The three girls - or, for the moment, the two young women and the rabbit - stood at the edge of the void, at the edge of the story, and stared into the darkness. None of them were quite sure what to do here. Jenny thought that they could possibly leave by a portal, if she made one, but that wouldn't do anything to resolve the issue with this monster haunting the books - and didn't that turn out to be what they had come to the library for? And anyway, trying to leave by another route might just wind up with them caught in another story, or something...
Artemis was trying to piece this all together - Lilly, she was sure, was favored by one of the gods. That explained some of the things she'd wondered about. But that stick of hers had a different kind of feel to it; something more primal, even more of a force and less of a will than the gods were. Not very strongly - it was more like some deep force had rubbed off on it, somehow, very slightly. What could it all mean? She was almost too distracted by this to think of the problem more immediately at hand.
Lilly, like Jenny, was also thinking about the monster. It was strange - it didn't feel malicious, just...very, very confused about things. It seemed...pitiable, kinda. A world where the insignificant can be significant...it reminded her of her own struggles, of feeling like she'd never be able to keep Jenny and Artemis as friends because she wasn't cool like they were - and before that, of the trouble he'd gone to to have Julian as his friend, for the same reason...but in the end...in the end, what had she learned?
Artemis's ears perked up. "Hey!" she said. "We can't get out of the story by going to the sides of the path, and if we go forward we'll get to the ending and be stuck. But there's one direction we haven't tried going!"
The other two thought about this for a moment. "You mean, back to the start?" Jenny asked. "Can we even go backwards? And how would that get us out?"
Artemis gave the closest approximation to a shrug her altered body would allow. "I dunno," she said. "If we go back to the start, and then we go back before the start, maybe..."
Lilly bit her lip. "But...if we go back," she said, "that'll take us to...to..." She thought back on that first scene, the creepy attack by all the doll-things that were supposed to have once been people, before the start of the story...but Artemis had a point, there was no "before the start," was there? Not if water wasn't even wet unless the book said so! Maybe if they could go back that way, none of this would ever have happened, and they wouldn't be here at all...
...but then, what would happen to this creature? It seemed a shame to just leave it to its own stagnation...
...but then, if they didn't get out of here before the ending of the story, they'd be stuck - forever! That wasn't something they could just put up with while they figured something out, they did have to get out of here. Lilly nodded and, holding tightly to her stick, led them back towards the path.
Yes, go back. Your part has yet to be played to its end.
"We're not doin' it your way!" she said. "We're goin' home!"
You cannot leave! The story must continue!
"Not with us!" Jenny shouted. "We're not just gonna become yours because you want things to go your way!"
This world must fulfill its purpose. You are needed to fill its roles. This must come to pass.
"It can't," Artemis said. "This world is incomplete. It's only a shadow of the real world. If it were just a story, nobody would mind, but you're only highlighting it by trying to pretend that it's real."
It is real enough. It is shelter. It is a better world than the outside.
"No it isn't!" Lilly said. "Outside is where the real people are! My mom an' dad, and Jenny's mom, an' our friends..." It didn't escape her notice that the more worked up she got, the more she began to sound like her little-girl self and less like this story-imposed young-adult mindset...but it didn't matter. That was going to be gone anyway, when they made their way out...
Outside, the insignificant do not matter...
Lilly really did feel sad for the thing, now. She understood that feeling...the feeling of having no intrinsic value, of being unable to do anything of merit or even to think in particularly nuanced ways, and of knowing that she couldn't, because there had been a time when she could...but...but for all that...what she had learned...was that that was the wrong way to look at it. Jenny and Artemis weren't her friends because of anything she could do. Her mom and dad didn't value her for her grades. She mattered to her friends and family because she mattered, irreducibly, tautologically. She couldn't for the life of her explain why, but it was evident nonetheless - and if for her, why not for any person? Even this thing must in some sense be a person, if it could think like this...
"Nobody's insignificant!" she yelled at it. They were back at the path, now - it was time to see if they really could go back...and if the thing would try to stop them.
