Ship of Fools: A Taylor Varga Omake (Complete)

[Derek M]

Chapter 1: Ship of Fools

Taylor and her companion sat at the corner, watching. At the far corner sat...her house. Well, it looked like her house, but they had yet to determine if it actually was really her house.

"You know, the easiest way to check on your home is to actually walk up to it and go inside?" said the tall man in the trench coat next to her.

Taylor frowned. "It's not that easy. Dad and I...we didn't exactly part on the best of terms."

"Do you want me to go and knock? I can see if there's anybody home first, at least. Once we're inside, I have more options."

She shook her head. "No, Harry, just wait here in case I need backup. I'll go..." With that, she began briskly walking down the street. Better to get it over with. The house looked to be in better condition than she remembered. That was...odd. She unconsciously avoided the broken step, unaware that it was no longer broken. Taylor came into the house and heard somebody in the kitchen, which was odd for the middle of the day. Stopping at the threshold to the room in question, she paused to watch the tall man washing dishes in the sink.

"Dad?" she asked hesitantly.

Danny Hebert turned around. Strangely, he didn't seem surprised to see her despite her long absence. "Taylor? Is something wrong?"

Taylor stared at her father. He looked good, healthier and happier than he had been in a long, long time. Seeing him there, seeing him so normal...it was almost like before her mother died. Throwing caution to the wind, she ran to him and threw her arms around him, and started to sob. "Dad, I've missed you so much..."

Her father held her, though he seemed confused. "Taylor, did something happen? What's wrong." Danny was clearly trying to get through to his unusually distraught daughter.

Just then, a voice came from the kitchen doorway. "Well, that's something I don't see every day...admittedly, YOU probably see it more often..." The voice had a strange accent to it.

Taylor turned, then shrank back. Inside her home was a cape...some kind of reptilian Case 53, maybe? The lizard girl was tall, and was wearing some type of professional-quality metal armor. Taylor started gathering her swarms in closer in case she had to act, knowing Harry would see the signs and move in to provide support. She stepped to the side, putting herself between the new cape and her father. Using her swarm voice, she told Harry outside about the cape. With her human voice, she said, "Who are you, and what are you doing in our home?"

The humanoid velociraptor gave her a slightly unsettling grin. "Hello, Taylor. I know this must seem weird to you, but don't worry. My name's Saurial, and I actually live here, too."

Taylor looked to her father, who seemed slightly nonplussed...but he seemed to be looking at her, not at the reptile woman. Was he being mastered? She wasn't sure what was going on here. "Dad, who is this?" she asked.

Her father looked at Saurial, and simply raised an eyebrow.

Saurial shrugged. "This is Taylor Hebert. My guess is she's dimension jumping."

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Harry watched the house from across the street. He kept checking his surroundings, despite knowing that Taylor would have her swarm watching for anybody coming near. The street was quiet, though he could hear sounds of the city...traffic, or a dog barking...in the distance. Getting Taylor home was the first bit of luck they had had in a while, but experience proved it never hurt to be a little paranoid. Sure enough, he noticed that there were suddenly quite a few more insects nearby than there had been just a few moments ago. A group of flying insects started to form into the vague shape of a human.

"Harry," the swarm clone said, "there's a cape in the house with dad. She appears to be some type of lizard girl...I don't know her powers or intent. I don't remember anybody like this from back home."

He started to quickly cross the street. "Didn't you beat a draconic villain your first night out as a hero?" he asked, remembering her story.

"That was Lung, a man who turned into a dragon. This girl looks like a humanoid dinosaur." The buzzing cadence of the swarm clone still gave Harry a bit of a shiver, though he was getting used to it.

Suddenly, the clone dispersed, and a literal horde of insects began to descend onto the house, covering the walls and windows. That was enough of a signal flare for him to pull out the big guns. He lifted his newly crafted staff in his one gloved hand, and shouted a spell. "Forzare!" The force of the impact was enough to tear the door off of its hinges and send it to the floor. Harry strode in, the hem of his duster swirling. Holding his staff up, he took in the room. Taylor was standing close to a man with a clear resemblance, presumably her father, who was looking at her strangely. The lizard girl was standing in the entry to the kitchen. She seemed to be reacting not at all to the door being blasted off its hinges.

