#shoggirl

[twitchesandstitches]

COMMANDER YATRUIGA -SHOGGOTH MONSTER GIRL WANNABE GENERAL

Basic Concept: World conquering shoggoth monster girl down on her luck and Doing Her Best to be a villain but just terrible at it.

Appearance: Imagine a very wide and strongfat humanoid woman, at least from the waist up. Get that broad image in mind, and add a few additional features: a variable number of arms (at least two, often six or more) that usually comprise tentacles, with optional crab claws or grabby bits. From the waist down, things get more interesting, dividing into a large cluster of enormous muscular tentacles crowned by a massive butt, each tentacle as thick around as her entire body and longer than she is tall. This is the default shape of Yatruiga, the shoggoth girl.

Normal shoggoth girls generally have amorphous flesh, but she takes it to an extreme, apparently made of jelly or a thicc ooze, so fluid that she oscillates and is subject to goo physics; it has some of a latex-ish look, colored a pale cream with veins of blue. This is mirrored in her plump face, and her eyes, which are usually the same blue, as are her very big lips. She doesn’t have hair, but she does have two thick bundles of tentacles that look like hair.

Technically she has at least three eyes at any given time, but she mainly has a large central eye, ringed by two smaller ones that sort of look like eyebrows, and the impression is of a cyclops. She often grows a set of short and spiky gills, but her face is otherwise featureless.

As a shoggoth girl, she can assume whatever body configuration she wants, but rarely deviates from this form; she usually increases her number of arms for an advantage, or make hands if she needs fingers. She can alter her body shape, like becoming incredibly muscular for a powerful attack, or immensely round to absorb an attack. She often adopts crustacean traits into herself, growing heavy exoskeleton, pincy claws, or shaping her tentacles into crab legs. She sometimes does this just for a bit of rigidity and to hold her body together, too. This form is astonishingly flexible, and more than a little stretchy. You don’t impact her or cut her, you just sink in.

She’s not precisely fat but she looks like it, and is very solid too, tending towards a very large gut and imposingly big breasts larger than her upper torso, and even wider lower hips. Her tentacles - and matching mega-scale butt - are incredibly large and somewhat longer than normal for her people, but her liquid form body is highly unusual. This is very hard to maintain and she is smug about her skill in maintaining her body like that permanently, and other shoggirls think this means that she is mentally fluid and capricious.

Her exact size varies, and she is not exclusive to any particular AU. In ones where human-scale is the normal, she’s about twice human size, 11 feet or so. In ones where giants are more common, she’s about seventy feet at minimum, though she can get bigger.

Backstory: Yatruiga’s people, the immortal and incredibly ancient people generally called shoggoth girls, have long cultivated a reputation as being elegant and cultured beings of great refinement, on the rare occasions they feel up to venturing out of their enclaves or form beneath the waves to bother with the rest of the multiverse. It is rare indeed for a shoggoth girl to deliberately seek out company outside of the great shoals of their hidden homeworlds and the private universes folded away from the rest of the planes. But it is even rarer for one to seek conquest and martial glory.

Yatruiga is such a shoggoth girl, hailing from a world that had contact with the shorter lived species prior to the multiversal cataclysm. That is to say, they opened their minds to mortals while remaining obscured to them, examining their cultures and media and written accounts, filing it away for study and reflection. Yatruiga examined these with great fascination, growing to admire the idea of change measured in mere decades, rather than the millenia her passive kind were suited to. She longed for the notion of suddenness, of quickness.

And in the wake of the cataclysm, in the rise of warlords and demagogue, she perceived the value in warfare. Not as a resolution, but as a means to an end. Finding more relevance in mortal customs than the slow pace of the shoggoth, she found that she wanted glory.

Since the cataclysm’s end, she has been patiently learning the skills of conquest, leaving her isolated worlds behind and shunning contact with her people, bearing their advanced technology (now overwhelmingly dangerous in contrast to the ruins elsewhere) and potent psionic abilities and magical theory, and has set forth to gather minions, forge mighty weapons, and conquer as much of the multiverse as she can hold.

In her heart, she dreams that all the multiverse will know her name.

Personality: She presents the image of being bombastic and a hammy, dramatic figure, prone to grand gestures and who wants only the most impressive of things to her name, making every single action or even her form a performative gesture. She speaks louder than most people yell, she gesticulates almost continually, and she takes advantage of her shapeshifting so that she is in an almost constant state of flux; the effect is, by shoggoth standards, of outrageous pomposity, and it is very deliberate.

