- Nov 22, 2014
- 3,715
- Gender
- amab Female
- Pronouns
- She/Her
- Posting Status
- Weekly
Name: Bara
Age: 27 (if you count from when he was discovered)
Birthday: April 20, 1989 - the day he was officially discovered
Gender: Variable; depends on form taken at a given time.
Species: Plants; some sort of magical shapeshifting chimera made of magically corrupted plants.
Category: Academy Faculty
Class: Teaches mostly at the University level
Subject/Work: Professor of Botanical Alchemy at Starlight Academy
Appearance Description: Bara is a (usually anthropomorphic) plant that can change his size and shape dramatically. He usually resembles a human in shape. His musculature is made of a material resembling bundles of small vines. His light green "skin" serves a largely aesthetic purpose; it resembles the epidermis of a flower stem with the same sort of waxy texture, but because of its stiffness there are gaps or overlaps at different joints to allow for more articulation. By human standards, his face will always be conventionally beautiful if he's had the chance to look in a mirror, but the eyes are always solid black.
Sometimes he wears clothes, but he usually projects large leaves or flower petals from his body to simulate the appearance of clothing; these decorative leaves or petals are usually very colorful and occasionally slightly bioluminescent. His "hair" can take the form of leaves, grass-like blades, or flower petals, styled in any of a number of ways.
When teaching classes, he usually takes a masculine form. He is usually large for a human, ranging from 6 feet and 2 inches to 6 feet and 10 inches in height, with broad shoulders and his epidermis contoured to simulate heavy musculature. For lab sections, he wears a lab coat with slightly torn sleeves. Rumor has it the sleeves were torn during an ill-advised flexing session.
On occasion, she will take a more effeminate form. She will always look conventionally attractive, modeling herself after pictures of supermodels she finds on the internet. Her effeminate forms are always shorter, ranging from 5'4 to 5'11 in height. Her shape-shifted "clothing" resembles revealing dresses whenever she isn't in a professional setting, and she is much more likely to include decorative flowers in her hair when she presents herself as a female.
Personality Description: Bara loves beauty, being beautiful, and being admired for his beauty. On a deep, instinctual level owing on some level to his plant origins, he feels that he needs to be pleasing to humanoids. It has taken a large amount of counseling over many years for him to cope with the reality that sometimes, people will not admire him or even like him. Being disliked still wounds him emotionally, but he just bottles up these bad feelings and does his best to ignore them.
He is usually polite, and occasionally flirtatious towards people he thinks would be receptive to flirting. Bara wants more than anything to be well-liked and his efforts at being nice can largely be considered an extension of this.
He is intensely curious about, and fascinated by, the world around him. Although he has become a professor of botanical alchemy, he dabbles in numerous other fields inside of and outside of magic and science. He loves learning, and loves rattling off various facts about the world if he thinks it will impress people.
Powers:
Shapeshifting
Bara can change his size and shape in a wide range of ways, as long as every part of him is homologous to something found in plants. It can take up to half an hour with a set of mirrors for him to make the complicated structures that leave him looking aesthetically pleasing, but if he doesn't care how it looks, he can grow crude additional limbs or appendages in seconds. These appendages can include spikes made out of a hard wood-like material or "armor plating" made out of that same material, if he's trying to defend himself. The extra appendages will usually just look like bundles of vines.
He can change his shape and size rapidly, but only if he focuses on the vinelike musculature that allows him to move. The superficial layer of plant epidermis and other accoutrements that make him look pretty will not grow with him unless he's spending at least half an hour on the transformation; these will sometimes tear and/or fall off otherwise. The upper limit of size that he's willing to attempt under any circumstances is about ten feet tall; lots of growth puts a huge strain on even his magical metabolism. His mind isn't able to handle manipulating more than eight limbs at once.
