Despite my worries, Amanda/maybe-Faith didn’t disappear when I realized she wasn’t real. I don’t fully understand my “powers” but it was uncommon for an anomaly to be fully understood and quantified anyways. They, and me now I suppose, inherently defied measurement and categorization as a rule of thumb. Maybe you could figure out a radius of effect, or the time something takes to do something, but even that was only true if the rules remained consistent. Said consistent ones are usually the types of phenomena or entities that are contained or destroyed, with the more nebulous ones like me being remarkably more difficult to pin down.

That made me wonder about how I’d be rated. It definitely wasn’t the most accurate measurement, but a lot of scientists tend to measure anomalies based on two scales, consistency and measurability. A specter that drives people mad then kills them in uniquely horrible ways within a month of being spotted for example, was consistent but not very measurable, with most descriptions of their capabilities being anecdotal. People that suddenly drop dead with no statistically measurable rhyme or reason with a supernatural curse with several measurable “stages of illness” was measurable, but not consistent.

There were separate scales for containability, danger, usefulness, and type, but these two scales were the first rough measurements that any eidologist could make about a new anomaly. The biggest issue with the scale, other than its arbitrariness, was that an anomaly was almost never immeasurable and inconsistent because if it was, they would have a hard time even classifying it as a single “thing”. The poor eidologists really have it rough with all of humanity relying on them to explain the unexplainable.

“You know, it’s interesting how the original Amanda’s world used the same term for anomaly scientists.”

Amanda/Faith(?) shrugged. “It was about as much of a coincidence as your entire languages lining up. Only about half of the people who end up here write in English, and a tenth use languages you’re pretty sure never existed on earth.”

Now that I’d realized she was fake created with my spooky powers, memories that I didn’t realize were muddled had cleared up again. A lot of the topics that I had talked about with Amanda/Faith(?) were actually just regurgitated from the weird not-memories I had of my time acting as Vincent with bits of embellishment and guesswork added in.

“So, what do you think? Where do I range on the anomaly scale?”

She briefly looked up from the Hyperdimensional Navigation System and hummed in thought. “Definitely more erratic than consistent, maybe -80% on that axis, and considering you’re a Phantasiai that near automatically puts you as more undefinable than understandable, maybe -60% on that scale”

My eyes lit up. “So, if I wanted to I could prank the eidologists I could probably run around pretending to be a bunch of different anomalies.”

She rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Yes, yes you could.”

“Buuut I won’t, unless I need to. I’ll find other ways to quench my boredom.” I smirked.

“I’m proud of you but do you really have to put it that way?” She blushed cutely.

“Yes.” I nodded smugly.

She was about to retort until a beep sounded out from the HNS. “Oh, sh- it’s right here, eighty seconds!”

I ran over to her and unzipped her bag. In there was our shined brand new doohickey I affectionately named “the penetrator” despite the redhead’s protest. I agreed, it wasn’t the best name because it was more about spreading and holding the holes open than penetrating, but I had to call it something.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

In any case, Amanda/Faith(?) didn’t really know how to use it right away, but due to her general knowledge in the field, she was at least able to figure out how to operate the thing after a few weeks of playing around with it, even if she didn’t understand how it worked. Or to put it in her words, “It’s like if someone pulled off a world record of six backflips in a row. It didn’t think it would be possible, but I get the idea of it.”

The timer held no mercy, forcing us to work together to set it up faster than we had ever dared to before for fear of fucking it up. When I clicked the last “confirm” the screen lit up, and the whole thing folded in a really weird way that made my brain hurt, like a piece of it had turned into a 2D image of itself, like a video on a phone, but only partially. Then there was a satisfying “kachunk!” noise as forcep-looking things kinda just disappeared from view. Ow, fuck, my brain really doesn’t like that.

And then a symbol I didn’t recognize appeared on the screen with a check mark, and the stands folded into the device so the big chonky device was hovering in midair around a distorted cube of spacetime that similarly hurt to look at. This was the first time either of us had seen the device successfully used, but there was no time to gawk as there was six fucking seconds left on the clock. Amanda/Faith(?) grabbed my hand and shouted “I calculated wrong, it’s not on the floor, so we have to jump! 3, 2, 1!” I didn’t bother arguing, and leaped into the ominous cube together, hand in hand.

I soon learned that whatever the fuck my Vincent persona was going on about with feeling the other dimenions was either bullcrap or it didn’t extend to me. As, despite reality itself distorting around me in ways I couldn’t comprehend, I didn’t feel so much as a thing. In slightly longer than a blink, I was in one area, and then I was in the next, collapsing unceremoniously onto the pavement face first.

“Ow. Motherfucker!”

I touched my nose, and luckily the fingers didn’t come away bloody. The redhead landed next to me at the same time, so I grabbed her hand and stood to pull her up. A “plonk” sounded behind us, and we looked back to see the device standing on its little tripod thing exactly like it was before, only on this side of reality. I didn’t bother trying to comprehend it.

Amanda/Faith(?) didn’t bother looking, instead dashing ahead and spinning around like a kid in a toy factory, or a country girl coming to the big apple for a grand adventure. “Is this… This is it!” She laughed.

I smiled despite not understanding a single thing, “This is it?”

She didn’t immediately respond, rapidly tapping away at her HNS with a fervor I’d never seen before, brown eyes glinting with barely contained excitement.

“Yes, yes, yes! This is it! We’re here! My homeworld!”

I raised an eyebrow incredulously, looking around, “Here?” All around my I could only see a mass of vehicles stretching across the road in a single direction. I stepped up on a car but yep, there wasn’t even a horizon, just a gradual blur as light refracted in the distance far beyond where it would if it was a planet. It almost fucked with my proprioception, seeing something stretch out that long.

“It isn’t my homeworld, no, but we’re right here! We’re on the exact 4D plane we need! We just have to walk in the direction HNS points us now, and we’ll end up on Earth!”

I hopped down and walked up to her. “Really? We don’t have make another jump? How does that work?”

She shrugged. “Anomaly bullshit. There’s just an old highway that for some reason, if you walk or drive down it, you end up in this hyperdimensional plane. It’s one of the only accessible, stable entrances to this place.

I laughed and tackled Amanda/Faith(?) with flying hug. “Helllll yeah!!!” She squeaked as I braced myself, hoisted my little scientist up, and twirled her around in a pirouette. “We did itttt!”

“Don’t jinx it, you dummy!!!” She complained, but she was laughing too.

“Oop-” My back twinged, and I lost my balance, both of us falling to the floor in a crumpled heap.

I winced, “Ow. Yeah, not doing that again.” We both looked at eachother, and burst out into laughter again, hugging each other tight. My mood only dimmed when I caught sight of the lifeless ball of Light hanging in the sky, but even that couldn’t kill my smile.

The road ahead was long. But we were here. As long as we kept walking, we’d reach the finish line.