Jon had to sit down for a minute - insofar as resting on the nearest part of her slug foot to her torso still constituted "sitting." This was just getting overwhelming...not only was she now part of some long historic line of wizards simply by having inherited the stone, now Brittany told her that a wish like hers was a primum movens for the entire history of human consciousness!? She could hardly even really grasp the idea. Her wish wasn't anything so epic...it was the careless half-thought of a bored teenager gifted with power he didn't fully understand...
And yet she could almost see it. Some pre-human in the mists of time, hundreds of millennia ago, or perhaps earlier still (she tried to remember when the earliest hominids supposed to be capable of speech lived - or could the stone work with some simple proto-language?) living a simple life of hunting and gathering - far enough along in human evolution that the days weren't simply a constant battle to survive against predators and starvation alike, far enough along that a proto-man (or woman) might have the time to sit and observe the nature of their life, and wonder if there wasn't something more.
Of course, she couldn't quite work out how that would even occur to a non-sentient creature. But maybe it wasn't entirely black and white. Perhaps hominids could have evolved just up to the brink of true self-awareness naturally, up to a point where simple selection for survival ability could take them no further, a gap that they couldn't cross on their own. Maybe they even remained at that point for...for millennia, perhaps. But at some point, some pre-human must have come across the stone, and found the words to express his simple dissatisfaction...to complain that life in this routine was boring, and to express a desire for something more interesting...
Her own wish, so vague and ill-formed (and without any such excuse as being incapable of truly thinking about it, she thought to herself;) "I wish something interesting would happen." Dangerously, cataclysmically vague - but also a wish of infinite potential. The whole of human history could have been kick-started by a wish like that, just as easily as it could have been tragically cut short. That it had worked at all was a miracle...
She stared at Brittany. "So...what now, then?" she asked. "If...if these 'gods' are coming back...what? Do we have to do what they say? Do they show up on Mount Olympus and go 'ta-da! Here we are!'? What am I supposed to be doing here?"
The ancient girl frowned. "I...I do not know for certain," she said. "When the gods left us, Merlin thought that it might be so that we might learn to support ourselves...if that is true, I don't know what role they will play in human affairs in the future. Perhaps they desire to see what has become of us in that time..."
"Huh," the slug-girl mused. "So...you knew which gods were...the 'real' ones, then? And they told you what to do?"
Brittany shook her head. "It's not like that...it seems that people in your country use 'god' differently. The gods we knew...I don't think they are what you think of as the exclusive rulers of all...they have their own domains, they embody fundamental aspects of the world. We had our names for them, and the Romans had others; you heard them yourself from Lady Summers. Nor am I certain that we or they truly knew the gods; we had ideas of what they were like, but we did not agree on all points; it may be that either or neither people were entirely right..."
She sighed. "In any event," she said, "I think you misunderstand. They did not 'tell us what to do' as though we were slaves and they the masters. I have heard of forces that would seek to rule mankind in that way, but they were not of that mold. We looked to them for guidance and aid when our own wisdom or strength failed...not to replace our own will. And where we thought that malicious spirits might be at work, we sought their intercession."
Jon felt a bit bad; she looked a little hurt. "Uh, I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to imply that...I just don't really have any idea how any of this stuff worked...or works, or however it is."
Brittany nodded. "I understand," she said. "They have been gone for so long that it is but a memory...of course you would not know how it was in the past. But as for your question, lady Jon, of your own role in this...it may be that you will have to take on the role of priestess for yourself. It is part of your duty as successor to Merlin. If we should need the aid of the gods, they are more apt to heed someone with a connection to magic, and certainly the keeper of the Keystone would draw their attention."
The slug-girl groaned. She'd never wanted this, to be drawn into this crazy world where the real, historical world turned out to have had magic all along, and there were gods and goddesses out there somewhere, and she had an aura that attracted unusual events thanks to all this, and she was expected to fill the shoes of a legendary wizard she hadn't even believed was a historical figure a month ago...it was nuts. She didn't want to have to do this. Two months ago her only goal was to get through the next year and into college okay!
But...if for some reason it turned out that the world did need intervention from these "gods"...well, she supposed she owed it one. If having to be a go-between for humanity and deity-kind (or incarnation-of-abstract-ideas-kind, or whatever they were) was her penance for having done this...well, she supposed there were a lot worse alternatives.
And...well, okay, there was a little part of her, the Grandpa Jack part of her brain that had made her get on so well with him, the part that thrilled to the discovery that there was an ancient mystery surrounding the book and the stone, and boggled at the revelation of their connection to each other and to Brittany...that part of her was enthralled by the possibility, no matter how much she tried to keep a level head about it.
