"Mrrrow?" she calls out, blinking, then her face shifts again and she pouts. "I didn't want to talk to you anyway!" she says to no one in particular.

"Oh, that's not your fault," says a voice.

She eeps. "What?" she asks, turning to look at wherever the voice came from. She was sure there was no one around, she checked! She'd have never shifted if there had been.

"Cats don't like me. Sorry about that."

"What did you see?" she asks immediately.

The stranger's hand flashes out, too fast to see, and brushes across Sadde's cheek, barely enough to feel, and then she duplicates the cat morph. "Just this."

She blinks. "You can do it too?"

"Mm-hm."

"How? Well I guess that's a stupid question since I don't know how I can do it either except, maybe you do? Since you're older, maybe you've had it for longer, have you had it for longer? How long have you had it? Do you know how you can do it?"

"I can do it because you can. Other places, I get different stuff." She puts her face back.

"What do you mean, because I-" She pauses, then checks that she can still do it. She can. Good. She squints at her. "You copied it from me? And there are other people who can do other things? How?"

"I did. There are. Magic. Some people are born with it, some... grow into it."

"You can grow into magic? How? How come I've never met anyone else with magic? And how does magic work? Where does it come from? Why do some people have it and some don't? How come everyone thinks magic is pretend?" There isn't a particularly sensible order to the questions.

"Oh, it's very rare, it's not odd that I'm the first one you've met if it doesn't happen to run in your family. The science of it is all very unscientific, unfortunately."

"How can science be unscientific? Either it's science and then it's scientific or it's not scientific and then it's not science," she says reasonably.

"Well, the sample sizes are at most two, and that's with me personally helping, you see, the exact same witchcraft never turns up twice. And I'm more interested in the practicals... for instance, did you know most witches can get their magic to do more things if they work at it?"

"Witches," she tastes the word, and giggles. "No, I didn't know most witches can get their magic to do more things if they work at it, since I never knew there was any such thing as most witches that didn't include me and no one else."

"Of course. Have you gotten yours to do anything you didn't start with?"

"That depends on what you mean by 'start with,'" she says, then looks at the sky. "I should probably go home, it's getting late, also you're a complete stranger and I shouldn't be talking to complete strangers about magic at night. But I wanna talk more about magic and you’re the first person to know anything about it.”

"That's what I'm here for, talking about magic. When would be convenient?"

"I'd have to ask mum. And she would actually consider it. Actually, if you come with and show her that you can do the same thing I can it might help, she's been looking into this stuff like crazy for years, you wouldn't believe how many whackos she's met. Anyway, yeah, unless you wanna kidnap me in which case I'm gonna run a lot and scream, I could show you to mum."

"I don't usually kidnap people, so we should be fine. Lead the way."

Addy shifts skin tone down to something more human and less sparkly-should-the-sun-come-out, adopts a new hair color (brown), and turns her eyes blue.

Laura blinks.

"Would you like to come inside and have some tea?"

"Oh, no tea for me, thanks, but I appreciate the offer." She steps in.

"It's all right, I'm very stealthy. There really was no one else around."

"My thing is going around, finding witches, and helping them expand their powers in creative ways!"

"My power - the copying, not the one I'm borrowing from Sadde - gives me a decent chance of telling from a ways off whether somebody's a witch or not. But there's some trial and error. What do you want to know about other witches?"

"You tell me, why isn't Sadde allowed to shift in front of people?"

"Chesterton's fence," she says. "Until we know why it's not talked about, we don't talk about it."

"Well, fair enough. But I don't recommend sharing it around. If too many people believe you, you'll have some people very invested in it not getting out at your throats. This isn't why most witches keep it secret; most witches don't know that - but it's why you should keep your mouths shut and mouth-shaped. Most people are doing more or less what you did: keeping quiet because they don't know what would happen if they didn't."

That's disturbing. Both mother and daughter look disturbed. "Why are there people so invested in it not getting out?"

"Fears of witch hunts, obviously."

"Obviously," she echoes.

"Okay, but anyway, witch classes from a witch trainer, that's kinda dropped onto our laps, good, right?" She's clearly very excited about the prospect.

