Vicissitude allows the torturer to become his own tool kit, forming his extremities (or the victim's extremities) into a variety of intrusive implements perfectly shaped to fit the victim — or not quite fit, as the case may be. Then, too, the sight of one's bones heaving of their own accord through one's skin is always disconcerting — and it becomes difficult to find release in a scream when one's tongue has been grafted to the roof of one's mouth...
— Vampire: The Masquerade — Clanbook: Tzimisce
"Blessed creatures! I have broken through their mortal crust and drawn from them their greatest strength: mutability. I coax bone, weave flesh, and lace sinew tight until it strains to lash out..."
— Andrei the Tzimisce, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines
"Maitreya was, ultimately a very interesting antagonist for Krishna. Krishna clearly preferred to work with objects, land, inert matter. Maitreya clearly preferred to work with human beings."
— Reddin, Supergod
For those who can master this power, will and body become one. Much as a techno-magos shapes metal into complex circuitry, elevating basic elements into objects of mechanical wonder, so too does the biomancer shape the flesh.
— Black Crusade: The Tome of Fate
The "gutter art" of mage-surgery can accomplish a great many things, given sufficient materials: it can shape flesh and bone at a touch, heal injuries that would beggar the powers of ordinary physicians, improve and augment bodies beyond the norm, sculpt weapons from internal organs, mould the face into new configurations entirely, and even accomplish a rather limited form of shapeshifting. As Heart's own research has proved, it can even renew the body efficiently enough to extend the human lifespan by several decades.
But unfortunately, it can't actually make the user invincible.
But unfortunately, it can't actually make the user invincible.
Bio-thaumaturgy after all, was a polite way to describe an expertise one of whose uses was to tear at and recreate flesh, to bond it in unintended ways, to manipulate it within the limits dictated only by imagination. Of course, the techniques could heal and repair, but that was not their usual application. No one had any proof, of course, but Isaac would not be at all surprised if some of Vermishank's research had been carried out in the punishment factories. Vermishank had the skill to be an extraordinary sculptor in flesh.
