malleable flesh [training]

[The Bearer of Bad News]

Shift of Organs (Internal)
Rank: B-ranked
Skill: Taijutsu
Effect: The user can move internal organs within the body by command, avoiding major injury.
Special: ---
Drawback: It takes 1/2 post (3 seconds) to shift during combat and consumes 1 movement from the user.
Description: Tapping into the user's cellular control abilities, organs may be grown, shifted and placed into areas of the bodies that may not normally exist in a normal human. The user may command their body to move and place the heart within the stomach cavity, rather than the chest, or place the stomach within the pelvic cavity, rather than the abdomen. This is helpful in the act of deception or can save the user in the moments of a Coup de grâce. If the heart would be stabbed, and the user is given enough time, they may shift it out of place for example.
Limit: Kedōin Blood Line.

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Schatzi had been neglecting her most unique trait for a long time. Her malleable physiology. Sure she changed her appearance frequently, rather constantly, but she never really tried to push the limits. So now she was going to do so. Manually. With a knife. A quick twirl to psyche herself up, and she clenched hard in her core, trying to draw the position of her lungs up higher in her chest. In theory, given how adaptable her body was, this should work. She plunged the knife into the middle end of her chest, toward the bottom of where the lung should be. The pain made her squirm, but otherwise she remained silent. Focused. Public was a party. Private is time to work.

Given the difficulty breathing she was experiencing, she had failed that first attempt. With that she drew out the knife, watching with mild interest as the blood clung to the edge and coagulated rather than flowing freely. When she looked down at her wound it had already healed. Benefits of being...whatever she was. Another try at the suicide game she couldn't lose yielded similar results when her spleen started leaking bile. That took a bit longer to fully heal, if only because the acid kept reopening the closing wounds until it had fully dissipated.

Another attempt at shifting her organs resulted in some slight kidney damage, but it was a bare thing this time. It had moved just a bit. Progress. Progress was good. Still, she believed herself to be merely half of one fifth through to mastery. Just as a test, she pierced her own heart. With most people, that was fatal damage. For Schatzi, she merely convulsed in agony. A moan escaped her, but it didn't sound like pain.

Feeling her heartbeat stop, she tried to force it to move with the knife still embedded. Releasing the handle, she simply watched as the knife slowly crawled across her breast, carving open flesh that healed seconds behind it. Eventually as her automatic repairs did their work, as the beating of her heart resumed, it beat by beat pushed out the weapon until it clattered against the grass.

She panted and wheezed, kneeling on all fours and desperately reclaiming oxygen. It was hard for lungs to operate without a heartbeat, and the presence of lungs drastically cut the efficiency of her skin transfer. Maybe next time she decided to screw around she would remove them. That would be smart. Also not her style. Guaranteed she would forget later. Whatever, not important. Important was screwing around with her internal configuration. So far she'd at least gotten used to making her organs move, but there was still a question of relocating them entirely.

[The Bearer of Bad News]

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Advancing the concept of organ movement wasn't going to be easy. But at least it would be enjoyable. No, wait, that wasn't right. Painful. Definitely no enjoyment. Not in the feeling of her internal configuration squirming and shuffling delightfully in her thoracic cavity. Certainly not on the fire that ran across her nerves when the steel sank into her flesh, seeking out vulnerable organs which fled enticingly from its wicked bite.

Yes, she was certainly getting good at that, at the chase. She was shifting faster, cutting faster and deeper, healing flawlessly smooth skin behind the blade without a drop of chakra spent. Now though, she wanted to take it to the next level. Not content to merely move a centimeter or two at a time, she wanted to be able to freely manipulate the positions of her organs across her entire body. That was the goal, one she intended to reach.

For now though, she would have to take smaller steps to the bigger goal. She had mastered centimeters, and in fact had gotten to the point where she could do it with a degree of rapidity, so then the ext logical step would be to operate within the span of inches. A far bigger space to cover, to relocate one organ across multiple inches would require moving other organs as well. That would require enough fine tuned precision and control to manipulate them simultaneously.

The actual process proved to be slow, she could feel her innards undulating with the effort. Not able yet to move them simultaneously she had to move them in an alternating fashion instead - first one, then another, then another. In this manner of doing things, by pushing just little bits at a time she was able to slowly wiggle and push her heart down further into her abdomen, just a tiny little bit at a time. It was actually difficult work, and it made her feel a few different things. Chief among them was the need to use the toilet, from squeezing and manipulating her intestines. But also there was...hunger.

