While Lily was working on seeing if she had shadow affinity unlocked, Kat was attempting to figure out how to hide her horns and wings by transforming them into water. The plan was to make the partial switch, then keep the excess water in a large water bottle nearby, or perhaps a camel backpack. Whatever could easily contain the excess water from the process. Kat didn’t want to test the maximum separation range any time soon, and certainly not on Earth.

Sadly, the first day saw Kat making no progress at all. Kat sat in front of a mirror and focused on swapping just her horns as a start. All she got for her efforts was exhaustion, mentally and magically. Swapping back and forth constantly was a massive drain on her demonic energy reserves, and it added another wrinkle into the plan. Even assuming Kat could figure out how to keep only part of her body transformed, there was no way to tell what the demonic energy cost would be. This meant, when the end of the day came, Kat was tired, a bit frustrated, and attempting to distract herself.

Luckily, Lily had much more success in proving she had shadow affinity. She had initially started with staring at the underside of the bed and trying to force the shadows to move. Lily found that no matter what she did, she just couldn’t get them to move, nor did she feel a connection between herself and the shadow. There was something missing. Lily’s guess, which she would mostly confirm, was the lack of magic in the area, and thus, in those shadows.

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To test her theory, Lily summoned up a piece of paper, keeping it as white as possible. Then, with a bit of focus on shadows, she dyed it completely black across both sides. Lily beamed and happily showed off her success to Kat, who had smiled at her girlfriend’s success… but also realised a potential problem. "So… Lily… I AM happy for you, and this isn’t just me trying to spread the frustration… but are you sure you aren’t just able to change the colour of the paper… because you’re a paper mage?"

Lily frowned at the obvious point Kat was making before saying, "I want to think I wouldn’t overlook something so simple… but that does sound quite possible. Let me test a few things." So Lily began a new round of testing at first she didn’t make any progress. It seemed that she couldn’t make the paper any colour but black, no matter how much she focused. Lily even borrowed a bunch of colourful paper from Callisto for better visualisation.

That’s when something seemed to click in Lily’s mind. She found that while she couldn’t dye paper any colour she wanted, she could summon the paper as different colours. It took considerably more effort if she chose something that wasn’t white, and black didn’t seem to work properly unless Lily added in a bit of shadow imagery, but it did prove that she had the affinity unlocked.

"Hmm… I wonder if the mana cost is more expensive because I’m more familiar with white paper, or if the added colour adds to the cost. I… I don’t quite understand how it works. Like… am I summoning paper that happens to not be white, or am I summoning paper AND the dye itself, and the extra dye is what’s increasing the cost," asked Lily.

Kat, who was currently taking a break to regenerate her demonic energy thought the question over for a while. "Hmm… do you know what papyrus looks like?"

"No… I mean, I’ve heard of it… but not really? Are you saying I should try and summon paper that isn’t quite paper?" asked Lily.

"Yeah, or perhaps trying to summon old paper instead? See if that increases the cost," said Kat.

Lily nodded and got to work. Lily used Callisto’s computer to look up a picture of papyrus and some information about it, then she looked at some examples of older paper by ducking over to her house and bringing one of the older books over. Just a touch of effort later and Lily had yellowed paper, and some papyrus. "Hmmm…" hummed Lily.

"What’s the verdict?" asked Kat curiously.

"The verdict… is that I’m still not sure. Papyrus still takes more energy, in fact, it takes slightly more effort then coloured paper… but I’m not sure why that is. Might just be the fact I’ve never seen real papyrus, or it might be that it isn’t paper. Still I CAN summon it. Not sure why I would, but I can. As for the yellowed paper… it’s still more expensive then white paper… but not by too much, and is by far the cheapest option if you exclude my default," said Lily.

"So… familiarity issue? Or is it that you have to age the paper artificially?" asked Kat.

"That’s the question… I wonder if there’s something in the paper magic book? Surely this is something that the Paper Mage tested out at some point… might be in one of the locked sections. Perhaps now that I’ve done some testing myself I’ll be able to see it. They might’ve tried with other things like vellum,"

"Vellum?" asked Kat.

Lily sent her a mental picture of the material in question. "It used to be baby animal skin that’s been prepped to write on, but we can make it out of other things now. Not sure on the specifics of that though. I’m also not sure I even want to try… not sure I like the ability to summon animal skin on command, even if I might have it,"

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Kat shrugged and said "I’m not going to pressure you about it,"

"Thanks Kat," returned Lily.

After that conversation Kat went back to trying and failing to make progress with partial water transformation. The next day, Kat checked with D.E.M.O.N.S to see if this was even possible to get the very unhelpful answer that basically amounted to ’I don’t know, figure it out yourself’. Still, it was nice enough to remind Kat specifically hiding her demonic features was supposed to be harder then anywhere else. So day two of this training saw Kat trying to transform just her fingernail.

It seemed to be suitably small, and also not that important if she lost it somehow due to performing the ability imperfectly. It took all day, and late into the evening for Kat to make any progress. Kat was exhausted, barely concentrating and just desperately trying to make progress before going to sleep. Lily was already snoozing next to her. So what happened next wasn’t entirely clear to Kat.

For just a moment, Kat swore that her entire arm turned into water. Just for a moment though. That’s because it was followed by a blinding pain like all the nerves in her arm were firing at once, and Kat collapsed onto the bed, arm twitching painfully but still clearly there. It didn’t take long for the pain to fade and the twitching to stop… but Kat wasn’t sure if that was due to her regeneration or not.

Kat was further ashamed to realise that Lily had woken up from the blast of pain down their mental link and was looking down at Kat, judgingly. "Um… I’m sorry?"

"And?" asked Lily.

"And what?" asked Kat confused.

"Are you not going to promise not to do that again?" asked Lily.

"Um… no?" offered Kat as her answer.

Lily’s frowning intensified. "Kat, I love you… and I don’t like seeing you in pain. I really don’t like waking up in a panic while you experience some of the worst pain I’ve ever felt… and that was all second hand! Why are you still planning to continue with this?"

"Well… I just proved that my idea IS possible… even if I’m not quite sure how I managed it, and it might have a few problems… but a bit of pain is worth it if I get to go to the science fair to cheer on Sylvie!" said Kat, conviction in her voice.

"Why can’t you just wear a baggy jacket for your wings and brutalise a headband to make it look like your horns are fake!" hissed Lily.

"It’s pretty hard to fold my wings up to get them under a jacket. They’re longer then my arms and don’t exactly fold neatly over my chest… I mean… it’s possible but it will look very strange. I don’t want to cause a scene, especially if someone asks what’s under my coat. It will look like I’m trying to smuggle equipment in or something," insisted Kat.

Lily sucked in a deep breath. "Right, I understand that… and you know what? Despite my better judgement I’m going to allow you to keep practicing with this stupid technique, for some reason. BUT! I don’t want you to practice it at all without me or Callisto nearby, and certainly not near Sylvie! I might have excepted your idiocy, but I don’t want Sylvie to know,"

"Yeah… neither do I," agreed Kat.

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