Sunday Morning
Despite the fact that they hadn't made more than some basic progress in their experiments with magic, Jon was glad she'd slept over at Karyn's. It'd been good just getting to hang out with her best friend a bit more than she usually got to, and it didn't hurt that Karyn's parents always put out a good spread for Sunday breakfast. She tried to remember how long it'd been since she'd had Swedish pancakes, but she wasn't sure; probably the last time she'd slept over at Karyn's, which had to be seven or eight years ago.
Anyway, they'd had a pleasant morning, and then Jon and Karyn had decided to go downtown for a while. Lakeside had a pleasant little section of the downtown that was mostly small shops and a few mini-parks that tended to attract artsy performer types in the warmer months. They'd mostly just gone to kick around for a bit, but Jon had wanted to stop in at Collins's Books and see if they had a copy of The Last Unicorn - Karyn had talked her into watching the movie last night, and while she'd enjoyed it (Christopher Lee made any movie worth watching, in her opinion, and it was funny to see The Dude abiding as a fairy-tale prince,) it'd felt a lot like the Cliff's Notes version of a more interesting story; she wanted to see if the book filled things in a little better.
They hadn't had it on the shelves, but the day-side shopkeeper (old Mr. Collins had of course had to turn daytime operations over to his assistant when the Sun changed) thought they might have a copy somewhere in the back, and had promised to dig around a bit when he got a chance. Jon figured she could come back later in the week and see if he'd found it; for now, she and Karyn opted to just meander around the area for a while.
The morning had started out cold, but it was warming up the more it got into midday; still not buskers-in-the-park weather, but a fine crisp day that felt more "late fall" than "early winter." Which was nice, considering that Jon now had some five feet of her lower body with its skin open to the air and coated in watery mucous. It didn't evaporate as easily as sweat did and thus didn't cool as effectively, but it still tended to make her a bit chilly; she was glad that she could still drive herself to school in the mornings in a van with a decent heater.
They'd grabbed lunch from the little diner down the block from the bookstore and had taken it to one of the little parks for an impromptu quasi-picnic. It was pretty good stuff, and they were just finishing up when Jon heard someone walk up to them and address her as "Ms. Madison?"
Jon turned and found herself looking up at a woman who looked to be somewhere in her late 20s. There was something about her face that was at once alien and yet not; it took a moment for the slug-girl to pin it down, but she realized that the whole shape of the woman's head was abnormal. The sloped forehead, pronounced brow, and recessed chin were very definitely outside the norms for the human face. This was odd; for all the non-human features that got incorporated into the sun-changed, it was unusual for the structure of the face to be changed, outside of anthropomorphic-animal transformees. Yet for all that it wasn't an animal kind of face - just a very odd human one...
Then she found herself a bit stunned by sudden realization. The woman's face wasn't wholly unfamiliar to her, because she'd seen something like it before. When she'd been thinking about the earliest of her predecessors, and what they might've been, and she had done some reading about early hominids...this was the face of a Neanderthal woman. The realization gave context to what she was seeing, and suddenly she couldn't believe that she'd ever missed it. She looked the newcomer up and down; yes, there were other features she recognized from her reading - the broad, bowed-out ribcage, which made her middle-sized breasts a bit more prominent than they would've been, and the curious proportioning of her limbs to her torso. She was powerfully built, but unlike "hulking caveman" stereotypes, she wasn't actually that big - Jon moved to what amounted to a standing position for her and found that she was nearly eye-to-eye with the woman. Certainly her posture didn't suggest any kind of simian knuckle-dragger, but Jon had been pretty certain that was a myth even before reading about it. Her face was framed by long red hair of a shade Jon wasn't sure she'd ever seen before.
The woman inhaled deeply, as if taking in Jon's scent. "You are the keeper of the Earth stone," she said. She spoke with a German accent, but her voice was unusual - not deeper than an average woman's voice, but more resonant. Jon supposed that might have something to do with the different shape of her chest, and maybe her nose, which was broader than most women's. Jon wasn't quite sure how to answer - even as she was taking more people into her confidence, she wasn't exactly ready to go announcing herself to the general public - but if the woman had some way by which she already knew, there wasn't much point in denying it. She nodded.
The woman eyed her intently, then gave a hint of a smile. "We have very much to discuss, then," she said. "Shall we go somewhere more private?"