Eventually she had pushed aside her abdominal organs and surrounded her heart with them, having shifted it down several inches. It wasn't as dramatic a shift as she would be capable of when she had mastered the ability, but it was quite a significant improvement. Slowly, with a sigh of relief as a great deal of pressure was eliminated, she wiggled everything back into its proper place where it belonged on a normal human being.

[The Bearer of Bad News]

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Continuing along from where she left off, Schatzi was trying to further disorganize her structure, pushing internal organs slowly out of pace one at a time to make room fr other organs to be moved. Trying to do more than one at a time was still impossible for her, but the degree of rapidity with which she was able to change which organs her musculature pushed and pulled at was increasing at an acceptable pace. Her training as a gymnast and in the discipline of gintsuki no senkou mai which was fairly athletic had already given her excellent muscle control.

So now she just needed to learn how to fine tune it, which was what she was working on. If she could clench just the right muscle in just the right way, it may be possible to force a movement of multiple organs at once, or at least that was the plan. And actually, it was a plan with a lot of evidence behind it. The only flaw was getting every affected organ to move in exactly the way she wanted it to. That was going to be tricky indeed.

Plus there was the concern of increasing the overall degree of movement total for an individual organ. She had managed to move her heart a few inches lower into her abdominal cavity, but a few inches was hardly enough to stave off a "fatal" strike. Granted she could actually survive total destruction of her heart, but it still hurt like all holy hell when it happened. And not in the good way. Well, maybe a little in the good way. It depended on the situation really. She might be okay with a little knife play, but in an actual fight it was more painful than erotic.

Regardless she had to keep at her efforts. Private time was working time. Working time was serious. She had to at least gain some sort of real progress or what was even the point? Her Master would be so displeased if she had nothing to show for her misadventures. But as the gurgling sounds emitted from her torso attested, this was not exactly a simple or easy task. Every effort actually rather upset her body, and at this point she was feeling like she may have to regurgitate. Not that she'd actually eaten in a while. The bloodthirst was making her weaker for it, but she simply hadn't come across anyone she could drink. And eat. No witnesses after all.

She frowned with effort, experimentally testing out points and angles internally. She was terrible at math. Particularly geometry. That made the issue more complicated, even though her theory was sound. It was hard to execute a plan when you have very little aptitude toward it. That was fine though probably. Yeah, that was fine. She just had to keep trying different combinations until something worked the way she wanted it to. When expertise wasn't a factor, trial and error could at least do the same thing in a longer time period. Gah, this sucked though. She really wanted to just cut loose and eat someone now.

[The Bearer of Bad News]

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Progress was inexorable. There was no denying that. But it was also slow. Schatzi hated slow. Slow was boring. She was on the verge of simply giving up and finding something more interesting to do, she really was. But she kept hold of her sanity, such as it was, for the time being, and continued to train. She was able now to shift multiple organs in a single push, to better make room for one that she wanted to move specifically, but still couldn't quite get the hang of pushing from multiple directions at once so as to slide the desired organ into place as room was made for it.

The amount of distance she had managed had gone up as well, though not as much as she would like. As it was, her heart, the most obvious and therefore best organ to practice on for such an ability, was only able to be moved at most to sit just above her pelvis. Which was still an incredibly unnatural postion for it of course, but her aortic arteries still occupied original heat space. Not THEIR original space, of course, but original heart space nevertheless. Specifically, they sat in the same area as the bottom inch or two of her lower left ventricle would.

If she could stay calm, stay patient, she might be able to progress in a reasonable amount of time. Probably. But that was the hardest part. At least she didn't need to stab herself to feel the movement anymore. She could properly tell where things were now. It was an acquired skill though. She considered another go with the knife just out of boredom and frustration, but decided against. It would just make this harder. A little to the right or left, and she could try to push it down further, down into her legs.

