"...Are you from another world?" Karyn asked. She wasn't sure if it was a rude thing to ask, but she had to know. There was something about that knowing look in the Lady's eye, that shared sadness...
The Lady smiled sadly. "Part of me was," she said. "I was born, raised, and educated in another world, in another time. I had friends there, lovers, at one time my family - though my parents were gone by the time I found myself here. I can still remember the things that were most important to me there, but much of it has faded. That was...I can't even say it was a lifetime ago, it was much longer than that. Long enough that the lesser things have slipped away into the mists of time."
Karyn stared at her. "But...you can't be...I mean, you don't look that old...?" She felt a little embarassed putting it like that, but the Lady gave her a wry smile. "Are...are you immortal?" she asked.
"I am," the snake-woman said. "Or, at least, my lifespan is that of the universe. That is the other part of me. I did not come to this world quite the same way that you did. You could say I was infused into this reality; I am the embodiment of the physical laws that govern it. So in a sense I have always been part of this world, even though I only came here from my previous life somewhat less than a thousand years ago."
She sighed. "But even being immortal, I am not immune from the ravages of time. I grow old just as you yourself will; I become frail and forgetful. But I do not die; when it is time, I shed this body and regenerate a new one. My youth is restored, my faculties are returned - but each time, a little more of my memory slips away, and a little more of my old life is lost. Perhaps one day I won't remember my old world at all, outside of the people most important to me."
Karyn stared at her. "I...I'm sorry," she said. "I can't imagine..." She felt sad thinking about her family forgetting her, but at least she remembered them. To lose that entirely to history...
"It isn't so bad," the Lady said, idly running her hands over the scales of her long snake tail. "I have all the time in the world to contemplate the splendors of this universe, and I see people now and again when the women of your kind make their pilgrimages to see me. I had already lost my parents, and after a millenium of separation from old friends they're only a collection of pleasant memories - though it's possible they may still be alive, for all I know."
Karyn frowned. "After a thousand years?"
The Lady smiled. "A thousand years for me. But time can flow differently between two different realities. Think of how a sound can change its pitch depending on whether it's approaching you or receding from you, though it works the other way around. It may be hard for you to picture, but the distance between this universe and other universes is changing. As this reality draws closer to another reality - yours, for instance - their time-flow begins to run closer to parallel with each other. If people in your own world could remember you, they'd think you've only been gone for a day or so. Eventually they will start to recede from each other, and the flow of time between them will change - one becoming much faster than the other."
Karyn tried to picture that in her head. "What...what determines the changes?" she asked.
"It would be difficult to explain exactly in a way you're accustomed to understand," the Lady said. "But if you think of them as if they were planets like yours, you could picture them orbiting around a common point - what you might call the 'axis' of the space in which they move. Whether it's a true space itself or not, that suffices for a metaphor. Their orbits and periods could be almost the same, or very different, so the changes in the distance between them could describe almost any pattern imaginable. I've been here for many centuries, but my own reality could be racing through this reality's time as it grows more distant, until it comes around to begin approaching again. Perhaps for my reality it's only been a century - a decade - a year? Who knows?"
Karyn tried to picture that, and couldn't quite get a handle on it. This kind of math and physics stuff had never really been her strong suit; she'd always been more into language-arts and P.E., which was an odd combination by the usual high-school standards, but then she was an odd person in general. She looked around the room for something to get her mind off trying to map out universe-orbits. For the first time, she noted that the Lady was dressed much like Fazalune and herself, with a loose skirt draped around her waist, and a separate, shorter top covering her breasts. Doesn't anyone get sunburned in this place? she thought. Maybe they were just naturally resistant to it? Was it something to do with ultraviolet light? She couldn't remember. Maybe the sun here just didn't produce as much? No idea.
She thought about asking the Lady whether she'd ever thought of trying to return to her own reality, but thought that that might be prying a little too far. She wondered about other realities; were there many? Were many of them like her own? She supposed if it was really true what they said, that there were branched universes for each possible way that things could unfold, then there must be a practically infinite number of realities that were like her own to greater or lesser degrees, depending on when they diverged. Maybe that had something to do with the "distance" the Lady was referring to, though she wondered how realities that had diverged could go on to approach each other again. Maybe...maybe it was in the broad strokes. Maybe all the infinitesimally small forks kind of averaged out to a more general course of events...? She wondered if you could call that path the "real" one. Was there even such a thing?
