Trust Machines Writers' Guide v1.12 (Last updated Dec 2019)
Imagine a TF booth with a twist. Outside is a single control, that sets the duration of the change. Put some money in (or any token - has to be a smallish object, no bigger than a paperback book), the duration display comes up. Set the time to thirds of a day, 1-3 days, 1-3 months or 1-3 years, touch the time display to confirm. Two doors appear - bits of the wall of the booth just vanish, rather than sliding or irising out of the way.
Inside the booth, between the two sides, is a transparent interface panel. Once a mentally competent being enters a side, the door vanishes again. The door will still close if said being is currently transformed into a state that makes them unable to choose. (See Inanimate/Incapacitated Subjects below both for competence, and reaction to inanimates.)
The interface is largely touch-based. The center is taken up by the currently selected image, which follows the movements of the person on the other side. An array of ‘bubbles’ around the edge of the image show variations on the central one. Touching one changes the central image to suit, and a new set of ‘surrounding’ bubbles that are variants on that theme show up. The new variants tend to trend in the direction already selected - if you make someone bigger-chested, the bubbles show more bigger choices than smaller ones. (Beyond the first ring of bubbles are more and more smaller and fainter ones, turning into a foam of random ideas at the fringes of the display. Touching into that area at random produces very random results.)
The other major display elements are two large round ‘buttons’. To the door-side is a red one that cancels the change and opens the doors. (It also resets both people to their original form, if subject to a prior Trust Machine change), and mirroring it on the other side is a green one. (The door-away orientation means if your partner in the other side points at their red button, they point at yours as well.)
The green button applies the selected change to the person in the other side of the booth. Once one person selects a change, the green buttons go through moon-like phases from Full to New. This takes about 48 seconds, and at the end of that time, if the second person hasn’t selected anything, the doors open and the interface goes off. If the second person selects a change in that time, the doors open immediately. The abort buttons vanish when either party selects a change, they’re mostly there to get you unstuck if nobody enters the other half of the booth.
The first person to press the green button can still apply further changes, in the 48 seconds before the green button vanishes and the door opens. This isn’t widely known at first.
There is a limited amount of voice control. The booth picks up partial phrases and uses them to ‘highlight’ areas in the bubble-foam at the edge that match. So if you say ‘cute dress’, a few bubbles will grow a bit bigger in the edge. Big enough to see they’re there, but not big enough to see the contents well. The chances are, it’s *just* a cute dress, and picking it turns the image in the middle into a floating dress, moving as the partner moves.
There’s no ‘back’ button. Once you’ve picked a dress, it’s hard to change it back to your friend. You can pick a cute girl in a dress, but it’ll be a random person, and generally won’t look much like your partner at all, or much like the dress you found. So if you really like the dress...
The user has a lot of impact on what gets displayed, mostly by what they pick. Venn Machines learn people's preferences and remember them, too. The 'suggestions' it brings up are based on previous picks, so if Sally found a cute dress she really liked (and especially if she said so), then the next time she's in a Venn Machine and said 'cute dress' it'd probably be the most prominently displayed one.
Icon: 3-lobed Venn Diagram. (“Three interlocking circles with a small triangular area in the middle where they all overlap. The middle area glows softly.”) Nobody is sure exactly what it’s supposed to mean. The most popular speculation is that they represent people you trust, people who trust you, and people who are trustworthy - ie, the intersection is the set of people you should enter the machines with. Another interpretation is: people in their right mind, people with the courage to change, and people trusting enough to allow another to change them.
This icon is what leads to the common name for the machines: “Venn Machines”. Note that the series name, Trust Machines, is almost never used in-setting in English. (The French do use a variation on the name as their common term for it, and I suspect the Germans have some complex word that includes both Trust and Venn.)
Duration is in 8h, 1 day, 1 month or 1 year increments. (Astronomical icons: (8h = a wedge of the earth, animated in sync with day icon) Earth going through phases, the Moon going through phases, or an icon of a circle around a yellow star. They get displayed multiple times per press.) Putting in a gift lights up the icons. The payment doesn’t even have to be money - put *anything* (up to the size of a paperback book) in the deposit chute and the icons light up. [Animation rate: Earth cycles every 4s, the Moon every few minutes.]