"I'm so glad you're enthusiastic about it!" says Addy. "So how far have you stretched it already?"

"Well, the first time I turned was... surprising."

"That's one way to put it," Laura says, dryly. "She switched sexes in her crib when she was one."

"That's still the easiest way I can change, probably because I have so much practice at it. For the longest time it was all I could do. But then I learnt how to change other stuff, like what you saw today, or what you did now. I think I can change into almost anything human, except the farther it is from what I currently look like, the longer it takes, and if I haven't done it many times before it also takes a lot of concentration."

"Hmm. What are you concentrating on specifically when you're doing a difficult transformation?"

"I have to focus on what exactly I want to change, and how I want it to change. Like... I don't need to specifically know the anatomical details or anything, but I need to kinda will my bones to do this and move there and look like that, and my eyes to turn this particular colour, stuff like that. And sometimes the stuff I have to change is all related in different ways, and so I have to focus on it all at the same time, or do it just a little bit here and a little bit there, and sometimes if I do it too much the wrong way it can get in painful positions until I fix it."

"Do you ever get out of practice with things you haven't tried in a long time, or is it like riding a bike?"

Laura watches this exchange with interest for a while, having little to add to it.

"I'm going to start working on dinner, if you need anything." And she goes to the small kitchen over there, from where she can still hear everything they're saying.

"When it hurts what's the cause? Something squeezing something else or stretching out, or do some shapes just hurt to be even if there's none of that?"

"The first thing," she says promptly. "At least, nothing I've tried yet just intrinsically hurts."

"What if you wanted to, say, grow horns, would that hurt?"

"I don't know, I've never tried! I don't even know what I'd have to do, I dunno if I can just like open holes on my skin for horns to come out like that."

"Can you grow more teeth? Or scales?"

"Teeth... mmmmaybe. I think I probably could, if I made my current teeth smaller to fit the new ones? I dunno about the scales, though, I guess I'd have to first figure out what sort of scales, and then I dunno if they'd come from my skin or from under it or what."

"You don't know? You wouldn't get to decide that sort of thing?"

"Maybe? I haven't tried anything humans can't be, so I don't know how it'd interface. All the things I've tried were just, you know, other ways to be human, or combinations of other ways to be human that might look a particular way when juxtaposed like the kitten thing."

"Well, if you can do teeth you can probably do horns, and if you can do horns you can probably do scales."

"You've grown new teeth before, you're not that young."

"Well but teeth kinda do hurt a little, don't they? I don't remember anymore. And horns would be similar but bigger, I think."

"Sure, teeth can hurt. But you can put yourself back. You've got lots of practice having the number of teeth you have."

"I guess," she says, dubiously. "What do you think I should try first, then?"

"Teeth'll be easiest. And gums are just another kind of skin. If you can grow things through that, you can do horns, too."

"I saw that, you didn't actually grow the tooth through the gums," Addy says. "That's fine for teeth but it doesn't help with figuring out if you can do horns. Hm. If you're nervous about it hurting, maybe add a fingernail somewhere that hasn't usually got any. You can start with nail matrix, that's the stuff under the nail itself, and grow nail from that, should be nice and smooth."

She pouts. "But what if I can do the same thing? Like, maybe open holes on the skin of my forehead, in a way that doesn't hurt, and push the horns through there?"

"All right, that's worth trying too."

"Why not? You can move bones."

"Can you grow bone without adding any nerve to it, maybe?"

Addy is infinitely more interested in Sadde than in dinner.

"Can't you close your blood vessels?" Addy asks, a little quietly, not using too much air.

"Dinner's—oh, Sadde, are you alright?!" Her mum quickly scoots over at her, shooting Addy a look.

"I'm fine, it doesn't hurt, I rerouted my nerves. Erm, can you get something to clean my face, though?"

"I didn't know she was going to start bleeding," Addy says. She taps Sadde on the hand and grows her own horns. "Look, when I do it I don't bleed." And indeed she does not.

Of course she doesn't.

Laura goes back to the kitchen and returns with a lot of paper towel, handing it to her daughter.

"Thanks, mum," she says, cleaning herself up as well as she can, then opening her eyes and blinking a few times. "Wow, you look wicked! Mum, do I look cool like that?"

