“Aren’t you afraid of me?” the looming, lanky thing wearing the shape of a man asked.

“Sure am,” Alexa grinned. “The thing is, I’m also quite tired of being afraid, tired of being stabbed, chased, devoured. I died way too many times for reasonability. Now I’m just ‘eh’ about the whole getting eaten thing. Get killed once and you got PTSD, get killed ten quadrillion times and that’s just a statistic.”

“Aren’t you excited to get going? Don’t you want to be a System Wizard?” The liminal thing asked eyeing Gate 7 and deflating ever so slightly.

“I’m excited about not dying horribly,” Alexa shrugged. “Excited about making a new friend. Wanna be my friend? What’s your name?”

“I do not have a name,” the thing wearing the approximate shape of a ticket sales clerk said. “I simply conduct null-space transients from this terminal to their destination.”

“Okkay, Mr. Conductor,” Alexa grinned, extending her hand. “Do you want to be my friend, go with me from this place and... do crimes?”

“Crimes?” The Conductor arched an eyebrow, keeping his hands down.

“I’m a supervillain,” Alexa said, waving her hand forward trying to produce a handshake from the train-station inhabiting entity. “Alexa Terror Nova. You could be minion numero… fiv-o?”

“Minion numero fiv-o?” the Conductor repeated.

“Yeah,” Alexa nodded. "Okkay, perhaps minion number four and three quarters on the account that you're not a real boy."

“Why?”

“Cus I don’t like being alone,” she said. “I know what it’s like to exist alone, to serve some unclear higher purpose given to you by someone. You seem all alone out here in nowhere-land. That’s gotta suck big. You said that you can be me. That means you can be anyone, anything. Can you be a raygun? I’m suffering from raygun deficiency over here and I feel that it might be fatal.”

“I’m not a gun,” the Conductor said. “My job is to…”

Alexa pulled her ticket out and ripped approximately in half and handed the smaller piece to the Conductor.

“Here,” she said. “This is your half. Come with me, please?”

The Conductor grabbed the offered ticket, his shape suddenly reforming, twisting to rearrange itself into a lookalike of Alexa. Its train station Conductor's uniform peeled off the girl's form like shedding skin, seeping down akin to ferromagnetic fluid and vanishing below the booth's edge.

“Give me a single reason why I shouldn’t just kill you and take your place,” the duplicate of Alexa said.

“I have the bigger half of the ticket,” Alexa said. “Plus, you seriously think you can beat me, while looking like me? What are you gonna do, exactly? Slap me with those puny arms? Ha! I’d like to see you try! I'm not a girl with infinite strength, I fight people utilizing my mind, see? If you're as smart as me now, then you know what's good for you."

The Alexa duplicate looked at her arms and then back at Alexa.

“Don’t you want revenge on the people who bound you to this place?” Alexa asked. “I’m not talking about some half-assed singular revenge, mind you. I’m talking about their absolute destruction. Lovely, infinite obliteration, dissolution, ultimate vengeance… etcetera.”

The Alexa-Conductor squinted at the supervillain girl.

“You wish to destroy the System Wizards?” She said, tilting her head. “Why?”

“Cus they’re the Good guys, duh!” Alexa grinned. “I exist to eliminate the Good, cus I’m bad, see? It's just what I do best. It's what I was made for! I'm the perfect killing macheeeen. Beep Boop.”

The supervillain girl tapped the empty raygun pouch.

“Come on, get in here,” she purred. “Be my lovely raygun and together we can eliminate the rule-makers and break the rules, everywhere, forever. Ain’t nobody gonna give you a juicy chance for vengeance such as this, see?”

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The Conductor-entity offered Alexa a single nod and then its shape warped and twisted and suddenly filled the empty space on Alexa’s belt, giving a certain, finite weight to it. The torn half of the golden-yellow ticket featuring less than half of an owl was now sticking out from one of the folds of the pink raygun hairdryer.

“See, was that so hard?” Alexa grinned, petting her gun. “Now, how do I become the Conductor?”

“You wish to take my job?” The Conductor’s voice pulsed along the body of the gun rushing up her arm. “I thought that you were seeking vengeance against the System Wizards?”

“Dressing up as someone that you’re not is handy when you want to break the rules,” Alexa said. “It confuses people’s expectations of you.”

“The Conductor’s outfit is inside the booth,” Alexa’s gun replied.

“Excellent,” Alexa climbed over the counter and reached for the outfit which consisted of a Conductor’s cap and jacket.