"Is...is this real?" she asked, half to herself, and then to the Lady when she realized she'd said it out loud. "Like, really real?"
The snake-woman laughed softly. "It depends on how you look at it," she said. "To someone back in your own reality, none of this is 'real;' they can't observe it or interact with it, unless they come to this reality. From your perspective, you are here, and the things of this reality can have a direct impact on you, whether you choose to think of them as 'real' or not. From a perspective outside of either? Each possible path that things can take could be followed through to any of their possible conclusions, but only the path we do take is 'real,' because it is the only path from which things proceed."
Karyn had a brief flashback to reading some of the choose-your-own-adventure books in the library as a kid - marking her place at every potentially interesting choice until she ran out of fingers to hold them with. You could conjure up as many hypotheticals as you wanted, but at the end of the day you had to actually stick with something in order to get to the end. "I think I get it," she said. "So I can be sure I'm in the same reality as Jon - 'my' Jon, and not some alternate version - because if he had wound up in some other version of this reality, I would've been following along the same path when I came in."
The Lady nodded. "Exactly. He is still the friend you know, though he may wear a different shape in this reality. Souls are constant and unique," she said. "There are people like you and your friend in other realities, but in all of space and time there is only one you. Souls give weight to the threads of possibility; they are the weft in the fabric of existence."
Karyn frowned. "Then...what about this body? Did...did I kick out some other soul from it when I came here? Or is it still around? ...God, I hope I didn't...!" She felt her stomach turn at the thought.
"No," the Lady said. "Do not worry about that. Remember, souls are constant, even across realities. One soul can have different bodies at different points in space and time. The body you have now was always yours, whether it existed before you entered it or not. If it did, then its history must necessarily be consistent with having been your body, even before you were in it."
Karyn heaved a sigh of relief. At least she wasn't evicting some poor person out into God-knows-where by mistake. "Then..." she said, trying to wrap her head around it, "then it's not actually settled? As in, before I showed up, it hadn't been determined?"
"Possibly," the Lady said. "Of course, it could only have been one of the set of histories compatible with having been you, but even within that set there are many possibilities. Now that you have arrived, the uncertainty has collapsed, and one of those possibilities is the 'real' path."
Karyn was about to ask something else, but suddenly Fazalune broke in. "Supper's ready," she said. "We'll need something hot, it's going to be a cold one tonight."
The younger scorpion-girl turned around to find that the elder had unpacked her little camp stove and prepared a pot of what appeared to be stew out of their stock of dry ingredients while she'd been talking to the Lady. "Aw, geez," she stammered, "you could've told me...you didn't have to do all that yourself!"
Fazalune chuckled. "I'm not as old and helpless as all that just yet," she said. "Besides, this meeting is exactly why you were brought here. Better to let it take its natural course. Now come on, don't let it get cold on you. Lady, will you join us?"
The Lady nodded, and softly slithered over to the campfire. Karyn noticed that the tip of her tail had only just left the place where she'd been seated when she arrived at the fire. Karyn found herself wondering whether, as an immortal, she even had to eat, and what she ate normally if she did. Whatever she might've been accustomed to, the snake-woman offered no complaints about the stew.
Sarah wasn't sure at first whether they'd be able to get anything for the little cat-girl; did a village this size even have shops as such? Plus there was the fact that a fairly significant percentage of the population (or so it seemed) were animal enough that they didn't even wear clothes. But upon asking around, she was told that one of the young women served as the unofficial village tailor, and might be able to help them out.
Sarah was relieved; she'd been worried that they'd have to go all the way to the next town up the road for something like that, and from what she understood that was a good two hours' walk either way. Plus, she wasn't sure whether she'd have to keep covering up with that hooded cloak in human towns; she hoped that that was only going to be necessary in places where word might get back to Tom's old boss, but she had no idea how the rest of the world would react to something like her. For as odd as it had been to be staying in a fox's den and spending their time with animal-people of all descriptions, it had been awfully nice to just be able to be out and about without having to worry about people catching on to her mechanical nature.
"So, Diana," she said, as they made their way over to the end of the village where the tailor lived, "if you don't mind me asking...where are you travelling to?"
