Harry nodded. "I won't tell anyone," she said. "I...do you mind if I, uh, look at you again?" She wondered if it was polite to go seeing into people without their permission...but it wasn't like she could really help it, aside from keeping her third eye closed.
Brittany smiled sadly. "You may look at me if you wish, though I do not know what you will find..."
Harry nodded. She was still weirded out and scared by this most recent development in her change, but...if the counselor was right, if this wasn't just her going crazy...maybe she should try understand how it worked. Taking a deep breath, she gazed at the older girl.
At first it was just as it had been the first time: Brittany seemed transparent, a mere apparition against the solid walls and furniture. But the longer she looked, the more Harry noticed that the walls themselves were becoming less solid, many rapid and subtle changes blurring together like a time-lapse photo, the rate of change increasing as she watched. The walls now seemed to have the color and texture of wood instead of the painted cement blocks the school was built out of, though it was becoming too blurred to really tell.
All of a sudden the walls began to fade, and in mere moments they were gone entirely and she saw only untamed prairie, with little flashes that she thought might have been Native American encampments. But now the vision was moving at a truly dizzying pace, and the landscape itself began to change, the flat midwest grasslands giving way to rolling green hills under an overcast sky, with chalky white bluffs off in the distance.
Coming over one hill she spotted a familiar figure, a red-headed girl in strange clothing that somehow no longer seemed out of place. Harry was confused; she was looking through and into Brittany the "ghost" in front of her, but Brittany in the vision was as solid as any other human being. What did this mean?
All of a sudden the rate of travel in the vision came to an abrupt halt, and Harry jolted back to reality with a gasp like a passenger thrown from a car crash. Luckily, she only physically lurched forward a bit, the only ill effect being that she slammed one elbow into her knee. Shaking, she tried to get her breath back.
She'd...she'd just looked into someone, really looked at them and pursued things as far as she could. She'd followed her sight clean through to another place and another time, to what she felt was fourteen centuries or more in the past, and while she was shaken by the experience, she wasn't frightened by it, at least no more than she might be frightened by a rollercoaster ride. (It helped, of course, that Brittany was for the most part an ordinary human being, with no dark and sinister or wild and mysterious auras about her.)
Brittany looked at her with concern. "Lady Haru? Are you well?"
Harry gasped for breath, feeling her whole body coming down from an afrenaline rush she hadn't even realized was happening. "I-I'm okay. I just...I've never gone so far before..."
The older girl nodded. "May I inquire as to what you saw?"
Harry nodded. "It...I followed it back to...oh, such a long time ago...I think maybe as far as fifteen hundred years! And I was looking at a whole other country, and I saw you coming over a hill, only you were as real as anyone else...then I snapped back..."
Brittany frowned. "I am a creature out of time, this I knew, but for you to have seen me there...am I but the shadow of someone from the past, brought forward by the sun? Or was my real self cast backwards through the ages, and only this little part of me remains? Did you perchance see what I was doing in that time?"
Harry shook her head. "Just walking across the countryside. You looked all right, at least."
Brittany nodded. "Such a mystery...but I thank you for your insight at least, lady Haru."
Harry smiled. "I'm glad I could help. And thank you for the practice...I can think of a lot worse things to get caught up in a vision of."
Brittany smiled. "It was an honor."
Harry took one last glance at the strange girl, who was murmuring in a language she couldn't understand, and turned to go; she had to get to class...and there was still the band this afternoon...
Now it was Effie's turn to be distracted. Did she...did she really have maternal instincts? She knew she felt protective of Mikey, but she'd thought that was because she was their host, not because...okay, maybe she thought of the robot-girl as a little sister, but that was different than thinking of her as a surrogate daughter, wasn't it?
And would...would she really make a good mother? Even if that was possible for digital fairies, even if she could stomach going through with all it might entail, even if it didn't probably mean giving up on any thought of ever getting back to normal...she didn't know the first thing about raising kids! She hadn't even babysitted before!
But then again...was that really necessary? One of the things she did remember about her family was that her parents had had her at a young age, neither of them feeling at all ready to have kids, and she'd turned out...well, okay, not great, but she didn't think any of what had been wrong with her was attributable to parental inexperience.
Besides, she couldn't have kids, that'd mean she'd have to have-no, no! She pushed the thought out of her mind, but not before it had triggered her teenage hormones again. She felt a brief pang of longing, a desire to grab someone - anyone - and have children with him. Stupid hormones! She didn't even have them, yet she was stuck with functionally identical mechanisms that were just as capable of causing so much trouble...
She managed to suppress that with the thought of her family. She knew her parents, mostly - knew their e-mail address, knew what they were like, remembered their given names, remembered incidents from her life with them. She couldn't remember their surname, though, because that had been hers, and now it was gone.
It had been so long since she'd heard from them; she remembered Bonzo mentioning that he'd try to get in contact, and she wondered if he'd succeeded yet. But even if he did, would they believe that she was really their missing child? Could she convince them, or had she changed too much for that? She didn't even know - how could she? What was she becoming?
She felt an arm on her shoulder. Sighing sadly, she leaned against Dennis, her head on his shoulder.
Jay and Lisa arrived at work quite a bit later than usual that day. Lisa had called in before they went shopping, but Toby was still waiting for them, looking just a bit impatient.
"Sorry, Toby," Lisa said. "As you can see, something came up this morning..."
The anime woman nodded. "Uh-huh. You two are just lucky you're such hard workers - you do know that you've got the Collins trial, the overview on the new school, and the upcoming presidential address next week to be working on?"
They nodded, and Toby rolled her eyes. "All right, I've lectured you enough," she said, a hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth. "Go on in and get to work."
Jay grinned. "Aye-aye, cap'n!"
When they had gone, Toby returned to her office by way of the coffee machine. She wondered how Terri was doing - was he getting back into the swing of a day schedule all right?
She thought about her kids as well; obviously, they would be asleep by now, as it was almost noon, and she couldn't help but feel regret that they'd be up and off to school within an hour or two of her getting home. If only...no, no, she wasn't going there.
