Lilly looked around the library. It was quite dark now, but somehow it seemed less spooky. The "librarian" apparition had turned out not to be hostile, after all, but that didn't make it not kind of scary...especially at her age. And it was her age, again - once again a squirrel-girl of about eight, just as her friends had been returned to their real forms. Well, that wasn't quite the right way to think of it; after all, she hadn't really been changed, or she would've felt different. It was more like her form in the book was an illusion that had been stripped away.
But...it was an interesting illusion. Was that what she would look like, when she did grow back up, she wondered? She hadn't really gotten a chance for a good look at herself, but somehow she had a pretty good idea of what she'd looked like; maybe that was part of living in a story, like how she'd known some of the backstory that was implied but hadn't been depicted. A young squirrel-woman, with thick, soft fur and a developed but gracefully athletic figure, and an overall aspect that reminded her of her mother...yeah. If she was going to grow up like this...that would be a nice way to be.
She though about the librarian again. They'd fixed the book, apparently, and then she'd faded away...had she only come into existence to do that? "What...whaddya think happened t' her?" she asked the other two.
Jenny shrugged. "I dunno," she said. "D'you think she ever was a real person? Maybe the library just...remembered what a librarian's like, an' when it needed someone to fix the books...I dunno."
"I wonder," Artemis mused. She had more expanded senses than the other two, but the thing was so insubstantial...she hadn't had much experience with reaching down into lesser states of existence, the way her mother had. Really, if she weren't a human being as well as a goddess, she probably wouldn't have been able to perceive things on a mortal level at all yet - there wasn't much she could tell about the apparition that her friends couldn't. "What about the thing in the book?" she asked. "What do you think'll happen to it?"
Lilly thought about it for a minute. It hadn't entered the library with them - or at least not in any way they could see. It had talked about continuing to observe the real world...did that mean it was still hiding away in the book? But whatever they'd done, it'd satisfied the librarian. Maybe...it was still wary, but maybe they'd gotten through to it after all. Maybe it would come out, when it was ready. "I...I think it'll be fine," she said, smiling a little.
Jenny nodded, and glanced out the window. "Ah!" she yelped. "It's already dark! I...I was s'posed to be home by now...we gotta get goin'!"
Lilly gasped - she hadn't considered the time, either. They'd have to leave the library to itself, now, but...it felt less abandoned now than it had when they'd come.
Haru had leafed back through the pages, finding, oddly enough, that they would go backwards even when they wouldn't go forwards. But when she'd gotten to page one, and turned back further, there had been nothing - only blankness. Not even a title page. She stared at it for a minute, then flipped all the way back until she got to the front cover. She shut the book and found, to her surprise and bafflement, that it had the cover of her textbook - then she opened it again and found her textbook inside, as if it'd never been anything else.
She frowned, mildly annoyed. "Crazy visions," she muttered. Yeah, that was it. If the counselor was right, if this wasn't a sign of illness...maybe it wasn't her. Maybe it was the world that was slightly crazy. Gazing out the window and thinking about the daytime world and its inhabitants, that didn't seem like a terribly wrong conclusion.
Shrugging, she went back to her homework.
Rest was all well and good, but for an incorrigible chatterbox, there's only so much non-action that can be done even in that state. Even sitting beneath a shady oak in the autumn night, Lucas found herself thinking about how things had gone, and her questions, and her doubts, and things she was still curious about...
"Um, Max," she said, hesitantly. She had thought of this earlier, when she had brought up the question of what he was willing to believe, but she hadn't asked, not sure if it would be rude to press the point. But she did wonder...
"Yes, Lucas?" the tree-man replied, in his sonorous, creaky voice.
"Well, it's just...I mean, when I said I saw the beginning of life...I mean, I saw it happen, and I saw humanity arising, and...well, it was all kinda compressed and whatnot, but it was in a pretty non-Genesis manner. What with the primordial soup and all. And...as I recall, the first thing God said wasn't 'let there be interesting stuff...'"
