Brittany held the book in her hands, cradling it like a child, savoring the feel, the smell, the weight - the one connection she now had to her old homeland as she last saw it. She could have stayed there for hours just basking in the fact of its existence, but more important questions weighed on her mind. She looked to Jon. Why was the book given to this girl? Given to deliver to her, admittedly, but still... "How...how came you by this?" she said, her voice hardly more than a whisper.
Jon hesitated, wondering how much she should reveal just yet, or whether she should go all-in - but that carried a lot of risk. "I was in a bookstore in the mall," she said. "The lady there said someone had sent it to them, with a description of me and instructions to give it to me. So I don't know who sent it or from where. You said...it was 'the book of Merlin?' As in...?"
The Briton girl smiled slightly; she had read a little in the school library about this. Tales of her world, her country, had passed down - much changed in the telling, but still remembered across time and space. It comforted her that something about them still resonated with people in this strange future. "The magician and seer, yes," she said. She was wary of revealing too much, but it could hardly all be kept from the slug-girl - and it wasn't difficult to deduce, anyway. "Chief of my order," she finished. "Lady Haru had discovered before you...I am a woman of what you know as the distant past. I do not know whether I was brought here by the sun or by some other force..."
Even as much as she'd considered the possibility, even as acclimated to the preternatural as she'd become in the past month, the realization still left Jon a bit stunned. There were other forms of magic - and she was sitting in the presence of someone with a connection to one of them!? She could hardly believe it. "Can...can you read it?" she asked. Part of her...that part that had thrilled to Grandpa's stories, that had discovered some small solace for his death in the astounding treasure he'd left her...that part of her was on fire, urging her to dive in, to spill everything and see what secrets awaited her within the book...
Brittany smiled and nodded. "I never did learn Latin well, but I can read my language in their letters. But the book is locked, and I expect with more than metal. If we only had its key, I might open it. The book did not come with it...a stone, a small stone of red colour?"
Karyn glanced at Jon, and Jon swallowed nervously. This was it...it had been hard enough to decide to tell Karyn, and she had grown up with her. Now she was about to take another into her confidence...someone she hardly knew, and who might be millennia removed from contemporary notions of ethics...yet something in her knew she could trust this strange girl. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the stone. Brittany gasped and stared, first at the stone, then at her.
"It didn't come with the book," Jon said. "I got it from my grandfather, who got it in Peru...but I noticed it was shaped to fit. I haven't tried it yet, though, since the book's yours..."
Brittany could hardly keep from shouting. "Y-you?" she said. "You are the new keeper of the Keystone! Why did I not know this before? Your questions about magic...of course! All this time..."
Now it was Jon's turn to be surprised. "Y-you know what it is!?" she asked. "What...but...how!?"
"I could ask the same!" the other girl replied. "That stone...I was charged with hiding it away for its next keeper, and aiding them when they appeared...I took it to a distant southern land...you say it was found by your grandfather?"
Jon nodded. There wasn't much point in hiding anything further, if she knew what it was. "He must've...must've found it where you left it," she said. "He found it in an old ruin, and when he died he left it to me with a note explaining how it worked...oh my God, I can't believe this!"
"You know of its power?" Brittany asked. "H-have...have you used it?"
The slug-girl felt her stomach sink as she thought about the history of the wishes she'd made on the stone... "Y-yeah," she said, hanging her head. "I, uh...I..." God, this was embarassing to admit... "I...kinda caused the sun to change. I didn't mean to, it just...I made a wish for...for something interesting to happen, and..."
Whatever Brittany had expected to feel about the discovery of the stone's new keeper, pity wasn't it. "Lady Jon," she said, "you need not feel ashamed."
Jon stared at her. "But I've screwed everything up, because I wasn't thinking...and it's not even really mine, I only have it because my grandpa found it..."
Brittany shook her head. "Have you heard the story of Arthur's conception?" she asked. Jon and Karyn stared at her and shook their heads. "Merlin saw in a vision the invasion of Britain," she said. "So he arranged with Arthur's father Uther that he should be disguised as his enemy and sleep with his enemy's wife. Out of this union Arthur was born, and went on to unite the land in repelling that invasion."
"...Oh," Karyn said. That was...odd.
"What I mean," her temporally-displaced classmate said, "is this: that sometimes in order for good to be done, things must be done that seem foolish or vile at the time. I do not think the sun's change was an accident; rather, that there is some reason for it to have happened beyond your wish."
"Huh? Why?" Jon asked. The idea was appealing, she had to admit, but she had no idea what could necessitate such a drastic change. And how did that absolve her of responsibility, when she hadn't known anything at all about any of this when making her wish?
Brittany shrugged. "I do not know," she said. "Perhaps it is some coming threat that will be fought back by a force brought forth in the sun's light. That, I think we should make it our goal to find out. Perhaps we should wish to know?"
Jon shook her head. "I'm afraid not," she said. "Changing the sun drained the stone pretty thoroughly. I checked and found it's going to be ready to change the sun back in about another five months, but in the meantime I'm afraid to use it for fear of throwing that off...there's some alignment something that we're only going to get one chance at."
"Ah." Brittany nodded. "That is a sound judgement, though unfortunate. If this is the case, we ought to make our own investigations. Lady Jon, I have been charged with aiding you as keeper of this stone...if you will permit me to offer you my counsel and service?"