And it is just that: a persona. She has studied many famous warlords, generals and battle-hardened champions across history and has tried to emulate all their various personalities into a single mask to put on, believing that this is the appropriate way for her to act with her ambitions of warrior accomplishment.

When she isn’t acting like that, though, she’s very low key and even surly, filtered through the mannerisms of a typical valley girl personality. Reluctant to speak more than she has to, she comes off as very terse. She might have a lot to say, but she will only speak in brief, clipped words, saying what she must and trickling it out in a laconic tone littered with easy-going terms.

Ultimately she is acting out a role, without really getting fully into it and still trying to figure it out; she worries that she has the tone down, but hasn’t understood the essence of it yet. This sense of ‘not quite doing it right’ pervades her entire outlook, making her nervous around mortals, and she is not used to that feeling, so it makes her angry and irritable.

However this is hard for mortals to take note of; as a species, shoggoth handle everything in extremely long-term progression, so while by her own standards she is shockingly impulsive and even disturbingly mercurial in how quickly her mind shifts, Yatruiga’s melancholy phases seem more to mortals that her bombastic personality regularly becomes grim and dour as the seasons turn, and remains like that for some time. To her, she slides smoothly into her role, but to mortals she comes off as gradually progressing from one extreme to the other.

She’s not an easy person to like. Whether she is grumpy or dramatic, she has trouble relating to mortals as people rather than brief things, finding them not so much interesting as their ideas, perhaps viewing them as mere hosts for fascinating notions; thus she often treats them as tools for her use, and annoying flies overtaken with their own importance otherwise. She’s not cruel, but her callousness and disinterest in caring about people in general makes her come off that way. She doesn’t enjoy suffering, she just doesn’t care about it much; she might try to swallow someone whole and simply not consider digestion as an unpleasant doom.

She’s also ludicrously overconfident, and simply will not learn from her mistakes, and her military career is full of constant defeats, setbacks and losses from her absolute refusal to accept bad odds. As she can regenerate from almost any wound, she tends to forget that her weapons and armies are not so strong as she is, and heedlessly charges into battle without much regard for tactics or common sense.

Many of her armies have been wiped out by her own overconfidence, or else aged past the point of service simply because she forgot that mortals don’t treat a few hundred years as a brief rest time. That said, she is a genuinely dangerous warrior and very hard to even slow down, but her armies regularly desert her. She’s made up for this by making herself into a broodmother and breeding a massive army of barely intelligent monsters little brighter than zombies, but she craves genuine loyalty, and doesn’t understand why no one really respects her that much.

As a broodmother, she almost constantly pregnant, periodically giving birth to thousands of bestial soldiers for her armies that grow to full size in a matter of weeks, and she has little attachment to them, viewing them not as children but in the same way as she regards individual tentacles. While she can reproduce parthenogenetically, she prefers to harvest genetic material from suitors (be they biological compatible for babymaking or not), and it doesn’t help that she gets crushes on those she has rivalries with. Her shapeshifting powers let her mate with any living being, and she’s become somewhat addicted to this in recent ages.

She does have some slight yandere tendencies; if she gets dedicated enough to a specific rival, she can grow more obsessed with them and single-minded about constantly breeding with them and milking them for every last drop of extra soldiers from them… and eventually become fanatical about consuming them and beating them once and for all. As a result, her getting attached can be a very bad idea, at least in a romantic context.

Species: Shoggoth Girl, a species of amorphous primordial masses of shapeshifting flesh, capable of assuming whatever form they please. She’s very atypical for her people in living ‘in the moment’ and leaving the homeworlds, and even more unusual for her love of violence and martial concerns.

Fandom: Mostly an original creation, though her people are cute monster girls versions of the shoggoth from the Lovecraft Mythos (with a touch of space elf and precursor archetypes), and draw upon the aboleths from Dungeons And Dragons.

Abilities: She is extremely skilled in most in-universe modern forms of warfare, having been doing it for an extremely long time. Practice alone has taught her much, and she is extremely good at fighting in a wide variety of ways, from firearms to melee weapons, and has come to specialize in shapeshifting in combat to maximize them, such as slithering out of holds or making many limbs to attack directly.