"Harry," Taylor yelled, "they knew about the dimension jumping before I told them anything!"

Harry looked at the lizard woman, and said forcefully in his best I-am-in-charge voice, "My name is Harry Dresden. I am a wizard. I think Taylor and I would like to have some questions answered, such as who you are and what you're doing in her home?"

The reptilian woman cocked an eyebrow. If she was at all intimidated by Harry, she wasn't showing it. That was actually fine with him. He had a reputation for taking down enemies that were supposed to be out of his class, and a person-sized lizard wasn't that intimidating after you've ridden an actual real-life (or at least reanimated) Tyrannosaur into battle. "I really AM a wizard, and I'm more than capable of protecting myself," he added.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Saurial grinned mentally. Things had been quiet recently, the recent sharing of information with Dragon notwithstanding. She could tell that the Taylor standing next to her Dad was her. The scent, the way she carried herself...there were a dozen little biological identifiers that made that clear as day to her senses. This Taylor, though, was also obviously different. She seemed to be tired, and she moved in a way that suggested she was favoring old wounds that had never happened to the Taylor merged with Varga. It wasn't much of a leap to assume she was an alternate version of herself, especially given Dr. Haywire's work and the fact that they had a fully functional wormhole station next to the DWU facilities. Time travel was a possibility as well, but much less likely since this Taylor most obviously wasn't joined with Varga as she was. She wasn't even sure if having two different versions of Varga was possible. If anything, this Taylor seemed to have some kind of insect control, based on the swarms gathering at the windows and doors.

The half-demon smiled. "I have no doubt of that. Trust me, you being a wizard is far from the strangest thing you'll see in Brockton Bay. Let me tell you a bit about myself."

Varga simply observed, equally fascinated by this turn of events. He expected that if Lisa were here, they would have to tie her to a chair again. "Was there a reason you changed the door back to a normal door?" he asked silently. The two of them had structurally reinforced the entire house, including the doors, with electron-degenerate matter (EDM), which would have easily withstood the wizard's spell. 'It would have been a shame to ruin his grand entrance,' she replied, 'and it's easy enough to fix.'

The wizard nodded at her to continue. "Taylor," Saurial said, "Back in January, a former best friend, a psychopathic vigilante and their hangers-on all conspired to shove me into a locker at Winslow High..." The swarm of insects nearby began to get agitated as it became obvious that Saurial was talking about Taylor's trigger event.

"Wait," interrupted Taylor, "they shoved YOU into a locker?"

At that prompt, Saurial shifted. The insects suddenly stilled, and Taylor's jaw dropped as the reptilian cape suddenly became a copy of her. "Actually," said the copy, "I think the same thing probably happened to both of us, but the results were very different."

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Harry watched as the lizard girl, Saurial, transformed into a copy of Taylor. He briefly had flashbacks to the incident with the ghost of the warlock Kravos masquerading as him to attack his friends, but this copy wasn't an exact copy. For one thing, her clothes were different. She also seemed to carry herself with more energy, and had an air of satisfaction that Taylor lacked (not surprisingly -- dissatisfaction was a common trait among their whole crew). He paid close attention to the girl's explanation, especially when she began talking about demons. This Varga, though, seemed very different from the demons he had encountered. Even Chauncy, the demon Chaunzaggaroth, had only pretended to be mild and friendly while Dresden had been foolish enough to give away more and more of his true name to him. Other demons had been downright homicidal, usually with Dresden as the immediate target. If Warden Morgan had still been alive, he probably would have been outraged that Harry was speaking with a self-professed demon. However, Harry had a feeling that he had already blown the Seventh Law of Magic all to hell and back -- he had been beyond the boundaries of his home universe for quite some time. Dealing with a friendly demon seemed fairly mild by comparison.

He had to admit, seeing an eight-foot-tall reptile appear out of thin air next to Saurial/Taylor was a neat trick. He wouldn't admit that this one was even more intimidating than Sue, his reanimated dinosaur, had been -- even if it were true.

"Greetings, Taylor Hebert, Wizard Dresden. I am Varga," said the giant lizard. He seemed slightly smug.

Harry couldn't help himself. "Demon Varga, I take it you've dealt with wizards before?"

