The Dragon Doctors

Discussion ¬

1. 
   MisterTeatime

   October 8, 2016, 3:46 pm | # | Reply

   If he did get stuck in a damaged stone form, I’d imagine they could turn the stone into something that grows- say, living wood- and then keep it that way until he had the shape of a complete human body again… or possibly change him into another life form entirely, something either with a smaller body mass or capable of surviving longer with the relevant parts missing, and go from there.

   And now I’m wondering how injuries are handled when an individual is transformed. Obviously if you’re turned into an inanimate state and your shape doesn’t change, you appear as a model of yourself in the new material, and reversing the change turns you back into the same person, possibly with the exception of new brain structure to accommodate your new memories. And it seems logical that if you’re missing a piece of your standard body structure- say, your hand- then you’d change into a stone statue that’s missing a hand, and back into a human that’s missing a hand. But what if you’re turned into, say, a snake? How does “missing a hand” get translated onto a form that doesn’t have anything resembling hands to begin with? Does it get lost completely- you become a snake with no specific injuries or deformities? If so, what happens when you go back to human? If the injury sticks around in some sense regardless of transformation, then could you reverse it by modifying the altered form- e.g., sculpting a new hand to attach to the statue? And if that works, what happens if you sculpt the statue a tail before transforming it back to a human?

   These are some very interesting problems!