Rachel Harris felt lucky.
Gazing at her reflection in the mirror, she realized how fortunate she really was. This house was crowded full of people who had been snatched abruptly out of their element and dropped into auras that were drastically different from the ones they were used to. There was a young woman who had become, in essence--to the eyes of everyone else, at least--an old man; there was a teenage girl who had become a young boy; there were a teenage boy and an adult man who had each become little girls. And then there was the professor... a ghastly man who Rachel had run into before. He had written a scathing article in the newspaper about the occult community and the practices of magic and divination, and about Rachel in particular, claming magic was a delusion and that the people who practiced it were criminals and psychotics. Rachel was actually to know he was running around in a pink dress with everyone in the world thinking he was a six-year-old girl; perhaps that would teach him some much-needed humility.
Rachel, however, had changed from being a thirty-eight year old woman to being a thirty-six year old woman. Yes, she looked different, and she was dressed in a much more conservative outfit than she would have chosen for herself; but hers had been a lateral change, while the other people in the house had been shunted violently from one lifestyle to another completely different lifestyle. Even beyond the struggles of having to live as a much different person, which Rachel imagined would be difficult enough for them, she feared that the stark differences between their physical and metaphysical auras would create a friction at the very essence of these people's beings, and she couldn't imagine what kind of damage that might cause.
She had seen people whose physical and metaphysical auras were mismatched, and that mismatch had created havoc in their lives and given birth to a great black grief in the core of their soulds. Rachel had trained herself to look past the physical and see the person within with every person she met. For most people, there was no difference between the two auras; but for a few people, the difference was a stark one. There was the transgendered individual who frequented her shop, for example; when Rachel had looked at this individual, she had seen her as a beautiful, loving, holy woman, not as the man she had been born as. And there was the mentally handicapped gentleman whose sister had brought him in, desperate for guidance; he had looked to her like the child he was mentally, not the adult he was physically. And just last week Rachel had met a middle-aged woman who looked to Rachel like a teenager. The last was not actually all that uncommon, just as there were some people--though tragically few, she reflected--who were older than their chronological years.
Rachel had not been surprised, then, to see the people who shared this house with her as the people they really were, not the people they had become. She saw Katie's feminine face and copper skin, not the old white man with the thin white hair who Katie saw now when she looked in the mirror. She saw Jessica's teenage body, despite the children's clothes she wore. She saw Harold and Rick's masculine frames, not the tiny feminine bodies everyone else in the house saw. And she saw the vile Professor Whitaker, not the adorable girl she would have much rather have spent the morning with.
Nor was Rachel surprised that the others saw the illusion of each other's physical aura. Most people insisted on seeing their fellow human beings as they wanted to see them, rather than seeing the person within; that prejudice, that ignorance, was at the heart of many of the world's ills. Few people were capable of tearing away the physical auras that cloaked their fellow women and men and seeing people as they truly were. Rachel counted herself fortunate to be among that select few; not even the other members of her coven, who were far wiser and more enlightened than most people, did not possess that level of true vision.
Rachel wondered if the six people in this house, along with the six people they had switched with, were the only people who had switched. If not--if the swaps had spread farther--then Rachel's vision would be an invaluable tool, and her coven's knowledge and skills might well be essential to setting the world right. Rachel didn't know what had happened to the world. The shift that had occured that morning had not come entirely as a surprise to Rachel; the cards had been predicting a major magical/metaphysical event for weeks now, and they had located a strange new magical presence in town, though she hadn't been able to pin down its location. Rachel had not, however, expected as strange and unprecedented, or at least previously undocumented, event as a widespread transposition of metaphysical essences. However the transposition had happened, though, it had happened, and Rachel knew with absolute certainty that she would have a hand in setting things straight.
