… and HA. In particular, HA at what happened at the end of issue #7!
Spoilers behind the fold! And there will be likely spoilers in the comments on this post so PLEASE exercise caution before reading those!
So yeah. Shenshen had Leetah turn her into a human!
All signs point to her having been altered ONLY externally and not down to the genetic level–just because Shenshen wants to be able to freely move among the human population and deploy her midwifery skills to them. It’s a very interesting decision on her part, and Strongbow’s warning about how humans will react when they figure out Shenshen is outliving them all is highly interesting, too.
We knew it was possible for an elf to mimic human appearance, of course–we saw Winnowill do that a long time ago, when she shapeshifted herself into human form and pretended to be “Lady Venovel”. But that’s a healer doing it to herself, as opposed to a healer altering the form of another.
And it’s not quite the same thing either as Timmain shapechanging into wolf form–or Kimo, for that matter. In both those cases, this is still an elf altering his or her own form. Having enough power and control to impose a different shape on another is a whole other kettle of fish.
Our only historical precedent for this, for the longest time, was what Winnowill did to Tyldak, and the documented ability of healers to remove Wolfriders’ wolf blood as well. That’s manipulation on both the external level and the cellular as well. But only in the Final Quest storyline have we really seen more examples of Leetah and other healers having power enough to alter the shapes of others–such as the form given to Sunstream when he attends the birth of his daughter Korafay–and now, Leetah’s ability to give her sister a human form.
It makes sense. After all, Leetah’s healed humans by now and should have enough experience to understand how a human’s body is put together.
But I’m tellin’ ya–if the Two Moons population had known that was possible back in the day when the MUSH was still running, I daresay the players of Leetah and Winnowill and maybe Doreel or some of the Underworld healers would have been swamped with players trying to rope them into such plots. The wizard council would doubtless have had to set down rules about the circumstances under which that kind of shaping could occur, because otherwise, yeah. Swamped.
I’m rather giggling at the thought of how some of the players would have run with this plot bunny, though!
And I’m amused for even older reasons as well, because before I played on Two Moons, I was running an Elfquest RPG back in Kentucky. And one of our characters was a human boy who wanted to fit in better amongst the elves–so he got shapeshifted into elf form. And I seem to recall that in my capacity as GM, I specifically decreed the change was purely external, as well! Though at this point, I’m thinking it’s been clearly demonstrated that a suitably powerful healer could have gone down to the genetic level, too!