The slug-girl looked around, a bit nervously. She didn't know this woman, or what her intentions were. She didn't have the stone with her, which meant that she had no really effective means of defense; even if this woman didn't have some form of magic to use, she could most certainly overpower her physically... Jon bit her lip. "I'd like it if my friend could join us," she said, indicating Karyn. "She knows what's going on." If there were two of them, they'd be at least a little safer...and she didn't know how strong Karyn's tentacles were, but having eight fully independent limbs would have to be handy in a fight...
The stranger thought for a moment, then nodded. "All right," she said, then turned and walked away from the crowd. Jon and Karyn followed her out to a quieter area with no people around. They sat down on the grass, and the woman extended her hand. "I am Johanna Katharina Silke Becker," she said. "You can call me Johanna."
Jon shook her hand. "Jon Madison," she said. "How did you know?"
"I used my own power to find you," the Neanderthal woman replied. "I am the keeper of elemental Fire." She reached into her pocket and withdrew what looked like a little clump of tinder, on which a bright little flame burned. She held it as though it didn't burn her at all.
Jon thought back to the book. Fire - the power that took in order to give. "You...you didn't...you didn't lose anything important, just to find me?" she asked. With all the responsibility she already felt, to add to it...but Johanna shook her head.
"I sacrificed some possessions with no sentimental value," she said. "The key to using Fire is to have prepared something to be taken - or you may lose something you would not wish to give up." There was a very noticeable melancholy in her voice, and Jon could tell she was speaking from experience. "I...I'm sorry..." she said. As bad as her own careless wish had been, if she'd unintentionally had something taken from her in exchange for it...
Johanna stared at the ground, her shoulders quaking slightly. "I...have never told this to anyone," she said. "No-one but one of the other keepers would understand. Years ago, when I first received my little torch..." She paused for a moment, frowning as if it was difficult to remember. "When I first received the power of Fire," she said, "the first wish that I made was to know how I had come to be in possession of it." She laughed bitterly. "I knew - I knew perfectly, so perfectly that..."
She trailed off for a minute, then looked up at Jon and Karyn. "I knew," she said, "about a woman of long ago, one of the first keepers of the Fire. A woman like what you see before you. Her tribe were very successful hunters and made good clothes and tools for themselves, and they were very proud of it. But...it came to pass that they met a different people, the New People - modern humans - and she mistrusted them. They had heard from another tribe that some of the New People were killing them."
She sighed. "But the tribe of New People they'd met didn't show any intent to attack them, so they didn't attack either. For a while they lived side-by-side in the valley. But the woman, that early keeper of the Fire, worried that it might not last - the New People knew how to make better tools than they did, and if there was a war, she worried that her tribe might lose. So she made a wish..." She trailed off again, murmuring to herself in a language that Jon was certain wasn't anything modern.
"What did she wish for?" Karyn asked.
"She wished that her tribe would never be killed off," she said. "That they would survive to have descendants living until the very end of the world." She sighed. "But she never anticipated what happened. As time passed, the truce between the two tribes became a lasting peace. Perhaps the peoples killed each other elsewhere, but not here. Eventually, they began to intermarry. By the time the Fire-keeper passed away, they were essentially one tribe. Still a tribe of two distinct peoples, of course, but she could see how it would go. She had traded the continued existence of her tribe for their identity - generations down the line, her own descendants were indistinguishably modern humans."
Johanna shook her head in bewilderment. "And she got her wish," she said. "The tribe lives on to this day, dispersed over half the world. I am the direct descendant of that long-ago Neanderthal woman, though I was born as much a modern human as anyone in this day and age. But..." She laughed bitterly. "I made my own unwary trade. I knew this woman so intimately that...in a way, I became her. As she traded the identity of her people away, I traded my own self-identity for this knowledge." She sighed. "Oh, I remember my own life. And I feel that I am not wholly my ancestor, that aspects of my own self still survive. But I am irrevocably altered by my wish. The fact remains that, years ago, long before the sun changed, I was a Neanderthal woman in the body of a modern human." She smiled slightly at Jon. "All your Sun did was to bring out in body what I already was in mind."
"I...wow," Jon said, her voice a whisper. "I can't imagine..."