NOTE: Month is a strict lunar (synodic) month, ends when the moon returns to the same phase it had when the change happened. (About 29.18 to about 29.93 days. 29 days 4h 19m to 29d 22h 19m) Year is a solar (siderial) year, 365d 6h 9 min 9.76 s.
If you press a button more than 3 times, it cycles back around to 1. So the options are: 8h, 16h, 1 day, 2 days, 3 days, 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, 1 year, 2 years, 3 years. If you want less time, you can change back on your own - just open the Trust Machine, enter, and hit reset. If you're inanimate, you'll have to trust that someone else will change you back at the time you requested...
The machines do not hurry you out. Take as long as you want selecting images.
The two people in the machine can hear each other - the interface panel transmits sound readily. The outside wall of the Venn Machine does not transmit sound, or anything else. So when the second door closes, the only thing you can hear is yourself and your partner. There is a diffuse light source inside, from no obvious source.
When the machine is idle, the Venn diagram icon slowly rotates (at minute-hand speed, 48.739 sec for a rotation - the rotation period exactly matches the time-out time of the buttons after someone presses the green one).
Rule Zero
Not everything about the Venn Machines (most notably "why") is outlined here. If you have a question that's not answered here or in the FAQ, ask. Even more so if you want to write about the "edge cases" you can see. Call before you dig.
Sample Transaction
Put money (or whatever) in, duration icons animate. Press the icons to change time (displayed as a larger copy of the time icon in the middle of the display, 1-3 of them as appropriate). Press the middle of the display, and the doors open/appear.
Laura goes into the left side, and her door disappears. The interface shows a green and a red circle.
Roger goes into the right side, and his door disappears. The interface becomes fully active, showing both sides.
They can both pick images by touch or voice suggestion. Laura hits her green button first, and Roger changes into a cute girl who’s quite a bit shorter than Roger originally was. Roger’s display adapts to his new height. Both displays lose the red button, and show the green button changing phases. Both have about 48 seconds to apply further changes, and in this time Roger turns Laura into a bustier version of herself. Since he was mostly fixated on breast size, Laura’s face isn’t quite the same as before, nor are her clothes. At this point, even though there are 20 seconds left, the interface goes away and the doors open.
Both of their clothes have been tailored perfectly to fit their new forms. Roger’s wallet is in a pocket of his new dress, and still shows him as Roger.
When Laura steps out of the booth, her door disappears. The same happens behind Roger, who Laura decides to call Renee. Behind them, unnoticed by both, the display resets to the spinning Venn icon.
If one or the other cannot exit the Venn Machine (while the booth is 4x4x8 inside, the door is closer to 3.5' wide to leave room for the outer interface), the machine will reset after a time, reverting them to their base form.
Inanimate/Incapacitated Subjects
If a person who is incapacitated due to inebriation, being asleep, or being too immature enters, they are ignored by the Venn Machine, and do not get changed by it even if someone else enters with them. The "too immature" limit varies a lot, particularly mature 12-year-olds have been able to use the Venn Machine, and some immature people in their twenties cannot.
If a person who is mentally capable, but not physically capable of pressing the buttons is put into the Venn Machine, they are restored the instant the door closes. This includes taking off bindings and the like if someone is gagged or tied up. More frequently it applies to people who are turned into inanimate forms. However, people who are disabled and unable to touch the screen without assistance cannot use the machines. (There are groups making simple prosthetics that are just good enough to cross the Trust Machines' threshold.)
The previously-inanimate person who's just been ‘reset’ gets a different display. There is a green and a red button. The red button cycles towards nothingness over 48 seconds. At the end of that time, if no button is pressed, everyone in the booth (both sides) are reset to their base forms, and the doors open. If the reset subject (or any reset subject, if there are more than one) hits the red button, the same thing happens. If all the reset subjects hit the green button in time, the Venn Machine operation proceeds as normal.
