Sarah laid quietly in the coffin, feeling things shift and jostle around her as it was hefted up onto the cart and then hauled off with the rest of the cargo. She wondered what was going to happen from here. Did Tom have any kind of plan, or was this all just improvised on the fly? Was there anybody they could turn to to ensure that her rights were protected? A horrible thought ran through her - did she even have any rights, in this society? Clearly Fletcher thought of her as nothing more than a piece of property - and she doubted, from what she'd heard of him, that he'd feel any differently if he knew she could think, move, and talk. On the other hand, Tom didn't seem to have much difficulty in recognizing her as a person. But how would the rest of the people in this place see her?
It was funny; she supposed by rights she should be agonizing and soul-searching about whether she was still a person, whether as a machine she still had a soul, etcetera etcetera. People always seemed to do that in movies if they got turned into something non-human, or if they were created in a lab, or whatever. But she knew what it had been like to be human, and aside from the actual physical sensations and the lack of raw animal edge to her emotions, it didn't seem to be particularly different now. Between that and the fact that her immediate concerns re: being sold at auction were so much more tangible and real, she was much less worried about anything so metaphysical than she was about the simple question of how people would treat her as this...this clockwork doll-thing.
Probably something like a couple minutes had gone by as she thought about this, the cart slowly bumping its way along the city streets, when she felt a brief seizing sensation and time seemed to skip for a moment, and then she found herself being slowly turned sideways. Unnerved, Sarah tried to figure out what had just happened; after a moment she realized that the winding key in her back had rotated to the point where it was stuck against the walls of the coffin, unable to rotate any further. The torque from the mainspring it was connected to must have started turning her the other way. Knowing what happened was briefly relieving to her, but she realized pretty shortly that something similar was bound to happen in a few moments, when her body would get similarly jammed going the other way.
She briefly tried to figure whether there was some way for her to get over onto her side, but it was hopeless; her key was stuck pretty firmly, and there wasn't enough room to maneuver inside the coffin anyway. There didn't seem to be any good way out of this, short of letting it happen and hoping that Tom would be able to get her out without too much trouble when they arrived. Sarah wondered what would happen when there wasn't any more play and her mainspring was forced to stop unwinding. If that was what was powering all the mechanisms that she guessed made up her brain, or whatever was analogous to her brain, would she just suddenly st-
Jon sat waiting for some time, watching the empty entrance of the snail-woman's shell and wondering if she should say or do anything to get her to come back out. She wondered again just how much room there could possibly be in there, considering that the woman herself would also have to fit, but then she supposed that if Sylvia was essentially just a human upper body connected to what presumably was a mass of boneless tissue below the waist, she could probably squeeze down quite a bit farther than someone who also had legs to contend with.
As she was pondering this, there was a soft rustle of cloth and jingling of bells and Sylvia reemerged from herself, shaking her mussed hair back into place and straightening out her dress. She smiled at Jon. "Thank you for waiting," she said. "Now, let's see, where were we...ah yes. Shall I tell you your fortune?"
Jon had been so focused on trying to work out the shell thing that she'd almost forgotten about that. "Uh, s-sure," she stammered out as a kind of default reaction to being offered something, before realizing that she wasn't actually sure she did want it - but she'd already given an answer, and it would be awkward and kind of rude to decline right after accepting, and anyway if it really was as fated as all that then was there anything she could do about it anyway? On the other hand, even if it was inevitable, did she really want to know about it ahead of time?
As she was trying to figure out how to respond to this when she'd already responded to it, Sylvia was already moving toward her. The snail-woman took her gently but firmly by the shoulders, cutting off Jon's internal debate. She brushed the stray hair out of the harpy's eyes, closed her own eyes, and took a deep, quiet breath; then she looked directly into Jon's eyes, or perhaps through them. Looking into the snail-woman's face when she was in this state felt like looking through time and space, Jon found herself thinking.
"I see many people gathered in your future," the snail-woman said. "Old friends and new acquaintances alike. Yours is a path with many twists and turns, sometimes dangerous and sometimes wonderful. You will tame a spirit of the wild, and be untamed. You will meet a king of no nation and ruler of no people. You and your companions will meet the people who shaped your circumstances; one will aid you, one will tempt you, and one can grant what you seek. You will find treasures you never knew you desired, and lose things you only thought were essential. You will save many people from those who would take control of their lives, but not all will be as it once was." She lowered her gaze, and when she looked up she was simply Sylvia again.
"Remember what I told you," Sylvia said, smiling gently at her. "All this will come to pass, but not necessarily as you might think. The challenge with knowing one's fortune is to not fret over every possible eventuality, but to mentally prepare oneself for what might come to pass based on what you now know." She placed a hand on Jon's shoulder. "I have a feeling that your future holds good things for you, if you can learn to receive them." She looked around and sighed. "But it's late, and I must be getting on home, and you have the rest of your journey ahead of you. I wish you safe travels, Jon."
With that, she turned and made her way off deeper into the mushroom forest. Jon watched her go, wondering briefly if she should follow her, but she did have to get along to the city as soon as the weather cleared, and she wasn't sure that going any deeper into the forest was a good idea, anyway. She waited until Sylvia had vanished among the gigantic stalks, then looked around. After a couple days of farm work and a long journey, she felt a desparate need for sleep. Fortunately, there was a largeish mushroom nearby that was kept out of direct rain by several other ones above it. With a powerful flap of her wings, Jon surmounted it, spread herself out, and drifted off, noticing as she did that, while Sylvia's little bells had long since faded into the distance, the gentle, hollow hum of the place remained.
Karyn had trouble sleeping that night. Partly she was just unused to listening to the wind sweeping across the rapidly cooling desert, making the tent quiver and shudder around them. Partly it was being unused to this new body of hers; while she'd more or less gotten the hang of moving around on six legs by now, actually getting comfortable lying down with them was another matter. She couldn't figure out where she was supposed to put them when her...uh, abdomen? But not her human abdomen? was lying flat on the ground so that she could rest her human half in a prone position.
But mostly it was because her mind was a whirl of questions. Who was this "Lady?" What function did she serve, or what was it that made other scorpion-people apparently put so much stock in her that they'd pilgrimage across the desert to see her? It wasn't some kind of cult thing, was it? Fazalune had said something about her being able to send people anywhere in the world...? That seemed like a tall tale to her common sense, but then it wasn't hard to imagine that things worked a bit differently in this world. Still, even in a fantasy kind of setting, that seemed more like something that would be reserved for...she didn't know, some kind of arch-wizard or demigod or something?
And of course even if she could go anywhere in the world, even if the Lady could also divine where it was that Jon had wound up...what then? Certainly Karyn would go find her friend, but how could they get back home? Was there magic in this world that could send them back the way they came? She had no idea. She sighed. Well, it would be morning soon enough, and according to Fazalune they would start their journey then, after the freezing desert night had warmed back up but before the sun got too scorching. And maybe she'd find answers to her questions once they got there...
