Wendy stepped into the bathroom and found Kristin curled up in the tub. She wasn't crying, but there were tear stains on her face, and her eyes were squeezed shut.
"Hey, baby," Wendy said softly as she sat down next to the tub. She reached out a hand. "Let me take that neck—"
"No!" Kristin snapped as she rolled out of reach.
Wendy sighed and withdrew her hand. "So… you heard your father and me talking. I'm not angry at you. I'm just scared. You understand that, don't you, baby girl?"
"I'm not a baby. Charlotte's the baby. Right now, I'm a filly," Kristin said, turning her back to Wendy.
Wendy frowned. "Is that the way you think of yourself? A filly? Or is that just the word you heard Miss Newman use?"
"I didn't hear Miss Newman say that."
That was concerning. Did this do something to Kristin's mind?
Charles walked in and sat two piles of clothes down on the sink, one for Kristin and one for Miss Newman. He looked at Kristin, then looked at Wendy. "I tucked the other two in. Do you need me for anything?"
Wendy shook her head. "I've got this. You need your sleep before you fall over. I at least napped in the car. You can talk to Kristin in the morning."
Charles nodded, then looked at Kristin again. "Love you. Hope you feel better."
"Love you, Dad," Kristin half-grumbled, not looking at either of them.
"Kristin, why'd you put the necklace on?" Wendy asked as she turned her attention back to her daughter.
Kristin sniffled. "I don't know. I just did. It's a magic pony necklace. I wanted to try it."
"Well, you've tried it. I think you should take it off now."
"I wanna keep it on...just a few more minutes, and I'll take it off...please?"
Wendy wanted to snap but restrained the urge. "Why do you want to keep it on?"
"I don't know," Kristin half-whispered, half-sobbed.
"I'm sorry, but I need a better answer than that," Wendy stressed, worry growing.
Kristin jumped to her feet...hooves and glared up defiantly. She lifted a leg and pointed past Wendy. "Andrea is the brave one, who is going to be a secret agent or something, and this whole thing is about Charlotte! Little Charlotte and old Charlotte! I want to be special too! Can't I be special for a few more minutes, please?"
Wendy chewed on her lip, wanting to embrace her daughter but well aware of the warnings. "Kristin, you are special. Your father and I both love you so much, and so do your sisters. You don't have to be as brave as Andrea, and we don't even know what Charlotte ends up doing. You're special in your own way. You're the one I count on to keep a level head. That's good for you, and your sisters need you for that too."
Kristin turned around and sat down. "Charlotte gets to time travel. She's more special than me."
"Um...no, we don't know that, and from what I understand, that's Miss Newman's spell, not Charlotte's. You don't need to worry about what Charlotte or Andrea do in the future. You'll do amazing stuff too."
Kristin turned around. "Nuh-uh, it's Charlotte that time-travels. Miss Newman is old future Charlotte. Charlotte time-travels, and I get to be a boring lawyer."
"Miss Newman isn't Charlotte, sweetie. I think you're confused."
Kristin stomped her hoof, and the bottom of the tub cracked. "It is her! Our Charlotte saw! They've got the same birthmark! She told you! Didn't you listen?"
Miss Newman did say to listen to her kids. She didn't recall Charlotte saying anything, but it had been hectic on and off.
Wendy turned and looked back at the room. "Miss Newman!" she called out.
"You're both very loud. Try to keep it down. You'll wake the others," Miss Newman called back in a harsh whisper that managed to carry. "Yes, I'm listening, and we can discuss it later. Deal with one thing at a time." The pony then walked out of the shadows and shoved the bathroom door gently closed.
"I don't think she wants to talk about it," Kristin observed.
Wendy was staring at the door, dumbstruck at this newest revelation. "Holy fuck!"
"Mom! You aren't supposed to say bad words!" Kristin objected, flattening her ears against her head.
Miss Newman was Charlotte? Why? How? Why hadn't the older woman said something? There had been clues, now that Wendy thought about it. Cinnamon liked Miss Newman, and the only person Cinnamon liked was Charlotte. There had been that odd discussion about Charlotte's toys and a few other things that Miss Newman had known that Wendy was sure she never mentioned to the older woman. The fact she was so well acquainted with everyone in the family in the future should have been a dead giveaway.
"See! I'm a filly, and you're still paying more attention to Charlotte!" Kristin screeched.
Wendy winced. Did turning into a pony give Kristin the ability to hit higher decibels? It felt like it. Kristin wasn't wrong. One thing at a time to deal with. She'd deal with this pony, then deal with the other.
