"Wait," Danielle said, "can't you use your detector-thing on Tanya like you did on Kat?"
Emily shook her head. "I could, but it wouldn't tell me anything meaningful. As far as the timeline is concerned, Tanya hasn't connected to your family's magic yet, which means there's nothing I could detect anyway. We won't know for sure whether she will or won't get her power until she turns eighteen. I might be able to get a clue in a few years, though, when she's built back a few years of life-essence."
Danielle hung her head, trying to hold back another burst of tears. How long was she going to be stuck like this? They'd have to wait years even just to know what would happen, and even if Tanya did get her powers back, she'd be a grown-up by the time Tanya turned eighteen! What if she got used to it? What if she didn't want to turn back anymore? She couldn't bear to think about it.
Danielle felt her mother's hand on her shoulder, reminding her again just how small she was. She looked over at Tanya; the raptor-girl was nearly as tall as she was, and she was only seven or eight! She really hoped Emily was over-stating the case about her being a hunter, or she'd be easily able to overpower Kat and Danielle by the time she was an adult.
"Come on, dear," her mother said. "Girls, it's time we were getting home. We have a lot of getting ready to do." She opened the door and paused, turning to Emily. "Thank you again for all your help," she said. "It looked like we were out of options entirely until you discovered Tanya hiding in the stone."
Emily smiled. "Don't mention it," she said. "At the very least, I'm just glad I can check another fugitive off my list. Hopefully we can get her to fix the damage she's done in time, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it."
"Who's she talking about, uh, Mom?" Tanya asked. Jill smiled sadly. "She means the other girl named Tanya, dear. She did some things to other people that she needs to fix, but Emily has to find her first. Don't you worry about it, though. Emily knows what she's doing. Come on, now."
She stepped through the door and back into her house, and the girls followed her. Danielle watched Tanya curiously, noting her strange, stompy gait and the way she leaned forward, her tail angled upward. It was kind of frightening how much the little raptor-girl reminded her of the dinosaurs she'd seen in Jurassic Park. Shuddering slightly, she stepped through the door, surprised once again at how un-strange it felt to be crossing space in an instant.
When they were home again, Jill dismissed the door, leaving blank living-room wall in its place. "Well," she said, "I think it's time for lunch. Kat, Danielle, did you have anything to eat at school?"
Danielle thought back to the sad, wilted greens she'd nibbled at in the cafeteria. "Not much," she said. Kat nodded. "All right," their mother said. "You girls go get Tanya dressed, and I'll drop the blinds and fix us some lunch."
Danielle felt a knot in the pit of her stomach. "But what about...?"
Jill chuckled. "You'll be fine," she said. "Emily's worked with so many magical disasters that she has a tendency to jump to the worst-case scenario. Go on!"
Nodding, Danielle took a deep breath and led the way. Tanya followed her, with Kat trailing behind. They went up to Danielle's room, and she opened the door to her closet and began to rifle through the shirts to find something for Tanya.
The little blonde raptor-girl stopped and sniffed, first in the direction of Danielle, then at Kat. "You smell like family," she said. "Are...are you my sisters? I can't remember..."
Danielle sighed with relief. "Family" was a lot better than "food" when it came to things to smell like. "Yeah, I guess we are," she said. "That's Kat, and I'm..." She paused. No, there was no real way around it, was there? "I'm Danielle," she said. "We're your older sisters."
"An' you're twins," Tanya said. "You smell the same as well as look the same."
Danielle paused. She hadn't considered that, but she supposed that was correct, since she and Kat were both the same age. And hadn't her mother said that, yesterday when this had all started? It seemed like so long ago... "Um, yep, that's right!" she said. "Now let's have you try this on." She handed Tanya a shirt.
Tanya stared at the shirt for a moment before realizing what she was supposed to do. She frowned, but slipped it on anyway. It was a pretty good fit, since despite their age difference, Tanya and her new elder sisters were about the same size. Danielle smiled, but Kat frowned. "That's only half-done," she said. She looked through Danielle's closet and shook her head. "No way are your pants going to fit her," she said. She dashed off to her room and returned with a skirt. "Here, try this."
Tanya made a face. "Yuck, no! Too girly!" Danielle smiled; at least they had something in common. Kat frowned. "Well, you can't just go around naked from the waist down!"
"Can too!" Tanya said curtly. She sprang out of the room in her weird dinosaur gait and went back downstairs. Kat followed close behind, and Danielle not far after. "Mom!" Kat groaned, when they arrived in the kitchen. "Tanya won't wear a skirt, and we don't have any pants that fit her!"
Their mother turned, looking her newest daughter over. "Hmm? Oh, that's fine," she said. "Good job, you two."
Kat gaped. "What? She's half-naked!"
Jill shrugged. "So she is, but it seems alright, more or less. Besides, you'll see stranger things in our new hometown. Non-humans tend to have a less restrictive view of these things. After all, you couldn't expect a centaur to put on pants, could you?"