Her liquidform body offers her many advantages; among other things, she is incredibly hard to hurt directly, since most attacks will just sink into her body; exceptional magic or specialized weapons are required to actually pierce her body or leave more than temporary holes, though heat does it consistently and she is incredibly vulnerable to biological weaponry. She is extremely flexible, even by shoggirl standards; she can force her way down someone’s throat, bend herself any which way, stretch her body like living gum, and force her way through any gap, given enough time.

By altering the chemicals that make up her body, she can become specularily acidic, dissolving most materials she’s in contact with; by forcing someone into her body (by swallowing them whole, forcing them into her or flowing around them) she can digest them and absorb their biomass directly, and do this to most substances too. She can even apply this to attacks, by making a blow with a limb briefly made of super acidic flesh, though this is draining to do repeatedly.

Her favorite ability is to shapeshift. AS a shoggirl, her amorphous body can assume any transformation she can imagine (though she can’t change her apparent nature, such as take on human appearance), diverting biomass to grow more limbs, reshape any part of her body or make them as big or restructure them, or even grow larger or smaller. She is incredibly creative with this power, manifesting extra limbs just to do a quadruple sword swing, produce a dozen hands on arm just to slap someone repeatedly, swell a tentacle into a barrier in front of her, or produce extra organs to survive different environments like gills.

She seems to favor altering her stomach in odd ways, such as splitting it apart into a belly to swallow enemies whole and then launch them like ammunition, make it a living shield, or store excess biomass in there so it swells to immobilizing proportions. If she is incubating young, she doesn’t grow particularly larger, through her transparent body might make them visible, which can be very disturbing; she can make herself more opaque, if asked.

Her body is also immortal, after a fashion. She does not age, and will regenerate almost any non-magical wound, and even those will heal with time and biomass, and since it is hard to harm her in the first place, she comes across as very tough. Even the complete digestion of her body is only a hindrance; if a single part of her remains, it will regrow into her again, still stubbornly refusing to admit defeat.

Another aspect of her fluid body is that she can gestate young in localized mini-wombs pretty much wherever she wants, though she usually keeps them in her belly to make herself look even bigger and cooler. She can do this parthenogenetically, making strange crab-monster minions that resemble her, but she has grown fond of harvesting genetic material from others through sexual means, or digesting them if she feels like it, adding those genetics to her creations and making stronger armies.

These powers do have a big drawback; her fluidity is the biggest one. She is very vulnerable to being, say, slurped up like any other liquid. Stick a straw in her and suck hard, and she will be drawn into it helplessly despite weighing several dozen tons. She has been defeated many ways in this fashion, and has never learned from it. Her great resilience gives her a false sense of invulnerability, and she heedlessly rushes into situations even when its a blatantly terrible idea.

Her broodmother mass breeding has the big drawback of requiring food for those thousands of offspring; she must constantly devour enormous quantities of food, almost every single hour, in addition to the massive amounts of food she needs to maintain her biomass. As a result she usually must hold off on replenishing her armies, at least until she has enough resources to do so. In theory, if she actually did conquer enough territory, she might end up eating every last drop of organic material or depopulating entire planets - namely, the populations she just conquered - solely to maintain her status quo, and she might not even realize this until after the fact.

She is also apparently incredibly delicious as a minor side effect of her basic chemical makeup, and considers this just another point in her favor. Making her enemies eager to swallow her up hasn’t yet occurred to her to be a bad idea.

Height: Highly variable. She can be as big or small as she wants, but she needs actual biomass to fill out to that point; she’s rather vain and refuses to be too skinny, or at least not look properly bulky. She likes to be on the bigger side on things, to the point that it is ridiculously impractical, such as growing to full size on her flagship and immediately breaking it into pieces.

Relationships: She doesn’t have any canon relationships as such; her tendency to destroy her own armies through mismanagement, obliviousness to their mortality, accidentally engulfing and then digesting them, or simply losing their loyalty through more mundane events, has left her with an inability to hold onto minions for very long. Stil, she always gets more, even if its not clear how she does it.

The minions she mass produces are more loyal, and really have no choice. They were born to obey her and know nothing but following her orders. They’re just not very good at it and unimaginative. She tends to order them to their doom, and she’s not very strategically minded either.

She’s not unfriendly though, or totally unapproachable; come to her pretending to be a servant or at least willing to play a submissive role and she will gladly take you on and she can have a aristocratic sense of duty to her subordinates, if she remembers that they have their own goals. One-on-one, she has the potential to be a good friend, if only she can be bothered to remember things, and learn some humility.

