She's cold. She's cold. She's so fucking cold. It occurs to her briefly that she's heard feeling cold can be a symptom of nerve damage before she realizes that the lightning seems to have burned her clothes off and it's still December in northern Saskatchewan. Which is objectively better than nerve damage but also imminently lethal if she doesn't get back to shelter posthaste. She scrambles to her feet and--whoah.

She's standing in a shallow crater of burned and blackened soil, the trees on the edge of the clearing charred and blasted back from the force of--the lightning bolt? But then how is Lucy not dead--

--no, focus. Get back to the camper, where there is heating and also additional clothes. Figuring out what the fuck happened and why it didn't kill her is less important than continuing to not die. Also thinking will be easier when her brain is no longer full of FUCK COLD COLD FUCK FUCK AUGH COLD. 

What the fuck. 

Okay, no, that's clearly Lucy, get her inside and warm--

"What happened?"

She makes a miserably uncertain noise as she huddles under her mother's offered blanket. "I don't know? I--got--struck by lightning? I think? I mean, I saw lightning, or something that looked like lightning, except--rain...bow? And then there was a flash of light and...something...and then I woke up and everything was burned except me. And then I ran back here."

That doesn't really make sense but "makes sense" is a little thin on the ground here.

"Have you gotten a good look at yourself? Since...getting hit, I suppose."

"Not...really? It's pretty dark out there."

They don't really have a good movable mirror in here so Lavinia gently guides her daughter by the shoulders into the bathroom. 

"What?"

Sounds about right, yeah. 

Lucy tears off a piece of paper towel and scrubs at her face with it a bit. The nacreous shimmer on her skin does not come off. She wets the paper towel and scrubs harder. It doesn't so much as smudge. 

"I...I don't..."

Probably she's dreaming. She REALLY hopes that if she's still asleep her winter gear is in reality intact. Not that that'd be enough to keep her alive for very long, probably. She tries to wake up. It doesn't work. 

"I don't know what's happening!" 

Oh her poor baby.

"Neither do I," Lavinia says gently, taking her firmly by the shoulders and drawing her into a hug, "but we'll figure it out." 

Lucy's ears are pointed now. She scritches at the pointed tip; she can feel her fingernail through what feels from the inside like regular skin, iridescent shininess aside. 

Hug hug HUG hug Lucy REALLY HOPES SHE ISN'T UNCONSCIOUS AND FREEZING TO DEATH IN THE SNOW RIGHT NOW. 

They were originally supposed to stay up here for three more days but there isn't any wi-fi this far out and also Lucy plausibly needs, like, a hospital, so when Grandpa wakes up the next morning and is brought up to speed on everything he slept through the night before, he starts driving back towards civilization. 

Civilization? Saskatchewan has . . . an amount of that! Including a hospital, in this town.

Saskatchewan has PLENTY of civilization but admittedly most of it is farther south. Hello doctors, is anything wrong with his sparkly granddaughter.

They're kind of busy right now actually! Way more house fires, car accidents, and, uh, coyote attacks than they were expecting to get on Christmas. If she's not immediately deteriorating she's probably fine and should come back tomorrow. Sorry.

Coyote attacks! That’s not normal. They’re, like, around, but not aggressive, generally. 

Hey Google do you have any idea what the fuck.

The cell towers are having a bad time right now, but once she gets onto the hospital WiFi: a lot of stuff the fuck! People have been getting struck by lightning and either reappearing shortly thereafter with various weird medical conditions and superpowers or vanishing entirely. 

Also there are monsters. Tokyo is under attack by a thing everyone is calling Godzilla even though it's shaped more like an octopus. Orlando has declared a state of emergency due to swarms of raccoon-sized bees. And that's just the first page of Google News.

What.

She is going to…confirm this. The lightning superpowers bit, it would be an exaggeration to say she doesn’t care about Octozilla rampaging through Tokyo but it isn’t immediately her problem. Can she find several unrelated more or less reliable websites confirming lightning superpowers?

It sure does seem to be the consensus reality of the Anglophone internet! CNN, Fox News, everyone on BlueSky . . . if it's a lie it's a very big lie.

She didn’t check Fox News, what do you take her for?

"Honey, the internet thinks you have superpowers."

Lucy looks up from reading about rabies statistics in coyotes. “What?”

“The internet says weird lightning has been happening to people and then they get superpowers.”

“Well, I don’t have cold resistance.”