Jon found herself pondering over that stone as she and Maggie made their way down the hallway toward the women's bath. "Solarite..." Well, that seemed like as good an answer as any for the question of what people came to this island for. She wondered if it was mined anywhere but here, and how common it was. Come to think of it, if it was mined in the mountains...wasn't that where most of the ruins that people were supposedly investigating were? Well, the ones that weren't already cleaned out, anyway? That was an interesting coincidence.
The tiger-man attendant led them to a door at one end of the hall, then stepped aside, opening the door in front of himself so that they could enter. Maggie flounced inside without a second thought, but Jon hesitated; no matter what people saw her as in this world, inside she was still enough of a teenage boy to consider such a place as if it were some kind of forbidden ancient temple, and it was a little intimidating to think of going in there, even if nobody else would see a problem with it. (In fact, the thought that nobody else would find it unusual, and in a sense they were right, added a uniquely surreal twist to the general feeling of foreboding.)
On the other hand, she couldn't very well leave Maggie to her own devices. As good-natured and well-intentioned as she was, the younger harpy still had a lot to learn about life among humans, and Jon wanted to be on hand in case of any surprises. Squaring her shoulders as determinedly as she could, she took a deep breath and stepped inside, the attendant softly closing the heavy wooden door behind her.
The Ancient Domain of Mystery that she entered was...well, a pool room. Granted, it was a pool room populated entirely with naked or almost-naked women, but...they were just there. Hanging out, taking a bath, chit-chatting amongst each other. As nice as the view was...well, Jon hated to admit it, but the sight of the female body seemed to have lost some of its allure now that she could see the same thing merely by looking in a mirror, and there was really nothing inherently sexy about this situation outside of that now-irrelevant sense of forbidden mystique.
So, then...shrugging, she looked around for Maggie, who had, it turned out, already jumped into the water without removing her tunic. She was standing in the water looking slightly sheepish as she lugged the heavy, sodden cloth around her back to the edge of the pool. Laughing softly to herself, Jon went over to meet her. She sat down on the edge of the pool and made a face at the unexpected sensation of the slick tile and its little puddles of tepid water brushing up against her uncovered girl-bits; the down on her pelvic region was a perfectly fine insulator against cold air, it seemed, but not so much against this.
"H-here," she said, shaking off the distraction and reaching a leg out to the younger harpy. "Let's get you out of that."
It took a little doing for Maggie to wriggle out of the tunic, and Jon nearly went into the drink herself when she underestimated the weight of the saturated wool, but she got it out and laid it out to dry a ways further back. Fortunately, she noted, the dye didn't seem to be running; it would've been a shame for that to happen to Maggie's brand-new outfit. She coaxed her "sister" into taking off her necklace, as well - the little harpy-girl was reluctant to let it go, but Jon managed to convince her that it would be a shame for it to fall off and get lost in the pool.
With this taken care of, and Maggie waiting for her, Jon turned to get in the pool herself, then realized that she hadn't undressed either. She hesitated briefly, but made up her mind and shucked off her own tunic, piling it up with her satchel and Maggie's necklace on a bench next to the younger girl's tunic. (She wondered briefly if it was safe to leave their things there unattended, but she noticed a female attendant standing just inside the door and keeping an eye on things.) It felt strange to walk back to the pool with her breasts bared for all to see, no matter how many other people here were in the same state, but...well, at least nobody else cared besides her. Hunkering down at the lip of the pool rather than sit on the wet tile again, she hopped into the water.
It was surprisingly warm - not quite hot-tub hot, but definitely warmer than what she'd been expecting. Looking around, she saw multiple bright spots around the underside of the rim where, she realized, chunks of this "solarite" had been placed in the water to radiate their energy. Little wisps of steam and some slight bubbling emanated from these recesses; the solarite itself might not flash-boil the water, it seemed, but she guessed that heat had to create the usual reaction eventually.
