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lmao, I forgot Chapman ended up on the aircraft carrier. Now I kinda want to see the series from the POV of a Fox Mulder style government agent trying to piece together why this seemingly unimportant Vice Principal keeps popping up in bizarre locations right before some kind of wild animal attack.
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Jul 22, 2022 03:57
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Just imagining
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Jul 22, 2022 13:01
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I think we finally found out what Jake's thing is
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Jul 22, 2022 13:41
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Zore posted:lmao, I forgot Chapman ended up on the aircraft carrier. Now I kinda want to see the series from the POV of a Fox Mulder style government agent trying to piece together why this seemingly unimportant Vice Principal keeps popping up in bizarre locations right before some kind of wild animal attack. I can't believe I forgot it too. It's enough to make you wonder what would it take for Chapman to snap and Dracon Visser 3 in the back. He'd probably go down too, but he might get a better execution than starvation. Strategic Tea posted:I think we finally found out what Jake's thing is I think it has been hinted that Jake has desperately been reading up on military biographies to get some sort of clue on how the big general is supposed to act.
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Jul 22, 2022 15:32
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Capfalcon posted:I can't believe I forgot it too. It's enough to make you wonder what would it take for Chapman to snap and Dracon Visser 3 in the back. He'd probably go down too, but he might get a better execution than starvation. My impression of Chapman's Yeerk is that it's one of those people who are blindly obedient and obsequious to anyone more powerful, and tyrannical to anyone with less power.
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Jul 22, 2022 16:29
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You know, in the early books it was pretty clear why Chapman was so omnipresent -- Applegate needed a character who the kids could recognize on sight as a Controller, so when they saw him in a situation they knew immediately that it was a Yeerk thing and not random happenstance. But I think she missed her chance to include a secondary villain to replace him once it became obvious that the series was going to be an ongoing thing. Come up with, like, the Yeerk "cleaner" whose job was specifically to deal with situations in which the Yeerks' cover was in danger of being blown. Play up the MIB tropes that were part and parcel of alien stories in the '90s -- Agent Jones, a nondescript person in a black suit and shades who has all the authorizations and clearances anyone could ask for, can countermand or commandeer any local authority with a word, and can make witnesses disappear without comment. Introduce that character as the villain-of-the-week in one of the early books -- somewhere in the teens, maybe, replace the Amazon or Jonathan Taylor Thomas or Area 51 book -- and then use them as the "oh no, such-and-such has shown up; now we know the Yeerks are in on this" signal going forward.
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Jul 22, 2022 17:43
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The other thing about Chapman is that not only do they recognize him, but he recognizes them, so if they ever break cover around him or their secret ever slips, they're doomed. Chapman is kind of like Tom in that way, just less omnipresent, and it makes sense that a lot of the time you saw two Yeerks together near the beginning of the series, it was Chapman and Tom.
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Jul 22, 2022 19:27
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I feel like it should really be Tobias' thing to know all about the carrier, since in the past he's been the nerdy/bookish one who came up with facts about dinosaurs and Marine One and Agincourt or whatever.
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Jul 22, 2022 23:41
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Chapter 11quote:We demorphed behind the industrial-size washing machines. I assume the Yeerk inside is for Captain Plummer. Chapter 12 quote:<Ax, we’re gonna try to bail, demorph, and get firepower before the captain’s infested!> Visser Two is certainly cocky.
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Jul 23, 2022 03:46
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Epicurius posted:Chapter 12 Man, I get Chapman's toadying to his direct superior who can cut his head off at any second, but who is actually a zealot for Visser Three? And when he's not around, even!