"Yes, dear," she says, smirking a bit and returning to the kitchen. "Anyway, as I was saying, dinner's ready."

Addy undoes her horn morph. "I can come back later, perhaps."

"Oh you needn't, there's enough food for you."

"Yeah and also you need to teach me how you managed not to bleed!"

"I'm afraid I have extremely bizarre dietary needs and I wouldn't dream of asking you to meet them," Addy says. "And I didn't leave any open blood vessels, that's how."

"If you're sure," Laura says.

"...what a curious person," Laura says.

Sadde just giggles.

"Hello!" the girl says when she opens the door. Her forehead has bandages covering the spot where the horns' damage is healing. "How come your forehead isn't all ripped open, too?"

"I put it back. Don't you think you could manage the same thing? Healing is just being a different shape than before."

"Mmmmmaybe? I never managed it before. I do heal faster than other people, though."

"You have lots of practice not having holes in your head. I bet you can arrange it."

"Hm."

That's actually pretty reasonable. She removes the bandages and—focuses.

It's hard. But not as hard as growing horns, since those aren't actually human at all and she had to invent a shape for them and such. Except it's another kind of hard, she has to concentrate on much finer detail than normal, knitting the wounds together. Just visualising the way she wants her forehead to be isn't enough.

But eventually she does manage to do it.

"Wicked!"

Addy boops her again. "I don't think I remembered to introduce myself. That's me, all business - I'm Addy."

She blinks. "Yeah, you didn't. And why do you keep booping me?"

"To update my copy of your power. I can't do anything new with it, only you can."

She scratches her head. "Mending the damage is the new thing? So how did you do it before, if it wasn't that?"

"Oh, sometimes it turns out there's nothing new after all, but I can't tell until I check."

"Oh. That's interesting. What counts as 'new,' though? Isn't what I did just another application of the same principles? I didn't feel like I really did anything all that new, just... erm... combined the old things in a new way."

"That's exactly the sort of thing that I pick up. That and stretching old things in new directions and new distances."

"It might have worked, but if it did, it would have been because you could already do it and hadn't before for some other reason, like being scared of it."

"Hmmm. I don't think there's ever been anything like that? Or at least I don't feel like there's ever been anything like that. It all feels like just the same thing. I mean... I guess the best way to explain it is that it feels like mixing paint. It may be a different colour, but I already had all the paint before and just mixed it differently this time."

"Sure. But my power doesn't work like yours, and every so often I'm gonna have to boop you."

She shrugs. "Okay, I guess. So, erm, what next?"

"Did you try the fingernail thing?"

"Nnnnooooo, I thought it wouldn't be very useful after I managed to do the horn thing."

"It's a different principle. Fingernails grow from a certain kind of skin. Changing some of your skin into matrix might make it easy to grow nail from it, or it might not, and either way would be interesting."

Addy is infinitely patient and attentive.

Eventually it does work. She reworks the nerves and closes the blood vessels, which takes a few more minutes—it's not nearly as intuitive as stuff she already knew—and then starts growing a nail along her palm.

"And now you can have mutant superhero armor at a moment's notice. Fingernails are made of the same stuff as rhino horn, you know."

"Thanks! But I think you can get faster. With practice."

"Hmmm, yeah, probably. But I'd need to practice a lot."

"As much as you can," Addy agrees.

"We should make this a thing. Mmmmaybe you shouldn't come home all the time, now mum knows you and stuff and she's not home all that often so being just you and me at home would be kinda creepy so maybe somewhere else? Like, somewhere public but not public enough that people would notice right away if my face became all weird or something."

"Do you have such a place in mind?"

"There's this park between here and school, there's people there but not too many people, do you think that could work?"

"I think your power's a little too conspicuous to practice in the park."

"Okay... hmm... maybe a library? I know a couple hereabouts."

"Maybe if you could go from thoroughly altered to normal faster than a librarian could round a corner, but you can't. Yet."

"If we were in a remote corner behind some shelves and I had my back to them, they might not notice..." she suggests tentatively.

"Yeah, until I have you trying to sprout wings. I don't wake up in the morning meaning to be creepy," she says, technically accurately, "but what exactly is wrong with your house?"

