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]

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."

[taste_tester]

"Sure. But my power doesn't work like yours, and every so often I'm gonna have to boop you."

[mswoods]

She shrugs. "Okay, I guess. So, erm, what next?"

[taste_tester]

"Did you try the fingernail thing?"

[mswoods]

"Nnnnooooo, I thought it wouldn't be very useful after I managed to do the horn thing."

[taste_tester]

"It's a different principle. Fingernails grow from a certain kind of skin. Changing some of your skin into matrix might make it easy to grow nail from it, or it might not, and either way would be interesting."

[mswoods]

"Hmmm, okay, let me try."

This one is a bit different as well. It's a way humans can be, but it's not the right place they can be. She could probably just move a bit of matrix around until it reached her destination, but that'd feel... inelegant. She has to coax a part of her body to be something it's not, not just to grow in a different way or move a bit.

...this one actually feels different in the way Addy suggested might happen. It's really not just some other way of doing what she always did. Her right palm, there, that's as good a place as any and good to show, so she starts changing.

It's really slow.

[taste_tester]

Addy is infinitely patient and attentive.

[mswoods]

Eventually it does work. She reworks the nerves and closes the blood vessels, which takes a few more minutes - it's not nearly as intuitive as stuff she already knew - and then starts growing a nail along her palm.