Diana looked over the sandy riverbank. It was quiet, except for the gentle splash and rumble of the surf off toward the mouth of the river and the cries of distant gulls. There was no sign of the ship left, aside from the crater it'd left behind it; wherever it had gone, it had gone. Peter was busy explaining the story to Brook, who was listening intently. "That's...pretty incredible," she said, when he'd finished. "I know people who'd have paid any amount of money to find something like that, but there's not so much as a trace of it."
Peter nodded. "It just...disappeared."
"Well, it's probably for the best, anyway," she said. "There's enough towns that have been overrun by treasure-hunters scrabbling for any scrap of an artifact from the Ancients; to have an actually functional machine turn up...a nice little place like Robin's Heath doesn't need that." She poked around the mud, looking for anything out of place. "But I don't think Kevin's been here since; there's no fresh tracks here. Diana, are you able to smell him anywhere around?"
Diana stared at the spider-lady. "H-huh?" When she thought about it, she actually did seem to have a better sense of smell than she had as a human, but it just seemed like kind of an odd request to make of her, as if she were some kind of bloodhound - and anyway... "Uh-uh," she said, shaking her head. She found that she more or less did remember what Kevin smelled like, but she didn't notice it anywhere around here.
Brook shrugged. "I thought not. Though based on what you told me, Peter, I'm kind of surprised he hasn't returned here. Seems like he was pretty fixated on that ship."
Peter nodded. "I thought he'd gotta be 'round here someplace. But I guess not..."
"Either way," the spider-woman said, "we'd better be heading back. We'll find him one way or another, but it won't do us any good to look where we know he isn't."
They returned the way they'd come, following the little river back down to where it opened into the sea. As they came down to the beach, Brook pointed. "Look, over there!" She led the children over toward one of the larger dunes. "See?" she said, gesturing to some divots in the sand. Peter and Diana looked - while the deep, shifting sand had obscured any details, it was pretty obvious from the size and placement that they were footprints. Brook looked around. "The village is back that way," she said. "So if he came from there, he must have been going that way."
They followed the tracks up onto the top of the dune, only to find that they abruptly stopped. There were a smattering of them at the top, as if he'd stood in several different spots, and signs of other activity in the sand, but no set of prints leading back down - not even the way he'd come.
Brook frowned. "Well - that's odd."
Peter looked a little apprehensive, his ears drooping as his tail twitched behind him. "Wh-what...what if somethin' flew up 'n carried him off?" Diana felt sorry for him - she was still miffed at Kevin for the way he'd treated her, but it was clear that Peter was worried about his friend.
"I don't think so," the spider-woman said. "There shouldn't be anything that size around here. Maybe a harpy might come down from the mountains, but they have no reason to kidnap a human child, and it'd only bring them trouble. Besides, they're not exactly known for subtlety; I'm sure they'd have left some kind of sign of any scuffle."
"Then...what happened to him?" Diana asked, her whiskers twitching. By all the evidence, it was like he'd just vanished into thin air...
Brook shrugged. "I don't know. It looks like he was digging here or something, but it doesn't look like he got very..." She frowned. There was no hole here, but they were standing in a bit of a depression, almost like a very shallow crater in the top of the dune. The sand is pretty deep and loose here, she thought. Maybe he did dig something up...? She frowned. "Children, help me dig here," she said, seating her huge spider abdomen on the sand and propping herself up with her back four legs while she began to scrabble away at the sand with her front four legs.
Peter and Diana hurried over to help her. The sand was loose and tended to slide back down into the hole they were making, but once they'd cleared away the top layer and begun to dig into the wetter sand below they started making better progress. Diana looked up at the strange spider-woman as they worked. She seemed so strange - her hair was silver-white and there were lines on her face that gave a clear indication that she was an old woman, but her skin was so smooth otherwise (if a bit thin) and she was hardly frail...she seemed possessed of a sort of ageless grace, but imbued with timeless wisdom.
