#twitchy!verse

[twitchesandstitches]

Peoples of the Twitchy!Verse - Succubi

A beauteous and much admired species of humanoids believed to be derived from human stock and a mingling of eldritch energies, magic runs in the very blood of these beings, and a powerful craving for the emotional energies of others that sustains them more effectively than mortal food.

Their appearance is well-known; they are a monogendered sub-type of human, their most basic facet being that they resemble exceptionally curvaceous human woman; their bustlines tend to be at least as big around as their torsos, if not larger, with hips broader nearly as much as the circumference of their upper bodies, and only growing more voluptuous as they produce children or grow in power. The resemblance to humans is largely superficial, as they generally have brightly colored skin in a variety of shades; most are warm, such as reds, yellows, with a few coming in darker tones: indigo, purple and even green. Some have similar skin tones to a human, but this is fairly rare.

Their skin is covered in thin layers of a chitinous or scaly material; around the arms, legs and back, this builds into a thin but noticeable layer of surprisingly strong armor. Their limbs differ notably from humans; their fingers bear retractable claws, and their feet are permanently arched into high heels supported by short, hornlike spikes from their ankle that resembles a heel. Most have a thin, prehensile tail, a pair of batlike wings large enough to allow them to fly, as well as multiple rows of long, curving horns. Notably, their eyes are a bright color (yellows, violets and reds being most common), their teeth are pronounced fangs most suitable for tearing meat or drawing blood, and they have a tendency to develop unusually long tongues; often several foot long, at full extension.

Some succubi are known to develop additional traits such as bovine elements (horns, greater size, and exceptionally large breasts), grow additional rows of breasts, additional arms, or manifest angelic traits like feathered wings and horns that merge into a shape reminiscent of a halo. These sub-types are poorly understood, and seem to happen at random.

Most succubi have significantly warmer body temperatures than humans, running downright hot at all times; this makes wearing most clothing impractical, and they tend to wear more revealing clothing simply to allow their bodies to vent. Interestingly, the sexual aspect of their clothing seems lost on many of the, as it is mainly a practical matter.

Succubi are relatively common throughout the world in terms of distribution, though they are a distinct minority compared to the dwarves, elves and goblinoids. This is likely a result of their difficulty reproducing in the conventional manners other humanoids do; pregnancy is invariably a result of particularly intense emotions, and not of sexual interaction. It has been proven that a succubi is physically incapable of being pregnant in circumstances where there is no emotional factor; their offspring are solely the result of dedicated, loving relationships or particularly intense encounters (though these need not be romantic in nature).

Perhaps related to this, they are very long-lived; the average succubus can live for many hundreds or even thousands of years, simply by maintaining her levels of emotional energy intake. Conversely, though, a succubus somehow deprived of all magical energy or emotions to feed from will rapidly sicken, and death is assured for most unfortunates.

Succubi, on average, tend to be roughly the same size as humans; its not unheard of for them to be goblin-sized, with shortstack proportions, but its quite rare. Many tend to grow significantly larger as they grow older and stronger, with some becoming giants in their own right; those that do so tend to become more monstrous in appearance, as well as fiercely protective of those around them.

-----

Succubi have an interesting relationship to pregnancy and reproduction; it is for them simultaneously sexless and intensely emotional. As noted elsewhere, succubi do not reproduce sexually, and asexuality is fairly common for them; while they may enjoy sex, they often have no particular urge to do so. (While it has been heard of for some to be hypersexual dynamos in perpetual craving for sexual partners, it is not as much an assumption as lurid literature claims.) Instead, the reproductive drive is fulfilled through their feeding; a powerful enough bond can impregnate them with the essence of one or more partners.

They are enormously fertile, their bodies adapted to produce not just one or two children, but many; dozens of children have been known from most pregnancies, and it is not unheard of for an otherwise ordinary succubus to bear so many children that her belly distends by nearly twice her height, the bottom of her belly reaching the ground and requiring magical aid for her to move at all as her belly continues to grow.

