Name: Marlin


Race: Navim

A species that has naturally evolved extraplanar flight, of a sort, Navim are long-lived gel humanoids with silver-toned bodies that stand approximately 208 cm (or 81 inches) on average. Facial features are soft and blurred, indistinct, although each tends to pick a facial feature they particularly like and emphasize it. Their pale, hairless skin is gelatinous when at rest, cool and slightly adhesive, sticking to whatever it touches; when in movement or flight, it hardens and becomes frictionless to prevent air resistance. The body is an affectation after its most common prey, and Navim can assume whatever form they particularly desire, within the limits of their volume (roughly two hundred liters of gel). Flight is achieved via a chemical reaction that produces a shortlived film over the skin of anamalous subatomic particles, which causes negative friction, propelling the Navim forward so long as it is in contact with matter. Without organs and possessing a naturally-pressurized body, they survive in empty space quite well, barring one major problem to be discussed later.

Essentially, a Navim doesn't fly; it's just the most lubricated thing in the universe, the eternally-dropped bar of soap.

Navim are physically powered by solar radiation, and periodically require trips outside the atmosphere to graze on cosmic radiation; however, lacking a cohesive brain structure, they require regular psychosomatic imprints from other intelligent creatures to retain sentience. This is achieved by drawing some unlucky soul within the membrane, either completely or partially, and sampling both a biopsy and a scan using a primitive, otherwise harmless version of a CAT scan. The Navim bonds these together and restructures the resulting makeshift neural net into its own patchwork. A Navim can survive, intellectually speaking, on one scan every three weeks, if it doesn't mind being fairly stupid. They almost all do, though, and invariably abduct sentients as often as they can get away with it.

Navim are fortunately a dying race due to one major problem: sublight spaceflight involves voyages measured in weeks or months, and no Navim yet has made a cross-planetary voyage without becoming a vegetable halfway through and drifting aimlessly through space, gorged on cosmic radiation and generally becoming happy space debris. The large majority of them are drifting in the empty void pointlessly now, unlikely to ever feed again or reproduce, now functionally space jellyfish. The ones that remain intelligent prefer not to discuss this.

Being functionally a gel in nature, Navim loathe other adhesives, and glue in particular frustrates them - it takes weeks for them to get it out.


Type: Monster!


Place of Birth: Median, Navim home planet


Gender: Male


Age: Twenty-eight


Height: 212 cm (83 inches)


Weight: 197 kg (434 lbs)


Facial Features: Marlin prefers to remain faceless, but on the occasions that require discussion with fleshbags he forms a strong, acquiline nose, a flat-pressed and stern mouth, and a single glaring eye with heavy brow, somewhat Slavic. He can no more explain the preference for those features then he can his survival; he could assume any, but now fars not.

Surface Texture: Navim membrane is soft, cool, and sticky at rest, and grips lightly at solids that it touches. When frozen in prep for flight it turns implacably solid; the flight-film that accompanies this transition is warm and, quite literally, the slickest substance imaginable. The silver color is ubiquitous and the defining feature of a Navim - nothing they do alters that shade, so it's the easiest way to recognize them.


Typical Appearance: A slime. Psuedopods, tentacles, and flight panels are his most commonly-chosen appendages, but generally most of the time he's a giant blob of silver slime without feature.

Appendages: It's a slime, so pretty much whatever it wants within the limits of its volume. The head is the main constant, and the only part of Marlin that is subject to structural damage. Dissolving, breaking apart, or battering the head will shake up Marlin enough to either mash him back into subsentient slime or get away.


Physical Capabilities: Aside from his morphic body, Merlin's main advantage is his speed; he can move at stunning speeds very easily and steathily, as he doesn't even have to worry about the sound barrier thanks to his lack of friction. In comparison, however, he's not terribly strong, lacking coherent muscles, only being about as capable as an adult human male. His impressive leverage gives him an advantage in this, true, but in brute strength he's unimpressive.

Durability is not a concern for Marlin, as he has no coherent organs beyond his "head", where his neural net resides. Damaging that will send him scrambling, but without that nothing phases him much.

Glue, as previously mentioned, gums Marlin up terrifically well, and he is violently opposed to getting within three feet of it.

Hunting Approach: Marlin prefers an aerial approach, hitting his targets with a swooping dive, sucking them into the membrane, and stealing them away to some conveniently abandoned area nearby, which can include the stratosphere if needed - suspending a target a mile above sea level in open air is often a good way to pacify them. Against wary targets he uses a hawk's approach, harassing at high speeds until he sees an opening, which he then exploits at maximum velocity.

Possessing no effective disguise and only the roughest facsimile of a humanoid form, Marlin can't even try to blend in, and instead prefers stalking his prey on high while learning their habits. He abets this by varying his hunting grounds - he can hit anywhere on the grounds with ease, and can even nail passing shuttles within a few minute's travel. Agents are tougher prey by far, but have more developed minds and thus pose more of a feast.

