That's not a cost, come the first, second, and third thoughts of Diana Alicia Vaudelle, but if I mention that, will this person find another to inflict just for the balance?  Best not to risk it.

"If the cost is being of a feminine persuasion, that's a price I am more than willing to pay, for the ability to transcend mundane existence."

"Ahahah. Naturally." There's an impression of an impish grin. "Too much of any one thing is so very... Well, boring, isn't it? Go back to dreaming, dear, you'll see the results come morn."

She can't wait.

...What does she find in the mirror, come morning?

Well, herself.

But there's a new string of attention. A feeling. A hint. A suggestion. It almost seems like a character-picker from a game, or a row of figurines. Plenty of room for lots of options, but for now- Only one available. It feels... Pink? Yeah. Calm, caring, pink.

Interesting.  How very interesting, that this even comes with the promise of more.

Nothing left to do but -

...She pulls on the string..

It takes about two seconds. She changes. Slimmer, longer legs, narrower waist, breasts, tanned skin, pink hair in a cutely slightly-disheveled arrangement that threatens to cover one eye. Heart-shaped face.

And gossamer-pink butterfly wings spread out behind her.

And, in her hands, a pink-and-white metal bow with a string made of light, full of heart motifs, and a quiver full of arrows in six colors.

...Holy fuck she's hot.

And cute too.

And she got taller?!  She was already incredibly tall!

Not to mention the breasts.  They're very nice breasts and apparently they're all hers now.  Gods, this is such a way and she never wants to stop.

Dear gods, who does she need to thank for this?

...Though she does hope she can get the hair to be a little more neat, just to make sure none of it gets in her eyes when she's using this fancy! magic! bow!!!! - How on earth is that going to work, anyway?  Does it have some sort of magical simulacrum of draw-weight?  Is it, like, somehow just Magic enough that the string doesn't need to be capable of behaving like a typical bowstring?  She doesn't have all that much practical experience with archery, but she knows enough of the theory to have some ideas - come to think of it, she should take a look at the arrows, and also, like, at herself, see if there's any new weird instincts or senses or something, she's getting this feeling that she maybe should have some sort of sense for something now even if it's just some sense for Her Stuff, from the part of her brain that has her genre savvy locked in - speaking of which, ah, can she fold those pretty wings away all neatly for right now?  And what happens if she tries - incredibly reluctantly, but it's necessary to know even if she's going to hate every minute stuck inside that other shape - to de-transform, if she's set the bow down somewhere?  What about the arrows and the quiver?

And, hm, when she does transform back - with almost a desperation to her, if she's honest with herself -

...Okay, no, she's not actually going to successfully pull off only halfway transforming even if it is possible, which she doesn't even know, when she's too busy feeling the weight on her chest take weight off her chest.  Not to mention the sheer rush of energy in her veins.  She wants to do a flip.  She hasn't done anything remotely like gymnastics since the age of five, but she wants to do a flip.  ..She's going to do it somewhere there are less hard surfaces.  Bashing her head open would be stupid.  And she might be positively manic right now - but she's not gonna do something quite that stupid.

...Also she does want to investigate the arrows in more details - the colors probably have meanings, or they'd just be generic arrows.  Can she summon a generic magical arrow?

She cannot transform back right now. There's a sense of a burning wick or a cooldown bar. Feels like a long one. Twenty minutes? Thirty? Ish?

It has a magical simulation of draw weight! The arrows are also magic! Green feels helpful. Black and red feel dangerous but there's a distinct sense that they're not deadly. Gold and white and blue don't feel like anything. She can summon a generic magic arrow. It's pink, and it feels a little bit draining, like dashing up a flight of stairs.

It's very easy when thinking about flips and acrobatics to accidentally start hovering with a slight tingling of her pink fairy wings. It's no more effortful than standing.

"...Huh.  That's odd.  Why is there a timer?  Real life isn't supposed to have game mechanics, but then this whole thing..."  She really wants to figure out what on earth - or rather what not on earth - is going on with that, but that's going in the 'for later' pile by sheer dint of not having the tools she needs to build the tools she'd need to observe the inner workings of the tools she has.

"Really, knowing all that, I kind of expect that's the catch and I got fairy-truthed a bit.  Being a pawn in someone else's Great Game...Pfah.  Still...  It's power, it's leverage.  Maybe flipping the table's still in the cards if I need it..."

