And the world changed again...
...and the Sun changed...
...and Jon stared up at the sun, shading her eyes, watching the soap-bubble colors vanish into the comforting, familiar yellow...
...and she waited...
...and waited...
...and waited...
...and nothing seemed to be happening.
Was...was something wrong? It looked normal again...but when she'd changed the first time, all those months ago, it hadn't taken this long to take effect! And she didn't feel anything happening...she should feel something, be able to sense the magic...but there was nothing. Nothing at all.
As seconds passed into minutes, she began to grow nervous, all the more when she saw something clearly happening to Lilly. The little squirrel-girl was undergoing something...it turned out that she remained as she was, but it clearly wasn't nothing happening to her...so how could nothing be happening to Jon? Unless...she didn't know, unless...then she remembered the qualifier on her wish - but that was clearly out of the question! But then why wasn't she changing back!?
She looked down at the stone. It...it seemed fine, and it had changed the Sun as she'd wished for it to...but if something had gone wrong, then, well, obviously she'd just have to fix it by hand. She took a deep breath. "I wish," she said, "that I would become my old, human, male self again."
Nothing. She blinked in surprise, then grimaced as she remembered those first panicked moments after her change, and the discovery that her world-altering wish had drained the stone - damnation! She turned to Karyn, who was still half-octopus, and was staring at her with a look of concern. "Jon," she said, "I think you're missing-"
"No, no, I remember," Jon cut her off. "It's...it's just, I...God dammit, not another six months!"
Karyn stared at her. "'Another six months!?' Jon...seriously, how are you missing this? You made the wish yourself!"
Jon stared back. She couldn't seriously be trying to say that...that... "That's...that's insane," she said, irritated. "Something went wrong, that's all." She looked up at the Sun. It had to be coming up on ten minutes now...why wasn't something happening? "That's all. If only the stone weren't drained..."
"Are you seriously this dense?" Karyn said incredulously. "Jon, we know damn well how thorough that thing is! Look around you! Look at...look at these!" she said, indicating her breasts. "Look, some crazy, weird things have come out of it when we weren't specific enough, but with everything you specifically said...I just don't see any other way to interpret it."
Jon twitched. "That's...nonsense!" she stammered. "How...how could I possibly be...be better off like...like this!? Look at me! Friggin' look at me!" she said, gesturing down at her slug body. "How could I be better off as...as a...a girl, Karyn? Look, someone like Haru, maybe, but...that's not me! I liked being a guy! I was happy that way! I never...I never felt like I was..." She trailed off, too upset and discombobulated to continue.
Karyn shrugged. "So? Look, I grew up with you, I believe you when you say that, but...since when do you have to be unhappy in one state to be happier in another? I'll admit it doesn't make a lot of sense to me either, but...you weren't ambiguous in your wording, Jon. The only conclusion we can draw here is that...well, that at the very least you're even odds for being well-off either way."
Jon shook her head, starting to tear up. How could she? How could she say this, side with this bizarre trick of fate, side with...side with Tim? "I...no," she said. "Just...just no. Something went wrong. When the stone's recharged..."
"Then what, Jon?" Karyn said sharply, grabbing her by the shoulders with her arms and by the hips with a couple tentacles. "Then you'll brute-force your way back to your old form just because you've convinced yourself that that's the way things have to be? That this is just part of a 'mistake' you need to erase? You do that and in the best case you'll be no better off - and worse, you might be missing out on something far better. Hell if I know what, but..."
The slug-girl stared at her, lip quivering. "I...I thought you were my friend," she said forlornly, her voice quavering in a distinctly and aggravatingly female tone.
Karyn huffed. "I am your friend, Jon! That's the whole reason I'm not letting you just sit here in denial for another six friggin' months like you've sat around in denial for the last six friggin' months trying to pretend like nothing that you're not comfortable with is happening and you didn't fundamentally change the entire world and pretending that Tim isn't mooning after you and you don't have feelings for him instead of letting him know what you think and now you've gone and broken his-"
She stopped short when Jon turned and fled into the woods.
