It wasn't that she wanted to keep it a secret. Jon had actually considered telling his family when he'd first got the stone. But...it wasn't that he didn't trust them, but he knew that Zoe had as much trouble keeping a secret from Athena as he did with Karyn, and both she and Mikey were his younger siblings - he hardly trusted himself with this power, how could he share it with someone less mature? And his parents...well, Jon had to admit that that was a bit more selfishly-motivated - what if they took it away from him?
Maybe it would've been for the best, she thought, lifting her gaze to the mirror across the room. But...well, if Brittany was certain that this was how things were supposed to be...she knew what she was talking about, right?
She looked back at the book, flipping back to those first entries, skimming through and watching the writing change, along with the style of the occasional illustration. It was strange - she could read this, even though it was written in multiple different languages and alphabets, as long as she was only trying to read it. The moment she focused on the characters and their arrangement into words, the cognition was gone, and they were just systematic scratches, or cuneiform, or other things she didn't recognize. Even the most recent entries were written in Latin, with smatterings of something that looked like Welsh. It was less like she'd been granted some kind of ultimate omniglot status and more like she was just tuned into the thoughts of those who preceded her.
She thought about the chicken-scratches and crude pictograms at the beginning. Brittany had said some things implying that this whole business went a lot farther back than modern humans. How far back? Was the first wielder of the stone some Australopithecus sort of creature? If he or she could write...was that a power gained through the stone, or did they always have that capacity, and there were simply no surviving texts? That seemed a little far-fetched, but then she was no paleoanthropologist - and even if she was, there was always that history-changing thing to throw in some extra confusion...
And that wasn't an isolated example, either - there were several hands at work in several different writing systems before even the cuneiform, which she thought she remembered being the earliest known writing system. She wondered how many of them were modern humans, and what the others might have been. Did, say, Neanderthal man wind with a representative in this record? For that matter...
She winced at the thought, but the question did present itself: if prior hominid species had had the power of the stone, why were they extinct? They couldn't all have had species-ending wishes-gone-awry, could they? No, of course not. Maybe they had lost it, or had it sealed away, as Brittany had, before they even knew they were in danger, or maybe it was just that...well, she thought back to the first Merlin's account of "war," of his people dividing over the issue of whether to advance. Maybe there had been a reason they were uncomfortable - maybe this or that change would mean becoming something fundamentally different from what they were.
That couldn't be all there was to it; Jon was no expert on the subject, but she knew enough to remember that evolution wasn't just a single linear path with a defined end goal. Not everything extinct had simply been replaced by a "more advanced" counterpart. But still, the idea was a little chilling - after all, she herself had introduced such changes to the world...she fully intended to see to it that those who wished to change back could do so, in a few months, but even with that, for all those that didn't...they would have children, and there would certainly be interbreeding, and she didn't know if vanilla humanity was a "dominant species trait" or however that worked now. Maybe humans would just get cross-bred out of existence. Without killing a soul, she might have initiated the extinction of Homo sapiens.
No. No, that couldn't be right. That wouldn't happen, and she'd see to it herself if need be; she had wanted interesting things to happen, but that didn't mean that she wanted to see the ordinary eradicated. The slug-girl sighed. If she'd only known at the start what a responsibility this was...still, even in the midst of this rather brooding thought, she couldn't help but smile a little. Even with all this...magic was real, and she was getting to be a part of it. She hoped that if Grandpa was still alive out there, that some day she could see him again and thank him for sharing this with her.
Lilly was sulking a bit as she and Stacy arrived home. She was, after all the fuss, wearing a pink dress, her face flushed under her fur. If she was honest with herself she had to admit that it wasn't that bad, it wasn't frilly and poofy or anything, and it was a fairly pale pink, not so vivid that it called attention to itself, but still...she had tried to resist, but her big br-her little sister's cajoling, coupled with the promise to buy her something fun...
She looked up at Stacy, who was in a thoroughly good mood. He'd spent even longer picking out clothes for her than she had picking out her reward. Thankfully, most of what they'd got was at least a little more in tune with her sensibilities than this...she felt a little better thinking of that; he wasn't trying to embarass her. The squirrel-girl sighed, feeling a little less moody.
Once they'd gotten inside, her mom came over and picked her up. "Welcome home, Lilly!" she said. "You look very nice. Thanks for taking her, Stacy; she's needed some more clothes for a while."
The dinosaur-boy grinned. "It was fun."
Just then there was the sound of a car pulling in the driveway. Mrs. Gordon stepped away from the entryway, and a minute later there was a knock on the door. Lilly cautiously opened it. There was Muriel, towing Melanie by the hand, and Jenny standing next to her. The squirrel-girl backed away a little when she saw the insect-girl; Melanie hadn't been mean to her after that first encounter, but she still felt nervous around her.
"Hi, Lilly," Muriel said. "I told Jenny you wanted to have her over."
