A troubling discovery.

A few seconds after Liz went upstairs, I heard Chloe and Jess coming down. Their giddy mania had subsided, and while they were still high they looked worried. They stayed on the far side of the room and Jess spoke.

"Uh, Dan, I think there's something a little off with me."

I tried not to panic. "Yeah? What's what's going on?"

She frowned, clearing trying to articulate her concern. "I, um... I'm not... me?"

My eyes widened. What had I done? "What do you mean, you're not you?"

Chloe chimed in. "Well, Jess and I were talking and I think something weird happened to us. I think we kind of... mixed? Blended? I'm not sure, I just feel a little Jess-ier than I did."

I was too shocked to respond, so Jess spoke again. "Yeah, and I definitely have some of Chloe's memories. And I think our personalities got kinda mixed up too. So it seems like we're both kind of a Jess/Chloe blend." Chloe shrugged and nodded.

I paused, taking a moment to compose myself. "Chloe?"

"Yeah?" they both replied simultaneously, then started giggling. "I think he means you," Jess told Chloe.

"You seem to be taking this pretty well. Why aren't you freaking out? And for that matter, how did you discover this?"

Jess whispered something to Chloe, who giggled madly. Chloe spoke. "We were just talking and, uh, comparing experiences." The girls shared a knowing look and I rolled my eyes.

"Yeah? So how did that-"

"You remember when I approached you in the parking lot?" Jess asked. "You don't, of course, but I do. We were talking about that first time... you know, when we got back to the house and I made that stir fry. And you told me all of those wonderful things." Chloe was nodding along and Jess continued.

"But I also remember you approaching me in the park. I remember that I'd stopped to tie my shoe and you came to me and you spoke to me. Then I talked to Chloe, and you made me fall in love with you. But I was already in love with you, because I'm Chloe."

I was getting frustrated. "Ok, so you have each other's memories. When did-"

"I think it was when we in the hot tub," Jess interrupted. "Is that the longest you've spent with anyone like that?"

I searched my memory. "I think so. I've kept people under for an hour or more while I stole from them, but never that long." Something occurred to me. "And never more than one person at a time for very long at all."

Chloe shrugged. "So maybe this is just something you didn't know about. Maybe when our brains are all soft and gloopy, they can kinda melt together. You know, it's not just memories. Haven't you noticed that we've been behaving a little differently?"

I replied with some embarrassment. "You know, I don't really know either of you very well."

Chloe continued without acknowledging what I'd said. "Jess is much more outgoing and cheery. And I find myself a little more sarcastic and a little less bubbly. And in a weird way, we're even sort of... thinking? or like, figuring stuff out together? We're like one mind now."

My eyebrows went up. "You mean you're like, telepathic?"

"No, no," Jess reassured me. "As far as we know, we gotta communicate the old fashioned way." She slapped Chloe on the back of the end, eliciting an annoyed grunt. "It's more like the blend of Chloe and Jess is almost perfect halves, as far as we can tell. It means she and I are pretty much mentally identical."

I must have looked confused, because they offered a demonstration. Jess ran and got two sheets of paper and two markers. She and Chloe sat on opposite ends of the coffee table.

"Ok, ask us both something," she told me.

"What's your favorite color?"

"Yellow," they both said in unison. "Come on," Jess continued impatiently. "Ask us for something that takes a few sentences to describe. Like what's your first memory, or summarize the plot of your favorite movie."

"Ok, um, describe your favorite genre of novel."

The women both took a second to scrawl out answers on their sheets, then handed them over to me. The sheets were identical and the contents hinted at their dual nature.

"I like cheap sci-fi paperbacks. They're like junk food for me. That and gossip rags, sort of. Except I remember hating gossip rags and I remember not caring about sci-fi. This is a pretty weird thing to be writing down, but I'll bet it matches hers perfectly."

Even the handwriting was the same. I stared at the papers, then the two women. "So you two are, what, identical now?"

Jess chimed in. "We'll probably grow more different as each of us has different experiences, but yes, as of twenty minutes ago we're identical."

"Think of twins," Chloe added. "At birth they're identical, but as time goes on they'll wear different clothes, get different scars, have different diets. We're like that, except it's-" she tapped her temple, "-up here. And we're adult women who only had this melding very recently."

I put my head in my hands. For a second, there was silence. I needed to think and I couldn't while they bombarded me with information. "Come over here." I commanded.

"Now?" they replied in unison. I simply nodded and they approached. As usual, when they were about five feet away they stopped and I had to repeat my command. Finally I had the two sitting beside me, staring blankly ahead. I tried to think about how to handle this. I wanted to reverse what I had done but it seemed impossible.

I reached out to idly massage Chloe's left breast while I thought. She gave no response, of course. As my companions stared thoughtlessly ahead, I tried to work the situation out. Obviously there were things I still didn't understand about my power. As I felt her nipple hardening under my touch, I realized that more experimentation was needed.

Luckily, just as I began to think about how to go about learning more, Liz appeared at the bottom of the stairs.