how to reset your morphing clock

[bizarrocarlos]

everyone remembers book 19 where cassie is a caterpillar then flips the finger to the escafil device as she demorphs thanks to a loophole in its designs.
this gets me thinking that if someone where to get trapped in a child morph,could they escape when they hit puberty as this is a type of metamorphosis for human beings.
would puberty reset the morphing clock????

[Chad32]

People don't change into different creatures after hitting puberty. Who told you this?

I guess anything that goes through metamorphosis would have their clocks reset, but it begs the question when exactly does the clock reset?

[goom]

puberty isn't metamorphosis. the term gets tossed around lightly.

Metamorphosis is a biological process by which an animal physically develops after birth or hatching, involving a conspicuous and relatively abrupt change in the animal's body structure through cell growth and differentiation. Some insects, amphibians, mollusks, crustaceans, Cnidarians, echinoderms  and tunicates  undergo metamorphosis, which is usually (but not always) accompanied by a change of habitat or behavior.

Scientific usage of the term is exclusive, and is not applied to general aspects of cell growth, including rapid growth spurts. References to "metamorphosis" in mammals are imprecise and only colloquial,

technically, it shouldn't have reset the clock at all, but KA needed a way to get her back (sadly).

[Alic]

Yeah.. She couldn't get stuck as a fly.. Boooo Cassie.

What about a sex change?

[AcreLorraine]

That's not a dna change either.  Though it sounds like a useful get out of morph card.

[goom]

i'm curious about the point the clock is reset.

the caterpillar/butterfly IS changing in the cocoon, and it is technically a butterfly before it emerges.

Some butterflies' wings may take up to three hours to dry while others take about one hour.

not much time left, must have been a pretty close call.

with a tadpole, however, it is constantly changing until it becomes a frog.
couldn't they demorph at any given point, then? or only when the process is 'done'?

the only reason that cassie couldn't was because the chrysalis is usually incapable of movement.

on a side note, how would karen/aftran not know about caterpillars? seriously, she's not that young.

[Chad32]

I'm not sure why she didn't know either.

[Kitulean]

technically, it shouldn't have reset the clock at all, but KA needed a way to get her back (sadly).

You're my hero, Goom.

But yeah. I had mixed feelings on the end of the book. On the one hand, it was hard not to be happy for them. On the other hand, I didn't really care about Cassie. Especially after what she did. I actually would have been just fine if she had gotten out of the whole trapped in morph thing but still quit the team. At least that would have forced the ghost writers to let someone else do something once in awhile. </bitter>

Buuuuuuuuut on topic, I'm not sure why a 'natural morph' would reset the clock either. For that matter, I'm not exactly sure what the 'scientific reasoning' behind the 2 hour time limit was anyway. Originally I assumed that the 'real body' in zero space was drifting apart too much, but that makes no sense with other things we know, including this whole... natural morphs reset the clock thing. Oy.

[Chad32]

Oringinally there wasn't even going to be a time limit, but I guess KA decided there needed to be more problems with morphng.

[Kitulean]

Limitations should always have some kind of explanation. The morphing wasn't magical, it was scientific.

[Aluminator (Kit)]

on a side note, how would karen/aftran not know about caterpillars? seriously, she's not that young.

Maybe Karen/Aftran, like us, never thought that a natural morph would reset the morphing clock

[Kitulean]

I think there's a specific line of thought in the book that Karen/Aftran must not have known about caterpillars becoming butterflies otherwise she'd know that Cassie wasn't stuck as a little slug-like creature for the rest of her life.

[Aluminator (Kit)]

Yeah, there is, and I remember the line. It could just be that Aftran knows, and wasn't thinking beyond the moment, and Cassie's speculating wildly.

[Kitulean]

That wouldn't be the first time.

[goom]

maybe KA underestimated the capabilities of a child?