That would be ideal, the farthest she could move it. Mainly because there wasn't enough space in her feet or anywhere along her skinny arms. There probably wasn't even enough from in her calves, though her thighs could likely do it. She'd broken (and then eaten) enough hearts to know they were actually fairly large organs, and unlike most of her organs this one was permanent. Which when you think about it was strange since she didn't naturally have any other internal organs for the blood pumped to oxygenate. Well, there was her brain, but she could always just osmose that. Wait no, the skull would get in the way. Did he even have a skull though? She'd once chopped off an arm and watched it grow back, and there was no bone in there. Her biology was distinctly nonhuman.

That inhumanity was precisely the reason this organ reconfiguration strategy was actually working. No ordinary person could survive such a thing. Ordinarily, considering Schatzi's ridiculous regenerative abilities, she wouldn't even have bothered. But it was clear from some of the notes left behind by her first master that this would be a prerequisite to greater things. If she didn't buckle down and get it done, she wouldn't be able to access the other powers that waited just beyond the edge of understanding.

[The Bearer of Bad News]

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Just a bit more. A few inches and her heart would be sitting in the middle of her thigh. Leaving that for the time being, she decided o get creative now. Agonizingly slowly, her left lung crawled through the empty space where her heart used to be, where it would have room to be manipulated. This was something she hadn't tried yet. She was going to turn the organ somewhat, so that it could be more easily fitted elsewhere. Bit by bit, little pokes and pushes from her twitching musculature tilted the lump of flesh onto its side.

Sweat was beading on her forehead at this point. Muscular activity still required effort, even when she made it look as if it didn't, and she'd been doing this for a while now. It was only to be expected that she begin to tire, after manipulating her poor, battered organs to such an extent. But she was't finished just yet. Not when she was so close she could almost taste it. Just a bit more and she would have reached that point of epiphany, that level where she could do as she pleased with the technique.

With that in mind, she slid her lung over bit by bit until the smaller top lobe was pointing away from the center of her body. Then she pushed it slowly across until it began nudging its way down her left arm. The broad lower lobe would prove the limiting factor here, as it could not slip past her shoulder muscles. Still that was one part complete. Only a bit more to go until she could say her project was completed. Her strange version of body arts and crafts that nobody could see, not even herself. It certainly felt funny though.

She started to do the same with her right lung, twisting it and gradually inserting it into her right arm, meanwhile also starting to drag up her stomach. When the lung was properly socketed, her focus shifted to positioning her stomach precisely at the centerpoint of her torso. From there she one by one gathered up all of her other organs, both vital and supporting, and arrayed them in crossing rings around her stomach. Yeah this was definitely wierd feeling, but possibly good? She wasn't certain honestly.

After that it was time for the hardest part if only for sheer length. She gathered up her intestines, which if not curled up and packed so densely would be several times longer than her own frame, and began to slowly loop them around the organ cluster. If someone were to look at her with x-ray vision, they would see something akin to a ringed planet surrounded by a spiraling nebula of smooth muscle. It was definitely one of her more harebrained designs. Exhaling, she gradually put everything back where it belonged, and fell flat on her back, breathing heavily. A bit of rest now maybe. Then food.

[Solus]

+50

[The Bearer of Bad News]

Shift of Organs (External)
Rank: B-ranked
Skill: Taijutsu
Effect: The user can move external organs and limbs by command for various purposes.
Special: ---
Drawback: It takes 1 post (6 seconds) to shift during combat and consumes 1 movement from the user. Shifted organs do not enhance or grant additional abilities to the user.
Description: The user is capable of tapping into the external control of their limbs and organs; places where organs and limbs may not exist in regular humans. Limbs/Organs will literally glide across the skin to a new desired location. The user may command the body to shift the eye(s) to the back of the head, place an ear at the end of a hand, or even move the mouth behind the thigh. This helpful in terms of espionage for the clan, or even further deceit. The user may pretend to be blind by covering the face, but secretly have eyes in the palms of the hands instead. A mouth may be shifted to a rope bound foot in attempts to chew threw the cord.
Limit: Kedōin Blood Line. Must know "Shift of Organs (Internal)"

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With mastery of manipulating the innards would come the potential to manipulate the outtards. At least that was the theory. But to so so seamlessly, that it would appear natural? That was a capability beyond anything Schatzi had attempted in the past. Indeed, it could open entirely new avenues of the application of her abilities to reshape herself at whim. It was something that would require specific understanding however, as merely thinking about it wasn't actually achieving anything.

