“Here I thought I was already a world-class champion at weird things happening. Turns out, I didn't even make the Double-A Rookie League.”
As the blonde girl spoke, Zeus turned his gaze that way. Her name, apparently, was Felicity. Or Flick, as she had put it. She was one he didn't know, along with several others. This mix of total strangers and incredibly familiar, yet very different friends and allies left him, and the rest of his crew, more than a little confused and off-balance. And it was clear they weren't the only ones. Everyone here in this casino room had been equally baffled. Or at least, they appeared to be. It was still possible that one or all of them were somehow faking the whole thing. But he was leaning further and further away from that being a possibility. Everyone seemed completely lost.
Hopefully, they would soon have some answers to help that confusion. In the thirty minutes since they had first entered this room and been confronted with so many doppelgangers, a lot had happened. Zeus and his crew managed to make it clear to the… natives here that they didn’t mean any harm. At least, they seemed to accept that enough to not start an immediate fight, though it was clear that there were a lot of quite tense emotions around the whole thing.
After it was made apparent that they weren’t all going to start attacking each other anytime soon, Zeus had called down a couple more science-oriented people, Apollo and Demeter, to help figure the whole thing out. Now those two, along with Artemis, had secluded themselves into a corner of the room along with… the other Artemis, another Apollo, and a couple of humans. They were all speaking in hushed tones, occasionally doing some sort of magic test either on one another or the air around them. Whatever they were doing, Zeus just hoped they came up with an answer soon. Because the situation wasn't getting less confusing and tense.
Mercury spoke up from beside Hera, addressing that Flick girl. “You think this is weird, you should have seen what happened when we crash-landed on that planet in sector 448GY2. It tried to eat us. The planet itself, I mean. Seriously, at least your grass doesn’t have teeth. I’ll settle for this ‘haha, isn’t it funny running into people who look like us’ over ‘oh voids, it’s digesting Teuviel and the engines are being sucked into that swamp-stomach!’”
“What he means,” Hera politely put in while resting a hand gently on the man’s shoulder and squeezing, “is that we have all been through quite a lot. And while we're still not entirely certain all of you are, as they say, on the up-and-up, this is at least better than an immediate attack. I believe we are all, on both sides, confused about what has happened.” Once she had said all that, Hera turned slightly to look at the Flick girl, who had been staring quite intently at her. “Sorry, is something wrong, ahh, Felicity, was it? No, apologies, you said you preferred Flick.”
“Um, no, I mean, yes.” Flick was nodding, then shaking her head, then nodding again. She clearly couldn’t make up her mind what the right gesture was. “This is all just really weird. I mean, I look at you guys and…” Trailing off, she looked toward the quite familiar figure of Athena, who stood nearby next to a blonde human woman who looked only vaguely familiar. Which clearly meant Zeus had only met a relative of hers, as his Seosten memory made it so that he would have remembered seeing the actual woman herself with crystal clarity.
“And,” Athena finished for the girl, “we really need to get some answers about what happened here.” She focused on Zeus then, her expression tense enough that he could tell she had very complicated emotions when it came to seeing him. “You said you went through some sort of distortion in space and now you're here. But where you come from, Earth is a lot different. It sounds absurd, and yet, it seems as though the only logical explanation is that--”
“Alternate reality.” That was Apollo--Zeus’s Apollo. He and the other science-types had finally separated a bit and moved back to join the main group. “We came through a wormhole and ended up here, in an alternate reality where things are, you know, very different.”
“First we believed it might be time-travel related.” That was Demeter. “Specifically, that someone might have gone back in time enough to effect a major change, which reverberated through the present, and we on the ship were somehow spared the alterations by the energy field we passed through. Which itself somehow ended up protecting us from the explosive effects of two identical beings existing on the same world at the same time.” She gestured back and forth between both Artemises and both Apollos as though to demonstrate. “An unlikely scenario, but then, the same could be said of this entire situation, and we know that is real. So all possibilities had to be considered.”
“However,” the other Artemis announced, “we dismissed that possibility. Not because the idea of us being the time-altered reality was a bit disturbing, but because we looked and can’t find even the slightest hint of time-magic remnant energy surrounding any of you.”
“But if they were protected by that thing they found in space,” Flick pointed out, “Wouldn’t they have been shielded from any of that time-magic energy stuff you were just talking about?”