The little cat-girl hesitated for a moment, her ears briefly flicking back. "...I dunno," she said, after a brief pause. "I...just gotta get away, 's all."
Sarah frowned. "From what?" she asked. Granted, she herself was in a similar situation, but it was hard to imagine what a cute little girl would have to run from.
Diana regarded the strange robot-doll-thing woman out of the corner of her eye. She wasn't sure she should tell; what if Sarah thought that she should go back "home?" What if she made her go back? She'd only just gotten away, and if she got sent back she was sure there would be no escape until they had her on a carriage bound for the remote mountain fortress where they'd imprison her and turn her into somebody else...
She shuddered at the thought. It was...it was scary. She was scared of it. It felt so strange to feel that way about it; Darrin hadn't felt anything comparable since he was a little kid. But (she consoled herself) that was only because it was clearly a bad thing. She had every reason to be intimidated by the prospect, so it was perfectly rational for her to feel this way. Perfectly.
But...anyway...she sighed. No, Sarah wasn't that kind of person, she didn't think. She'd actually asked Diana's own permission for them to come along, just as if she were a grown-up. "It's...from my parents," she said, then corrected herself, her tail lashing in agitation. "Th-they're not really my parents. But the people who...kept me. They wanted t' send me off to some school an' make me all 'proper' an' girly an' stuff."
Sarah felt a twinge of sympathy. She'd had a friend as a little girl whose dad had insisted on sending her to a private school when she'd actually wanted to go to school with Sarah, and they'd never quite managed to stay in touch later on in life. "I...I see," she said. "So you don't really know where you're going besides 'away' then?"
Diana shook her head. "I...I wanna find a way to become a...a grown-up," she said. She almost said "a man," but she was afraid Sarah would get freaked out at that. "'Cause then they can't tell me what to do."
Sarah really did feel sorry for her now. "I guess I understand why you feel that way," she said. "But you shouldn't be in such a hurry to grow up. Growing up has its own problems, and if you focus too much on getting there, you're gonna miss the good stuff about being a kid."
Diana balked at that. But...well, she knew full well that Sarah wasn't wrong. Grown-up life wasn't all it was cracked up to be; as Darrin, she'd been stuck going not much of anyplace, and she'd actually enjoyed the lower pressure and lighter responsibility that working at the arcade had brought with it. But that was a different thing from actually going back to being a little kid - and a little girl, at that! "H-hey," she said, searching for a change of subject, "this's it, right?"
The tailor's little cottage was about as close to being a shop as you could get and still actually be a house. Like most of the buildings in the village, it was a tiny affair - more than one room, at least, but from the looks of things she slept on a cot in the corner of the kitchen; every available inch of the main living area was dedicated to her craft.
The tailor herself was part mouse; she was unusual for the village populace in that she was actually mostly human, with only the ears and tail marking her as an animal-person. Most of the people they'd seen here were more animal than that, though nobody seemed to place any particular value on being one way or the other. She had short brown hair which matched the fur on her ears, and she called herself Elizabeth.
"I think I've got some things that will fit her," she was saying to Sarah. "My niece is about her age, and I made some things for her birthday, but..." She laughed. "Well, she hasn't grown quite as fast as we were expecting. Her father has more of the wild type in him, and I guess she takes after him more. So I had to make a whole new set at practically the last minute, and I've had these sitting around ever since."
"I...I see," Sarah replied. It was strange to think that people here might not even know whether their children would be normal-sized as they grew. Still, it seemed like they managed alright. "What we could really-" She glanced over at Diana, who had just succumbed to the urge to clean herself, wetting down the back of her hand with her tongue and running it over her hair; the cat-girl noticed Sarah watching her and yanked the offending arm back down to her side, biting her lip and trying to pretend like that hadn't happened, even as her tail and ears gave away what she was really thinking. "...what we could really use is some good sturdy playclothes," Sarah finished.
"I think they should be just what you're looking for," the mouse-girl said, rummaging through a bewildering array of clothing. Sarah wondered how on earth she expected to sell it all in a village where so few people even wore clothing. Maybe she sent it out with traders, like Millie's husband?
Elizabeth came back out from the depths of her collection with an armload of assorted clothing. Sarah and Diana looked them over. "I don't wanna wear skirts!" the cat-girl protested.