He can also grow additional eye-stalks, which are essentially black retinol-filled orbs on the ends of vines. He can only see clearly in one direction at a time with each eye stalk, and he needs at least two looking in the same direction at the same time to have good depth perception.
Bara would need to be either incinerated or cut into very tiny pieces and crushed to be killed. Cutting off his head just means that he needs to grow a new head, and that's very inconvenient for him. He probably worked hard on that head. The part of his body that contains his consciousness is usually some part of his torso, and this is only important for the purpose of knowing what part of him is still "him" if you cut him into smaller pieces; his mind is magical and he does not require a brain or nervous system to think. Given enough time and magical energy (see below), he can regenerate from almost any form of trauma.
Bara can produce pollen that is hypoallergenic and a mild narcotic. Outside of this, his body is not able to make compounds that harm or affect humans in any significant way. Furthermore, at its most intense, his body's bioluminescence can put out about as much light as a cellphone screen.
Species Abilities: Bara needs to eat magical waste products from several factories on the island in order to survive. These waste products contain the power that sustains him and his consciousness, and allows him to shapeshift. Large amounts of shapeshifting or growth deplete this power quickly. He can afford to expend this power liberally because he has barrels upon barrels of magical waste at his home, but if he is kept away from his stash for an extended period of time he will need to revert to a much cruder and less beautiful form to save his energy and avoid starvation. If he can't eat the stuff for more than a week, he will die.
He also spends a lot of time in well-irrigated soil under a powerful sun lamp in his home. He doesn't do this because he has to - he just does it because it helps him look prettier. His aesthetically pleasing parts wither and die otherwise, and then he has to shed and re-grow them.
He has an uncontrollable urge to leave pollen on people he likes; his forms usually allow him to extrude anthers from the skin on his hands or elbows. Rubbing pollen on people is very satisfying for him, and thanks to some alchemical meddling on his part, his pollen is now mostly hypoallergenic and a very mild narcotic for humans.
Biography: Back in the 1920s, Manta Carlos did not have as many regulations about environmental protection as it does now. Some factories liked to dump their magical waste in the forbidden forest, just because it was convenient, and dumping the magical waste in the ocean had been illegal since the Sea Monster Incident of 1905.
Bara was "Born" in a puddle of this mutagenic magical waste left behind by a factory that used alchemy in its metalworking operations. He always needed to eat these waste products to live, and he never strayed far from the dump site. He doesn't remember much until some point in the 70s; he was able to see and move at this point, though he was some kind of knee-high viney shambling thing at the time, and he remembers animals being confused and terrified by his presence. By the early-80s, he could think and speak, though he had nobody else to talk to or think about. He didn't know what he was, why he existed, or why he felt so unbearably alone all the time. He started to take anthropomorphic forms in 1988, though he never remembered seeing a human and didn't know what he was imitating. He was a vaguely human-shaped bundle of vines with two black eye-stalks.
It was in 1989 when she stumbled upon a small group of college students who were smoking weed in the forbidden forest. They very calmly introduced themselves to her and tried their best to socialize with her despite her social ineptitude and the incredible amount of marijuana in their system. They made her promise to stay where they found him until the next day, when they had all sobered up and brought an academy recruiter along to see about turning her into a proper citizen of the island.
The company responsible for accidentally creating him still existed; this company was required by law to create a substantial trust fund for him, as a penalty for their negligent creation of intelligent life over 80 years earlier. Once it was discovered that he needed that waste product to survive, they gave him a steady supply of it.
She was a dependent of the academy for most of her life, learning how to properly interact with humans in human society for the first two years, followed by the beginning of what would turn into twenty-two years of schooling.
By the year 2016, he had finished two undergraduate degrees and a graduate degree, and had already been teaching at the school for several years.
Additional Information: Botanical Alchemy is a field that combines magic and science with relation to plant life, specifically. It's an upper-level university course, but Bara will sometimes teach seminars open to students in high school.
