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]

"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.

[mrwoods]

Sadde is:

twenty-three.

[taste_tester]

Knock knock!

[mrwoods]

Blink blink. "Addy?"

[taste_tester]

"Hey Sadde! How goes?"

[mrwoods]

Sadde is no longer living in a tiny apartment in London.

He is living in a rather large and well-decorated apartment in London.

"Pretty great! Wow I did not remember you were this pretty. Erm. Wanna come in?"

Sadde, himself, is quite pretty, and of course, that is by design.

[taste_tester]

"Sure!" In she comes. "If that's going to be awkward, you should know that I'm completely asexual."

[mrwoods]

He blinks again. "Okay, attempts at flirting will no longer happen."

No, seriously, it is a really large apartment. There's a second story!

"Anyway, how about you, how've you been?"

[taste_tester]

"I've been doing well! I thought I'd swing by while I was in town. Did your magic turn out to have any hidden depths that you dug up without me or is it as-was?"

[mrwoods]

"As far as I can tell, no hidden depths, only other creative uses. Same memory slash training slash precision limits, though. I have a few useful shifts pretty much instinctive by now, and I've created some personal vocabulary for the qualia involved that English doesn't have and started keeping a diary with recipes for other stuff."

[taste_tester]

"Ooh, personal vocabulary!"

[mrwoods]

"Yes! Wanna see?" He's asking it out of courtesy, he doesn't wait for an answer before going upstairs to grab his notebook because of course she does.

...it's pure gibberish.

"I'm afraid I don't really have a dictionary," he says apologetically. "If you boop me I could show you what some of these meant but I think it'd take a few years for you to memorise them all."

[taste_tester]

She boops him. "I'm a quick learner."

[mrwoods]

So maybe it's time for him to teach her!

The first recipes are mostly basic general stuff, like how to turn some kind of tissue into some other kind, or how to rupture tissue without causing too much damage and pain, mostly the building blocks for more complex stuff.

[taste_tester]

She is in fact a very quick learner.

[mrwoods]

He notices this! "Wow okay you gotta teach me your trick, does your magic-copy power make you magic-learn other stuff too?"

[taste_tester]

"I've always been good at learning things. My personality trait that gave rise to my magic is mimicry, remember?"

[mrwoods]

"So it's not something teachable? That's disappointing," he sighs.

[taste_tester]

"Well..."

[mrwoods]

"That's promising."