Deceiver

'Important note: This species was created with vore in mind so there will be references to it throughout this (both fatal and non-fatal). If you don’t like vore this species doesn’t have to be used for it but please keep this in mind when reading, thank you!' Deceivers are a physically sexless, predatory species largely found in the tropical continent of Malina. Their roots of origin lie in an unusual forest called Turnaway Forest, the only known location where the species feels comfortable enough to reproduce, making them a rare species.

Deceivers are feared and famous for the unique ability of shapeshifting into whatever suits their environment or situation in the moment. This has made them one of the most widely feared predators in Faria as some deceivers know how to use this ability to its fullest potential. Deceivers are one of only two species left in Faria capable of producing magic by simply being present in the world.

History
Deceivers have an important footnote in history that they themselves have forgotten long ago. They were a species created by the ancient titans, a gigantic species that once walked Faria and created it's earliest thriving worldwide civilization. When their extinction loomed due to dwindling food resources, they tried to create deceivers to use as an additional conduit of magic in their place as their closest cousins, the capres, were not powerful or numerous enough to resupply the world with magic in their place.

This attempt failed, however. While deceivers were certainly capable of magic through grasping elements and other species could use magic through them, they had little interest in preserving the knowledge or using magic unless prompted to it. The titans inadvertently created a near-ultimate apex predator that needed to eat constantly to maintain it's constantly burning energy, so other species didn't want to be anywhere near them, making them a useless conduit. A mistake made in the process had caused the deceivers to be extremely sensitive to static charges and extremes in temperature, which limited their potential habitat. This was a blessing in disguise to the titans, knowing full well the deceivers were a rushed effort and thus a complete failure in magical conservation.

With time running short, they allowed the deceivers to carry on existing while they fled through the Titan Gates. Strangely, deceivers would come to settle in the Turnaway Forest they were created in, reluctant to spread themselves further beyond the tree line. From here, they remained contentedly cut off from the wider world for thousands of years.

It can be safely assumed from here that deceivers carried on living freely in Turnaway Forest, as deceivers have never kept any written record of their history and have long forgotten this important role they were intended to fulfill.

While the deceivers by technicality can be seen as non-native to Faria, they have been around for so long compared to other introduced or created species that they have perfectly integrated with the world.

Biology
Because of the sheer range of physical forms a deceiver could take, it's not possible to accurately pin down baseline anatomy. Deceivers have been noted to take all manner of forms imitating wildlife around them, but the most common baseline shape is a slender humanoid form. This gives them a less threatening appearance as well as keeping their mass compacted to stop them from being hurt or separated too easily. Deceivers may or may not have a tail, but tails with an additional mouth on the end are commonplace.

Deceivers have two eyes that are all white with no clear pupils or irises of any kind. While they can easily create additional false eyes, only their original ones can see. Deceivers cannot morph their eyes, change their colour and still need them to see. Smarter deceivers will create a translucent film over their eyes out of mass like an eyelid with spots of colour on to mimic more typical eyeballs to make their disguises more convincing, though these are more difficult to see clearly through. Deceivers most commonly have a broad, slightly flattened head sporting extensions of unknown purpose and a pair of arms and legs, limbs may end in roughly shaped hand and feet or in rounded tips.

A deceivers entire body is made of a substance called mass. Mass is a strange, semi-blob/gel-like material that a deceiver has full control over, like a single muscle that can move any which way. Deceivers can manipulate mass in a lot of ways. Their mass can simultaneously function as a nose, tongue or experience sensations of external stimuli such as sexual pleasure or the reception of pain. Deceivers are capable of extending out bits of mass to allocate the sensation of sexual pleasure to if desired, easily able to recreate more typical genitalia of any sort if they know how.

Deceivers need oxygen to live like any organism. Their mass takes in oxygen and energy from meals and passes it to all the inner parts, including the stomach if there is someone in there they wish to keep alive.