Those who have bested and digested her in the past, she tends to see as rivals and constantly seek them out, always striving to beat them. This even applies if thy died a long time ago, and she pursues their descendants, sometimes under the impression that they are that ancestor.

Pred Level: She thinks she is an alpha predator that flawlessly devours all in her path as surely as she wins campaigns, and she really does try to do this; she does digest whatever she possibly can, rather like an acidic slime monster, just to maintain her biomass levels and be healthy. However in practice she’s not very good at it, most of her attempted prey fighting free of her or actually washing out of her when she forgets to solidify herself. At best, she’s a low-tier with very high potential.

However, her sexual appetite can very easily translate into genuine hunger if she gets attached and her rivalry hits a high pitch, her yandere potential going into overdrive. While she hasn’t had much opportunity to do this yet, it might happen.

Prey Level: Extremely high, though she won’t admit it. She’s constantly getting drunk by enemies, indifferent monsters, ship machines she got stuck in, her own soldiers sleepwalking, kisses that get too intense… it just goes on. Due to the messy nature of her body, at least one droplet of her always falls free and she regrows from it, dazed and unsure of what just happened. Despite her sheer size, it is strangely small for even extremely small beings to swallow her. Even if she’s a 100 ft tall giantess, a regular human girl can swallow her in one drink, and her body material is easily digested.

MILF levels: As she is right now, N/A. Callous, oblivious to anyone’s interests except her own, she’s barely a team player, let alone a matriarch. While she is a powerful mass-producer of young, she doesn’t view them as children but extensions of herself, and she might not even be wrong there, and it's unclear if she even can produce intelligent young, at least without mods. She does have the right look, though, and it's unclear what the MILF fleet’s patented mega-fertility and empathy enhancers might do to her.

Overall Themes: Generally a light-hearted antagonist that just won’t go away, and a recurring threat that isn’t that dangerous despite being quite powerful. Mainly themed around being vore prey, but as a component to adventure and battles rather than a focus detail. She’s also a giantess and at least a huge BBW, with extra tentacles and plush-ness. Her habit of constantly seeking out ‘genetic material’ from interesting suitors makes for some potential sexual vibes. Plus, she’s a cute monster gal!

[twitchesandstitches]

Lilisheb the Shoggirl

Basic Concept: A nice and sweet girl who happens to be a gigantic shoggoth-like creature; her alien appearance is comedically at odds with the unusual situations she finds herself in. And it’s funny for a Lovecraftian entity to be a bit of a wallflower!

Appearance: A massive lime-green woman with a vaguely humanoid body, her body composed of a constantly shifting amorphous mass; new features continually drift in and out of being, additional limbs are common. Overall she has a fairly solid, thick build, but she’s just slim enough to qualify as curvy instead. She’s not usually super busty by the standards of my characters, but she can be! Black veins streak across her body, especially wherever she is about to change form. All her body is extremely soft, but not to the point of being liquid. She’s still solid, just… extremely wobbly. She’s got a lot of subtle details of marine life in general: gills, the sheen of scales, and so on, but she appears to base her form specifically on turtles and octopi in general. She likes those.

Her face is mostly featureless; huge, plump lips, several sets of eyes in fairly random places, and a slight swell where humans would have a nose. She does have several thick tentacles where humans would have hair.

Below the waist, her body is a mass of tentacles, notably thicker than her upper body; she can grow any number of these, and her arms are a similar part of tentacles. She had pseudopods instead of fingers, with very dextrous cillae; she can grow fingers, but prefers not to. She has a very plump and shelf-tier backside, and takes some effort to keep it all big and round.

Due to her shapeshifting abilities, she can take on pretty much any shape she wants, though she cannot alter her species; she is obviously a shoggoth girl, in any form. She generally prefers not to deviate from this base form too much, but doesn’t mind adding extra features such as additional eyes, breasts (for multi boob elements), or limbs.

Backstory: She is OLD. Like, super old, really old. She was old long before humanity ever made their first tentative steps into space, and she may well have been alive since before our most distant ancestors had even begun to walk upright on the plains of Central Africa. Consequently, not a whole lot about her is clear, as her vast age leaves her earlier times obscured by the fog of ages, and she would indeed like to know more of what she has forgotten over the years. It is clear, though, that she is a fairly ordinary woman of possibly the eldest known species in the multiverse. She’s lived through at least four different collapses (societal, galactic and even truly cosmic levels) and in conjunction with the constant disasters she sees on an almost daily basis, she’s become something of a hyper anxious nervous wreck.