Wendy sighed. "You're right, sweetie. I need to be focused on you right now. I need you to be calm. Look down. See what you did to the tub? I know you, and I know you don't like to break things. You're usually the most careful one of you three with your things."
Kristin did look down and noticed for the first time the cracks she had put in the tub. A look of horror crossed her face, and she jerked her head up and started crying even more.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to!" Kristin sobbed.
"I know, sweetie. It's okay...well...it's not okay, but we're going to pretend it didn't happen, just this one time," Wendy said soothingly. "When this is all over, we're going to have a day just for you. We'll have cake and ice cream, and watch whatever you want to watch on TV."
Kristin's ears lifted. "Like a birthday party?"
"Like a birthday party," Wendy confirmed.
"And Andrea and Charlotte have to do what I want?" Kristin asked.
Wendy took a deep breath. "You still need to be nice to them, but you'll be the one picking the activities. You want them to be nice to you when they have special days, right?"
"I guess so," Kristin pouted.
"Good," Wendy said with relief. "Now, I know you're tired. Can you please take the necklace off? I know turning into a pony seems like it might have been fun, but I don't think you can even reach the top of the bed in your current state. You don't want to end up sleeping on the floor, do you?"
"No…," Kristin said with reluctance. She then sat down and used her forelegs to pull the necklace off.
The change was almost instantaneous, and the little girl almost lost her balance while still sitting as her form shifted back to normal, but Wendy was fast and was able to grab her before she fell over. She quickly removed the necklace from her daughter's hands and set it aside. She then started inspecting Kristin to make sure she wasn't hurt.
That lasted about ten seconds before the protests began. "Mom! I'm fine! Can I have my clothes?"
Wendy let go of her daughter but continued looking her over for abnormalities. "Are you sure you aren't feeling sick or sore? Nothing at all?"
"Just tired," Kristin asserted. "Can I have my clothes?"
Wendy kept checking. "Are you really sure?" she asked again.
"You aren't going to find anything wrong with the child. Let her get dressed so I can reclaim my necklace and get dressed as well!" Miss Newman fussed from the other side of the door.
"She's rude!" Kristin stated.
Miss Newman snorted loud enough to be heard through the door. "I'll refrain from saying how some little girl needs to keep her grubby little hands off things that don't belong to her. You've no idea what kinds of consequences will result from this."
Wendy balled up her fist. The pony had better give a thorough explanation.
She handed Kristin the proper pile of clothes. "Get dressed quickly, and I'll tuck you in. I'm going to make sure you're okay. Tell me right away if anything seems or feels wrong, okay?"
"Okay," Kristin answered and began dressing.
After Kristin finished dressing, Wendy opened the bathroom door. Miss Newman was waiting, and despite her heated words, her body language indicated she was worried. That sent a chill down Wendy's spine. She could be misinterpreting the pony's body language, but she didn't think so. The pony waited for them to exit then hurried into the bathroom.
She brought Kristin over to the bed where Charles was lying, already passed out. "Hop on up, and try not to wake your father. You'll be sleeping with us tonight."
Kristin did as instructed, getting as close to the middle of the bed as she could without waking her father, but still giving room for her mother. Wendy adjusted the blankets as best she could with one arm and kissed Kristin's forehead.
"Aren't you going to lay down, Mom?" Kristin asked as Wendy stood up.
"In a little while, sweetie. I need to speak with Miss Newman," Wendy answered.
"With old Charlotte," Kristin reminded her.
Wendy looked at the bathroom door. She could hear the shower running within. Was that really Charlotte, or were the kids letting their imagination run away with them? She couldn't bring herself to think of the older woman as an aged-up version of her daughter, not yet anyway. She needed to hear it from the woman directly. Even then…
"Maybe she is; I don't know yet. That's one of the reasons I need to talk to her," Wendy replied. "You just go to sleep. It's been a long few days, and it might be a few more long days still."
"Okay. I love you, Mom," Kristin said as she snuggled up to her pillow.
"Love you too, sweetie. I'll be with you soon."
It was several minutes of waiting for the pony to finish. Wendy sat at the small table in the room and had a cigarette while the woman got herself clean and human. Wendy had just finished the cigarette as Miss Newman emerged from the bathroom, human and dressed.
The older woman looked at the kids and Charles, then looked at Wendy. "Let me get my tablet, and we can step outside. Go ahead and bring your smokes; you'll probably need them before we're done."
Wendy stood and shoved her cigarettes and lighter into her jacket pocket. She waited while Miss Newman rushed the strange compact computer from her bags and walked to the door. The older woman opened it and gestured for Wendy to step outside first.
It was cool, but not freezing. Maybe in the low fifties. The parking lot was silent, but she could hear activity in the distance and see the interstate exit from where she stood and cars using it even at this hour.
