"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.