Sarah sighed. She really didn't know how choosey they could afford to be here, but she supposed if Diana was running away from a finishing school this kind of thing probably held some uncomfortable associations for her. "Do you have any pants that would fit her?" she asked. The tailor shrugged. "I suppose I've got some for boys her age she could wear," she said. "Shame, though. You'd look pretty cute in these, Diana."
The little cat-girl felt her tail beginning to puff out. She tried to keep her emotions in check, but it was so hard! Everybody treated her like a little kid...well, at least she managed to stop herself from stamping her foot on the floor, and forced her ears back up to a mostly normal position.
"Here," Sarah said, as Elizabeth went digging through her wares again. "You can try this on in the meantime." She held up what Diana took at first for a pair of overalls, which didn't seem so bad - but then she noticed that it was open at the bottom like a dress. Her mouth began to turn down again. "Aw, come on," Sarah said. "It's not that bad. Only tomboys wear these things; they're hardly girly at all. Besides, it'll let your tail move freely."
Diana felt all frustrated and mixed-up inside; part of her wanted to stomp and shout and run out and go hide somewhere until they decided to let her have her way. But...but they were trying to help her...Sarah was clearly trying to do what she could to compromise...and she had asked for this. She wanted clean clothes, she just didn't want to be all poofy and frilly...but this wasn't that, she had to admit. And she did like the idea of having her tail free; the hole in the back of her pants was a lot better than nothing, but it did get a bit irksome having the waistband hanging down on the base of it - though she supposed that was partly because her current pants didn't fit her quite right anyway. Still...
"A-all right," she said, trying to make herself settle down. A little nervously, she undressed; it felt good to get her increasingly dirty clothes off, but it was weird doing this in front of someone else, even if she was a little girl now. She slipped the jumper over her head and settled it over her body, adjusting the straps to sit comfortably on her shoulders. This was...this was...not so bad, really. It hung comfortably and didn't cramp her tail at all.
Sarah chuckled. "Well, you need a shirt under that." Diana glanced down at her chest and turned a little red as she thought about that, which made the wind-up doll laugh again. "Not for that," she said. "Not for a couple years yet, anyway. But that kind of material's just going to trap sweat if you don't wear something else with it, trust me. Still, it's a good look for you."
When they'd finished their meal, Karyn helped Fazalune clean up as best as they could. As it turned out, the Lady was able to produce water from...somewhere...in a little fountain, on the next floor down in what seemed to be an all-purpose washroom. Karyn wondered, as she scrubbed the remnants of the stew out of the pot, whether there was a spring far down below the sands, or whether this was yet another of the Lady's magic tricks. Certainly whatever pumped it up here must be magic...? She wondered if the Lady was a goddess; was that possible, if she'd used to be a mortal? Was there a difference between that and just being an ordinary immortal sorceress with power over the laws of physics and intimate knowledge of the nature of existence? She didn't know.
When she was done, she made her way back up to the top floor cautiously; it was hard to imagine any kind of accident happening to the property of someone with such power, but there was something about a building that moved and rearranged itself like a living thing that was instinctively a bit unnerving. Plus, this was the first time she'd ever taken stairs in her new body. Fortunately the steps were broad and shallow, probably because the primary resident of this tower didn't even have individual feet to climb them with; even so, Karyn found herself raising her back legs higher to hold herself at a more comfortable angle, so that it didn't feel so much like gravity was going to drag her long body and hefty stinger back down to the floor below.
She rejoined them to find both Fazalune and the Lady seated around the fire, which had been piled up high with brush from the original modest cooking fire and was now crackling away quite nicely. Karyn wasn't sure where Fazalune had gotten the fuel, which looked to be mostly enormous quantities of tumbleweeds and thin networked roots of desert flowers; maybe the Lady had them stockpiled somewhere below. She took a moment to pack away the dishes and then joined them.
For some time, nobody said much of anything. Karyn wondered if it was nighttime wherever Jon was in this strange world. Did it even make a difference here? Maybe this place was actually flat and the sun rose out of the sea in the morning - but she doubted that. Finally, she asked, "So...when can I see Jon?" She hoped that didn't come off as too demanding, but she'd been here for days already and she still had no idea if he was safe.