"Well, mainly, if you try to kidnap me it'll be a lot easier if we're here than if we're anywhere else," she says, either lacking any kind of tact or not wanting to apply it.

"I'm not going to kidnap you! What good would that even do?"

"I don't know, I'm not a kidnapper. Why do you want to kidnap me, huh? Huh?" She giggles. "No, I guess it's just, safety precautions, since you're a strange adult who appeared out of nowhere with magical powers, and literally all the information we have comes from you. Like, there could be some conspiracy of witches somewhere and you want to steal me away for it—by the way, if there is one I am so in you can just tell me and I'll join."

"Alas, I have no conspiracy to offer, it's just me and people I've visited before whose powers don't grow anymore. Would talking to some of those people help?"

"It certainly wouldn't hurt, as long as you don't kidnap me to do it." She shrugs. "Do you have any suggestions of suitably private places that would make it nevertheless not ridiculously easy for you to kidnap me?"

"I could call them on the phone. But unfortunately the nature of privacy is that mostly people are not supervising it to make kidnappers' lives inconvenient."

"The phone's good, I guess, though not a guarantee. But I guess if you really really wanted to kidnap me you had a pretty good chance with the cat." She shrugs. "Alright, we can keep coming here, I suppose."

"Thank you." Pause. "So, did you know some humans are born with extra fingers?"

"I did!"

"But I'm sure Ms... Addy must be very tired of you occupying her time like that," Laura's voice can be heard before the woman can be seen coming from the kitchen again, with a book in her hand. "Besides, it is a school night. It might be best if you resume experimentation tomorrow."

"Sure. When would it be convenient for me to come back?"

She looks at Sadde then back at Addy and says, "After Sadde has come home from school, at around the same time as today, would be a good time, I suppose. I won't be home until a while later, however."

"Well," says Addy. "I won't let anyone kidnap her."

"Oh good," Laura says, dryly.

Sadde giggles. "Bye, Addy! See you tomorrow!"

Sadde is waiting the next afternoon!

"Hi, Addy!" she greets, waving and then gesturing for her to walk inside. She might notice the hand Sadde's doing that with happens to have six fingers.

"Oh, lookit you, you did it!"

"I did it! It wasn't really any harder than growing the nail but it took longer. I was working on it at school, I had my hand inside my pocket and it was weird, I had to first create the skin then start filling it with bone and tendon and it hurt at first but I started doing the nerve thing so it didn't hurt anymore but it was still pretty slow. And now I was trying to untie the tendons of these two fingers and then you arrived and I can’t really move my hand much at the moment.”

"Untie them?"

She shows her good hand and tries lowering the pinky finger without doing the same to the ring finger. "You know, the way these two tendons are kinda the same tendon? That. I wanna separate them so I can move my fingers separately. I bet that would be a nice party trick to show people," she says, giggling.

"Ooh, that sounds clever. How're you doing with it so far?"

"Not very well," she admits. "I don't actually know much about tendons, and this is different than the other things in that there's nothing I can, like, directly see about it. Usually I have to focus on what I want it to look like at the end, but this will mostly look the same so. It's different."

"I'll get you an anatomy book. Maybe you could make your skin transparent. Humans don't come in transparent but frogs do."

"I can get you pictures of glass frogs. You have transparent parts, though. Your corneas, for instance."

"Yeah, but I can't really translate? I mean, I guess I could... shift the tissue of my skin into cornea tissue, like I did to create the nail, but then it wouldn't really be transparent skin, exactly. And I think it'd be just as fragile."

"Frogs it is, then. Ever seen a firefly? They glow. Maybe you could light up from the inside to get a look at what you're doing with only your normal transparency to work with."

"I've never actually seen one." Pause. "Would you mind terribly if we went to a library to borrow some books with this kind of thing? I know a few around," she says, not possessed of perfect memory to recall she mentioned that the previous evening.

"Oh, I was going to just buy you the books, but if you want to go to a library I'll tag along." She checked; she can shift enough not to sparkle in the sun.

She blinks. "Oh." Pause. "One part of me wants to graciously decline, the other is just repeating the word 'books' over and over."

"I'm not hurting for money. It's a hobby expense, you see?"

