...rest...
Lilly shifted around in her bed, gradually and gently waking from a very comfortable sleep. She opened her eyes and looked around the room - oh, it was her room. But hadn't she been in the treehouse? Then...had that been a dream, with...with Venus? And the angel, and the Numbers, and everything? It...it didn't feel like one...she looked out the window. No, there was the treehouse...
She went downstairs to the kitchen, where her mother was working on getting the nighttime dinner ready, and her father was working on a project. Her mom turned to her. "You should really be in bed, Lilly," she said. "It's late, and you have school tomorrow."
The squirrel-girl frowned slightly. "I...I was in the treehouse, an' then I was in bed," she murmured, half to herself.
Mrs. Gordon nodded. "You fell asleep out there. Daddy brought you in and put you in bed, since it was past your bedtime anyway. Jenny and Harriet had to go home."
Lilly nodded, feeling a little sad. "I...'m not...not like 'em," she said, again to herself.
Her mom looked at her, a little concerned. "Why do you say that, honey?" she asked.
Lilly sighed. "'Cause...'cause 'm not magic, or a goddess, or nothin'..."
"Oh, honey." Abbey knelt down next to her daughter, placing an arm around her. "Is that something they told you?"
Lilly felt a little guilty, and tried to stop her ears from drooping. She hadn't meant to imply that they had, but...it did kind of sound like that was what she was saying. "N-no," she said hastily. "It's...it's just...'m not. They can do stuff an' I can't, an' they can go places I can't, an' I can't keep up with 'em...'m just a...jus' a girl..."
Her mom hugged her. "Sweetie, there's nothing wrong with being just a girl," she said. "But you know what? Friends aren't your friends because of what you can do, Lilly. If they like you, then they like you."
Lilly frowned, her tails twitching. "But...but if they wanna do stuff an' I can't do it..."
Her mom nodded. "That's frustrating when that happens. But if they're your friends, honey, then they'll try to accomodate you. Maybe they just don't realize that you feel left out yet. Have you ever told them?"
Lilly tried to think back, and couldn't remember if she had. "I...I dunno," she said.
"Well, maybe try telling them that," Mrs. Gordon said. "It's best to be honest with people about these things; you just have to be careful to say it in the right way." She hugged the little squirrel-girl again. "Besides," she said, "from what Lucas was telling us I wouldn't say that you're just an ordinary little girl, honey."
Lilly sighed. "But...but that was just...jus' stuff that happened. I found a stick that was magic, an' I could do magic with it, but then it started wearin' out an' gettin' smaller...if it's gone then I can't do magic..." She sniffled, beginning to tear up a little.
"Are you sure of that?" her dad asked, coming over to join them. Lilly stared up at him, not sure if he was just trying to make her feel better or what. "I...I couldn't b'fore," she said. "S-so...if it's gone, then I can't anymore, neither."
Her dad knelt down next to her as well. "I wouldn't be so sure, Lilly," he said. "Today we learned about your friends - one who's a magical girl, whose power comes from numbers, and one who's a goddess of the Moon - and her mother, who's also the Moon goddess. And there's the angel friend of yours, who's also got some tricks up her sleeve, and there's this stick you're talking about. You know what all that tells me?" he asked.
Lilly blinked. "N-no...um, what?" she said.
Her dad smiled. "It tells me that there's more than one kind of magic," he said. "Or more than one way to use magic, anyway. Maybe you can't use your stick once it's gone, but there may be some other way to do it that you can use."
Lilly took a moment to process this, feeling a little bit of hope begin to fill her heart. "Y-you...you really mean that?" she asked, smiling in spite of herself.
Her father shrugged. "Well, I can't say for sure, honey," he said. "We're only just starting to understand that magic is even real, and there's still so much that we don't even know about it. But there's a lot of stories about things like that, and maybe there's some truth to some of them. That's something we'll have to find out in the future."
Lilly thought for a moment. "B-but...I thought you did science," she said. "An' that...I thought you thought magic was...was jus'..."
Les smiled, a little sheepishly. If he was honest with himself, he was still trying to wrap his head around this at all...but over the last couple months he'd been increasingly led to the conclusion that it was impossible to explain things like the Sun phenomenon by a conventional understanding of physics, and after what he'd seen today, he couldn't really deny it.
"Lilly, science is just a method for studying the world," he said. "It doesn't say that only the things we've already discovered are real, and above all scientists aren't supposed to ignore something that they have evidence of just because they didn't think it was real before; that's just the way that some people think."
He shook his head in mild amazement. "I've seen enough by now to know that there is something to this magic stuff," he said. "I don't know how it all fits together yet; maybe we won't even discover that in my lifetime. But it's something we're going to have to start studying, now that we know there is something to study there." He smiled. "So...who knows?" he said. "We may discover ways in which anybody can learn to use magic. Perhaps some of the old stories had more truth to them than we thought..."
Lilly felt a little overwhelmed by the idea. When she was a boy, she'd grown up wanting to be just like her dad, wanting to learn how the world worked and to use that to do things like his company did...when she'd become a little kid again, when she'd found herself set back to an eight-year-old's understanding of math and science, she'd felt like she could never be that kind of person, and then she'd learned that magic was real, and she'd thought that meant her dad was wrong...but now he was saying that they weren't incompatible, that scientists could study magic, that maybe people...people like her...could learn how to do it, without needing to stumble across a magic stick that just let them...
"Y-you really th-think s-s-so!?" she stammered, excitedly. "L-like, wizards were real an' stuff? An' we could...could teach me!?"
Les looked a little embarassed, and shrugged. He hoped he wasn't getting her hopes up too much, but he could tell this was something she placed significant importance on, and it sounded like she could use the encouragement... "I don't know, yet," he said. "Maybe some of the old stories about wizards were based on people who really did know how to use magic; it's anybody's guess at this point. I don't know what we'll learn yet; it'd be easier if we had somebody who knew where to start, but we're starting from scratch here. But I promise you, Lilly, I'll tell you anything we find out, if you want to know."
The squirrel-girl broke free of her mother's embrace and tackle-hugged her dad, who was knocked from his crouching position onto his posterior. "'Course I do!" she squealed.
Abbey laughed. "But you're not going to be in much of a mood for learning if you don't get some sleep," she said. "Come on, sweetie."
