Kalvin, or rather Kate, sighed as she rummaged through her bag. She pulled out her glasses. "Figures," she muttered. "Everything about my body changes except the one part I would actually want changed." She was a little surprised when she examined them; they seemed thicker than they had been before. Then she realized that they were actually the same thickness; it was just that the lenses were smaller on the other two axes than they had been. Great, as if they didn't make her look nerdy enough. She slipped them on anyway; being able to read past eighteen inches was a lot more important than not looking like a dork.
She looked around. There was a small stand-mounted mirror on the exam table; for her it was big enough to serve as full-length. She looked geeky, all right, but not quite as badly as she'd expected. She was what her friend Jason would call a "meganekko," which, she had gathered, was just "glasses girl" in Japanese. (Jason used those kinds of phrases a lot. She thought it was kind of annoying, and would often fire back with one of the insults that comprised about half of her Greek vocabulary, but they got along well in most other respects.) She wasn't quite as nicely-built as some of the other girls in the room, but she was fairly shapely for a fourteen-year-old, which would have been nicer if she were supposed to have breasts or a figure at all. Thankfully, the nearly-amorphous hospital gown she was wearing made it easier to ignore this.
"So what do we do now?" Tanya asked. "If the book can teleport, what hope do we have of keeping ahold of it?"
Dawn shrugged. "I'm not sure. But maybe it can only teleport after transforming someone? None of us has had it disappear at any other time, right?"
"That would make it easier to hang onto," Rachel said. "If we can get to it and keep anybody else from using it, maybe it won't be able to teleport away. It's worth a shot, anyway."
"Wait, 'anybody else?'" Kate interrupted. "You mean all of you...? But you've always been mythics! I remember you," she said, pointing to Rachel, "you took second place in swimming last year! Is this why my student ID has changed? Things have changed so I was always this way!?"
Dawn nodded. "As far as we know, it started with me. I found the book in the library yesterday, became this, and all of a sudden everybody knew me as a girl with the lower body of a snake. I talked to Tanya, back when she was Tony, and told him the truth. We decided to try and find it, and then we had a slip-up back in the library and he became that. And so on, until we got to where we are now. As far as we know, we're the only ones the book has changed, but even if that's true, it may not stay that way for long."
Kate let out a low whistle. "I'd say you were crazy if we hadn't passed the point of 'crazy' a long time ago," she said. "So the idea here is to find the book again and keep it until we figure out how to get back to normal?"
Dawn and Tanya nodded, but Rachel just stared at the ceiling, a far-off expression on her face. "That may not be enough, you realize," she said.
The other three stared at her. "How do you mean?" Tanya asked. The mermaid shrugged. "Okay, we know it's getting faster, right? And it seems like it may be able to bend circumstances more effectively than it used to, to boot. I mean, Dawn just opened up the book and touched a picture, but by the time it got to Kate here, it just happened to fall on the floor, after we'd warned him not to touch it. What if it is getting more capable with every transformation? By the time we get it back, who knows what it'll be able to do?"
"What...what are you getting at?" Dawn asked, not sure she wanted to hear the answer. Rachel sighed. "We may have to destroy it," she said. "Before things get any worse."
"What!?" Tanya yelped. "But how do we get back to normal, then?"
"I dunno," the mermaid replied. "Maybe we don't. But this thing has already changed four people at least, and it's getting faster and maybe stronger every time. When is it going to stop? When everyone in the world is a mythic-girl? Maybe we just have to suck it up and destroy the thing anyway, before anyone else falls prey to it."
"That's easy for you to say," Tanya groaned. "You're the one that said you could get used to this! What about the rest of us? I want to be myself again!"
"I don't know," Dawn mused. "She might be right. I want to be a guy again as much as you do, but a lot more people might get screwed over if we let this go on any longer than we can help."
"Besides," Rachel said, "we know now that magic exists, right? This book can't be the only magical thing in the world. So destroying it doesn't necessarily mean that we're stuck, just that changing back might take longer. And anyway, we don't even know if there is a way to use the book to change back. Dawn, you said yourself that the book might be one-way, and the more we see of it, the more I think you're right. If it's trying to make people into mythic-girls, I don't think it would have a way for us to return to normal, at least not one it would ever let us find."
While Tanya groaned in frustration, Dawn sat there, thinking over what Rachel had said. Kate just sat in stunned silence, pondering how much stranger her life had just gotten.