“Clothes define the job,” the Conductor warned from her belt. “If you wear these, you won’t be able to escape the transit terminal, become its servant forevermore.”

“Ehhh, I’ve dealt with memetics before,” Alexa shrugged. “This is fine."

She pulled the cap and jacket from the alcove.

“I am the Conductor now,” she grinned, scanning the empty station and putting the cap atop of her silver locks.

In the moment when the Conductor’s cap touched her head, Alexa’s mind became skewered sideways, filled with infinite station-like spaces, which were interspersed with an infinite number of travelers trying to talk to her, asking her stupid questions about the terminal, demanding passage, threatening, or straight up looking lost.

Alexa hissed, trying to focus on a specific something, trying to claw her way out of an infinity of potential transit terminals. It was impossible. She pried the cap of her head and huffed.

“See?” the raygun said. “You cannot handle infinity without being consumed by it. Only a liminal being can do a liminal job without being completely subsumed by the transit terminal.”

“Shush you,” Alexa said. She sat down in a lotus pose and focused on the insides of her head, imagining that she was talking to a very specific individual inside of her head.

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The copy of Hero Resonance suddenly found herself existing once again. She noted that she was sitting in an empty white space, facing the supervillain girl.

[Sup, Rezzy,] Alexa grinned.

The simulated copy of the hero frowned. She didn’t want to talk to Alexa. She didn’t want to exist in a world where the villain won, dismantled the Superstate, dismantled her glorious plans of being the Admiral of Titanomachy.

[What do you want?] Resonance demanded.

[I have a job for you,] Alexa said.

[What kind of a job?] Resonance squinted at Alexa with ember-gold eyes.

[Managing an infinite number of observations,] Alexa grinned.

[Say what?] Resonance sputtered.

[I found an infinite hat that manages an infinite transit hub and I need someone capable of managing infinity for me,] Alexa said.

[Why… me?] Resonance asked.

[Isn’t your primary superpower duplicating yourself?] Alexa tilted her head. [You should be able to handle such a simple task, no?]

[Why not do it yourself?] Resonance snarled.

[Ehhh,] Alexa shrugged. [Don’t wanna spread myself too thin. Being infinite is giving me a bit of a migraine.]

[What’s in it for me?] Resonance asked. [Why should I cooperate with whatever nonsense this is?]

[It’s not nonsense,] Alexa replied. [It’s an experiment, or an educational experience, or something… I dunno.]

[I’m a hero, not your goddamn guinea pig!] Resonance growled.

[You don’t want to be more? You don’t want your powers back? You don’t want to try out being infinite?] Alexa asked. [Come on, you’ve got the biggest head out of everyone I know. I wanna see if an infinite hat fits your big head.]

[Is that… supposed to be an insult or something?] Resonance asked.

[I won’t be there,] Alexa said. [You’ll get to talk to an infinite number of people, learn an infinite number of things. Maybe you’ll discover the cure for cancer or something. Maybe you’ll find out how to make yourself a body. Think about the possibilities!]

Resonance sighed.

[What? You enjoy being stuck in my head?] Alexa asked. [Wouldn’t you rather be stuck in an infinite train station talking to infinite travellers? Come on, it’ll be fun! Just try it out!]

[Fine,] Resonance said. [Anything to get me from seeing your stupid smug face. I’ve had enough of seeing it for the duration of the Tartarus simulation.]

[Aww you didn’t like being bffs for a hundred thousand years?] Alexa grinned.

[We weren’t bffs!] the redhead hero growled. [You were my prisoner… and… I clearly failed to reeducate you, failed to stop you from being completely batshit insane.]

[I choose to believe otherwise! Okay, when I put on the hat, you take over, got it? Good!]

----------------------------------------

Alexa opened her eyes.

“Attempt numero duo!” She announced and put the Conductor’s hat on.

The infinite possibilities of the infinite transit terminal shaped like an infinite number of spaces became filled not with her but with the eternally-replicating copy of Resonance. The hero’s mind stretched into forever, settling into the ever-increasing boundary of the observation offered by the hat akin to an infinite stream of water endlessly trying to fill an infinite glass.

Alexa ignored that. She stood up and leapt out of the booth.

“Booyah!” She grinned at her own reflection in an oversized mirror framed by a dark gothic iron beams. “That takes care of that!”

“Wait… how have you done this? Why aren’t you preoccupied with eternally managing the infinite?” The Conductor asked.

“Eh, I got someone else to do it,” Alexa shrugged. “So, Mr. Conductor. You wanna explore the nooks of this place for a bit or take the train to Wizard town?”