Acquring and Morphing DNA: Rules and Guidelines
Marco’s Acquiring Ability (This one is not under lj-cut 'cuz rich text is made of fail)
Marco can only morph animals - he cannot use the DNA of plants and become one. Or rather, this option has never been explored in canon, so I will take this as an absolute inability on his part for the game’s sake.
He has to touch the animal in order to do so, as he needs its DNA. While technically he can use blood, other fluids and various other things to acquire the DNA, it has never been used in this fashion in canon except perhaps one botched attempt, so I will take this another absolute limited ability for game’s sake.
The DNA acquisition requires concentration on Marco’s part. Any creature being touched by Marco will become in a trance. Sentient beings might compare it to be doped up by morphine. This side-affect lasts from thirty seconds to a minute. On rare instances, the trance does not happen and creature in question still becomes alert and aware.
If Marco has severely wounded an animal and needs to acquire its DNA, he has to do it while it is alive.
As a rule imposed by the other Animorphs, Marco does not morph sentient creatures without their permission. Due to complications, this does not include chimpanzees or dolphins or gorillas. If unless these creatures are actually sentient and can make their own language and culture in other canons, please see the next paragraph.
Marco being Marco, he will acquire somebody’s DNA without their permission anyway if he feels he has no choice. Please contact me if Marco can to acquire your character’s DNA so I can have your permission to do so, even though there’s a possibility that in-game Marco has not ask for the character’s permission.
Marco’s Morphing Ability and Skills:
When in morph, Marco can communicate telepathically, which in canon is referred as “thought-speak.” The range of thought-speak varies - it depends on the distance and how much physical clutter there is. For example, thought-speak can be heard faintly over a mile or so in open air. However, if Marco is twenty feet underground, the thought speak can be of “hearing” range by every third word or so, like: {There’s - boulder - people are - not good - Stephen King’s gonna - this is insane!} In short, thought-speak can operate like radio. Thought-speak can also work as e-mail: it can be “sent” to everyone publically, or can be aimed to a certain individual or a group of individuals privately. No one else can hear Marco unless Marco wills it so. Unless your character has telepathic abilities their own and can communicate with their own mind, then Marco will not “hear” their thoughts.
In morph, he has the strengths and the weaknesses of the morph’s body. I take the research of Marco's morphs very seriously, and if there’s not enough data on a certain animal’s abilities or strengths, I will safely guess and go from the there, like his Tyrannosaur’s morph, for example. Since there’s so much debate whether the T-Rex is a hunter or a scavenger, or can run or can’t run, I will try to combine both arguments and present the morph as somewhat presentable. So I will portray the T-Rex as an ambush predator (like a jaguar) and a scavenger (like a vulture) and can run in high speeds in short bursts when it does hunt. I am not interested in debating the biology and the anatomy of dinosaurs or any other animal. I have done my research and I am working the best I can with it. If you like to give me more information on a certain animal, please do so, but I will not go in a debate if I am portraying the senses or the abilities of an animal right, let alone an animal that has been extinct for over forty-five million years ago! Dammit Jim I’m an artist, not a scientist!
If Marco acquires another creature that is not from his world, or not even remotely similar to Earth with the same Earth animals, please tell me what the animals’ abilities and instincts might be like. For example, let’s say he acquires the DNA of Akamaru from Naruto. Is his dog senses better than the average dog? How good is his sense of smell? His eyesight? How fast is he? What are the downfalls of being Akamaru? Again, I will need player’s permission to acquire that particular character’s DNA.
Because we are dealing with characters that are far greater powers than Marco can imagine from other humans (or human look-a-likes), if there’s a chance that when Marco acquire their DNA, he may or may not have their abilities. This is up to other players. However, certain rules must be in place in terms of what Marco can and can’t do. Any injuries that the character has acquired in the past will not transfer to Marco - DNA is not based in injuries, and vice versa. Any powers given to the characters because of their injuries, such as Clare’s arm replacement in Claymore or Kakashi’s sharigan in Naruto will not be transferable to Marco’s morph. If their powers are something is something that can be trained into, there’s the possibility of Marco learning that skill, as memories are not transferable in morphing. However that is up for the players to decide.
NOTE: if Marco acquires somebody/something born with a physical disability, then he will get that disability, whether or not that character's disability has disappeared somehow within the game.
Instincts. Every living thing has them, and it varies with each creature. For Marco’s “traditional” morphs, I will reference the books as it goes into great detail as to what animals’ instincts might be like. If Marco acquires something else in the game and it is not an “average” Earth animal, I will like to have information at least some idea what their instincts are like. It depends on the animal if Marco gets carried away with the morph’s instincts. For example, if he acquires a shrew morph, he’ll loose control and act like a shrew would be acting. If the morph is more like a domesticated dog, he’ll have less of a hard time controlling it, though he might feel the urge to give in and have fun. If you are confused and like more clarity, here’s an excerpt from one of the books, a Marco-narrated one at that:
The world, you see, is nothing but prey.
And I was nothing but hunger.
There was nothing else. No mother or father, no fear or joy, no worry.
Hunger. Prey. Hunger. Prey.
I turned away from the shore and swam out to sea. And then, I stopped.
The last vestiges of my human mind were swept aside. The shark sensed blood. Sharks had been swimming Earth's oceans for hundreds of millions of years already when the ancestors of Homo sapiens were still trying to figure out how to peel a banana. People will tell you, "Oh, you don't need to be afraid of sharks. They have more reason to fear humans than humans have to fear sharks."