She is a member of her species commonly referred to as a brood queen; she reproduces asexually, gestating and producing hundreds of offspring that she can then implant in physically receptive mortals - and in turn give her offspring some of their traits and gradually help her own people adapt to changing circumstances - and her relationships with mortals can cause her to gestate entire new species from them. AS a consequence she’s always been rather sheltered and tends to be very codependent on those around her for emotional support.

In fairly recent years, she has done her best to assume ordinary jobs free from stress and Adventure. She does well as an archaeologist, not so much seeing it as uncovering mysteries as remembering things that modern folk have forgotten or laid aside, but unfortunately that does tend to involve a lot of adventure. Invariably, whether she is a cleaner or manager or professor of magic, she winds up entangled in stressful situations.

Personality: Most people, blessed with powers that make humans look like wimps and a natural form of immortality - or something close to it - would probably be a bit arrogant if they spend all their time around those doomed to die by the advance of time. Lilisheb is not one of those people; fundamentally sweet, kind-hearted and as inclined to nastiness as a lump of jelly, she is deeply loving and is a stable center despite being a primordial mass of shapeshifting immortal flesh.

She’s very anxious in pretty much any high-octane situation or what takes her out of a comfort zone… which is bad for her since most of the events I write her into are full of ADVENTURE. This all despite her being borderline indestructible. She does her best to stay calm, which usually lasts for all of a few seconds.

Outside of constantly panicking when villains attack, giant monsters start fighting or she gets pulled into a treasure hunt as a meat shield, she’s a friendly and kind entity, doing her best to put others at ease. She is very affectionate, and doesn’t have much interest in social norms. She shows her love the ways that feel right to her, even if this means sucking you right into her with an overly affectionate hug! Her basis deamonir is like a combo of bubbly and sedate, easygoing but very cheerful about it. Because her people tend to take a very long response to anything, she comes off as obnoxiously airheaded to her people. She does her duties calmly and without emotion, and often serves as a living couch to her smaller friends..

Species: Her people are commonly referred to as shoggoths, but their own word for themselves - roughly translated into one human language - can be rendered as ‘eldlimi’, or eldlimus in singular. They are unbelievably old, and hold a competitive place for ‘oldest beings in the known multiverse’ alongside the Transformers of Cybertron, the giants of the elemental planes, and various precursor societies. They have little common appearance, generally manifesting as a mass of amorphous flesh that is almost liquid in its flowy-ness. They can learn to assume whatever form suits them, though they are often inclined to use certain morphs as a default. Tentacles, multiple eyes, and aquatic traits dominate their instinctive forms, suggesting that their true origin is deep sea.

Certainly the eldlimi are very, very old and established, having stood as masters of the cosmos time and time again. They hold a position for establishing cosmic councils where all civilizations can meet together and peacefully negotiate for the future, and did so shortly after recovering from their most recent collapse. Due to their age, they tend to not take ordinary mortals too seriously, but at worst they tend to infantilizing others, rather than cruelty or oppression.

Fandom: Original. While heavily influenced by shoggoths from Lovecraft’s mythos, she bears little resemblance to either them or their outlook in a practical sense. She’s more or less her own thing.

Abilities: As typical with her people, she is a shapeshifter and can remold her amorphous body into nearly any shape. She can manifest a seemingly limitless number of limbs, eyes or even produces mouths or relevant organs from her body. (Multiple breasts, mouths of any shape or more delicate, unusual transformations are well within her power.) On the same note, she can alter her body to produce certain liquids or chemicals as she sees fit, assuming she knows what they are made of and the details of their production. She could make herself lactate enormous amounts of super-nutritious milk, for instance, but not super-flammable organic gasoline unless she worked out its chemical composition first.

She can grow smaller or larger, with no real limitation besides the mass she has available to work with, though she naturally gravitate towards larger, squishier forms. She can produce as many eyes or limbs as she requires, but leans towards tentacles rather than hands or feet. While she can force her insides into a rigid framework like a skeleton or even an exoskeleton for armor, she finds this deeply uncomfortable and prefers not to. She also cannot change her body’s consistency from its natural spongey nature, and thus she cannot disguise herself as a different species.