While this would seem to suggest that succubi can reproduce more effectifvely than most other sapients, this is countered by two things: firstly, they have very long gestation periods, as long as upwards of several years, up to a full decade. Secondly, impregnation is fairly rare, requiring intense emotional connections, and most succubi are not likely to see frequent litters. As a result, they tend to gravitate towards societies that view raising children as a community effort, as a normal succubus cannot expect to raise all her children by herself and perhaps one or a few partners.

Of note, succubi can interbreed with any sapient being capable of emotional feeling, and their litters are almost universally succubi, with one or two children of the father’s kind.

-----

The succubi, as they are generally known, have acquired the name due to a mixture of their extremely sexualized appearance and a unique aspect of their magical abilities: they can feed off the magical resonances in emotional sensations, allowing them to passively feed off of the feelings of others. This does not drain the person in question, though they do experience the sensation as a euphoric ‘kiss’, in a spiritual sense. This is enormously addictive and pleasurable for the succubus, and is not limited towards sexual experience. Indeed, many veer towards asexuality, finding little interest in sexual matters when they can feed simply on the more conventional feelings of others, and even reproduce by absorbing intense enough feelings.

This is a result of their ancestry: they are usually believed to have once been humans (perhaps even elves, as suggested by their distinctive ears) who were exposed to enormous amounts of magic, and were said to encounter fiends who had abandoned their malicious ways to ascend demon-hood. Perhaps their ancestors interbred with these redeemed fiends, or they were exposed to energies attuned to realms containing creatures similar to fiends, or it was just a coincidence that they mutated in this fashion. In whatever case, the magical energies remained for long enough that it created a stable population, producing the succubi.

Ultimately, it is generally a problem that they are associated with fiends; there is no spiritual element of corruption within them, and some scans suggest they have divine origins in some fashion, but the general assumption is that they are fiendish in nature, and this reputation follows them where they go.

Additionally, they carry enormous magical power. All succubi are naturally gifted with magic to a degree above and beyond most other sapient beings; they instinctively can perform minor cantrips and spells regardless of the direction they have molded their magic into, and any powers they develop tend to be very flexible compared to others like them. Some of the most powerful magic users in history have been succubi, which sometimes leads to the assumption that any given succubus must be a powerful magic-worker. This is not necessarily true!

-------

Many succubi tend to the same degrees of personality as any other species; they can be hot-tempered or docile, malicious or kindly, apathetic or fiercely loyal. As a result of their magical heritage, they tend to be more intense than most others, and they also live very long life-spans, which tend to influence their perspectives as well.

Due to their long lives and inherent magic, many succubi gravitate towards positions of leadership or influence, especially in places where humans form a significant amount of the local community. Historically, they tended to develop rivalries with vampires, who often assumed a similar position among the herds of human settlements they used as cattle, fighting them off and ferociously attacking them in pre-emptive defense of their humans. To this day, it is a general assumption that vampires and succubi are natural enemies. (A vampiric succubus is usually considered a contradiction in terms, though there is nothing to stop this from happening.)

[twitchesandstitches]

Tia ran on all fours; her massive boobs made this somewhat inconvenient, but she barely noticed cobblestones and sideways getting gently flattened into pancake shapes as she galloped over them, her powers leaving them dented down.

“Get back here!” a knight yelled, charging after her in an exoskeletal suite of mechanized armor.

“Okies.” Tia turned, her massive tail suddenly expanding several times its size, a solid wall of plush blackness. It swept forwards, and the knight slammed right into it. She flicked, and the knight went skidding away.

“Curses! Foiled by the bounce house monster!”

Tia paused in the middle of scrounging something to help. She held up a large lamp post she’d wrenched right out of the ground, and frowned. “Is that being what everyone is calling me?”

The knight shrugged. “Perhaps not. But it is what I call you!”

“Okies.” She ran her hands along the iron post, lengthening it, spreading the material outwards.

It wasn’t something she was able to do very fast, though, and the knight was getting back up. Her tail swept back, returning to its normal size like a balloon deflating.

Okay... she put her hand along a knob at the end, pushing it just right; honing the edges, making it sharp, and very heavy. She pulled it away, and what she had was a spear in her hands.