The giant reptile smiled with a mouth full of teeth that made Harry involuntarily swallow. "Yes, in fact some of them made amusing sounds when they were stepped on."

Harry deliberately looked away. Taylor...the Taylor that come with Harry...had slumped down into one of the kitchen chairs, clearly overwhelmed. Harry went over to her, having lowered his staff when Varga appeared. He put his hand on her shoulder, and asked, "Hey kiddo, are you OK?"

"I'm not sure," she replied. "This place, it's so much like home, but it obviously isn't. Are we all going to be stuck wandering from one universe to another without finding our way back?" The look on her face was heartbreaking to Harry, and what's worse is that he didn't have a good answer.

"We may be able to help," said the alternate Taylor.

"I'm sorry," interjected Harry, "but could you shift back to your lizard form? Having two Taylors is confusing." Saurial was suddenly standing where the copy of Taylor had been.

"No problem," she said with a smile. Harry noticed that she now was wearing a trench coat and fedora, and wondered if she was poking fun at him. His suspicion intensified when she winked at him. "I do think we may be able to help. We work with some extremely smart people who know quite a lot about many things."

"Don't sell yourself and Varga short, dear," added Danny. He had at some point moved to the other side of the sitting Taylor and put his hand in support on her other shoulder.

"How, if I may ask, did you get here?" asked Varga. "Was it through a portal?"

Taylor and Dresden looked at each other. "I think," said Taylor, "we need to take them back to the ship?"

Dresden narrowed his eyes. That was a risk. The ship was their only way out, and revealing its location put everybody on board at risk.

"Are you sure these lizards aren't secretly hiding evil goatees?" Harry asked.

Taylor nodded her head slowly. "I'm sure...it feels right. Also, I'm telling Miles about that reference. You know he hates that."

Harry smirked. "He'll get over it, especially if these folks have somebody to talk technobabble." Suddenly, Harry did a quick double-take, gazing at the two giant lizards that were staring back at him passively. He could have sworn that Saurial had had a goatee for a second.

"All right," said Harry, "we're going to take you to our spaceship."

"So," said Danny tentatively, "you're a wizard with a spaceship?"

Dresden shook his head. "It's more like I'm hitching a ride on a spaceship."

"It's not called the Enterprise, is it?" asked Saurial with a sly grin.

"No," said Taylor. "We call it the Ship of Fools..."

 

[Derek M]

Chapter 2: Gathering Guests

Lisa stopped looking over a budget spreadsheet for the harbor salvage effort when her personal phone rang with Saurial's ring tone. "Saurial, what's up?"

"Hi, Lisa. We've had a couple of interesting visitors at home today. Taylor Hebert and a wizard named Harry Dresden," said Saurial on the phone.

Lisa paused for a moment. 'There is an authentic Taylor Hebert that is not our Taylor, and an actual, real wizard...and apparently they're friendly. This is going to be more weirdness.' Out loud, she said, "What do you need?"

"Corral Randall, Kevin and Linda. Also see if Dragon wants to tag along," replied Saurial. Saurial then gave her an address to a warehouse that was near the Docks. "I think they'll all want to see the spaceship."

Lisa's power was strangely silent at that revelation. "Your visitors are aliens?" she asked.

"Only in the legal sense." Lisa could hear the smugness.

'Alternate version of Taylor, plus an actual wizard, neither of which are local. Suggests an alternate Earth, but not one like Earth Aleph. Spacecraft is possibly a means of conveyance across different Earths?' "I'll get them together and send them over with Metis," she said, referring to her own alter ego in the third person. "Do you want me to contact Armsmaster?"

There was a short pause. "I'm going to say we don't involve him. While I believe him to be trustworthy in general, he still works for the Protectorate."

"...and Dragon is now a safe risk after what happened with Big Brother, right," acknowledged Lisa. Varga had managed to find a workaround for the AI cape's hard-coded subservience to any legal authority. "All right, we should be there within the hour, depending on what the guys want to bring."

"Make sure Kevin brings his tricorder," added Saurial.

"I'm sure he will," responded Lisa, "but why that specifically?"

