There was a black limousine parked outside. It was impossibly sleek; so much so that it had blended in completely with the dark concrete, camouflaging like a chameleon. She only noticed it now because the door was slightly ajar. A single leg, pale and narrow, protruded out.

“You have to do it now,” Valerica whispered urgently, pulling back from Momo’s cheek. “I won’t be able to help you anymore, darling. You have to do this one yourself.”

Momo couldn’t look away from the window; couldn’t turn to face her mentor, even as she was begging to be faced. Momo's eyes felt pinned to that gauzy glass, her neck fixed in position like it was sitting between two slabs of metal. Valerica’s words fell muffled and quiet on her eardrums. She felt an unnatural pull to that limousine like the gravity on Jupiter.

“I…” she mumbled, willing her lips to speak, but Valerica was already gone. Not that Valerica had ever really been there, necessarily. It was only her apparition that had vanished. Her true body was probably somewhere far away and safe, Momo hoped. A hideaway where no one would ever look, like the attic of a dusty old Victorian, or an unwieldy field of tall grass in the middle of an Appalachian bald.

“Honey, are you good? That was just one shot,” the Viper’s viper bartender said to her, pulling her from her stupor. He was looking at her with a mixture of pity and annoyance. “Huh. There, finally got your attention. I thought I was going to have to get you escorted out. You’ve just been sitting there talking to yourself like a mad woman. Not that having hallucinations is a crime here or anything. Half the people I serve are half-in, half-out, so to speak. But it sure is distracting to my work environment to have you be so melodramatic.”

“S–sorry,” Momo stuttered, blinking fast. Had he not noticed Valerica? Maybe Momo actually was going insane. She felt the need to confirm what she was seeing, and pointed out the window. “Do you see that limousine out front? The black one?”

“A black limousine?”

He moved his head languidly forward so he had a good view out the window, then narrowed his eyes. Momo waited with baited breath for his conclusion; she could still see the limousine clear as day. There was a valet standing outside of it now, obscuring the woman’s leg. The valet had on a suit and tie, navy blue, and was holding a fancy black umbrella.

“Shit,” the snake hissed, his eyes going wide as he jerked backwards. “Shit, shit… Sandy! This is a code goddamn S, Sandy! Clear this place out!”

Sandy, as it happened, was a giant bear—and also the head of security. After the bartender blew the alarm, the next few minutes flew past Momo like a paper bag in the wind. The patrons rushed out in chaotic waves, the lights flared briefly—red, blue, yellow, white—before dying out, draping the room in a messy, cluttered darkness. Trash littered the floor. Unfinished drinks sat on tables and countertops. On the stage, Sera’s paper-carcass lay in pieces. Her head lolled over the side of the stage, tumbling into the darkness.

Momo shot out the back exit, finding herself by the garbage bins. Racoon men were there, chatting absently as they feasted on the evening’s trash. They were the only people left who hadn’t run for the streets, or glided up and out of Nether Shibuya in search of a different replicant area to dance the night away in.

“[Focus],” Momo cast, urgency pumping through her veins as she stumbled behind the dumpster. The raccoons gave her a suspicious look.

“This is our garbage, alright?” one said, and she nodded obediently.

She had one singular focus, and that was not their leftover anchovy pizza.

Fetching the Wraith Box from her pocket, she cupped it in her hands. It was vibrating now, a little faster than when she arrived, but still not cataclysmically. She had time. Minutes, probably.

“That … that … diabolical piece of...”

Glass shattered. Sera’s paper-mache head came rocketing out of the nightclub and onto the blacktop. It rolled and rolled until it settled near the raccoon-men’s feet, its hollow eyes staring up at them. They looked at it for a moment, looked between each other, then tossed the anchovy pizza aside. They vanished into the streets not a moment after.

“I swear to Morgana, I’ll have each one of her bodies hung until I find the real one. Then I’ll trap that one in a little cage—a bird cage, made for parrots—and make her sing me lullabies.”

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“Ms. Sera, I don’t think she’s here anymore,” another voice addressed her quietly. It was probably the valet. “But we’ve got a good trace on her coordinates. The catwalk communicator we planted on her suggests she’s somewhere around…”

“I don’t have time for Valerica,” Sera hissed back. “What I need is for you to track down that filthy horned-prodigee of hers. If we don’t haul her back to where she came from, all of this will be for naught. Do you understand? Am I making myself clear enough for you, Jeffrey?”

“Very clear, madam.”

