“Look, it’s ridiculous to go around discorporating one another!” Crowley sloshed mead from his tankard. “It’ll jus’ sl...slow us both down.”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale suddenly had a brilliant idea, helped along by early experiments in fermenting honey. “Have you ever actually been discorporated?”

Words: 3,245

Status: Complete

Rating: Explicit

Art Credit: Portrait of a Bravo by Friedrich Gotthard Naumann

@princip1914

Buk sending Aziraphale Upstairs the quick way.

The ending scene of Chapter 61 of "Are We Meant to Read the Footnotes?" by @riathedreamer .

Does this ring any bells?

I am sure I've answered an ask like this before, but I cannot find it. Anyway, I think what you're looking for is this ficlet posted to tumblr.

Don't worry they are only discorporated lol

 With the new Tech Revolution book came a new class to Starfinder, the nanocyte! This tanky combat class has a nanomachine colony integrated into their body, granting them many benefits that such a symbiotic relationship can bring, ranging from obscuring themselves with clouds of nanites to creating weaponry out of nanomachines, and more.

Nanocytes also specialize in faculties, which are more elaborate than the one-note knack abilities, representing a suite of tricks that their nanomachines are particularly good at.

The first of these faculties, which we are focused on today, is discorporation!

One of the core defensive abilities of the nanocyte class is their ability to rapidly break down and rebuild their bodies to either harden against attack, or open up temporary holes in their bodies to let attacks pass through unhindered. While viscerally disturbing, those with the discorporation faculty take this even further, able to break down their body at will.

Such discorporators seem to melt or evaporate at will, and almost seem more like a swarm of nanites able to adopt a humanoid form than they do a living being with a very meticulous ability to take them apart and put them back together again while maintaining their consciousness.

Indeed, that seems to be what sets these nanocytes apart from their peers, since their consciousness seems more integrated into the nanites themselves much more so than others, to say nothing of how advanced they are to be able to remember and rebuild their shape so easily.

Such nanocytes might be insidious infiltrators and assassins, or they might simply be elusive combatants, or even simply explorers that can get into nearly anywhere.

 Rather than try to escape damage, discorporators can unleash a spray of nanites from their wounds to fill the air with a cloud similar to one they might have created deliberately, albeit lasting mere moments, though perhaps long enough for them to escape or get into a better position.

The iconic ability of this faculty, however, allows them to break down into a liquid-like form, slithering through small spaces and being resistant to physical damage, but losing many of the benefits of limbs, speech, and so on.

Eventually, they also learn to spray their nanites while also escaping damage reflexively, and they can instantly liquify parts of their body to avoid the effects of wounding weapons, reforming and merging the damaged parts nearly instantly.

More powerful discorporating nanocytes can achieve a flying, gas-like state, becoming resistant or immune to many physical ailments while it lasts, and are hard to disperse.

The most powerful of these can discorporate and form a sheath shell around an ally similar to what nanocytes normally do on their own, providing all manner of useful protection for hours at a time, though they can also form limbs to create nanomachine weapons and help fight back. However, doing so destabilizes their sheath form, reducing the time they can remain covering an ally like so.

This faculty works well with pretty much any nanocyte build, allowing them to enter a mobile and resistant state, while also providing reflexive cover and the ability to shield another at high levels, so with that, you can do things like combine it with the infestation faculty to deal damage to nearby foes when you get hit, combine it with effects that bolster the cloud array, or provide new abilities to the sheath array if you expect to get to high level. Regardless, it is quite useful for any utility, stealth, and defensive build.

 More so than any other nanocyte faculty, the question of how much of these beings is still mortal and how much is just nanomachines comes to mind. Some might be more likely to refer to themselves as “We” than other nanocytes, but not all of them. Certainly they are more familiar with how their own bodies fit together than most others, akin to those who regularly use polymorph abilities.

  An unknown verthani intruder was detected not long before the assassination of Magistrate Verga, but no trace of them can be found, and no immediate escape route was available… that is until the party runs a sweep for nanomachine signatures, finding traces of them leading into the ventilation.