...That's odd, what her instincts are saying about the arrows not being deadly.  She's going to just sort of flick that pink arrow she just made at a convenient tree stump.  Not really trying to get it to sink in or anything, just loosing it from the bow with enough pull to get it loose from the bow - she double-checks with The Internet that she knows the right way to hold it - well, okay, first, she needs to have pants on.  And a shirt.  She might be in absolute awe of the sight of her present anatomy, but that's no reason for her to show it off to all and sundry.  All and sundry would probably be more scandalized by it than she'd like.  ...Shit, how is she going to make clothes work with the wings?  That's going to be annoying.  Maybe if - well, at the moment, all she can think to do is improvise, unless she has magical cloth-conjuring powers to go with her magical arrow-conjuring powers.

No?

She figured as much.  Dammit, she didn't exactly have any incredibly low-back blouses lying around in case of sudden gender acquisition!  Not to mention the -

...Are these wings as fragile as they look?  To be clear, she's not going to just randomly engage in destructive testing, but surely she has some instincts on the matter to consult.  And maybe then that would allow her to know whether it's safe to stuff them into the back of a shirt.  ...She could probably cut a t-shirt open if she needed to, she has a couple of those and it's not like she's worn them for anything else whatsoever...

Her wings will be fine in a shirt. But maybe not fine under any treatment much rougher than that. They're very soft, and a little tickle-y on her skin. Covered in tiny little hairs.

...Right, that she is going to need to fix before someone takes advantage of the giant pink weakpoint.  Magical healing - and she does expect that that's what she has with the green ones, even if she's not sure what's up with the other flavors yet - is the kind of thing that absolutely gets you kidnapped by supervillains.

...Shit, is she actually at risk of that?  This isn't that one incredibly depressing web serial, she would have already been kidnapped-and-or-pressganged if that was the case, but - the news has been reporting on superheroes and supervillains starting to make their debuts.

Fuck.  Maybe having encountered this problem before outsideness happened was the best of all possible options.  ...Uh.  Internet, what've you got for her on the general state of societal handling of newly emergent powers?  Let her just...bounce that through a proxy server first, actually.  Couldn't possibly fool the NSA, but they're not looking for her, yet at least.  It'll do.  And she rather expects they won't bother or need to bother anyway, it's not like she's going to be quiet about attempting to do good in ways that are not, in fact, 'beat people up', and that's going to narrow down her location rather severely just by dint of who she's working with and how she could have gotten there.  So it's rather kind of pointless in a sense to bother obscuring.  Still, though.  She does actually want to do the search, rather than get caught up in thinking about whether and how she should search.

Barack Obama has asked supers to please be good. A bunch of states declared that super-powered vigilantism is still vigilantism and will be punished if they catch you. Heroes mostly ignore this. Villains definitely ignore this. Lots of people on the internet LOVE the heroes. A few heroes are openly working with or for the government. Or big corporations, like Everyman, the shapeshifter. But a lot are more secretive about it. Villains mostly seem to be in it for cash or glory, with a few ideological nutjobs thrown in for good measure. There seems to be a general wink-wink-nudge-nudge Unwritten Rules thing going on? But, like, superpowers started showing up just three or four years ago. Honestly, legislation about supers is still being churned through the US legislation. Nobody really knows what to do about supers besides try to shove them into the normal justice system. Badly. About the highest power levels out there are Stella Sky, who built a space shuttle in her garage, or some guy with over the top theming going by 'Chronos' who can give himself and his buddies Haste, more or less, and wins fights via action economy.

There are ALSO, lower profile but there if you're willing to look, a lot of super-powered individuals who don't play the cape game. They're just less news-grabbing. Speedster working his mail route. A pyrokinetic who runs a bakery and a YouTube channel. A super pornstar called Salem who has only ever Done a Crime Fighting, like, twice. And more.

Yeah, she'd rather stay out of the heroing business even if she wants to help people with her new superpowers.  Picking fights for the sake of picking fights is stupid.  ...Not that she expects she'll get to stay so low-profile as all that, given, healer, but.

...Also Stella Sky seems really awesome.  She wants to meet them sometime.  Building a space shuttle in your garage is such unmitigated bullshit.

...This "Everyman" fellow...  Honestly, she's pretty sure she'd rather have him working with corporations, given he's open about it - and that's not a sentence she'd ever thought she'd say - but she would be absolutely terrified of the possibility of his existence in a government position given just how badly any given government would muck up the capability to assassinate anyone and pin it on everyone else.

...Really, she still is terrified of that, just slightly less so given there's at least one person who does not appear to be being buried in the black budget for this purpose.

