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]

"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?"

[taste_tester]

"They're not! And that means that you can make, and then change, non-alive matter. Maybe you could figure out how to grow specific kinds of things. Lay golden eggs, only probably not literally."

[mswoods]

"That... sounds like it would hurt. And I don't think I can shift into stuff that was never alive-ish in the first place? Or that's not... biological in some way? I mean, I can change bone, so the border's fuzzy, but I think gold is way too far from it. I mean, I totally want to try, I just have no idea how." She turns blonde - that's actually pretty fast, only takes a second - and her hair grows quite long. She flicks it. "Blonde, yes, golden, no." She shortens and blackens her hair again.

[taste_tester]

"Cutting your hair doesn't hurt," Addy points out. "And you can make it longer, which means you can generate new things. Maybe not solid gold, maybe you're stuck with biology, but biology can do neat things. Ivory? Pearls? Coral?"

[mswoods]

"Those sound all possible to me," she says, after a second thinking about it. "I think that's also in increasing order of difficulty. Ivory sounds like I could just convince my bones to be a bit differently, Pearls like I could convince my cells to secrete a certain substance, Coral... I dunno much about Coral, I'll need to research that too, I guess." She pauses. "And it's interesting that I seem to have some intuition for this? I never noticed I had intuition for this."

[taste_tester]

"It's very promising that you've got intuition for this! I bet wood would be even harder than coral, am I right?"

[mswoods]

She thinks, then nods. "Yes. I'm not even totally sure I could do wood. Why is that true?"

[taste_tester]

"Coral's an animal thing, wood's a plant thing."

[mswoods]

"Hmm... isn't that distinction kinda pretty fuzzy anyway? I wonder if I could convince my magic it's a pretty fuzzy distinction."

[taste_tester]

"Maybe you could! Might be easier to go via something other than wood. Convince your magic that your hair is not that unlike moss, maybe."

[mswoods]

"...but it is. Moss is actually alive, for one, and also is it even made of the same kind of thing? Erm, I should probably convince myself before trying to convince my magic."