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]

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.

[taste_tester]

"I'm fine. Circulation thing." Addy lets go of her hand.

[mswoods]

"Huh. Alright."

Sadde starts working on it, and at first it's quite easy. After there are enough slices, however, creating new ones that aren't just the same as the old ones becomes increasingly hard, and each new slice takes longer than the previous one.

[taste_tester]

"What's tripping you up?"

[mswoods]

"Creating new slices that are far enough from all others that they're not just widenings of another slice."

[taste_tester]

"Maybe if you ran sandpaper over the intact slice of bone it'd give you fine little grooves to follow."

[mswoods]

"Oh, that sounds like a good idea." Pause. "Couldn't I just use the sandpaper itself as I grow more bone to keep grinding it?"

[taste_tester]

"If you sand your bone to powder that's a way to get bone powder, sure, but it's not going to do a thing for your magic."

[mswoods]

"I guess," she sighs. "I don't think we have any, though."

[taste_tester]

"I'll bring some tomorrow."

[mswoods]

She grins. "Best teacher!"

[taste_tester]

"I try!"

[mswoods]

"Alright, what next?"

[taste_tester]

"Non-blood fluids?" suggests Addy. "Without such a convenient mechanism as capillaries hiding the action from you."

[mswoods]

"Producing or absorbing?"

[taste_tester]

"Both, of course, you don't want the wrong amount of lymph."

[mswoods]

She giggles. "I'm not sure I want to start out with that. Saliva is probably still the safest one to try."

[taste_tester]

"Sure. No shortage of options. Leave spinal fluid for last."

[peterxy]

And so it goes. It turns out that Sadde cannot convince her power to treat free fluid as if it were a part of her and shift it, but she can produce and reabsorb arbitrary fluids, which is almost as good. Her hunch about powder turns out to be correct as well, and it doesn't matter whence comes the matter. She can produce pretty arbitrary biological things, and stretch "biological" pretty far (producing, say, iron), but not too far (no gold). Eventually, the main limitation is practice time, human precision and human memory. Addy bids goodbye. Years pass.