So then the question was, if she couldn't make it happen simply by willing it to be so, how could she? Perhaps that was too nonspecific a line of inquiry though, since realistically all of her skills were an act of thought and will. No, a more accurate method of describing her problem would be to say that she didn't know which neural pathways to follow in order to properly trigger the changes to her body that she desired.

She dissolved her eyes for now, letting utter blackness dominate her sense of sight. Better for visualization than simply closing them, at least that was her thought process on the subject. What she wanted for now was to be able to move her surface biology where she pleased. She could generate and dissolve certain organs as she pleased. But it was always in the same configurations. Always with the baseline template of "human". And the rest of her body was stuck immutably. Always two arms attached to the shoulders, two legs attached to the hips. No matter how hard she focused on changing it, nothing would happen. She didn't know the secret, not yet.

Unable to look outward, instead the Rutherford shapeshifter instead looked inward, combining her limited knowledge of her own inner workings with her understanding of medical techniques which relied on understanding the human body. In this way she was able to "see" the pathways of energy through her body. Her chakra network, the mysterious energy which was different from chakra that she called upon for her soulcaster techniques, her nervous system, the connections of bone and tissue. Everything worked together to bind her into a single shape, limiting her possibilities. It was intolerable.

But several of those energies, she knew how to manipulate individually. If she could twist everything at once, pull the reality as it existed into a new position, surely then she would change her shape to become more similar to the reality that she desired. That was the plan at least. Or rather, that was the best plan that she was capable of coming up with at this moment. Schatzi was a creature of instinct. To think so much, to consider her techniques on such a philosophical level, it was difficult for her.

[The Bearer of Bad News]

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Still without physical sight for the time being, Schatzi focused on the various energies twisting about her inhuman biology. There was only so much she could do for now, but by mentally and physically grasping hold of the threads that bound her, her muscles clamping down tightly, painfully, she felt as though she could very nearly take a hold of them. Once she had a firm grip, so to speak, she twisted, cutting off the flow in her left arm. Letting the radiating energy dry out, letting the feeling of cold seep into her limb, she began phase two.

With her arm starving for the essences of life, chakra, and the soul, new pathways started to form automatically, seeking reconnection to her core. This was what she was waiting for. Mentally, she dragged downward on the connective tissues, attempting to force them to combine at a different point than normal. With everything else remaining unchanged, it should result in her arm "existing" lower down on her torso than it should do under normal circumstances, forming an asymmetry with the opposite arm.

She reformed her unique green eyes, and tilted her head slightly to one side so that she might be able to gaze upon the handiwork she had just now wrought at this time. It had been successful, but far less so than she had hoped. It looked more as if she had simply dislocated her shoulder somehow, and even that only to an extremely minor degree. It was irritating and discouraging, but Schatzi Rutherford was nothing if not a persistent example of the...whatever species it was that she belonged to.

Now that the shapeshifting female had engineered this rather limited degree of success however, that meant that she had stumbled upon a theory of the technique which would actually function. At least to an extent. Therefore she had to take the concept which was already being utilized and continue along that very path, except that she had to do it better than she just had moving forward. Better, and faster, and more critically more easily, because the degree of concentration that was required at present was simply prohibitive.

Returning to the task at hand, it was significantly easier for her to return her arm to its normal position than it was to move it away. Perhaps that was because in spite of her strange, inhuman physiology, her "origin" was still something registered as "human". Or perhaps it was simply that she was used to it, set in her ways like a habit she simply couldn't break. Moving forward she would have start smaller, and work her way up to limbs when she was more well practiced.

[The Bearer of Bad News]

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Starting smaller as she had previously promised herself that she would do, instead of attempting to reposition an entire arm, Schatzi was going to attempt to move one of her eyes. In a normal human being, such a feat would be completely inconceivable except as an illusionist's act of deception and trickery. But not Schatzi. Due to her circumstance of not actually possessing eyes at all in her basest of realities, that meant she was not equipped with an optic nerve until she decided to grow one.

This meant of course that where a normal human would have to drag their optic nerve around their body and potentially damage it, the Rutherford shapeshifter could simply dissolve the connection while retaining the physical presence of an eye. This she should be able to move into the desired position with less difficulty than she had experienced with her arm. Maybe. Then she would reform the optic nerve and attach it to her spinal column rather than snaking it directly to her brain.