There was a gentle swaying in the branches above that gave her the impression of a gentle chuckle. "Child," Maxwell said, "there is...very much in Scripture that is...metaphor. I have not...typically thought of...the Creation account that way, but...if God used natural processes...or even other parties...to shape the world and its inhabitants...that does not make it any less...His handiwork."
"Huh." Lucas nodded thoughtfully, head propped against Maxwell's trunk. "So you don't find that in any kind of conflict with your beliefs, then? I...okay, I'm kinda relieved. I hate to make a big prod-okay, that's a lie, I love to make a big production out of ideological standoffs, but you're pretty cool. I didn't want to cause any trouble for you, or anything...besides, I'm not that standoffish about it."
"Conflict? No," Maxwell replied. "I am...in much the same place as I always was...accepting in faith that God...is at the head of Creation, and guiding it...but you yourself said it: I believe that God came to Earth...both wholly man and wholly God...to intervene on behalf of Men. And Venus, you said, says that...this pattern of transcendence is repeated...in more ways and places than we...can even perceive. How is that...in conflict?"
"Huh," Lucas mused. "Guess I hadn't thought of it that way. You don't think that devalues it at all, for it to be commonplace? I mean, I don't, that's basically what I always wanted the world to be like, but...I thought the whole specialness of it would be kind of a big deal for you guys."
"Scripture is full of repetition...strengthening its themes, not weakening them. A metaphor in one place turns out to be fulfilled in reality in a later apperance...Devalued? Just the opposite. If God is...at the head of Creation, and Creation extends...farther than even the gods can perceive...how much less commonplace could it be, for...the very Highest to reach down...into our world, so far below?" He smiled. "Fear not, Lucas...if anything, you have...given me an even fuller appreciation...for that sacrifice."
Hawkins still wasn't quite sure how it had transpired; the more he thought about it, the less it seemed to make sense. Admittedly, he was never much of a scholar of customs, but it seemed to him that people in this part of the country would invite you to dinner at the drop of a hat, but somehow never in a way that sounded like they were inviting you to dinner. It had seen him and Cecilia fed on a couple occasions in the wake of the Hedgeton incident, when people who recognized them from helping with the search and organization effort during the crisis just happened to say something like "oh, we were just going to eat, won't you have a bite?"
At any rate, somehow during the course of Cecilia's chat session, the girl's parents - and it was a girl, or rather she was a girl now - had picked up that she was talking to some people who were visiting just down the block, invited them in, asked what they had been talking about, then asked about the lost-time phenomenon, which Mikey apparently hadn't mentioned to them, and then - all of a sudden, it seemed - they were eating. He didn't really have any complaints about it, the food was quite good, he just didn't really understand it.
There were two other children present, a slime-girl and a little girl whose only visible sign of being changed was blue hair, and he gathered that a third, the oldest, was visiting a friend. Both were pretty quiet. The conversation had since passed from lost time to their line of work (since it had become clear why they were visiting, Hawkins saw no reason to be evasive about it,) and then to questioning Cecilia about robot-changed in general - apparently, while Mr. and Mrs. Madison had some familiarity with their daughter's specific case, they didn't know much in general, and wanted to know if there was anything they should know. This was less to Hawkins's interest, though he did note with surprise that apparently some of the robot-changed could "mature" in a human-like fashion, and his thoughts drifted off to the earlier topic.
Why was it Mikey who had noticed first? All she knew about it was that she had noticed because she remembered having learned about a friend's secret before that friend had told her. That had pretty big implications right there - the Time Devourer must have gotten at least some little bits of history separated from the rest, before they'd stopped it - but it didn't actually explain why she was the first. Mikey wouldn't say what the secret was, but that wasn't surprising - she was a kid, little secrets seemed big at that age. But she wasn't obviously exceptional among the robot-changed, and her family seemed pretty ordinary; he had a difficult time imagining that there was anything that unusual going on here, but there was still that question of why...so much footwork and so little progress... He wondered, again, how Jenny and Riley were getting on.