"Not just yet," the snake-woman replied. "Rest assured, your friend is well. But both of you have a great task ahead of you, and there's much that we will need to show you before you're ready to join Jon."
Karyn frowned. "What task?" This was the first she'd heard of it...
The Lady slithered around the fire to face her, probably not coincidentally exposing more of her great length to the radiant heat. "A doorway has been opened between this reality and yours, Karyn. These things are normally rare and almost always brief, but this one remains open still. Two others from your world have already crossed over after you, and at least one more is in danger of being drawn to it; and there is no reason to think it will stop with them."
Karyn felt a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. "That...that was...a wish," she said. "Jon made it, and this happened..."
The Lady shook her head. "That may have been the thing that allowed it to complete the opening," she said, "but trust me, it could not have even begun without someone in this world to open the way." She sighed. "There are others like myself," she said. "I suspect that one of them is behind this."
Karyn stared at her. "You mean, other...gods? Immortals? Whatever it is you are? Someone's trying to make this happen?"
She nodded. "I see no other way that this could've happened. But I don't know which of them it is, and if I ever knew why, I've forgotten. They are hidden from my perception, and they've stayed out of the public eye; all I know is that they exist, and that only they could've done this. Even then I can't see how they would've accomplished it, but it must have been one of them."
"But...but what do you want me to do about it?" Karyn said. "If they're like you..."
Fazalune put a hand on her shoulder. "There's no other option," she said. "The Lady cannot go herself."
The snake-woman nodded. "Unfortunately. I've told you that I embody the physical laws of this reality; were anything to happen to me, I'm afraid that this entire world might come undone."
"But...but you're immortal, aren't you!?" Karyn was beginning to get flustered. She just came here to get her friend back, and now they were trying to pit her against gods or demigods or whatever?
"I told you that I do not die," the Lady said. "But with so much at risk, I can't take a chance on finding out whether that means I cannot die. I'm sorry to bring you into this, but I cannot risk taking it into my own hands, and in any case your goals are in line with mine. Whoever is behind this, if they want people brought to this world, they'll certainly make it even more difficult for anyone trying to get back to yours."
Karyn sighed. That was probably true. "But...I mean, how can I do anything about this? I'm just an ordinary human being, and if they're anything like you..."
Fazalune laughed at that. "Have you already forgotten?" she asked. "You're not exactly a human anymore. And even they aren't exactly defenseless. There's plenty of things we can teach you, as well." Karyn thought about that, looking back over her shoulder at the barbed stinger that hung behind her. She hadn't thought about it that way. Still, though...
"Besides, they're not all-powerful, any more than I am," the Lady said. "And there's reason to hope that it won't come down to violence in the first place. Whoever is behind this, they've taken a very long time to enact their plan, which means it must have been difficult to manage. So much so that I'm not even sure how they succeeded in the first place. Something that complicated almost certainly involves some kind of delicate balance, which means it might not be difficult to disrupt."
Karyn sighed. "So...I'm not leaving just yet, am I?"
"I won't stop you," the Lady said. "But we both know it's necessary to prepare you before I send you to your friend." She moved away from the fire, and away from the heat Karyn could almost see her breath. "Now come. We don't get better nights than this here."
Karyn and Fazalune followed her back to the center of the room. "For what?" Karyn asked.
The snake-woman only smiled as she sat back upon her own coils. Suddenly, the walls of the tower began to melt and reflow around them. The ceiling opened up, exposing them to the cold desert night, and the sand began to form a support structure for something enormous and circular above them, with another smaller circle higher up. As Karyn watched, sand began to flow into the circle; like in the hall of mirrors, it reformed into glass, forming an enormous lens in the ceiling, and a great galaxy bloomed into being above them.
A telescope, she thought. The view was absolutely breathtaking; even a giant-scale magically-created optical telescope could only do so much, but she could see the core and the individual spiral arms, and stars around and behind it.
"I like to see them up close," the Lady said. "To bask in their enormity. It helps keep me humble. And it reminds me of the responsibility I bear, like the ancient legend of the god who held the world upon his shoulders."
"It's...it's amazing," Karyn said. For a long time, they sat there gazing at the stars, and she thought about this strange woman with the galaxy hanging over her.
