Well, give it some more thought.

Meanwhile, Sophie, I'm sorry to say it but you are lost.

What? No. She's lived here all her life, she walks on this hill all the time.

You walk one specific route to and from your school. You know a thin slice of the hill, and it's usually still light out when you walk it. This time you went charging off with nothing but superpower sense to guide you, totally off your mental map, and it's too dark to even know which way is north.

Also you keep finding fallen trees that you're pretty sure weren't fallen yesterday.

...fair.

Okay, well, Flint Hill isn't that big. If they just keep going downhill she'll hit a road, and then they can stay on someone's porch or something. She's pretty much given up on keeping her absence a secret from her parents; she had some plans for how to do it after rescuing Emily but it's probably already too late. Here's hoping her friends didn't tell too many easily-checkable lies when they were covering for her.

What kind of story is she going to tell about her and Kyle? That they, what, just bumped into each other on the hill? That sounds like an insanely obvious lie to Sophie, but if she just sticks to it she doesn't see how anyone could prove anything. They're definitely not going to guess the truth.

Maybe they'll be so excited to have Kyle back that no one will question it.

Speaking of, how's Kyle doing? If he possibly can, she wants to hear the story of what he the Juice Man was doing right before the storm got so bad.

Kyle's memories get pretty dreamlike toward the end, and cut out completely before the storm started. His last clear recollection is of installing a bunch of windows in a bunch of trees, climbing up and down ladders in the dark and dragging the heavy windowframes behind him. His last clear recollection that he's sure actually happened is a sort-of-conversation in the car between himself and the other man, late at night:

Man: "You know, I quit that factory way back when because I kept pulling night shifts."

Kyle, smirking: "If you wanted a normal schedule, you shouldn't have gone to work for an alchemist."

Man: "Puh. Alchemists. Always know the phase of the moon, but never the time of day."

Kyle, laughing: "And we cut our pizza into twelve slices."

Man: "And make quicksilver smoothies."

Kyle: "And we're too stuck up to play cards."

That last line got a big laugh, for some reason. The other guy had a reply, but Kyle can't quite bring it to mind; right now he's about three quarters asleep, with his neck tucked up so he can rest his head on Sophie's shoulder.

Aww.

But also: "alchemist"? It's not a word that means much to Sophie. Somebody from medieval times. Somebody who makes potions? The juice was probably a potion! It fits.

The storm and playing card were...?

A diffident voice forms in Sophie's mind, "Hey, what's going on? Who is that guy? Is it safe to come out?"

!?!

She certainly didn't forget about her new psychic bear friend Otso in all the excitement, that would be ridiculous.

Hmm. She wants Kyle and Otso to meet...but maybe he should get a night's sleep first. He took the superpowers thing pretty well, but she'd like him to not get any more shocks for a day or two.

"Kyle's important to me. He was possessed by something dangerous, but I think things are all right now. But we should still be cautious. But don't hurt him." She shuts her mouth before she can say anything even more mangled; her brain sure can get tired even if her body can't. How did Kyle take it? She was trying to be a little vague.

"Okay." Otso honestly feels a little put-upon that Sophie is allowed to sit on this guy and strangle him but Otso can't. Doesn't she TRUST him? But that's pretty immature, he tells himself. He's in a grown-up situation now; he has to use his head.

That's what Dad would say, if he were here.

Kyle stirs a little at the sound of her voice, and cranes his neck just slightly to see if he can figure out who she's talking to.

She'll stroke his head. "Shh, shh, don't worry." If he really wants to see the bear she'll let him, she just wants to keep it down to one reality-shattering revelation per day like she wishes someone did for her.

Yeah no, "craning his neck just slightly" is Kyle's exact limit right now. If super-Sophie says it's fine, it's fine.

Insofar as he's having thoughts in words at all, he's trying to figure out if Sophie's really different than she used to be, or if he just understands her better. Maybe he just...sees peoples' souls now, and this is what Sophie's looks like. That would track. He wishes there were some more people around he could look at, just to compare. Wasn't Sophie talking to someone, a moment ago? He doesn't see anybody, just her and trees and rain. He feels like there are more people around, like there's someone right behind them. Maybe that's who Sophie was talking to.

