Sublime Showdown (Round 1: Faerie)

Strings went taut and slack and taut again as Darling played the crowd like a violin. Switches flipped, props engaged, and that terrible rolling thunder of a voice swept over the assembled creatures. The timing was perfect. Therefore, Darling's unseen puppetmaster reasoned, any appearance of mistakes must be the fault of time itself.

In the depths of the mechanisms and trapdoors concealed in the darkness above, a gear clicked into place. A spring began to uncoil counterclockwise. Everything went backwards. Nobody noticed.

Click.

"ou might not think she's much to look at, but where she comes from, she stops traffic."

Moving to the final jar, Darling gestured to the winged humanoid frozen inside, posed in a menacing snarl above a foam facsimile of a soulless corpse. "And finally, we have Ikhinde," she croaked, pronouncing it "Ik-hend". "This form you see here is just the shell she's currently wearing; you see, Ikhinde is a body-swapping apparition that can move soul and flesh alike. Of course, she's got to keep hers intact to use the ability, and the other five are sure to make that difficult for her."

Darling my declined.

The pin holding the spring retracted and the coil snapped neatly back to its prior position.

And the show goes on.

Show Content

SpoilerUsername: Whimbrel
Name: Ikhinde [ih-KEEN-day]
Text color: #A515A5
Gender: Female, no matter the current body/ies.
Race: Multimorphic Kleptoparasite
Equipment/Abilities: Ikhinde is a hivemind who primarily obtains her bodies by displacing the original occupants. Once the soul is displaced, she is able to shove it into another vessel, and gains limited transformative capabilities over the stolen body. She begins the battle with a single body; a harpy with a heart defect.
To displace a soul, Ikhinde first obtains an invitation into the body, and then simply allows herself to fill the available space, compressing the host's soul until it can be dislodged. Without an invitation, she is incapable of entering another's body. Without entering a body she cannot compress a soul, and is thus unable to pry them out of their shell. In a similar vein, she has great difficulty dealing with free-floating souls, as it is nearly impossible for her to envelop and compress them.
She cannot gain control over artificial or predominantly non-biological bodies, they simply go inert once their owner is incapacitated. However, she can place souls inside bodies that she is unable to occupy, provided that they would be able to operate them. She does not obtain any of the memories, skills, or supernatural capabilities possessed by the former inhabitants of her bodies, nor does she store her own memories, skills, thoughts, etc. within the confines of her skulls. Still, she will die if she loses all of her bodies, to death or otherwise.
The strength of her transformational capabilities is directly tied to the number of bodies she possesses at a given time. With only one body, the changes she can maintain are nearly insignificant. A slight change of pigment over a small area. A papercut temporarily healed. A problematic blood vessel sealed off. She is unable to permanently alter her bodies with her ability, but she is capable of sustaining a transformation indefinitely, for as long as she has sufficient bodies to enable the transformation. The further a transformation deviates from the unaltered state of the body, the more powerful she would need to be to enable or sustain it. The strength of this power does not function like a "pool" that all her bodies draw from, that would allow one body to make extreme changes by locking the others in their original forms. The strength is a measure of how far from the original form she can currently transform all bodies, and remains the same no matter how many bodies are transformed, so long as her body count remains constant.
Though Ikhinde has lived many lifetimes, in many simultaneous bodies, she has not amassed as much knowledge as one might reasonably expect. Though she is capable of processing vast quantities of sensory information and has practiced to be able to respond appropriately to each body's situation as though independent of the others, Ikhinde is quite poor at academics. She has attempted to learn useful academic skills countless times; elemental summoning, geometric computations, planeswalking, structural configuration, forgotten poetry, and so on. Inevitably she would become bored or frustrated by the material or the teacher, and consequently pay less attention to that particular body. She seldom retained anything of use from such attempts. She's picked up a bit of golemancy from her most recent lover, largely thanks to her soul-manipulating ability enabling her to bypass the most complex parts of the ritual.
Description: In her youth, Ikhinde did indeed exploit her innate abilities to a truly monstrous extent. Though she remains the monster in myth, she has spent the centuries following her defeat learning to function as a member of civilized society, and considers herself completely reformed.
She abides by her word, and endeavors to barter honestly and fairly with others, especially when it is concerning the ownership of their bodies. She attempts to avoid committing violence and murder--she reminds herself that while she can afford to lose a body or two, most people cannot. She strives to be polite, considerate, and aware of the existence of other people as something possessing inherent value.
To reinforce the last point, Ikhinde has taken to keeping at least one body in close proximity to a loved one whenever possible. Her family currently consists of five surviving children from various relationships, and one longtime lover.

She now obtains most of her bodies from deals with the elderly and those with serious health problems, placing their souls in quality golems in exchange. She is able to apply her transformative powers towards repairing and rejuvenating these bodies, allowing her to use them for substantially longer than they ought to have lasted.
Her harpy body is nearly six feet tall, more than half of which is attributable to her stilt-like legs, ending in talons better suited to perching than to walking. Her wingspan is a bit over sixteen feet, but she is unable to use them to do more than glide short distances until she is able to strengthen the muscles. Her coloration is predominantly a yellowed green, accented by a burst of fuschia feathers at the neck. Her primary and secondary wing feathers are discolored, but otherwise normal for a harpy. giving A belt of tinted glass beads attaches to her striped half-skirt, and secures a heavily embroidered satchel to her back. The vambraces worn on her arms and legs are decorative rather than functional, made of soft leather and secured with yellow ribbons.