"You're not helping the first part," she says. "Well alright, but for now we can go to the library. Unless you want to buy them now?" Tad hopeful? Tad hopeful.

"Sure, why not?"

So Addy escorts her to a bookstore and gets her a book on human anatomy and one on various sorts of animals with pictures of e.g. glass frogs.

"Helpful?"

"Sounds good to me. The transparent skin could be useful for all kinds of tricks. You could get rid of your appendix, those things are nothing but trouble."

"I wonder why it's so slow. Do you feel like something bad would happen if you tried to work fast?"

"No, it's more that I have to really pay attention to what I'm doing when it's new. Sorta like a new recipe, making sure I got all the ingredients right and timing everything and all that. I've tried doing new things too fast before and it was nnnnnot pretty. Like in this case," she says, showing her shifting hand, "I could maybe miss a spot, or maybe a deeper layer would stay the same, or something like that, I mean I don't know for sure that that's what would happen but it's the kind of thing that could happen. Changes I'm more used to come much faster."

"Seeing a picture of a glass frog helped. I wonder if you should watch movies with shapeshifters in them. And good special effects."

"I don't feel like this would work. It's different than the frog thing. It feels like I need something to pivot around, even if I don't know the exact biological details of what I'm doing, and that's what the picture was for. I won't need a picture anymore, I know what it feels like to turn skin transparent, but I don't think I could do it at all without seeing it once. The time thing... Okay, I like the recipe analogy, so I'll go with it. Seeing the picture of the frog is like seeing a recipe, being fast is like knowing it by heart so I can just do it without thinking. If I see someone else baking a cake that doesn't make me good at baking cakes, even if I can in theory mimic it and bake a similar cake."

"Fair enough." Pause. "Eyes evolved from light-sensitive patches of skin. I wonder if you could get three hundred sixty degree vision."

"...oooooh." Pause. "What about all the nerves connecting to the visual cortex, though?"

"I don't know. You can feel warmth all over your body, maybe with practice you could use that map to see light too."

"Hmmm." She thinks. "Maybe I could try to, turn it into a different kind of warm? I dunno if I could hook it into the cortex, I'm afraid of touching my brain and screwing it up. And there's all those layers of stuff there, I dunno if I can get as much fine detail from that."

"Layers of stuff?"

"Neurons, layers of neurons, the visual cortex has lots of those to process images, I read that somewhere, and I think I could at most get blurs that I could learn to interpret visually from the rest of my body."

"Fair enough. You could make yourself another kind of cone and see in more colors, maybe? I don't know whether there are real human tetrachromats but they're suspected possible and shouldn't require nervous system rewiring to emulate if I understand it right."

"Ooh, I like that idea!" She opens one of her books and looks for stuff related to eyes. "I've never tried creating new cells, though, that sounds really hard to do."

"You make new cells all the time just growing and replacing dead ones. These'll just be a different kind."

"Well, can you see any new colors? Or do existing colors look weird?"

"Nope, but I dunno that it'd start working right away, I dunno if I have to rewire anything to get the new cones up and running."

"I'm not sure either. Maybe we should read your book's section on eyes, see if it explains how cones work. In the meanwhile, you can change your hair, right? Even though hair's not alive past the root?"

She nods. "I think nails aren't all alive either?"

"They're not! And that means that you can make, and then change, non-alive matter. Maybe you could figure out how to grow specific kinds of things. Lay golden eggs, only probably not literally."

"That... sounds like it would hurt. And I don't think I can shift into stuff that was never alive-ish in the first place? Or that's not... biological in some way? I mean, I can change bone, so the border's fuzzy, but I think gold is way too far from it. I mean, I totally want to try, I just have no idea how." She turns blonde—that's actually pretty fast, only takes a second—and her hair grows quite long. She flicks it. "Blonde, yes, golden, no." She shortens and blackens her hair again.

"Cutting your hair doesn't hurt," Addy points out. "And you can make it longer, which means you can generate new things. Maybe not solid gold, maybe you're stuck with biology, but biology can do neat things. Ivory? Pearls? Coral?"

