14th St., as Jon recalled, was the one that turned into Highway 23 out in the suburbs and left the city proper, going out to a small industrial/warehouse district and running south with the interstate off to...wherever. She remembered there being a custom-manufacture film plant out there, and some other businesses that would probably raise noise complaints if they were closer to where anybody lived, but she'd never really thought about it that much. Was there any place out there that would even be designing a...a mecha? She knew there was some kind of science lab that'd been doing research, but that was in town, and she was pretty sure it was just physics research, anyway, not...not robotics. Maybe one of the warehouses was being rented out to someone? Huh. Now she kind of wished she'd paid more attention on the rare occasions she'd driven through there.
In any case, the question remained: what were they going to do? It was frustrating - for all that it felt like they'd made real progress today, for all Jon was still reeling from the fact of having done magic, she was quite sure that she wasn't powerful enough to hold off a belligerent dog without the aid of pepper spray, yet - let alone something like whatever it was Lucas was hinting at. (Even accounting for the fact that half the things Lucas said sounded like they'd been lifted from Dr. Who synopses, and she wasn't certain to what extent the reality had been en-awesomed in the angel's mind.) All the same, it seemed like it would be...well, negligent for an order of magic, even one that consisted of one semi-experienced acolyte and a few complete novices, to know that something like this was going down in their city and not to at least show up...whether or not it already rested in more capable hands.
She glanced to Brittany, evidently with enough of a question in her expression for the Briton girl to shake her head sadly. "Even what I do know how to do," she said, "I cannot. Lilly may have freed me from this place, but I should have been able to work some magic even in here. I think it may be that I can't properly commune with things, being caught between two times and not fully present in either. Until that changes, I am afraid I can only serve as your advisor."
The slug-girl sighed. "And Karyn and I aren't capable of much of a contribution, at this point..." She glanced to the squirrel-girl. "Well, we'll take Lilly home, and then...I guess we'll see from there. Hopefully it doesn't make it that close to the city..." She turned to Tim and Haru. "Look," she said, "you guys don't have to come. We probably won't even be involved, it's just..."
"...it'd be a shame not to be there," Tim finished. Jon nodded, and Tim shrugged. "Yeah, exactly. And if we probably won't be involved anyway, then it's no big deal, right?" He glanced at Haru, who looked a little less okay with the idea, but nodded.
"Well...okay, then," Jon said. "Um, thanks, you two. Really." Sheez, she thought, six people...glad I drove the van to school.
Ricky glanced around the mostly-empty bus, feeling a bit nervous, and held Belle tighter. She'd managed to get the smaller girl out of tutoring for today and left a bit early on the excuse that they were going to visit a sick friend - which wasn't, strictly speaking, the truth. But both of them had been worrying about Jeff since she was taken out of school and away from her house after her change, and yesterday afternoon Ricky had overheard a trucker in the gas station remarking to his companion about the load he'd hauled from some rich guy's house out to such-and-such a warehouse down 23, which he hadn't even been supposed to look at, but which he was pretty sure was some kind of giant changed...
So here they were. Ricky had been rather surprised to find out that the Lakeside bus system actually ran this far out, but it did, which was good; she could hardly have walked this distance on one winding, and getting Anne's help would've meant waiting for sundown. To be honest, she wasn't really sure what they were going to do when they got there - it wasn't like these were high-security fenced compounds, but there was no reason the people at the warehouse would have to let them in if they didn't want to. But she couldn't stand the thought of Jeff being stuck there, alone, with only her father and his people for company...
...she sighed, irritated. She couldn't believe she'd started feeling sorry for Jeff, who had always kept her trying to earn his friendship by letting him exploit her, who had tried to control her as soon as he realized he could... But...well, Jeff just seemed so different as a clockwork girl than she'd been as a human, even in the brief time they'd spent together. Had the shock of her change forced her to reconsider her behavior, or had there been this other person inside the Jeff she'd known all along? She had no id-
She snapped back to reality very suddenly, bracing herself against the seat as the bus came to a very short, tire-screeching stop. Had they hit a deer or something? "Son of a...!" yelped the driver, an older man with a thick accent. "What is that!?" Clutching Belle, Ricky ran to the front of the bus, trying to get a look outside. She gasped.
In the middle of the road was a giant clockwork, like Jeff had become, only this one was male and a little "older." Ricky was struck with a terrible sense of wrongness looking at it. It was clearly professionally manufactured and immaculately designed to resemble...actually, it closely resembled Jeff as he had been. But the way it moved was all wrong. It was simultaneously too stiff and precise, and too sloppy - one minute it would be jerking through motions that brought to mind the worst connotations of the term "robotic," the next it would be flailing a limb in roughly the correct direction as if it wasn't used to having a body at all, let alone this one.
Ricky felt the closest thing to visceral, gut-level terror that she'd felt since her change, since she'd become this mechanical creature without hormones to put that animal edge on her emotions. In adjusting to her new form she'd always felt slightly embarassed of her movement, sometimes feeling like a comical oversized wind-up toy that belonged in an old cartoon or something. She'd never realized the kind of grace that informed her and Belle's motions until now, when she was looking at what its absence was like.
She had an unshakeable sense that this was a not-a-living-thing - a horrible mockery of her own form, a bogeyman, bodysnatcher, or animated corpse. She was half glad she couldn't see its face from here and half wishing she could just so she could stop imagining it. And it was heading into town. She would've felt sick if she was still capable of it; as was, she cringed and cowered under the dashboard. That thing...that thing that looked like Jeff but wasn't...Jeff...where was she? What had happened to her?
Jeff woke with a start. She...what'd happened? Her father had asked her to stop moving, and she had, and then she'd dreamt...bad dreams, dreams about aliens inside her body, and this thing that looked like her but wasn't her, and...and...and where was her father? He was here when she...when she went to sleep, and now he was gone...that wasn't surprising, he left a lot, but...she felt odd. This place felt odd. It looked odd, too - the walls didn't seem to line up the way they should, and it looked like the ceiling was wider than the floor, except when it looked like the floor was wider than the ceiling. The big loading door seemed to be larger than the wall which contained it. Was she still dreaming? Where was the way out of this place?