Haru scanned over the page. This book was such a jumble...so many disparate ideas thrown together, princesses and moon rabbits and a monster lurking between the pages...was there any context for any of this? She moved to turn back the pages; maybe she couldn't go forward past page four, but if she could at least read the earlier parts, maybe some of it would make sense...
Ricky sighed, still fuming internally. That wasn't a prank, dammit! He hadn't wanted to hurt the mermaid! He'd just gone along to get a chance to talk to her, and stupid Razor had blown even that! Now he'd have to wait until she was in a good mood, and never let on that he was part of it...and now he was stuck doing the guy's homework on top of that, not even having gotten what he came for! But...well...he couldn't just say no...Razor would tell him not to come back, and then he'd never get a chance to talk to her...he could picture himself talking with her, her and her amazing body...but dammit, he was stuck in here, with regrets and math problems...
...and now his hand was cramping! Or...no, that wasn't it. It was numb...that wasn't it either. It felt...weird. Hollow, kind of...he set down the pencil and stretched his fingers this way and that, trying to alleviate it... He stopped when he heard a soft tick-tick-ticking noise, like a ratchet rotating and then catching, rotating and catching. It was faint, almost so that he would've guessed it was a clock or something in another room...only it was timed to his movements...and he could just faintly feel it.
Ricky jerked his hand up in front of his face and stared, slack-jawed. The memory of meeting Anne this morning (or rather, evening) came burning back into his brain. "What's up with your hand?" She had seen that something was unusual, and he'd dismissed it...oh God, the window! Julian...that bastard! He'd been exposed after all, and somehow it had taken so long to begin its work that he'd thought he was safe...and now...and now...
The hand was no longer human, or even animal. It was a facsimile of a human hand made out of individual pieces, finger sections made out of some hard material and covered over with a velvety type of covering that was a pale cream color and might conceivably look like skin from a distance. There were no fingernails, just a gently-rounded tip to the last section. He nervously flexed his fingers - he could see the seams between the sections moving underneath the fabric, and he could hear and feel the gentle ticking of what must be gears driving the joints...
There was an immense weight in the pit of his stomach, and a kind of horrible, adrenaline-soaked calm settled over him. There was no stopping this now - there was only finding a safe place to ride it out, before...oh God, before Razor noticed... Ricky stood up and jammed the hand into his pocket, making for the door. Razor noticed and looked up at him, annoyed. "The hell are you going?" he demanded.
"I...Igottagotothebathroombackinabit!" Ricky stammered. Razor snorted. "Fine. End of the hall. Don't take too long."
Safe for the moment, Ricky sprinted to the bathroom and shut the door behind him, then pulled his hand out. The fabric covering was up to just above his wrist now - it was accelerating! But what caught his attention at the moment was that the whole hand was noticeably too small for his arm - but the little bit of his arm that was changed had shrunk to match it, or rather was in the process of doing so, meeting the new wrist and the old rest of the arm and looking weirdly tapered in its in-between state. Was he...was he shrinking, then? Then earlier, when his pants had felt loose...and they were looser, now...oh God, all this time it'd been happening slowly and gradually accelerating...
Curious, and with nothing else to do but watch, he pressed the fingers of his left hand to those of his changed right hand. Somehow or other there was still feeling in them - he could feel the pressure, and sense his body temperature...
Time ticked by, feeling like fleeting moments and eternities all at once. Ricky watched in mute, stunned amazement as the change crept further up his arm, getting faster as it went. The covering seemed to be quite elastic, but it only partly disguised the mechanical nature of the joints - particularly when it got to the elbow. By that point, his left hand had changed as well, and he could feel it begin in one of his feet. He had shrunk noticeably, too; his short sleeves were now down almost to his elbow, and his pants didn't want to stay up without a belt - he found one in the little bathroom closet and appropriated it for the purpose.
As the change reached his shoulder, it accelerated still further. It began to spread across his torso at a perceptable speed, hollowing it out, filling it with internal support structures for mechanisms that, while he couldn't sense as part of him, he could feel at work, in their tiny, gentle vibrations. One of his legs was completely changed, and the change began to work up from there as well. Something felt odd about the way his torso was changing - the front of it felt like it curved out a little too far, the shoulders felt like they should've been broader - and now something felt odd about the way his pelvic area was changing, too...but it wasn't until his hair began to grow out quite rapidly that it clicked (with an actual distinct mechanical click.)