For defensive purposes, deceivers prefer their mass strongly coloured and solid enough to hide and protect their core. Mass can be made more translucent to a point where they’re almost completely see through, but some pigmentation will always remain. Their bodies are very delicately held together in this form as it takes a lot of concentration to retain being "invisible". Keen senses will still detect deceivers in hiding and they can be startled out of it if you get the jump on them first.

Shapeshifting
As their name suggests, deceivers can imitate things that they've seen, tasted or digested with varying accuracy. The more that they've experienced of a shape, the easier, faster and more accurate their imitation is. For instance, if they see a person or creature they want to copy, they can eyeball them and change to look vaguely similar after quite a bit of work, but this imitation won't be very accurate and miss a lot of key details missed from distant observation. If they instead ate and digested them, a deceiver could do it much faster and look a lot more natural as their cores have the ability to commit a "blueprint" of sorts to an intricate memory store of every biological organism a deceiver has ever eaten.

Having total control of their body means that a friendly deceiver can be extremely useful to people in countless ways. In a vore sense, deceivers have control of digestion as well as what orifices or genitalia they have and can swallow things from any part of their body, even to the point of being able to hug someone and allow them to sink inside them.

Basic shapeshifting techniques every deceiver knows off by heart can include but not be limited to:


 * Changing their body's consistency so things can (or can't) sink into their mass.
 * Changing colour from their natural colour like a chameleon, though they will always revert back to a default colour.
 * Altering the amount of mass that is allocated to each body part.
 * Making their mass less or more translucent as well as heavier or lighter.
 * Temporary creation of additional appendages.

Size Changing
Deceivers can change size at will depending on how much mass they have. To shrink, deceivers simply stores mass in their core until they reach the bare minimum needed to function normally, enough for them to stand 4 inches tall. The bigger they are, the more stretched their mass. If a deceiver has grown to a huge size and doesn't have a huge amount of mass to back it up, it's extremely vulnerable and can be hurt or knocked over very easily due to being next to weightless.

Controlled body parts
They have the ability to control parts of themselves remotely. They can only do this for a short amount of time before the separated part/s become inactive and dies. While they can't fuse back with any dead mass of theirs, they can still absorb it like food, only this process takes longer and they don't get all the mass they lost back, if the mass isn’t long dead then the deceiver can absorb its memory of sensations into their own.

Cloning
The farthest a deceiver can push this ability to control an extension of themselves is to make another copy of their body. This copy is much weaker than the original and in order to have it survive outside their mass they have to create a temporary fake core or simply lend the copy a lot of their mass so the copy can think on its own. The copy eventually will run out of energy without the real core providing it and becomes inert. If the original body fuses back together with their copy they will take their memories as their own.

Deceivers don't need brains but the mass around them is basically an extension of their brain (so impulses and space take up their body) so the more mass they have on the outside and inside the more efficient their brains/minds are.

Regeneration
While they can regenerate, deceivers can't do this infinity. As long as they have the mass or energy spare, they can create new limbs and with more mass they can create excess limbs if desired. Excess limbs are usually temporary and can be reverted if a deceiver is attacked or startled.

Shedding
Another technique deceivers have is the option to harden their outer layer of skin; this is called shedding. Shedding kills the mass that it is done to but makes it hard and durable and can protect the deceiver from further damage. They can survive others digestive system largely intact this way. Doing this uses a lot of mass and unless the deceiver in question has a lot of it then they can't do it for very long without needing food.

Shedding also means deceivers can make their bodies into weapons. Deceivers cannot make anything as complicated as firearms and can't make a sharp edge without shedding some of their skin into a hard edge to do so, they mainly make do with either enveloping their prey, or using blunt force trauma, sometimes strengthened with shedding.

Deceivers can make more set changes to their body that they would not lose upon losing their focus/consciousness but this takes a mixture of lots of time spent in these forms uninterrupted and experience with what form changes they are trying to achieve. It can take a long time but these changes can eventually become a part of their default form. Smart and patient deceivers will usually make small changes gradually and work their way up as it’s less intense on their body to adjust to.