"Just a hunch." Again, there was clearly audible smugness. Lisa just rolled her eyes. After ending the call, she sent text messages to Über (Randall), Leet (Kevin) and Vectura (Linda), then went to get the Metis bioconstruct ready before calling Dragon. She also wanted to check on something. That name, Harry Dresden, seemed familiar somehow...

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Daniel was finding the Internet on this world utterly fascinating. The consequences of people having real superpowers had had a profound impact on society, and it was different from anything they had seen previously. In fact, there were some obvious signs that this society was starting a downward spiral, at least until very recently. He had been going through a site called Parahumans Online, or PHO, and a lot of the changes seemed to involve the city they were in, a place called Brockton Bay that didn't exist on his own home Earth. This world also seemed to be extremely hazardous, with rogue parahumans, giant kaiju-type monsters called Endbringers that seemed to destroy cities on a regular basis, and an almost ludicrous bias by governments toward a particular interpretation of superhuman rights and responsibilities.

He was pulled from his research as his communicator chirped. Tapping it, he said, "This is Daniel."

"Daniel, it's Harry. We've made some friends and are bringing them by for a visit," said Harry's voice.

That sounded positive. "Did we hit the right place? Is this Taylor's home?"

After a slight hesitation, Harry answered, "Yes...and no. We met Taylor's dad, and we also met a couple of rather large lizards."

That sounded very familiar. "Did these lizards happen to be named Saurial, Raptaur, Ianthe or Metis?"

Daniel could hear Harry having a muffled side conversation, though he wasn't sure how that was possible with these communicator badges.

"Saurial and Raptaur, actually, though apparently we'll be meeting Metis soon," said Harry. "You've seen reference to them already?"

Daniel nodded, despite there being no visual pickup. "Yes, they're quite a popular topic of conversation on the local superhero Internet forums." Privately, Daniel wondered if Harry even knew what an Internet forum was. His magic didn't seem to work well with technology unless it was either fairly primitive or extremely advanced. 21st century Earth didn't fit into either category. Ironically, he probably would have gotten by just fine on most Goa'uld controlled worlds...at least until the ruling snake realized he was hok'tar. Thankfully, the Goa'uld seemed to be limited to a certain set of realities.

"Well," replied Harry, "I'll be bringing them and Taylor's father by for a visit. Make sure to tidy up for company." Daniel took that in the way it was meant -- make everybody aware of their guests and be ready with some surprises. Based upon what Daniel had read about the Family, he wasn't sure what kind of surprises would be effective. From the forum descriptions, it looked like Raptaur could catch an RPG out of the air and eat it. Maybe force fields would work...he would have to ask Miles.

"We'll get ready," he replied, then closed the communication channel. He looked over at the others doing research online. "Did you guys get all that?"

The two young men both nodded. The one on the right looked younger than his actual years, with a mop of unruly red hair.

The one on the left was the opposite, a brunette with scars, and a look in his one remaining eye that was far too much like Jack O'Neil for Daniel's comfort most days. "I'll go down to engineering and see if they're almost done down there," said the brunette.

The red head chimed in with, "I'll head to the bridge and run through the security systems."

Daniel acknowledged their tasks with a nod of his own. While most of them weren't technically inclined, they had all learned the basics of how to operate the ship. It wasn't safe to have crew on board who couldn't handle basic functions in an emergency.

"I'll prepare for our guests. Hopefully, this is situation that we can handle diplomatically." That was always Daniel's hope, but it hadn't worked out that way in a depressingly large number of cases. With any luck, he could avoid starting a war this time.

The three men left their terminals to get ready for what was likely to be a very interesting meeting.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"So," Harry began, "you go by Raptaur as a 'cape' name? Why do you need a name different from Varga?"

The group of them were walking toward the warehouse where the Ship of Fools was stashed. They had picked a location that was conveniently close to Taylor's home, though the Docks in general seemed to be in much better condition than Taylor expected, better even than before Leviathan hit the city. The people they passed somehow failed to notice them, which was a little eerie.

"Varga is his secret identity," chimed in Saurial.

At the looks from both Harry and Taylor, Raptaur provided more context. "Raptaur is the name given to me on PHO, and we thought it suitable."

"It's certainly better than Chubster," added Saurial, to which Taylor could only agree. It was better than Skitter, too.

"Wait," said Taylor, "if Saurial is the local version of me, and Raptaur is Varga, then who are Ianthe and Metis?"