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Jul 23, 2022 06:30
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Capfalcon posted:Man, I get Chapman's toadying to his direct superior who can cut his head off at any second, but who is actually a zealot for Visser Three? And when he's not around, even! This has led many people to theorize that the current Visser Two is probably also very newly appointed to the job as well. It doesn't seem likely like Visser Two, someone who until about a week ago outranked Esplin-9466 would exactly be some weird sycophantic fanboy of a guy who had been their inferior for possibly years at this point. And moreover, why didn't they just Iget bumped up to the top job instead of Esplin? It's possible that Edriss going down took a bunch of Yeerks with her as collateral damage, the old* Visser Two among them, leaving the position free to for Esplin to stack the deck with an obsequious toady... No, put your hand down Chapman, not you. The other option of course is that V2 knows how to read the room like an open book and knows the best strategy for self-preservation now is to embed himself as deep into Visser One's Andalite colon as he can because he knows that motherfucker is Donald Trump level crazy and capricious and will start swinging blades if you dip below 99.99999999999% loyal to him. nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 06:55 on Jul 23, 2022 |
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Jul 23, 2022 06:53
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bravesword posted:I think she missed her chance to include a secondary villain to replace him once it became obvious that the series was going to be an ongoing thing. Come up with, like, the Yeerk "cleaner" whose job was specifically to deal with situations in which the Yeerks' cover was in danger of being blown. Play up the MIB tropes that were part and parcel of alien stories in the '90s -- Agent Jones, a nondescript person in a black suit and shades who has all the authorizations and clearances anyone could ask for, can countermand or commandeer any local authority with a word, and can make witnesses disappear without comment. Introduce that character as the villain-of-the-week in one of the early books -- somewhere in the teens, maybe, replace the Amazon or Jonathan Taylor Thomas or Area 51 book -- and then use them as the "oh no, such-and-such has shown up; now we know the Yeerks are in on this" signal going forward. Epicurius posted:The other thing about Chapman is that not only do they recognize him, but he recognizes them, so if they ever break cover around him or their secret ever slips, they're doomed. Chapman is kind of like Tom in that way, just less omnipresent, and it makes sense that a lot of the time you saw two Yeerks together near the beginning of the series, it was Chapman and Tom. I feel like they should have done this during the Aria book. Her being Tobias's "cousin" and Visser Three in morph meant she could have worked with a "detective" to find him, who's a Controller and just that kind of menacing agent-type they keep seeing show up for Big Deals. Plus it would have further traumatized Tobias to keep seeing him, and we know how much this series loves that.
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Jul 23, 2022 13:24
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Chapter 13quote:I ran full out, away from the storming sailors. Very 2000 view of China. I think nowadays, The US would probably consider China rivals. But yea, the plot to start WWIII would be bad for humanity, Not great for the Yeerks, but there are enough people that even if a few million die, they're still way ahead of the game. Chapter 14 quote:<We have to do something!> So that's good. So long as the real Carrington stays unconscious, Ax might be able to pull this off. Epicurius fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Jul 25, 2022 |
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Jul 24, 2022 03:10
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Still playing catch up with the thread. Christ, I did not remember EVERY BOOK starting with a full recap of the set up and each main character including physical description and personality overview. There's some merit to seeing each character's POV as they describe the others. It does lead to Jake and Rachel having extremely odd "I'd be into them, but they're my cousin" commentary though. Only on 12 now.
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Jul 24, 2022 16:34
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SonicRulez posted:Still playing catch up with the thread. Christ, I did not remember EVERY BOOK starting with a full recap of the set up and each main character including physical description and personality overview. There's some merit to seeing each character's POV as they describe the others. It does lead to Jake and Rachel having extremely odd "I'd be into them, but they're my cousin" commentary though. Only on 12 now. It was mainly a marketing convention at the time. Because kids could theoretically hop on to the series at any time, they needed a way to get them up to speed. So for returning readers, it gets annoying and repetitive, but for new readers who just started reading the series with the book where they go to Australia, engage in some racist stereotyping off aboriginals and then throw boomerangs at Visser Three, it was a godsend. Because the main way these books ended up in kids' hands when they were being published was through the Scholastic Book Club, a partnership between Scholastic and schools across the US and Canada where they sent a monthly flyer catalog to students with all sorts of books advertised in them so parents could fill it out and order like five books a month for their kids for like $30 or so. And the top headliners for it were always Goosebumps and Animorphs. So Applegate and Grant always had to keep that in mind when they were writing, especially because they always had to get one book out a month to keep up with the next Scholastic flyer that would come out. nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Jul 24, 2022 |
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Jul 24, 2022 19:35
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Yep. I read mine in the order in which they were available in my local library, so it was kinda random. The current book is actually the first book I read in English (and one of the only two I still own). Unfortunately the last book translated into my language was 20 so I was a bit lost jumping into it but kids don't care. The next one I read was #54 and I still loved it. I did read everything in order when I was in highschool or in the army. But by then I knew to skip Australia!
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Jul 24, 2022 21:10
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Chapter 15quote:“What the … ?” Sorry, about that. Only one chapter today. It's an odd number of chapters in the book, so while sometimes I just do that at the end, sometimes I go ahead of time. And it sounds like there's been enough of a revelation here we can just talk about this chapter, because Visser Two does like to monlogue. Tomorrow Belongs to Me is a song ending out the musical Cabaret. If you've never heard it, I've linked it below. It's actually a very sweet song if you manage to forget it's being sung by Nazis about the upcoming Nazi takeover of Germany.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv0jav4lNsk
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Jul 25, 2022 03:20
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Trident? Aren't they British?
