Additional Information
Two-Natured»» Creating The Beast
Blood Shifters
Most shifters get their ability from family members; parents or relatives who happen to possess That Special Gene. Children only begin shifting during puberty; their late childhood to early teen years.
Why aren’t there many shifters out there, in that case? Why, this is because nature has imposed natural regulations on the carrying on of this trait. Only one child is attributed with the shifting gene, and due to a high infancy mortality rate, there is a very real possibility of the child dying prematurely.
Only the offspring of two pure shifters have the ability to transform at will. The child of a shifter and a human, as well as the child of a shifter and a werewolf, can only shift during the full moon.
Bitten Shifters
When a shifter attacks a human, one of two things happens. Either the body violently rejects the genetic virus that delivers the shifting trait and the human dies, or the body adapts to the virus. After being bitten, the number of people who survive are relatively equal to the number of those that die, resulting in a 50-50 split between the afflicted. If they survive to the next full moon, they proceed to transform into a mutated version of the animal that bit them.
They cannot, and will not, shift completely, instead becoming a human/animal hybrid. The animal they become is entirely dependent on the animal that bit them – this cannot be changed. They cannot shift at will, like their pure-blooded counterparts, but are forced to transform during the full moon. They cannot genetically pass along the shifter trait.
Surviving is not the only difficult task in the life of a bitten shifter. They are seen as lesser creatures by the entirety of the shifter community, independent of whether it was their fault that they were bitten or not. Since creating a bitten shifter is a practiced looked down upon (and in the case of werewolves, even outlawed), if a shifter manages to do such, then they are immediately cast in a negative light – and since bitten shifters are often held responsible for the actions of their creators, this does not bode well for them.