To let the previously-inanimate subjects know what they’re getting into, the selected duration is displayed. Between the green and red button is an icon matching that on the front of the machine, showing thirds of days, days, months or years as appropriate.
Tiny subjects (either entering that way, or changed that way) get a version of the display that's scaled to suit them, so they can still reach the buttons.
Multiple Subjects
If more than one person is on one side of the machine, they get both get transformed into the selected form. If the form has multiple parts, they get distributed between them. (This includes a girl in a dress - one subject becomes the dress, the other the girl.) If there’s only one object, they’re both inside it. If it’s animate, one of them is in control, selected at random. The person in control gives it up if they fall asleep, or voluntarily relinquish control. The person in control can feel what the other one is trying to do with the body.
If multiple people are in a single inanimate body, they can sense each other to a limited extent. They can’t tell what each other are thinking, but they can sense the intent to move, much like the above.
Animal Forms
Animal forms retain their instincts. The subject is in control of the body, but aware of what the animal ‘wants’ to do. Letting the animal control the body is an all or nothing proposition - once it has control, it generally won’t give it up until it sleeps. The animal ‘mind’ isn’t able to take over, but the animal’s emotional state is felt intensely. If a person is transformed into a deer, and put into a situation where the deer is scared, the person will be scared too, and may react (flee!) before thinking. If you’re willing to let the animal guide you, it becomes much easier to use a distinctly non-human body (snake, bird, etc). A person who allows the animal to drive ‘too much’ will find themselves thinking like the animal over time as they adapt to their current state. See ‘Mental State While Transformed’ for typical ranges (accelerated by a factor of 3 or so due to the active nature of the animal), but someone who resists the animal is unlikely to ever go feral.
Flying is tricky. Without a lot of practice, you have to let the animal drive almost completely, so it will fly pretty much where it wants to, not where you want it to. It is also very easy to end up thinking like the animal if you do this for long, which makes breaking out difficult. Like all things, this improves with practice.
Denied Forms
Some forms simply don’t show up when asked for. Transuranics, explosives of any sort, toxins and the like. The most dangerous weapon one can create is a sword or a crossbow. A gun will only work if ammunition is provided separately, and finding ammunition that fits will generally be an intractable problem.
The Venn Machine doesn’t do printed objects well. If they get changed, the printing ends up in some unknown language. If you want to use your money after the change, put your wallet/purse in a locker. (Most Venn Machines end up with coin-op lockers nearby, ones where you can set the combination lock as keys wouldn’t work when merged into a dress...)
The randomization of printed material extends to most icons as well. Sports logos, and so on, anything stylized. Highly representative images (photographs, paintings) do not get affected, though sometimes the subject subtly changes. Notably, the picture on your photo ID will change to match your new form. This is not as useful as it sounds, as all the text will be illegible.
Wallet contents stay roughly the same (but the text gets muddled) unless the wallet itself is transformed, at which point the contents are random. If your new clothes have pockets matching the old ones, the contents are only lightly muddled (text muddled, including on cellphones, keys reshaped just enough to not fit anythying). If the pockets are substantially rearranged, so are the contents. If you have no pockets, everything that was in your pockets will end up merged into your clothes, or body if you have no clothes.
You can turn people into working electronics with the Venn Machine, but they will be unable to communicate with existing signal protocols and networks. Radios don't receive, video recorders can't be hooked up to your TV or record in any parsable format. (However, you can play back the video on the recorder, and point a normal camera at it...)
Certain objects get inerted when they get transformed by a Venn machine. Atomic weapons, particularly nasty toxins and virulent diseases. High-grade WMD, basically. Small bombs, biologically derived toxins, and most firearms work afterward. (The Venn Machine won’t create explosives, but won’t inert them either.)
Survival
If a Venn Machine subject is damaged while transformed, they return to normal just fine. If they are broken into multiple parts, they reappear near the largest collection. If the location where they would reappear is deadly to them (deep underwater, high in the air, too small for them to fit), and there isn’t a viable location within a short distance they reappear inside the nearest unoccupied Venn Machine instead.