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Jul 25, 2022 03:31
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Comrade Blyatlov posted:Trident? Aren't they British? Trident is the missile, used by the US Navy and Royal Navy. The actual sub would be an Ohio-class.
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Jul 25, 2022 03:58
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Trident is the missile, used by the US Navy and Royal Navy. The actual sub would be an Ohio-class. oh! Jake is a goon?
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Jul 25, 2022 04:47
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I don't see why they needed to fake an attack on the George Washington in the first place. If the Yeerks have an American nuclear sub crewed by Taxxons, why not just have them fire without going through doctoring up a justification? It's not like China wouldn't consider a nuke launched at Beijing by an American submarine an act of war and retaliate even if the Americans denied that they ordered it.
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Jul 25, 2022 05:38
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WrightOfWay posted:I don't see why they needed to fake an attack on the George Washington in the first place. If the Yeerks have an American nuclear sub crewed by Taxxons, why not just have them fire without going through doctoring up a justification? It's not like China wouldn't consider a nuke launched at Beijing by an American submarine an act of war and retaliate even if the Americans denied that they ordered it. I think the idea here was to layer a bunch of attacks so any of them failing still means they have a bunch of backups still going on. Plus it makes the war a lot murkier and more likely to draw in the rest of the world the more you have America and China convinced that they were attacked unprovoked. Plus I imagine at this point they're expecting the Andalite Bandits to foil at least part of their schemes 
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Jul 25, 2022 05:45
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Epicurius posted:Tomorrow Belongs to Me is a song ending out the musical Cabaret. If you've never heard it, I've linked it below. It's actually a very sweet song if you manage to forget it's being sung by Nazis about the upcoming Nazi takeover of Germany.. So you still think you can control them, Seerow?
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Jul 25, 2022 08:19
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Epicurius posted:Very 2000 view of China. I think nowadays, The US would probably consider China rivals. But yea, the plot to start WWIII would be bad for humanity, Not great for the Yeerks, but there are enough people that even if a few million die, they're still way ahead of the game. I remember reading this as an adult (because I never read it as a kid, Australia having been my last straw) and wondering how many hosts they really need for it to still be a windfall. Say, a billion? How many Hork-Bajir do they have - a few hundred thousand? Which leads to the darker consideration of: if the Yeerks had approached and convinced the leaders of the great powers that they could lay waste to the planet if they wanted, how quickly would those leaders have agreed to strike a bargain to hand over the population of, say, Africa? quote:“And how long before all nuclear powers are involved? Russia, France, Great Britain, Israel, India, Pakistan. Equal opportunity destruction. Tens of millions will die. Perhaps hundreds of millions. And the way will be prepared!” Here, though, merely tens of millions dying pretty optimistic from the Yeerks' point of view. In a full-blown global nuclear war I think you'd be down to the populations of southern Africa, the south Pacific, New Zealand, some of Australia, and your biggest population core would be left in South America. That feels like less than 1 billion and you're still going to struggle to infest many of them before they start dying off from the overnight evaporation of the global economy, never mind radiation sickness.
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Jul 25, 2022 10:40
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freebooter posted:I remember reading this as an adult (because I never read it as a kid, Australia having been my last straw) and wondering how many hosts they really need for it to still be a windfall. Say, a billion? How many Hork-Bajir do they have - a few hundred thousand? Something like that, I believe. And most of them born in captivity. freebooter posted:Here, though, merely tens of millions dying pretty optimistic from the Yeerks' point of view. It's also interesting that the authors list Israel among the nuclear powers, when to this day they refuse to acknowledge whether, or how many, nuclear weapons they might have.
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Jul 25, 2022 11:30
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freebooter posted:I remember reading this as an adult (because I never read it as a kid, Australia having been my last straw) and wondering how many hosts they really need for it to still be a windfall. Say, a billion? How many Hork-Bajir do they have - a few hundred thousand? In Visser, because of a misunderstanding, one of the characters originally thought that Earth's population was 6 million and still considered that a regular planetary population. I get the impression that even if there were a billion people left after this, earth would still be the most populated planet the Yeerks know of. Of the places we know, the Taxxons struggle for survival because of their hunger, there were never many Hork-Bajir, with the Quantum Virus killing most of them, and the Andallites abandoned cities for a more pastoral lifestyle and use family planning and birth control to keep their population down. Only the Yeeks and humans reproduce freely, without any concern for their population or environment. Epicurius fucked around with this message at 13:51 on Jul 25, 2022 |
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Jul 25, 2022 13:36
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So... Yeah, Visser Two clearly has had his promotion for all of a week given how he's basically experiencing religious ecstasy for the thought of being killed in the line of duty for Visser One. No way someone like that would get there on their own.