Keen adaptability
Deceivers are highly adaptable to a range of environments. Able to live well in forests, lower elevations of mountains, caves and anywhere fairly even and temperate deceivers can push this adaptability further by mimicking the most successful predators in their area and copying traits from them or choosing to disguise themselves as such predators, either to compete directly with them or directly eat their competition to perfect their form. Cunning deceivers may also disguise themselves as top predators preferred prey in order to ambush them.

Deceivers can live in water as long as a small amount of them is above the water. They can develop gills to fully live underwater or a gill/lung mixture but this takes some time. If a deceiver was forced completely underwater they could likely escape confines and surface if they can swim well enough, but deceivers less experienced with water or with not enough blueprints of water-faring creatures would struggle to get out of such situations.

Element Control
Unlike many of Faria's species, deceivers are a conduit species, able to exude magic from their bodies naturally as a source. With this magic, they can learn a basic element, how it works and use it as a tool or weapon if they are pushed to it. These are commonly basics basics like fire, water, earth and wind but they can learn to control other elements and powers such as metal, poison, ice and most rarely electricity.

Elemental control can be a big advantage to deceivers but this skill is more commonly found in friendly or loner type deceivers than their adverse cousins in the wild. Deceivers usually can't control their elements to mass destruction levels, typically they have enough power to sufficiently defend themselves from threats, but with excess mass to convert into magic, they could push themselves harder at the cost of mass.

This skill is not a common one in deceivers and usually it takes something major in a deceivers life that gives them a push to want to learn such things, usually to protect themselves from something they’re deeply afraid of or consider to be a major threat.

There are numerous downsides to elemental use. For uncertain reasons it seems to cause unavoidable and very stark colour changes that reflect with it. While this on its own is not a problem it makes it very easy to identify elemental deceivers if you know what you’re looking for, especially as outside of temporary colour changing deceivers only have a single natural colour or a soft lighter or darker hue of their base colour. This often will paint them as a target to those seeking to make a fortune off of them or research them rather brutally to learn how they can access magic.

Additionally, using an element is very intense work. Creating elements from mass requires converting mass and energy into magic for use. There are different amounts of affinity a deceiver can have with the elements, the closer they are to it, the more colouration reflecting that element there is on their body. Having high affinity can have downsides for a deceiver, for instance, a water elemental deceiver may find that they lose mass via water being absorbed from soil they walk on or having it evaporate off of them. A fire elemental deceiver may give out a lot of body heat, unknowingly making others uncomfortable and using up mass. A meeting between high-affinity elemental deceivers wouldn’t go very well either. A fire deceiver and water deceiver would make each other especially uncomfortable.

A dedicated deceiver can gain affinity with more than one element but would have to be careful shapeshifting the higher their affinities become as the differently attuned mass may interact and cancel each other out, resulting in a loss of mass/energy. This also takes years of dedication to achieve, and many deceivers are usually too sidetracked with trying to support their cores needs to become much in the way of an ultimate elemental.

Absorption
The most intricate ability a deceiver has with their shapeshifting is the ability to devour a person and absorb the personality and memories of that person into their core as a part of them, as long as the person is alive when they are devoured and digested or their brain is intact enough to salvage memories from. This process is permanent and can never be undone, once the deceiver dies they take their absorbed personality with them and the act cannot be repeated with another deceiver.

A deceiver can generally cope with accepting one personality alongside their own personality. It can take some time and getting used to as the individual absorbed into them also retains their sense of self. The absorbed person also must get used to sharing a new body that is typically very alien to them as deceivers deviate massively from other biological lifeforms. It can be a tricky process for both parties to get used to sharing the same body but it is possible for two to be one easily with some time and patience. This is usually easier if the two personalities are able to get along with each other or already knew one another prior.

The original personality will retain dominance while keeping their other personality in a safe extension like putting them into a limb of their own or sharing their body in turns. If they have gotten used to each other and the new personality has become familiar with their new body, the deceiver may put themselves to ‘sleep’ for a time and let their other personality take over to do whatever they like. It’s even possible for the new personality to learn to shapeshift as well and take on their old form again, but this can take a long time to master, even with their blueprint available.