Running away didn't feel anywhere near as cathartic in this form. There was no vertical bobbing, no rhythmic pounding of the legs against the ground; just extra exertion and the consequent elevation in pulse and respiratory rates, as Jon forced waves of contraction and expansion down the length of her foot as fast as she could. She couldn't outrun someone with legs like this, but at the very least she was a lot faster than a cecaelia-girl in a wheelchair that wasn't at all made for woodland travel. And she was too distraught to care, anyway; how could Karyn do this to her? Karyn, her friend, her best friend for so long, and...and she'd just turn on Jon, side with this cruel twist of fate, side with Tim...how could she? How could she say such things when she knew perfectly well that the slug-girl was supposed to be a human male? How coul-
She yelped as she slid too quickly over a short embankment where the ground caved away about a foot or so into a wide, shallow pit, which she'd been too absorbed in her fuming to notice, pitched forward, and only just managed to take the brunt of the fall with her elbows instead of her face. Great; that was just great. (If she'd had freaking legs it would've just been a short stumble...) Everything else, and now this, just to put the cherry on the sundae. That was perfect. She started to cry into the warm green turf.
...
...wasn't it March?
Blinking the tears out of her eyes, Jon raised herself off the ground slightly and looked around her. She blinked again and stood up (or at least as much as she could stand, in this form,) surveying the clearing she found herself in. Behind her, she could see exactly what she expected to see: snow cresting the embankment she'd fallen over, thin and patchy but still there, with a carpet of dead grass and sopping-wet leaves peeking through. Around her, within the confines of the pit, however, the earth was warm, the grass thick and green. Wildflowers and untamed shrubs dotted the ground. It smelled florid, earthy, spicy, fertile.
In the center of the pit was a stand of trees, which seemed too placed to have simply grown there and too irregular to have been planted, and which were too thick together to let her see what lay behind them; the only clear gap in the stand was covered over by a curtain of willow strands. Too irregular to be artificial and too purposeful to be wild...it was a description that seemed to fit this whole clearing - even without taking the aberrant weather into account. Something strange was at work here. That conclusion was only further reinforced when she smelled what she could swear was a woman's perfume - but it didn't have the overbearing chemical tinge to it that her antennae picked up from modern perfumes.
Jon had a curious sensation of uneasy wonderment, feeling like she must be in a dream even though she knew that she was perfectly awake. It made her think of how she'd felt when her mother used to read fairy-tales and old myths to her as a kid; Odysseus wandering alone on Circe's island, or something like that. There was something captivating about the feeling; thoughts of turning and leaving did flit through her mind, but her curiousity was much too strong for her to seriously entertain them for even a moment.
Instead, despite having no idea at all what might await her on the other side, she slowly moved towards the willow-curtain. She almost felt like she could hear music, but the pit or grove or whatever it was was almost preternaturally quiet; still, there were moments that she thought she caught unusually harmonic sounds in the rustling of the grass or the soft, nearly inaudible spring breeze. Wondering if she really wasn't dreaming, Jon reached the curtain, ducked through, and stared.
If the grove had felt like myth, this was downright primeval. The rich scent of the grove was far stronger in here, and the air was caressingly warm and humid. Cycads and tree ferns, definitely not native to this part of the world (and perhaps, she half suspected, not native to this time,) formed a dense wall around a central clearing, the leaves of the largest plants meeting to form a canopy that mottled golden sunlight passed through, dappling the grass and the pool at the center. At the far end of the pool was a large, smooth, warm-looking rock; and sitting on the rock was Her.
Jon simply stood and gazed for a long moment. She was unclothed, and it seemed impossible to even conceive of Her needing such things as clothes; She was more richly attired in nothing than Jon could ever recall seeing a woman in fabric. She lounged on the rock in a feline kind of way, making what would look lazy or even decadent from most people look simultaneously regal and carefree. Jon wondered idly if this was what life had looked like in some lost age when the world was young and before mankind had brought sorrow on itself, but she didn't believe for a moment that She was a human being. Jon in fact had a pretty good guess as to what She was; but at the moment she could do nothing other than stare.
Somewhere in the thicket of cycad leaves, there was the cry of something that wasn't a bird, but sounded like it might get around to being a bird in a few dozen million years.
