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]

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."

[taste_tester]

"Couldn't tell you, not my area."

[mrsparkle]

"Alright, then, let's see..."

Over the following couple of weeks - sleepless weeks! He doesn't have to sleep! He is really glad he became a vampire, so useful - they determine that Sadde's power has not substantially revised its opinion of what counts as biological, though it does make him more immortal than the typical vampire. Addy's guess about enhanced Standard Vampire Attributes also turns out to be true, but that's mostly just because of the different raw material and some magic-based insights on how to tweak it.

The boost to cognition is by far the most significant improvement, but she already knew that.

Sadde also sees people from a distance, and although the heartbeats and veins are horribly tempting, they're not enough to turn him into a raging machine of death.

He's now pondering the pros and cons of turning his sense of smell back on.

"Do you think I should?"

[taste_tester]

With a few weeks under his belt Addy thinks his guess is better than hers about whether that's smart. Although she does advise him not to do his blood generation trick near any humans. Being mid-"hunt" around humans is a bad plan even if "hunting" means "salivating weirdly".

[mrsparkle]

Good point! He thinks he probably wants to try, it can't be that hard if all other vampires do it.

...then again, other vampires don't have as many compunctious as he does about the occasional slip up.

He decides to drink enough to slosh before turning his sense of smell on with a human anywhere nearby.

[taste_tester]

This is an entirely reasonable precaution.

[mrsparkle]

"Anywhere nearby" is about five hundred metres away, covered by trees.

The slosh helps. It's abundantly clear that it does, because the second he can smell again his throat is on fire. He holds himself very still, focusing on the fact that it's a person, and that he has just eaten a lot and he's a horrible person when he has to convince not to kill someone by arguing that he's just eaten and now he's in a funk.

But it's a murderless funk so, um, yay?

[taste_tester]

Sure, why not.

[mrwoods]

He does that a few more times over the next few weeks, getting progressively closer to his targets each time. One time he does in fact go after a human, but the shock of having his first arm ripped off by Addy is enough to snap him out of it. Also, his power grows another arm pretty quickly, so, oops?

Eventually he feels confident enough to shift his skin and eyes into more natural colours and actually talks to a human. It's about as awful as he'd expected it would be, but he's getting used to the awfulness so he doesn't actually kill anyone!

[taste_tester]

"You did not have to grow a new arm. This one would've gone back where it came from just fine if you just licked the stump and held it in place," Addy comments, when she is left holding a redundant arm.

[mrsparkle]

"It was wholly accidental and unconscious," he says, giggling as he pulverizes his extra arm (that's marginally faster and way more fun than just shrinking it back) then reattaches the old one.

[taste_tester]

"Sure it was."

[mrsparkle]

"My magic has a very protective personality."

[taste_tester]

"Yum."

[mssparkle]

Eventually Sadde feels she's ready to come back home.

[taste_tester]

"I will stalk you for the first week or two in case you have a newborn moment, and then I'm going to fuck off," Addy says. "I know you'll miss me terribly."

[mswoods]

She laughs. "I actually will!" And one part of her whispers in her head that Addy will now resume being a mass murderer but there's not much she can do about it yet.

Human-coloured self, activate!