Thread:Disgustedorite/@comment-27725096-20161024235401/@comment-25175729-20161025013202

Her physical form is simultaneously in two states--summer and winter. Parts of her physical form express one of the two states based on temperature; if you were to place her in an arctic tundra, her entire form would always be in winter state, and if you placed her in a burning hot desert, her entire form would always be in summer state. If you strapped an ice pack to her leg when she's in her summer coat, you'd remove it later to find that fur grew under it.

The seasonal coat system originally arose when Gomedha migrated to the Great Plains thousands of years ago. In the summer, it was so burning hot that she had to be hairless and covered in scales to avoid overheating; but in the winter, she had to be a ball of fluff to avoid freezing. At the time, she couldn't switch between the two without regenerating, and it made spring and fall months uncomfortable as well.

After spending an entire winter frozen at the edge of a lake unable to reform until the ice melted (not fun!), she decided she'd had enough. So when she reformed, she tried to be both fluffy and scaly at the same time, adjusting only based on temperature. The result was something resembling her modern summer coat, but with extra fluff on her back.

Because she was technically in both versions of her physical form at the same time, all she had to do from there was to find a way to remove parts of her form that got too hot or too cold and replace them with parts from the opposite version; her self-amputation ability came in handy here, as an extension of the ability is her being able to quickly regrow any part of her form that was lost (not like right away quickly, but within a day or two). So, if she gets too hot when fluffy, she literally makes her fur fall out and scales grow in its place, and when she gets too cold when scaly, she sheds her scales and grows some fur. No shapeshifting is involved, as it's all contained within her main form.

I hope that explains it well enough!