And...she used to be a boy, Diana thought to herself. Just like...just like me... She would never have guessed it, to look at her - and the innkeeper had said that she was a great-grandma on top of that! Was...was that why it seemed so hard to think that she had ever been a boy? Because she'd had children and been a mom and a grandma and a great-grandma? Or was it just because she'd lived so long this way? Am...am I gonna...? She shook her head, trying to clear the thought away, and focused on digging.
They worked at it for some time. Diana found herself feeling grateful to have retractable claws in place of fingernails, because she would've gotten so much dirt built up underneath them. She glanced over at Peter and sure enough, his were already brown underneath. He wiped his forehead and came away with a dingy smear along it. She giggled; he was such a grubby little boy right now, and the part of her that remembered being a grown-up found it amusing even as the part of her that was a cat felt an urge to stop and clean it off. But he was making really good progress. I guess that's 'cause he's part rabbit, she thought.
It took them a while, but finally Peter scooped away some of the damp sand and gasped. "Brookie! Look, lookit this!"
Brook and Diana turned their attention to the spot where he'd been working. Lying uncovered at the bottom of the hole they'd made was the corner of a large stone slab of some kind - some kind of black soapstone. Brook's eyes widened. "Goodness," she said. "Let's get this cleared off, children. But if it looks to be doing anything funny, get clear as fast as you can."
Jon found her thoughts turning back to that strange black altar as she and Maggie meandered through the library. The idea of a teleporter that might take her to other worlds...that was a tantalizing prospect. Granted, even if she could figure that out it didn't help her with the immediate problem of being in the wrong body, but if this world contained the kinds of magic and oddities that it did, who was to say that some other world didn't contain a way to restore her to her old shape?
More importantly than that, though, it might mean an answer to the problem of returning home - at least, if it really was one, and if these "ancients" had ever been to her world. On the other hand, she thought, would something in a game world actually be able to connect to something in the real world? Granted, she still had no idea whether this was really a "game world" and not a real one that happened to resemble what was in the game, but she had a brief vision of teleporting into, say, some other portion of the ROM and stepping out into a mad world jumbled together from pieces of random data, like when a game glitched out on the old Nintendo she'd gotten from her uncle...
No, that didn't bear thinking about. There had been a way into this world; there must be a way out of it. And as soon as she found it...well, as soon as she found it and figured out how to get back to normal...? She wondered offhand, if she had to choose between one or the other...no, no, that didn't bear thinking about either. She'd figure it out. She had to.
She wondered, as Maggie drifted over toward the section with the beginners' books that Jillian had pointed out to them, how her friends and family were doing. Did they even realize she was gone? For that matter, had she even been gone long enough for them to notice, or was it like stories where a week in another world might take only minutes back on Earth? Gosh, she'd been here for...nearly a week now, hadn't she? Mind-boggling...
"Jen?" said Maggie. Jon looked over to her "sister," having by now pretty much resigned herself to Maggie calling her that. The younger harpy had opened up one of the books that were laid out on a little reading table in the beginners' section, and was peering at it intently. "Can...d'ya know how to read?" she asked. "'Cause, you know, you useta be a human?"
Jon chuckled. "Yep, I sure do." Which is kind of odd, honestly, she thought. As far as she could tell, most or all of these books were written in English - but why should English be the dominant language - or even a language - in some foreign reality far from her own world? Or was she just perceiving it as English, when it was actually something else and she'd been granted knowledge of it in this new life? But why should that be the case, and even if it was, why would she perceive it as something else? Of course, the game was in English, but then that took her right back to the question of whether this really was a game...
Maggie eyed her expectantly. "D'ya think you could...teach me?" she asked. "Seems like humans use these things a lot..."
