Alyssa wraps her towel around Leona Matic’s body, wishing that she had a
robe instead, and peeks her head out into the hallway. It’s kind of annoying
now, not having a bathroom directly attached to her room. Then again, this was
how she grew up. She had to share one with her brothers and sister growing
up. What’s awkward here is that she still looks like Leona. It’s not her
face, though; she’s a temporal illusionist, so it’s not the first time that
she’s looked like someone else. It’s the rest of the body. Seeing it,
washing it, using the toilet. It all feels like a violation. Leona told her
that it was fine, partly because this isn’t even her original body anyway,
but that hasn’t made things any less weird.
By the time she makes it to the shower room, Mateo has come around the
corner, holding his own shower stuff. “Oh, sorry. Go ahead.”
“There’s more than one stall in there,” she points out.
“That’s okay, I’ll just wait.”
Alyssa frowns, but doesn’t enter the room.
“Have you talked to Ramses about switching to your old body? When does he
think it’ll be safe?”
“Oh, it’s safe now,” she replies. “I just don’t really want to switch back
just yet...”
“Why not?” He starts thinking about it when she doesn’t answer. “Oh, you
like the idea of being able to teleport and survive in the vacuum of space.”
“I haven’t tried to do anything yet, I’m kind of scared, but yeah. Is that
wrong?”
“No, it’s not wrong, I’m sure—” He stops talking abruptly, and a look of
horror appears on his face. “Oh, no.”
“What? Did I already mess something up?”
“No. No, you didn’t do anything wrong. This is their fault. They should have
seen this coming. In fact, Ramses shouldn’t have let you even attempt to
transfer to Leona Reaver’s body, because something like this may have ended
up the consequence.”
“What? What consequence? Tell me.”
“It’s hard to explain, and I definitely don’t understand it, but when we
were resurrected from the afterlife simulation, the man in charge added a
code to our minds that gives us our time skipping pattern. We can’t delete
the code, or modify it. We can’t even get rid of it by switching to new
bodies, because it’s a part of us. Every time we transfer to a new body, it
somehow becomes a part of it too. Again, I don’t get how it works, but that
body you’re in right now has the code...and now so do you. You are now like
us, and it apparently can’t be undone.”
“So once you five start jumping through time again, I’ll go with you?”
“Yeah, unless Ramses can finally figure out how to stop it, which he might
actually, because he didn’t really have time to work very hard at it the
first time it happened, and now we’re in this world, which has different
rules.”
This is big news, and a huge game-changer for Alyssa. It explains why all
these people already knew her from the future. She would not officially join
the team if something like this hadn’t happened. They wouldn’t have asked
her, and she wouldn’t have been able to keep up. She needs some time to
process. Without saying another word, she just walks through the door, and
spends a good forty minutes under the hot water. The good thing about this
being a medical facility is the shower seat.
No comments :
Post a Comment