Her body’s amorphous nature grants her some other advantages. She can extend her jaws and swallow anything whole no matter the size, as long as she can wrap around it, and make her digestive acids extremely strong; she could even shift them around into her egg chambers, flushing them with regenerative liquids as an unbirthing method. She can push herself through most gaps and flow out like living water, and she is absurdly flexible thanks to her lack of an internal skeleton. Many attacks will simply pass through her if she remembers to decrease her solidity, and those that do hit her will likely be regenerated very quickly by her immortal flesh.

On a more prosaic note, while she claims to have no useful skills, her sheer age means she has picked up an extremely wide variety of skill sets. She has likely done every single conceivable non-violent career in existence, from plumber to manager to economics expert to caregiver… it goes on indefinitely, even if she can’t remember it or if they were so specific to a certain time’s technologies and social norms that they no longer have applicability. This gives her an enormous range in practical abilities, and incidentally makes her a fantastic teacher.

Height: Varies enormously; since she is a shapeshifter, she can be virtually any possible height if she has the mass to do it. She can’t just grow to whatever height she wants, as if she doesn’t have enough mass, she won’t be able to even stand up under her own power. She typically stabilized at around twelve feet or so, barring exceptionally large meals or unusual magical circumstances.

Relationships: She’s a friendly, sweet and gentle person somewhat prone to developing infatuations with people she has just met, so she has a LOT of friends and casual lovers, though it can be very hard to understand exactly what’s going on in her head. She is by far the single oldest of my OCs, even older than the likes of eons-ancient Jord, and tends to drift into the role of a den mother among her friends for that reason. She doesn’t have any established relationships as of this post, but some possibilities:

Sekhma - she thinks Miss Dionsi is cool, but way too serious! Relax a bit, no need to go all evangelical and stuff…. She may be one of Sekhma’s customers, seeking help for her chronic anxiety problems.

Pavumi - She has NO idea what Pavumi honestly is and that deeply worries her. She may be akin to her own people… or to their makers. This worries Lilisheb a lot, even though Miss Ekidna is a really nice lady!

Hivluk - what a handsome young man! She adores him, he’s just so sweet! For his part, he’s fine with her advances, as she is not even slightly scary.

Toast - she’s a xenophile sweetheart who wants everyone to be happy; he’s a loopy killing machine who wants to kill all humanity for what are probably imagined slights. They don’t get along at all for those reasons, but would probably be decent friends if that wasn’t an issue.

Odina: Besties!!! Both of them hate adventure, and would rather stay home and enjoy mundane, slice of life things. When together, Odina tends to be the more practical and sensible between the two, and gets sandwiched into her body a lot.

Pred Level: Moderate predator, with some prey levels. She is not primarily a predator-type, finding it horrifyingly cruel to swallow friends whole and hurt them no matter how hungry you are. Against threats, ordinary animals or genuine monsters, though, she has little problem simply swallowing them whole with as little interest as if she had finished off a fast food plate. It’s not her first course of action, though, and she is very reluctant to do this.

Prey Level: She’s likely vulnerable to more serious predatory specialists, due to her lack of combat skills and general timidity. Her prey levels are fairly high, owing to both the shape of her body and her trusting, timid personality. However, because of her regenerating flesh, its pretty much impossible to kill her through digestion alone; even one speck outside that gut will regenerate back to the true Lilisheb!

Relevant Kink Material: Xeno stuff in general; her shapeshifting powers offer many possibilities for Big Sexy Monster Girls. Her vast size, kindly demeanor and romantic inclinations are great sweetness material.

[twitchesandstitches]

CATHIGULA - THE UNIVERSAL BEASTFOLK

An attempt to make some kind of universal species to accommodate any anthropomorphic animal/furry OC or character that fits that motif, as well as any fandom with characters that might also suit the motif, such as Sonic the Hedgehog’s Mobians. If it’s an animal person, they can be here!

A huge and massively diverse race of humanoids, possibly the most common species in the entire multiverse, the Cathigula are not the only kind of beings to be called ‘beastfolk’, but they are certainly among the most famous. Fitting into everywhere, seemingly anywhere you look, these friendly folks are equally happy being at your side or at your wedding, and they don’t generally mind either.