Absorption is seen by less wild deceivers to be a very personal choice and they will not do this for just anyone. This is because it can be extremely damaging to a deceivers sanity to do this to too many people. If a deceiver was to absorb several people in this fashion it would create a case of extreme chaos in the deceivers mind. The many different personalities and memories all trying to fight for dominance over the body, trying to understand what’s going on and any other chaos can all be far too much for the original personality to bear. Deceivers living in this chaotic condition will live on a teetering edge of trying to retain themselves. Others will give in and become a chaotic state that will wildly attack and devour anything, often absorbing more personalities into them. This is one reason a friendly or loner deceiver could turn adverse.

Deceiver Organs
Deceivers only have two organs which can be found anywhere in their body as they can be moved around. The colour of these organs depends on the original colour of the deceiver and does not change even if the deceiver works to change their default colour.

The Core
The core of a deceiver is the most important part of their entire body. It houses the personality and memories of the deceiver and is root of all control over deceivers shapeshifting. The core is typically only around 1-3 centimetres in size. Cores can have different appearances based on pure chance at conception, but they typically have the appearance of geometric shapes of any sort surrounding an orb of energy. The colour is also dependent on the original colour of the deceiver, it’s usually darker or lighter and more crystalline in appearance to their original hue.

It's best described like a deceivers brain, the rest of the body cannot hope function without it if it is damaged or destroyed. A deceivers core is not invulnerable to damage, they’re not easy to break but if they’re damaged badly enough they can cause lasting damage to a deceiver and their ability to hold a stable form. If the core is completely shattered they will die, and all information stored inside dies with them. A deceiver will also die if their core is separated from their body for too long by removing the core from their mass and their core runs out of energy without the external mass able to provide the core fresh energy reserves.

It can convert mass to pure energy to hold inside itself and back again so the deceiver has some extra mass for an emergency. If a deceiver is eaten and digested or just loses a lot of their mass in some manner, a small amount of their mass is absorbed back into their core as a sort of last resort method. This mass is enough to maintain a heart and some leftover for consumption. Every 5 minutes or so, a faint film of mass will cover the core to sense any nearby prey before retreating back into the core to wait for direct contact to be felt on the core. Once the core comes into contact with anything edible, even something as insignificant as a fly landing on it, the core will immediately attack, envelop and digest it with some mass without discrimination. This slowly builds the form back up again until the deceiver regains enough mass to make themselves a small body to get on the move again, usually to find meals to get more mass back with.

Deceivers who haven’t eaten for some time will store all external mass in their core to wait for a meal. Deceivers who have stored a large amount of mass in their core are able to wait for the most suitable meals to come close to/into contact with their core without their cores reactive, destructive instinct kicking in.

The Heart
The heart of a deceiver is a much more simple organ than it seems from the name. It allows their body to create and distribute cells across their mass. The core creates this organ to allocate the task of cell production to it so it has less work to do.

The heart needs to have fuel from food to create new cells since deceiver cells cannot divide. Because of this, deceivers must eat 5% of their bodyweight an hour in order to gain even just a small enough portion of mass to replace the cells lost during the same hour, but ideally they should eat at least 15% to have supplementary mass to store for emergencies.

Behaviour
Deceivers living with other species commonly feel the need to be a certain gender depending on which they feel most comfortable with, although they can be any sex and gender they wish and move from one to the other at will. Those who choose a specific gender identity often tend to follow the example of what other species find attractive in a very exaggerated manner due to a lack of understanding of many social norms, which do tend to vary from species to species. This is also a common strategy for luring in prey among more wild deceivers.

Some deceivers may choose to not bother with any gender, either finding themselves comfortable identifying without a particular gender or just finding the notion to be too much effort to put thought into. These deceivers switch to whatever is convenient in the moment to get a meal and otherwise don’t care at all.