 Strange solar flares and radiation are detected emanating from the surface of a distant world. When approached, explorers find the source to be a solar fey called hulsa, who is obsessively blasting the landscape with solar fire. If politely asked why, they reveal that a curious figure stole a relic from them and vanished into a mass of nanomachines that escaped underground to parts unknown. Unable to track the thief, the fey has been trying to melt a path to follow ever since, though they have certainly gotten very far away by now.

A tremble ran through them at the entire thought of being so exposed. But they sensed no humans nearby. No one here to see them so vulnerable. There was only the open sky that no One looked down from anymore. They were alone. They didn’t have to be.

Crowley opened up their senses and let their inner form spill outward, scales blooming across their skin. No accident now, this was an intentional opening up and being ready to feel the world, to see, to be seen. While there might be no people, there was still the whole world there, full of so much life, all of it connected and dependent upon each other.

And right now so much of it was dominated by layers and layers of one vast, interconnected life, a tree made up of itself. The soil around it was made of the broken down leaves and wood where pieces of it fell and decomposed. All the creatures that fed upon it and died here went back to the soil as well. Here was the great mass of it beneath that soil, growing and twisting and sending up new pieces all over again, all pieces of the same great vast network and yet each tree looking slightly different as it was shaped by the weather and interaction with other creatures that used it for food and resources.

Crowley could feel their form spilling away into the earth but they were not falling this time. This was reaching out for sensation, for understanding, to be part of that earth for a bit, to have that simple desire of simply existing and growing and being, of feeling the sun beating down upon them as a source of life and strength. They’d made the stars that gave life to the universe and now they gave life back to them through the forest.

Crowley felt like laying down and so did, form merging with the earth and meeting something equally vast. It was willing to just take them, take away that flesh that kept them separated from the world.

It had no desire for their power, no fear, only a desire to live. It would strip away the flesh Crowley’d never wanted and incorporate it into the world, roots twisting through their bones and leaching their minerals away as beasts gnawed at them. Those beasts too would pass away, faster than Crowley’s bones had, gobbled up by some larger beast or broken down into the earth by the twisting roots of the forest. Time would pass and they too would pass through that cycle of life. No destruction, only passing from one state to another, to feeding the great and endless tree, pieces of that unwanted flesh taken into something greater than themself.

A line of growth would mark where a demon had lain down and never gotten up, just one of endless rings stretching back farther and farther and well past where Crowley knew time should start but now believed it went back farther. Each little piece of growth and connection was marked off in the body of something so incomprehensibly old that it was beyond human comprehension of how much time that really was.

But it had experienced Time, not that unstructured Now that Crowley had experienced before having a body. This forest had always had a physical form and deep in the twisted mass of roots they could feel that sense of dynamic destruction where the old body had fallen away to nourish the new, taking forward some part of that past. Not truly eternal, but dynamic and changing in a way that felt both familiar and alien at once. It reminded them of how they had been Before everything, before having a body, before being Changed. It reminded them of how they’d felt before, something so vast and present and yet… it did have an end. It too had a body.

This was no god, but there was that sense of awe there. There was no need to call out ‘be not afraid’ as it had no concept of fear or of Crowley as a separate entity at all. There was a temptation to just let go, to sink all the way into the earth and let their body go. It was not exactly what the endless forest desired, but it did desire to live. Crowley was as interchangeable to it as a stag or a flock of birds or part of its own form rotting away to be reabsorbed. Crowley would be lost in that all encompassing connection and cease to be in some way.

It was as inevitable as the Great Plan.

Crowley shoved themself back to newly formed hands and knees, dirt spilling off them as they rose back out of the earth. They didn’t have to do this. They could be separate and still be something as vast and seemingly eternal as this forest and yet… care. They did care. Others cared about them. Others who might be as fleetings as rodents were to this forest, but that didn’t mean Crowley shouldn’t care about how they interacted with them, how they connected.