Scrapyard Station: Shapeshifters

Scrappers are shapeshifters in the most literal sense of the word. It’s like they’re inside an invisible container, and the container stretches, squashes, and deforms. The container can be incredibly detailed, but they can’t change color or texture, so they’re still obviously slime.

When conversing with non-Scrappers, it’s common to mimic their species, e.g. a Scrapper talking to a Tinker would take the shape of a Tinker. More specific details, like apparent gender, are a matter of preference.

Scrappers can’t change size or density just by shifting. An average-sized Scrapper makes for an average-sized Tinker, but a short Nomad and a miniature Builder. However, they can get a bit bigger with a high-calorie diet.

Scrappers can’t give themselves a sense of balance, so they don’t usually create separate legs when mimicking bipeds. They keep a blobby “base” and just shapeshift a torso.

Bored Scrappers have been known to “stir” themselves, circulating the slime around their form so what’s up goes down and what’s inside goes outside. This isn’t necessary or helpful, just a way of distracting yourself, like tapping your foot.

Winnowers can barely change from their standard blobby form, like making a mouth and vocal chords to speak, or making a crude limb to manipulate objects.

Tinkers just swap out robot limbs for different purposes. Naturally, internal augmentations are a lot trickier to change.

Guardians can fool the universe to a remarkable degree, turning into anything semi-organic within a very wide range of sizes and weights. They can be amphibious, they can filter poisonous gases, they can give themselves new senses . . . Other than their mental block against perfectly imitating other species, their imagination is the only limit.

A Guardian’s injuries tend to persist in some way, but the precise nature of the injury and how repairable it is can change after a shift.

In theory, a Guardian could shapeshift around you, sheltering you inside itself.

If you don’t see a Guardian change, you might not recognize it until it does or says something identifying, at which point you’ll suddenly snap into remembering its current form as the one it always had. In other words: “A Guardian?” *Puts on hat* “Per’ri the Guardian?”

Builders don’t shapeshift, but when they roll up in a ball, they can make you wonder where all that belly fat suddenly went.

Stewards have a sudden and massive change in the fossil record, as if they suddenly all shapeshifted from quadrupedal to centaurean one day. They have no shapeshifting abilities now, however.

Parasites can shift your shape. They need some amount of biomass for big changes, but not as much as it should logically take. And they can do stuff that by all rights should be impossible, like making flying creatures that should be too heavy to get off the ground, or making living spaceships that can travel for light-years without food.

If it seems like Scrappers get the short end of the stick here, consider that they have no supernatural abilities at all. Scrappers’ natural shifting is a wonder of evolution, while Guardians’ supernatural shifting is a wonder of the Engineers’ supernatural research and genetic engineering.

Which fiction is this?

There’s a group of visually distinctive people who have historically been stigmatized and called “demons.”

There are also actual demons, but they’re bodiless entities that mess with your mind, not people you can find walking around.

I’ve seen this twice: in Arknights, and in a Christian romance visual novel.

I'm playing Sanabi

I swear, if it turns out Angsty McManpain's memories of his saccharine perfect murdered daughter are all fake and were made to manipulate him into this mission, I'll be even madder at the writers for making the flashback scenes even more pointless.