As the light cleared, Zoe found herself lying in a hospital bed. Looking herself over, she was glad to find that she didn't have any IVs or anything like that hooked up to her body; she wouldn't have wanted to jump in and snatch someone away from essential life support. Much of her body, however, was covered in bandages, and it made it difficult for Zoe to move.
Taking advantage of this quiet moment, Zoe thought back on her last dozen jumps, and on the facts she had been able to determine about her new situation. She knew these rapid-fire jumps were the result of her spell; and the nature of the spell itself offered Zoe some clues. The spell had been of a fairly modest nature, at least compared to the magic that was directing the swaps that were occuring more generally across town. That meant that, when the spell had backfired, its magnitude would have been fairly limited. It probably hadn't stretched much beyond the limits of her house, which meant that the rapid body-swtiching that was affecting her would not spread to the rest of the town more generally. She had been relieved to note, as well, that this body-switching, unlike the switching that was affecting the rest of the person, did not pass from person to person on bodily contact, which further suggested that there would only be a few people affected by this serial body-hopping. Again, that was probably due to the relatively limited parameters of her original spell; there was not as much latent magic in Zoe and whoever else might have been affected by the spell's failture, so it didn't need to spread from person to person to disperse itself.
On the other hand, this all meant that everyone within the range of the spell--everyone who might have been in Zoe's house when the spell had backfired--was now subject to an indefinite string of body swapping. Zoe didn't know who else might have been in her house at the time of her spell, but the commotion she had heard that had interrupted her spell in the first place had seemed to come from inside the house, which meant that there must have been one, maybe more people in the house besides herself. That meant that somewhere in town there were others hopscotching all over the place from body to body.
The swaps did, however, seem to be slowing down. It hadn't been a steady progression; she'd had one fairly long jump followed by a very short one. Generally, though, the time between her swaps had become greater and greater. She imagined the swaps would continue to slow down as the magic that was driving them used itself up. She doubted they would ever stop, though, at least not without additional magical interventiion. Unless she did something, she and the others would be hopping bodies at unpredictable intervals for the rest of their lives...
And doing something, she realized, would be a lot more difficult now. If Zoe kept switching like this, she was going to have a hard time finding her friends, much less rpeparing the potion they needed to prepare to stop the swaps for good.
She had screwed up, Zoe realized as the light took her again. She had screwed up big time.