Kat frowned. "I, uh...huh. I suppose not?"
Her mother nodded. "See? It makes sense. That's rule number one of life in the world's magical pockets - don't treat anything as a problem unless you know it's a problem. Now have a seat, I've got some lunch prepared." She smiled. "We're certainly going to have balanced meals from now on."
Danielle looked down at her salad; while she still found it unusual that this was her diet now, the crisp lettuce and bright red tomatoes looked positively mouth-watering, especially compared to the wilted pile of sadness that had been her first lunch. Still... "Are we really gonna have to be vegetarians?" she asked.
Her mother shrugged. "Difficult to say without experimenting," she said. "I don't think meat is going to harm you or anything, and I'm sure you can handle dairy products since you're mammalian anyway. But you're probably not built to digest meat very well, and you might not even find it tastes good to you. Similarily, I think Tanya is going to have trouble with vegetables, at least the ones with a high cellulose content. We'll just have to find out what you like and dislike as we go, I think."
Danielle frowned - she'd miss the taste of a good burger if it turned out that she couldn't enjoy meat anymore. Still, at least the salad looked good. Tanya, on the other hand, was picking rather unhappily at the arrangement of lunchmeat she'd been provided with. "Uh, Mom, can I go out and hunt something?" she asked.
"Sorry, honey," Jill said. "We can't go outside today. But we'll be moving to Grandma's town soon, and you can hunt as much as you want there. I'll make sure we have some real meat for dinner, okay?"
Tanya grinned, fangs gleaming. "Okay!" She dug into her lunch, and Danielle did the same.
The rest of the afternoon passed pretty quietly, though pretty much anything would have seemed quiet compared to the events of the morning, as far as Danielle was concerned. Danielle's father came home from work as he always did, but Danielle watched as her mother embraced and kissed him with a new perspective, trying not to think about what this might imply for her. Tanya sidled up to Danielle, eyeing the man curiously. "Is that Dad?" she asked. Danielle nodded.
Her father was as surprised to see the raptor-girl as she was to see him. "Who's this?" he asked. Jill sighed. "She's our youngest daughter, dear. Her name's Tanya."
He nodded thoughtfully. "Well, that explains why she feels familiar, I guess. I gather we've had a bit of a strange morning? Does that have anything to do with our other girls' new look?"
His wife nodded. "Yep. I'll fill you in over coffee."
He shrugged. "Okay, but you know how much of this magic stuff goes right over my head. C'mere, Tanya!" He picked up his new daughter and gave her a hug; she was confused for a moment, but returned it. "Ah! Watch the claws!" he chuckled.
Danielle frowned. "Mom," she whispered, "why didn't he remember Tanya? I thought Emily said that reality had changed or something?"
Her mother laughed. "Oh, I've had memory wards on your father for years now," she said. "I used to be pretty paranoid about your aunt escaping and doing God-knows-what, and anyway it was easier explaining how things had changed when a spell affected the timeline that trying to convince him that things hadn't always been that way."
"So let me see if I've got this straight," Danielle's father said, once her mother had told him the whole story. "Kat wound up harnessing this witch's power for some further petty revenge, and it drained her of her power, and then things went haywire when you tried to bring her back, and she somehow became a certain little girl who shall remain nameless?" He looked at Tanya, who was happily reading one of Dan's old picture-books.
Jill nodded. "Well, I'm not certain how much of Kat's motive was revenge and how much was her desire to be closer to Dan that she told me about. I'm not sure even she knows. But yes, that's about the size of it."
"And due to technical details that you simplify down to 'it's complicated' for laypersons like myself, she needs to grow back up before we'll even know whether she's still capable of changing our older children back?"
His wife sighed. "Yes, I'm afraid so."
"I see," he said. "But I don't get why we have to move in with your mother. Can't you just set up an obfuscation-shield-thingy around here? I thought that's what you did with the school when you sent them there today."
She sighed. "Yes and no," she said. "I did do the same type of spell, yes, but it was temporary and limited to the school grounds. The field around my hometown took the whole Order of Hunters three months of planning and labor to create, and that was for a town of a dozen square miles, counting the whole surrounding countryside, and a few thousand people. We live in a city that's ten times that size with more than a hundred times the population. That's so far out of my league, you would have as much chance as I do."
"Ah," he replied. "I suppose your plan is about the simplest approach we have available, then; I know you wouldn't be suggesting this if there was an easier way. At least it's not too far. I'll miss the ten-minute commute, though."
Jill nodded. "Yeah, I'm sorry about that. I know you like your workplace."
"It's okay. I've done longer commutes before. As far as lodgings go, what's your plan? We can manage at your mother's for a week or two, but not for anything long-term."
"I'm not sure yet," she said. "I was thinking of scouting around for a house for sale and seeing if I can persuade the realtor to trade straight across. I just don't want to push anything too hard; the timeline's still knitting itself back together after the last couple of days."
He nodded. "Well, guess we'll have a busy next couple of weeks, in any case."