Consequence: if you are Venned, you cannot be killed, wounded, or even catch a disease. (Or get pregnant, assuming a short-term change.) Doesn’t mean that getting cut doesn’t hurt, though. It just automatically fixes itself when you change back. Inanimate forms don’t have pain receptors, so being turned into a sheet of paper and fed through a shredder is unpleasant and disorienting, but not acutely painful. Being turned into a chocolate bar and eaten is perhaps as achy as the sore muscles one might get after overdoing exercises. If the person eating you is nice, and lets you melt on their tongue instead of biting, it’s actually quite sensuous.
Pregnancy
The Venn Machines will work fine on someone who is pregnant, and will ensure the survival of the fetus. A male form will retain the womb and fetus, but not have a birth canal. Hormone levels will be off-kilter (enough to read on a pregnancy test) but not massively so. Inanimate forms will have no detectable fetus, but much like the transformed person, the fetus is still there, and still developing at the normal rate.
A male transformed into a female for more than a few weeks may become pregnant, and all of the above applies. If they revert to their normal form while pregnant, they will still have the infant inside them in a womb, but no birth canal. Medical recommendations vary at this point, but I expect most doctors who take time to think about it will strongly suggest staying female for the duration, to ensure an appropriate hormonal environment.
When the baby is ready to be born, the mother will spontaneously change to a suitable form. Inanimates will revert to human, males will change to female for the duration of the birth, then revert to ‘normal’ after the delivery. This is not well known at first, as the standard recommendations work against its discovery, and few people will be willing to test it.
Non-human forms are only interfertile if they are highly similar. Generally, that requires that they both be based on the same existing terrestrial species, or on biological designs created by the same designer. The mother has to be changed for about 2 weeks (for human-scale forms, anyway) before she’s fertile, and must stay changed for at least another 2 weeks for the pregnancy to take. The father’s reversion deadline must be at least 2 days after conception, or the disappearance of the sperm’s genetic contribution will cause the zygote to fail to divide. For optimal fertility, the father should be changed for a month, though he is free to change back any time after conception by returning to a Venn Machine.
Overlaying Changes
Changes don’t stack, and duration is controlled by the most recent change.
If Roger (now Renee) from above is changed into a girl for 1 day by Laura, and later in the day steps into a Venn Machine, he will still be in his female form. If he is changed again, the ‘new’ change lasts for the selected duration, even if it’s shorter than the original change. At the end of this new change, he will revert to Roger, not to his female form.
Clothes and Accessories
If suitable, the clothes and other possessions of a subject are tailored to fit the new form. If not, they get merged into the new clothes, or into the new form. ID cards will have the picture of the new form, but the rest of the text will be muddled and unreadable.
If more clothes are with the subject (such as in a backpack or suitcase), they also get tailored to fit, even on a minimal change. The pattern on clothes will generally get randomized, and any text will be affected as other printing is.
If the subject is changed radically rather than incrementally, anything they carried into the Venn Machine will end up merged into them or their clothes instead.
Permanent TF
Doesn’t happen.
Simultaneous TF
Also doesn’t happen - the timing tolerances are too tight. One is changed first, then the other. If the first ends up inanimate, they cannot trigger a change. So no double-inanimate changes.
Senses while Transformed
Animal forms get the full range of appropriate senses.
Vision generally depends on the body or object's eyes - if there is something with a focusing element and a photosensitive layer, you can see through it. If there is only a poor focusing element like a glass bead, you can see through it, but not well. It's like peering through a bottle or faceted crystal, blurry and indistinct. This secondary sight also relies on your own retina, so people blinded due to damage to the retina or nervous system cannot see this way, but someone with a cataract still could. (Note, this is a revision of previous guidance which said you needed a good camera to see.)
The sense of touch is variable - a stone statue can only feel warmth or cold (and neither to a painful extent). The softer and smoother the form is, the more sensitive it is to touch. Sufficiently soft and silky forms feel better than normal touch.
