Author's note... I apologize if my previous chapter was confusing and if this one isn't any better.
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Eliza slowly made her way through the mirrorverse toward where she sensed where her daughter was. Her mind dwelt on the physical transformation that she had just undergone, leaving her a living being made out of indestructible glass, like her daughter.
But at the same time, she felt she had to be by her daughter's side. Something was troubling her. Something involving four love dolls had struck her as incredibly unfair. As she traveled through the mirrorverse, she also began to feel changes in the very nature of reality itself, largely relating to these four love dolls.
"I need to get to her," Eliza thought to herself, "she needs my comfort... and I need to understand what is happening... I... I know EXACTLY where she is, but Marie didn't tell me exactly where she was going... I can sense that she's raised some protective magic around herself... but how can I know that..."
As she went, she felt and saw how reality shifted. First was an incident when Marie was four and just discovering her powers. She figured out how to turn plastic candle holders into exquisite glass crystal candle holders, which Eliza had found to be unbreakable. Her husband had thrown it through the air to test it against a brick wall. The brick cracked. The candle holder didn't even have a scratch.
Eliza had asked Marie how she did it, and when Marie went to explain, she accidentally transformed her mother into a glass human.
"But I only just became this way..." Eliza thought to herself.
The incident had frightened Marie and her daughter apologized profusely for it. She then began trying to figure out a way to undo it. This led to a second incident. Marie had come to her saying she had figured out a way to undo the earlier mistake, saying that she had managed to reverse the transformation on one of the candle holders.
"At least it is keeping her as responsible as she was," Eliza wondered, "but what is this leading to?"
Then she saw the second accident. Marie's tests had all been on inanimate objects and when she tried it on Eliza, a living being, the backfiring of her plan ended up turning Marie into her glass wolf form and created a powerful link between the two of them.
Being flesh and blood inside the mirrorverse, Eliza let a tear fall down her cheek.
"It's my fault," Eliza thought to herself, "the initial transformation wasn't Marie's fault. It was an accident... and then she tried to fix it and it transformed her... and it's all my fault. I'm a horrible mother..."
She then felt herself learn about the connection between herself and Marie. It was close. Closer then the standard mother/daughter bond. Marie gained several aspects from Eliza while Eliza likewise gained aspects from Marie, while neither of them really lost anything that made them individuals, but they were close. Some family friends had made the joke that the two of them could read each other's minds.
But the connection went beyond that. It seemed to link Eliza to Marie's magic. Eliza had found that she could somehow channel it somehow. Mostly in the creation of souls, which Eliza still didn't fully understand.
She had come across Marie playing with a doll, and lamenting her status as a "lone wolf", both mentally and vocally, Eliza had then closed her eyes and felt a strong tingle flow through her and through Marie. Eliza remembered seeing Marie looking up, with her eyes glowing with a soft and peaceful light and then felt a small glowing orb emerge from her belly and float down and into the doll.
"I still don't get it entirely," Eliza thought back as she remembered the incident.
The orb had been a soul. Unbreakable and forever and fully formed. Eliza had no clue how she could have done that on her own. She wasn't a goddess, and she was privately sure she wasn't a witch...
"But then there is the link I share with Marie, "I used the link to send the soul to the doll... but I still don't understand how I could have created it alone."
Marie had guessed that since her transformation into a glass human had thrown her menstrual cycle so out of whack that the second application of Marie's magic altered it. According to Marie's theory, she was able to generate souls from "what might have been" and that she used Marie's magic to make the transfer.
Through some testing, Marie and Eliza had learned that the process was fully controlled, but usually connected to strong feelings from Marie. And it also was also limited to the number of potential "husks" for these souls to go into. It left Marie with a host of souled dolls and stuffed animals that could "talk" with Marie, and whom Marie loved dearly.
"And that is why I released four souls a few moments ago," Eliza then thought, remembering to what she had recently felt from Marie.
Marie was helping some private investigator deal some troubling aspect involving some town's curse. In the course of this investigation, they had come across four love dolls made to resemble Leomen. According to what Marie called the "original" time-line, they had all been human, but thanks to the intersection of the game "Transform or Dare" and cascading "plague" of Leomen they had all become Leoman shaped love dolls and the souls began to fade out of existence. Marie found this extremely unfair and when Eliza felt it, she released four new souls through Marie's powers that went into the four love dolls, stopping the "unfairness" of what had happened to them.
"I will need to talk with Marie though about trying to control her emotions," Eliza thought as she went through Mirrorverse, "not everything in life is fair after all... and now for the three steps..."