"It is slightly more complicated than that. The group of us are known locally as the Family. Taylor and I have alternate forms that go by other names...Kaiju and Umihebi."

"Kaiju and Umihebi are the big sisters of Saurial and Raptaur, while Ianthe and Metis are cousins," said Saurial.

Harry looked at the over eight-foot-tall Raptaur. "Your big sisters? How much bigger are they?"

"I think you would find the difference in size quite noticeable," answered Raptaur. Harry could hear what sounded like a stifled snicker from Danny Hebert, who had been quiet for most of the walk.

"OK," said Taylor, "but where did Ianthe and Metis come from? They're not just alternate forms for you two?"

"That is somewhat of a longer story..." Raptaur proceeded to outline the series of events that led to them almost accidentally creating a race of undersea lizard people, aliens from a realm beyond those known to mankind. Harry couldn't help but think it a bit cheeky to pretend to be Outsiders, though Varga probably qualified natively for that title.

"What does it say about my life," asked Taylor plaintively, "that the hardest part of that for me to accept is being best friends with Amy Dallon?"

"You didn't get along in your world?" asked Saurial.

"The first time we met, I put black widow spiders on her and she tried to hit me with a fire extinguisher," stated Taylor rather blandly.

"The first real interaction with us in this world was when Amy dragged us into a broom closet, and we threatened to kill her and eat her if she revealed Taylor's secret."

Harry stared at his Taylor, Saurial, and Raptaur. "You guys need some serious lessons on how to win friends and influence people," he said after a moment.

Taylor glared at him. "Like you're any better? Based on your stories, you can't seem to go more than a few months without pissing off somebody or something capable of squashing you like a grape. Your godmother comes to mind..."

"Let's not bring her into this, seriously," said Harry. Harry was worried that mentioning any of the fae by name, especially Mab, would let them find him...something he really did not want to have happen. So far, their absence had been the only significant benefit of this little adventure.

The three of them walked up to a decrepit warehouse, one of several that still existed around the Docks. The work by the DWU hadn't pushed the property values up quite enough for things to rebound, although things were definitely trending in that direction. One sizable difference, however, was that the number of Merchants squatting in the area had dropped almost to zero. Of course, the number of Merchants squatting anywhere had dropped almost to zero thanks to the Family.

Harry led them into a side door, into a small enclosed office space that had a door leading into the main body of the warehouse. There was a man in his thirties waiting there, with an odd mix of academic air and military bearing. He had eyeglasses and hair longer than the typical military man, though. Harry began introductions. "Saurial, Raptaur, Mr. Hebert, this is..."

Saurial interrupted him before he could finish. "Dr. Daniel Jackson, of Stargate Command, I believe?"

As Daniel, Harry and Taylor stared at her, Raptaur could be heard muttering, "Interesting..."

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"Are you guys almost done here? Our visitors are going to be here soon," said the dark-haired young man in the entrance to the engine room.

"Just...another...minute..." grunted Peter from where he was holding up the extremely heavy drive assembly. From behind the unit, a voice said, "That's got it." Peter visibly relaxed and let go of the equipment.

"I'm getting a positive read on the connection," called out a female voice from one of the consoles. "I think that did it."

From behind the equipment, a man in a futuristic jumpsuit walked out, wiping his hands on a rag in a way that engineers from any century would recognize. "Thanks for the help, Peter. That would have taken twice as long if we had to use the antigrav units. I know you would have rather gone with Taylor and Harry."

"Not a problem," replied Pete. "They can take care of themselves. Plus, if we did have to rescue them, having my spider-sense would help." Peter still wasn't sure why, but he could sense Taylor as if she had powers similar to his, despite her actual powers being quite different.

"Not to interrupt," interrupted the man in the door, "but Daniel is going to be bringing them in through the cargo hold. We should meet up there. At least one of them is larger than human-sized."

Peter acknowledged him with a nod, and said, "Don't worry Xan, we'll clean up quickly and meet you guys there."

"Don't be late," was the smiled reply.

"Don't worry," said Peter, "I wouldn't miss it for the world...any of them..."

 

[Derek M]

Chapter 3: SGC and DWU

"I'm sorry, have we met?" asked Daniel, puzzled.

