In Which Celina Makes Use of Her Options

January 1, 1200

If that pond really was magic, and Celina really had been conceived in it, then that was a mystery solved. Sort of.

She held up her right hand in front of her and watched it broaden, fingers lengthening and thickening, once barely-there hairs asserting themselves in thicker prominence. The change reached a natural stop as it always did, looking rather like Wolf's hand; she brought it back to its normal size and delicacy with the same ease she'd always managed.

She pulled her eyes back to the mirror and forced her nose to expand, like it had somehow occurred to her to do when she'd discovered this particular ability, when she'd been twelve years old and hadn't been able to take the cramping of her first period any longer. She'd been quick to realize that aesthetics were incidental and limited. She couldn't change her coloring. She couldn't adjust any features she found lacking to make herself prettier. She couldn't make the hair on her head grow or thicken or otherwise change--only the hair on her body, and on her face as she'd grown older.

There was leeway. She could change any part of her body independently of any other, or she could change the whole thing if she wished. And she didn't have to go to one extreme or the other, able to stop instead any point in between--even with parts that most people didn't even know had points between extremes! How else would she have learned of such things, after all, beyond her own curiosity and unique ability to experiment?

No, she couldn't give herself Lyssa's luscious auburn curls.

But, now that she knew where her powers had come from, she couldn't help but revel in their existence. She'd proven too much of a natural scientist to refrain from testing their limits, but she'd been conservative in their use, perhaps afraid that some day she'd reach the point of no return, stumble upon a change she couldn't reverse. Why their source would have made her so sure now of that being impossible, she couldn't puzzle out--but it did. It wasn't some sort of fluke, or quirk of a malfunctioning adolescent body that might one day fix itself. Some of the magic of that pond had stirred itself up in her parents' loins and this was how it had manifested in her. It wouldn't leave.

And if it would betray her, it would have done so by now.

And, knowing that... well, perhaps it was time to have a little fun with it.

Celina pulled back her nose as she abandoned the mirror in favor of her dying bedroom fire. The obvious way to go about using her powers, she considered as she prodded on log off of another, was sex. She was quite fond of Marsden, and she did find him attractive; she wouldn't have agreed to marry him if she hadn't. She wasn't immune to finding other men attractive either. But, just because she found men attractive didn't mean that she didn't find women any less than that. She could bed other women as a woman--and she certainly wanted to at some point--but it couldn't have been easy way to figure out which women would be willing (though she supposed she could ask Camaline if there was any way to tell). A man, however, could easily walk into the nearest brothel and pay for an hour of pleasure without any fuss.

And--well, men could bed other men as well. The same difficulties may have applied, but Celina wasn't about to leave out one combination if she planned on trying out the others.

And there was no denying that in social and business situations, there was often a substantially advantage to being--as far as anyone else present knew--a man. Why not take advantage of that? She could be whatever she wanted whenever she wanted, whenever it suited her, whether by reasoning or sheer whim. Why should she restrict herself to what she now assumed had been randomly designated as her default setting at birth? She liked being a woman, but she liked having options more.

She directed her energy between her thighs, labia fusing partially, clitoris lengthening just enough that another word might have applied. When her experiments commenced, she would push it further--but tonight, she was alone. It would suffice.

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