(October 30th, 1986, Atterberry Ranch, Ireland)

Today was a very special day. Mom had been talking about it for weeks, it was my birthday! Apparently, every year, on the day that a person was born, the person and all their friends and family throw a party in celebration of the birthday-person's continued life. Mom said it was like Christmas but all about me, which sounded nice, but I didn't know what Christmas was. I think she was talking about The Colourful Day in winter.

Nice to have an official word for that now, ‘The Colourful Day’ was a bit of a mouthful. Not that I spoke, but Christmas was much smoother on my inner monologue.

Speaking of not speaking, I was planning on finally stopping not speaking. I was probably good enough now to not horribly miscommunicate something.

So starting at some point today I was going to say… something. I didn't exactly have a speech planned out, but I was thinking of going with something nice and sweet, something that Mom would like.

Mom had been running around like a headless chicken doing birthday preparations, mostly it was gathering things. She said she was going to make me a ‘cake’. Supposedly this ‘cake’ was some sort of delicacy, like crab, or well cut tomatoes. I trusted Mom though, so I knew I would like it.

When I woke up it was surprisingly late. Judging the sun's position by the shadows in the room, I could tell that it was around 10:21am. That was odd because normally Mom woke me up at the break of dawn.

Must be a birthday thing.

I was in my latest version of my cuddle-bug form. I had the same perfectly adorable moth-like face, but I no longer had a shambling mass of tentacles as a body. Those were prone to cuts and bruises, and weren't the best at giving comfortable hugs. I had kinda just pulled everything together and squeezed. There was no structure or balance to those hugs, just a big melt of fluff. I knew I could do better, so I did. The newer form had six sets of legs, and when fully extended each was a metre long. The legs had a layered structure to them. First was an internal muscle system, then exoskeleton, followed by a spongy layer that made the legs compressible, and finally there was the fur. I used a different fur now, one that I had custom made from the ground up, it was still white but now it had this lovely prismatic sheen to it.

I also had wings. They needed a fairly high flapping speed, but they were packing a hefty 2000 flaps per minute on them. That was over 30 flaps per second!

Anyways, not only had I improved my TrueForm™, but I had improved my bed as well. It took a while, but I realised that I could just… make furniture. I could shapeshift into furniture and then detach it from my body. It was kind of embarrassing to think that for the longest time I didn't know I could do that.

So I made my own bed. I would describe it as… a big pillow, with a hole in it. Not in the fabric, in the shape. Like if someone had a ball of clay and then pressed their finger into the middle.

Hmghm… I was maybe a little too good at bed design. I was trapped in a prison of my own creation, one that sapped me of my will to leave with its warm compressing walls. A cosy cave of comfort that I had condemned myself to.

Hehe, alliteration was silly.

It took 20 more minutes until I was finally crawling out of my hole. Aside from my bed, my room was still much the same. Mom had mostly stopped getting me toys after she realised that I never played with them much. There were several books scattered around, my favourite was Quidditch Through the Ages by Kennilworthy Whisp. It was a history book about the wizarding sport quidditch, I had reread it half a dozen times. One day I was going to show all those dweebs how to really ride a broom.

But in the meantime, birthday! I wiggled my fuzzy abdomen as I approached the door. I used my ‘antennae’ to grab the door handle and push it open, and my backmost legs to kick it closed behind me. I scuttled through the hall until I reached what should have been the entrance to the living room. Instead of the normally empty space, there was a barrier of colourful paper, and upon closer inspection there was a note written on the paper.

It read “break me”. I had to double check that I read it properly, because that was an odd thing for a note to say. After some cautionary thing, I figured it was telling me to break the paper so that I could reach the living room. I could faintly smell breakfast on the other side. Bacon, eggs, and hashbrowns. All cooked how I liked them. Which is to say barely cooked at all, and then tossed in a bowl together.

Mom really was perfect, and the best, and kind, and perfect, and the bestest. I clearly need to expand my vocabulary, so that I could have more words to compliment her with.

But first I needed to break this wall. Seemed simple enough, I could probably just push through it even without a running start.

Hmmmmm.