Jon smiled. "Sure," she said. She had a seat at the table, spreading out her tailfeathers behind the little stool and gripping one leg with her left talon while she lifted the other up to the table to turn the pages. She motioned for Maggie to join her; the younger harpy hopped up onto a stool next to her. "See," she began, trying to remember years back when her dad had taught here, "each of these strings of symbols is a word, and each of the symbols is called a letter. All the letters have a sound that they make...um, well, one or two sounds, depending on...one of several sounds..."
Diana stood back at the edge of the hole, looking down at the thing they'd uncovered. Brook's instructions had made her a little wary of it, but to all appearances it was nothing but an inert block of stone with a raised circular top, about five feet in diameter. The structure seemed to continue below the bottom of the pit, but they'd left off after clearing the top of it off. She frowned; although it was hard to make out over the wind and the surf, she almost thought she could hear...some kind of distant hum or high-pitched whine. Her ears twitched this way and that, trying to locate it, but she couldn't pinpoint it. Had it been there before?
Peter looked up at Brook, his ears perked up. "What is it?"
The spider-woman shook her head. "Nobody knows for sure. It's something the Ancients would make. There's one of them in almost every major ruin, but nobody's ever been able to get them to do anything, so all we have is guesses."
Peter gave a low whistle. Diana frowned; against the hum, it made a wolf tone (albeit a quiet one) that she was pretty sure only she could hear - though she'd have expected Peter's oversized bunny ears to be pretty sensitive as well. She turned to Brook. "Do...d'ya think this's got somethin' to do with where Kevin went?" she asked. Brook shrugged. "I can't imagine what," she said, "but it seems like this is where he was when he went missing, so...yes, I expect so."
Diana was about to ask some more questions, but they were interrupted by a holler from a little ways off. They turned to see a group of people making their way down the beach toward them. Diana recognized Sarah almost immediately, and that must be Tom with her. It took her a moment longer to realize that the other two figures were the innkeeper and his daughter. Brook answered back, motioning them to come over.
"Diana!" said Sarah, when they'd made their way up the dune. "We had no idea where you were..." She felt like she should be out of breath from the trek, but if there was one upside to this body it was that she was immune to physical fatigue; still, in a way she kind of missed it. Anyway, she thought, at the moment she was just glad that her artificial "skin" covered her joints. It was bad enough getting this sand in her shoes - getting it inside her limbs and into her inner workings would be awful, if not actively dangerous.
The little catgirl looked apologetic. "Um, sorry," she said. "We were just lookin' for Kevin..."
The innkeeper's attention was suddenly fixed on her. "Have you found any sign of him?" he asked. "He's been missing since this morning, only with everything that's been going on with Mary and in the village we've hardly had time to look..."
Diana peered at Mary and realized to her surprise that the older girl was now sporting a metal key very much like Sarah's. It was strange to see someone seemingly in the process of being transformed - she herself had just appeared in this body, and while she knew that Peter had been affected by this town's curse, he'd already been a bunny-boy when she'd gotten here. She wondered what that must feel like. It wasn't turning the way Sarah's was, but how weird it must feel to have a piece of metal growing out of your back...
"Yes," Brook said, and Diana turned her attention back to their conversation. "But we haven't found him, I'm afraid. We found tracks that are probably his leading up here, but they just stopped here." She explained about having dug out the ground underneath, and indicated the object in the pit. Kevin's father stared at it. "Isn't...isn't that...?"
The spider-woman nodded. "It's one of the Ancients' artifacts. It was directly underneath the spot where he disappeared."
The innkeeper stared down at the black stone slab. An ancient altar... He had a terrible vision of his son being sacrificed to some dark god, but he felt old Brook put a hand on his shoulder. "Don't think that," she said, and he realized how clear his thoughts were showing on his face. "I don't think this is a place of evil. But I'm afraid I don't know where your son is, or what he might be facing there."
He was about to ask if there was anything he could do, if there was anything she could do to help him find his boy. But they were both distracted when Sarah gave a sudden groan. All six people turned to her to find her clutching her head.
