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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sparky" data-source="post: 4557931" data-attributes="member: 13681">@Shayuri regarding Mask and Thorn (note: these spoilers are not 'Keep Out' signs, they're only so folks don't see what they don't want to)[sblock]Let's figure out what doppelgangers are and possibly were. Some, you know, ecology. Do doppelgangers breed? If so, do they breed with other doppelgangers? If not, how do they reproduce? Maybe a doppelganger can doppel (or gang?) a baby inutero? But how threatening is a baby doppelganger... I mean, it's sinister, but it's not like babies are particularly swift or deadly. They'd be very vulnerable. Maybe a baby doppelganger's defense mechanism is that if it is killed its consciousness leaps into the killer. If this was known to be the mechanism, then folks would kill them (directly) only rarely. Imagine that dynamic, a sinister magpie baby that you couldn't retaliate against and then, at some point (maturity?) the defense mechanism goes away and they can doppel on their own (in the murder and assume the identity of the victim sense). At that point someone close who knows offs them or they flee. I think that means there was always a fixed number of doppelgangers. They would be mighty scary and powerful, having been 'alive' for ages in different bodies. So Thorn fits into the picture as 'The Thief That Stole a Soul' and, in her quest for a soul and immortalitly for herself and an end to this grim cycle she advertently or inadvertently won a soul for all doppelgangerkind.  So now they reproduce like other humanoids, sexually, and the offspring has even odds of being either race (masquerading as the non-doppelganger race). If the baby is a doppelganger the shifting power passes the baby and the parent doppelganger can't shift any more. The shifting power becomes a mimicking power instead of a murder-swap power and modern doppelgangers are born. (Can the reproduce with eachother? What then?)  I'd imagine that most doppelgangers would have been pissed at her for effectively ending their immortality. She got a soul, but she alone could stay alive (immortal) if she did the murder-swap thing, her consciousness and soul leaping from body to body. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that Thorn lost her taste for this (if she ever had it) after a time and eventually died. Then what?[/sblock]</blockquote>

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