there's only so much I can turn into

[mswoods]

The thirteen-year-old girl is coming back home from school, on foot.

There's a cat following her. It's been following her for a while, but from a distance.

She decides to be friendly. She stops and turns around to look at it. It stops as well. "Mow?"

The girl's face- changes. It's still a human face, mostly, but now there's something different about it. More feline than anything. Whiskers grow, her pupils dilate and her eyes get a bit rounder, her bones move under her skin, their shape changing a bit. "Mew," she says, vocal apparatus having changed a bit, apparently.

The cat blinks and approaches cautiously. "Moow...?"

She doesn't giggle, but she feels like giggling. She's talking to a kitty! Well, kinda talking to a kitty, it's not like she can understand kitty-speech. But still! "Maw!"

Comments

[mswoods]

"Yay!"

Books!

[taste_tester]

So Addy escorts her to a bookstore and gets her a book on human anatomy and one on various sorts of animals with pictures of e.g. glass frogs.

[mswoods]

Glass frogs are neat! On the way to the bookstore and back she works on retracting the extra finger, and she's done by the time they're experimenting again.

Twenty-three minutes later, she's staring at the tendons of her hand through her skin and can't decide whether the sight is gross or cool.

[taste_tester]

"Helpful?"

[mswoods]

"Grool!" is what she settles on, giggling. "Okay, so, I guess I can compare the tendons here and..."

It's much easier when she has more of an idea of what she's aiming for like that, especially when she can compare directly. First she makes the tendons between ring and pinky more like the others; then, she changes all of the intersections so that all of her fingers are effectively independent of all others. Finally, she repeats the procedure on her other hand, without making its skin invisible first. That takes longer.

She wiggles them in front of her face, thirty-two minutes after she's started, grinning. "I think I'll keep this one," she says.

[taste_tester]

"Sounds good to me. The transparent skin could be useful for all kinds of tricks. You could get rid of your appendix, those things are nothing but trouble."

[mswoods]

"Oooh good idea! But I don't think I can do all that tonight, might be best to wait for the weekend."

Her hand starts slowly returning to a state that matches the surrounding skin.

[taste_tester]

"I wonder why it's so slow. Do you feel like something bad would happen if you tried to work fast?"

[mswoods]

"No, it's more that I have to really pay attention to what I'm doing when it's new. Sorta like a new recipe, making sure I got all the ingredients right and timing everything and all that. I've tried doing new things too fast before and it was nnnnnot pretty. Like in this case," she says, showing her shifting hand, "I could maybe miss a spot, or maybe a deeper layer would stay the same, or something like that, I mean I don't know for sure that that's what would happen but it's the kind of thing that could happen. Changes I'm more used to come much faster."

[taste_tester]

"Seeing a picture of a glass frog helped. I wonder if you should watch movies with shapeshifters in them. And good special effects."

[mswoods]

"I don't feel like this would work. It's different than the frog thing. It feels like I need something to pivot around, even if I don't know the exact biological details of what I'm doing, and that's what the picture was for. I won't need a picture anymore, I know what it feels like to turn skin transparent, but I don't think I could do it at all without seeing it once. The time thing... Okay, I like the recipe analogy, so I'll go with it. Seeing the picture of the frog is like seeing a recipe, being fast is like knowing it by heart so I can just do it without thinking. If I see someone else baking a cake that doesn't make me good at baking cakes, even if I can in theory mimic it and bake a similar cake."

[taste_tester]

"Fair enough." Pause. "Eyes evolved from light-sensitive patches of skin. I wonder if you could get three hundred sixty degree vision."

[mswoods]

"...oooooh." Pause. "What about all the nerves connecting to the visual cortex, though?"

[taste_tester]

"I don't know. You can feel warmth all over your body, maybe with practice you could use that map to see light too."

[mswoods]

"Hmmm." She thinks. "Maybe I could try to, turn it into a different kind of warm? I dunno if I could hook it into the cortex, I'm afraid of touching my brain and screwing it up. And there's all those layers of stuff there, I dunno if I can get as much fine detail from that."

[taste_tester]

"Layers of stuff?"

[mswoods]

"Neurons, layers of neurons, the visual cortex has lots of those to process images, I read that somewhere, and I think I could at most get blurs that I could learn to interpret visually from the rest of my body."

[taste_tester]

"Fair enough. You could make yourself another kind of cone and see in more colors, maybe? I don't know whether there are real human tetrachromats but they're suspected possible and shouldn't require nervous system rewiring to emulate if I understand it right."

[mswoods]

"Ooh, I like that idea!" She opens one of her books and looks for stuff related to eyes. "I've never tried creating new cells, though, that sounds really hard to do."

[taste_tester]

"You make new cells all the time just growing and replacing dead ones. These'll just be a different kind."

[mswoods]

"That's true," she says, reasonably. "And it's not really that different from the healing, is it? Fundamentally. Producing new cells from old ones and stuff. Hmm."

She doesn't close her eyes - that'd defeat the point. But she focuses.

For about five minutes, when she says, "I can't really tell if it's working or not."

[taste_tester]

"Well, can you see any new colors? Or do existing colors look weird?"

[mswoods]

"Nope, but I dunno that it'd start working right away, I dunno if I have to rewire anything to get the new cones up and running."

[taste_tester]

"I'm not sure either. Maybe we should read your book's section on eyes, see if it explains how cones work. In the meanwhile, you can change your hair, right? Even though hair's not alive past the root?"

[mswoods]

She nods. "I think nails aren't all alive either?"