Diana wondered what was going on with the clockwork girl, and worried whether she was alright. That strange high-pitched whine had intensified, and she could hear strange, burbling, static-ey fluctuations in it. She looked around, wondering if anybody else could hear it, and found Peter looking around trying to pinpoint it as she had. What was going on here!?
Sarah winced under what she could only describe as a kind of mental assault. She felt Tom beside her with his hands on her shoulders. It felt like some outside force was probing her mind, methodically examining it one cog at a time. For some reason she got the impression that it was trying to identify her, but she was unknown to it. Then, after a small eternity of this, it suddenly gave up and vanished. She gasped a deep breath, purely as a residual human reaction to an experience of that intensity. Tom stared at her. "Sarah! Are you okay!?"
Still shaken, she nodded. "It was...I don't know what it was," she said. She could feel Diana hugging her waist, and put a hand on the little catgirl's head. "Some kind of-" But then Mary gave a sudden cry, and their attention turned to her instead.
Mary, it seemed, was undergoing an experience similar to what Sarah had just been through. She was clutching her head and trembling as her father held her from collapsing. She couldn't make sense of it - of anything - it felt like pieces of her mind kept dropping out and then reconnecting, and all the while something was trying to connect with her. Meanwhile, strange feelings ran through her limbs, through every muscle in her body, as a new tension began to coil up in her back...
Tom stared at the innkeeper's daughter as she underwent this strange ordeal. He'd been somewhat amazed when Sarah had roused him that morning to tell him what was happening to the girl - it had been amazing enough to find Sarah herself, an artificial person created based on the technology of the Ancients, but to have someone appear to be turning into one!? In the grand scheme of things it was probably no more strange than anything else that happened at Robin's Heath, but it was still...well, he felt a little bad for thinking of it as fascinating when it was some poor scared girl having to go through this, and especially given what she seemed to be going through at the moment, but he couldn't deny that the engineer's side of his mind found it very interesting.
But there were bigger things to worry about at the moment. Mary looked as if she'd gone into some kind of shock; her eyes were open and she could look around, but her limbs were stiff and she didn't look like she could breathe. He realized with a start that her key, which had previously been purely decorative, was now turning, but something clearly wasn't right; there was only a click-click-click-click-click sound as if some gear were slipping, rather than the smooth, gentle ticking and whirring that Sarah's mechanisms made.
Tom wasn't sure what to do. It was clear she was in trouble, but even if he'd known exactly what the problem was, Mary's body was apparently still flesh and blood (for the moment, anyway) - it wasn't like he could just open her up and go in with a wrench to fix it! But they couldn't very well leave her like this - not if she couldn't breathe! He rushed over to her side. Nothing for it, then - this was a situation for the oldest, most basic maintenace technique in the book. Listening carefully to the sound and trying to figure out exactly where it was, he wound up and gave her a good sharp whack at the base of her neck.
Immediately, something connected inside her, and Mary lurched forward, gasping deeply as her lungs pulled in the air that they'd been denied. She pulled in several deep breaths, then stood there trembling while her father hugged her tightly. The others took notice of the sound - she was now emitting the same soft mechanical ticking that Sarah did. "Oh, thank Heaven!" her father said. "Oh, Mary, are you alright?"
The sun was beginning to set over the desert as Karyn surveyed it from the top of the Lady's tower. It had been so busy over these last few days, since she'd come to this place; even just meeting with Fazalune had been eventful enough, but once they'd met the Lady it had seemed like a non-stop barrage of things they thought she would need to know. Healing, archery, wilderness survival... She wondered what it was they thought she'd need all this for. Granted, the desert was dangerous, but she was in this world to look for Jon and find a way home, not to...to fight in a war or something. Even if she did meet one of these other quasi-demigod sort of beings that the Lady had known, what was she supposed to do about that?