What would his friends be like, if he could see them this way? He doesn't have any guesses, he realizes. Disturbing.

Mr. Walz would be...a big cockroach, maybe, like in the Metamorphosis.

What would his grandparents look like?

After that he can't hold his thoughts together anymore, and he's asleep.

Seconds pass, and bad things keep not happening to you, Sophie.  Eventually a full minute has gone by without a fight, or a dangerous animal encounter, or a terribly fraught conversation, or anything at all.

Sophie is not relaxed, as such, but she's starting to feel freer to imagine the future. Well, futures; she's got a lot more of them than she did when she woke up this morning.

Magic is real. At least, some of it is. People can create water out of nothing, and steal bodies, and turn into whatever it is Sophie turned into. There are Concepts out there, ideas so powerful that just seeing them once permanently changes you, and you can make friends with them. Sophie grew up in a small town; she always knew the world would turn out to be something bigger than what she'd understood as a child. But this...

She's going to tell Carol and Joanna. That isn't even a decision, she just realized suddenly that it was true. She could have told them about Kyle, she sees that now, she just...got caught up in the drama of hiding from their dads, and liked having a secret boyfriend. They'll forgive her for that, she feels sure. They'd probably forgive her for hiding magic from them, too, but they shouldn't. They deserve to know.

And...so do her parents. That feels like a decision, a scary one. Her friends will keep her secrets, if she decides that's what she wants, but her parents will just do whatever they think is right, maybe without even talking to her first, because they'll trust that she's sensible, just like they are, and so would definitely agree with them.

CRUSH THEM

That's...no. She understands the impulse, but no. Sometimes people have different opinions than you do, and you just have to live with it. Or, even if you don't have to live with it, you still should.

But she can try to persuade them, at least. She tries it out in her head: I'm basically an adult. I can drive safely. I get good grades. My friends' parents all think I'm a good influence. I kissed a boy I liked, and rescued him from a demon. I probably saved Emily's life. I can glow in the dark. I can be trusted to make my own decisions about my own superpowers.

...maybe don't tell them the "kissing a boy" thing quite yet, that just kinda slipped out.

...the fact that she still thinks she can't tell them that is a Sign, isn't it?

She follows that thought a little further, tries to really imagine that conversation going well, tries to think through how it could go, if it ended up with them agreeing that they'd keep her secret or not, as she preferred...and, yeah, she can't. Maybe they'd try to ban her from transforming again, or go to the police, or, or, she doesn't know what. All kinds of things could happen. What can't happen is them wanting one thing, her wanting another, and them going along with it.

Well then, do it the other way: she tries to imagine not telling them, keeping it just her secret and her friends', for -- months? years? She can imagine that, it turns out, it just sucks. She's going to, what, go fight the Juice Man after school while her friends cover for her, for however long that takes? And then more demons, or alchemists or whatever, for her next two years at Raymond high, and then off to college to do it all over again there? Sneaking in late at night, telling implausible lies? They're going to think she's on drugs. Disappearing from school in the middle of the storm is already going to be hard enough to explain; does she really want to spend her last years at home doing more of that?

Sophie always thought her life was low in parental angst, but, no; her whole lifetime supply was just being saved for this moment.

She had an interesting thought just there, actually. Why did she assume there'd be more enemies after the Juice Man?

What she comes up with, after another minute's thought, doesn't feel like a complete explanation, but it isn't nothing, either:

It isn't very likely that Sophie is the first glowing superheroine. Probably Otso isn't the first-ever talking bear. The demon she fought, or alchemist, or demon-summoning alchemist...there are probably more of those out there. But those aren't the kinds of secrets that would keep themselves, are they. People would really have to work for it.

Magic is real, and no one told her. Probably not a lot of people know. Kids believe in talking bears and glowing superheroines; adults, and serious-minded almost-adults, know better. Which works out pretty well for the wizards alchemists, probably, when you think about it.