Jon couldn't help but smile. "Just 'Jon' is fine," she said. "And...I think we could definitely use some advice from someone who knows a little more about this stuff."
Brittany smiled back. "Gladly. If you will permit me, perhaps some of the answers we seek lie in this book..."
Jon nodded, took a deep breath, and handed her the stone.
"Mrs. Crawford?" Becca said. "I was thinking...'dja see on the TV about the town that disappeared?"
The teacher nodded. "Yes...it was awfully strange, wasn't it?"
The little girl nodded. "I was thinkin'...you think it had to do with the bad guys?"
Mrs. Crawford thought for a minute. "I don't know, Becca," she said. "They have done some strange things, I guess, but it doesn't seem like that would make a lot of sense. Nobody was hurt that I've heard of, and some of the people actually transformed back into their human forms, they said. I don't know why they'd do that."
"Huh, yeah," Trident said. "Maybe, though...maybe if they were planning to use the re-humanized people, to corrupt them? They can't do that to changed people, can they?"
"N-not that I know of," the teacher said. It always felt uncomfortable talking about the subject...that dark force that had possessed her and driven her to such twistedness...thank God Becca had pulled her out of it. And...she had wondered about Tiffany, who had also seemed...corrupted. Different from her, somehow, not driven to seek out and destroy the Numbers, but not too different.
"Maybe you're right, but I'm still not sure they were involv-oh!" She looked at her watch. "I'm sorry, Becca, but I have to get to a meeting..."
The little girl nodded. "Okay..."
At the meeting, she found herself having a little trouble paying attention, which was unusual for her. Her thoughts were still on Tiffany. She, too, had had the corruption removed, it seemed, though she was certainly less happy about it. She could kind of understand, as her own purification hadn't resulted in a second change, but on the other hand, Tiffany's new form was quite lovely; she didn't know what she was so upset about.
Who had removed the corruption from the girl, she wondered? She glanced over at Tiffany's teacher, Mary Summers. She was an odd one, seemingly completely human; yet she was changed, nobody was quite sure how and nobody had asked her. But what was unusual was...she didn't really know for sure. There was just something sort of around the "edges" of her being that seemed different, like there was something else there that wasn't visible normally...
"...and so Mrs. Crawford and I...will be sharing duties," the principal said. "She has agreed...to serve as acting principal at night. And I believe...she had a suggestion to make...Emily?"
"Oh, uh, yes," she said. "I've been developing a plan to deal with the issue of clothing here. I think that we could try simply offering rewards to students for wearing clothes. I've developed a tentative reward structure, mostly centering around selective grade bonuses, and some special privileges..."
"So, uh, do you propose to leave the current system in place, then?" one of the teachers asked.
"Actually," she said, "I was thinking that it could be changed so that there's no punitive measures for not complying, students who wish not to wear anything would simply have to get a daily permission slip from their teacher..."
"No punitive measures?" one of the other teachers asked. "If you give a bunch of kids a reward for doing what most of them do anyway and then tell the ones that don't 'sorry, you're not in the club,' that's certainly not how they'll see it."
"Besides," one of the science teachers said, "I don't change my grades, come Hell or high water, and I sure don't give extra credit for something that has nothing to do with school work." She'd known he was going to object to that...he always felt that way about grade questions.
"But...we have to address this somehow!" she said. Some of the others nodded, some didn't look so sure.
"Look, to play devil's advocate," Mrs. Maple said, then laughed along with the rest of the group as she realized what she'd said. "Sorry, I swear that was unintentional," she chuckled. "Still, I have to question that premise. Rachel made a fair point when she talked with Mr. Erin, in that we're letting Sarah and theoretically any other similarly-hampered students go naked without a fuss, when there's no reason, strictly speaking, that they couldn't wear clothes, mainly because it feels like hassling a disabled person. But Sarah's probably capable of dressing herself, if she would put some thought into it."
"Are you suggesting that we drop the idea and make her dress?" one of the teachers asked. The rabbit-woman shook her head. "Not at all. My point is, we're kind of waffling on the whole issue. Do we or don't we want to require students to wear clothing? And if we do, is it because we're afraid it'll be a distraction, or because we just don't like it? Personally, I've always been uncomfortable with social engineering in education."
Ms. Summers nodded. "And I have to report that with Sarah as a proof-of-concept, the other students have become more or less accustomed to the idea. Certainly there was a bit of a disruption the first day she showed up naked, but they've been remarkably good about keeping on-task, increasingly so as the novelty has worn off."
"But isn't it social engineering to allow our students to thwart our laws in school?" Mrs. Crawford said.
Maple shrugged. "The state's suspended prosecution of simple public nudity pending a debate in the next legislature session," she said. "Some other states have amended their laws outright. It seems to be a bit of a trend in societal adjustment."
"In any case," another of the teachers said, "I'm damned if I'm going to write half a dozen permission slips a day!"
The principal held up his hand for quiet, a little trickle of black sand running off it. "Obviously," he said, "this is an issue...many of us feel strongly about. I think perhaps...we had better come back to this...another time. In any case, I feel that...such a drastic change ought...to be discussed with the students."