"Beautiful, isn't it?" said a voice beside her. Karyn started, then twisted her upper body around to see the strange snake-woman sitting beside her. "Um, what?" she said.
"The desert," said the Lady. "It can be harsh and dangerous, hot and arid, desolate...and yet there is life here. Life, yes, and beauty too."
Karyn stared out across the sands. "Yeah, I suppose so." Honestly, she missed rolling prairies, pine forests, and quiet lakes, herself, but she did have to admit that this place had a certain beauty to it.
"Even in the harsh places, life and beauty can thrive," the Lady continued, slowly coiling her long tail up underneath herself. "For all its difficulties, it's not a barren place. But your world could be."
Karyn nodded thoughtfully. "If people are drawn here instead?"
"Yes. Right now, your world is missing a few people out of countless multitudes. The echoes of your former existence remain there, but the world will go on much as it always has. But as more and more people are drawn here by their connections to you and to each other, that will surely change."
Karyn frowned, shuffling several of her feet uncomfortably as she felt her stinger bob overhead. "What's going to happen if it keeps up?"
The Lady sighed. "The fabric of your reality will continue to adjust as it can. But the shape of things might change greatly as the adjustments become more and more drastic. Eventually, I imagine that it would reach the point of being unsustainable - a world with only a tiny handful of people in it cannot easily have been a world with countless millions and still remain a world suitable for a tiny handful."
Karyn shuddered. She could imagine some great catastrophe being conjured up as an explanation, but it was hard to imagine how that would also allow whoever remained to continue on with the life they had been living. "And what then?"
"I do not know. Remember what I told you: souls give weight to the threads of possibility. Without them, I expect the fabric would come apart completely. The remaining souls would likely end up here with the rest, and your world would be only another vague possibility, as if it had never truly existed."
She felt her stomach turn. Even if it were true that everyone ended up safely in this world, to have the whole world just...come undone... She sighed. "And that's why you've been teaching me all these things, isn't it?" she said.
The Lady nodded. "It must be prevented. I cannot risk myself, for the sake of this reality, so I must ask you to do it."
"But...I don't know where to look or what to do about it. I only came here to find my friend..."
"Nevertheless," the snake-woman said, "you'll find that the thread of your life passes through the knot at the center of this matter. After all, the force that drew you here - you and your friend - is the force that would keep you here in order to facilitate the exact catastrophe that would await you if you were able to return without stopping it."
Karyn sighed. That made sense, but...she didn't ask for any of this.
"As for starting," the Lady said, "here is my advice. A couple days' journey to the southeast, there is a pass over the mountains that surround this desert. Across the pass and to the south, there is a town where a small branch of a noble family from another land lives. In this house is an old fellow who serves as one of their retainers; he has many sources of information and knows a great deal about what goes on in the world. I would start your search with him; perhaps he knows something about your friend, or perhaps he's heard some rumblings of whatever the force behind these events may be, but I doubt you'll leave his presence having learned nothing."
She frowned. "I...I guess. But...I don't have to go by myself, do I?"
The Lady shrugged. "As I've said, I would go in your place, but I cannot. Fazalune has already gone out of her way to bring you here, and as much as she might think otherwise, she is too old to be trekking off across the world into the unknown. And we have no time to search out any of her younger kinsmen."
"But...I mean, I'm hardly ready to go off into the 'unknown' by myself!" Karyn protested. "I just got here, and there's still so much I don't know anything about..."
The Lady smiled. "Not being 'ready' didn't stop you from risking yourself to come here in the first place," she said. "You were ready as soon as you entered the portal of your own free will, Karyn. Everything we've taught you in the last few days has only been to make the task easier. We might spare another day or two for your training, but sooner or later you must take that first step on your own journey."