True. Humans kill far more sharks than sharks kill humans. Will that fact make you feel any better if a shark chomps you in two at the waist?
Probably not.
Sharks are killing machines. Mostly they kill fish. In some parts of the world they kill seals. They kill dolphins. They kill whales, when they can manage it. And they kill humans. At least some species do: the great white, the tiger shark . . . and the hammerhead.
This was the killing machine I had become.
Utterly without fear. Utterly without emotion. A mind with no room for anything else but killing. There was nothing playful, like you'd find with a dolphin. Nothing in the shark that cared about family or children. No sense of belonging. Just a solitary creature of sharp, cutting triangles. A restless, ever-moving thing, ever questing after blood. A mind as cold, as sharp, as deadly as a polished-steel knife blade.
That was the mind that gathered my confused human consciousness up and swept it along in the endless search for something to kill and eat. The shark turned toward the scent of blood. My long tail pushed lazily at the water. My hammerhead worked like a diving plane to let me turn this way and that. My vision was surprisingly good. Almost as good as human vision. I could hear. And I could feel other senses that were unlike anything human. When fish passed close by, I felt a tingling from their electrical current. And at some deep, hard-to-grasp level, I realized I could sense the very magnetic field of planet Earth. I knew north and south without knowing the words.
But mostly, I could smell. I could smell the water as I sucked it in, relentlessly sampling. And right now, I could smell blood. I was aware of the others nearby. I knew they were sharks like me. But I didn't care. I was on the trail of blood. I followed the scent of the blood.
No more than a few drops of blood, a thin, wispy trail diluted in billions of gallons of surging seawater, but I smelled it. I followed the scent through the water. If the scent was stronger in my left nostril, I veered left. If it was stronger on my right, I veered right. It would lead me to prey. It would lead me to food. The blood trail had come from very close by! I could sense it, and a cold excitement seized me.
Blood! A wounded animal! Prey!
But as I turned and turned again, circling back toward more shallow water, I became frustrated. Where was it? Where was the bleeding creature? Where was my prey? The others circled nearby. One of them brushed against me, sandpaper on sandpaper. They were seeking it, too. The bleeding prey whose scent filled our heads. Where was it? The shark brain was confused, uncertain.
And in that moment of confusion and uncertainty, the steel mind of the shark left a slight crack. Enough of a crack. Enough for my human brain to call up the picture of a human hand, bleeding from a small cut.
My hand! My hand. The human named Marco. {Oh, my God!} I yelled in thought-speak. {That's my own blood!}
The others didn't care. They continued to turn in ever tighter circles, looking, searching, marauding for the source of the blood.
{Jake! Jake! Shake it off, man. The shark has you. Jake, come on, man. Get on top of it. Cassie! Rachel. Ax. Tobias. All of you. It's the shark instincts. Fight them. That was my blood.}
It took a few minutes before we were all back to being ourselves. Tobias dealt with it easiest. I guess that's not a surprise. He's a predator normally. Maybe the shark mind and the hawk mind aren't so different. Ax handled it well, too. Not that Andalites are sharklike. It was mostly that he'd morphed a shark already.
{Yikes,} Cassie said, laughing nervously. {Kind of single-minded, aren't they?}
{No one else bleed,} Rachel said. {l'll be hungry for hours.}
We were a little shaken up. We'd gotten cocky about being able to control animal morphs. But the shark was different. I think at some level, at the most basic survival level, that primitive shark brain was actually superior to our own human brain. It knew what it wanted. And there is a terrible strength in knowing what you want and having no doubts.
-Book 15, The Escape
While sentient creatures are less of a problem in terms of control, Marco will feel urges to whatever the individual is most likely do. If he morphs into Madara for instance, he’ll probably be compelled to do whatever Madara normally feels like doing - like fighting, doing speeches, being manipulative, fight some more, make more speeches, be more of a bastard, ect.
Marco can’t create chimeras with his morphing. For example, if he tries to morph something and he controls it to be half-poodle half-polar bear, it will be near impossible to manage, as the two animals bodies will make his movements clumsy and the two animal minds will be clashing with control, along with Marco’s mind as well. As he has something similar happen to him earlier in the books, he won’t be doing anything like this. Plus, controlling the morphing process is difficult as it takes extreme concentration. It takes someone like Cassie, who is naturally talented in controlling her morphing processes, to make the transition much more smoothly.
If Marco gets injured in his normal human body or in morph, then all he has to do is to morph/demorph and he will be fine. As a result, Marco can be hard to kill. The morphing process in general takes about a minute to take.
Marco can only be in morph for less than two hours. Any more than two hours, and he will be trapped in that morph forever.
And the most important thing to remember is that the more Marco uses the morph, the more experiences he gains from it and be able to push its limits and become creative with it. He's not just a kid who can turn into animals: he's a kid who can use his intelligence to do things with his morphs than normal creatures wouldn't do. For example, there had been instances when bird-formed Animorphs actually shot Dracon beams with their talons because they knew how the weapon functions. Possibilities abound with their morph.
Note: Marco in morph means that not only can he control the body in terms of movements and senses, but he can actually control the DNA itself. For example, if he morphs a bear, he has the potential to trigger certain things in the bear's body to make it ready for hibernation.