Forms that are soft enough also have a limited ability to hear. Generally, if the form is free to vibrate in the air, it will allow some hearing. But skin-tight clothing tends to get muffled by the skin, and can only hear their wearer’s voice. A bra might not even get that, thanks to the breasts muffling bone-conducted sound. Again, this "secondary" sense depends on the body's own hearing, so a deaf person could hear if venned to a form with working ears, but not if turned into a dress.
Mental State while Transformed
Most people’s identity is somewhat plastic. You know who you were, you largely are who you were. But... new bodies react new ways, and it’s awfully easy to accept that you are what you see in the mirror, especially if you touch yourself (and *most* especially if you touch yourself *that* way). Whether or not that matches your body identity is another matter. Kinesthetic adaptation is quick. Body image plasticity is highly variable. The worst body dysphorics can’t adapt at all, which is why they have such a time if their body is wrong. Most ‘normal’ people adapt fairly readily to new stimuli, and within a month will be perfectly at home in their new body. Call a month the mean, with smaller numbers of people adapting in under a week. A few people adapt almost instantly. In all cases, this is a skill that can be developed with practice, so an experienced venner will generally be able to adapt rapidly.
Similarly, there is a range of body integrity/integration among various people. Most people are used to being who they are, but don't mind being something else for a bit if it's convenient or fun. A smaller fraction find being something different appealing, and rarely return to their base form. An even smaller group have a very strong self-image and find it distressing to be in the "wrong" body - some of these are natively in the wrong body, and find Venn Machines a huge relief. Others may not even realize they have such a strong body image until they're changed into the "wrong" body, and get hit by severe dysphoria. Even among these groups there are variations - some people may only be happy in a specific body, others may have a subset that keeps their dysphoria at by.
Reversion: Adapting *back* to your original body is one to two orders of magnitude faster. Average person would take a day or two the first time, but anyone with even a moderate amount of experience with venning will bounce back much more rapidly.
Practice: The more you do this, the better you get. Exercising plasticity improves it, especially in young bodies. (To *really* get good at it, spend a day or two as a baby.) Repeated changes to the same/similar form lead to even faster adaptation to that form. (ie, a guy who spends several weekends as a girl will find it very easy to drop back into the right body identity, but if he gets turned into a cat he’ll take longer to acclimatise.)
Inanimate state: Same applies. A low-adaptability person reverting from inanimate will think of themselves as an object for up to a week afterward. They are *very* susceptible to offers to change back into an object. [Same applies to a normal person in the first hour or two. Even a highly adaptable one will likely be much more willing for the first few hours, just because of that adaptability. Heck, they’d likely be willing anytime, with the right offer.]
Mental Changes
The Venn Machines do not overwrite the subject's mind. However, the body has its own mind, that used for animal instincts (and flight reflexes). This is true of human bodies as well, so a man venned into a woman has an intelligence there that he can allow to guide his actions. Doing so too extensively risks falling into that mindset comprehensively, much as with animals, but more subtly so.
If the designer of the form specifies aspects of its mental state, those may carry over (it's hard to see if they do or not...), but will only affect the 'body mind', not the subject's mind. That will affect the sort of personality that emerges if the subject lets the body have its way, however...
The "pleasure" setting also can have a strong indirect impact on the mind of the subject. If used three times, the form will be almost impossibly attractive, leading to rapid addicition in people who are susceptible to addictive behaviour. There are support groups that help wean people off such addictions.
Multiple People / Multiple Items
If a person is changed into multiple objects (a whole outfit of clothes, for example), they can only be changed back by the Venn Machine if more than half of their mass is present. The other parts won’t change back until their time is up, at which point they’ll disappear. After being changed back in this way, the person can no longer sense the other parts - they are truly inanimate.
Generally, a clothed person turned into multiple objects can feel all of them - the clothes become an insignificant part of one of the objects. (This may result in the person changing back naked, if that object is separated from the ohters.) Broadly, the relative mass stays the same - the person is 90% of the mass in the Venn Machine, so they’re 90% of the mass of the result. If there are many small objects, some of them might be clothing-bits.
If multiple people are turned into a single clothed person, the lighter of the two becomes the clothes. If multiple people are turned into a single naked person, they are both present, and can both feel the body. Neither has full control, it becomes a battle of wills as to who controls each part at any given moment. There is no mental connection between the two, but they can whisper things quietly to themselves.
