Sarah stared down at the phone. It was lucky for her that speakerphone capability had become so ubiquitous in recent years, because it was unlikely she'd have been able to hold it up to her ear without hands. She'd have to invest in a headset for it; she'd always found them too dorky for her tastes, but if it was that or share both sides of every conversation with the general public...
She snapped back to focus on the task at hand. She'd contacted just about every relative she had to see if they were interested in taking care of the house for her, but the ones that weren't tied down with their own families and houses or too freaked out by her (admittedly coy) description of her family's changes were worried about being able to make a cross-country trip under the cover of night. Sarah sighed wearily. Down to the last few on her list, and up next was...
Ah, yes. Aunt Iris, her mother's youngest sibling. Sarah hadn't actually seen her aunt inprobably five years, but from what she remembered, Iris was a San Francisco artsy type with a thing for music - any variety, really, just music in general. She couldn't think of a memory of her aunt where there wasn't something playing in the background. She and Sarah's mother got along all right, from what Sarah remembered, but she thought that her mother didn't really think much of the string of lower-income jobs that her sister took pretty much just to support her hobbies.
Still, at this point having anybody to take care of the place would be an improvement. Sarah lifted one talon up to the tabletop (at least her legs were more flexible as a harpy, though that hardly made up for everything else) and dialed the number.
It took a few rings, but soon enough there was the distinctive clatter of her aunt's old Bakelite corded telephone being picked up. "Hello?" she said.
"Hi, Aunt Iris?" Sarah answered. "It's Sarah."
"Sarah! Good to hear from you. I was beginning to get worried; I haven't heard anything from your parents since the sun changed. Are you all right?"
Sarah cringed, thinking of those awful weeks as her parents slowly lost their grip - it was all right now, but it still hurt to think about. "We're...we're okay," she said. "But, well, that's why I was calling..."
"'Okay' but not 'unscathed,' I presume?" Sarah could hear the concern in her aunt's voice. "It's all right, dear; tell me all about it."
Sarah sighed. "Well, um..." Even three weeks later, she didn't really want to admit it to other people, but... "I'm a harpy now. I don't have hands anymore, so I've been having trouble with a lot of things."
She heard Iris softly gasp. "Oh, I'm so sorry, dear! That must be hard for you..."
Sarah smiled bitterly. "Yeah. My mom's been helping me, but she and my dad changed the other day, and now my dad's immobile and my mom's too small to do much. I've been staying with a classmate, but I don't want to stay here-uh, I don't want to keep imposing on her..."
"I see. Are you calling to ask me to come out and help you?"
That was Iris; straight to the point, every time. "Um, yeah. Well, to help all of us, really. My mom and dad might need help too, and the house needs looking after...but...well, I'm not going to lie, you might be pretty freaked out by Mom and Dad."
Her aunt chuckled. "Oh, Sarah, my tolerance for strangeness is higher than you expect, dear. If you can live with a woman who has the lower body of a giant spider, I think I can handle whatever your family situation is. It's probably charming and quaint compared to some of the people around here."
Sarah gaped. A...a spider? She wasn't a full-blown arachnophobe or anything, but they still gave her the shivers. But...it was her aunt, and this was by far the furthest she'd gotten with any of her relatives...
"Uh, yeah," she said. "That'd be great."
"All right, then. I'll be out your way as soon as I can. God knows how I'm going to get my things moved, though."
While her parents had seen to Becka, Mikey shot off an email to Bonzo, the Emergence admin who'd hooked her up with Effie. She described the way she'd found her WinME fairy hanging out inside the family computer, and interacting in a perfectly literal way with its desktop metaphor. Did digital fairies always exist in a more abstract way than low-level AIs like herself, she wondered? Was it just a facet of Effie being a userland process on her operating system? And if she was just a simple user process, how did she have permissions to do something like share a connection to another machine?
Mikey had no idea. Heck, she was only just beginning to understand how she worked. But hopefully someone at Emergence would know. She also asked about Effie's wanting to change her appearance. Although Mikey was fond of the way her new companion looked now, she supposed that she shouldn't tell Effie how to look. But she did want to know that it was safe before she let the fairy go digging around in her own code, especially if it was anywhere near as obscure and baffling as it looked.
She finished the email shortly before her Parents came back, which was good timing. "Mom?" she asked. "Dad? Jon says that school's starting again. Am...am I gonna have to go?"
Her mom smiled and hugged her. "Mikey, you've always been a bright kid," she said. "And I know that's probably even truer now. But there's still reasons we want you to go back to school."
"For one thing," Mr. Madison said, "it helps you learn how to interact with people, and that's not something you can just look up on the Internet. And we also want you to build and exercise your thinking skills, not just accumulate factual knowledge."
"Besides," Mrs. Madison said, "you can't just stay cooped up in here all day. You ought to be around kids your own age. Okay?"
Mikey wasn't too thrilled about the prospect, but she had to admit that her parents had a point. She smiled. "Okay."
Her mother grinned. "Good girl."
Jon sat on her bed, her foot curled up under herself. For some reason, she couldn't stop thinking about what the tree-pastor had said that morning. Was there a purpose or intent behind all this? It did seem kind of odd for the stone to pick this out of all the possible definitions of "interesting," and some of the running themes in the changes she'd observed or been informed of seemed worthy of note.
But...then again, it could be chance. Random events could just as easily have the appearance of order as not, and who'd know the difference? Besides, what sane purpose was there that would require turning her into a slug-thing, Mikey into a robot, and both of them plus Biff Meadows into girls? It boggled the mind.