"No...no you can't," the Neanderthal woman said, her voice a bit choked. "Be glad. I don't think anyone but myself can really understand how it felt - to look around and see a whole world full of the New People and not one of my own - not even in the mirror. I've never felt anger at your people, but...I have felt overpoweringly lonely..."
She was tearing up by this point. Jon approached her and put a hand on her shoulder, feeling the smooth but firm musculature under the skin. Johanna looked up at her and smiled through the tears. "But," she said, "now...now the face in the mirror is familiar to me. And I've seen others of my people - I haven't yet gotten to meet one, but I've seen them. Part of the reason I came to find you was that I had...I had to say thank you, Ms. Madison. Because of you, because of your wish, I'm no longer alone."
The slug-girl smiled, tearing up a bit herself at this point. It was one thing to know that, in the midst of all the chaos, she'd helped one or two people like Haru find an existence that they were happier in. This, though...it was the first she'd heard of it, but however unintentionally, she'd helped save from extinction an entire branch of the human race. Probably not all of the others Johanna knew of were temporal transplants like her - maybe none of them were, maybe you had to be involved with the stones in some way to pull off something like that, as Brittany was - but Johanna, at least, remembered a culture that had been lost to history for tens of thousands of years; it lived on in her, and eventually it would through others.
She was overwhelmed by emotion at the prospect - for someone who'd accidentally changed the world just in hopes of making it "interesting," it resonated mightily with her. She hugged Johanna close, crying, and then the three of them sat in the park and talked about the whole affair for a long time after.
Later.
As they sat and ate, the Woman observed Her surroundings with some degree of curiousity. Partly because they had been asleep for so long and therefore She hadn't been down among mortals in a couple millennia, but mostly because She was trying to understand what point it was that Selene was trying to make. It wasn't, after all, as if She hadn't dined with mortals before - though it had been a while since those ancient days of coming as an unexpected guest at the tent of some proto-Semite and being received unaware, or appearing to devotees in a secluded grove, even by immortal standards. This pattern of bonding over a meal dated back far longer than mortals' recorded history - and while She was not the sort that thought of ancient customs as dusty and devalued, She did wonder why Selene thought She needed to be reintroduced to it.
Or was it about the meal, per se? But it wasn't as if she didn't understand human customs, even if she wasn't as intimately familiar with them as Selene and Terra. Did the Moon-goddess just think she needed a refresher, after a mere two-
Her thoughts were interrupted by a hand placed on her shoulder. She turned to face the interloper, a nebbishy devil-man in his mid-thirties. She had seen enough of Bacchanalia to know at a glance that he was quite drunk - this was, after all, a bar and grill. He grinned, in an off-kilter way, and made a loose swipe at the general area of her bust. "Hhey, foxy lady," he slurred. "'z Heaven missing an angel? 'Cause...'cause you're really...hot. Lookin'. Knawmsayn? Mebbe you wanna...wanna join me f'r...f'ra...an' then later we could go back to my place an'..."
He trailed off, trying to find the missing bits of his sentence, but She knew what he was going to say. Venus saw, out of the corner of Her eye, that Selene was watching Her with bated breath, probably wondering if she was going to have to step in. Indeed, the Woman did feel a little of the old temper flaring up - but she made it a point not to act on that alone, no matter what the mortals' stories said. She drew a deep breath and peered into the man; then She stood up and placed Her hands on his shoulders, gazing into his eyes in what even his sodden brain could understand was a strictly maternal capacity - and looking just disappointed enough to make him question himself a little.
"That's no way to treat a lady," She said, sternly but gently. "And you're better than that and you know it." His face fell, but She took him by the shoulders and steered him around to face the corner of the room, where an emerald-skinned devil-girl was sitting by herself in a booth. "You see her?" She said. "She'd like someone to talk to. But you have to really talk to her, not just try to talk her into something. Go offer her a mojito. She likes those." The devil-man looked at her curiously, but seemed to buy it, and walked over to the girl's booth, looking a little less smashed than before.
Venus sat back down. "It's his thirty-fifth birthday," She said quietly. "He's very insecure about it - thinks that he's coming up on forty too quickly, and he hasn't had a serious relationship since college. She's new in town - left the southern part of the state because her family didn't take kindly to her change, doesn't have any friends in the area."