It wasn't terribly crowded in the bath, at least not at the moment; that probably had to do with its being the middle of the workday for most people, as well as with people only getting a free bath once every three days. Still, there were a good dozen other women in here, not counting the attendant. At least half of them were human, but there were a few animal-people as well, a young lady who might have been an elf (although it was difficult to tell, as she was at the far end of the pool,) and one woman who looked human until Jon saw her rise several feet out of the water on a column of snake-body to fetch something from a nearby bench. A few of them were by themselves, but the majority of them seemed to be bunched up into little groups and chatting; it seemed that bathing here was almost as much a social thing as it was for hygiene.
Jon looked around her, taking in the scene. The decor in the bath wasn't lavish, but it was pleasant enough; there were abstract, vaguely-aquatic-motif mosaics in a band along the walls, and there were some windows that were high enough off the ground to dissuade peeping while letting sunlight into the room. She noticed that, out the windows at the back, she could just see the top decks of several ships; she hadn't realized it, but the bathhouse apparently sat close to the harbor. It was hard to see much in the way of detail, but she could see masts and the bottoms of sails on all but one of them. The last one, oddly, seemed to be sitting next to...a Ferris wheel?
It took a moment for her to put two and two together, but a second glance confirmed it. She'd only seen pictures of them before, and this was built in quite a different style, but it was definitely a paddle-wheel steamer! She was a little bit astonished to see something so comparatively modern in this setting; granted, in her world such things were still pretty antique-y, but it was the first time she'd even seen any complex machinery here. She wondered if other parts of this world were further ahead of the curve in that regard than this little island. Even then, what was it doing out here? She knew from the centaurs' map that this place was some ways from the mainland, and unless there was a full-fledged industrial coal-mining operation somewhere over that way, it was hard to imagine that they could make ocean voyages just off of...
Then it clicked, and she laughed out loud. So that was what people came here for! If solarite could be used to power steam machinery, and this island was the place (or one of the places) to get it...well, that explained a good deal. Chuckling to herself and idly humming "Proud Mary," Jon turned her attention back to Maggie. As long as they were here, they might as well get a bath in. Though she wondered if maybe she should try saying hello to any of the other women...?
Zoe sat at her desk, waiting for class to just get the hell over with already. She never particularly enjoyed this to begin with, but she was feeling particularly irritable today. It probably had to do with not getting enough sleep, thanks to that goddamn nightmare she'd had...why did it keep eating at her like this? She knew it was just nonsense, even what little she could remember of it was bizarre, but...but...
...there was just something about that boy. She didn't recognize him, but it had felt so much like she should that that nagging feeling kept persisting in the back of her mind no matter how much she told herself it was all bullshit. Her brain kept dragging out the but what if...? every time she had almost convinced herself that there was nothing to it, and then she'd be right back to getting irritated over it again, and there was nothing to distract her from this stupid cycle besides her boring-ass teacher's boring-ass droning...
Finally, several eternities later, the bell rang. She stood up and yanked her purse back up onto her shoulder. When she went to set her pencil back down on the desk, she found that she'd been gripping it so hard that the wood had cracked.
Karyn stirred slightly as a cooler breeze swished in under the roof of the veranda. There was always a breeze this high off the ground, but the heat in the noonday desert sun had been so great that even the air currents up here had been balmy at best. This was sharp and cool, however slightly, and it pierced the fog she'd been in and brought her back to full awareness.
She stretched, stood up from the sandy couch, and then stretch the rest of her. She looked around; sure enough, the sun was beginning to slide down towards the horizon. It was...what, maybe 4:30? It was difficult to say for sure without a watch (and, for that matter, without a knowledge of what time of year it was, where they were in relation to the equator, and whether this world even had seasonal variation in daylight in the first place,) but that felt about right.