Both Artemises started speaking at the same time, before Zeus gestured for the other to go ahead, being the one who actually knew this Flick girl. So, she explained, “If time had been altered as thoroughly as this idea suggested it had been, there would still be remnants of the spell essentially floating in the air, in deep layman’s terms. Too spread out to affect anything normally, but those same energies would have detected that these people weren't altered. They would have been drawn to them the same way… ahh, the same way water is pulled down a drain when you take out the plug. These… people would have drawn in those energies. It wouldn’t have been enough to change or affect them, but we’d be able to detect it. Like radiation sticking to someone.”
“Precisely,” Demeter confirmed. “There would be some indication of such, I think. But there is not. There is nothing to indicate the time was altered in our pasts. Which leaves possibility number two, an alternate reality.” She looked to Zeus then. “The energy field we passed through was, indeed, a wormhole. We have arrived in a very different reality, where things have proceeded along a path far alien to the one we are accustomed to.”
“It’s a mirrorverse thing!” That was the small Asian girl who stood somewhat behind Flick, blurting the words out loud. “You know, like Star Trek! They travel into another reality and meet their evil duplicates. You--wait a minute.” She squinted toward Zeus. “You’re not evil, are you?”
Blinking a couple times at the question, he glanced toward his wife and the two of them shared a brief smile before he turned back to the girl and shook his head. “I certainly hope not. If nothing else, I haven't worked on my maniacal laugh for centuries. I'd be pretty rusty.”
“This is weird,” the other girl next to Flick, Caucasian with equally dark hair and what would be considered Seosten-level attractiveness, announced while making a face. “It's not just me, is it? Tell me this is weird for everyone else.”
“It’s weird,” the semi-familiar adult blonde woman agreed, without taking her eyes off Zeus. “Okay, if you're from some other reality, maybe everyone should introduce themselves, and we can all figure out where the changes happened. If you’re really here to be nice.”
Zeus started to point out that they weren’t ‘here’ to do anything, aside from hopefully find a way back to their own reality. But before the words could come out, Hera abruptly snapped a hand up to catch hold of his arm, squeezing almost painfully tightly. Her voice broke from the emotion that filled it as she blurted a single word, a single name. “Hebe?”
Hearing that name made Zeus’s head snap around. He focused his gaze on a pale, brown-haired Seosten girl who appeared to be in her thirties (barely fifteen or sixteen by human appearance), who had just emerged from behind several others to look at them silently. That figure made him realize why his wife was suddenly choked by emotion. Because he was the same. His mouth opened, but the words wouldn't come out. All he wanted to do in that moment was throw himself that way, yet his feet wouldn't move. His heart pounded so hard the man was almost certain it could be heard by everyone in the room. Finally, he managed to speak through the thick lump in his throat. “Hebe.” His voice cracked, moisture filling his eyes as he turned fully that way. “It’s you. It’s really--”
“No,” the painfully, achingly familiar figure informed them. “My name is not Hebe. It’s Theia.”
“Theia, like… Aletheia?” Hera guessed. “Of course. Of course.” There was a giddiness to her voice, and Zeus was fairly certain she had barely blinked since laying eyes on the girl. “Of course we would name her after your second wife. But… does this mean she has no children of her own to pass the name to? That poor woman.”
“Okay,” Flick blurted, “yup, very weird. This is stupidly weird. So profoundly fucking weird.”
“You don’t understand,” Zeus quietly informed them, forcing himself to keep enough of the emotion from his voice to remain comprehensible, while blinking tears from his eyes. “In our world, in our… reality, our daughter’s name was Hebe. She--” He squeezed his eyes shut tightly before opening them, taking a breath before managing to continue. “She was murdered. There was nothing we could do. We tried to save her, but she--we… couldn’t. She died in our arms, but never woke up. She never woke up so we couldn’t say… we couldn’t tell her…” A shudder ran through the man, before he found himself stepping that way, raising a hand toward the girl’s face. Hera was right beside him.
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Hebe--or rather, Theia, reflexively took a step back. Her head shook. “I am not Hebe.” She paused before raising her gaze, squinting at both of them. “And you would not have treated me the same as her if I had been your child. I may look like her, but you would consider me broken. You would have considered me an abomination for my disability. For my--”
“Locked-Pair Condition?” Hera finished for her, the emotion clear in her voice. “Maybe you know it as Anima Catenata. Chained Soul. Our--Our Hebe had that too. She was affected by LPC, the same as…” She glanced over her shoulder to where the rest of the crew was.