"Those sound all possible to me," she says, after a second thinking about it. "I think that's also in increasing order of difficulty. Ivory sounds like I could just convince my bones to be a bit differently, Pearls like I could convince my cells to secrete a certain substance, Coral... I dunno much about Coral, I'll need to research that too, I guess." She pauses. "And it's interesting that I seem to have some intuition for this? I never noticed I had intuition for this."

"It's very promising that you've got intuition for this! I bet wood would be even harder than coral, am I right?"

She thinks, then nods. "Yes. I'm not even totally sure I could do wood. Why is that true?"

"Coral's an animal thing, wood's a plant thing."

"Hmm... isn't that distinction kinda pretty fuzzy anyway? I wonder if I could convince my magic it's a pretty fuzzy distinction."

"Maybe you could! Might be easier to go via something other than wood. Convince your magic that your hair is not that unlike moss, maybe."

"...but it is. Moss is actually alive, for one, and also is it even made of the same kind of thing? Erm, I should probably convince myself before trying to convince my magic."

"Maybe. Maybe you should start small. Chlorophyll."

"That's... a molecule, right? What should I do with that?"

"Make sugar from sunlight, is I think the usual use. Also turn green."

"Mmm," she says, and focuses on the back of her hand. She squints at it, and it does turn green. But—" I don't think this worked. I think my magic got stuck on the 'green' thing and kinda ignored where it was supposed to come from."

"Not all plants are green. Japanese maples, say."

"Yes, ornamental red plants still photosynthesize the same way."

"Do it to your tongue, then go outside and go aaah at the sun and see if you taste anything."

"Well, sun yourself while chlorophylly for an afternoon after skipping lunch and see how badly you want dinner."

"But wouldn't that just make my skin cells get really sugary? How would the sugar get to the rest of my body? I'm not sure I could feasibly—well, I tell a lie, I'm pretty sure I could grow plant vessels around my body but I dunno if I could interface it very well with everything else."

"Yes, that's true. Go around with chlorophyll in your lips on a dry day and then nibble some skin off them."

"That's a good idea! And I might just leave chlorophyll on them anyway." Pause. "I wanna see if I can understand cones well enough to grow new ones from that book," she says, and grabs the book.

"Should I leave you to that for the day?"

She has not reached eyes yet. She looked at the index and there was so much stuff and she got distracted and—" Yyyyes, I think so."

"Same time tomorrow?"

Sadde takes a while to answer—she's become engrossed with something. "Oh, yeah, same time, sure!"

Addy lets herself out. She's back the same time the next day.

"What happened to you?"

"Got into a fight," he shrugs. "I kept this because I wanted to show you that I can make it go away! Not quickly, though." He gestures her inside. "Also I made it so it wouldn't hurt, that took a while so it hurt at the start, but eventually I was giggling. That's when I got the black eye. It's really hard to feel angry and hit back when it doesn't actually hurt and I'm giggling."

"Well, I'm pleased to see your dedication to the enterprise."

"This is fun! I can totally see why you do it." He starts working on the black eye. It doesn't exactly heal as if it were going through all the normal stages, it just... fades away, over a couple of minutes.

"What order were you doing that in?"

"What do you mean?"

"It took a while; there must have been steps. What were they?"

"Oh. They were mostly, like, dissolving the blood clots and making sure they were going where they should go and stuff. I kinda have to go through all intermediate stages between where I am and where I want to be."

"But in what order?"

"Top to bottom?" he tries. "Or, shallower to deeper. First what was closest to the skin, then what became closest to the skin after that, and so on, until it was all gone."

"Why in that order?"

"I... don't know, it just came naturally. I don't think it'd be any more difficult to do it the other way around."

"It might matter why it came naturally. People get witchcrafts that suit their personality; and figuring out exactly how your personality gave you the specific affordances it did can be key to expanding it."

He ponders. "Hmmm... Yeah, I can see how my magic suits me. I'm—well, I'm a boy today. I just don't feel always the same way, like I should look the same or be treated the same. It's not just gender either, but having to be pretty inconspicuous doesn't help."

"If you could be as conspicuous as you wanted what would you do?"

"Well, they could be. Sounds very... whimsical. Mercurial. Actually, your last sentence reminds me of me, a little. I focus on magic these days but my thing turned out to be mimicry."

