup of pressure
-Releases either shards or needles of dense compressed bone or tiny irritating buffs of sharp hairs/inhalable bone powder
-Loud shattering and popping noises when mechanism is activated
-Bone shards are limited in speed due to material limitations, at most will penetrate a few inches into unprotected flesh
-Therefore this is released in shotgun-like spreads to maximize chances of hitting and inducing distraction to allow for escape
Scream
-Alteration to lung capacity, vocal chords
-Create modifications to allow for circular breathing, resulting in unending scream
-Can’t really damage hearing with this, mostly for shock and distraction
-High-pitched screaming that doesn’t stop
Construction
-Creating shaped objects out of compressed modified bone and sometimes laced with metal and/or minerals grown in certain ways
-Mostly just used to create stashes of potentially useful objects
-Also used for the novelty and fun of practicing power control and sculpting
-Spears, swords, lances, and
fantasy exotic weapons made of compressed bone of various sizes are in storage at bottom of Standley Lake or at Metanoia’s apartment
-Other equipment or ornaments are stashed there too, including a pretty crown of bone that turned out better than expected
-Chains, necklaces, rings, bracelets, armbands, hair ornaments
-Originally there was a human skeleton, but that was removed on the off chance someone found it and assumed the worst
-Sometimes decorated with feathers or other pigmented tissue
Booby Traps
-Metanoia’s homes are filled with quiescent cells controlling payloads that contain noxious fumes, corrosive liquids, explosive structures, etc.
-Can be set off to discourage intruders and to attack from unconventional angles
-Also can contain useable flesh (muscle fibers, mostly) to strike with
-These booby traps also need to be refreshed every few weeks or they will starve
Food and Water
Metanoia simply generates flavorless, if a bit salty, packages of food and water. Water is created through generating a substance similar to her own tears and filtering the liquid with kidney-like structures. The food is a mostly flavorless combination of muscle tissue and fats, though she can also produce sugars on-demand. She doesn’t need this ability, as she can directly shunt mass into her own tissues, but it’s helpful for feeding comrades and testing the digestive systems that she creates.
Decapitation Survival
-For use in situations where decapitation and then subsequent destruction of the body is, for some reason, a concern
-Modification of head to compress brain and add in energy reserves and a miniature circulatory system, basically a self-sustaining head
AVOIDING DEATH
-One of Metanoia’s last resorts
-When it seems like she might die, she develops structures under high tension and pressurized sacs in her body, then detonates
-This ensures that her flesh and her cores fly as far away as possible, potentially making the enemy unable to destroy all the pieces and thus giving Metanoia a chance at survival
-Also handily imitates a last-ditch attempt to take out the attacker with a violent death
-Said pieces of flesh may grow wings and attempt to fly away to further distraction, like lizard tails moving after being torn off
DO NOT USE (unless things are seriously borked)
Sins of Thy Children
Using something similar to Projectiles or Bombardier for distraction, Metanoia also includes bits of her own flesh in the payload, spraying down an area with “seeds”. Said seeds will either grow into their target, form into caltrops, release noxious sulfuric fumes, or otherwise provide area denial. They can also be in the form of pods with small hooks that latch onto people or things and remain quiescent for later activation by Metanoia when they re-enter her range. Effectively, they can serve as long-term threats in areas where Metanoia has been and as starting points for her to use her power through to attack from unconventional angles.
Birds of Feather
Metanoia violently launches bird-shaped projectiles at a target. The projectiles are guided in Metanoia’s range and either explode into fragments upon hitting the target or immediately attach and begin burrowing. If the targets are within Metanoia’s range, the birds begin disabling limbs and performing other nonlethal actions as first resort, otherwise they mindlessly attack the target with rhythmic muscle contractions. Within Metanoia’s range, they can also grow bone into targets or release specific compounds. They can also carry corrosive, explosive, irritating, or obscuring payloads.
Plague
Though Metanoia is limited to mostly mammalian physiology, she can still work on miniaturizing her creations and packing them into smaller forms. Plague is simply the logical conclusion to this development. She spawns thousands of tiny flesh-creatures that are essentially just birds with crunchy exteriors and directs them to attack and harry foes while simultaneously using them as vectors to grow mass from and increase her own mass. Plague is far more cost-efficient than producing minions such as life-sized birds, rats or rhinos, and is thus Metanoia’s last resort when she is willing to sacrifice her public image.
Autonomy
Though this isn’t quite possible yet, Metanoia has put some time into developing the ability for her creations to be fully autonomous. This would allow them to harvest nutrients and perform tasks outside of Metanoia’s biokinesis range, technically increasing her capabilities.
Unfortunately, Metanoia is also aware that this would cause people to draw comparisons between her and people like Nilbog, and thus is unwilling to use this unless using it would somehow make the difference between life and death.
Practically, this still has a lot of issues that Metanoia hasn’t solved yet, and her power is only feeding her dribbles of useable information. Nerve nets are too simple for complex behavior and Metanoia hasn’t managed to make more complex nervous systems fully autonomous yet. Creating organ systems from scratch is similarly hard, and her created organisms simply break down and die outside of her range. Giving the organisms the necessary instincts to survive and grow is even harder.
There is an easy solution, of course. Metanoia
could simply grow another human...but she isn’t willing to go that far yet, nor is she sure that such a thing would even work at all.
Metastasize
This is Metanoia’s “the world is ending” option, where she leverages her biokinesis, changer abilities, and regeneration to their fullest extent. She ramps up her regeneration to reach her maximum regeneration rate as quickly as possible while spreading herself across the land, into the earth, and throughout the air. Burrowing forms begin tunneling, her body splats across the ground in an ameboid-like form, and she continually releases flying forms and dust made of flesh wrapped in hardened shells to saturate the air. As this occurs, her mass increase increases her biokinetic range, allowing her to launch pieces of her flesh further away from herself while also maintaining her control over them.
Assuming preparations have already been completed by then, Metanoia will give her flesh the capability to obtain energy chemotrophically, digesting inorganic and organic compounds to allow her flesh to grow and spread without having to manually grow them through utilizing her regeneration’s mass-shunting. When there is sufficient surface area, Metanoia will focus on consuming plants in order to harvest their chloroplasts in a manner similar to Elysia chlorotica, a sea slug, and use the chloroplasts to accumulate greater amounts of energy and nutrients. In addition, a larger surface area also allows for using the sun to heat the flesh instead of having to expend additional energy to keep the flesh warm to have it continue to grow at optimal rates.
The goal of this is to eventually saturate the land, earth, and sky with Metanoia’s flesh, giving her increased survivability and area control in order to protect herself. Metanoia will also constantly produce autonomous minions that attack on sight and perform target recognition through simple nerve nets and pheromone identification.
In the best case scenario, Metanoia will attempt to spread into large bodies of water, as she’s not only accustomed to growing in water but also because the water is far better at supporting large masses of flesh that would otherwise crush themselves under their own weight on land.