One to Many
It is possible to turn one person into two or more. Initially, most people find it difficult to distinguish between the two bodies, so they act in sync. Once that sync is broken, they can practice trying to move each body independently. With more practice, they can start to act like two independent people. To some extent, doing so relies on the 'body mind' of one or both bodies, and it can be easy in male-female splits to somewhat lose track of what the other half is doing and thinking as a result.
To make matters more complex, it is possible to split a secondary body away entirely, so it is independent. This relies on the 50% mass rule - if more than 50% of your remaining transformed mass goes into the Venn Machine, that is "you" for the Machine's purposes. You can change again, or reset, and the other parts persist until the original change ends. This includes a sentient other part. Once both doors close or the red button is pressed, the link between the two bodies is severed, and the secondary part is exclusively run by its "body mind", which can be significantly different in personality if the transformation was extensive.
This secondary body is "not a person" from the Venn Machines' point of view. If they enter a Venn Machine, the door will briefly close and they will vanish. They also vanish at the end of the original transformation's duration.
After vanishing, the memories the body accumulated appear in the mind of the original subject. They aren't experienced as a stream of events, just as memories that seem as fresh and real as the subject's own memories of the same span.
Carry-On
Items carried with the subject aren't prioritized the way the subject is. They can be transformed, but generally only incidentally to whatever is happening to the subject. The objects created by non-person parts tend to be of inferior quality. Turning a carried bottle of water into wine doesn't work very well, the result is watery and weak at best. Turning a person into a bottle (or case, or cask) of wine on the other hand tends to produce superior vintage. Better yet, when the person reverts, so does the wine or beer, removing any hangover.
Biometrics
Even a identical twins have different fingerprints, different retinal patterns. So anything using those will fail someone trying to be another person’s clone - even if they were twinned inside the Venn Machine. It can’t be used to prove *who* a given Venned person is, but it can prove that they are not who they look like - at least at secured facilities. (Of course, sneaking in as someone’s shirt is still possible.) Even getting a small change in a Venn Machine will change your prints and eye patterns.
Voiceprint analysis can see through a lot of Venn changes, too - a person’s speaking patterns are at least partially a mental artifact.
DNA Samples
These can be used to produce near-clones of creatures if brought into the Venn Machine and suitable requests made. However, the quality of the offered shapes depends on the quality of the DNA. A badly degraded sample (such as for dinosaur samples) will produce a broad array of options, and it's up to the user to pick the one they think most likely or representative. Or most fun.
A Brief History of Venn Machines
The first machines arrived in early September, 201X (I'd rather not nail down the year past that). About a week after the first few showed up, they started to pop up in much greater numbers, and it is this second wave that's broadly seen as the "start" of Venn Machine arrival. Early on, the machines barely seemed to understand spoken language at all, producing nearly random offerings, but over time their parsing of language greatly improved. By the six month mark or so, they were comparatively fluent and could react to complex requests.
Also around the six month mark, the "history" command started to work, see below.
The Venn Machines mostly showed up in small towns to start, around 10k population, then spreading up and down the line from there. By the end of the first year, most places between 5k and 100k population would have at least one Venn Machine. Places where the Venn Machines frequently have lines of people waiting for them often acquire a second or third machine. Venn Machines tend to favour locations where the largest fraction of the town's population pass through over the course of time. This is often a mall or market, but sometimes the town library, a busy central park, or even in a few cases, the town church.
By the end of year two, all except the largest mega-cities have Venn Machines in one spot or another, the few that don't are still within no more than an hour's driving distance of one. Long before that point, most mid-sized cities will have access via nearby towns - if the town looks visibly separate from the city from a satellite view, it'll count as separate for purposes of getting a Venn Machine.
In the first two years, most governments try to ignore the Venn Machines, and most national news outlets do likewise. (Part of that is because none of the machines show up anywhere handy for the big-city papers that drive the news.) There is growing popular awareness of the machines despite this, and in Year Two, several reality shows start making use of the Venn Machines, driving greater awareness.
