Robert wanted to leave. Just turn and go, forget this whole thing, go hide somewhere where nobody could see what she had become, where nobody could call her a monster, a creature of evil - even if she was. But...Father Maxwell wanted her to...to teach them? Teach them what? She was a...a...she couldn't even resist her own desires, how could she possibly hope to counsel others against temptation when she was controlled by her own flesh?
"For what I would, that do I not," she murmured to herself. "But what I hate, that do I." If even Paul struggled with this, the same Paul who wrote a large portion of the New Testament, who was instrumental in the building of the early church...maybe the senior pastor was right. Maybe...maybe God could use even a sinner like her. It was possible that they wouldn't listen to her...possible that she'd taught them too well. Nevertheless, she'd at least make the attempt.
And before that, she'd at the very least finish cleaning up the mess she had made, doing what little she could to repair the damage she'd done. The devil-woman stood, took a deep breath, and went back towards the church. The lizard-man was there, as were a couple other people, who looked uncomfortable at the whole situation.
"Why are you back here?" the man said, scowling. "The Enemy does not belong in our church! Get out of here!"
She wanted to, but she couldn't. She had to...had to do something here, not just run. That was what she had always done, hide from problems and temptations...that was why she was so easily swayed, wasn't it? She'd never learned to face her own base urges head-on, just tried to hide from them, and so when she was confronted with a new set of desires that she didn't know how to escape...they had won. Utterly and completely, in a blissful evening of sheer...
She shook her head, trying to focus. "I am not the Enemy," she said. "I serve God alone. Maybe not well, but...I do. I'm going to clean up the mess left by the fire; I'm sorry if that offends you." She walked past him, back to her work, while he stared in confusion.
Erica watched him leave, sighing in relief. She wasn't exactly happy about being discovered, not when she'd hoped to simply spend this week hidden in the forest and get home as quickly and uneventfully as possible, but that could have gone a whole lot worse. If someone here had to know of their existence, she didn't think there was likely to be a better choice. What luck...
She turned back to the den entrance to see Nikki standing there, smiling. The teenaged skunk-girl gasped. "I thought I told you to stay in the den, kiddo!"
Nikki shrugged. "I heard you talkin', an' I know he's nice. 'sides, I wanted to see him..." There was a wistfulness in her voice that Erica couldn't quite interpret, but she was still smiling, so it must be okay, right?
"Well," she said, "next time, listen a little better, 'kay?"
"Okay!" the little skunk-girl said. "Do we still got the firewood? We can cook the bird now that they're gone..."
Erica sighed. Now she was really looking forward to dinner...
Tiffany was still fuming when she noticed that...that slug-thing come up to her. "Piss off!" she muttered. Why couldn't people leave her alone? Why couldn't they just stay away? If she'd had her old aura back, this would never be happening...
Jon shrugged. "Okay. Just one question, though: how is it the sun changed you twice?"
The horned girl nearly exploded. "Don't you...don't you dare suggest I was anything like you freaks!" she snapped. "It was completely different! I had so much...I was going to...I could have...could've..." She fought to keep from breaking down - there was some nagging thought, some stupid Sarah-voice in her head, asking her what she could have done...why wouldn't it go away? She knew better than that! It was all so clear at the time how much superior she was to these animals, and yet now, now that it was taken away, she found it hard to remember how.
Jon eyed her curiously. "Completely different," huh? On the one hand, Tiffany was obviously in some kind of denial about the whole thing. On the other, what if she was right? Her first change had been unlike anything else Jon had seen the sun do. Nothing else she'd encountered had seemed evil so much as just weird.
What if...what if it was from some other source? She didn't know what that would be, but since she knew magic existed, she had to admit it was possible, even probable, that magical forces other than her stone existed. Suppose something...or someone...had been behind Tiffany's first change, and then for some reason the sun only got her much later?
She'd have to think about this later, though. It was lunchtime already, and she had something way more important to look into. She slid off into the cafeteria, where Karyn was chowing down on breaded vaguely fish-like patties. "Hey," she said. "If you've got a minute..."
Karyn nodded. "Right. Just a sec here..." She grabbed her lunch tray and set it carefully on her lap, holding it steady with her hands while she used a couple of her tentacles to wheel herself out from the table. "Okay," she said. "Let's get this figured out."
Jon gulped. She dearly hoped nothing was going to go wrong with this...she almost wanted to call it off, but she had to know how all of this was connected. "Yeah. Let's."
"Lady Haru," Brittany said, "I must ask...do you know much of what has become of my country? I have heard much of what it did in...in the past..." How strange it felt to be calling things that had happened so many centuries after her own time "the past," when it was a mere two hundred years ago out of nearly two millennia! "But I have heard little of what it's like now...are the old traditions still kept there?"
Haru thought for a moment. It was kind of funny how the older girl had started eating lunch with her, because she'd been the first to see her true nature. She was so strange...so interested in the world around her and how it had changed, yet always with a hint of sadness, like she longed for the past she'd left behind...it must be hard for her to be thrown out of her own time...
"I...don't really know," she said. "The 'old traditions' - if you mean what people believed back...back when you were from, it kinda got displaced when the Church came in, we were talking about that a little when school started, just before the sun changed. I think it lasted longer in places like Ireland, though, and from what I've gathered it's always kind of there around the edges of stories and stuff. And the Saxons and the Angles and a bunch of other people invaded, but they all kinda left or got taken over by somebody else, so they just left people there and left their marks on the culture."
She took a bite of her sandwich. "As far as what it's like now? You hear a lot of things from a lot of people who live there or who've just visited, and it's hard to know how much of what they're saying is the truth and how much is just them picking out stuff that supports what they already believed. Some people say it's a nice place, some people say it's not. I've heard their police are getting kind of scary with cameras watching everybody, and I've heard their police are incompetent and don't care...I dunno what's really true." She wondered, could she see "into" a whole country, to see the truth? Would she have to be there?
"But...a lot of people still live there," she said, "so I guess it can't really be terrible. It's not like North Korea or anything where they can't leave, so if it was really bad I suppose they would've. It's probably pretty nice, I guess - I think most countries probably are."
Brittany frowned. She supposed it was only human nature that people would tailor their reports to suit their ends - after all, she'd heard that the old Caesar had claimed that they sacrificed one out of every three newborn children as part of their rituals, when he needed to convince his Senate to support his campaigns in Gaul and Britain. That was nothing new, then - but it left her with so little to really know about the fate of her homeland!
"Hey, Brittany?" She turned to see Jon standing - or was that sitting? - next to her. Her friend Karyn was there as well. "Could we talk with you a minute?" she asked. "In...uh, in private? Sorry, uh...?"
"Haru," Haru said. She was...she was beginning to get used to the name, really. "It's okay, go ahead."
