Methods of shapeshifting

"Am I correct in assuming that you want shapeshifting to be your primary power?" Drake asks you.

"What do you mean?" You ask. "What does it mean for a power to be primary?"

"Well..." Drake starts. "I mentioned before that magic cares a lot about imagination and intent. How you intend to use your power and how you imagine it will end up affecting how it works. With the powers you requested, you might become a powerful shapeshifter who uses those other three powers to make your shapeshifting more believable and effective. Alternatively, you could lean into the ESP and hyper-cognition powers to become an incredible detective, using shapeshifting and multipresence mostly as a means of infiltration or gathering information quicker. Or you could really lean into the multipresence to make swarms of copies to solve situations with pure numbers, using ESP and hyper-cognition mainly to keep track of everything and your shapeshifting for simple disguises."

"It doesn't really mean anything for a power to be primary, as you'll still have all four powers, but it would make things easier for me to plan if I had an idea as to which one was going to be your main focus. The way you described things made it seem like you intended shapeshifting to be your main focus, but I didn't want to assume." Drake explains.

You think for a moment. "Uh, yeah. I mean, I don't know exactly what the implication is here, but I plan on shapeshifter being my main focus. The other abilities will mostly be helping with that."

"Right. So there are a few ways we can do this. The best options I see are either illusions, a magic shell, or transformation."

"Illusions would be the safest and easiest way to imitate the effects of shapeshifting. It's not real shapeshifting, of course, but I could give you the ability to create illusions which you could use to make yourself look however you'd like. It would work really well in conjunction with your enhanced perception, and it would be very easy to learn and master because no matter how bad you fuck things up, it's just an illusion. You'd still just be yourself underneath, but if your intent with taking this power was making people see you as you want them to see you, it's all you really need."

"The magic shell method is closer to real shapeshifting, and it is still perfectly safe to use and relatively easy to master. Essentially, when activated, you wrap yourself in a shell of magical power and control its shape and appearance. The shell method is the most common way I have of granting people various powers and has a lot of built-in safeties to prevent you from accidentally doing something wrong while learning to use it. Plus, the shell itself acts as an extra layer of defense, and anyone trying to hurt you needs to get through that shell first. Ultimately you would still be you underneath the shell, and you would revert to your original appearance once you turn it off, but while it's on you could change your form at will."

"True transformation would be the riskiest method and would be the hardest to learn and master but would be the closest to real shapeshifting. What I could do is give you the ability to reshape and transform matter, which you could then use on yourself to shapeshift. This means you would be making actual changes to your own body, which wouldn't revert once you turn off the ability. Permanent changes require a lot of initial power, but you wouldn't have to spend anything to maintain those changes like you would with illusions or the shell. This power would also allow you to incorporate healing as well as more advanced stuff like body optimization and de-aging into it; however, it would require you to study and understand anatomy and biology and all that in order to make the changes you want to make. With the other methods you could just use your imagination, but with this one you need to actually know what you're doing in order to avoid doing something wrong. I wouldn't normally suggest this method if it weren't for the fact that you were already planning on taking hyper-cognition. With hyper-cognition you could spend some time studying how everything in your body functions before you start messing around with your insides."

"So, what do you think?" Drake asks.