It would probably be funner if I burst though with a running start, but that doesn't quite feel optimal. I think I felt a notification ping from some sort of warning ward go off when I examined the note, so mom might've been expecting me on the other side. I shifted my eyes slightly, moving the spectrum of light that they picked up a little bit higher. The world shifted, and the colour bled from my vision until it was only picking up luminosity, the paper faded away and into view came the couch, and then the couch faded away revealing my mother hiding behind it.

I was hit with a wave of guilt, she was clearly trying to surprise me, but I ruined it. I had ruined her surprise. Maybe I could fix this, she wanted there to be a surprise, so what if I surprised her, since she couldn't do so for me?

Yeah, that was a good idea. I could do this. I could fix this. I would fix this, because guilt sucked, and I didn't want this. I just wanted to know what the best thing to do would be, but instead I ruined Mom's surprise.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

I could do this. I was really nervous, but I could do this. I knew I could, for Mom.

Two arms, two legs, a head, hands and feet, fingers and toes. It wasn't hard on a technical level, but it felt heavy on my soul. I stood up on two legs from where I was previously sprawled out on the floor. I looked a lot like Mom, blonde hair and blue eyes, but I also looked different. I was shorter by a large margin, my cheeks were still filled in with baby fat, and my mouth was a few teeth short of what she had. Currently my body was basically a clone of her, but de-aged. I think this body was currently around five or six years old.

I didn't know, it was hard to tell age based purely on biology, especially considering how everybody aged at different rates. As they say, age was just a number. I'd yet to find out who this mysterious they was.

Anyways, for the first time ever I was standing up on my own two legs! I felt like I could take on the world… as soon as I had some clothing. It took me an embarrassing second to remember that humans wore clothes, and then I promptly grew a frilly pink dress around my body.

Okay, now I was ready! I could do this!

I took a few steps back, away from the barrier, calibrating my balance as I did so. I was pretty good at learning to use new bodies, had some sort of instinct for it.

With a running start I sprinted towards the paper, and once I was just a foot away, I jumped, crashing through it like the flimsy barricade it was. In the air I pumped both my fists up in victory. I hit the ground running, still with both hands above my head, and Mom springed up from behind the couch. “Happy birthday day!” she shouted, waving both hands into the air, similar but not quite the same as I was. She blew on the party horn wedged between her lips, asking it wail like a tiny trumpet.

Half a second later she caught sight of me and she stiffened, her party horn re-rolling itself. I was still running, it had only been two seconds, I reached the couch and quickly sprinted up it like a short flight of stairs, launching myself from the top as I brought both my hands forward, and tackled my mother with a hug around the neck as she was still stunned.

On reflex she caught me, holding me as she collapsed onto the floor. “Buhwa, I, w-what… Art? I-is that you?” she sputtered.

Yay! Surprise successful!

I nuzzled into her neck, the action surprisingly even more jubilating than normal. “Hi Mum,” I whispered into her ear. “I wanded tuh come up wih somethin cool tuh say, bu I couldn fid th wyrds.”

Her hold on me shifted into a proper hug as she seemed to shake off her surprise. She hugged me tighter, breathing heavily as she held me. “I love you.” she whispered.

“I wuv you too, Mum.” She trembled slightly at my words, holding me as tight as she could. I noticed she was crying, so I hugged her as tight as my little body could. “D-did I do something wrong?” I asked. I was so happy, just talking to Mom was already so much more than I thought it would be. It felt like I was filled up with fluffy cotton.

But Mom was crying. “I-I'm sorry, eyh m-messed up. I s-should h-have waited longer.”

She disengaged from the hug, and held me in front of her. “W-what, no! No, Art you did nothing wrong. I just… I was worried…” She sniffled, before letting out a large sigh. “What's this about waiting longer?”

“Oh, um… langwedge hs hard… a-and I didn't wan tuh mess it up, and miscomunicake somethin. So I, um, wanted tuh make shir tuh get it wight. On my first try.”

She stared at me with widening eyes, then she let out a small laughter. “Art, dear, that-this… you didn't need to do that,” She sighed, again, and then smiled, “I apparently need to show you some videos of how other kids your age talk, or, well, how they try to talk.”

I let a small questioning ‘Hmm~’ noise rise from my throat.

“Art, kids don't just spontaneously start talking one day. It takes years of them babbling incoherently until they figure out how it works. They learn to talk by trial and error, throwing stuff at the wall to find what sticks… I was kinda worried about how silent you were. I-I was afraid that you… that you couldn't.”