It was all just theory at this point, considering several possibilities to achieve her goal effectively, but it should work. So she put it into action, dissolving the connection between visual input and the comprehension thereof, but only for the one eye. Concentrating now, she focused on repositioning that eye in a similar fashion to how she had done earlier when manipulating her arm, feeling that same empty coldness as the optical organ "died".

As it began to move, Schatzi experienced the most awful crawling sensation across the flesh of her face. It was like a tickle, but also like a numbness, and she did no enjoy the feeling. In fact, it rather repulsed her, and as if to spite her for that, it was also so very agonizingly slow. Her eye inched down slowly across her cheek, then down her neck, where she moved it aside to cross over hr clavicle and then her shoulder. All this was a slow pat which led down her arm until the organ eventually sat in the palm of her hand.

At this point, she re-established the nervous connection between thought and sight, using her spinal column as an intermediary. The input was flawed, lacking in color and full of static, like a television set that was just barely out of tune, but it was a start. She now just needed to attempt to tweak the connection until she was able to receive images with the same clarity as the eye in its normal position. It was still weird as hell to be receiving visuals from two separate sources, and killed her depth perception, but it was pretty cool too.

[The Bearer of Bad News]

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Next Schatzi Rutherford intended to up the ante, so to speak. This would prove a complex manipulation, given that the aspect of her biology she intended to move now was her mouth. More than simply a singular nerve, the mouth was connected to the infinite complexities of the entire gastrointestinal system. That by extension would mean that a connection couldn't be formed just anywhere, it would have to be applied to a specific point or else compromise the entire function of the organ system.

Granted, Schatzi didn't actually NEED a mouth or stomach or any of the assorted auxiliary organs, since she could absorb nutrients directly through her flesh the same as breathing, but she found that she enjoyed the act of eating in the same fashion as a human, which meant also the requirement for digestion. Because for some reason, taste buds and the rest of the general human eating kit didn't come separately. That was slightly irritating, but ultimately not too much of an issue in the grand scheme. It only complicated matters right this moment, because of the nature of what she was attempting to do.

Even so the mouth was the logical next step. Still not a manipulation of even nearly so much mass as an attempt to relocate an arm had been not too long ago when she had done so, but a far more intricate process when compared to the prior action of moving her eye and seeing with it. The feeling on her skin as her mouth slowly crawled across it, taking the oral cavity with it as it went was absolutely bizarre, especially when she could still feel the entry to her gullet up in her throat where it had always been. She had simply detached the two to calculate the best approach to consumption later.

As the mouth traveled down her neck it momentarily displaced the path to her intestines, but all other than the mouth itself was righted shortly thereafter. She found herself distinctly less than fond with the sensation that it generated, especially when it moved onto and then across her breasts to sit just beneath them in the middle of her chest panting. She was out of breath? Oh right, the mouth was no longer leading to her lungs either, and she would have to begin breathing through her nose to continue acquiring oxygen. There, that was better.

Now re-energized from her unanticipated break, the shapeshifter continued to work with the travelling of her mouth across her smooth, lithe flesh. When it had managed to reach all the way down to her navel, she had it crawl around to the outer side of her midriff. She didn't want it going over her crotch. The logistics of that were terrifying to even imagine. Better to play it safe and go the lang way around, yes. The mouth continued to shift along the outside of her leg before coming to rest under the arch of her foot, facing the earth. Testing experimentally, she bit off a piece of grass. With nowhere for it to go, she just spat it back out.

[The Bearer of Bad News]

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Having restored her anatomy to it's original form, Schatzi determined that she would finalize her mastery of this ability by performing a truly complex task. It was her intention to simultaneously form multiple organ systems from scratch, all in the wrong places of her body. By doing that instead of simply moving them from their normal position, it would in a way validate her new ideal of mastery over her own sense of self.

Clearing away all of her Warped Visages, she found herself so utterly bereft of sensation for the first time in so many years that she honestly started to panic slightly. Her face was a blank slate, neither male nor female, but beginning to stir as her mind went through the instinctive motions to shift and grow into the necessary organs. Calming herself, the shapeshifter stilled her roiling flesh, and focused everything on the goal. The goal being to understand her own nature, and move beyond her prior limits. Like her creator's notes said she could. Like the Black Dragon had implied. Kedoin. Sooner or later, she would discover the meaning of that word. That was the entire reason for her long journey after all, wasn't it?

