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."