Bara chose the name "Bara" for himself because it means "Rose" in Japanese. Bara and his friends did not know very much about gay pornography at the time.
Age: 27 (if you count from when he was discovered)
Birthday: April 20, 1989 - the day he was officially discovered
Gender: Variable; depends on form taken at a given time.
Species: Plants; some sort of magical shapeshifting chimera made of magically corrupted plants.
Category: Academy Faculty
Class: Teaches mostly at the University level
Subject/Work: Professor of Botanical Alchemy at Starlight Academy
Appearance Description: Bara is a (usually anthropomorphic) plant that can change his size and shape dramatically. He usually resembles a human in shape. His musculature is made of a material resembling bundles of small vines. His light green "skin" serves a largely aesthetic purpose; it resembles the epidermis of a flower stem with the same sort of waxy texture, but because of its stiffness there are gaps or overlaps at different joints to allow for more articulation. By human standards, his face will always be conventionally beautiful if he's had the chance to look in a mirror, but the eyes are always solid black.
Sometimes he wears clothes, but he usually projects large leaves or flower petals from his body to simulate the appearance of clothing; these decorative leaves or petals are usually very colorful and occasionally slightly bioluminescent. His "hair" can take the form of leaves, grass-like blades, or flower petals, styled in any of a number of ways.
When teaching classes, he usually takes a masculine form. He is usually large for a human, ranging from 6 feet and 2 inches to 6 feet and 10 inches in height, with broad shoulders and his epidermis contoured to simulate heavy musculature. For lab sections, he wears a lab coat with slightly torn sleeves. Rumor has it the sleeves were torn during an ill-advised flexing session.
On occasion, she will take a more effeminate form. She will always look conventionally attractive, modeling herself after pictures of supermodels she finds on the internet. Her effeminate forms are always shorter, ranging from 5'4 to 5'11 in height. Her shape-shifted "clothing" resembles revealing dresses whenever she isn't in a professional setting, and she is much more likely to include decorative flowers in her hair when she presents herself as a female.
Personality Description: Bara loves beauty, being beautiful, and being admired for his beauty. On a deep, instinctual level owing on some level to his plant origins, he feels that he needs to be pleasing to humanoids. It has taken a large amount of counseling over many years for him to cope with the reality that sometimes, people will not admire him or even like him. Being disliked still wounds him emotionally, but he just bottles up these bad feelings and does his best to ignore them.
He is usually polite, and occasionally flirtatious towards people he thinks would be receptive to flirting. Bara wants more than anything to be well-liked and his efforts at being nice can largely be considered an extension of this.
He is intensely curious about, and fascinated by, the world around him. Although he has become a professor of botanical alchemy, he dabbles in numerous other fields inside of and outside of magic and science. He loves learning, and loves rattling off various facts about the world if he thinks it will impress people.
Powers:
Shapeshifting
Bara can change his size and shape in a wide range of ways, as long as every part of him is homologous to something found in plants. It can take up to half an hour with a set of mirrors for him to make the complicated structures that leave him looking aesthetically pleasing, but if he doesn't care how it looks, he can grow crude additional limbs or appendages in seconds. These appendages can include spikes made out of a hard wood-like material or "armor plating" made out of that same material, if he's trying to defend himself. The extra appendages will usually just look like bundles of vines.
He can change his shape and size rapidly, but only if he focuses on the vinelike musculature that allows him to move. The superficial layer of plant epidermis and other accoutrements that make him look pretty will not grow with him unless he's spending at least half an hour on the transformation; these will sometimes tear and/or fall off otherwise. The upper limit of size that he's willing to attempt under any circumstances is about ten feet tall; lots of growth puts a huge strain on even his magical metabolism. His mind isn't able to handle manipulating more than eight limbs at once.
He can also grow additional eye-stalks, which are essentially black retinol-filled orbs on the ends of vines. He can only see clearly in one direction at a time with each eye stalk, and he needs at least two looking in the same direction at the same time to have good depth perception.