With newfound focus, she raised one arm, parallel to the ground, and concentrated on the squirming of her mass. Carefully running the esophageal tube alongside her ulna first, and then her humerus. From there it slid along her clavicle until reaching the point where it would normally be extending down from her throat before before hooking down and forming a normally-placed gastrointestinal tract. With that done, the flesh on the palm of her hand split open, forming a shallow cavern leading to the esophagus. The edges of the hole puffed up and shaped themselves into lips, while the bones of her hand split wide to encircle the esophagus before extending forward and forming pointed growths. She had teeth in her mouth on her hand now, she could feel them.

Next stage. Scent. Breath. Focus...The flesh on the back end of her same upraised hand flowed and expanded, merging into a pointed extension, supported by a tiny spine of bone. In this, two gaps were drained facing out to the horizon, tiny hairs growing inside to line the entrance to the cavity. These merged in her wrist to a single tubular formation protected by rings of bone and hardened cartilage. This trachea, while in a severely underdefended location, stretched across her arm and twined itself with the existing esophagus to follow the same route to her chest cavity. Once there it filled out to form two healthy lungs surrounding her irregularly beating heart. This effort was proving to be highly taxing on her, and she wasn't certain how much longer she would last.

Final stage. Light. Color. Her other hand rose like the first, this one palm up and out to face the world. It would be easier now. She'd already formed an eye in the palm of her hand before. It went similarly to before, though smoother, faster. No depth perception though. That was a problem. Slowly, making certain not to move it too far, but also not to move it too little, she slid the eye a bit to one side. More complicated now. She had to create a second eye next to the first. Her breath was starting to catch. Malformation of the trachea or the lungs? Simple exhaustion? She hadn't fed in too long. But she could see now, properly. Three dimensions.

As she collapsed to her knees, all of her organs disappeared, only to shimmer into their normal positions, leaving her gasping for air. Such inexpert manipulation was simply too taxing anymore. A short break. Just a bit. Just for now.

[KoKoKo]

+50 tp

[The Bearer of Bad News]

Aromatic Mislead
Rank: B-ranked
Skill: Taijutsu
Effect: The user can alter and produce various scents and smells.
Special: ---
Drawback: Cannot alter scents that have left the body; such as a residual scent left behind on clothing. Aggressive pursuit may allow trackers to pick up on the shift in scents.
Description: Cells and pheromones may be commanded by the user to alter their aroma and odorous signature. With a shift in the molecules releases by the cells and sweat glands, the user can change what they smell like. Kedōin are granted the capability of smelling like another person, or misleading a group or tracking dogs if the need arises. If the user posses an object that contains a scent from another, they may mimic that scent as well or reproduce smells they've encountered before. The user can even mimic perfumes and colognes that could not normally be produced by the human body. Multiple scents can be created at the same time. Scents can be manufactured all over the body, or manufactured in a single place. The user can even place scents onto different objects with their hands if they choose to (masking and hiding any old scents). All Kedōin have a "Default" scent, and they must make this conscious decision to change it. Altering scents takes 1 post.
Limit: Kedōin Blood Line. Must know "Warped Visage: Growth of Eyes" and "Shift of Organs (Internal)".

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Schatzi rifled through the notes that had fueled her training so far, trying to decipher the codes that concealed aspects of her nature. It seemed like it would be possible to change her scent? That should be fun. And sexy. It wasn't clear how to do so, or what its limits were, but as a masterful medic she had theories. It helped that her control over her anatomical structure had vastly improved in a short time. She was going to need to goo deeper than merely organ manipulation for this to work. This would be an adjustment on the chemical level, something she'd never conceived would be possible until now.

More importantly, there was that word again. Kedoin. Somewhere in these notes, there had to be something. But she lacked the skill and understanding to dig any deeper just yet. Her keen sense of smell wasn't quite powerful enough to trace scents, but it could definitely recognize them well enough to identify if her idea worked. She dissolved her eyes, her ears, and her mouth. Her attention needed to be inwardly focused. The only sense she would need was of smell. Her basic scent was...surprisingly plain. That was disappointing. The changeling had assumed there would be something to set her apart, some raw sexual musk. But there was nothing. At least it was a clean nothing though. Better than turning out to smell terribly and just never having known.

