Thread by @AlexandraErin

Today's example RPG character:

J. Wobbling Wibblesworth, Esquire (or Wobblesque, to friends), a blue slime lawyer whose protean nature means it can only do slime things when it remembers that it’s a slime and can only do lawyer things when it remembers that it’s a lawyer.

When in full-on lawyer mode, Wobblesque's body reshapes into a humanoid form with a perfect gumdrop blue slime head and a hollow resonating chamber inside that produces mellifluous human speech and it is able to follow, if a bit rigidly, complex internalized knowledge..

When reminded too strongly of being a slime, poor J. Wobbling's assumed form collapses into jelly, which is then drawn back into what had been its head, and the shifting currents of its colloidal nervous system can no longer make sense of arcane humanoid systems or rules.

The most dangerous times for Wobblesque, career-wise, is when it is required to exercise large amounts of creativity and flexibility, as this relaxes the rigid tension needed to maintain a vaguely human-ish shape of both body and thought patterns.

So within its law firm it has a reputation for being an absolute powerhouse of a workhorse when it comes to paperwork and documentation and the most rigid, formal sorts of filings and declarations.

But it's a poor trial lawyer, as trying to think on its feet only reminds it that it has feet, or at least, broad round stumpeties at the end of noodle-like extrusions that serve it as legs, and once it starts thinking about how it is even standing up, it's likely to fall down.

Valued associate, unlikely to ever make partner for various reasons but holding onto that as a goal is how it holds onto the knowledge of the law. Senior partners explain its value thusly: with Wobblesque, you either get a slime *or* a lawyer, never both, and you know which one.

It has never thought much about its origins, because as a lawyer, Wobblesque *can't* think about them, and as a slime, Wobbles has no reason to, but a friendly and interested paralegal believes it was born when a mimic and a blue slime simultaneously ate each other and a lawyer.

An evil alchemist who has been trailing, studying, and occasionally trying to trap Wobblesque in order to produce an army of single-minded, nigh-indestructible slime-person soldiers, found her notes and tried to reproduce the circumstances described.

He failed, not because the paralegal's theory was wrong but because it's incomplete; what she doesn't know and can't know -- what nobody knows except Wobblesque, who doesn't know that it knows it -- is that the lawyer also started eating the monsters back, purely out of spite.

This is one of the example characters I created for demonstrating the character design process in my tabletop project. It started with just the idea of "blue slime lawyer" and grew as I took that concept through the steps of the process.

Having now summed up this information in one place for people who aren't me, I'm refining the identities a bit: Wobblesque (he/him) is the lawyer form, Wobbles (it/it) is the slime form. People (including Wobblesque, briefly and carefully) use "they/they" to refer to the gestalt.

Or I guess he would use "we/us"; the point is that the collective being that is Wobbles[que] is plural and uses plural pronouns, while Wobbles the simple, carefree, and flexible slime... actually I guess Wobbles would be [any].

The editorial pronouns for Wobbles as an example character will remain "it/it"; it does not refer to or think about itself in any meaningful sense but if it did, those would be the pronouns it would use.

But as an agender and asexual mass of mostly undifferentiated colloidal ooze, other people will inevitably project their won assumptions onto its placid, glossy gumdrop form and so use whatever pronouns makes sense to them.

I don't have a visual imagination so I am not "picturing" this character in any sense, but I am thinking that Wobbles would look a very shiny 3D and lifelike resolution version of the classic 8-bit Dragon Quest blue slime monster...

...and Wobblesque is that on top of a very oddly cut and tailored suit, fashioned to nicely fit on a body that is something like a cross between Gumby and one of those inflatable flailing arm windsock/balloon guys outside car dealerships.

Wobblesque's suit appears a darker blue when he wears it. The fibers are translucent tubes built from substances extracted from ethically sourced black dragon scales and is extremely resistant to corrosion. The alchemist who was contracted for this is the one who now stalks them.

When Wobblesque collapses into Wobbles, Wobbles oozes out of the suit then uses its otherwise cosmetic mouth to open Wobblesque's briefcase of holding and drag the suit inside it before hopping back out and shutting it.

The briefcase is a handsfree model with the Dancing enchantment (as in familiar adventurer items Dancing Scimitar or Dancing Shield) and a contingency that activates it and makes it follow the owner, in case the owner should set it down and forget about it.

How and why Wobbles retains and chooses to act on the impulse to stash the suit without fail is something no one has been able to explain, given how otherwise impossible it has proven for Wobblesque to pass on any kind of instructions or priorities to his other self.