Jon's attention turned to Her body and features, not so much because of any male thought patterns as because there was simply no ignoring them, and no call to ignore them; not here, not in this place. She was...difficult to categorize. Sizable, shapely breasts on a delicately sculpted torso, broad hips and long legs matched with the smoother, straighter lines of a classical nymph, subtle suggestions of muscle beneath smooth, tanned skin, obviously on the tall side but not giving any kind of Amazonian impression. Her face was gentle but sculpted, framed by long brown hair, the dignified face of a grown woman but infused with the brightness of someone much younger.
She didn't wear it in quite a human fashion, though. There was no feeling of wrongness like Jon got from ventriloquist's dummies or plastic-surgery addicts, but the slug-girl got a more definite sense that She was not ordinarily a human being. At the same time, it didn't feel like some kind of suit that had been thrown on for the occasion (whatever the occasion was.) She might not be exactly human, but She was obviously naturally a woman - the Woman. In Her, maidenly innocence, womanly vigor, statuary beauty, erotic charge, matronly warmth, and lady's grace were combined in equal measure, with none of them detracting from or diminishing the others, in a way that no mortal could display.
Jon simply gazed. She felt like she could go on gazing at this scene for...for forever, for the rest of her life. But the Woman turned to face her. "Come here, child," She said, Her voice like silk.
Jon did. It wasn't even a conscious decision, really - she simply did what was to be done, which was what the Woman had asked her to do. She moved around the pool and slid up onto the rock. It was pleasantly warm, moving heat into her winter-chilled body faster than even the warm, humid air did. She realized she was sweating heavily in her winter clothes, and no wonder - she was hardly dressed for this little pocket of jungle that had sprung up where it didn't belong. But it was alright, the Woman was undressing her now, gently folding her clothes and setting them aside. She sat there as naked as She was, and nothing seemed strange about that.
"Why are you so troubled, daughter?" the Woman asked, gently placing a hand on Jon's shoulder. Jon twitched, finding the spell of this place somewhat broken by the reminder of her predicament. "I...I'm not your d...daughter," she stammered, trying not to sound snappish, trying to forget about it and let this place entrance her as it had just done mere minutes ago.
But the Woman pressed a little more firmly on her shoulder. "You are my daughter," She said. "As your mother is my daughter, and her mother, and her mother before. And you were clearly troubled when you came into my grove. What is the matter, daughter?"
Jon tried to keep herself from grimacing, with limited success. "I...I'm not, okay?" she said. "God, I just did this conversation! Twice! And...and that on top of this...this malfunction, or whatever, and now I've gotta spend another six damn months like...like this!" She gestured rather violently down at her body, naked and nakedly bizarre, becoming as flustered as she'd been earlier and starting to tear up. Wasn't there anywhere she could go and not have this same stupid argument?
"Then you're upset at being counted among my daughters?" She asked.
"W-well, yeah!" Jon said. "I'm not even supposed to be a girl, it just...this just happened, and now everybody's acting like I should be skipping gaily along on legs I don't have and singing twee songs about how glad I am to be able to have goddamn periods or something! It's...I mean, just...why the hell is it so wrong for me to want to go back to being what I spent my entire life as before this?"
"Who said it was wrong?"
The slug-girl sputtered. "Karyn!" she said. "And...and Tim wants me to be...wants me for...God, I don't even want to think about it..."
"That wasn't what Karyn said," the Woman replied. "And you're making some sweeping assumptions about what Tim meant."
Jon reddened, starting to become irritated with the Woman Herself. The whole grove seemed to close in around her, looking less beautiful and more hostile as she got angrier. What Karyn had actually said, of course, was that Jon's failure to change, based on the terms of the wish, was evidence that she'd be better off staying this was, or at least no worse off - and the slug-girl had to grudgingly admit that there was a certain logic to that. It was just that...it couldn't be, it simply couldn't. It was ridiculous. And to hear Her defending Tim, after...after everything that had happened this morning...GOD! She felt like she was going to start breaking out in hives. How dare She!? But...there was still part of her that didn't want to be angry, that remembered the sense of wonder she'd come into this place with and wanted to recapture it. Maybe it was just that...that...