Mikey watched Ms. Penbrook with fascination as she talked with her parents. She had seen pictures of this type of robot-changed before, online, but this was the first time she'd ever seen one in person. The clearly nonhuman styling, all plastic and chrome, with structures that suggested their human equivalents but could never be mistaken for them, was a sharp contrast to her own body, so clearly designed to blend in - well, except for the antennae, and the more camera-like nature of her eyes, and the strict bilateral symmetry... It almost seemed a little alien, to her; not frightening or off-putting, just...strange. She was glad, now that she saw this up-close, that she was closer in appearance to her family than to the kitchen appliances, but...still, there was something about Cecilia's lines and colors that seemed kinda cool.
"...so, really, you're doing fine. It's not that difficult, we self-regulate pretty well. The most trouble you're likely to have is keeping her from browsing the Internet during conversations - isn't that right, Nate? Hey, Nate!" Hawkins caught his partner's elbow in his rib and started - he hadn't realized how far off he'd drifted. "Hmm? Sorry, what?"
Cecilia laughed that clearly-synthetic laugh of hers. "Geez...and here I thought I was the one who needed to be kept on track in a conversation...watcha thinking about?"
"Oh," Hawkins said. "Just wondering about Jenny."
Cecilia nodded. "Ah, yeah...I wonder how One and Four are doing?" She realized that that must make no sense whatsoever to their hosts, and was about to brush it off for a return to the previous topic, but the youngest girl, who had until this point been silent, suddenly gasped.
"What do you know about them!?" Becca demanded, excitedly.
All was quiet in the kitchen, for a while, as Ricky and Anne sat and waited for the kettle to boil. Ricky was just going to stick a couple mugs of water in the microwave, but Anne, apparently, was a traditionalist at least where tea was concerned. So they sat and waited, the only sounds the quiet ticking of Ricky's mechanisms and the gradually increasing burbling of the water. You know, the clockwork girl reflected, when it finally hit boiling and the kettle began to whistle, at least I'm not steam-powered. It was an odd thought - any thought that involved her now being a living machine powered by a wind-up spring was an odd thought - but the idea that she might just as easily have wound up as some hissing and clacking antique-locomotive monstrosity was, in its own strange way, a little comforting.
Which was good, because the tea itself wasn't much help. It didn't do anything bad to her insides, and to her great relief it didn't drain out the hole between her legs or anywhere else on her lower body, but it didn't have any measurable effect on her. She did, however, manage to drink it with more grace than she usually handled her beverages with, for some reason. In any case, Anne enjoyed it, and it did help a little to just be sitting quietly in the company of a friend.
For a little longer, they didn't say anything. Finally, as Anne was putting their mugs in the dishwasher, Ricky turned to her. "A-Anne?" she asked. "What...what am I?"
Anne looked her over, thinking of how to respond. "How do you mean?" she asked, sitting back down and scooching her chair over next to the stool Ricky was sitting on.
"Well," she replied, "I...am I a girl, or just an...an 'it?' What kind of thing am I? Am I even a person?"
Anne laughed softly. "I don't think you could even ask that question if you weren't," she said. "I've...I've never heard of a kind of changed like you, but...I guess there must be. Even if you're the only one, it's not hard to see what you are - people just don't have a name for it, yet. Wind-up? No, that's silly. Automaton...sounds too much like you're just a machine. I dunno. You are what you are, I guess. And...well, you're at least as much a girl as girl robot-changed are, I think. And nobody's questioning them on it."
Ricky nodded thoughtfully, then frowned at the last bit. "But how can I be?" she asked. "If I can't...can't have kids...isn't it all just for show? What's the point of that?" It was weird to even be discussing this - it wasn't like she wanted to...to go through that kind of thing...but if the question was whether she was a real girl or not, that was a pretty defining factor...
Anne shrugged. "Well, we don't know you can't," she said. "More than a few of the robot-changed have systems they think are for reproductive purposes. A lot of the time they think it's even roughly analogous to human parts - maybe even cross-compatible. Don't ask me how that works, they don't even know for sure, but I know at least one researcher said that it's the one thing that seems to be constant across all the changed..."