Deceiver Subtypes
Because of the existing fear and stigma against deceivers there are three main subtypes of deceiver that are commonly identified for distinction sake:

Friendly
Friendly deceivers are much more sociable with other species than most deceivers, willing to try their hand at participating in civilization and make connections with people. They may or may not always be disguised to blend in with the area they live in, this could be down to personal choice or fear of being discriminated against or hurt if their true species is found out. A friendly deceiver can be extremely useful to a populated area with construction, military or heavy duty cleaning as well as pulling a huge amount of people into a brothel due to the fact they can probably fulfil almost any fetish dreams a person could have.

Out of the deceivers that are friendly, most usually don't have any desire to eat or kill people and wish to coexist with them peacefully, though exceptions for self-defense or protecting others can occur. They do however still have to eat regularly so they will go hunting in the Outer Lands for wildlife/plants for the day, or meet up with friends after work/hunting and eat their fill in a tavern to keep their mass up.

It should be noted that "friendly" is an erroneous term, and in this context simply means a deceiver is willing to socialize with people, it doesn't mean they are always nice to people or that others can actually tolerate their company.

Loner
Loner deceivers may live in a populated area or camp on the outskirts as a passive observer who visits settlements when they need supplies. They do not readily make friends and most likely will keep their species to themselves. A loner doesn't always target other species as food, but they are not above eating them or otherwise hurting people if they feel the need, though they would do this discreetly so no one can catch them out for it or chase them off.

Some loners might more bold in proclaiming devious acts depending on their personality, but this rarely ends well as they lack the recklessness needed to pull them off with full confidence. Smarter loners keep their plans to themselves and act when the time is right, of if they are very very desperate for food and hunting has turned up nothing.

Adverse
Adverse deceivers are completely wild deceivers that have next to no experience or interest in attempting to socialize with other species. They are extremely dangerous and will kill and absorb many people, thinking of them as nothing more than food. Adverse deceivers are usually identified quite fast when they attack settlements as they rarely if ever cover their tracks and think far too little of other species to take needed precautions to hide themselves when they go for the kill in an ambush.

While they can be easy to confront due to being more confrontational than other deceivers, they can still be difficult to catch or get under control. These deceivers typically live fully wild but stalk nearby towns in their territory to prey on. Adverse deceivers are largely, albeit inadvertently, responsible for the poor reputation their friendlier cousins share in.

Adverse deceivers may attack anything wildly with little rhyme or reason if they have absorbed too many personalities of past prey into themselves, this being a common cause of deceivers becoming adverse even if they were friendly or a loner before. Adverse deceivers are commonly referred to as feral or wild deceivers. Friendly and loner deceivers dislike being compared to them and will often take it as an insult to their intellect and efforts to be more social.

Deceivers as Predators
Deceivers require mass and energy to survive. Their cells cannot replicate so they must eat large amounts to keep their mass up. As one would expect, deceivers make terrifyingly good predators thanks to their shape shifting abilities, which they use to maximum advantage. When it comes to hunting, deceivers greatly favour an ambush approach towards their prey. They're often far too cautious to brazenly approach a meal and expect it to go along willingly, so they prefer to disguise themselves and hide until just the right moment to pounce. If their disguises are broken or their meal detects something is off they will often abandon the hunt and move onto the next target unless they are desperate.

Deceivers can circumvent digestion for people they like and want to keep safe. This is done by bringing extra oxygen into their body to allow their occupants to breathe normally and protect them from being suffocated, along with keeping their digestive enzymes under control by halting enzyme production wherever their meal is stored. The deceiver will have to eat and digest something/someone eventually to recover mass and cells, so they can't keep a meal inside them forever unless they create a new storage chamber for themselves, though this is quite cumbersome for a deceiver to do as it would inhibit their hunting and reduce movement speed.