She flourished it as the knight charged. Many strange insignias and incredibly complex ornamentations rippled on the spear as she twirled it. “Okay! Give me everything you got!” She said.

“Very well,” he said, swinging a sword. She swing her spear at it-

Tia was VERY strong. Her muscles, even when not augmented by magic to do the whole ‘breaking cities in half’ thing, could propel a car straight through the horizon. Nevertheless, when her spear met the knight’s vibrosword, the spearhead was neatly lopped off.

She gaped at it. “Um. Was not supposed to happen.”

She puzzled over the missing half of it as the knight sighed dramatically, voiced modified by the communicator in his helmet. “Just because you made some metal long and put a sharp bit on the end doesn’t make it a spear.”

“Am thinking, that is literal definition fo spear?”

“Oh, come now! There’s more to it than that!”

“Is not!” Tia walloped the knight right on the head; her chaotic energies flowed into the improvised weapon and into the knight, and like a ball being sat on, his head swelled out sideways.

“Oh, that didn’t even hurt.” He saw his reflection in his arm and gaped. “My goodness! I look like something you’ve sat on!”

“Not fair. You are not being COMPLETELY flat.”

“Did you make my head into a pancake!?”

“...Not on purpose. It is reflex!”

He wiggled his hand in front of his visor, which were now spread across his face like runny eggs on an untidy breakfast plate. “This feels very strange. Shouldn’t it hurt?”

“Nuh uh. Hurting people is mean.”

“I did see you tear someone in half the other day.”

“Yes but they were not hurting!”

“Yes, they were quite puzzled about that.”

[twitchesandstitches]

Life energy pulsed out from Tia’s private chambers, aboard a vast and fearsome assemblage of ships crammed together into a single one, and the concentration of such potent fertility would have made it easy to track her down. It flowed from her in thick, soothing waves, flooding into the bodies of every receptive being for miles around. Breasts swelled in its wake; bellies bloated, and wombs gestated new chimeric life.

Pulses of it swam out, and each time it did, the pregnancies redoubled, again and again, so that bellies previously big enough to carry twins were swelling out to the ground, skin squirming with countless young beneath. In the most extreme cases, the same happened to other parts of the new mother’s bodies, rebuilt from the inside so that they carried wombs wherever they was a sufficiently big cavity to store them, or converted from other organs and body fat.

Tia felt aware, distantly, of impregnating thousands of people, and her lust-added minded mixed together the pleasures of impregnation with such primal closeness to so many people, all of them already close to her in some other fashions.

But she had other matters on her mind, and beneath her, a lover squirmed and writhed in absolute submissive joy.

Tia’s latest baby momma was barely even a third her size, not even up to her knees. Tia stood perhaps sixteen feet tall, on a good day; the green-skinned woman panting and gasping underneath her virile bulk, totally swallowed up in her black flesh, was barely three feet tall. She was also so curvaceous and plump that her voluptuousness made her nearly wider than she was tall, but compared to Tia’s ludicrous levels of curviness, it seemed... insufficient.

Gargantuan black breasts, nearly bigger than Tia herself, rose and fell like the descent of continents as she railed her hips back and forth, driving her endowments deep into her lover, flooding her with her virile seed with every thunderous slam into her. Milky sloshes drowned out their mutual lovey noises, and still Tia slammed deeper and deeper.

From between her legs, in a complicated arrangement of decidedly alien genitalia, there was a cluster of what might have been tentacles. Enormously thick, glowing green and slightly transparent in places, and larger across than the goblin they were delving into; the goblin seemed to suffer no discomfort, though her belly was tremendously distended with the weight of both pseudo-penises and several tons of reproductive fluid flooding her belly (and indeed, the rest of her).

Tia kept her balanced on her own massive thighs, bending her over, gut smacking into the goblin’s back, and her hips swing back, and drove forwards, sinking the fullness of her sexual weight into the goblin woman.

Again, and again.

The goblin girl’s voice was a gibbering mess of pleasure, of nonsense sounds deprived of any meaning except expressing her own pleasure. Her eyes rolled back into her head, and she rocked helplessly, joyfully, around the massive tendrils that had become her whole world, her entire body a living toy to please them. Tears flowed from her eyes, her mouth seemed fixed into a wild grin obscured by increasingly bloating lips.