And of course vigilantism is vigilantism.  ...Man, where's WWE in all this?  They should be on this shit like white on rice.  Anywho.  Uh.  ...Well, while she's letting the idea of writing Stella an email percolate, and letting the idea of emailing the local prestigious hospital to see if they've got anything put together to solve the problem of figuring out the extent of her ability to heal, assuming she has one...

...She rather still does need new shirts.

Order some of those, goddammit she does need them delivered ASAP - gotta let the wings out - so she's going to have to pay for the fancy shippping...  She's kind of glad that the other occupant of this house is on vacation right now.  Gives her time to get things in order before their return.

...Oh right, she was wondering if anybody was talking about their trigger events.

...Well, no, these aren't trigger events qua trigger events, but still.  Has anyone talked about the experience of being given powers or acquiring powers?  She needs to find something and write down what she remembers of the person responsible for hers.  Strange, that the memory is so crystal-clear still, but she will neither look the gift horse in the mouth nor bring it inside the walls of Troy.  And with that done, she's going to write that letter to Stella Sky she was contemplating.

Dear Ms.? Stella Sky,

I have recently come into possession of... a gadget, that I am interested in hopefully reverse-engineering in some way, or at least coming to any understanding of why it functions rather than merely knowing the basest details of how it must function given what little capability I have to even properly experiment therewith myself.

I do not know if your abilities lend themselves to this purpose, but as your name has become a byword for Tinkers entire, what with the space shuttle - which is really dang cool by the way - I can but hope you might be amenable to such a thing, or if not, knowledgeable as to who might be.  If this even gets through the filters that you presumably have these days.  I imagine you get messages like this rather a lot, and most of them are cranks going on about microchips in vaccines rather than, exempli gratia, magical bow and arrow.

I hope this message finds you well.

Sincerely,

--@StellarCupidity

P.S. I...ah, hope that I have not offended with the choice of pseudonym; it rather jumped out at me and refused to let go.

(This is, of course, a completely fresh account.)

And now...

Ugh, she should probably call the hospital front desk or something.  She rather suspects that the email will get circular filed if she tries sending it sight unseen.  But that then runs risks of its own like "some asshat deciding she's just delusional and siccing the cops on her via a phone trace or something", which...She is really not prepared to deal with right now.  So maybe it's better that she just send the email.

To Whom It May Concern,

I am hoping that there has been some thought given to supernal abilities and the medical consequences thereof within your hallowed halls, because I have recently come into some that may have medical function, and am hoping that some guidance exists on the matter instead of just having to hope that I will not by attempting to heal someone instead subject them to turbocancer.  If no such protocols exist as of yet, I would be glad to assist in developing them, if such assistance is needed?  I've no formal training in medicine, but I might hope I am at least well-read enough from experiences on the patient side of things that I might have a hope of keeping up with the broad strokes.  Not to mention that there are things I know I do not know about my own capabilities, and do not have methods I believe are safe to discover without support I do not yet have, that would likely benefit from professional insight.

Sincerely,

-- 

...Oh, hell, she's going to need a proper persona for this... ...whatever this is....

Right now, though, she's just...going to politely elide over that question by not signing a name to the email.

...I hope this message finds you well, whosoever eventually receives it, and look forward to hearing from you, at your convenience.

She gets a reply instantly from Stella Sky's account.

Hello StellarCupidity,

This is an automated response system.

I understood that you say you have an object that you imply was created by or has something to do with superpowers. If you would be so kind, please reply to this message with photos and/or videos of the object that demonstrate this. More is better, as they can be analyzed for consistency to reduce the probability of this being a hoax.

I also understood from context that the object is a weapon. Please be cautious with unknown weapons! Do not attempt to fire it if you are uncertain how it operates. If you feel unsafe, please avoid conflict and call 911 or other emergency responders.

AutoResponder

....Holy shit that just beat everything in the field of computer intelligence's pants off if it worked like she thinks it might've.  Watson, eat your heart out.  (She still vividly remembers the time it played Jeopardy and got a very human-obvious "Who is Voldemort" confused with the protagonist of that series instead.)

Of course.  ...Also, uh, holy shit, I don't know how much of this could have been just simple keyword search, but if the automated response was generated in the way it is implied to have been generated, which is to say, presumably Ms. Sky having actually taught or caused to be encoded English as more than a series of X-follows-Y associations but instead a fully realized model of meaning, and you do not already have the entire field of computer science beating down your door to give you, like, the Millennium Prize or something (n.b. I don't think it's actually the Millennium Prize, I'm pretty sure that's pure math, but, like, something of equivalent prestige would well be warranted if the process can be replicated by mundane means), you should know that nobody knows how to instruct a computer program how to do that under normal conditions and, er, also, hi, Autoresponder, thank you for your promptness!  Because I'm pretty certain that that sort of self-reflective capability to understand and reason is what makes a person so I'm going to err on the side of caution, aheh.