“That I wasn't a people.” I realised out loud. I nodded solemnly. It made sense, that was similar to a fear that I had, “I know that it's stupid, but I've-I've been afraid that you only saw me as a pet-”

Right as the words left my mouth I was crushed into an even stronger hug than before.

*crack*

“Gah, Mom, ribs!” I choked out, and she immediately lessened the hug.

“Oh, are you-”

“Yeah, I'm fine. Already good as new.”

She sighed, relaxing her hug further. At least that quelled one of my worries, albeit a small one. I was pretty sure I could literally smell the love radiating off her, making me all tingly and warm. I really overclocked my eyes, nose, and ears. It was something a hobby of mine, like the different cuddle bug iterations, but more universally applicable.

Mom wiped the tears from her eyes. “I made breakfast.” she said.

“I know,” I responded.

“The food won't be warm forever,”

“I know,” I said again, this time a little more of a grumble. We de-tangled ourselves from the hug, and when I stepped back I saw Mom's face. She had the most radiant smile I had ever seen, as if its light alone could calm the heavens and part the clouds. A similar smile was reflected on my face, and seeing that, her smile somehow got even larger, blinding until all I could see was her. She might have actually been glowing, I couldn't tell, I was too distracted bathing in her love to tell.

The moment seemed to stretch on and on, as if time slowed to a stand still. That thought caught me for a second, I blinked and the moment ended. Mom held my hand and helped me to my feet, walked me to the table, and lifted me by my armpits into the seat. I giggled along the way, casting aside the anomaly in my temporal perception, filing it away for later under ‘things to science on boring days’.

In front of me was a fork, a bowl, and a glass of water. Mom was sitting on the opposite side of the small round table, as she always did. Her eyes were half lidded and she had a dopey grin on her face. “You really like this, huh?”

Mom blinked a couple times. “You're adorable,” she said unapologetically. She was right, I was. “It makes me so happy to see you like this, to see you smiling.”

Oh, yeah, that did make a lot of sense. Facial stuff was another big way that people communicated, it was nice to know that she could see my joy more effectively. I had eaten at the table hundreds of times before, but I'd never done it as a human. It was mostly the same— using the utensils to move food into my mouth as fast as possible, whilst still maintaining the appearance of politeness—, but I found myself using my neck a lot more. Usually I would just use tentacles and not move my head much at all, but the rigidity of the human arm had me coordinating both head and hand onto an intercept course.

It was strangely fun in its complexity.

I'm sure it would get old fast, but at least it was an interesting new experience. It was fine, for now. I finished my food before Mom, and spent the rest of the meal kicking my feet back and forth in my chair. Once she finished eating, she retrieved the dishes and pointed her wand at them. “Pallodiesie.” she incanted, cleaning them before putting them up in their respective cabinets and cupboards.

“So, is there anything in particular that you want to do today?” she asked.

I plopped down onto the couch. “Couch,” I said simply, as I held my hands out in her direction. The implication was clear enough apparently, as she sat down beside me, and I crawled onto her lap as I always did. She wrapped her arms around me as I wiggled in closer, fitting my head under her chin. I giggled when I looked up at her upside-down face, our cerulean eyes meeting each other's. “Well… wasortve things are there to do?”

“Hmm… we could go visit Mercy. We could play some sport outside. We could read something together. I could even try to teach you something new, like painting.”

I gasped, Mom did painting, but she had never let me in the painting room before. “That sowns fun, let's do that!” I said before asking, “Why coudn't I paint before?”

Her smile became wryly for a moment as she answered. “It's-it can be messy, so I figured you were too young for it. Like cooking”

I let out yet another giggle. I had tried to help with cooking once, a half dozen months ago. It didn't end well. On the upside, the kitchen smelled like pasta sauce for weeks!

“But we can do it now though?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure. You're a big one-year-old now, you can probably handle it now,” she took a moment to think before adding, “with supervision.”

This was so exciting, I was gonna do painting, and-like, paint a thing into a painting. A thought popped into my head as Mom and I walked hand in hand towards the paint room. “Hey, Mom?”

“Yes, Sweetheart?”

“Why is it called a painting if it's already painted?”

She chortled, “Baby, I have no idea.”