Tia barely made a sound, from the occasional grunt of effort or a sing-song siren’s murmur to soothe her tiny partner. She didn’t sound like she was exerting herself, but like she could simply keep doing this for months on end.

Eventually, as her partner’s excited clamps slowed, Tia slowed down too, and lay on her side as she observed the goblin passing out, asleep.

With her tail, she reached out and felt her partner’s belly, and was satisfied at the firmness of thousands of eggs forming within.

[twitchesandstitches]

originalverse concept i would like to flesh out a bit more at some point: a group of benign space pirates and treasure hunters who directly serve under Tia’s horde and answer to her specifically, perhaps employed by her clan in general, whom bring their loot to her and act as scouts and explorers

sometimes ‘loot’ is recruits to the clan they have rescued from nefarious evildoers and brought home to be cared for. sometimes its the extracted essence of all the foes they have consumed on their adventures. you never know!

current thoughts is that the group consists mainly of the absolute apex of sexy pirate ladies, leaning hard on the ‘pirate hero’ tropes and character archetypes in general. this provides a starting point for what they’re actually like and where to go with it

(things to think about later; the specifics of the crew and its characters, the ways for them to be curvy and sexy, possible kink-specific themes for them on an individual and group basis, and so forth)

[twitchesandstitches]

I was doing some writing to prepare for a more intense session of writing, and i came up with the idea of putting down some ideas I had for Tia’s powers in action, so to speak!

(I’m tempted to imply that the ACTUAL function of Tia’s powers is less a strict set of abilities, and more a general narrative guideline based on some themes of ‘consumes stuff’, ‘mom to the logical extreme’, ‘RAGE SMASH’ and ‘is weird and disruptive’ to extremes, on both literal and conceptual levels, and any limitations are deliberately assumed to give her greater power by instilling limits.

the key thing is that this is not known to her, nor characters in-universe)

------

Tia's fist swung in a slow and gentle arc, but ungentle was the fierce energy crackling out of her arm and erupting out of cracks and fissures appearing upon her surface like the escape of heat through molten obsidian; the flesh was swimming in the mutagenic energies so essential to the character of her magical essence, spikes and hornlet growing into a spiny carapace around her arm and to be broken apart, cast aside as soon as the blow was made.

The air blasted with the power she was unleashing. The wind screamed, and blew away from her incoming blow; the stink of fear rose high and far from her, the world itself crying out that here was a thing that simply should not exist. The enhancement of her power was not entirely a physical thing, less a result of muscles amplified and more of feeling and the idea of Destruction imbued into her arm. She could let it flow out of her, becoming constructs of solidified dream-energy or more hands to crush with, and it was only her whim that they did not do so. Her power ran deeply, for she had spent much time of late carousing and alarming others with her disdain for the mores of society, and it resounded within her. Her mere presence had broken what others thought to be the way of the world, and now she could break anything she wanted.

She embraced it. The anger, the rage, speaking to something primal and terrible within herself. She felt the other ways she could be fading away; the goddess bestowing gifts and curses alike from on high. The mother, caring and protecting as a basic expression of identity.

All of it fell away, a little bit, just for the sheer joy of feeling something get smashed.

For a moment all scrying tools and ponds of divining returned only the message 'THE MONSTER IS HERE'.

Her blow landed.

Energy coursed out, to the sky, very briefly resembling a fungal bloom. It was blue, and pink, and burned so intensely that for a moment it all became a violent, vibrant magneta color.

The earth cracked and tore apart. A crater blasted out, the power she unleashed having poured out and smashed everything around it, violence imparted to the ground and air alike...

And a few moments later, a few ashes were all that remained of straw and cloth.

There was a long pause from some of Tia's friends, who had watched the whole thing happen.

"Wow," Chopstop said dryly. "You really showed that training dummy who the boss is."

Tamitayo cleared her throat. "Impressive. But you are supposed to fight the dummies. Not... annihilate them."

Tia hesitated for a long moment. "Ah. Oops?"

