Sphere Collecting

A lady with gray hair carefully lifts a crystal sphere off of her mantle. She places it on the coffee table, making sure it won't roll away. She shuffles into her aging kitchen, stopping in front of the tarnishing mirror to fix her short, wispy hair. The lady carefully fills a porcelain kettle with cold water, produces a handful of loose leaf tea from a jar and methodically places it into the kettle. The kettle is placed onto the burner as it clicks to life. She checks the coffee machine which had been started half an hour ago. The machine is still slowly dripping the potent liquid into the pot below. She shuffles back into the living room, surveying the layout there. Her chair is placed perfectly in the sunspot and the loveseat is angled towards her chair. The sphere, thankfully, is still in place in the middle of the table. She frowns at the table, trying to figure out what is missing there. She gasps as she realizes what is missing. The lady returns with a plate of assorted cookies and places it to the side of the cookies.

The doorbell announces that her visitor has arrived. She hurries to the door and pulls it open as fast as her creaking joints allow.

“Come in, come in,” she says to the other woman,

The woman is taller than she expected. The other woman's hair is long and black, her eyes look strange, but they never stay still long enough for the old woman to see.

“Marianne, is it?” the woman has a soothing, confident voice,

She steps inside Marianne's house with a wide smile.

“I'm sorry, I wasn't expecting you so early,” Marianne's voice wavers, “The tea's still on...and I wasn't sure if you like coffee or not,”

“Coffee will be fine,” the mysterious woman answers,

The woman sits in the loveseat. Her attention is immediately on the sphere so carefully laid on the table. The kettle whistles. Marianne starts, but the woman seems unaware.

“The coffee...please?” the woman prompts,

Marianne starts again, this time towards the kitchen.

When Marianne returns, the woman is holding the antique sphere in her hand. She opens her mouth to admonish, but realizes that the woman's sphere is discolored in the middle, a sort of swirling pattern that makes it seem like it has motion. Marianne finds herself compelled to sit on the loveseat with the woman, if only to get a closer look at the intriguing pattern. The woman takes the coffee from Marianne's hands and holds the sphere in her hands a bit closer to herself.

“Do you mind?” the woman asks after taking a gulp or two,

The woman gestures towards the sphere on the table. But she's reaching for it before Marianne answers. The woman's finger no more than caresses the surface of the sphere before it begins to change. The sphere in her hand and Marianne's sphere now look identical. Both spheres contain the same swirling pattern in their cores.

“Oh, excellent,” the woman smiles,

“I don't understand...that ball has been in my family for generations...it's a priceless, one of a kind...!” Marianne cries, feeling on the verge of fainting, “It's never done that before!”

“Ooh,” the woman coos at her, sounding disappointed, “This is a sphere, not a ball. And it is just what I've been looking for!”

“How...how did you get a copy? How did you get it to do that?” Marianne sinks further into the chair,

“These spheres require a certain...touch...to work,” the woman regards her own sphere with pride, “I can't be sure which is the copy, actually. I was worried that mine was the fake. But with two...! With two I have twice the power. This...this is amazing!”

The woman's odd eyes began to take on a manic gleam that was unsettling Marianne. She sinks further into the loveseat. Suddenly, the woman stands, holding both spheres,

“I'm going to need this. Terribly sorry,”

And the woman is gone, leaving only the faint smell of coffee.

Pchoooo! For the 5/10 prompt "What if someone had the same exact one-of-a-kind object as you?"