“Glad to hear it, love, but that’s not much information.”

“I don’t know! I’m not going to shoot myself to see if I’m bulletproof. And if I have super-strength I’m not going to find out here.” Despite her words she quietly pops the case off her phone and squeezes it. Does it crack? No? Okay.

“I’m not saying we need to figure everything out right now. But the internet is very confident that you got hit with weird superpower lightning and not normal nerve damage lightning.”

“…Good? I guess?”

“And that people are having a hard time everywhere. We should…not go back out into the woods, I think.”

“Because of rabid coyotes?”

“The coyotes might also have superpowers? I’m not sure. It’s not only coyotes, anyway.”

“Grand.” She looks down at her sparkly fingernails. Her cuticles were sort of ragged, before the lightning bolt. Now they aren’t. “Well, let’s…stop being a burden on the nice hospital people.” They aren’t currently occupying hospital staff attention but they are occupying hospital…space.

Nod.

Home is several hours away by car.

…Home was several hours away by car. Presumably it’s going to be longer this time.

Yup. Everyone who was travelling for Christmas is trying to get home and also there are a lot of accidents. There's one where somebody vanished and their car went into the guardrail. Over there is one where the lightning startled someone into slamming the brakes and getting rear-ended. There's one where . . . okay that one doesn't seem to have been a car crash per se but there's a lot of cop cars and a dead deer or moose or something.

Also there's an eight-foot-tall hulk of a man standing over the deer-or-something corpse talking to the cops.

“—Is it okay if I get out?” Lucy asks while they’re stuck behind the moose incident.

Her grandpa looks back at her. “We have a bathroom in the RV.”

”No, it’s not—it’s not that. I don’t know, I just want to check—”

Sigh. “Please try to be back quickly.”

She nods, and steps out of the vehicle and approaches the giant.

"No, I had no idea, I just did this as soon as I realized I could because I thought it was cool--who doesn't want to get ripped without hitting the gym, am I right?"

"...Um, hi."

"Hey. Are you, uh," he gestures at her opalescence and then blushes as he realizes he just gestured at a lady's entire body, "like me?"

"I think so? I got hit by lightning and then I looked like this." And was naked, but that's not something she needs to introduce to this conversation. "But I haven't figured out what...if anything...I can do...except I could sort of sense that you were there before I saw you, and I feel like maybe I could do something to you? But, like, I don't know...what...so I probably shouldn't?"

"Yeah that sounds like don't? Also, you just started out like that? I had to do this on purpose."

"I just started out like this!!! I'm not gonna, I just, was hoping you knew more than me." 

"I know I've got some kind of shapeshifting powers? I can see what's going on in my own innards, which is pretty damn weird, pardon my language, and I can make myself buff. Or green or whatever but I don't want to be green. And then this giant deer attacked my car while I was stuck in traffic so I pulled over and punched it to death. But the deer started it."

"No, yeah, there've been a lot of animal attacks apparently."

"Have you seen any yourself?" asks a cop. "We're trying to find out what's going on."

"I haven't seen any attacks, but when I was struck by lightning my family brought me to a hospital and the hospital had a lot of cases of attack victims. Coyotes got mentioned specifically."

"Man, if there was a coyote as big as this thing that would be pretty messed up!" says the hulking guy. 

"We've been telling people to stick to populated areas and stay in their houses as much as possible," says the cop.

"Yeah, we're trying to get home, we made the objectively bonkers decision to go camping for Christmas but it wasn't a bad idea until all this started."

"Good luck."

"Yeah."