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

[mrsparkle]

"Yes, it was," he admits. "Still a pretty sweet deal, other than the searing fire in my throat I'm not even traumatised, being a vampire is awesome, everyone should be one." That thought skirts waayyyy too close to treasonous thoughts, though, and the fact that Volturi head honcho can download his mind makes him try to think about something else immediately. Fortunately he's so easily distracted! "Should we come back to my house?"

[taste_tester]

"Are you sure you want to go into the middle of London on day one? Even with your many advantages? It's nothing on the smell, but heartbeats and really pale people with visible veins are still a thing, and you can barely control your mood, let alone your teeth."

[mrsparkle]

"Okay, good points all, where do you suggest?"

[taste_tester]

"Here's fine. Unless you're really feeling the lack of furnishings. Introduce yourself to the next hiker. Shake hands. Stare at their throat. If you mess up it's no big deal and I don't have to commit arson."

[mrsparkle]

"Yeah it is quite big a deal to me I think I want some less direct-contact tests before going with that. Maybe look at someone from a distance." Pause. "And I was not expecting humans to be quite this tasty, I had expected to come back after three days, and I don't have internet here. Fudge."

[taste_tester]

"No cell phone?"

[mrsparkle]

"I didn't bring it, I expected there was a very good chance I'd lose or crush it if I had."

[taste_tester]

"Well, you might crush mine if I loan it out, pick up a rock or a stick or something."

[mrsparkle]

He looks around for a suitably shaped rock and picks it up.

Oops. No he doesn't. He starts laughing. "This feels like butter." He tries again, this time being very delicate, and noticing that he actually has very fine control over how much strength he exerts. He doesn't crush that one. "...I should probably still not use a cell phone for a while."

[taste_tester]

"Anybody you want me to text?"

[mrsparkle]

He thinks about it then frowns. "I can't remember! Yes- my mother, my boss, and my friends- I don't remember all their names! Well, okay, some of them, the closest ones, I can remember those.” He rattles off a list of eleven names, as well as appropriately mysterious details each of them should hear, confident that Addy would remember them all.

[taste_tester]

"You don't remember their phone numbers, do you."

[mrsparkle]

"Nnnnooooo but I can give you the keys to the apartment and you can maybe get my phone and do that? And I can sit here and twiddle thumbs, I guess." He sounds positively miserable about this, which, of course he does.

[taste_tester]

"I can do that, no problem. Are you going to cause trouble while I'm not around to rip your arms off?"

[mrsparkle]

"Nnnnnnoooooo I'm gonna just stay here and get distracted by how pretty all these dust motes are."

[taste_tester]

"Okay. Be right back. Don't turn your sense of smell on."

And off she zooms.

[mrsparkle]

He doesn't turn his sense of smell back on! And for the first few minutes, he does in fact just sit there twiddling his thumbs.

But eventually he thinks of something even more fun to do than admiring blades of grass.

He bets Addy will be interested in this fun thing when she comes back.

[taste_tester]

Addy comes back with his phone and other objects in the apartment that looked memory-jogging.

[mrsparkle]

They jog his memory! He remembers people, and what his mother looks like, and that one ex-boyfriend who he still pines over but has never gotten the courage to call again since they broke up's phone number!

Also his notebooks, which he quickly devours and memorises lots of things.

Not that he needs to.

He beams at Addy as his skin gets less sparkly and becomes red, then he grows a tail and a pair of horns, and it's all pretty smooth and much faster than he could've done while human. "This is so much easier! Look!" He cups his hands and shakes them a bit, and they fill with bone powder. "But I bet you knew that, I bet you tested all these things when you were on your own already!" he accuses playfully.

[taste_tester]

"You caught me."

[mrsparkle]

"Ngh!" he complains. "Well did you ever think of anything that might be expanded upon my turning other than the fact that I have basically infinite mental room and super speed and super precision and concentration?"

[taste_tester]

"It's a lot harder to predict what will change on turning than to predict what can change with time and elbow grease. It would not floor me if you could now shapeshift other people, or produce totally inorganic materials, or beat any other vampire you met in contests of Standard Vampire Attributes unless they had a more specialized witchcraft helping, but you might have gotten no upgrades besides the brain one, I don't know."

[mrsparkle]

"Hm. Shapeshift other people, okay, that's something to try. Totally inorganic- well, given just how much my definitions of organic have changed over the past few days, that could maybe work, yeah. I dunno about the Standard Vampire Attributes - how are they even encoded? Is it just magic fuelling our bodies or something?"

[taste_tester]

"I think the current understanding is that a non-witch vampire is technically not magic, just evolutionarily inexplicable. But I don't know if you can improve on vampire venom as an all-purpose doing-things fluid."

[mrsparkle]

"Are there many biologists or physicists turned vampire? Because I may not be either of those but what I do know of them makes me think there is no way in heck this isn't magic."