A seam in the multiverse

You opened your eyes, feeling a cold mist clinging to your skin. Startled, you sat up, looking around at your alien surroundings before bothering to know what happened with your new self. You rubbed at the back of your neck as you glanced out at the sandy landscape, but the sky was a strange purplish hue, with trails of energy swirling like an aurora in the upper atmosphere. Beyond it, where the stars should have been, were criss-crossing lines of light instead, long stretches of pulsing energy that looked familiar, somehow...

Part of you knew exactly what you were looking at.

Those were the other timelines of the multiverse.

Your heart started to beat faster, as you put a hand to the side of your head, seeing the impossible in the sky. The cold mist continued to cling to you, anchoring you to wherever you had ended up. You spun around, getting to your knees and then to your feet, looking around at the sand and water that stretched out in every direction until colliding with some sort of impenetrable fog in the distance, with streaks of lightning weaving through the strange mist.

As you walked along the shore, the world shifted and changed, much like the dream you'd experienced recently. Landmarks had been scarce from your original position, but as you stepped forward, strange stone formations seemed to come into existence, whole mountains in the distance seemed to rise and fall. When you came closer to a nearer cluster of rocks, you watched it carefully as you saw cross-sections of the stones change depending on your distance to them. You could see within them, at the fossils and crystals contained within, but they disappeared the closer you came.

This was all wrong... it was like you were looking at the wrong dimensions in the universe! Your mind was trying to make sense of this upper-dimensional existence in a way that the majority of the bodies within you could understand, though that was merely a problem with having eyes, a sense which seemed to betray you in this strange world. When you closed them, you could 'feel' a more complete world, thanks to Ela's presence within you, seeing the walkable paths to reach any of the physical objects you could sense nearby.

You thought it would feel so natural after this, with the combination. But it seems that there had been a slight miscalculation in your combination of six bodies into one. But, that didn't feel correct either! You felt everyone inside you as if they were you. You practically took roll call within your mind--Ela and Zoe were thrilled to be combined, Amanda and Chloe were curious, Kazumi was just happy to be included in whatever was going on. And you, of course, felt comfortable in this body, this... Angela form.

You opened your eyes again, lifting an arm at the water, which rose up to create a reflective surface so you could examine yourself. You felt mostly complete, but... your eyes, in particular, gave you pause. They slowly shifted between multiple colors as you looked closely, between greens and blues and browns and pinks from all the bodies within. Your wavy hair was solidly pink, evidence of Ela's presence as your outermost exterior. You ran a finger through it, testing its incredible softness. Your form still felt like a dream come to life, at least... much of your facial features were borrowed from your original appearance, although modified or exaggerated by the bodies contained within, with hints of Kazumi or Amanda for example. Ela clearly favored you as the representative of the body, although from the neck down, your frame was more like a mix of Laura and Zoe's impressive shapes, wrapped in a simple pink and faded mint-green dress of some sort, with multiple layers to the fabric that fit you so perfectly.

Perhaps that had been the problem. A perfectly unbiased body maybe would've woken up to a harmonious combination of six forms in one, but Ela's bias toward you, maybe because of the nanite connection, must have thrown things off! You still didn't know if you believed it... because you still felt like a perfectly capable person in your merged form, but this personality for Angela was undoubtedly dominated by the Emily side of things. The fact that Emily still came to mind when you thought 'you'... made it feel like maybe it wouldn't be fair to call yourself Angela, not yet. You were an augmented Emily, at the moment.

As you wandered, you played over the events of last night in your mind, only ever briefly distracted by your mesmerizing body and the way the dress shifted against your smooth skin before returning to the thoughts of what might've gone wrong. Even though you stepped through the combination process in your mind, piece by piece, you couldn't find anywhere that you did anything wrong. Every step you had taken should've worked!

Unless... there was outside influence. Something else affected you during the process, and somewhere in the process of your combination, the result had an adverse effect on your combination, going so far as to throw you outside of your typical three-dimensional space, putting you in this... void between worlds, it would seem.

With that thought in mind, you closed your eyes and 'looked' around again. You felt outwards, trying to get a grasp for the range of this sense of the world. It seemed like you could stretch quite far, and in the distance to your left in the three dimensional space, and then... up, or something, in this other dimension, there was something here, a massive metallic object. A ship, perhaps? It was like something out of science fiction, the size of it like a small city, but clearly was a single oval object, complete with a recognizable shape such as thrusters and the like embedded within it. It would have been impossible to locate without your extra-dimensional 'vision', but you knew how to reach it.

