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]

"Okay, but anyway, witch classes from a witch trainer, that's kinda dropped onto our laps, good, right?" She's clearly very excited about the prospect.

[taste_tester]

"I'm so glad you're enthusiastic about it!" says Addy. "So how far have you stretched it already?"

[mswoods]

"Well, the first time I turned was... surprising."

[peterxy]

"That's one way to put it," Laura says, dryly. "She switched sexes in her crib when she was one."

[mswoods]

"That's still the easiest way I can change, probably because I have so much practice at it. For the longest time it was all I could do. But then I learnt how to change other stuff, like what you saw today, or what you did now. I think I can change into almost anything human, except the farther it is from what I currently look like, the longer it takes, and if I haven't done it many times before it also takes a lot of concentration."

[taste_tester]

"Hmm. What are you concentrating on specifically when you're doing a difficult transformation?"

[mswoods]

"I have to focus on what exactly I want to change, and how I want it to change. Like... I don't need to specifically know the anatomical details or anything, but I need to kinda will my bones to do this and move there and look like that, and my eyes to turn this particular colour, stuff like that. And sometimes the stuff I have to change is all related in different ways, and so I have to focus on it all at the same time, or do it just a little bit here and a little bit there, and sometimes if I do it too much the wrong way it can get in painful positions until I fix it."

[taste_tester]

"Do you ever get out of practice with things you haven't tried in a long time, or is it like riding a bike?"

[peterxy]

Laura watches this exchange with interest for a while, having little to add to it.

"I'm going to start working on dinner, if you need anything." And she goes to the small kitchen over there, from where she can still hear everything they're saying.

[mswoods]

"Okay, mum!"

Back to Addy: "I never get as out of practice as if I had never tried it before, but it can get harder, yeah. Like, the more I practice it, the more natural it becomes to do stuff a certain way in a certain order, so I can just redo it more quickly later, but then if it's too long since I've done it I have to try to remember it again. Maybe the best analogy is an old recipe?"

[taste_tester]

"When it hurts what's the cause? Something squeezing something else or stretching out, or do some shapes just hurt to be even if there's none of that?"

[mswoods]

"The first thing," she says promptly. "At least, nothing I've tried yet just intrinsically hurts."

[taste_tester]

"What if you wanted to, say, grow horns, would that hurt?"

[mswoods]

"I don't know, I've never tried! I don't even know what I'd have to do, I dunno if I can just like open holes on my skin for horns to come out like that."

[taste_tester]

"Can you grow more teeth? Or scales?"

[mswoods]

"Teeth... mmmmaybe. I think I probably could, if I made my current teeth smaller to fit the new ones? I dunno about the scales, though, I guess I'd have to first figure out what sort of scales, and then I dunno if they'd come from my skin or from under it or what."

[taste_tester]

"You don't know? You wouldn't get to decide that sort of thing?"

[mswoods]

"Maybe? I haven't tried anything humans can't be, so I don't know how it'd interface. All the things I've tried were just, you know, other ways to be human, or combinations of other ways to be human that might look a particular way when juxtaposed like the kitten thing."

[taste_tester]

"Well, if you can do teeth you can probably do horns, and if you can do horns you can probably do scales."

[mswoods]

"I suppose. It sounds like it'd hurt, though."

[taste_tester]

"You've grown new teeth before, you're not that young."

[mswoods]

"Well but teeth kinda do hurt a little, don't they? I don't remember anymore. And horns would be similar but bigger, I think."

[taste_tester]

"Sure, teeth can hurt. But you can put yourself back. You've got lots of practice having the number of teeth you have."

[mswoods]

"I guess," she says, dubiously. "What do you think I should try first, then?"

[taste_tester]

"Teeth'll be easiest. And gums are just another kind of skin. If you can grow things through that, you can do horns, too."