Their mother straightened herself up, visbly trying to calm her anger. "All right," she said. "The enchanter's stone, where is it?"
Kat frowned. "Danni made me drop it," she said. "I think it went over by the handicapped stall." After a hard stare from her mother, she grudgingly went over and searched the floor for it. She found it resting in a crack in the tile, gingerly picked it up, and handed it to her mother.
Her mom rolled it around in her palm, eyeing it curiously. "Dear God, Kat, what did you do to this thing? It's almost completely drained!"
"Almost?" Kat said. "I didn't feel any charge at all! But, uh, I didn't do much, just the one spell..."
Her mother frowned. "Huh. Well, that's all we can do for now, then. Come on, girls." She gestured at the bathroom wall, and a door appeared. She opened it, and Danielle could see their living room through the doorway. "We're going home?" she asked.
Her mother shrugged. "Well, unless you want to finish out the school day like this. But I've already worked up a suitable cover with you two going home sick for the rest of the day."
Danielle nodded, and the three of them stepped through the door. After it shut, the door shimmered for a moment and vanished, as time resumed its normal course in the middle-school girls' bathroom.
Danielle was surprised by how unremarkable the trip was. It was just like going through any other door, only she'd covered about fifteen miles in a single step. Given her other experiences with magic, she'd expected some kind of gut-wrenching "bottom dropping out of the world" feeling. (Not that she was complaining.)
Their mother sighed and eyed the enchanter's stone again. "Well, this little charge means no chance of reversing the spell with this," she said. "Which means we're going to have to track down the creator and get them to do it. Kat, where did you get this?"
Kat frowned. "Um, it was some little crystal shop in the city," she said. "I don't remember the name, but I have it written down in my room." She ran to get it, bounding up the stairs in a way that made Danielle giggle, until she realized that she probably moved the same way.
Kat came running back down with a worried look on her face. "My room's changed!" she gasped. Her mom's eyes went wide, and she dashed to Kat's room, the two rabbit-girls close behind. Sure enough, Kat's room was not only filled with smaller furnishings matching her new stature, but stripped of all the mystic paraphernelia that Danielle had thought to be complete bunk until yesterday. (She peeked into her own room and was relieved to find that, while there was evidence of its being a young girl's room, the stuff that reflected her main interests was still there.)
"Oh, this is just great," their mother moaned. "Well, that explains the power drain."
Danielle cocked an eyebrow> "Mom? What's going on?"
Her mother sighed, chuckling bitterly. "Well, Kat, being a novice witch" - she practically spat out the words - "unwittingly included some kind of reality change on top of the bodily change. The combined strain of transforming you and changing reality, plus mirroring it to her, must have drained the stone. She's actually lucky that she bought cheap head-shop crap; a professional-grade enchanter's reserve might've had enough energy to complete the spell, and you'd both be full rabbits right now."
Danielle cringed at the thought. "But if reality's changed and we're no longer even mostly human..."
Her mother nodded. "It's quite possible that reality says you're no longer biologically related, which means no hereditary magical ability. That would explain why Kat couldn't even sense the little energy remaining in the stone. And if that hapens, Kat can't ever lift her spell on you until we get her changed back, and for that, we need to find the manufacturer of this stone."