Miss Newman stepped out and closed the door, and then walked up beside her. The older woman stood, sharing the same view for a few seconds, seeming trying to gather the will to speak.
Wendy decided to go straight in. "Is it true? Are you Charlotte?"
The older woman sighed and lifted the side of her sweater, revealing the distinctive birthmark. Wendy had overlooked it before, or perhaps the older woman had just perfectly blocked the view of it with her arms, but there was no mistaking it. That was Charlotte's birthmark, not something similar.
"I should remind you about what I said about divergent timelines," Miss Newman said as she lowered her sweater again. "Charlotte will never be me. That ship sailed the second those ponies showed up hunting her. It would be easier for everyone if we both treated each other as no relation. This is awkward enough."
"But until they showed up, you were who she would end up as?" Wendy asked in a low voice.
Miss Newman was silent for a few seconds before answering. "That would be correct, but there's no point discussing might-have-beens. There only is what is. She will never be me. She might end up looking similar, but she'll be a different person who lived a different life— at least from age six on. Have you tried remembering details from when you are six? I'm sure you can remember some things, but it's patchy."
Wendy tried to figure out how to respond to that. "So… anything about Charlotte I should know about? Bad things I can head off?
The older woman laughed. "Being a concerned parent? That's fair. I'm not going to go into much since you are only responsible for her till she's off to college, but I can give some tidbits, and you can decide what to do with them. Do try not to be too overbearing, okay?"
"I'll try," Wendy answered.
Miss Newman sighed and looked up at the sky. "Let me see. As a teen, I went through a goth phase. I was an angsty teenager, mad at the world because I wasn't pretty enough or popular enough. I took to wearing black everything, dyed my hair black, wore black makeup, listened to music that involved people moaning about life is pain, started smoking, and behaved overdramatic about everything. I didn't do drugs or drink much alcohol, so there was that. I never stole anything, not even your cigarettes. The first whiff that you had I was smoking, you just started buying them for me— you'd already gone through both Andrea and Kristen stealing cigarettes from you until you realized it was futile to try to stop them. Honestly, I wasn't that bad a teen. I kept my grades up enough to get a scholarship to a college. It was a phase, one I outgrew. I went through a lot of them."
Wendy groaned. "All three of you picked up my bad habit? I've always worried about that."
"Yet you keep on smoking," Miss Newman said with a grunt, then shrugged. "All three of us quit, and long long before you did. I'm not sure exactly when either Andrea or Kristin quit, but I quit when I went to college."
"Well, that's good, I suppose," Wendy said with some relief.
Miss Newman pursed her lips and rubbed at her palms nervously. "Since it was brought up, and because I wanted to make sure to tell you anyway, my version of you got lung cancer. She got lucky. The spell virus that turns people into ponies saved her. Dad was already starting to make arrangements for your funeral before the transformation ended up healing you; it was that close a call. I doubt you can quit anytime in the next few days or even weeks— believe me, I get it, especially with all the stress you're currently under— but take my warnings about you needing to quit seriously."
That hit Wendy like a slap in the face. "I-I'll take that under advisement."
The old version of her daughter nodded. "I'm not going to get into the gory details of my life as an adult. You had little to do with most of it, but there is a matter involving me and Charlotte that I want to address, one of my biggest regrets."
Wendy tensed up. "What is it?"
The older woman looked down at the ground, avoiding making eye contact. "Andrea and Kristin are attracted to men, but Charlotte isn't. She prefers female company, or at least she will when she is older."
"Oh…" Wendy replied, again at a loss at how to respond. "Well… she's my daughter, and I love her no matter what."
"I know you will," Miss Newman replied. "The thing is, things played out very badly for me because of it, and I prefer to save her and you that pain."
"I don't understand how that could make a difference," Wendy asserted.
Miss Newman took a deep breath. "People are more accepting of that kind of thing in my time, but when I was coming of age, there was still a big stigma against it, and the one who put the most stigma on me was me. I refused to accept that about myself, and when I started college, I did something stupid to prove I wasn't a lesbian. I got involved with a jerk of a guy, and I got pregnant."
Wendy gasped. "Oh, no! You did seem too young to be—"
"I'm older than I look," Miss Newman cut in. "Anyway, I ended up getting an abortion. I didn't tell anyone about it until many years later. I also ended up feeling a ton of guilt about that, and that was the time I got highly religious."
It did seem odd that this version of Charlotte was religious when Wendy knew she didn't raise her kids that way. This explained that. "And that's a regret? Sorry, I don't understand. Is it the abortion you regret?"