They have an interesting quirk as a species; rather than being entire sub-species that resemble or descend from terrestrial animals, they become those species while fundamentally being the same kind of beings as their brothers and sisters. As they mature as children, they adopt the forms of animals they spiritually resonate with, transforming into beings like them as they discover themselves.

These beings are quite old, though have fared as badly as any other species in the multiverse; it is believed they might be one of the oldest known species, dating back to the ancient times of even the shoggirls and other primordial creations, though they themselves disagree to whether they evolved naturally, are some kind of apotheosis of all life that exist beyond form that any race may eventually grow into (And thus, there have been many of their kind in countless variations), or were created by some magical force. Some even believe that they were once entities of raw magic, who assumed forms inspired by animals and grew so complex they became truly alive and mortal.

These might also all be true, with the modern Cathigula being a composite of many different beings that all interbred and produced the modern people as they are today. Certainly, they tend to be magically powerful, very easily altered by mods and magic, and have the unusual ability to interbreed with virtually any species.

Physically, they are almost always humanoids (with others of different body types, but seemingly modeled after specific alien races that live near them), but their appearances are clearly derived from the animals of all different worlds. Each individual, as they grow up, manifests the appearance of a different animal, altering to more closely resemble them. Birds, reptiles, insects; all can manifest among these beings.

This is not genetic; any cathigula can become any potential animal, though some lines tend to run in families with similar personalities or outlooks. These can be any species imaginable; from the karkliosaurs of Tuchanka, the turbo-foxes of Cybertron, or the many kinds of animals from Earth, any individual can appear to be any one of these, with a few exceptions. Most of them tend to be animals that have some kind of resonance in sapient culture; while they can resemble animals that are obscure or unrespected, it's quite rare. Even extinct animals can manifest among them, though it’s uncommon. Mythological animals are not especially rare, like dragons or phoenixes, though it is usually taken as a sign of arrogance or self-importance.

They are not born as these animals, but as they mature, they gradually develop a sense of kinship for these creatures and their bodies shift, growing to match this animal. This process is of enormous cultural importance to them, and they don’t even need to know the animal in question; many of them take on the form of an unfamiliar creature, and will go on a journey to see one in person to learn about it. This is apparently a sign of their character and personality, and learning about this animal will help them understand themselves.

Prior to this change, a cathigul appears to be a mixture of the animal types of its parents. A fox and a rabbit may make a fluffy and small child with a big tail, and a whale and housecat might produce a very large and plump spherical child with thick fur. As they grow up, they slowly shift; fur falls away to reveal scales and/or feathers, chitin forms where there used to be moist flesh, or they even spin a cocoon with sudden spinnerets.

One may be a bird, another a mouse, and a third a tyrannosaur… and they may all be siblings. Again, while certain animal lineages run in families, this is not a rule and they can look very different from one another, even those of the same animal type. This is even more pronounced with extinct animals whose appearance is not altogether certain.

Another big difference is that they do not always map up to their animal types. Yes, cows tend to be extremely busty and whales strongfat, and armadillos rounds, but its not certain. There are some sauropods that are only a few feet tall, while there are mice and rabbits that stand more than twelve feet high and are built like walking (and jiggling) trucks of muscle and meat. Each cathigul is an individual above all, with a totally unique body, size, and shape.

In terms of appearance, the cathigula have a huge range of size, from under a foot tall to potentially under twenty feet, sometimes based on their animal-type. They tend to look like cute and sexy anthropomorphic incarnations of the animal they are based on, with exaggerated body types; breasts bigger than their heads, bulges so large they strain against their pants, enormous muscles and massively engorged bellies are all extremely common among them. When they are thin, they are spindly and frail stick-beings. When they are fat, they are massive and jiggly mountains of firm flesh. And when they are beefy, they are often towering piles of pure muscle.

Some other oddities include; human-like facial construction and lips even if they shouldn't have them, a tendency towards slight muzzles rather than full on animal-heads, often growing hair on their scalps for no apparent reason, and so on. Individuals might have stranger traits.

Many cathigul can manifest their animal traits more stronger, channeling magic and mutating into more monstrous humanoid beast-things. These forms are brutish and savage in the extreme, at least half again as big as their base form,with extremely pronounced natural defenses. There is nothing appealing about this form, it is a straight up monster and often called the war form. However, changing into this form doesn’t make them uncontrollable or vicious, but it can be harder to resist their instinctive reactions. They mostly resemble barely bipedal versions of their default forms, huge monsters lacking the dexterity to od more than rip and tear.