A beautiful, and incredibly curvaceous human woman had watched the whole thing in silence. She looked at a journal she had been writing in as she observed various members of the adventuring guild practicing combat techniques. There were detailed sketches of Chopstop's mechs and their internal structures, for example, or brief dissertions on the magical craft Tamitayo employed as she summoned power from nearby willing spirits of nature and artifice alike.

Tia was a more complicated affair. A number of short phrases, questions and theories all outlined her attempts to wrap her mind around whatever it was that Tia was doing:

NOT SUPER STRENGTH? - MODIFYING THINGS SHE HITS??

EVIDENCE OF CONTINUAL TRANSMOGIRIFICATION. CENTIPEDE PROBLEM; IS SHE AWARE OF THIS?

PHYSICAL MODIFICATION OF OWN BODY LARGELY AESTHETIC, BURNS AWAY AFTER BATTLE. POWERS MAYBE WORKING ON CONCEPTUAL LEVEL? ATTACKING 'IDEA' OF THING, NOT THE PHYSICAL MATTER? STILL BREAKS, BUT PERHAPS NOT ENTIRELY FOR PHYSICAL REASONS?

MIGHT BE TAPPING INTO OTHERWISE COMMON MAGICAL POWERS, RESULTS APPEAR DISTINCTIVE DUE TO INTERPLAY OF UNIQUE POWER SOURCE AND GREATER POTENTIAL POWER.

This and others outlined it, mad lines connecting to one another entirely at random, betraying the fundamentally doomed prospect of trying to understand Tia.

She calmly scribbled it all out and wrote MAN WHO THE FUCK EVEN KNOWS.

Tia picked up on it. "Sorry," she said.

"You are indeed a fascinating mystery," said the science lady.

[twitchesandstitches]

okay so today’s quick Original Verse setting thought is that the setting is, more or less, thousands or millions of individual worlds that are each potentially infinite in scope, many of them with their own odd rules or magical twists that make them distinctive settings in their own rights, and that there’s ruins of a far older land in all these worlds, and in the depths of the magical realms that sort of appeared AROUND them

so you might wonder; ‘how did THAT happen?’

there’s two reasons. The first one is that the magical realms are heavily influenced by the idea that certain ideas get powerful, even from the POVs of completely different and unrelated cultures, so the more these related ideas spread, the more it effects the magical realms. isolated ‘bubbles’ of semi-reality, where ideas from mortal lands propagate and give the magical lands something to work with, will manifest around concepts like this. So you might see seemingly ancient ruins, filled with magical technology and telling strange histories with murals in the walls, but they weren’t made by mortal hands; they just turned up. They’re not ‘real’ in a technical sense, but they still have information; these ruins can convey lost history or forgotten lore, and are worth examining even if they have no real historical value.

The second reason is that the oldest worlds were once a single place.

In the ancient times of history, long before any living culture yet existed, the multiverse was a single vast world of immense scope and bounded by many moving landscapes that embodied an element concept, pinning the shaped world into place. Many cultures lived here, thousands of societies of every kind and populated by beings of immensely varied form: to present day characters, no one knows if these were all one people who had learned to freely alter their shapes, or if these cultures had transcended species-as-identity and regarded all beings as one.

their mastery of technology and magic had developed into a transcendent understanding of the powers over reality; they possessed unmatched magitech that is still unequaled, and they individually all held the magical power equivalent to a god, so that all beings had limitless power and absolute freedom to do with it what they pleased. It is believed that they derived some form of power from thought and belief itself, and shaped that into limitless potential to do whatever they could imagine.

And their entire empire completely was destroyed, splintering into trillions of shards; when their world came undone, the magical realms came flooding in, and carried those splinters upon their empyrean tides. Over the course of eons, those splinters became new worlds, and forgot the old ones, with only the remnants of the ancient societies’ technology and cities as a testament to what they were.

The exact nature of the event that destroyed this omni-society are unclear. It could have been a battle with eldritch forces and unspeakable monsters that poses a threat in the modern day, and it might be that nothing is meant to last forever, and this society’s death was only forestalled, and when it finally came, it did so with a bang. It might also be a key to the metaplot of the setting as a whole.