She'd been thinking about something, but it was taking a while for her awakened brain to fully catch up to what she'd been pondering in her half-conscious state. Finally, she caught ahold of the stray thought. "Lady?" she asked. It felt odd addressing her that way, but since the Lady herself didn't remember her old name, it wasn't any more awkward than any of the alternatives would've been. The snake-woman turned to look at her.
"You said that other people had been drawn here besides Jon and me," Karyn said, trying to hang onto the thought long enough to form her question clearly. "But the portal...if what we were told about it is true, it's existed in our world for...well, for longer than we've been alive. Why weren't a bunch of other people drawn into it before?"
She realized as she asked it that there were several possible answers. If the arcade machine hadn't been running...but they must've at least had it on for testing, surely? And it seemed hard to believe that a force that could draw people across dimensions into other lives and other bodies could be halted at the flick of a power switch, anyway...? Or perhaps people had been, and nobody connected the dots? After all, there were many unsolved disappearances in a single year, and the arcade machine had been around for a couple decades, even considering that it'd been in storage for most of that time...but then, if the Lady could sense that, wouldn't she know? Or was this another thing she'd forgotten?
The Lady nodded thoughtfully. "Tell me, Karyn," she said, "how was it that you came to pass through the portal?"
"I...Jon went in, and I followed after to find him," she answered. She was sure she'd explained that already, but the Lady seemed like she was getting at something here.
"So, in another way of looking at it, it was your connection to Jon that brought you here."
Karyn frowned. "Well, yeah, I guess..."
The Lady nodded. "You remember what I told you: souls give weight to the threads of possibility. The next step in determining the shape of the future was taken when you made that decision, and whichever course the future takes, it must proceed from the present that you established in doing so."
Karyn shifted uneasily on her six legs, pondering that. "But, wait," she objected. "It can't be as fixed as all that. The past can be changed - I know that. I...I lived that." She regarded herself, still bearing the golden hair and enhanced bust that she'd gotten as a result of her hasty, unintentional wish. To everyone except herself and Jon, she'd always been this way...
The Lady chuckled softly, pulling herself up from her resting position and seating herself on the tail which was coiling underneath her. "Yes and no," she said. "You still know the difference, and it only changed as a result of your own actions. What happened was less changing the past and more...weaving in a new thread. Your change to reality required a new past, and so one was joined into the fabric - but it doesn't change the fact that the future must now proceed based on the decision you made. Even the new thread had to match up with it."
Karyn frowned. She wasn't sure she'd call an accidental wish a "decision," but she supposed she understood the point.
"But that's not what I was getting at," the Lady said. "In the same way that souls and their courses distinguish the possible from the real, the bonds between souls have a measurable effect on the fabric. You made the decision you did because of your friendship with this Jon. Other bonds will manifest their influence in other ways - perhaps you or he are missed by someone, even if they don't realize you're gone. Perhaps, in the absence of your influence, someone will make decisions they otherwise wouldn't have. There are any number of ways it could happen - but the fact is that your connections, your influences on others, even the ones you don't know about, shape the course of the future just as your own direct actions do."
Karyn thought for a minute. "Then...what about the connections of whoever it was that was drawn here?" She had a sinking feeling in her stomach...
"Now you begin to grasp the full picture," the Lady said. "It won't stop with you, or them. It won't happen all at once, either; the fabric doesn't change so drastically so fast, and from what you've said there's only the one portal for now, but consider how far these connections might extend."
Karyn felt herself give a little involuntary shudder as she did. "I've...I think I've heard somebody say that anybody is...is only six degrees of separation from anybody else in the world," she said. She didn't know how accurate that was, but if it was even close...
The Lady nodded solemnly. "Indeed."
Athena was rummaging through her locker looking for one of her textbooks when she felt an iron grip on her shoulder. She turned to look, and frowned. "Zoe, what?" she said, slightly annoyed. What was she so worked up over?
Her friend stared intently into her eyes. "Athena...tell me what you know about...whatever the hell you were talking about."