"L-look," she said, trying to rein in her temper, "you...you don't understand. Karyn doesn't either. It's just...not supposed to be this way, and she can't see that. I'm not supposed to be like this. It was just some freak accident, from an accidental wish...it shouldn't even have happened. I'm not really this, I just...just look like it."
"Do you only look like one of my daughters?" She asked.
Jon made to answer in the affirmative, then almost involuntarily stopped to give it some consideration, then made to answer again, then hesitated. She...she knew, if she was honest with herself, that this had affected more than just her appearance. Her reaction to the realization that Tim...wanted her...was proof of that, but even aside from that, there were smaller things, in broader aspects of life than merely the sexual, that pointed to it - her regained closeness with Karyn, her increasing comfort and ease around other girls... All the same, she still wanted to say yes, to reaffirm the point...if the Woman could just understand what she was going through...but the idea of lying to Her felt deeply wrong. She glumly shook her head, as subtly as she could.
"Is it that you're unhappy as a girl, then?"
Again without really wanting to, Jon found herself honestly considering the question. Was she? There...there were inconveniences, to be sure. Definite inconveniences. Periods, backstrain, guys staring at her breasts... But...well, when she got right down to it...if she thought about it...in the last six months...there was physical discomfort that was due to her being female, but unhappiness? The last six months had...had basically been...okay. Filled with ups and downs: discovering magic, making new friends, stressing out over having changed the world, worrying about how to fix it...but ups and downs were just part of life, weren't they? It wasn't as if everything had been total smooth sailing when she was a guy, either. She...she didn't know that she'd say she was particularly happy about being a girl, but then, she...she couldn't honestly say she was unhappy as one...she shrugged.
"Then why do you think that you have to be a man?" She asked gently.
Jon frowned. "Because...because I am," she said. "I...I mean, I was born as one, I was never unhappy as one...look, it's one thing if someone who wasn't happy the way they were got changed into what they wanted to be and stayed that way. I mean, hell, that means something good came out of my screw-up. But that's not me. I never felt anything like that...I just...this just happened. But it's not supposed to be this way. I'm not supposed to be this way. Why would I be? I never felt like I wanted to be something else...I was happy as...as a guy..."
The Woman said nothing for a minute. Instead, She gently turned Jon to face away from the pool, hunched over on the rock and resting her arms on her foot, which she'd curled around her, then reached down into the pool, took up some water, and began to wash the slug-girl's back. Her touch was gentle and motherly, and the water was pleasantly cool. Jon hadn't quite realized how heavily she'd been sweating (or how hot-blooded she'd gotten in her anger) until she felt the sticky grime wash away in cool moisture.
"Child," the Woman said, after a minute of this, "why do you talk so much about 'supposed to?' Who has set forth any of this as a requirement? Where is it written?"
Jon frowned, glancing back over her shoulder at Her. "I...I dunno, it's not written down, it's just...obvious," she said. "That's how things were before I screwed things up."
"But you've already admitted that good has come out of this, even though you never intended it to happen at all," the Woman said. "Why could that not be the case for you? Just because you were happy on one path doesn't mean that another might not be better still, in the long run." She scooped up a sizable handful of water and splashed it over the slug-girl's hair.
Jon sputtered as water ran down her face, wiping her soaked bangs out of her eyes. "But...I was born a guy," she said. "Doesn't...doesn't that mean anything? Or is it like some people say, that there's no real difference besides...all the differences? I mean, that it's all external?" She hesitated for a moment, not really sure she wanted answers to this line of inquiry, but by this point there was really no backing out of the conversation. "Am...am I just a girl now, because I have a...a vagina and breasts? Was I only a guy because I had a penis? Does any of it mean anything?"
The Woman held her chin and turned Jon to face Her. She smiled enigmatically. "There are differences," She said, seeming simultaneously intensely personal and intimate and vast and cosmic in a way that left Jon with no doubts as to what She was. "The female form you know is only a facet of a larger truth that runs all up and down the ladder of Creation, twisting and turning its way in and out of many different aspects of every plane of existence. So is the male. Make no mistake: there are differences, and they are very real."
