He made it up what seemed like an infinity before he came to a little ledge. The nameless man hauled himself up onto it and breathed heavily, arms aching. He looked back down...what? That couldn't be more than forty feet! How long had he been at it? It had felt like hours, but...who knew?
Against his better judgement, he looked up at the remainder of the cliff. His heart sank...it was so much farther to the top. How was he supposed to ever climb this? He had to go on, but he wasn't sure he could.
"You're amazingly persistent."
He nearly jerked right off the ledge at the sound, and whipped his head around to see the woman, sitting next to him, kicking her feet in a gentle rhythm as they hung off the edge into empty space.
"H-how did you get here!?" he said, trying not to sound too shocked.
"I jumped," she said. "I don't think you'll make it, at the rate you climb, at least not before sunrise."
He scowled. "Let me guess...you want me to come with you and do your light thing." She nodded. "But you're still not going to give me a straight answer about how or why, are you?" he asked.
She sighed. "I know it frustrates you, but I can't. You want to help Jenny...so do I. But if I tell you everything you want to know, it will hurt Jenny."
He frowned. "That doesn't make any sense! How could my understanding what's going on hurt Jenny?" This was all nonsense, it had to be...
"I can't tell you that," she said. "...what I can tell you...you worry about corrupting her. This has to do with that. As you are, I can't tell you the whole truth."
"And if I do your cleansing ritual and become part of the club, then you'll tell me. Naturally." It had all the marks of a cult, with the secret knowledge that only initiates could possess, and the demand of total surrender as the price for initiation. But it did unnerve him that she knew...knew what he'd worried about. He didn't want to taint an innocent little girl with his own sins...
She nodded. "I'm sorry...I'm just going to have to ask you to trust me."
He scowled and stared off into space.
"You want to do it on your own, don't you?" she said. "Self-reliance is an admirable quality...although yours springs too much from distrust. But you need to understand that there are some things that you really can't do on your own. By yourself...you can't save Jenny."
"Save her?" he asked. "Save her from what? Is she in danger? Where is she!? Tell me, dammit!"
"I-I c-can't," she stammered. "I'm sorry, I just...can't. She's not in immediate danger, nor kidnapped, that I can tell you. But you...if you continue as you are, she will come to harm by it."
"You're crazy," he said. "You're full of shit. You're trying to scare me into doing what you want me to do..."
She looked at him, her eyes suddenly burning with intensity. "I am not lying to you," she said, perfectly calm and polite but very, very serious. He was startled by the sudden shift in her mood.
"We share a goal," she said. "You want to help Jenny. I need to help Jenny. I can help you help her, but I need you to trust me. Please, for her..."
He looked at her, then down at the base of the hill, then up at the rest of the cliff. He grabbed a nearby rock and angrily hurled it into space, then turned to the woman.
"I will let you take me up there," he said. "Do NOT take me into the light. I'm still deciding what to do."
She nodded. "I promise you I will not take you any further than the top of this cliff." She stood up, her back flat against the wall, and he followed suit. She sidled up next to him and then squeezed in behind him. He felt his gut sink like the moment before a roller-coaster begins its descent; there was only barely enough room for the two of them on the ledge. The woman wrapped her arms around him and gripped him tightly, then...oh God! She leaned out over the abyss, so that there was space between her back and the cliff wall.
In an effort to think about anything else, the nameless man noticed that something felt odd about her chest against his back, and thought back to before.
Four of 'em? he thought, as she took an impossibly high leap off the ledge, somehow managing to curl back towards the cliff. Eh, it's hardly the strangest thing about this place.
Jon lazily stretched and yawned as she woke up on Sunday morning. The sun's warm glow filtered in through the shades - she didn't have anything more to fear, but she kept them down to minimize the risk to her parents. She lay in bed for a while longer, then rolled over and slowly peeled herself off the mattress. The slug-girl slid over to the dresser and threw on a skirt, bra, and shirt, and gave a cursory shake of the head to straighten her hair out.
She tossed her head back to clear it out of her eyes, and then stopped and stared into the mirror. Even after five weeks, she still had moments where it startled her to realize that...this girl in the mirror was her. It passed quickly, but it was still strange. She shook her head, trying to clear her thoughts up, then headed downstairs for breakfast.
Everybody was present; the nice thing about weekends was that neither the Madison children nor their parents had a schedule to keep, so they were free to ignore the day-side/night-side divide and spend more time together as a family. Jon sat at her usual place, sliding up onto the chair and wrapping the rest of foot around it. She took a sip of coffee and then dug in, looking around the table as she did.
Her mother was cheery as usual, and her dad was in a quieter but still pleasant mood. For having been on the night-side so long, they seemed remarkably unaffected by the pseudo-seasonal affective disorder that many unchanged to varying degrees. And so unfazed by their children's transformations, too. Jon wondered if they were really so okay with it, but her parents never seemed anything but sincere.
What did her mother think about the fact that...Jon looked so much like her? She hadn't really realized it until she'd noticed an old picture of her mom in one of the collage frames in the hall, but she really did. Especially in the face...there was more of her father in her eyes, but the face was all her mother's. It was so strange to think about...
She continued looking around the table. Biff - or Becca, rather - seemed to be engrossed in thought, off somewhere else entirely. Jon gathered she'd had a visit with some friends yesterday, but she didn't remember who - she'd been out with Karyn, and then Tim and Max, for most of the day, and the visitors had been gone by the time she got back. Mikey also seemed a little distracted, but not so completely off in her own world.
Jon herself was feeling a little distracted, actually - something was bugging her about yesterday that she couldn't quite remember. What was...
Oh! The book! That was it. Mind-boggling...but what was there to do about it? She supposed Karyn would come over and see, but neither of them knew where Brittany lived, and there wasn't much to figure out about a book if she wasn't even going to open it. But she had to wonder what it all meant...
"What're you thinking about?" Zoe asked. Her voice had picked up a sort of thicker, slightly syrupy tinge to it since the whole "fruiting" episode, since she'd lost the seemingly-human form. Not by a lot, but still noticeable.
"Eh? Nothing," Jon said. Her sister seemed to have more or less come to terms with her new form in the last week-plus - she wasn't even trying to hide the dark splotch her food left in her translucent adbomen anymore, and after a couple abortive attempts at shaping herself into a "clothed" form (and the discovery that heavier clothes sank right into her,) she'd settled for a sort of simplified, PG-rated version of her original body, without the visible nipples and genitalia.
Zoe raised an eyebrow, though it was a bit difficult to tell, given that there was no hair to delineate it (and anyway, her "hair" was the same translucent orange as the rest of her.) "You always get that look when you're thinking of something you find interesting. What is it?"
Jon frowned. "Nothing, really. Just thinking about yesterday, hanging out with Karyn and...yeah."
The slime-girl looked curious now. "'And?'"
"A couple people from school were there, we hung out for a bit." Zoe was so withdrawn most of the time, but she had a knack for turning inquisitive at awkward moments...
Zoe nodded, her expression skeptical. "Uh-huh." There was something more going on here...Jon had been okay at hiding things before, but she wasn't used to keeping a poker face with her new...well, face.
"Sounds fun," Mrs. Madison said, smiling. "Who did you run into?"
"Oh, uh, I don't think you know them," the slug-girl said. "Actually, one of them I hadn't even met before; she just kind of needed some help and we got to talking. The other, he's talked with Karyn and I now and again..."
The slime-girl grinned. "Met a boy, did you?"
"Yeah...what?" Jon flushed a little. "No, not like that."
Her sister smirked. "Suuure."