Maybe this is what secret societies are. You get into Skull and Bones, or one of those, and eventually someone sits you down and explains how things really work. And then you get rich and powerful, because it would be easy to get rich and powerful if you could do magic and no one knew, probably, right?

And if you had something like that, you'd need ways of dealing with people who stumbled onto the secret.

CRUSH THEM TOO

That's...yes, all right, Sophie endorses that one. But if they exist, she's probably not the first person to want to crush them, and yet there they hypothetically still are, un-crushed. So far she's been in exactly one magic fight, and it went pretty well but she doesn't even really know why she won, or what her enemy was capable of, or what she's capable of. She should focus on crushing Juice Man, and work her way up to secret societies. Maybe he's a member of a secret society, and after she crushes him they'll send others, and she can train that way...

She's getting ahead of herself. All she's really seen is her own superpowers, her new Friend, and whatever Juice Man's deal was. For the rest she's applying her common-sense understanding of the world, and that's not a bad place to start but she can't hold onto it too hard. She hasn't adjusted to the common sense of the world she really lives in; how could she have? She found out about it like two hours ago.

Could she show the card to other people? Should she?

Just thinking about it makes her cringe, and it's not hard to figure out why. Inside her own head, where no one could ever hear, she'll admit it: she likes the idea of being the only one with superpowers. But she just thought this through, right? She probably isn't the only one. Most likely there are others, working in secret for...some reason. So ask the real question, the one that lines up with the world as it is: does she like the idea of being the only person she knows and likes with superpowers?

Then again: can she give other people the powers she has, really? Everything about her new self feels perfect now, but at the beginning, at that first moment when she didn't even know whose thoughts were whose no, that's wrong, all the thoughts are Sophie's. When she didn't know that she'd changed, when she couldn't reflect on it, put it that way. If she'd just gone along with things, yes, all right, that could have been bad. If she'd had the wrong thought about her dad, and he'd been right in front of her, it could have been really bad. At first she was Sophie, and now she's Sophie and her Friend, but in the middle there was...less, and more. Something died, and something else was reborn in flames. What would have happened, if she hadn't been able to stop and reorient herself in the middle? Her Friend would still be here, she's certain of that, but would Sophie?

It's daunting. But then again, she was caught by surprise. If she just showed people some magic first, explained what would happen, and told them what to do and expect, maybe they'd be fine. Even then, would it really be OK for someone else to make the same Friend she did? Sophie is managing her crushing-related urges pretty well, she thinks, but it's work. How would someone else handle it? She can't focus on that, it's too vague, try again: would it be OK for Joanna, say?

Hmmmm. Joanna's smart. She's strong and confident. Her impulse control is...good enough for life in small town New England, where nothing ever really happens. She likes competing, likes winning. She has a whole wall of cheer and gymnastics trophies, and she can tell you a story about every single one of them. Giving her an insatiable appetite for conquest...seems like it could go wrong, actually. Maybe really wrong.

She needs a different card, for a different Concept with a different personality. Are there more cards? It seems like there ought to be. Cards come in decks, right? Come to think, didn't the Juice Man say there were? She can't remember the exact wording, something about retrieving everything that belonged to him. There are probably more of these things out there; maybe as many as 51 more, if there are 52 altogether like in a normal deck. They could be anywhere. They could be everywhere. Maybe twenty other people got powers at the same time she did. Well, probably not; sane people don't go out in storms like this. But sometime soon the storm will stop, right? Then what? I need to find the rest of those cards, before anyone else gets hurt. And before the Juice Man gets them.

Fifty-one pieces of laminated paper, blown all over by the worst storm in Raymond history. Finding them sounds...time-consuming. If only she could trust her parents to work with her, instead of assuming she'd work with them!

She's going in circles; she's just too tired to hold all the different considerations in her head at the same time. She needs to sit down with her friends, and maybe a few sheets of paper, and talk things through. Tonight, she decides. I'll make my life-altering and maybe world-altering decisions tonight, after some dinner and a long talk with Carol and Joanna.

Hey, come to think of it, she's only going in circles figuratively, right? Shouldn't she have come to the school or a road or something by now?