Attempts to change her scent would be complicated, but at least given her surprising lack of any spectacularity to speak of, it would at least mean that any degree of success, or any particularly dramatic failure, would be very much something that was noticeable to her. That would most likely prove to be useful in the midst of her efforts, but probably not without its downsides. Chemical changes meant changing the nature of the organs which excreted said chemicals, and in the case of scent this primarily meant the sweat glands in here pores

Although sweat glands were not always producing moisture, they did produce a person's olfactory signature on a constant basis by providing oils to protect the skin. By changing the makeup of these glands, it should be possible to change her olfactory signature by excreting different chemicals, or combinations of different chemicals. Beneath the surface her flesh was already warping and changing, causing the upper layers of skin to shimmer and roil with the movement.

When she was satisfied that she had indeed managed to force a change of some kind, though she was rather uncertain what that change might have been at this point, she forced her pores to squeeze tightly enough that additional excretion could commence, making the new scent easier to detect and identify. Sniffing deeply of her unnatural musk, she immediately recoiled. It was terrible! Like rotten eggs served on a bed of sauerkraut. So much regret! She had to dissolve her nose for a moment while her chemicals returned to normal just to get that scent out of her mind.

[The Bearer of Bad News]

OOC: On Hold for now.

[The Bearer of Bad News]

OOC: Resuming this technique.

[The Bearer of Bad News]

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Continuing to practice within the suggested concept of manipulation over the very scent of her body, the infernal changeling that was known to the world as Schatzi Rutherford was attempting to perform internal changes to the structure of her very body without any sort of degree of manipulation to her outer formation of the way in which her appearance was at the current time. This was so that she would be able to change the way in which her organs responsible for scent were formed.

The reasoning behind this was the same as when she had been attempting earlier on in the day when her slow translation of the notations which were left behind by the man responsible for her creation revealed that this would be within the overall capabilities of her unnatural body systems. The theory that the way in which her scent was created was the responsibility overall of the very chemicals excreted through her pores, and that changing the shape within these pores could perhaps cause a change to the chemicals.

The theory itself was perhaps overly complex, or perhaps it was naively oversimplified, but with her learning within the capabilities of a medical specialist and the understandings that brought toward the ways in which a normal human beings body systems functioned it was the best assumption that she was capable of making at the current time without further information that she did not currently have access to. Because of that she could only attempt to operate within the knowledge that she had.

The hypothesis put forward in the attempts performed here to manipulate the way in which her scent was interpreted was actually correct at least to a degree, as she had earlier managed to perform a change to her scent after a fashion which was actually extremely negative according to her enhanced sensory ability of scent, but it was an incomplete form of knowledge, in that she currently had a lacking amount of the certain control which would be required of the ability.

Despite that much negativity in the ability to change her scent, she continued with persistence and valiance to affect only the sort of changes which she found to be at the time desirable. Success would be a thing which would in fact be a difficult thing to accomplish with these efforts, but she believed that with a continual amount of practice and dedication within the capability to change various things about her body at will she could master this as well.

[The Bearer of Bad News]

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Still Schatzi Rutherford continued to practice within the ability to change the way in which she smelled at will. Having confirmed beyond any sort of doubt that she was absolutely capable of such a thing, she required the ability to excrete only exactly the scent that she wished at any given moment. Recollecting one of her favorite smells, that which was reminiscent of the spice cinnamon, she once more caused the rippling of her subcutaneous flesh.

The smell that was being emitted as the roiling ceased was not that of the spice cinnamon however. In point of fact it seemed that even with her improved sense of smell that Schatzi was incapable of properly identifying exactly what this peculiar scent was. It was not a variety of scent which would be found to most people as something which was unpleasant to be exposed to, but nor was it something which would have been particularly pleasant. It was on the whole a neutral scent, though still somehow highly unusual.

Since it was not the scent that she had been attempting to replicate, the changeling still considered that a scent such as this peculiarity would have to be marked as a failure of sorts, though it was perhaps not so horrific and even catastrophic of a failure as that disgusting scent which had been created during the events of her very earliest of attempts within the capability of the scent manipulations. That time had been a failure completely unadulterated, where this was merely an incomplete success of sorts.

