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

[taste_tester]

Addy undoes her horn morph. "I can come back later, perhaps."

[peterxy]

"Oh you needn't, there's enough food for you."

[mswoods]

"Yeah and also you need to teach me how you managed not to bleed!"

[taste_tester]

"I'm afraid I have extremely bizarre dietary needs and I wouldn't dream of asking you to meet them," Addy says. "And I didn't leave any open blood vessels, that's how."

[peterxy]

"If you're sure," Laura says.

[mswoods]

"Well, these are neat, anyway! I like them! Yes mum I know I can't keep them," she sighs, and then shrinks them herself, not nearly as quickly as Addy. "How come you're faster at it than I am?"

Also, there seems to be a slight problem in her version of the horns, namely that she doesn't actually have super healing, even if she can keep her skin flaps close together and not... flapping about.

[taste_tester]

"I have practice at picking up new magic quickly and I'm not afraid of things hurting," Addy says. "I'll be back in, call it an hour, enjoy your dinner."

And she lets herself out.

[peterxy]

"...what a curious person," Laura says.

[mswoods]

Sadde just giggles.

[taste_tester]

Addy is back an hour later. There is not a homeless man's blood on her lips; she ate very neatly. Knock knock.

[mswoods]

"Hello!" the girl says when she opens the door. Her forehead has bandages covering the spot where the horns' damage is healing. "How come your forehead isn't all ripped open, too?"

[taste_tester]

"I put it back. Don't you think you could manage the same thing? Healing is just being a different shape than before."

[mswoods]

"Mmmmmaybe? I never managed it before. I do heal faster than other people, though."

[taste_tester]

"You have lots of practice not having holes in your head. I bet you can arrange it."

[mswoods]

"Hm."

That's actually pretty reasonable. She removes the bandages and- focuses.

It's hard. But not as hard as growing horns, since those aren't actually human at all and she had to invent a shape for them and such. Except it's another kind of hard, she has to concentrate on much finer detail than normal, knitting the wounds together. Just visualising the way she wants her forehead to be isn't enough.

But eventually she does manage to do it.

"Wicked!"

[taste_tester]

Addy boops her again. "I don't think I remembered to introduce myself. That's me, all business - I'm Addy."

[mswoods]

She blinks. "Yeah, you didn't. And why do you keep booping me?"

[taste_tester]

"To update my copy of your power. I can't do anything new with it, only you can."

[mswoods]

She scratches her head. "Mending the damage is the new thing? So how did you do it before, if it wasn't that?"

[taste_tester]

"Oh, sometimes it turns out there's nothing new after all, but I can't tell until I check."

[mswoods]

"Oh. That's interesting. What counts as 'new,' though? Isn't what I did just another application of the same principles? I didn't feel like I really did anything all that new, just... um... combined the old things in a new way."

[taste_tester]

"That's exactly the sort of thing that I pick up. That and stretching old things in new directions and new distances."

[mswoods]

"But it's so weird that you can't do it yourself. Like, what would have happened if you had tried doing the horns thing before I did? Or the tooth thing, even?"

By the by, her teeth are back to normal.

[taste_tester]

"It might have worked, but if it did, it would have been because you could already do it and hadn't before for some other reason, like being scared of it."

[mswoods]

"Hmmm. I don't think there's ever been anything like that? Or at least I don't feel like there's ever been anything like that. It all feels like just the same thing. I mean... I guess the best way to explain it is that it feels like mixing paint. It may be a different colour, but I already had all the paint before and just mixed it differently this time."