Sorry to bump this old thread up, but I had another couple questions on this topic.
If someone/thing was acquired that had a tattoo, would the person morphing them also get the tattoo? Also, if you had a tattoo on your normal form, but were injured and somehow had the patch of skin/flesh with the tattoo cut/burned off or something, would it come back if you morphed and demorphed?
Well, since morphing uses DNA, the answer to the first question should
theoretically be 'no,' since the DNA has no way of knowing about the tattoo. But going back to the 'biological computer' explanation I mentioned earlier, it might be possible, so long as the morpher knew about the tattoo. After all, the morphing technology seems to be able to mimic haircuts, age, and other features that DNA alone would not specify.
Another question to ponder. What of identical twins? I've known cases where so-called "identical" twins actually looked nothing alike (different height, facial features, etc.). I even heard somewhere that identical twins actually have different fingerprints. Yet, they still have the same DNA. So what would happen if you tried to morph one of them? How would the morphing technology know which of them to morph? Could you acquire one of them and then use that DNA to morph the other?
As for your second question, Think, that's a good question to consider even after you take into account my little theory of how the morphing tech works. I guess it would depend on whether or not the 'biological computer' takes your memory as it is (i.e., if you know that your tattoo ought to be gone, the morphing computer would know it, too), or whether you can concentrate and override it. I think it's probably the first one, though. What Rachel said in book #2, about how she hated her haircut but that morphing couldn't fix it, suggests that the theoretical 'morphing computer' I've been talking about takes your memories as you know them to be true, and you can't trick it. Meaning that burning or cutting off a tattoo would probably remove it, I think, since the computer would know just as well as you do that it should be gone.
After all, if you
could just concentrate hard enough and trick the morphing computer, you could add all sorts of features to yourself that weren't there before. Maybe you could make the morphing computer think you had filed your teeth into points, or grown your fingernails into claws, etc.
. . . Come to think of it, though, why the heck would the Andalites have made it so you
couldn't do that?