Selene eyed her a little skeptically. "And you sent him over still drunk? Their kids are gonna hear a story that starts with 'I was hammered in this grill on my birthday, and I tried to grope this lady...?'"
The Woman shrugged. "He's too shy without it, at least until that barrier's broken down. But he should at least be able to form full sentences now. Besides, she's the kind of girl that's going to make him want to be a better man. That happens, you know."
Celine looked a bit more cynical. "Yeah, and then they make a million movies about it, and then girls grow up thinking that it's a sure bet that you can make a bad guy into a nice one if your love-fu is only strong enough."
"Just because they take it the wrong way doesn't make the true stories that inspired the made-up ones any less true," Venus said. "Are you the goddess of love, now?"
Selene didn't answer, but smiled to herself behind her menu.
Jon arrived home late that afternoon, feeling happy but a bit exhausted. It had been a good morning with Karyn, and while she was still coming to grips with the idea that she'd actually met another person who held the power of one of the keystones, she was still very happy to have found out that she'd actually unwittingly brought back the seeds of a whole hominid race from aeons-long extinction. As much as she still sometimes struggled with all the implications of what she'd done, that was indeed a pretty stunning bright side to it.
But...really, for the time being, she was ready just to relax and unwind and mull it over in her mind in the company of normal people, with her family, who weren't all tied up in this kind of stuff...she needed time to process it, was all. She got out of the car, slid up the walk, and went inside.
Her mom was there to greet her. "Hi, honey," she said, smiling. "Did you have a good time?"
The slug-girl smiled back. "Yeah," she said. "Yeah, it was great. How were things here?"
Mrs. Madison's expression suddenly got more serious. "...good," she said. "But...there's something that's come up...Zoe and Mikey already know, so we were waiting to fill you in."
The ambiguity of that left a knot in Jon's stomach as she followed her mom. Had a relative died? But that would hardly constitute "good..." They came into the living room, where her dad was sitting on the couch, next to Becca, who was idly doodling in the margins of the Sunday funnies. He smiled. "Glad you're home," he said. "We've got a lot to talk about."
What followed was a bit of a mind-expander for Jon, as she came to realize that apparently the Sun had created in her former classmate one of a set of magical-girl guardians destined to protect the world from some kind of dark, nebulous "Enemy..." The thought came into her mind that her wish itself might have created this Enemy, but judging by what Becca was saying, it didn't sound like that was likely - apparently they were off in some far corner of the Universe or something? Well outside even the stone's conditionally-expanded range, surely.
"And so we're taking her to meet the others tonight," her dad said. "We've decided that since she's living with us, we're all sort of involved in this, so you may come with, if you want."
Jon thought it over. She did want to find out more about this - to determine whether there was anything she could do to help, whether the "Numbers" could use her help more than the world could use her getting the Sun back to normal, and just to see what this was all about...but she was worried about these government people. It wasn't that she thought they secretly knew about her and the stone, and were surreptitiously using this as an "in" to get at it, or something; it wasn't even that she thought they would necessarily try to take it from her. It was just...well, she was a bit of a worrier, and it was easy to imagine that a department of "paranormal investigations" might be better-suited than most to recognize that someone had access to powerful magical artifacts, and...
"Uh, no thanks," she said. "I...kinda had plans." That wasn't true in a strict chronological sense, but she was currently planning to have had plans - she was just trying to figure out what they would be.
"Alright, then," her mom said. "Zoe didn't want to come along, either. That's fine." Jon nodded and excused herself a bit quickly, then went up to her room.
She took the stone out from the little safe in the back of her closet where she kept it. Again, it wasn't that she thought anybody was trying to get it, it was just...she didn't know. If those people came back here afterwards...she almost stuck it in her purse, but then thought better of it. If they knew it was here, they could've gotten it earlier - and surely Mom and Dad would've noticed if they were snooping. She put it back in the safe, but took the extra precaution of rearranging some of her stuff to hide it, just to be sure.
All the same...she did want to not meet with these people...not yet. She wanted to get out and away, and she'd said she had plans...she could go over to Karyn's and...no, damn, Karyn was catching up on homework. And...well, she couldn't get back into the school now. She thought about it; then she pulled out her phone and looked up one of the numbers in the call history.
"Hey," she said. "Tim? Yeah, hi, this is Jon. Um...you wanna hang out?"