Immediately, you turned and began your journey towards it. It was miles away, but there was nothing else to grab at your attention like this unusual object. You were transfixed on understanding whatever this metallic structure was, convinced that it had something to do with your presence here now that you'd ruled out mistakes on your part in the combination.

You walked as far as you could toward your destination, eyeing the ever-morphing landscape for dangers or other perils as you strolled along. If you had taken other paths along the way, you could've ended up walking right off of cliffs or into the middle of water that moments before hadn't been present there. Now came the hard part... shifting along a dimension you couldn't see normally. You seemed to just know how to do such things, however, as you seemed to just twist upon yourself, disappearing into nothingness in one place, and reappearing in another.

The person whom you appeared before in this different position was not thrilled by your company, startled by your sudden presence! To be fair, you were startled as well, as the last time you tried to view this location, you hadn't seen someone else in the area. As far as you had known, the metallic structure was empty. But now you saw this silver and white massive craft before you, and between you and it was a woman completely in strange shiny blue armor, looking almost like a beetle or something. Her instinctual response to your sudden presence apparently was to slash at you with some sort of strange blade of energy, causing you to stumble back into that extra-dimensional space briefly to avoid being sliced in two! You popped out of that space completely, appearing a good deal further back, hands up.

"Whoa, whoa! Hold on, I'm not here to fight you! I'm just trying to figure out what the hell is happening!"

The other woman seemed to relax a bit, after looking more closely at you. It was like she recognized you, shutting off her energy blade. "You and me both, friend." Her helmet retracted from her form, and snowy white hair cascaded out from their former confines, tumbling down to her shoulders. The girl's glowing blue eyes and blue streaks of energy along her cheeks struck you as particularly strange, as did the slight glittery appearance to her skin. Something felt familiar about her instantly, as you felt a presence in her that was in particular not unlike your own, something akin to your nanites. But there was more... just as she recognized you somehow, you recognized her in kind. Because her face looked so similar to your own...

A you, from an alternate reality, stepped forward, extending a hand in greeting, though her eyes and face remained fixed in a serious expression. "I'm Dr. Juno Ternion, and I'm sorry to tell you that I have no idea why we're here. I thought maybe something had gone wrong with the quantum reactor on my ship to bring me here, but I've taken it on three solo trips to various locations in the solar system and back, everything followed theories perfectly. I know every inch of my colony ship, nothing about it should've caused this anomaly."

You looked up again at the ship, realizing now that it was half buried in the sand, or it appeared to be. That may be another trick of this multiverse space, given that this ship, dubbed Alexandria II if the painted name on the side of it was an accurate indication, appeared to be incredibly large. Certainly more than a one-person craft.

You looked around, coming to new revelations after listening to Juno's words. "I'm Em--Angela. I recently became like this, myself, but my own, uh, combination process couldn't have been the cause of both of us being here. At most, it would've just affected me." You turn around, looking out at the sandy landscape once more. "I know you're me, kind of, so I'm guessing you're from one of these alternate dimensions. And if you didn't intentionally pull me here, and I didn't pull you here, then something else may have targeted us. And, there might be more of... well, us, out here somewhere."

Juno nodded, crossing her arms. "I didn't expect to come across another, but I've not been here very long, myself. All of that seems possible, and if you're right... well, I hope you're not right. Because clearly you've got some unique abilities, not unlike myself, and a gathering of more like us could mean a lot of things. I doubt we're being invited to an annual Hideki barbecue, to say the least."

You closed your eyes, feeling outward again with your senses, this time looking for little dots that might represent other life, other people like you. You shook your head. "I can't feel anybody else around here, though it's not easy to get a good idea. I only knew about this place because of the ship."

Juno motioned toward her ship, and started walking. "If you understand the dimensional domains here, then maybe you can come aboard and help me recalibrate my sensors. Maybe we'll find more like us, or at least the real source of this dilemma."

You hesitated. Should you trust... you? This Juno person, you felt traces of yourself, Zoe, Chloe all inside, but the nanites and another entity--the exosuit itself--were wild cards to you. She could be benevolent as you are, since you would never hurt anyone and you would hope your multiverse counterparts wouldn't either! But it all felt rather convenient, this one other person around here who has a 'colony ship', something filled with extremely advanced technology, you could just sense it. How could you know that Juno wasn't just trying to trap you for her own purposes? She's a combination of multiple beings herself, what if she would want to combine with you and grow even stronger, and she was just luring you here? Maybe this is all just an illusion, and your combination process just caught the attention of some extra-dimensional creature tricking you into being its prey. If so, it was very convincing...

Following Juno could be a massive opportunity, or a total disaster.