Somewhat reluctantly, Kevin allowed himself to be led out of the dining area by the strange clockwork girl, who escorted him back to that odd moving room. He glanced up at the mirror on the ceiling, staring at the reflection looking back at him. The strange "clip" that had formed on his head was clearly visible - it was a silver-white metallic-looking band that stretched from one temple to the other, and it was definitely attached to his head. He tapped it gently; it didn't transmit any sensations itself, but he could feel the vibration where it connected to his skull. There were two flexible structures that grew out of it, sort of like an insect's antennae, only they had star-shaped crystalline structures at the tips, which bobbled slightly with the motion of his head. He touched these, and that he could feel.
Parted along the band was a fringe of soft lavender hair - why was it lavender? It looked a bit longer, too...this had all started with his hair, why did it keep changing no matter how he tried to return it to normal? And he could see now that his eyes had changed to match it - the irises were a deep, vivid purple. And there were the long, pointed ears, too...this was so weird! Why was this happening to him? Wasn't he supposed to be safe from the village curse? And when would the clockwork girl's "treatment" start working already!?
The moving room came to a stop at another building, and I-5483113 led him into a small, quiet room where there were several rows of small desks. He followed her over to one, feeling a little weirded out by the sensations of this outfit. It was kind of odd to be wearing this robe-type garment and no pants - granted, it covered everything that needed covering, but it felt weird having the open hem swishing around his knees - and the long, knee-length socks were an odd touch as well, and the underwear felt just a little bit too snug... He'd have to see if he could will this thing into something more normal later. For the moment, he walked over to the desk that the clockwork girl was indicating and sat down...then stood up again, took a moment to arrange the bottom of the robe underneath him, and sat back down.
Kevin wasn't sure why he was going along with this. He didn't need to go to school to learn what he needed to know for running an inn, and he didn't much care for grown-ups telling him what to do, anyway. But...well, this whole place was such an interesting experience, and now that his hostess had given him a treatment for the transformation he'd been suffering from and he didn't have to worry about it, it was like the entire place was here exclusively for his benefit. It'd be silly not to see what it had to offer.
"Based on your age," the clockwork girl said, "I will suggest that we begin with this lesson." She concentrated for a moment, and a little screen of light sprang out of the desk in front of him. More of those strange symbols that had been printed on the obelisk and on the menu hovered in the air before him. "Um," he said hesitantly, "I...I can't read any of this stuff..."
"Is this the truth?" she said. He nodded, a little embarassed. She paused to process this; it was unusual, and the subject should certainly have been taught before now, but if it was the truth, then further instruction would be severely impeded unless corrective measures were taken. "Understood," she said. "We will now begin remedial lessons."
She concentrated again, and the display was replaced with, of all things, a sort of moving picture! Kevin stared wide-eyed. It was just some man, of a race he didn't recognize, but even at this small size the image moved like a living, breathing thing, far moreso than that strange ghost had.
"All the words in our language are made up of the same set of sounds," the man began. His tone was somewhat forcedly cheerful but restrained, like he was trying to explain something to a child but didn't want them to feel like he was talking down to them. "Because of this, we can use a set of symbols to represent the sounds. We call these 'letters.' Each letter makes exactly one sound, and together a sequence of them can represent a word..."
The man went on talking for some time. Kevin felt like he was kind of a boring person, but the novelty of seeing this moving picture talking to him kept his attention fixed on the lesson anyway, and in any case he actually was interested in learning to read. Though he wasn't entirely sure the guy knew what he was talking about; in the lesson, he made some strange statements, like that "boy" was pronounced "nako" and "girl" was pronounced "nana." Nevertheless, Kevin found himself understanding surprisingly well; it made it easy that each of the thirty letters made the same sound no matter where it appeared in the sequence.
Still, it would've been easier for him to concentrate if he could get properly comfortable. It felt like his hair kept tickling at the base of his neck, and for a brief period he found himself squirming in his chair as something felt funny between his legs. But that went away soon enough, and he was able to turn his attention back to the lessons. Even so, he wondered when the treatment was going to properly take effect, and when he'd be able to return home...