He thinks about it. "Yeah, but I'm not really about copying other people, it's more like being a kind of thing? But... Prodding my brain a bit, I think it's more that I like to be in control, kinda. In control of what I'm showing, what I'm doing, how I'm presenting and what other people are thinking of me as. ...yeah, that sounds closer to the mark. I want my body and my self to be something I can control, not something that just happens."

"So why the constraint to biology? What if you wake up one morning and want to be a cyborg?"

He blinks. "I don't know? I mean, I may be completely wrong here and that's a just-so story, maybe it's just the whimsical mercurial thing, you're the witch genius, I dunno how my power relates to myself. I mean, if you were trying to explain that constraint, how would you explain it?" Pause. "I just thought of a way maybe but I want to hear what you have to say anyway."

"Your guess will be better than mine but I'm starting to wonder if it's aimed more at cosmetic results than practical ones."

He thinks about that. "Kinda? I mean, I guess it'd be super cool if I could shoot lasers out of my eyes but that's, yeah, not really what I meant. My guess is mostly that my magic is about my body, and cyborg isn't as much about a presentation as it is an... addition. Kinda like clothing? I wouldn't feel like clothing is a way I am, it's just a thing I have on me at the moment and that's not the same at all."

"Hmm. What things are about what you are, then? Hair color counts, cyborg parts do not..."

"...everything that grows?" he tries. "I don't think I could shift hair that fell or nails I cut."

"So you identify with things that you grow more than things that you build, because they're part of who you are. ...You know, I've never met a witch who could do magic to their magic before, but I'm just going to toss that idea out there, you grew it, it's natural to you."

"Metamagic? Okay that sounds really cool."

"Might not work, but your power's as plausible as any for it."

"Got any thoughts on how to go about doing that? Because I have no idea what I'd even focus on, if that's possible it might be better to wait until I can maybe shift without knowing what my destination would look like or something?"

"Well, I don't know if this helps, but to my magic, your magic tastes like eggwhites."

"...my magic has a taste? Why does my magic have a taste? Is that common?"

"It's just how my own witchcraft interprets things. Plenty of witches have synaesthesia to go with it. When I grab something, I taste it and how to use it. It's a nice compensation for my dietary constraints."

"Well, do these tastes usually mean anything?"

"I can usually make up a just-so story. But there are only so many foods with so many properties."

"Are tastes typically unique?"

"No exact duplicates, but I've met several different kinds of bread and so on."

"Hmm... and did those breads have anything in common? And just how many witches have you met?"

"Nothing obvious. A certain general applicability and Western upbringing. And lots, but I don't spend as much time with most of them as you."

"Really? We've only been at it for three days and you've given me so many ideas and there's so much to do!"

"Sometimes I find witches whose powers are stuck. Or only flex in one or two ways. Or who simply don't want to work with me for some reason."

"Hmm, I guess that makes sense. What kinds of powers have you found? On the one hand I really really want to develop mine, but on the other I'm pretty sure I could listen to you talking about them for days but you probably care more about the former."

"Yours is unusually good, if slow. Sometimes it's just, say, an enhanced sense, or the ability to find people you're looking for. There are some good ones, though. Telepaths and precogs and one guy who controls the four classical elements."

"Whoa, there are precogs? That is super cool I think I'm a bit jealous. ...oh I forgot to say! I can see ultraviolet!"

"Oh, good for you! Your cones came in?"

"Yeah! And I really need to invent lots of new words for colours, now, there's a whole lot of context to all other colours that wasn't there before."

Addy boops him. "I'm afraid languages are pretty inadequate to such a task."

"Yeah. Anyway, what should I do next? Oh, look, I can do nails faster." He shows his palm, and a nail grows at the same spot it grew the first time, taking only about ten seconds to do it. "I'm still kinda learning to generalise, but I can do it almost anywhere in less than a minute."

"Did you test your chlorophyll yet?"

"I didn't skip lunch, but my lips are tastier than ever!"

"Promising. Are you developing pearls?"

"Nnnnot yet. I had some plans about that, and I looked some stuff up on them, and it turns out it takes years for them to form. I think I could probably do it faster but I'm not sure how, I'd need some more information about how exactly it works."

