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]

"Well," says Addy. "I won't let anyone kidnap her."

[peterxy]

"Oh good," Laura says, dryly.

[mswoods]

Sadde giggles. "Bye, Addy! See you tomorrow!"

[taste_tester]

"Bye!"

And Addy departs.

She is back punctually the following afternoon.

[mswoods]

Sadde is waiting the next afternoon!

"Hi, Addy!" she great, waving and then gesturing for her to walk inside. She might notice the hand Sadde's doing that with happens to have six fingers.

[taste_tester]

"Oh, lookit you, you did it!"

[mswoods]

"I did it! It wasn't really any harder than growing the nail but it took longer. I was working on it at school, I had my hand inside my pocket and it was weird, I had to first create the skin then start filling it with bone and tendon and it hurt at first but I started doing the nerve thing so it didn't hurt anymore but it was still pretty slow. And now I was trying to untie the tendons of these two fingers and then you arrived and I can’t really move my hand much at the moment.”

[taste_tester]

"Untie them?"

[mswoods]

She shows her good hand and tries lowering the pinky finger without doing the same to the ring finger. "You know, the way these two tendons are kinda the same tendon? That. I wanna separate them so I can move my fingers separately. I bet that would be a nice party trick to show people," she says, giggling.

[taste_tester]

"Ooh, that sounds clever. How're you doing with it so far?"

[mswoods]

"Not very well," she admits. "I don't actually know much about tendons, and this is different than the other things in that there's nothing I can, like, directly see about it. Usually I have to focus on what I want it to look like at the end, but this will mostly look the same so. It's different."

[taste_tester]

"I'll get you an anatomy book. Maybe you could make your skin transparent. Humans don't come in transparent but frogs do."

[mswoods]

"Hmm." She looks at her hand - the one with the extra pinky - and tilts her head, frowning slightly. The skin there starts getting really pale, as pale as Addy's and somewhat more insubstantial, as if she's quite malnourished in addiction to very terribly pale, but not yet transparent. "I think maybe I'd need to see a picture of a frog like that? Or... something. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong."

[taste_tester]

"I can get you pictures of glass frogs. You have transparent parts, though. Your corneas, for instance."

[mswoods]

"Yeah, but I can't really translate? I mean, I guess I could... shift the tissue of my skin into cornea tissue, like I did to create the nail, but then it wouldn't really be transparent skin, exactly. And I think it'd be just as fragile."

[taste_tester]

"Frogs it is, then. Ever seen a firefly? They glow. Maybe you could light up from the inside to get a look at what you're doing with only your normal transparency to work with."

[mswoods]

"I've never actually seen one." Pause. "Would you mind terribly if we went to a library to borrow some books with this kind of thing? I know a few around," she says, not possessed of perfect memory to recall she mentioned that the previous evening.

[taste_tester]

"Oh, I was going to just buy you the books, but if you want to go to a library I'll tag along." She checked; she can shift enough not to sparkle in the sun.

[mswoods]

She blinks. "Oh." Pause. "One part of me wants to graciously decline, the other is just repeating the word 'books' over and over."

[taste_tester]

"I'm not hurting for money. It's a hobby expense, you see?"

[mswoods]

"You're not helping the first part," she says. "Well alright, but for now we can go to the library. Unless you want to buy them now?" Tad hopeful? Tad hopeful.

[taste_tester]

"Sure, why not?"

[mswoods]

"Yay!"

Books!

[taste_tester]

So Addy escorts her to a bookstore and gets her a book on human anatomy and one on various sorts of animals with pictures of e.g. glass frogs.

[mswoods]

Glass frogs are neat! On the way to the bookstore and back she works on retracting the extra finger, and she's done by the time they're experimenting again.

Twenty-three minutes later, she's staring at the tendons of her hand through her skin and can't decide whether the sight is gross or cool.