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.”

“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."

"Thanks! You too!" 

She goes back to the camper. She...wishes she had gotten to try the thing it feels like she could do, but that would have been a long shot even if she had said "can I" instead of "probably I shouldn't," which was the objectively correct thing to say. 

She peers out the window for aggressive and/or oversized wildlife, vaguely wishing they were Americans with guns. 

A really fucked-up-looking bird with enormous claws flies overhead, but it doesn't find the fast metal cans below an appealing target.

Here's more cop cars! This section of highway is CLOSED it is NOT OPEN you have to GET OUT AT THIS EXIT.

Oh boy. They will get out at this exit. 

Lucy peers out the window REALLY HARD to see if she can get any hints about why this stretch of highway is closed. 

There's an overturned semi and a fire truck. The fire truck has the hose out and there's wet pavement but no visible fire.

Now they're on a winding back road that was not even slightly meant for this much traffic. It's basically a parking lot.

Country road, take me home, to the-- some kind of giant fucked up land fish the size of a school bus is lumbering towards them. It has a mouth full of needle teeth and grey eyes full of malice. Some people try getting out of their cars and running away on foot.

It feels the same as that one guy.

It gets within ten yards and she pulls. 

It doesn't like that. It gets--wobblier. Less sure of itself. It swats at a Toyota with an ill-defined limb and dents the roof; the driver screams. 

A guy in a pickup has been doing a seventeen-point turn to get pointed the right way and clear of any obstacles; he goes for a ramming attack.

SHE WAS REALLY HOPING IT WOULD GET SMALLER HONESTLY.

It seems to have stayed the same size while acquiring higher standards for physical plausibility. The pickup connects and it falls down in a heap of fin-tentacles and attempts to grapple.

They don't have a gun but they do have a fire axe. Lavinia gets out of the vehicle and attempts to apply the axe to tentacles that appear to be successfully grappling the pickup. 

The fish-thing loses some tentacles, bleeds purplish blood everywhere and groans horribly! The pickup, now less grappled, reverses and comes back for another pass as soon as Lavinia's clear, and when it comes to a stop atop the fish-heap the fish-heap stops too.

"Are you alright?"

The pickup driver hollers in triumph and then rolls down the window to stare at Lavinia like she's the dawn of a new age. "I think so! Who are you? My name's John MacArthur."

"Lavinia Woodrow! No damage to your truck?"

"This old girl's seen worse." He attempts to back off the monster corpse and discovers he's having a traction problem: its ribs are caught in his undercarriage and three of his tires are on gore instead of pavement.

"Hm. Don't suppose you've got any kind of a towing setup? I might've gotten hung up a bit." This is not what he wants to be admitting to the beautiful brave woman with an axe but what can you do.

"No...but we've got some rope. I bet we can jury-rig something."

"Thank you ma'am." 

The combined efforts of John and the Woodrows and the camper succeed at getting the pickup off of the land fish. There's not much hope of getting the land fish fully off the road, but it's far enough over that people can drive half on the shoulder and get around it. Traffic behind their little altercation is backed up well beyond the highway off-ramp and a space has opened up ahead of them.

"Thanks again, folks, and I'd best be getting on. God keep you."

"And you as well." 

Nothing troubles them for the next hour or so, until they come to an underpass where chunks of rock and dirt ranging in size from "grape" to "baseball" are intermittently flying around and past and through the opening seemingly at random. Cars attempt the passage one at a time, mostly making it through unscathed but some getting cracked windows or dented doors.

...Lucy could tell where Muscles Guy and Landfish were without actually seeing them. Can she tell--yes. 

She scrambles out of the camper again where they're stopped on the shoulder and attempts to creep towards whatever is causing this without getting whacked. 

If she stays low to the ground she can get close enough to hear muffled sobbing and moaning from the shadows at the upper corner of the underpass.

OH NO. 

She dashes towards the sounds. 

There's a teenage boy scrunched up in the angle where the sloped concrete meets the underside of the road, clutching his head and crying. He shifts a little when he hears her approach, but doesn't quite manage to look at her.

"Hi," Lucy says gently. "Are you okay? Do you need help?"

If he manages to look up at her, she looks like someone gave Bernini a pile of mostly-white gemstones and told him to go nuts. And then dressed the resulting statue in extremely normal modern clothing. 

"Hurts"

"I can't make it stop"

...Lucy will attempt the PULL action. 

Some of the farther-away chunks of dirt and rocks abruptly become subject to gravity, and the kid makes a relieved sound.

"Thanks"

"You shouldn't be out here, you could freeze to death."