"I… had noticed," he says. "Yep."

"As it is however I'm not sure how to test your sense of—hmm, okay, maybe I do. You could hold your breath while I prepare two different solutions of different concentrations of things and then taste each and see how finely you can tell them apart. Although I'm not sure we can perform meaningful tests here since you apparently can smell the sugar from across the room and can tell different patches of wall apart by licking."

"Not meaningful because it's just 'oh, what tier of super upgraded are you' or…?"

"Because I don't think we'll actually be able to really get low enough concentrations of anything for you to stop being able to detect them with what we have in this kitchen."

Nod. "Could just continually dilute and separate the spare, lower the concentration each time and mix well? I think? But yeah, 'tasting walls apart' suggests it's gonna be quite a lot of dilution."

"I suppose we could start with a pinch of salt and go from there?"

He shrugs. "I'm not sure it's really particularly useful information – at least not in the short term – but yeah?"

"Well most of this isn't honestly but as far as killing time until school's out goes..."

"Yeah," he shrugs. "Okay, well, licking various concentrations of salt water, yum."

So Sadde provides him with those.

And it turns out Theo has a good sense of taste, but it's not infinitely good.

Definitely better than a human's.

Well, of course it's not infinitely good.

"What else do we have to test? I have no clue how to test proprioception, maybe temperature?"

"I have no idea how good or bad humans are at detecting differences in temperature – I'm gonna guess not great? But, uh, could get various temperature water in different glasses? I probably have a thermometer somewhere."

"Yeah, something like that, maybe heat water up for various lengths of time and see how fine my ability to tell them apart is versus yours..."

He nods and goes looking around for a thermometer, then after finding one decides that it would probably be efficient for him to just look in all the cupboards so he can remember exactly where everything is.

And then they heat up some water and test his ability to tell apart the difference and he can do it quite well relative to other bits of water and it turns out he's quite good at absolute values once he's calibrated for how much a degree is.

Not amazing, but quite a lot better than a human.

Of course.

Is it time for school to be out yet? These experiments are probably quite time-consuming.

They're quite time-consuming but there's still another twenty minutes.

"Sense of balance?" he shrugs.

"How would we even test that?" he wonders.

"I'm not sure. Spin in a circle and try to get myself dizzy, presumably I can spin quickly enough of my own accord to make a human dizzy so presumably if I don't get dizzy it's better? Not that that gives us much information." He snorts. "Or I could try walking a tightrope if you happen to know where one might conveniently be."

"Spinning sounds useful, try to do it as fast as you can. Also, maybe pay attention to how vision works there? Whether it goes blurry or not and stuff."

He nods and then does it, feeling utterly ridiculous as one might expect to feel in his position. (Ugh.)

And then he suddenly stops! After going really quite quickly. And blinks.

"Maybe a little bit of dizziness? But a lot less than I expect you'd get at that speed. Or, maybe your shapeshifting would make up for it somehow, dunno. Vision was mostly fine."

"Were you going as fast as you possibly could?"

"I don't think so because it's kinda hard to make sure I'm spinning as quickly as I can, especially," he looks down, "on this floor – a bit slippery. So, maybe I should be careful next time I try this, make sure I don't fall unconscious or something if I make myself dizzy with just this."

"Try it!"

So he– does it.

And, like he predicted, ends up slipping on the floor a bit, making him not quite fall over but definitely stop.