When it comes to prey for a deceiver, they’re not usually picky about what they will eat. They can’t afford to be choosy over their meals when their cells can’t divide, so they’ll take and fully exploit any opportunity for food. This puts pretty much any sapient species on the menu depending on what is available to them, as well as many kinds of wild/domestic animals. Deceivers have been noted to have favourite prey however, so they like to stalk outside of settlements of their favourite food for a time, smart deceivers may also eat a single member from the settlement of their preferred food and take their place to get access to more of them, a dangerous problem for any settlement to have.

Deceivers as Prey
Deceivers have many tricks up their sleeve to avoid being eaten in the first place, so more often than not they may get preyed upon purely by accident due to being in disguise, which usually doesn't end well for the predator. If a situation did turn in such a way that a deceiver found themselves inside of another's stomach, they can just as easily survive the process of being eaten themselves.

Thanks to how they work, a deceiver can't really be digested completely in the same way other biological lifeforms would be in this predicament. They can avoid losing mass altogether by just retreating into their core to hide until the predator eventually lets them out of their body through either passage, which would likely happen sooner rather than later as deceiver cores are very tough to digest.

It's also possible for them to be digested entirely while still having their backup mass to use when they come out again. Volunteering themselves as a meal may be something a friendly deceiver would offer as a service for someone who was hungry (in exchange for reigels or something they want) or do with a close friend they place a lot of trust in. Even wild deceivers have found use in allowing themselves to temporarily become a meal, before migratory birds leave Turnaway Forest for the year, some deceivers might use the opportunity to get over the electric fence keeping them in by getting one of these birds to eat them. They have to time this right before they leave because migrations are also a perfect opportunity for deceivers to hunt for food, so they wouldn't want to end up in the stomach of another deceiver, they can't eat each other or it would risk a rejection occurring in both parties. When it works however, this allows deceivers to cross the fence and venture into the open world.

Diet
Deceivers will eat nearly anything to recover lost mass and add to stored supplies. Turnaway Forest is full of many species of plants that would easily grow out of control anywhere else, so these make an easy meal in a pinch, but there are also lots of fruits, nuts, vegetables, roots available if a deceiver can't catch any meat. The only things they can't digest so easily are clothes, bones or hair, so these will usually be discarded discreetly. In truth, deceivers can digest almost anything weaker than stone but the digestion process would use more energy than that granted by the food, so most deceivers wouldn’t bother digesting everything on the person they've eaten unless they wanted to leave no trace, or ‘own’ their meal entirely.

Weaknesses
Deceivers are very frightening predators, but not without weaknesses that can be exploited to protect against being eaten by a deceiver, or simply expose a deceiver. Most deceivers will move onto their next meal once they are found out since they rely on ambush methods, but not all of them.

Deceivers, while they can shapeshift quickly, cannot maintain very good accuracy when rushed, as they need time to pull off proper shape shifting and they do better with eating what they want to copy enough times. This means they can’t get a new change correct enough on the first try without causing an uncanny valley in others. Taking the time needed to iron out imperfections also can leave a deceiver vulnerable in the heat of the moment.

They cannot imitate hair or clothes well. Hair would just be coloured mass like the rest of them and would not feel natural. The clothes would seem normal at a distance but would lack logos and finer details, reflect light strangely and feel completely wrong. Deceivers may keep the clothes of victims stored inside them to wear so they can blend in. Some might wear them all the time because they want to, but most find they’re more comfortable without them or putting disguises on their clothes. Smart deceivers sometimes keep the hair of their victims to use as part of a disguise if needed to get hair looking more correct. This just means they keep a small area inside them open and containing the hairs and they move these up so they're sticking out when they change form, though the hair may still look like a rats nest it sometimes works.