Early resistance to the Venn Machines varies a lot from town to town, but once people realize the Venn Machines are ridiculously safe, the resistance mostly fades. Radically non-human forms are still not popular many places, especially ones that can do serious harm. Most police are aware that even the most terrifying venned forms will fall to a heavy calibre sniper rifle, and also aware that such forms can be shot without risk of killing the person transformed. As the anti-aging and health benefits become better known, routine use of the machines becomes more common. The popularity of such changes goes in cycles, once local news starts reporting "she turned me into a newt" stories where trust was badly misplaced...
Many services crop up that help with trust issues concerning the machines. Professional seconds, well-vetted escort companies, Venn-specialized notaries, and so on...
By year four, things will be changing in bigger ways, and more details will be forthcoming on that in time. (Hopefully by sometime in 2020...)
History
Calling up a person's history displays up to nine of their most recent or most used forms. The display like much of the rest is circular in nature - a set of bubbles pop up around the center of the display. Three slightly larger ones show the most recent form (biggest bubble), and the most used ones. They're roughly equally spaced around the perimeter. In between are six more smaller bubbles, showing older forms. It is thus possible to "wash" an embarrassing or inconvenient form out of your history, by changing repeatedly. However, if you've used that form a lot, it may not prove possible to quickly flood it out of the system...
That said, it is still possible to access history from further than nine shapes ago. One has to know the shape well enough to describe it, and the offered bubbles for that description will contain one that's subtly highlighted (more shimmery, with a slightly more opaque look than its neighbours) to indicate it's one from the subject's history.
If someone has only used the Venn Machines a few times, there are only a few history bubbles, spread out roughly evenly.
Exploded View
Discovered somewhat after "history", exploded view lets one look at parts of a complex form individually. It only applies to separable parts, such as for a human-motorcycle hybrid. Exploded view of a person just separates the clothes from the body. Yes, Venn Machines can show you naked, but they already could quite easily...
This view is mostly useful to get a closer look at the components of a complex shape, and lets you indicate them individually. This makes it somewhat possible to restrict changes to just the parts of interest, but as usual, the Venn Machines don't always do what you want, or even what you ask them to.
Theme
Everyone has something they want. Something they’d like to change. Something else they’d like to be. Most of them might seem tawdry or boring to an observer - but to *them*, it’s hugely important.
And of course, the other person doesn’t quite share that vision. So sometimes it’s a matter of dropping quarter after quarter in for 1h changes, tweaking this, fiddling with that. Until one of ‘em says heck with it and turns the other into a dress, or a purse, or a cute little hat.
It also leaves room for ‘play’ - just mess around for a bit and ‘restore’ at end. What would your friend look like as a hot chick? (this often leads to ‘what will I wear’ and a popup of clothing choices... so fairly frequently doing this to one’s buddy leads to being worn by them). Of course, if you find something that looks interesting... you might hit apply instead. <heh>
Version History
v1.03 - Summary up top modified to have correct order of payment/time selection.
v1.04 - Modified the handling of animal forms so the ‘persistently give up control’ option isn’t there. Expanded on the ideas some.
v1.05 - Reappearing at a Venn Machine if reverting somewhere unsafe: happens inside the nearest unoccupied Venn Machine.
v1.06 - User has a lot of impact on what gets displayed, as Venn Machines remember past picks and the words associated with them.
v1.07 - Clarified non-human pregnancy issues.
v1.08 - Remove use of 'sentient' in preface, clarify to 'mentally competent' (courtesy of HeraldOfOpera), tweak some other nearby text.
v1.09 - 3-lobe interpretation added (courtesy of Trismegistusshandy)
v1.10 - (Nov 2019) Major update, adding timeline (to year 2-ish), history, exploded view, door size, what happens if you can't exit, more on sight and hearing, much more on mental effects including multi-body changes.
v1.11 - Further refinements, clarification on payment slot, interface look, wallets/pockets, and dysphoria.
v1.12 - Refine/revise timing of "split mind" effect (when the doors close, vs on green press).