“The same as me,” Mercury put in. “And boy, I hope you all already knew that, otherwise the other me is gonna be pretty annoyed when it comes out.”
“Wait.” That was the other Artemis, stepping over to stand next to Theia. “You knew--you knew your daughter had SPS--I mean, Locked-Pair Condition? And you still--”
“She was our everything,” Hera informed them, not taking her eyes off Theia. “Our light and breath. Hebe was our child. She was our pride, our joy. We would never see her as lesser. Especially not after serving alongside Mercury for so long.”
“Wait, you guys already know about Mercury and-- and that made you accept--and…” Flick finally trailed off, looking utterly baffled before settling on, “Shiori, I'm starting to think we should be the ones wearing the evil duplicate goatees.”
Before Zeus could ask what that was supposed to mean, an excited voice called out, “Mama!” In that moment, a little blonde Seosten girl came charging through the room, nearly leaping into Artemis’s arms before stopping short as she saw the identical woman standing nearby. Her head tilted in confusion. “Mama? What… umm…”
“Here, baby,” Sariel leaned down, opening her arms to collect the girl, who was obviously her daughter. She rose again, while Artemis stared at her open-mouthed. It was an expression that grew even more uncertain and surprised as mother and child were joined by two blonde twins stepping up on either side.
“Tabbris, Tristan, Vanessa, this is… another me, I suppose,” Sariel managed. “Artemis. These are my children. Some of them, anyway.” As she said that, the woman glanced toward Zeus and Hera with a dark expression before focusing on her interdimensional duplicate.
Artemis, a woman who had been so devoted to her work for as long as Zeus had known her, spoke hesitantly. “Our… our mother, your mother. She--”
Sariel’s face fell a bit. “She is still afflicted. Is she..”
“The same,” Artemis confirmed. “We’ve been working on a solution, but nothing has worked.” Shaking off the emotions that brought on, she hesitantly reached out, hand trembling a bit before finding its way to the face of that Tabbris girl. “You have children here.”
“Mama?” Tabbris herself asked in clear confusion as she leaned in to the touch from her mother’s twin. “What’s going on?”
“It’s a long story,” Sariel answered both her daughter and her twin at the same time. She was obviously referring both to the existence of her children, and the presence of Zeus and the others.
“A long story indeed,” Athena agreed. “Perhaps we should all have a long discussion to get everyone on the same page. I have a feeling that there are a lot more profound and surprising differences between our universes that we should come to terms with if we are ever going to move on to determining how to send you home.”
“Yes,” Zeus murmured absently, all of his attention centered on the girl who looked so identical to the child he had tragically lost. “Going home, to our own reality.
“That is exactly what we should be doing.”
******
There were, unsurprisingly, a lot more differences than the existence of a child who was so identical to the one Zeus and Hera had lost. For one thing, they were correct about the assumption that the world-wide spell to hide the existence of non-humans was a product of their own people. As expected, in this reality they had never fully allied with humanity, leading to a much different world. One where the Seosten had created an elaborate system involving Reaper-connected artificial Bonded training and growing stronger on an Earth where they believed all non-humans were evil, in order to give them power boosts so that Seosten could eventually take them to the front lines of the war against the Fomorians (which was still raging just as much in this reality as the one Zeus and his crew had come from). It was vaguely similar to their own situation, but twisted like a dark mirror. This Crossroads and Eden’s Garden were vaguely, superficially similar to the academies on their own Earth. But seemingly far worse and more… ineffective. The Heretics, as they were called, were used as suits of armor for weapons rather than partners. In Zeus's reality, a human and Seosten would be trained together from a young age in a large group. When they reached a certain age, they would find a pairing that was best for them, from amongst a group of friends they had essentially grown up alongside. From there, the Seosten and human would choose a Natural Bondmate together, usually again from amongst those they had grown up with. The human was bonded to the non-human, and the three would form a core training group. The non-human would help teach the Seosten and Bonded learn to use the new powers, allowing them to become a much better pair. The Seosten and Bonded were partners in every way, a relationship as close as marriage, though they weren’t necessarily intimate.