Deceivers are very sensitive to extreme temperatures. They hate extreme cold as it causes their cells to slow and makes them very sluggish and unable to shift as quickly as normal. Cold won't kill a deceiver but they certainly dislike it enough to avoid it. Their exact cold tolerance isn’t known but it can be assumed they would avoid anywhere further north than the northern parts of Nowe, Andor and high mountain peaks where average temperatures are colder. Too much heat can cause shedding on their outer layer quite fast, meaning their appetites can accelerate to a degree they may not be able to keep up with. In Malina and Sphraga, especially during heat waves, living with a deceiver in the area can become much more dangerous when their appetite skyrockets due to the heat so efforts are made to try to move them to a cooler area to get them under control. The biggest weakness a deceiver has is that they hate electricity as it can totally disrupt their bodies and forms. If a deceiver is electrocuted, even by a strong static spark, it can throw off any colour change back to their real colour and stronger voltages will cause a deceivers body to go haywire. This is due to a deceivers body being like a single muscle that can change its function at will. Because of this, unlike most biological lifeforms that have hundreds of muscles that can absorb a shock up to a point, deceivers only have one muscle that all electricity in an instant. A deceiver that takes a powerful enough shock will fall into a dormant state where it becomes a puddle of slime with its core now highly vulnerable as they can’t protect them properly. It's not a good idea to touch an electrocuted deceiver without the right gear, mass full of electricity from being electrocuted is still conductive, so if one tried to take away their core without protective gear on then they would get a nasty shock in turn. A deceiver will not die from being electrocuted but they will be put out of action for a good while, more than long enough to make a getaway to safety.

Despite this, tasers, cattle prods and other such tools utilizing electricity are a valuable tool of self defense in Malina; people will literally pay thousands of reigels to get a hold of one just to keep deceivers at bay. This weakness to electricity has been exploited by The Warren, who many decades ago erected an electrical fence powered by an underground generator that runs around the entire radius of Turnaway Forest to trap them inside. Maintenance crews are sent to the generator via an underground subway twice a year to maintain the generator and keep it working.

No one keeps as much of a close eye on the fence itself however, as a result many small holes and gaps under the fence have been exploited by curious deceivers inside, allowing small numbers to escape into the open world.

Spirituality
Deceiver's hold little to no interest in pondering the nature of the world around them, usually thinking more in terms of here, now, what's immediately in front of them and when their next meal will be. As a result they have very little known history or background to their species, never mind unique thoughts on religion due to the somewhat wild existence they lead.

Some deceivers might have heard of The Family in passing but pay little mind to it or just accept whatever they've been told at face value without questioning it, but they would not be ideal to attempt to convert to religion as you'd quickly get a headache trying to get them to take an interest or even understand what you're talking about.

Treating Other Species
Deceivers wanting to be part of society may change their natural appearance to coincide with their fellows. One example of this would be if a deceiver was accepted into a naga clan or village, they may change their legs to be more that of a naga tail, as to fit in more but still appear as a deceiver. They can do the same with other changes like growing wings and learning to fly if they live with harpies or other flying creatures, developing gills and fins and learning to swim to live underwater entirely with sea creatures and so on. Settlement residents will often never know their new arrival is a deceiver, as many prefer to hide their species under a disguise.

In terms of how deceivers might choose to treat others around them, they could be as caring and loving as the sweetest person on the planet, or as sinister as an evil radioactive shark with a cigar riding an asteroid into an orphanage, and everything in between.

Deceivers have little to no preconceptions, positive or negative, of other species due to being so isolated from them. Many people are afraid of deceivers for their abilities and for the reputation that the more wild members of their species create. As a result it can make it hard for them to find somewhere to fit in sometimes, though not impossible. Part of what makes this hard is there are rumors of a boomtown somewhere in Malina where deceivers ate the entire population and are now all acting in their place as them to prey on visitors, but no one knows for sure.

Treating Each Other
Deceivers usually see each other as rivals or threats and tend to stay away from one another. A deceiver cannot usually devour a rival deceiver with the intention to digest as not only would the eaten deceiver change their mass so it starts eating away at the predator’s mass (and vice versa) but the prey's core would end up trying to be fused by the predator's mass.

This can cause a rejection which affects both cores, resulting in death of both. This also makes absorption with deceivers impossible too so any additional personalities will only have one extra chance at life. An especially evil deceiver could in theory erase fellow deceiver’s cores without killing them and then using them as extra nodes inside itself, although this would be considered a grave sin by all deceivers. If a deceiver really wanted to eat another with the intention of adding to its own mass, then it would have to remove the core from its victim first (which would cause death) then make its mass its own.