He was becoming a girl. A machine...girl. Thing. Oh God, oh God, ohgodohgodohgod...he wanted to panic, he wanted to run screaming from the bathroom...but he was...no, there it went...she was frozen, still too shocked to move...or was it that she hardly could? She could flex her fingers...if she worked at it, she could move her arm, but it was difficult...the parts of her that had changed were suddenly sluggish to respond. Was there something missing? She wasn't going to start out with a dead battery or something, was she? The idea that she would even have such a thing was mind-boggling, but she was already boggled to her limit - anything else was equally as believable as everything that had happened to her thus far.
Her hair continued to lengthen until it was past her shoulders, and the color was different, too - different than anything she'd ever seen. It was pearlescent, shimmering, changing colors with the viewing angle the way the Sun shifted its hue. If she turned her head one way, it would be a creamy pearl color - another, and it was a silvery green - still another, and it was a rich purple. And each individual hair reflected this at its own position, so the change seemed to sweep across the whole bit by bit...she was so entranced by it that for a moment she almost forgot her situation.
She was reminded, however, when she felt the change, long since having conquered the rest of her body, reach the base of her neck. It crept up towards her head with greater speed than it had shown before, spreading out across her face in splotches, like an encroaching army of liver spots. She saw her teeth change just slightly, the acquired yellowness and nicks and scratches vanishing as they became made of ivory or something, she watched it creep up and overtake her left eye - now a thing of flesh and blood, now a pearly orb with a soft gray mechanical iris underneath a glass lens.
But somehow it still wasn't over. She watched her clothes ruffle and shift of their own accord, changing from ill-fitting jeans and a loose T-shirt into a navy skirt and a crisp white blouse that, from what she could tell, buttoned up the back, with socks up to her knees and smart black pennyloafers. She wondered what the point could be, but then something else happened. At first she became aware of a hole in her back - through her back, rather, into the inside of her torso, into...her inner workings. Then something was growing out of it - something with no sensation in it, but she could feel it by its point of attachment, like she had been able to feel her hair as a human. It extended out close to a foot from her back, slipping through one of the spaces between the buttons on her blouse. It finished forming...and then it began to turn.
As it turned, Ricky could feel life, energy, returning to her limbs. No longer slowed in her movements, she turned to one side, looking into the bathroom mirror to see a large metal winding key, just two loops of metal on a pole, sticking out of her back, slowly rotating on its shaft, which sank down into her body. She could feel the gentle click and hum of a million gears, cams, pawls, and other intricate clockwork parts ticking away inside her, driven by a spring whose coiled intensity she could almost feel, attached to this key...her power source. ...no, perhaps not her only source. She had, after all, been able to move before it had been formed, and even now she could feel some kind of inner energy coursing through her - but this key was certainly providing the bulk of it, if her movements without it were any indication.
She realized that this was it...that it had finished. She was Changed, now. She was...she was this, this thing...a robot? But she'd thought robot-changed had some kind of internal computer system in which they existed, and she couldn't discern anything like that. She was just...something, this thing, like a life-sized doll powered by impossibly intricate mechanisms...this clockwork girl.
She looked over the rest of herself in the mirror. The first thing that struck her was that she was small. Not...not outside the realm of normal variation, she supposed, but well at the lower end of the spectrum - and it seemed more dramatic considering that she'd been taller than average as a guy. She observed her own face, reacting to what she was seeing - noticed how she could still see the joints where mobile but solid parts had taken the place of loose muscle - her lips and eyebrows and cheeks - but how the elasticity of her outer covering smoothed it out into a fairly convincing facsimile of human expression.
And then it hit her - oh God, what had happened to her!? She'd just changed, she'd just become a girl! A machine girl! And...and she was still stuck in Razor's bathroom, with no idea how to deal with this or what to do next-
"The hell's taking you so long in there?"
-get out. Leave. That was what to do next...
