Agent Hawkins took a deep breath as he settled back into the motel room for the first time since yesterday afternoon. Fortunately, Jen had come around after a little while and been in suitable condition to walk back to the town. They'd taken her straight to the doctor, who had kept her in for observation, though he said that she looked good overall. And he had made it back here only about a half-hour before sunrise - a bit too close for comfort.
Or at least it would've been a close call if it weren't for the fact that the sun that rose over the town was the now-familiar soap-bubble of a star to which Earth belonged. He had discovered that it indeed no longer performed the miraculous change-back when Cecilia arrived back an hour or so later, just as non-human as she'd left. She had talked with some of the locals and discovered that the town had now reconnected - with fair reliability - to Earth. Some of the National Guardsmen had been sent into the town to see if any aid was needed, and had been quite surprised to learn about the other world's yellow sun.
According to Cecilia, she'd followed the creature across the landscape for some time before it had pulled a surprise disappearance in a rocky quarry sort of place that had a large number of cavern openings. Hawkins had explained about the apparent sub-surface life they'd encountered, and they'd theorized that the quarry might actually have been a village of some kind. She had considered tracking it further, but didn't want to get lost, as her GPS reception was spotty at best the further she got from the town in the other world.
"Oh, get this," the robot-woman said, stretching out and flexing her mechanical joints. "I met some of the Guard guys on my way back in, and we got to talking about this whole incident. Took a little persuading, but I got them to let me in on the fact that they caught start of the incident on satellite, including pinpointing the epicenter."
"The town, I'd presume," Hawkins said. Not that it wasn't good information, but he was feeling a little tired...
"More specific than that, actually!" she grinned. "There's a nice old house out on the edge of the town proper. Right smack in the middle of that property, that's where whatever happened started to happen."
He raised an eyebrow. "Interesting. Did they offer any insights on the subject?"
She shook her head. "Nah, they were too busy getting their whole 'rescue' thing going. I checked and the property's listed as owned by an Edith Avery, but she passed away in June, and I couldn't find who owns it now."
"Hmm, good find," Hawkins said, smiling slightly. "I guess we'll be paying them a visit then - I need to sleep first, though. Haven't slept in...oh, forty hours or so..."
"Oh, you weak little fleshbags!" Cecilia laughed. Truth be told, she had her own maintenance tasks that required periodic hibernation, but she found it funny to play this angle now and again, at least when it was someone like Hawkins who knew her and would understand she was joking.
Hawkins smirked. "Uh-huh, sure. Wake me in four hours, overgrown alarm clock."
She grinned. "You got it."
Steven stepped out of the counselor's office and into the waiting area. She still wasn't sure what she thought - she knew of course that she was probably right about the diet thing, and doubtless her mother would get right on that, probably without the school even needing to tell her. And it wasn't like she hated this body and wanted it to die - after all, she was still inhabiting it, even if it wasn't what she wanted it to be.
But the prospect of...of growing up as this? Of growing into...into a woman? It wasn't at all what she wanted. She was already seventeen, and not so very shapely for her age, but if she did suddenly start to fill out the natural shape of her top...
She was distracted from this train of thought when she saw Ben in the waiting room. "They made you take the test, too, huh?" she said. "I still can't believe you did this..."
Ben nodded sheepishly. No longer human, he appeared to be an anthropomorphic rat - not a cartoon sewer rat, though, more like an actual ordinary rat, with a chocolate brown coat. He was mostly human in shape, though his hands did look just a little more like a rat's forepaw. His head was the biggest difference; it was unmistakeably a rodent's muzzle, though enough of his old face remained that she had recognized him. His bare-skinned tail twitched gently behind him.
"I know," he said. "I thought I might as well give it a try, I just...didn't think this would happen."
"Well, nobody does," Steven said. "I mean, you think when I stumbled into the light I expected this to happen?"
Ben shook his head. "No, I guess not. Look, Steve...I'm sorry if I was...you know, at the arcade..."
The flower-girl shrugged. "It's okay," she said. "Let's not get too hung up over it."
Robert arrived at the church to continue the cleanup work. She went in carefully, hoping nobody else was here, that nobody would see her...like this. She was already feeling embarassed enough by everything that had...transpired last night, the last thing she wanted was to have to deal with anybody else.
She still couldn't quite get the memories out of her head...of everything she'd done, of all the sensations it had brought her, of her attempts to reason her way through the issue that she knew were just weak attempts to keep from admitting that it was simply what she felt the urge to do...so where did that leave her now? She wanted to be faithful, but if she succumbed to temptation so easily, how could she? Or was it true that she was making a big deal out of something that really wasn't? That certainly wasn't what she had thought before, but...
Oh, this was all so confusing... That was part of why she was here; the devil-woman hoped that work would distract her from her problems. Heading back towards the wing of the church where the fire had been, she knelt down by the remains of a cabinet, still thrown off by the feel of her breasts moving and the strange way her legs bent. Pushing this aside, she began to dig through. The cabinet had contained a pile of old church records - mundane stuff like baptism and marriage notes. She didn't know how far back it went, but it was quite a pile.
She shuffled through the burnt papers, trying to figure out which ones to even bother keeping. They hardly really needed any of them, but it didn't seem right to just throw away perfectly good information like that. She tried to sort them into "readable" and "unreadable" based on how badly they were burned, and quickly lost herself in the task.
Towards the bottom of the first stack, she came across a little surprise - the barest remains of an envelope, mostly burned away. It was a little odd, as none of the other documents had been in envelopes. Curious, she pulled what was left of the paper inside out. What wasn't burnt away was blackened, leaving only one word really legible: "Eric." It looked like there had been another letter on the end that was scribbled out.
Huh. She wondered for a moment who Eric could have been, but with the rest of it destroyed, there was hardly any way to know. Oh well. In the unreadable pile it went.