"I will get you a book about oysters. Anything else getting you stuck?"

"I haven't tried coral yet, but!" He closes his eyes and his forehead starts moving the way they do when he shifts nerves and stuff around. Eventually a tiny point appears right in the middle, but it's sharp enough to cut through skin almost immediately, this time with no bleeding to speak of. He continues pushing the single horn out, shaped somewhat like an elephant's tusk only smaller, and with the same ivory texture. He opens his eyes as it grows, and beams.

"You're a unicorn. Congratulations, you can make a fortune on the black market selling arguably genuine ivory if you can just detach it."

"Congratulations!"

"This power is really a stretch from the personality thing but I'll take it. And I mean, it's breaking Conservation of Energy pretty easily, here. I bet I could make honey."

"You probably could make all kinds of things from honey to milk to cruelty-free filet mignon, although I don't know that I'd advise telling anyone where you got your potluck contributions."

He giggles. "Now that's fun, I could become vegetarian by eating myself." More giggling. "...seriously, though, where is this mass coming from? I've not been eating noticeably more between yesterday and today."

"Magic. Or maybe you're breathing out less than usual and using the carbon. Or you'll be ravenous tomorrow. Or the chlorophyll worked better than you thought."

He looks at the horn he's holding. "Maybe I should have tested this before shedding mass like that."

"I don't think having a really big breakfast tomorrow will do you any harm. But come to think of it, can you reabsorb it?"

He looks at the bone then touches its tip to the part of his forehead's that's still exposed. The bone there starts shifting to try to engulf the detached one, but then it stops and returns to its old shape. "It doesn't feel like me at all. It feels like some random object I just happen to be holding."

"When did that kick in?"

"Hmmm... what about fluids? Those don't have as clear a point of disconnection."

More pondering, some licking lips. "It doesn't feel like me at all. After I've actually produced it I can't seem to change it. Well, saliva, anyway, maybe blood's different? I'm not sure I want to change my blood inside my veins, though, I think that might kill me."

"But you were able to grow a new finger, which presumably got blood, and then get rid of it after. Maybe you need to watch your blood pressure."

"Okay, that's actually a good test, yeah. Grow something that'd need more blood, then shrink it back, measure my blood pressure throughout. It'd need to be something pretty large to be noticeable, though."

"I don't have a blood pressure cuff or know offhand where to buy one but I can get a decent reading with my bare hand."

"Okay. What should I grow?"

"Ooh, do a tail."

Addy's very patient, with a light grip on his elbow to monitor blood flow. She does not lick her lips.

"Nope, steady the entire time. So you are definitely making new blood. Now the question is whether you can get rid of it. Preferably without endangering the carpet."

"And you are getting rid of the blood, or your pressure would have gone way up when you squished the tail's worth in. So you can too handle fluids - at least that one - but so far you only know how to do it as part of another shift."

"Hmm. Okay. I can too handle fluids. Any idea on how to do it? I'm grasping at straws here with figuring out how the heck my power decides what's actually a part of me and what isn't."

"What did you notice when you were so absorbed in removing your tail?"

"I was only really paying attention to the solid parts, shrinking and reabsorbing bone and hair, unstretching—destretching? Something like that, with the skin and the muscles and the nerves and the blood vessels. I didn't actually pay any attention to the blood itself, though."

"Well, it may have folded in with the vessels... are you doing capillaries individually or does your magic handle those okay?"

"Mostly the magic. I have this... awareness, sorta, of my body, and it's all fuzzy around the edges. I can feel the capillaries if I focus on them, but most of the time focusing on the larger vessels takes care of it all."

"Try adding a little something with capillaries in it somewhere and pay attention to them, they might be taking your blood with them when they go."

Of course she was. "You added blood that time."

"What? Why?"

"I don't know but I want to."

"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!"

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"Ooh, what'd you figure out?"

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"Ooh, lookit you. Best prodigy witch."

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

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

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

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

She does.

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?"

"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.

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

"What's tripping you up?"

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

"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?"

"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."

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

"I'll bring some tomorrow."

She grins. "Best teacher!"

"I try!"

"Alright, what next?"

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

"Producing or absorbing?"

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

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