But in this world? This was far different, and the idea that any version of him had been instrumental in setting up anything like this made him feel sick deep in his stomach. A feeling that didn't get any better once he understood just why Theia didn't want either him or her mother to touch her. That took the sick feeling in his stomach and turned it into a boiling sea of rage. Rage directed entirely at his own alternate self, and his wife, for what they had put their own child through. Even to the point of forcing the girl to kill her own mother to save the lives of those she cared about. For Void’s sake, they still called her a… a Lie. It wasn’t even Zeus and Hera (or rather, Puriel and Kushiel in this world) who had given the girl her name. They still clung to that barbaric practice of not giving their own child a real name if they were affected by that condition. And the things Kushiel had done to the girl, the horrors that--
This was a dark reality. That much was perfectly clear. Kushiel had been a monster who was justifiably killed by her own daughter to save lives. But not before she had apparently imprisoned and tortured Artemis--Sariel still in this world, forcing her into a… a breeding program that, while clearly producing a remarkable child in the form of this Tabbris (and others), was still a monstrous, horrific crime. And that only after Zeus--Puriel had deliberately broken up the woman's real family with the human man known as Haiden. Though there were some more complications to that whole situation that Zeus still didn’t fully understand. And Hades--Manakel here, was also dead after being killed by a combination of Sariel and the Flick girl after doing so much to hurt the people here. Even Charmeine, Nemesis in their own world, had been a threat to the children here despite being one of their Artemis’s closest friends. A threat to Artemis was enough to trigger Nemesis’s Olympian power (a gift that made her stronger and more powerful based on how much she loved the person she was protecting or hated the person she was fighting) to its full extent. But here, she had been killed by Flick while attempting to do even more horrible things.
The point was that this world had a lot of problems. Not that the one they had come from was all sunshine and roses, of course. After all, they were all still at war with the Fomorians. To say nothing of all the other threats that were always trying to carve out their own territory, or just cause as much damage as possible. And yet, seeing and hearing how this Earth was and what it went through made Zeus appreciate his own reality that much more.
Except for Theia. Seeing her, seeing and hearing how close she was to being Hebe reborn, that was the one thing that made this Earth better than the one he had come from. Yes, learning how she had been treated here, the things that have been done to her as a direct result of his and his wife’s counterparts was… painful, to say the least. So painful that he and Hera were clearly both feeling intense shame that any version of them could be capable of that sort of thing.
At the very least, they had arrived in time to prevent Fossor from carrying out his plan to abduct that Flick girl. And that was a whole new can of worms. Apparently the Necromancer was holding the girl's mother (who had once led a rebellion against the Seosten-established Heretic society) prisoner and had been for years. He'd made a point that he would come after her daughter once she was eighteen, which hadn’t happened yet. But the man had clearly attempted to bypass that little technicality by sending the girl through a time spell to a moment when she was eighteen. And even that had come at the end of an elaborate plot involving a different prisoner from Gehenna, one whom they’d had no idea was actually working with Fossor himself.
Well, if nothing else, at least this reality was full of as many complications and confusing plots as the one Zeus was accustomed to. Strange as it might have been, that gave him a sense of comforting familiarity, in a way.
Once everyone was, if not on the same page, at least in the same book about what was going on, the vaguely familiar blonde woman (her name was Virginia Dare and Zeus was very confident that he’d met her descendants) carefully spoke up. “It sounds as though the Earth you come from is a lot more united than this one.” There was a lot behind her words that she wasn’t outright saying just yet, Zeus realized.
“We still have our problems,” he murmured. “But yes, in this case at least, allying with Earth was definitely the right choice.”
“Hold on, I’m still stuck on the part where I’m a dick,” Ares interrupted. “I mean, am I still a handsome one, at least?”
“Later for that, Ares,” Zeus chided gently before focusing on this planet’s version of Athena, Apollo, and Sariel (he still wasn’t fully clear on why some of his people went by their old names and some went by the Earth versions). “What matters now is the Necromancer. If this Fossor is anything like the one from our universe, he won’t stop trying now. And he may lash out to hurt… and kill a lot more people before he’s done.”
“I would have thought what would matter to you would be getting home,” Sariel carefully pointed out, watching his reaction intently.
“That is important,” Zeus agreed, before exchanging a brief look with his wife. Hera had spent most of their time in this room staring longingly toward Theia. “But we’ve dealt with Fossor once already, we know what he’s capable of, and I wouldn’t feel right about leaving things as they are here without pitching in to help deal with your version of him. It seems to be the least we could do to help you put this world… on the right path.
“Besides, I have a fairly strong feeling that us staying in this universe for a little while could be important for everyone involved.”