In Street Magic (p. 60), the Empower Animal advanced metamagic technique offers some interesting opportunities. Here's an idea that came to me.

The technique allows the transfer of an Adept Power to an animal Attuned to the Adept through the Attune (animal) technique. Empower Animal does not limit the duration of the transferred Adept Power, and says,"If the animal does not possess an appropriate skill required to use the power, it instinctively taps the adept's own natural (unmodified) skill rating for any relevant test, but with a -2 dice pool modifier."

So, what if the Adept has the Linguistics Power (SM p. 177-178)? It would seem to me that he could imbue his Attuned animal, say his dog, with the ability to learn a language at a rudimentary level. Yes, since the dog has no Magic ability it would take 10 hours to make the attempt, and the dog's INT and LOG Attributes are not too high, but learning a simple language would be numerically possible. Sure the dog could not articulate words well, but the number of commands that could be used would surely be greatly increased. The duration of transfer applies only to the learning of the language, and would not have to be maintained for use of the language.

For example the following commands could all be trained into a dog's repertoire using traditional methods, but particularly because of the Sense Link set up by Attune (animal) could be quickly given and understood once the dog knows a language:

"Get my gun."
"Wake me quietly if a person comes to the door."
"Find Jaco."
"Go pee on the man by the door."

Any thoughts?

I like it!



I do not really see any problems with that.

So if Scooby Doo can speak at about 80% effectiveness (Number Possibly Wrong) these animals could speak at about 20% effectiveness? Sweet.

Might want to make a note about parrots and related birds who are already able to mimic human speech.

Also, it'd probably be possiblw for chimpanzees and other fingered-creatures to become fluent in Sign Language.

Chimps can learn sign language today (or symbol-language use through computers) so that part should be easy...

Two words: Kinestics.

Have your adept take a level of Kinestics and transfer it to the dog after it has learned human language. According to the RAW, this gives the dog all of the Adept's social skills at a -2 penalty.

Better yet, give the dog missile mastery and a bandoleer full of grenades. He grabs the grenade with his teeth, rears his head back, and hurls the weapon a surprising distance.

Or give the animal Improved Ability: Long Arms and a heavily customized tripod-bounted sniper rifle. It would take him several complex actions to set the thing up but once he does he'd be a crack shot.

175 Chimps
130 Gorillas
85 Orangutans
20 Adepts with Linguistics and Empower Animal
1 Cave-City
200 feral human meatpupets
1 Inhabitated Clone of Charlton Heston
The real Statue of Liberty

The best rendition of Planet of the Apes, ever.





It would be a great plot-hook actually. Some high profile runners are hired to steal the Statue of Liberty so a rich madman can stage the penultimate performance of Planet of the Apes.

Lupin III has done it!

He stashed it in the grand canyon IIRC.

Then again, Lupin III is hardly the hallmark of realism...

That would require actually reducing all of humanity to a primitive state and replacing them with an actual civilization of hyper-intelligent apes and then throwing a Charlton Heston clone who has been personafixed to believe himself to really be Taylor into it.

Since the total destruction of human civilization of Earth is required, it is really something that can only be done once. Particularly if you also use the sequal, in which Taylor detonates a doomsday device because he didn't want to do a third sequal.

I don't know, my dog has a wide variety of sounds she makes that are quite similar to speech.
Put a set of trodes and sim rig on him, give him your improved ability (computer, hacking etc, and have him as your wing man on hacking runs. (esp. good if said animal is a dolphin)

It's not just to vocal chords, it's the shape of the mouth and throat that allow speech. Our air passage bends at the top, so we get to make all sorts of nifty phonemes.

You could give him a comlink, some trodes, and an external speaker.

Well yes, but, do you really want to hear what he has to say?
Dog: "I saw a squirrel today, it was great. Hey, what's that over there, poop? Yum yum, nutty. Hey, you crotch smells a little different today. Why does your crotch smell different? Smell your crotch. Smell it! Here, smell my butt, does it smell okay? I like bacon."

AFAIK, animal attunement doesn't actually make the animal in question any smarter. So giving them the ability to speak might not be all it's cracked up to be.