Even so, it was not something which was discouraging to the female-identifying creature. The closer she came to something which could be considered a successful intentional manipulation of the scent of her body the more she was in fact spurred on harder to continue, because of the logical assumption that she would more quickly completely fulfill the thing that was her most current objective of that moment in time. Also she recognized that she had attention span difficulties, so that if she didn't finish something quickly she may not finish at all.

Such a thing was not unheard of from her, and she had abandoned projects in the past if she didn't see results within an amount of time that it would take for her to get bored with it, or for something entirely otherwise to catch her eye and distract her for a time. But for the time being she was absorbed in the discovery of her origins, and the abilities that the notes were revealing. In this case, the very ability that she was practicing within currently, which was to change her scent.

[The Bearer of Bad News]

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An improved degree of success was being made with the chemical manipulations of Schatzi's body, and already she was currently able to replicate a fair number of recognizable aromas with which to tempt and to tantalize. However, she had yet to master this tactic to such a degree as that she could simply decide upon a scent or combination of scents and make it so. No, each of these smells she had stumbled upon inadvertently over the duration of her training.

That was not to say that she could not return to those smells whenever she wished now, because she was very much now capable of doing such a thing, but it was an action born moreso from memory than it was from intellect or intuition toward new creations. With that being the case, it was still beneficial to her to be able to perform within so much of a capability for changing her scent, and in a way it could be considered a complete technique. But it could not be considered to be something which has been perfected, no.

In order to be considered as perfected she would need to fine tune her understandings of the way in which this scent changing capability was able to function within her body, to the point that she could determine to replicate a scent or even a combination of scents that she had not previously had as a result of her practices and complete it correctly within her first attempt at such a creation of scent. At only such a point would she be willing to claim completion. Unless she was distracted by something else.

Regardless, she could feel that moment inching closer instinctively, her chemical manufactory becoming increasingly devious as she invented new combinations to use in the search for perfect at-will emission of intended aromas. Why? Mostly just because it seemed like something that would prove to be exceedingly entertaining to be capable of toying around with in the future, to deceive and entice the individuals she chose to allure.

But she had become aware of a small issue that her training was creating, particularly with the sheer exertion of constantly transforming the interior of her body systems. She was beginning to excrete a greater amount of moisture compared to normal, too much in fact, especially around her hands for some unknown reason. It was really rather disgusting to her sensibilities, and was the precise impetus which would cause her to take a short break for the time being.

[The Bearer of Bad News]

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The inhuman creature which identified as Schatzi was approaching a level now within the capabilities of changing her scent such that she could quite nearly claim to have mastered the form of ability with which it was utilized. At will, she could synthesize aromas from memory, and not only her memory of forms previously utilized but also memory of experiences which had not yet been replicated. In this way one could say that she had already mastered the capabilities that held her attention at current, but that was not entirely the truth. She remained unsatisfied.

There was some measure of this capability which somehow she felt still perchance eluded her manipulations. She had now learned even to layer more than just a single aroma on top of others, synthesizing perfumes which were rich and deep in layers, though her favorites were simple three-level affairs. Because of that, it was most likely not anything which was related to such an ability that was to be the cause of the changeling's continual doubts within her ability.

So if it was not such a thing causing her consternation at this moment in time, then what else could it possibly be. She had previously affirmed to herself the capability of duplicating any scent that she was at the moment able to recall within all of her experiences, though that was but a portion of her excessively long life span due to the fact that she waltzed through mortal lifetimes without paying terribly much attention to them. So it was doubtful that this was to be the cause of such things either.

Perhaps it was her uncertainty that she would be able to create a brand new smell, which she had encountered only moments before? Sadly there was no available way to test that theory here in what could most easily be referred to as the back end of the middle of nowhere. Another option existed which was that she wasn't certain if she could replicate the natural musk of another person whom she had met either immediately or in the past. That bore merit of a kind in reality, but still lacked any sort of method with which to test it here.

And also there was the sweat that continuously formed on her palms. Actually, that was probably it. Such a flaw within her capabilities of changing her body was an irritant, and irritants were something which she did not deal with well at all. After wiping her hands off once more into the poor abused grasses which she had settled in for the time being, she noticed something new - the grasses now smelled similarly to how she did herself. Curious indeed. If she could control how and when such a transfer was applied, it could have amusing effects indeed.

[Ace Detective Nara]

look at that, I found this five and zero in my attic, might as well glue those together

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