And finally, as far as diet goes, barring a few individuals, they are omnivorous, even if their animal analogues are not. Voracious behavior is highly common with them, and has no real relation to what their animal types would normally eat; whales won’t just eat plankton. As a result, they have different cultural norms about consuming sapient life, though it is still illegal on most stable worlds barring supremacist rule. They simply regard the taboo differently, viewing it as just murder rather than something taboo. Magical abilities to consume others without harming them are very common among these beastfolk, to the point that their law enforcement often employs them to arrest people or just bring them in for questioning.

Lifespan: They live for a fairly long time, upwards of about eighty years or more without the use of longevity treatments. Species known for long lives, like tortoises and jellyfish, have noticeably longer lifespans, but the reverse doesn’t apply for short lived creatures like mayflies.

Culture Notes: Originating on many worlds, they have had hosts of different civilizations with few common threads. Harsh authoritarian societies dominated by warlords with deceptively frail animal analogues; democratic societies dominated by herbivores with predator/omnivore second-class citizens, liberal utopias where all are considered equal, and grand space-faring nomadic fleets who treat space travel as a massive party forever. There are few common denominators, and their psychology seems all over the map.

They’re somewhat atypical of most species; the norm is that normally species drift away from governments of their own species (Human Federations and so forth) and form newer, vital societies with beings of many different kinds, seeing one another as ‘their kind’. The cathigula, on the other hand, have apparently always commingled with others for the most part. They are certainly numerous, boasting massive fertility scores and incredible birth rates (whether they lay eggs, incubate litters on pouches, or simply give birth to many children at once), so that they individually are so common that these beastfolk are ubiquitous among the species of the multiverse, outnumbering any given alien species (barring extreme birth rates) by at least three to one.

Among themselves or areas where they dominate, they tend to encourage a more easy-going mentality, since their own biology demands freedom of expression to find themselves and mature into a form that embodies who they are. Their enclaves are havens for non-combat modding for this reason. They can be fractiou though; they inherit some of the instincts of their animal kin, so while wolf and dog types might be family-oriented, tyrannosaurus are more solitary and many herbivore types are extremely ferocious. This is not hard and fast; cat-people don’t need a colony structure to thrive, and many bird types do fine without a flock, or fish without a shoal, and sharks happily deal with extended family groups.

Above all else, they are individuals. Their animal natures are an influence, but do not determine their fates.

Technologically, they tend towards magic-focused devices. For whatever reason, they have a strong spark of magic within them and even their least talented wonderworkers can power basic magic devices, so they make use of faster than light travel that goes through the realms of magic without worrying too much about the denizens within, and most can master at least a few essential combat and mundane techniques, such as superhuman strength or working magic into mundane tasks.

Language is a tricky matter for them, as many of them have mouth shapes ill-suited to conventional language. Hand signs, non-verbal communication and written language - preferably that which is easiest to write quickly, with hundreds of extremely specific pictograms - feature heavily. With modern technology and mods to enable easier communication, this isn’t as necessary, but they still demonstrate a fondness for it. Historically, they also tended to favor clothing that informed an onlooker of their social class and skills at a glance, with specific cuts and colors as a visual cue.

They can interbreed with any other cathigul, regardless of animal type. A lion may romance a hyena… or a crocodile, or a mosquito, without any concerns about compatibility. At a certain level, they are all the same species. Generally the children are born in the way suitable to the mother’s animal type, even if this doesn’t fit the father’s biology: a croc-lady laying eggs with a lion father, for example. They have a lot of children at once, with four or six children being typical. As a result, extended and large communal families that are mini-communities dedicated to teaching and rearing the children on their own are the norm, out of practicality.

They can also interbreed with almost any sapient being, barring robots (and if they are dealing with mechanical life, that’s another story), though the resulting children are almost always of the other parent’s species, with animal traits from the cathigul parents, not developing their own. These traits are often minor; animal-like ears, a tail, small claws, minor instincts, and so forth. With magical power, they might be able to fully shapeshift into the animal their parent associates with, but this isn’t widely known.

If they cared to, they could likely dominate the entire multiverse or at least establish a firm control base, but thus far, no major group of them has cared to. Due to their sheer numbers, they can pop up anywhere; assume any reasonably large group that doesn't bar different species from membership have a sizable amount of them: especially the MILF Fleet and Cobalt Stingers.