She began to squeeze the water out of Jon's hair, smoothing it out with Her fingers and working out the few tangles that had gotten into it. "But mortals do not know all of them," She said. "And many of the ones they think they do know are their own constructions, that they have elevated to the level of what they believe to be 'truth.' Nor is the distinction in any mortal's life as rigid and eternal as some would think. You've seen that yourself, with more than one person; the barriers are not impermeable, nor were they meant to be. One truth is not diminished by the existence of another."
"And it does mean a great deal, Jon," She said, "that you were born a man. Everything about you for the first sixteen years of your life has been affected by that. Everything in your future, no matter what its course, will be informed by it. Even if you remain a woman, you will have a more intimate understanding of men than any born woman can. It means everything."
She began to gently massage Jon's back. "But by the same token," She continued, "even if you return to manhood, everything about the months that you've spent as a woman will inform the course of your future. All of this is meaningful. But there is no divine mandate for your future, child."
Jon felt pleased to hear that in a number of ways. That it was important that she was a guy, that there wasn't some universal force railroading her into staying this way...still... "B-but...but if there isn't," she said, "then...why? Why does everybody keep pushing me into this? What is even the point of all this?" She felt herself starting to get worked up again.
"Nobody has been pushing you into anything, Jon," She said. "You're being unfair to them by treating it that way. Karyn cares very deeply for you; she sees you rejecting the good that you've been given for the one you think you should pursue, and she worries that you may find it wasn't the best choice, in the long run. She's been trying to make you stop and think before you make a rash decision."
"Think about what?" Jon retorted, feeling a little upset to have the Woman defending Karyn and Tim again. She was so muddled inside by now...all these feelings that were welling up in her and clouding the issue...her friendship with and trust of Karyn versus her certainty that Karyn was wrong, her offense at Tim's trying to talk her into staying for him weighed against...against the fact that she really was attracted to him...why did this have to be so complicated?
"Jon," She said, "you cannot ignore the evidence in this matter forever. You know perfectly well what you wished, and what happened, and what Karyn makes of it. Don't pretend that she's acting without reason. You know her better than that."
Jon felt her lip quiver. She did know...but...but...she still couldn't really believe that...not even if Karyn did. Just because life as a girl wasn't actually bad, and she'd been handling it okay, she was supposed to believe that it'd be better for her to be one!? Okay, and she did have to admit that Karyn's argument was logical...and that it fit with what they knew of the stone...and that...that...she couldn't really find any obvious holes in it. But still...oh, she didn't know! Why did this have to be on her shoulders? Why did she get saddled with the responsibility of choosing her own future, with the fear that the choice she felt like she was supposed to make might be the wrong choice? Why did there have to be so much potential for screwing things up in addition to the possibility of improving things? Why!? She...she just...if she could only know...she looked up at the Woman. "Can't...can't you tell me?" she asked, starting to tear up. "You must know..."
The Woman smiled sadly. "Whether or not I could tell you," She said, "I would not, I'm afraid. I work more subtly than that...and you don't want to be pushed, do you? You can't have both autonomy and freedom from responsibility for your choices. I could take away the burden of this choice, but then you wouldn't be free to make it."
"But...but I want to know!" Jon said. "I...I want to know what I'm supposed to be...I don't want to screw this up..." She started to cry, and buried her head in the Woman's bosom. She held Jon close, gently embracing her. "It's alright," She said soothingly. "You won't screw it up," She said. "You didn't do that even with the Sun; good was brought out of that even though you didn't intend it. You won't do it here, either. It's alright." Jon embraced Her tighter. "It's alright," She said, this time in Karyn's voice. "It's okay."
Jon blinked and looked up through her tears. Karyn was holding her, gently wrapping both arms and tentacles around her, in a little pit in the forest that was covered in patchy snow and held only a couple scraggly jack pines for vegetation. She was back in her winter clothes, and she could feel the cold nipping at her nose, and ears, and antennae.
"It's okay," Karyn said, hugging her close. "You'll be okay. I know this must be a lot for you to deal with, but you'll be okay."
Jon pressed into her, still crying, but smiling in spite of herself. Maybe...maybe Karyn was right. Maybe she would be okay.