The other woman shook her head sadly. "I do regret the abortion, but it isn't the big thing. What I regret is that around that time, my relationship with the rest of the family got very frayed. It got so frayed that I cut you off. From around the time I was twenty-three up until around fifty, we didn't talk or communicate in any manner. You were dead to me. It took so long to reconnect, and I feel terrible for all the time we lost. If there's something I would go back and do over again concerning you and Dad, it would be that."
Wendy drew herself up, telling herself she wasn't going to cry. "I'll do my best to make sure the same thing doesn't happen again. Thank you for telling me."
Miss Newman let out a long breath. "That's enough about me. Kristin is who we need to be concerned about now and how much she fucked things up for herself by putting that necklace on."
Wendy gulped. "Tell me; I need to know."
The older woman turned a stern gaze on her. "Yes, you do. First thing, Kristin has magic now, and there's nothing anyone, including me, can do to undo that. It is a side effect of having that particular spell used on her."
"Magic like you?" Wendy asked.
Miss Newman shook her head. "Human magic, and the thing about human magic is you never know what it does until it starts doing something, if it does anything. However, with how long she had that necklace on, I'm willing to lean on the side hers is going to do something, and that's bad, very very bad."
Wendy wet her lips with her tongue. "Okay, you can't undo it. What do I do?"
"Pray?" Miss Newman answered with a mirthless chuckle. "Her having magic is bad enough, but what happens when the government finds out about what she can do? They'll make a science experiment out of her, depending on how dramatic the magic manifests."
"How...how dramatic can it get?" Wendy asked, afraid to find out.
"It varies widely. Human magic like mine is rather tame; I just see things and am lucky enough before it first manifested to have learned what I'm looking at. However, there are far worse case scenarios. I have a niece who, when her magic manifested, had all sound go haywire around her, and it never stopped until she finally learned how to control it. I know of a man who had an aura around him all the time that caused everyone who came within fifty feet of him to have crippling anxiety, and he could control you through your emotions. I know a woman who could suck all the heat out of a room by stepping into it; she could turn a sauna into an icebox in seconds. I met a woman who could cause excruciating pain with the briefest of touches. These types of things Kristin wouldn't ever be able to hide, and she won't have ponies there to help her learn to control whatever it is she ends up doing. You can't predict human magic until it has been used."
Wendy started to cry. "And you can't do anything to help her?"
"I'm not even going to be here for it. I only have a few days here, and then I'm pulled back home, never to return," Miss Newman said firmly. "What Kristin will do won't happen right away. At the earliest, it will be a few months till something happens. At the latest, I give it till she's thirteen or fourteen at most. Her magic is in her, and it isn't going anywhere, but it needs time to mature, just like her. I'm telling you now; there won't be a warning; it will just happen at some point."
"Oh God," Wendy whispered. What were they going to do? Did they need to keep Kristin locked away from everyone until the magic finally manifested? What good would that even do if they had no idea how to deal with it once it started? They couldn't lock her away forever, and that would be cruel.
"The other big issue is she is now effectively immune to the virus that ends up transforming people into ponies," Miss Newman continued. "The way its designer set it up wasn't intended for working on people who already had magic. If I were more powerful, I might be able to come up with a way of fixing it so she could get infected, but I'm not."
Wendy gave the woman a confused look. "Is it important that she transform? Is it...is it something like what happened to the other me?"
"A health problem?" Miss Newman asked, then shook her head. "No, nothing like that. All of us had lives when the virus came, families. Andrea was the only one in her immediate family that caught the virus; none of her kids, grandkids, or her husband did. Guess what happened to her marriage when she transformed and her husband didn't?"
"Oh no…" Wendy said, crying again.
Miss Newman nodded. "In Kristin's case, everyone in her immediate family did, all of them, down to the grandkids. If you are asking how Andrea's family got completely skipped and Kristin's took a full hit, the reason was it hit different regions of the country harder than others, and they were living in two very different places. Anyway, it's no guarantee that they'll end up with the same people, but if they do...Kristin's perfect marriage might be over. And I mean perfect marriage. I have never seen two old ponies like her and her husband be so lovey-dovey with one another as they are. Married for forty-five years, and they still act like every day is their honeymoon. I swear rabbits screw less than those two."
Wendy took a step back. "I didn't need to hear that last part. Although I'm thrilled to hear it goes so well… or at least, that it did. What do I do to make this better? With that or with the magic or anything with Kristin?"
"Sometimes we make a bad decision, and it screws us over for life," Miss Newman replied and sighed. "Kristin made one of those today, and there's nothing to be done. I'm sorry. I really am."
Wendy broke down crying again.