Largely contemptuous of physical harm, Merlin is difficult to drive away. Those who escape indoors have a far better chance, and adhesives ruin his metamorphic abilities, so those two give great chances of escape.


Motivation: An intellectual egotist, Merlin is terrified of the thought of being an idiot jellyfish like his kin, and thus attacks as often as he can get away with it. In regards to his stay at Shokushu, however, he's pretty much just a bum. Filing for extraplanar citizenship has thus far proven a dead end, and the roads open to a currently-illegal immigrant are few. Marlin is thus deeply indebted to the school authority for allowing him to stay on campus - something he dislikes being reminded of.

The attacks serve to feed his neural net and physiological coherency, but he's since discovered a particular advantage to attacking females; during orgasm, the natural fluttering of the womb allows him a chance to pilfer an egg cell, which is loaded with potential genetic information. That prize now drives most of his hunting habits.

Psychological Profile: Marlin is stentorian and stoic, disdainful of fleshlings and their frail carbon-based brains. He rarely chooses to engage in conversation with them beyond taunts and insults, considering it a waste of his time. Humanoid monsters, likewise, invite his contempt, those he is careful to not provoke them unduly - a political animal by necessity of his precarious position on campus, Marlin instead chooses a sort of blunt civility.

Only those similarly disembodied and free of a solid shell recieve Marlin's comradeship, and it is somewhat disturbing to see. Since the loss of his race, Marlin has been at a lack of "equals", and he is now painfully courteous to those who fit the category, in an effort to avoid driving them away. If that does happen, he'd be disappointed, but survive; he's now in his fourth year as a sole survivor, so far as he knows, and solitude has become something of a regular for him.

Has a soft spot for birds, his favorite of which he takes his name from.


History: The Navim race has ended. The last great migration twenty years ago faltered when the designated Navigator lost coherence halfway through the voyage and allowed their cluster to drift apart, scattering the only pod of Navim left across half a galaxy. Marlin himself barely survived, impacting, by wild chance, a traveling shuttle, which he promptly entered and thoroughly investigated internally. At a loss for what to do without his pod, he turned the shuttle right back to its point of origin: Shokushu. The welcoming comittee there, having recieved the distress call, laid down the law to the fledgling monster, and then welcomed him in warily.

Marlin is barely an adult for his race, though that doesn't mean much anymore; with a full nine-tenths of his species squatting in empty space, he's since preferred not to associate with them. Work for a flying slime without citizenship is difficult to find, but the curious culture of Shokushu is right down his alley. His tacit agreement with the authority is that he helps to patrol the airspace and keep unwanted observers away, a task he is frighteningly good at. Having spent the last two years at the school without any prospects elsewhere, Marlin has been careful to remain on the local authority's good side, and in particular is respectful of the prefects and professors. It doesn't hurt that their company feeds his intellectual elitism, either.



~*~

Yes, it was a bad film, but the graphic suits here.

Welcome.

Welcome aboard!

While my non-physicist brain boggles at the concept of negative friction, I think it looks like a cool character

Thankee, both of you.

Technically, PiaM, negative friction means that resistance increases as load decreases (TLDR: it sucks you in), which has absolutely nothing to do with what Marlin is doing; if you don't have friction you literally can't move at all, because you slip off every time you push against something. So speaking in terms of physics he's, to quote Wolfgang Pauli, not even wrong.

But I think it sounds cool. Hence: app.

. . . I have a thing about explaining, yes.

I think sounds like it belongs under the rule of cool

Anyway, thanks for the explanation! Now I have learned some science today as well

My main question about the "intersteller travel" part... how do they deal with the near-absolute-zero temps that are found in space?

Blast, a logical counterpoint.

Considering they metabolize cosmic radiation (which is primarily just high-energy protons and nuclei) the vacuum wouldn't do much to Navim; they don't have a circulatory system with a minimum required homeostasis, and their method of movement involves playing with physics rather than any sort of physical exertion requiring work (and thus heat). This said a fire extingusher would still mess them up pretty bad, because carbon dust is designed to choke and cling, sort of like glue. Good catch!

So basically they flash-freeze themselves, and when near a planet/star, use solar radiation to thaw themselves?

And yeah, I do play a slimegirl here.

Yup. With the added bonus of losing brain cells the longer they stay frozen. Just like with ordinary people!

I had noticed the gelatinous-ess-ness. Life is better when you're a smoothie. Everything tastes like raspberry.

Welcome to Shokushu.

*Pokes the silver slime man with a claw*

*jiggles with joy*

. . . now how often do you get to say you saw a guy do that.

I mean, besides the Pillsbury Doughboy.

Um....never. I've never seen a guy do that.

Me, neither.

I'm unique!

Also, am I speaking to Calvin or Hobbes, here?

Both technically. White is me and Yellow is what I'd imagine my character would write.

You're a Schrodinger's Character: both simultaneously IC and OOC. Astonishing.

I bow in awe.

But no seriously I'm not made of space catnip, stop looking at me like that.