Jon was glued to the TV. Granted, all it was showing right now were distance shots of the strange landscape that had replaced Hedgeton; one of the station's reporters had apparently gone further in with a handheld camera, but whatever had happened to her, they weren't getting a usable transmission right now.
The slug-girl's stomach churned. Could this have anything to do with the sun? She didn't think so; it had only demonstrated its transformational effects on humans thus far, why would it change now? But it certainly couldn't be non-magical, could it? Did it have something to do with some aftereffect of her wish? Was...was she responsible? For the death or disappearance of 500 people...?
No! No, that couldn't be true. At the very least she couldn't jump to that conclusion without some real evidence to that effect. But if only there were some way she could help, it would ease her conscience...if only she could use the stone! But it was still recharging, and she needed it to put the sun back to normal. She couldn't risk upsetting anything for this one rare chance to put right what she had made wrong...
She wondered, though: could there be something bad enough that she'd be willing to sacrifice this opportunity in order to address it? Could she give up on ever absolving herself for screwing it up in the first place? After all, she might never get another chance to change the sun again...
...on the other hand, would that really be so terrible? Civilization seemed to be withstanding the blow; certainly it brought its problems, but who was to say that the world couldn't simply learn to deal with it? Maybe there'd even come a day when everyone was changed in some way, when the ordinary human was something that existed only in history books?
Jon had to admit, in a way the idea did intrigue her; she had, after all, wished for "something interesting," and there was practically nothing about this whole scenario that wasn't. On the other hand, she liked ordinary humans. She was one herself until very recently; she certainly didn't want them gone, or having to hole up indoors whenever the sun was out...
Her attention snapped back to the TV as something changed very suddenly, but by the time her eyes focused on the screen it was gone. Then it was back, then gone again, then back, flickering in and out in no particular rhythm. It was an image of...of the town! It was flickering in and out of reality, as were the crystalline pillars and rock mounds that had replaced it! She gasped. Was it coming back by itself!?
Riley frowned. This was hard work! Reality had a very elastic structure; you could deform it slightly in places, but it had a tendency to snap back...which was a wonderful thing most of the time, when you weren't deliberately trying to alter it. Now it was just a plain nuisance. She needed to carefully guide things to make sure everything turned out as best it could, that this area wouldn't suddenly disconnect from Earth again...
Argh! There it went again. It kept flickering in and out. That wasn't what she wanted; if she couldn't get it to stay as part of Earth then they'd have to abandon the town altogether, right? That'd be a lot of trouble when the solution seemed so simple. Even if it wound up as only partly the town, if some of all this weird alien rock stuff remained, as long as people could rely on it being there...
This was a pain. As she tried to bring unity to the two areas, some of the energy with which it wanted to snap back tended to sort of escape out the edges in weird ways, like a water balloon bulging out the sides when it's squashed in the middle. She thought that there were pockets in the area where time was being weird...not here where she was, at least, but who knew where else? If she could just get it far enough to break its elasticity, to mold it in place so that the two places were truly joined and not just pinched together...
Adam cringed as he watched things flicker in and out around him. The world outside the house was in an unstable state; he really hoped that girl knew what she was doing. It was bad enough that he'd done this by accident, but if reality itself got screwed up as a result of something he'd done...oh, how could he have done this? All he'd wanted was to try and help, but he'd gotten the whole town stuck in some...some weird alien hellscape! He wondered if he shouldn't just give himself up to the sun, when it rose...would that make up for it?
Toby and Terri weren't quite to the point of clinging to each other, but they were both sticking very close to where Riley had been. Toby thought she could just catch glimpses of her daughter's form; not flickering in and out of full reality like the world outside, but ghostly and just on the edge of actually being visible. They couldn't keep their minds off her, desperately hoping she was all right...
Jay sighed and frowned, training her camera out the window at the show. She'd wanted to tool around and explore the area, but after ten or fifteen (admittedly great) minutes, pillars and buildings had decided to start existing or not existing at random, and she'd had to seek shelter in the house; it would've been problematic if a wall decided it wanted to share the same space as her, probably. She wondered how Peter the cameraman was doing; he knew enough to get away if things looked dangerous, but what if he'd been caught by surprise?