Deceivers can allow themselves to be absorbed by a lover or trusted fellow by finding that specific deceiver’s core and mass' "wavelength" and tuning to it so no rejection occurs, though this is not being ingested, but rather...

Reproduction
Mating is a very unusual act for deceivers, both in its execution and how regularly it happens.

Witnessing a pair of deceivers mating is said to be one of the rarest occurrences in all of Faria. To this day no filmed footage of it exists but a single photograph of it happening has been taken. It’s such a rare event because they adamantly refuse to breed anywhere but within Turnaway Forest and in complete seclusion from others where they feel safe enough. Deceivers also have very little trust in one another as a species, so building up a close bond is difficult among their own kind.

The act of mating consists of two deceivers who love each other fusing with each other's bodies for a while. During this, their cores can move around inside freely, if the cores touch in the right way and each deceivers core and mass hit the right "wavelength", one can get impregnated. The equivalent of deceivers being "pregnant" is that one deceiver will now have a new core inside their body, regardless of their chosen sex or gender identity.

This pregnancy is potentially very short lived. It's entirely dependent on how long it takes for the impregnated deceiver to find enough food to produce enough mass for the offspring to grow from and how much excess mass the deceiver and their mate gave to the new core between them. Once the new core has absorbed enough mass the deceiver will just ‘know’ by pure instinct when it's ready for the world and unceremoniously shed the new core from their body, dropping it on the ground and leaving it there to go on with their life.

From there a new deceiver grows and takes shape, already adult human sized if given that much mass to start with and with the intelligence capacity and grasp on baseline concepts of an adult. They are however still inexperienced at how to function as a deceiver, so they need to roam and watch other deceivers living their lives to learn from them about how to survive and shapeshift, though they are born with enough knowledge and vague understandings from their parents to start with.

Life Cycle
Deceivers from the moment they're "born" have no parents or relatives that they know of, very much thrust into the world and expected to figure it out for themselves with whatever knowledge was passed onto them by their parents. Deceivers are as intelligent as an adult human at “birth” and if given enough information to start with, may already have a decent vocabulary if their parents have a good amount between them, along with passing on knowledge on survival their offspring will need to learn further context in order to apply it properly.

Deceivers are a rare species, and while this can be attributed to their highly limited range and reluctance to expand it, it can also be put down to how few new deceivers are "born", a best estimate says only 10 new deceivers are born every year, possibly fewer than that. Luckily these few new deceivers can learn quickly, and in Turnaway Forest there’s never a shortage of their kind around so most grow up successfully. This is thought to be why deceivers cannot bring themselves to mate outside their home as it would severely affect their offspring's chances of survival since they don't parent their offspring, but nobody really knows for sure, not even the deceivers themselves.

New deceivers live off of fruits, nuts, leaves, carrion and other easy to find meals until enough years go by where they feel they’re old enough to have the confidence to tackle hunting. When this happens depends, but this does happen around the same time a deceiver reaches sexual maturity/adulthood. It's not known when exactly this happens as their growth has been too little witnessed to be reliably documented since Turnaway Forest is so dangerous and closed off. An estimate has been placed around at least 18-20 years like in humans, but it could be less or more. Deceivers themselves seem to just know they’re ready to mate and tackle hunting when the time comes for it, like a sudden realization coming to them out of the blue.

Deceivers don’t go through the typical stages of life that most lifeforms do, they’re best seen as newly formed adults that need to learn how to be adults from observation of others. It remains unknown how long a deceivers lifespan runs for, estimates have been placed at around 80 years or so. Some scientists think it could be longer or shorter based on their constant need for food to create new cells and the longevity of their core. The available knowledge on deceivers gathered is not enough to say for sure. The lifespan of a deceiver is only one of many things that are a mystery about this unusual, amorphous species.