"Боже мой," Nikolai muttered, then repeated himself in English because he remembered she wouldn't know what that meant. "My goodness, Mel, let's take things slower."
I love her energy, but for heaven's sake, she might be the death of me.
"Okay, so first things first," he said, taking a sip from the mug in his right hand— the one that contained tea. Kolya's only a double-handed drinker when it comes to tea, his mother might have joked if she was here right now. "My family has abilities related to art. They can vary a little from person to person, but mine are just a little different from the standard. First, I've got the ability to transfer color for one thing to another." He raised both mugs a little as he spoke. "From a scientific point of view, I have no clue how that works, but then science doesn't explain a lot of the things we do."
Setting the mug with tea down on the table again, Nikolai turned the one he'd created around in his hands, studying it.
"As for the other part... bringing the drawing to life is a separate ability from transferring color. I know people who have one or the other, but I've never heard of anyone else having both. What I do is just make the drawing more real. I add depth, form, shape, whatever you call it— oh, and if I have a certain material in mind, I can also make it out of that. It's worth pointing out that the object will come out the same size I draw it as, so if I want to get something large, I'm going to need an equally large piece of paper." He laughed suddenly. "Which is why we have a storage room that has super big paper sheets in it. But it works on other surfaces too, like walls and floors, as long as it's something possible to draw on."
He tapped the drawn mug and set it on the table in front of Mel, in case she wanted to take a look.
"Right now, it looks just like a normal mug. However, it's not going to last forever. Maybe just a few hours. Not entirely sure how long." Nikolai shrugged. "By morning, it'll reverse the process you just saw. It'll become a drawing on whatever I drew it on, back the way it was before. I'll also pass the color back to the first mug then."
He'd hadn't needed to explain it to anyone in such a long time. Trying to remember what words he used to answer the variants of the next question before, he took another sip of the tea.
"I do have limits to things I can draw," Nikolai admitted. "For example, I can't draw a fire. Well, I can, but it wouldn't have any light or heat— I can't create those. As for food and drink... I suppose I've never tried to draw a meal and then eat it, so maybe it'd be edible, but I have no idea about taste. Also, it'd just become a sketch soon afterwards. You wouldn't actually gain anything from snacking on my of my drawings." He laughed. "Oh, and living things..."
There was a word he was looking for that he could remember in Russian, just not English. He rubbed his eyes, trying to think. What was it already... Oh, that's it.
"I heard of something new called a wind-up toy," he said thoughtfully. "They've started making this thing in Europe, and you've got to... well, wind it up to make it move. Honestly, that's a lot what it's like to draw and create something that's alive. If I drew... I don't know, a robin right now, it would act like a robin in some ways. The bird would move around, flapping and hopping all over this room. It'd also be really cute, if I did a good enough job. But it wouldn't be a living creature, really. It wouldn't have thoughts, or have any instincts, like fear or hunger. And it'd go back to normal like any other drawing. So, yes, I can do those to some extent." His face fell a bit when he remembered that she'd asked about people too. "But no, I don't draw people," he added. "I can, but I don't." He added no explanation for it.
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