The milk-river surrounded Lilly, and she tried to swim upwards, but she wasn't much good at swimming even before she became a little girl, and anyway things didn't seem to work quite right in this place, and she found herself being pulled further down by the current even as she was swept along. No, was it down? It felt like that was the wrong word here...because there was the surface again, below her! Confused, she twisted around to see...the surface above her? There were two of them!
She was still trying to figure that out when she washed ashore. The riverbank was strange; it wasn't dirt or grass, it was something soft and inviting, but firm underneath, but nothing she could put a name on. She laid there for a moment, gasping, even though she wasn't really out of breath, or even wet. This place was so strange and confusing...and there was nobody here to help her understand, either. She wished she wasn't alone here...
"You've come a long way to be here, child."
Somehow the squirrel-girl wasn't startled by the voice, even though she'd had no idea there was someone here. She was a little irked by being called "child," but she couldn't feel very angry right now; it was all too strange and unreal to react like strongly. She looked up to see a humanoid figure, wreathed in flame, burning gently. It...it kinda looked like a lady, though she couldn't really tell. "Wh-who are you?" she asked.
The figure smiled - or at least Lilly felt like it was smiling. "People call me a lot of things," she said. "Sometimes I'm a person; sometimes I'm an idea. Names aren't important to me, I think."
That was a confusing thing to say, Lilly thought. She stared at the figure, trying to figure her out. The voice was strange; it didn't sound like a person's voice, with a distinct character to it; instead, it reminded her of a lot of different people. In some ways it reminded her of her mother; other things she thought sounded like Miss Violet, or Jenny's mom. Sometimes she even thought she heard a little bit of her dad in it. Mostly it was girls, though...
Oh, now she understood. "You're...you're kinda a girly thing, aren't you?" she asked.
The figure nodded. "You might say that. It's partly right. But it's not entirely true, either. That's a name people put on me, but it means some things that reflect me, and some things that don't really have anything to do with me. Most of my names are like that. If you had to call me something, you could say I'm the fundamental nature of Woman."
Lilly stared at her. "Th-the firmam'ntl...? Huh."
There was that smile again, as the flaming figure gracefully sat next to her on the riverbank. "And that's not even my true name, just imagine. But I think it helps you understand...?"
The squirrel-girl shook her head. "I dunno," she said, idly rubbing a little tuft of her tail-fur between her fingers. "There's a lotta stuff I don't unnerstan' anymore..."
"There is, but not as much as you think, child. A lot of what you think you don't understand is because you're paying too much attention to labels."
Now she was really confused. "L-labels?"
The Woman nodded. "You're confused about being a girl, because you think that means doing and being a lot of things that you haven't before. Some of those are for real, but some of them you just think are girl things because that's what people have told you. It's like I said; people call me different things, even when those already have meanings that don't quite match with what I really am. They don't have a word for me, so they use whatever they think is closest, even when they don't really know me well enough to say."
"Oh." Lilly sort of thought she understood. But did that mean that...that being a girl was no different from...? She didn't feel like...
"Of course not," the figure said. "There are Real differences between the two. But a lot of people mistake the common and the visible for the fundamental. That's when the trouble starts. Trying to discern the true nature of something by observing the common attributes confuses the issue, when unrelated things appear to be held in common. Visible attributes are the outward reflection, the true nature glimpsed through many layers that may alter and distort the image, not the true nature itself. Even physical sex doesn't always reflect the inner truth in the way that people expect."
Lilly felt like she should've been unnerved that the figure had answered a question she hadn't even asked, but somehow it didn't seem inappropriate. "So..." she said, "should I...what should I do? I miss bein' a boy, but I don't wanna lose my friends..."
"Who says you have to?" her strange host said. "They wouldn't be very good friends if they abandoned you for being a boy, would they? But if you try to 'be a girl' based on what you've been told that means, you're just going to be confused again."
"Oh," the squirrel-girl said. "B-but...what does it mean, then?"
She felt a smile from the Woman again, but this time it seemed mysterious and mischievous. "I can't tell you," she said. "I don't tell anyone else, do I? I couldn't tell you, even I were to try; you don't have the words for it. That answer you can only learn by discovering it yourself."
The Woman rose suddenly, but her motions were as graceful as before, and it seemed purposeful, not abrupt. "Come now, child," she said. "It's time for you to return." She held out her hand, and Lilly took it without even thinking. She realized a moment later that the figure whose hand she was holding seemed to be on fire, but although she could feel the heat, and the flames licking at her wrist, she wasn't in pain, nor did she seem to be getting burned. She decided to go along with it; this was already strange enough.
"A-are you...f'real?" she asked. This did all seem strange to her...
Her host glanced down at her as they walked. "If you mean 'is this place real?' No. This is a dream you're having. But you're real, aren't you?"
"Huh, yeah," Lilly said. "I guess you must be, too?"
"It's all in what you mean by 'real,'" the Woman said. "I am the fundamental nature of something, but if you mean, 'do you have a body like mine?' the answer is no, not right now."
The squirrel-girl nodded thoughtfully. "So...is there a...a boy-you...thing?"
"Of course. He is no less fundamental than I, after all. Perhaps you will see him, as well, though he shines less brightly than I."
Lilly wondered what that meant, but before she'd had time to contemplate it too much, the Woman had led her to a gentle, grassy hollow nestled between two ridges. "Farewell, child," she said. "Thank you for allowing me to share your dream. Now it's time to-"
"Wake up, Lilly, dear!" came her mother's voice. "You need to have breakfast now if you want to be ready for school on time!"
Lilly rolled out of bed feeling unusally refreshed; she couldn't quite remember what, but she'd had a strange but pleasant dream. She put on her school uniform and went out to join her mother, who pulled her aside and gave her hair a quick brushing; then it was down to the kitchen table for breakfast. Stacy was already tearing through an omelette, and in a minute her mother had a peanut-butter muffin ready for her.
She stared at her dad's newspaper as she munched her breakfast. "Daddy?" she asked. "What's a...magnet-shere?"
Mr. Gordon set down the paper and smiled in spite of himself; he often found it upsetting when he saw Lilly trying to remember things her change had made her forget, but he was pretty sure she'd never known this one to begin with; science wasn't really her strong suit. And the way she asked...was pretty adorable, he thought; it reminded him of when she was little the first time. "Magnetosphere," he said. "It's a cloud of particles attracted by the magnetic field around a planet."
"Ovh," she said, trying to swallow her bite of muffin before her mother noticed her talking with her mouth full. "Whaf...what's it do?"
"A lot of things," he said. "What they're talking about here is that apparently the Moon has one now, because its magnetic field got stronger in the past couple weeks. One of the things it does is it helps to keep the atmosphere from being blown away by other particles like solar wind - so now they think that it might be possible for the Moon to have an atmosphere in the future."
"Oh," Lilly said. She didn't really understand all of that, but it was kind of interesting.