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Jul 25, 2022 13:59
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Chapter 16quote:<Let’s go! Up to the flight deck!> So, it's combat, which means, like usual, it's chaotic. But Ax has found Chapman. Chapter 17 quote:He was dressed as before, in the uniform of a navy officer. Hey, Chapman took Ax prisoner. This seems significant.
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Jul 26, 2022 02:31
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“No, my esteemed foe, I don’t fear death. You may kill me now, if it pleases you. The plan will unfold whether I live or die. What I fear is failure.” Have we seen any Yeerks with this attitude before? Did this guy get promoted solely for his very un-yeerk-ish sacrificial outlook?
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Jul 26, 2022 04:36
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Tree Bucket posted:“No, my esteemed foe, I don’t fear death. You may kill me now, if it pleases you. The plan will unfold whether I live or die. What I fear is failure.” Nope. Yeerks have been stated to tend to just shut down or surrender, as a cultural trait, when faced with impossible odds and unwinnable situations. This sort of suicidal fatalism looks like something new.
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Jul 26, 2022 05:43
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Fuschia tude posted:Nope. Yeerks have been stated to tend to just shut down or surrender, as a cultural trait, when faced with impossible odds and unwinnable situations. This sort of suicidal fatalism looks like something new. Or it's a Yeerk with a different perspective. As far as Visser Two is concerned, the plan is in motion and unstoppable. Maybe to him it's not an unwinnable situation, it's a victory that he already knew he might give his life for one way or the other. It's not fatalism if you think you've won; surrender would be aborting the plan. But also he's clearly not fully stable, so...
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Jul 26, 2022 14:58
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Sory, everyone. No chapters tonight.
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Jul 27, 2022 02:36
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Chapter 18quote:I ran across a lush field of grass, hooves pounding. Poor Captain Plummer, Also, great loyalty there to Team Yeerk you other two Controllers. Chapter 19 quote:Tragedy upon tragedy. I think Ax is pretty much near breaking right now.
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Jul 28, 2022 03:06
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Absolute mayhem. A bit unbelievable they're all surviving this. Also, morphing humans is (as expected) incredibly useful.
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Jul 28, 2022 11:51
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Yeah, they keep talking about how Andalites only use morphing for spying and it's becoming clear how powerful that is.
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Jul 28, 2022 12:43
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Capfalcon posted:Yeah, they keep talking about how Andalites only use morphing for spying and it's becoming clear how powerful that is. It already was with just animals, really, even as the Yeerks increasingly got wise to/paranoid of any animal ever, but yeah, blending in as other humans is a whole other tier of usefulness. Shame about all those pesky morals getting in the way til now. I wonder what past adventures, if any, would have been improved/gone better for the animorphs if they'd been more willing to stuff people in closets and take their places in a critical moment.
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Jul 28, 2022 13:58
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CidGregor posted:I wonder what past adventures, if any, would have been improved/gone better for the animorphs if they'd been more willing to stuff people in closets and take their places in a critical moment. Frankly, morphing would be a great gimmick in a Hitman style game. Find the right people with the proper level of access, acquire their dna/incapacitate, secure the body, and morph them, all without being seen.
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Jul 28, 2022 16:36
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CidGregor posted:I wonder what past adventures, if any, would have been improved/gone better for the animorphs if they'd been more willing to stuff people in closets and take their places in a critical moment. Off the top of my head, any time they're worried about going into the Yeerk Pool, they can just mug a known controller instead of all the terrible plans they have had so far. The Cow Book could have been done by getting a worker who can see things from a normal perspective. The multiple books where they have to ruin a famous controller's reputation are as simple as morphing them and going streaking or something. Turns out being a terrible person with no concern with right or wrong makes fighting wars way easier!
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Jul 28, 2022 17:26
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Still getting through the thread. I'm at the Andalite Chronicles now. It's the first book I'm confident I didn't read as a kid. It wasn't until Loren popped Visser Three with a pebble that I remembered these a children's books. Children's books about leaving a man behind on a dying planet and genocide.
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Jul 28, 2022 19:12
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Llab posted:Frankly, morphing would be a great gimmick in a Hitman style game. Find the right people with the proper level of access, acquire their dna/incapacitate, secure the body, and morph them, all without being seen. I may have written an interactive story about doing just that a few years back 
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Jul 28, 2022 19:24
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