“Considering you’re still standing,” Sera said, and her voice adopted a chilling quality. “And not on your knees begging for my forgiveness, I don’t think I’ve been clear enough.”

“Ms. Sera, please, forgive my tone—”

The inside of the nightclub sounded like a demolition zone. Momo couldn’t see exactly what was transpiring inside, but the central emotion was most definitely fury.

A new wave of dread washing over her, Momo looked at the trembling box in her hands. Sera was liable to come bursting out of those nightclub doors any minute now, and if she laid her eyes on Momo… well, it didn’t sound like it would lead to any pleasant conclusions.

She needed to find a safe place to finally disassemble this thing.

“[Rift Hands – Create Portal]”

A portal etched itself into the back of the dumpster. Momo didn’t wait for it to grow on its own terms. She drove her hands through it, forcibly peeling back the edges with her fingers until there was room enough for her to squirm through; she shoved with her torso, shimmied through her wings, until she was flung once again into the milky blackness of the between-space.

Her head promptly collided with the front of her old Toyota. She groaned.

“Stupid thing…” she groaned.

She waded around in the black, dazed, desperate to find a new world to stow away in. As much as she’d love to get comfy inside her old, crusty Yaris, she knew it wasn’t wise. If Sera caught her in this between space—in the darkness that existed between all of the replicant areas—she’d have nowhere to hide. And Momo was quite fond of hiding.

But given that Sera was quite fond of finding, Momo decided she needed to create a red herring. Inspired by Valerica’s [Body Double] skill, she remembered that she had, in fact, acquired her own version of that very skill. It didn’t work quite the same way, but it would accomplish the same key effect, she hoped: distraction.

She reviewed the skill briefly before casting it.

[Body Double]: Using your mastery over Nether manipulation, you can temporarily pull a version of yourself from a different dimension. Given that it is a real person, you cannot mind-control this double. It will simply act as if it was you, with all the accompanying personality traits and quirks. This skill works within a 30 foot radius, and lasts for 10 minutes. When the double is on the verge of being killed, it will despawn.

Dear god. This could end very badly.

Unfortunately, Momo didn’t have time for catastrophizing. This was already a catastrophe-in-progress. She cast the skill, holding her breath as she watched a figure materialize in front of her in the dark. First came the face, with her rounded, chipmunk cheeks, then her eyebrows, perpetually raised, then, well, the rest of her.

In a matter of seconds, she was facing her longest-time rival. Herself.

Other-Momo was dressed in an outfit she recognized immediately. It was her Mallmart employee uniform. Holy shit. This was Momo pre-college, in the most social time of her life—when her singular friend was her 56 year old coworker—as opposed to previously, when her only friend was her cat.

Clone Momo looked at her with wide, disbelieving eyes.

“Oh god, oh god, oh god. Where am I?”

She then twirled her head around, blinking quickly.

“This isn’t the maternity section.”

Other Momo did, immediately, what Momos do best. She began to panic and hyperventilate.

Momo wasn’t sure why she didn’t see this coming.

“We don’t have time for this,” Momo urged, grabbing her clone’s hand. Clone Momo shrieked, wiggling her arm desperately. Momo was actually quite impressed at Mallmart-Momo’s strength. She had clearly put on some muscle hauling dog toys and maternity wear across that football field of a store everyday. Muscle that Momo quickly lost after she quit, but it was a small miracle that it was ever there. “Oh my god—stop wiggling. Can’t you just be quiet? We’re usually so good at being quiet.”

Luckily, Momo did stop her wriggling. Besides being quiet, her other biggest strength was, of course, taking orders from absolutely any source of authority that presented itself.

“Sorry,” Clone Momo apologized. “I’ll be quiet.”

With a relieved breath, Momo moved to drag her clone into the nearest bubble, but then something dawned on her like an anvil. She paused, turning her head around.

“Wait, that’s it? I just teleported you—my clone—from a completely different universe, during your workday, and you’re just going to accept that? And also apologize for it?”

Clone Momo stared at her mutely. Momo knew that expression. She—despite every single reason for her to act out, scream, run away, hide—was only concerned with one thing. And that was making sure that Momo wasn’t mad at her.

“Wow,” Momo said. “Wow, this is…”

This is exactly what Valerica saw that first day. This was the crumpled-piece-of-paper of a human being that she had so easily believed in, no questions asked.

Before Momo had time to reflect on that in any meaningful way, she spotted a hand clawing its way out of the Nether Shibuya bubble.

“Shit,” Momo yelled. “We’ll work on your self-confidence later!”

Without looking twice, she hurtled the both of them into a new realm.