#except for the main factory reset au funnily enough

[duckapus]

I said that I'd elaborate on Meggy only being human-ish rather than fully human and I meant it.

So thanks to Splatoon 3 we know what exactly happens to Inklings that get dried out, and they...very much Do Not turn human. So my idea is that when Ultra Instinct Shaggy flew in to save her at the last second before the island blew up, what he found was her shriveled, dehydrated form crushed under the rubble, not dead quite yet but she definitely wasn't going to survive even if he flew her straight to a hospital.

So instead, he used his insane powers to restore her himself! Unfortunately, he was technically less than a minute old and knew next to nothing about Inkling anatomy and biology so he ended up doing some Weird Shit in the process.

On the outside she looks mostly human apart from a few features; namely, her ears are still big and triangular (not that you can tell unless she takes off her headgear), her lips are still v-shaped, she still has a beak instead of teeth, she still doesn't have fingernails or toenails, her hair gets darker towards the bottom (this somehow persists even if it gets cut) and is thicker than normal human hair (though you can only really tell if you touch it), and she has a bunch of freckles spread under her eyes and across the bridge of her nose that loosely resemble her old eyemask.

The inside is where things get really interesting. She's got a skeleton now, but certain big parts of it are made of cartilage instead of bone. She still has a fully functional ink sac and three hearts like a normal Inkling, and has gained a few human-exclusive organs, but she's also got a gizzard now for some reason? Along with a few other organs that neither species should have but are there anyway, likely because Shaggy thought it would be cool. Also she has ink instead of blood, which isn't true for humans or inklings (at least in this continuity) and by all rights shouldn't work but it does anyway because Anime Magic.

In terms of how it's affected her abilities, since she still has her ink sac she obviously can still produce just as much ink as before (her weapons wouldn't work otherwise. The only reason Mario, Tari and Luigi's do is because their Ink Tanks have extra tech based on FLUDD installed (and in cases where they aren't wearing their tanks it can work if sufficiently funny because Meme Logic)), but her more human-like anatomy means she no longer has a Swim Form, and she's also no longer saturated enough with it for the microbes in unfiltered water to splat her. She's stronger than before thanks to the support of her new skeleton but also more prone to injury due to less squishiness.