Note that while there many characters that ARE old enough to remember this society, none of them remember it clearly for various reasons. Tia’s memory is spotty past about a few mortal lifetimes ago, and while she has vague memories stirred by the ruins, and there’s some suggestions that her appearance HEAVILY resembles the general look of some of those ruin’s long gone inhabitants, she doesn’t know the significance of any of that and certainly doesn’t remember this era, though she believes that its the clue towards working out her origins.

In any event, this era provides a convenient source for plot hooks and ideas; its mysterious technology can do whatever might be desired for a good story (from several artifacts that, when gathered, can grant any wish, to infinite power-inducing batteries) and any adventurer would love to study the ruins that have been preserved.

[twitchesandstitches]

How do ship (or even other vehicle) girls work im your setting?

my first impulse is to suggest that it has to do with either adopting the ship girl vibe as a power up/deliberate modification, or that it sticks to a ship or other vehicle 'waking up' and gradually adopting a more humanoid form. HOW humanoid that form is may vary!

while i specify ship girls here, note that pretty much anything that applies to them also applies to any other vehicle; the general rule is: are people invested in THIS vehicle, specifically? Does it feel like it has a heart or spirit? Could someone conceivably put an AI in it? Could someone, for whatever reason, turn themselves into this kind of vehicle? if the answer is yes, they can be considered a potential ship girl!

As a key note, a nearly universal aspect of a ship girl is that the crew is essential to their power. Their on-board weaponry may still exist, or contribute towards the metaphysical power they have to offer (if they were game statted up, their ordinary weapons would contribute to their magical power for the purpose of raw offense, for instance), but crew benefits most of all; the collective crew boosts the power of the ship girl, usually multiplying her raw power. The exact number is hard to determine, but its usually based on their overall numbers, the power they themselves have to offer, and the intensity of their attachment towards her. (A crew simply serving a ship generally offers less of a boost, even if they're individually strong, than a crew that is emotionally invested to a ship.) so i see it being broadly split into the following categories:

1. Deliberate modification. This is linked towards giantess-ness as a measure of power, since as a basic notion of my setting (as with pretty much all my AUs), size equates to power. The exact REASON can vary a whole bunch; power may more easily rest in a greater size, so as someone channels more and more power, their body grows to properly manifest it, or transformign into a larger body that expresses the themes of their power (in other words, monsterization and similar transformations are a big theme in this!)

So when you get a ship girl, you can have someone modifying their body on purpose, via magical rituations, physical augmentation and magical cybernetics to form literal decks and converting themselves into allowing people to board them and empower them, which gives you the advantage of allowing your powers to function on automatic (since the people inside you can manually set them off) or gaining the cumulative power of everyone inside you and probably multiplying it by your own.

Generally speaking, these are people who are in essence a giant living ship girl in the very literal sense of 'being a girl, that functions as a ship'

2. Mechanical being that transforms FROM a ship, or functions as one. This is KIND of similar in theory towards 1, with a lot of the same abilities, but with an important distinction; this applies specifically to living skyships (the in-universe term for spaceships, since 'space' doesn't actually exist normally), in the sense of a sapient AI that runs the ship and identiifes that ship as their body. As a manifestation of their power or through more conventional means of just physical reconfiguration, the ship may transform their body into a more humanoid form.

These forms are essentially the idea of the ship girl as... well, a humanoid transformation OF that ship. They'll still look like the ship, otherwise; they won't be made of flesh or light or a reasonable simulcrum, unless there's a technical reason for them to be so. This is when a self-aware ship weaponizes its power to become a hyper-busty, super thicc version of itself!

So this is the more literal definition of being a ship girl.

3. Spirit of the ship as a person, or a variant of the 'city father' spirit idea, and the one closest to the intent of the ship girl, i think.

This is where a ship 'wakes up', its spirit become its own being. This is based on the city father notion, that a city has a spirit that wakes up to guard the complex interweaving forces that make up a city; the same thing applies to a ship. All the systems that make it up, the emotions between the hierarchy of the crew, the past lingering on it and the potential of the future, the places its been and the things it has done, the complexities all weave together and... wake up. This becomes the ship girl, their personality largely determined by the character of a ship and informed by a lot of different possibilities, most generally the things that ship has done and the history around it.

