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

[mrwoods]

"Okay... Let's see... The only difference this time was that I was paying attention to the capillaries... And... They weren't fuzzy anymore..." He blinks. "So I think maybe-"

He's interrupted by Laura's arrival! "Hi sweetheart, hello Addy. Much progress today?"

"Yeah! I made a tail!"

[taste_tester]

"Which was very impressive, but more importantly, he made blood and then got rid of it again, which he seems currently to only be able to do subconsciously. Work in progress."

[peterxy]

"I can see why generating blood might be very useful, but why would getting rid of it be?"

[taste_tester]

"So that he doesn't burst like a balloon after doing a lot of the generating part."

[peterxy]

"Ah, yes, that would ruin the carpet," she says amusedly. "In any case, I'm sure he has taken up enough of your time for today."

[taste_tester]

Addy is not literally incapable of taking a hint! "See you tomorrow, Sadde." And off she skips.

[mswoods]

It is:

the following day.

"I figured it out!" she says excitedly when Addy arrives.

[taste_tester]

"Ooh, what'd you figure out?"

[mswoods]

"If I dump the blood into other more solid tissue it gets reabsorbed with it. My magic was doing that when I wasn't paying attention, but when I did pay attention it kept the blood in the actual vessels. I think if I ground up the bone from yesterday into powder I could reabsorb it too."

[taste_tester]

"I can do that and bring it back tomorrow if you want to try. I could also bring you some other powder and see if your magic rejects what wasn't yours to begin with."

[mswoods]

"Oooh good ideas! How are you gonna do it?"

[taste_tester]

"Remember how I," boop, "have your witchcraft?"

[mswoods]

"I mean how are you gonna powder it in the first place?" Pause. "I wonder if I can just reshape bone into powder."

[taste_tester]

"Ooh, could you? Be careful you don't wind up losing bits you don't know how to reabsorb yet in any of your more crucial systems, but that would be very interesting."

[mswoods]

"No, look!" She shows her right palm, and a circle in the middle slowly solidifies into bone, then starts growing. "I figured, given the extent of what I can do, there's no reason why bone should only come from bone. Magic agreed."

[taste_tester]

"Ooh, lookit you. Best prodigy witch."

[mswoods]

She beams. "Okay, let's see..."

Frowning. For a few minutes.

"It feels like I could do it, but I don't have enough... precision?"

[taste_tester]

"You can do capillaries and cone cells but not pulverized bone, really?"

[mswoods]

She frowns and tries again.

"...yeah. It's not exactly the same, though. The capillaries were branching off from larger vessels so I could keep some track, but I could only like focus on bunches of it at the same time, not any individual one, and the cones were also done in kinda modified batches from other cones. This though is... The bone feels like this pure featureless mass and trying to grind it up would require me to kinda draw a lot of minuscule cracks. I can do larger cracks individually, though," and to demonstrate she makes the bone she'd been growing fall of her hand, and then returns the hand's skin to its normal non bony state.

[taste_tester]

"Maybe you could halve it, and then halve it the other way, and then halve the quarters, and so on..."

[mswoods]

"But if I halved it all the time how would I keep the parts always connected to me to keep affecting them?"

[taste_tester]

"Here, do the disk on your palm again."

[mswoods]

She does.

[taste_tester]

Addy takes her hand and traces a cross across it, then an offset cross, like a sliced pie. "Like that, and then -" She draws a grid over the cross. "Like that, and so on, but it's always attached to your hand, just not to itself. Until you're holding a palmful of attached powder and can detach it all at once. Sound doable?"

[mswoods]

"Yeah, I'll try that. And your hand's really cold, are you okay?" It's also kinda hard to the touch, but Sadde doesn't feel like that's a polite thing to say. She's not always tactful but by now she's grown pretty fond of Addy.