Synbria is a quadrupedal zorgoia, a typical specimen of her species. Eight feet tall in typical circumstances and two-and-a-half times that in length at her shortest, her near-black fur makes for an intimidating silhouette – an impression not relieved by the bright pink pattern of symmetrical marks on her snout, branching and zigzagging like lightning. That vivid color shows up again as "socks" along all four of her paws, and brightening up the fluff around her tail-barb. Her throat is ringed twice with the color, and her tail three times; otherwise, it shows up as erratic swirls and spirals along her flanks, thin marks breaking up the light-soaking black-violet color of the rest of her.
It barely matters that “intimidating” is rarely the effect she wants to have! She wants to study, to talk, to research, to learn, and it’s hard to hold a conversation with a colleague distracted by the fear that she’s going to eat them. Promising to give plenty of warning before she eats any of her delicious co-workers seems to have done little to alleviate their anxieties; this interspecies research project has some social hurdles to climb.
Being, arguably, a subject of the research as well as a researcher doesn’t make things less complicated. Years of study as a research clinician prepared her for the procedures of the lab and long hours writing grant proposals, but it did nothing to prepare her for the challenges of being seen as a barely-civilized test subject or voracious monster by the people she would like to call peers, or even friends. She’s moderately active in the local zorgoian ex-pat community, at least for the board games, but she’s eager to make more connections in her field of study.
Already familiar with many of the applications of zorgoian venom and gastric fluids to interspecies medicine, she’s got her ambitions set on bringing an analytical, scientific eye towards zorgoian reformation magic. It strikes her as the most under-researched matter in interspecific zorgoian medicine: can this process be altered to bring people back not just as they were, but as they should be? Can the wounded be healed? Can the aged be restored to their prime? Can the link between the soul and the shape of one’s body be modified, altered somehow, to turn this miracle of restoration into an even more powerful miracle of healing?
Maybe if she solves this, she can solve aging and death forever, bring the reputation of her species to one of saviors, rather than parasites – and then maybe her co-workers would stop complaining so much every time she eats them.
Assorted Notes:
- Pink “socks”, too
- Pink color is somewhat varied, between magenta and fuchsia
- She hates summer, she overheats
- She uses her innate magic to take a smaller, anthro shape when necessary for use of lab equipment, but she’d really like her colleagues to get used to zorgoias as they are so refrains from doing so whenever possible; this often makes for crowded meeting rooms
- Tongue and maw are orange, including luminescence
- She is irrationally dismissive of investigations towards zorgoia shapeshifting as a healing tool:
- She takes it for granted and barely thinks of it as magic
- It’s already being heavily studied, she wants to break out into an under-researched field
- Also it wouldn’t help reduce the stigma of eating people
- The research is largely at its basic, fundamental stages, since it’s awfully hard to find volunteers for experimental procedures modifying zorgia reformation - the dangers of which she takes extremely seriously, despite her otherwise flippant attitude towards the matter