"But I'm...just gears and springs and things," Ricky murmured. She was...it was so bizarre to be saying so, but she was...
"Again, don't ask me how it would work," Anne said. "I'm just saying that there's a lot of changed out there that...kind of stretch the boundaries of possibility. I mean, even you...you're already a person made out of machinery. So for all we know, maybe there is some way you can make more of you." She placed her hands on the clockwork girl's shoulders and looked her in the eye. "But even if you can't," she said gently, "you look like a girl, you sound like a girl, you even got girls' clothes when you changed. You're sure not a boy anymore, and you're too much like a girl to be an 'it.' Trust me: you're a girl now."
"I...o-okay." Ricky did trust her - she'd done so much for her already, from keeping her secret to seeing her home to helping her with her blouse...and if a real, flesh-and-blood girl said she was one, wouldn't she have to be a better judge of it? She...she must be right...it was just so strange to think not only that her body could be called a girl's, when she was a...a machine, but that she was a girl at all... It wasn't horrifying to her - maybe you needed viscera to feel visceral emotions - but it was so very strange...
There was another short silence. "So," Anne ventured, "you, um...have nipples...do you have, um...?"
Ricky felt a little tension build in her springs at that, what she felt would have been a blush, if she'd possessed the capacity, but she stammered out a "Y-yeah...I think..."
Anne smiled. "Well, if you think you do, it's hard to say what else it'd be."
"W-well," Ricky stammered, "I mean, y-yeah, that's what it's supposed to be...I just...I dunno if it does anything..."
Anne shrugged. "I guess it might have to do with whether you can have kids," she said. "So who knows...but it's probably not there for no reason."
"I...I kinda thought a lot of this stuff was for no reason," Ricky said, trying to change the subject a little.
Anne frowned. "Oh, well, if you look at it like that, I guess. But I meant, like, most of the changed have bodies that make sense in some way, it's not just all a jumble of random parts. The Sun doesn't seem to do that kind of thing."
"You know a lot about this kind of stuff," Ricky said, a little admiringly. She had focused so much on the looks of the changed, herself, maybe partly because she honestly appreciated them, but also largely to feed her own fantasies, but Anne...Anne had really studied this...of course, Ricky had never expected to need to know any of this, but still...
Anne smiled and shrugged. "What can I say? It's fascinating. I kinda envy you, actually - now you're going to be free to go out any time you want...even go to a whole school full of the changed, right up close, in daily life..."
Ricky's jaw dropped. She hadn't even thought about that...right up close and personal...so many of them...
...actually...it was a little frightening. It...it could be so amazing, but...she knew nothing about getting along with the changed...or even people in general, really...and if she just went around staring at them...if that happened, she wouldn't be any better off than she was at the night-side school...maybe worse. After all, the girls at the night-side school had only interested him in the way all girls interested him, but a school full of changed girls...if...if she still felt that way about them...she didn't even know if that was true, as muddled as she was feeling right now, but...oh, this was all so confusing...
"I...uh, I...dunno," she mumbled.
Anne eyed her curiously. "What don't you know?"
"I...dunno if I want to," she said. "I...don't know anything about all that..."
Anne chuckled. "They're just people, you know. You don't have to be initiated into the club to get along with them or anything."
Ricky nodded, but she wasn't really sure how she felt. "Yeah," she said, "I...just don't know, is all."
Anne gave her a sympathetic look. "Look, it'll be okay," she said. "You have all the rest of tonight and tomorrow night before Monday comes to figure it out. I know you must still be going through a lot, dealing with all this, but it'll be okay, I promise."
Ricky smiled; she knew that Anne couldn't really promise her anything with regard to her own internal life, but...the thought was nice. But both of them were distracted from the conversation when the front door opened.
"My parents are home!" Ricky said, her springs tensing up. This...this was it...this was where she had to face them...had to tell them what had happened to their son...
