Q. What efforts have scientists with morals made in studying Beings and their abilities?
A. Some, though not many. A few examples:
Attempts to document patterns in their behavior. These haven’t made much progress as every Being is different…and even with one individual, their habits tend to change radically when they switch Masters.
Measurements of height, weight, mass, strength, and other qualities while they change shape. They have upper limits on size, but how they change mass in the first place hasn’t been figured out.
Genetic testing. No matter what shape they’re in when the sample is taken, Beings’ DNA tests as “related to, but not quite, human.”
Q. How is art influenced by beings? Are they a theme in art at all? Is there a significant amount of literature featuring beings? What about TV shows, comics, movies and so on?
A. They’re not a world-changing theme, but of course Beings have appeared in or inspired various pieces of art over the years. A couple of anime. Some medieval iconography. A handful of silent films. One of the character selections in Street Fighter II. Loads of hard-to-regulate and morally-questionable pornography.
Q. Beings and pronouns! Do Beings care what pronouns are used to address them? I’m also curious what pronouns they use amongst themselves. Obviously they have a way to tell each other apart, but do things like sex and gender exist among them?
A. Having lived through plenty of languages with a variety of pronoun systems, Beings will pretty much go with whatever the people around them use. Their shapeshifting extends to everything, so whatever biological sex characteristics they have at any given time aren’t permanent.
“One of the character selections in Street Fighter II.” This is intriguing. Beings can’t harm humans, and I’m guessing deliberate use of projectiles isn’t a loophole, so it’d be near-impossible to have just one a Being character in a fighting game- you’d have to have either multiple Beings, so they can fight each other, or none at all. A Being-inspired character would work if they weren’t actually portrayed as a Being in-universe… what would that make them, though? I feel like you’d have to include “animal-human hybrid”, “shapeshifter”, or both as character attributes for the reference to be obvious- you could have a Mystique-like human shapeshifter with a consistent color scheme, or a werecreature with the ability to change between human and animal form, or someone who doesn’t change shape at all but has both human and animal attributes. There might or might not be an equivalent to the Contract in the storyline, with the character’s “master” as an NPC… maybe this could even be a fight mechanic, with the master occasionally giving instructions and the player having the option to follow them or ignore them, where obeying provides a stat bonus on that move but is more predictable and disobeying can surprise the enemy but incurs a stat penalty…
The silent film thing is also interesting. I haven’t seen many silent films but I feel like slapstick comedy featuring a Being character who takes its master’s orders too seriously or not seriously enough could be hilarious.