Warrl wrote:
As for Raine... what is our source of information about the spell on that collar? Her. What's her source of information and when did she get that information? She got it from a guardian-slash-jailer when she was young. The guardian may have been misinformed. The guardian may have simplified (even over-simplified) the explanation for a young child. She may have misunderstood the explanation. Her mother and guardians may have also deliberately chosen to not teach her accurate information about magic so that (among other possible reasons) she could not mess with the spell on the collar.
Also, until fairly recently halfbreeds were impossible. She could not have been a halfbreed; she had to be a were, with a fully-human form and a fully-keidran form. Neither would necessarily be the default, but a shape-stabilization spell would tend to lock her into her current form and might sap her magical energies to sustain that spell (while leaving open the possibility that when sufficiently desperate she could do other magic). Now halfbreeds are possible, and she is one, so she could have a halfbreed form which would be her logical default. In other words, the universe may have retconned her.
Him wrote:Except she is not a halfbreed. Raine is a human who cannot control her perfect transformation ability. Magic appears to be genetic in Twokinds. She got the power of her mother, and her abilities from her father. Unfortunately, she cannot control the ability like her father. That's why she needs the magic suppressor. To keep her ability that she got from her father in check.
I agree that Raine may not be fully aware of the abilities of the cuffs, since Mary enchanted them shortly after she regained her humanity.
What makes us (and everyone in-universe) so sure that she was ever fully human in the first place? The rules set in place by the Masks previously precluded that possibility, and such a pairing between Mary and Euchre could have resulted in an individual who had bistable forms: human and keidran, with the only way of Raine's existence being possible is to have inherited the magical abilities from the father. But now with Ephemeral allowing the pairings between human and keidran, there is now a possibility for monostability in the form of a half-breed.
My rationale is this:
1. Since there is the possibility of Raine not being fully informed about the cuffs (please inform me otherwise) what's to say that the cuffs in fact don't "turn her human," where in fact they do, in addition to suppressing her ability to change between forms.
2. Precluding #1, the only other time we've seen here change was when she was relatively calm, so she might have willed herself back with the help of the cuffs, where it is possible that the only allowable magic is the shifting to human.
3. In the case of #1 and #2, the cuffs only permissible form is that of a human. Upon being broken, Raine's magic had nowhere to go but into her transformation ability, and with the added stress of the assassin situation, caused her form to change much like that of a overdamped oscillator, overshooting the mid-form, and changing her fully into a keidran. Upon this magic running out, due to the keidran not being able to draw mana as efficiently from the environment as humans, she would revert to the most stable form, a half-breed, which up until this point was restricted by either Ephemeral or the cuffs.
Lurk moar; it's never enough.