Bara would need to be either incinerated or cut into very tiny pieces and crushed to be killed. Cutting off his head just means that he needs to grow a new head, and that's very inconvenient for him. He probably worked hard on that head. The part of his body that contains his consciousness is usually some part of his torso, and this is only important for the purpose of knowing what part of him is still "him" if you cut him into smaller pieces; his mind is magical and he does not require a brain or nervous system to think. Given enough time and magical energy (see below), he can regenerate from almost any form of trauma.
Bara can produce pollen that is hypoallergenic and a mild narcotic. Outside of this, his body is not able to make compounds that harm or affect humans in any significant way. Furthermore, at its most intense, his body's bioluminescence can put out about as much light as a cellphone screen.
Species Abilities: Bara needs to eat magical waste products from several factories on the island in order to survive. These waste products contain the power that sustains him and his consciousness, and allows him to shapeshift. Large amounts of shapeshifting or growth deplete this power quickly. He can afford to expend this power liberally because he has barrels upon barrels of magical waste at his home, but if he is kept away from his stash for an extended period of time he will need to revert to a much cruder and less beautiful form to save his energy and avoid starvation. If he can't eat the stuff for more than a week, he will die.
He also spends a lot of time in well-irrigated soil under a powerful sun lamp in his home. He doesn't do this because he has to - he just does it because it helps him look prettier. His aesthetically pleasing parts wither and die otherwise, and then he has to shed and re-grow them.
He has an uncontrollable urge to leave pollen on people he likes; his forms usually allow him to extrude anthers from the skin on his hands or elbows. Rubbing pollen on people is very satisfying for him, and thanks to some alchemical meddling on his part, his pollen is now mostly hypoallergenic and a very mild narcotic for humans.
Biography: Back in the 1920s, Manta Carlos did not have as many regulations about environmental protection as it does now. Some factories liked to dump their magical waste in the forbidden forest, just because it was convenient, and dumping the magical waste in the ocean had been illegal since the Sea Monster Incident of 1905.
Bara was "Born" in a puddle of this mutagenic magical waste left behind by a factory that used alchemy in its metalworking operations. He always needed to eat these waste products to live, and he never strayed far from the dump site. He doesn't remember much until some point in the 70s; he was able to see and move at this point, though he was some kind of knee-high viney shambling thing at the time, and he remembers animals being confused and terrified by his presence. By the early-80s, he could think and speak, though he had nobody else to talk to or think about. He didn't know what he was, why he existed, or why he felt so unbearably alone all the time. He started to take anthropomorphic forms in 1988, though he never remembered seeing a human and didn't know what he was imitating. He was a vaguely human-shaped bundle of vines with two black eye-stalks.
It was in 1989 when she stumbled upon a small group of college students who were smoking weed in the forbidden forest. They very calmly introduced themselves to her and tried their best to socialize with her despite her social ineptitude and the incredible amount of marijuana in their system. They made her promise to stay where they found him until the next day, when they had all sobered up and brought an academy recruiter along to see about turning her into a proper citizen of the island.
The company responsible for accidentally creating him still existed; this company was required by law to create a substantial trust fund for him, as a penalty for their negligent creation of intelligent life over 80 years earlier. Once it was discovered that he needed that waste product to survive, they gave him a steady supply of it.
She was a dependent of the academy for most of her life, learning how to properly interact with humans in human society for the first two years, followed by the beginning of what would turn into twenty-two years of schooling.
By the year 2016, he had finished two undergraduate degrees and a graduate degree, and had already been teaching at the school for several years.
Additional Information: Botanical Alchemy is a field that combines magic and science with relation to plant life, specifically. It's an upper-level university course, but Bara will sometimes teach seminars open to students in high school.
Bara chose the name "Bara" for himself because it means "Rose" in Japanese. Bara and his friends did not know very much about gay pornography at the time.
Name: Bara