This is different from 2. The second case discusses a ship that is a artificial intelligence; functionally they are pretty much the same kind of thing as, say, a human or other more conventional form, a mind within a vessel, born through the interaction of spirit and body. A ship girl of this kind, however, is literally the spirit of the ship itself, awakened to full awareness. Each case varies, but generally if the ship is destroyed, the ship girl is injured, though could potentially move to another one, especially if she is carried by the crew's attachment.

Ship girls in this sense can vary REALLY hugely; they can manifest through a physical transformation of the ship, but its just as common for the spirit to manifest as a separate being. Their shape and form are, given their power, proportionately busty and curvy, but can be very diverse depending on the ship's nature; they can be human or monstrous, any varient of monster girl or sapient being, or a completely unique chimerical being. In general they always have some elements of the ship, either with clothing that suggests the ship's design or their appearance inevitably calling to mind the ship in some way. As they are a spiritual manifestation of the ship itself, their appearances will warp to match it's look.

----

Whether or not these gals are common is really situational; industrially produced ships are unliekly to awaken their spirit, as it usually requires a lot of time of service to create the kind of narrative weight that produces a ship spirit; otherwise you have the normal spirit ecology that exists within any kind of complex set of systems. If the crew is passionate and views the ship with a degree of personhood, that is way more likely to cause one to develop, too. So in the end, you're unlikely to see one from big powerful military groups that view ships as tools to be employed and disposed of.

Intimacy, narrative weight, and power produce ship girl spirits; as a result, they tend to form around dedicated adventurers, really OLD ships, or people who rely on a ship for survival or livelihood. (More than want appeared from a shipwreck on an island with people who grew increasingly attached to their only means of shelter.)

Conversely, people converting THEMSELVES into ship girls varies a lot by regional interest. In some places its very popular, particularly with a dommy mommy kind of leader who demands absolute control over her crew or the sort of hero who goes to extremes to prevent their friends from being harmed. It can be unsettlingly invasive in some places, and others ship girl modifications may be a fad or even obligatory towards officers or champions of sufficient rank.

Living ships, conversely, tend to be WAY more common. If you plug a sufficiently smart thinking engine into any kind of form, its going to become intelligent most likely, and if it gains enough magical power, it can probably reformat itself into a more mobile shape. (Things being what they are, that form is typically curvy and sexy.) However, the kind of storybreaker power that can create high-level characters, and ship girls, isn't quite as common. It helps to be physically powerful or have a lot of guns, since that translates into the sort of OOMPH that makes the ship girl transformation easier, but its not universal. Se yes, sapient ships are common, but what's NOT as common is the magical power to assume a giant ship form. It's more common for them to, say, operate a curvy drone as a proxy, and gradually gather the emotional experience and willpower to one day transform their ship body into a true humanoid avatar.

[twitchesandstitches]

Who’s the best gamer?

in terms of 'is actually good at games and wins consistently', I would suggest either Host or Chopstop. Both of them have a drive to win, and in Choppy's case a competitive streak to begin with. Odina, surprisingly, probably won't rank very high, because the same aversion to drama and high-tension adventure that leads her to being at best a reluctant addition to an adventuring party also means that she generally dislikes competition-themed games unless it has a gameplay that wins her over. In which case, the competition is an unfortunate detail she must accomodate, and she doesn't normally try to win big.

Just because you like to play doesn't mean you're good at at!

In more domestic or mundane scenarios (such as ones where they're all in a mostly real life-style kind of city or homestead) its safe to assume that everyone is some kind of a gamer, but again, they're not necessarily good at it! Tia, for example, loves sandbox and crafting games, such as Minecraft or the basic elements of Ark Survival Evolved, but she's not neccesarily good at them. She tends to avoid games with any kind of stressful elements, or minimizes them. You see, her default reaction to frustration or stress is to simply smash the offending element, and since you can't do that in a game, she generally avoids them entirely.