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, 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."

[mswoods]

She nods and- closes her eyes.

She grins, and all of her upper teeth start getting progressively smaller (mostly thinner), with a gap opening up in the middle. It's a pretty slow process, sometimes an "Ow!" escapes when she squeezes something she shouldn't have, but otherwise it goes smoothly.

Eventually there's enough space for a reasonably sized tooth, but instead of pushing one through the gums she extends the openings around her other teeth so there's a clean hole there. Then a new tooth starts growing from the hole until it looks quite natural, there, except for the fact that it's in the middle of her face.

"That kinda hurt a little, but not too much," she opines, her words sounding a bit weird due to the unfamiliar landscape.

[taste_tester]

"I saw that, you didn't actually grow the tooth through the gums," Addy says. "That's fine for teeth but it doesn't help with figuring out if you can do horns. Hm. If you're nervous about it hurting, maybe add a fingernail somewhere that hasn't usually got any. You can start with nail matrix, that's the stuff under the nail itself, and grow nail from that, should be nice and smooth."

[mswoods]

She pouts. "But what if I can do the same thing? Like, maybe open holes on the skin of my forehead, in a way that doesn't hurt, and push the horns through there?"

[taste_tester]

"All right, that's worth trying too."

[mswoods]

She closes her eyes for this. The skin and muscle of her forehead start shifting visibly, two circular depressions appearing where they get thinner and thinner. She frowns a bit, but says "Ow!" when that pulls something she's working on and stops frowning. Eventually the shifts settle and there are two very clear discs on her forehead, but no horns are forthcoming.

"...I don't think I can do it."

[taste_tester]

"Why not? You can move bones."

[mswoods]

"I... I don't mean it's impossible to do it, I think if I tried really hard I could, but I think it'll hurt a lot."

She closes her eyes again, and after a few seconds two little points start poking from under the skin of those depressions, as if tiny little horns were trying to grow from there.

[taste_tester]

"Can you grow bone without adding any nerve to it, maybe?"

[mswoods]

She ponders the question. "Ye-es? I think." Pause. "I wonder if I could maybe remove the nerves from the skin and muscle, too? So it won't hurt?"

She tries that. But that is not a way a human could be. With the two little points still pushing against the skin, a faint shifting can be seen - by Addy the vampire, not by any humans, it's too faint. She winces and shudders as she does that, but doesn't actually say "Ow!" It just... takes quite a while.

Dinner smells can be smelled!