She can get some pictures.  Maybe even a video of making an arrow, if she can do that without flashing the camera.  (And certainly of her pulling the string, both with a hand and with, like, a mechanical grabber.)

So here's some data.  ...My apologies for some of the awkward camera work, but I haven't yet had time to acquire something that would be suitable to cover all of what needs covering while not itself posing an unfortunate obstacle to safety or comfort, and didn't have anything i could make suffice on short notice.

This one takes slightly longer. A few minutes.

Hello StellarCupidity,

This is an automated response system.

I understood that you are impressed/shocked by the capability of the AutoResponder system. Please note that I am not fully reliable, which is why I clearly state what I understood from your message. If I seem to be confused, you should rephrase your reply.

I understand that you think AutoResponder may be a person. Thank you for your concern, but this is not the case. I am a proprietary computer program developed by Stella Sky. I am only capable of simple responses and am incapable of higher thought.

I have received (17) images and (3) video files. I think they show [Pink Bow and Arrows]. Thank you! I will forward these to Stella Sky for analysis.

AutoResponder

....Well.  Thank you, nonetheless.

Hokay.  Can she figure anything out about these arrows while she's waiting for her package to arrive?  Like, in 'poking them with magic and seeing what happens' ways, or any other ways that might reveal themselves to have poking enabled.

Gold and black feel a little similar. Emotional? Red and blue and green feel a little similar. Immaterial? White feels... Heavy?

And Pink, for comparison?

Pink doesn't really feel like anything in particular.

Great, that's totally helpful, thanks, magic,

...Say, if she has a pink arrow, and other examples - could she change the pink arrow to be a different color?  And can she do...She doesn't know, a controlled detonation of just the arrow without shooting it at somebody?

Changing colors........ No? Making a pink arrow feels like a primitive action, kind of like breathing out really hard, and there aren't a lot of ways to do that differently.

If she intends to set a pink arrow off too hard, it will explode into pink light in her hands! The wash of light leaves her a bit stunned. It's not painful, and it's even kind of pleasant in a warm-tingly way, but mostly it just really seems like doing anything would be really hard right now. It would be really lovely to just stand there instead.

It fades after about thirty seconds.

"...the hell kind of executive-dysfunction-ass effect is that," she mutters, frustratedly.  She hadn't actually been intending to set it off in her face.  "...Well, at least I have a good fuck you to people with big red buttons.  And holy hell this should have pinged the emotion signal, for fuck's sake...  I guess that means that the magnitude of the effect is therefore that much greater in the case of black and gold....  But then there's...Huh.  What could it be?  "

...There are like half a bajillion different ways to breathe out really hard, she might never have done much herself but there's a whole family of wind instruments - but she was thinking more about using an existing pink arrow as a vessel for further empowerment, not - creating a further-empowered arrow directly by the same means.  She's not sure how they work but she's sure there's going to be a method, considering it would be poor game balance if she only ever got so many arrows of those colors ever.

...Here, hold on a second, these bits don't make sense -

...Well, maybe they do if they - but then - how?

What the hell are these things supposed to be doing?

...Alright.  So.  Rebasing the value of 0 to pink...

Maybe the danger-signal arrows are nociceptive?  Or - but then why would - oh, but hm, black has the emotional bit set, and if 'emotional' therefore has something to do with amplifying the stunning effect -

--

If she has magic horny powers she is going to have to email Salem.

...But then what's gold, if black is possibly "incredibly disastrous amounts of arousal"?

What does it play up relative to -

- and is red simply pure nociception?  Yikes.

- But really, what is gold?

...She supposes the answer is kind of obvious, given the givens, and especially looking at the cultural associations that could be in play - it's magic, after all.

Also looking at the emotive-tactile experience of the pink one detonating, since it already had quite a bit of what she suspects might be in the gold, hidden beneath or within the fuzzy nature of the fuckery around executive action.

...This is going to be an interesting powerset, that's for sure.

She needs another space on the table for what she expects the arrows to be, doesn't she.

...Hm.  She wants to take a closer look at White, actually and see if it has, like, less emotion than pink, comparatively.

And she has this funny feeling that blue's actually sleep, but no solid reason why besides the utter vibes of it.

White does seem to have less emotion than pink. Actually, so do red, blue, and green. It's almost like Pink's emotion signal is, like, 0.1.