Saurial looked at Raptaur and said in FamTalk, {Do we tell him?}

{If they have Internet access, they can find out on their own,} replied Raptaur.

Saurial turned back to Daniel, who suddenly had a fascinated look on his face. "What language were you just speaking?" he asked.

"In English," she answered, "we just call it FamTalk. It's the language we use among the Family."

"You invented your own language?" asked Taylor in a slightly bewildered tone.

"We did not invent it," said Raptaur. "We merely adopted it. It suits our form quite well. In any event, we have something to tell you. Saurial and I were merely confirming this between ourselves."

"Yes, the reason we know who you are is because Earth Aleph has a television show that talks about the exploits of exploration teams based out of Stargate Command in Cheyenne Mountain," explained Saurial. "The focus of the show was on a team called SG-1, which included yourself for most of the series."

Daniel, who had been looking a bit disappointed that they weren't sharing more details about FamTalk, was now looking slightly perturbed.

"That fits in with some other things we've learned," interjected Dresden. "Daniel, you know that we had fiction based on Peter and Miles' home universes in mine. Ellen's too, if I'm right about her universe."

"Earth Aleph is the parallel Earth that you have access to, isn't it?" asked Daniel. "How do you know so much about their popular culture?"

Danny Hebert answered him. "Information is about the only thing we can share back and forth between the two worlds. There's a thriving trade in books, movies, television shows and music between here and Aleph."

"We also took a particular interest in the show," added Raptaur. "It was of particular interest as we were setting up our own wormhole facility."

"You have a Stargate?" asked Daniel excitedly.

"No, we built our own device for creating wormholes based on Tinker tech. It works slightly differently, with one difference being that it is bidirectional," explained Saurial. "We can discuss it more at length after we've discussed more of your situation here."

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Daniel's head was spinning. His first surprise was their unexpected knowledge of his identity. Then he was distracted by a completely new and alien language, which was utterly fascinating. Then he learned that he was apparently a fictional character on a TV series on an alternate Earth. On top of that, these reptiles apparently had the ability to create wormhole devices, something only a few cultures like the Asgard and the Tollan had in his universe.

Putting that aside, he responded to Saurial's comment. "Of course, let's go inside and I can introduce you to the rest of our group."

Without further discussion, Daniel led them through the doorway into the main open area of the warehouse. The Ship of Fools was sitting on its landing struts inside, with barely enough room to clear the ceiling. The landing ramp to the cargo hold was down and extended below the neck leading up to the bridge. The ship itself looked a bit haphazard, with a mix of different technologies bolted on in a way that looked like a kit-bashed model. Seen from this angle, Daniel realized the ship looked a bit reptilian. He wondered if that would make their guests feel more at home.

"How did you get it inside here?" asked Danny Hebert. "Unless the roof itself swings open, I can't see how you did it."

"We didn't, actually," said Taylor. "Somehow the drive system acts like a kind of teleporter. You'll have to ask Miles if you want more details."

Daniel winced a bit at that summary. He actually remembered enough to know how much of a misinterpretation that was, but he held his tongue. His memories of the actual technology was vague at times, coming in fits and starts. Miles had a much more practical grasp of the systems.

"Please, come this way," said Daniel, leading them up the ramp. Inside, the rest of the crew was waiting to meet their guests -- though it looked like the three from the engine room had just arrived. "Raptaur, Saurial, Mr. Hebert..." started Daniel.

"Call my Danny," the man in question inserted.

Daniel nodded. "Danny, allow me to introduce the rest of our group."

Daniel gestured to a pale man with curly hair. He looked to be about forty-something, and he was wearing a dark jumpsuit with a yellow collar and badge that was surprisingly familiar to everybody. "This is Chief Miles O'Brien, a member of Starfleet, the navy of the United Federation of Planets." O'Brien nodded politely. Next to him was standing a man who seemed slightly younger, with dark hair and an easy smile. "Peter Parker, who was what you would call a 'cape' on his own Earth." Beside Peter was a woman of approximately the same age with short, dark hair. "Ellen Ripley, who was a warrant officer on a commercial starship in her home universe."

He gestured to the side where the remaining two members of the crew sat together. Both men appeared to be in their twenties, though they carried themselves differently. Gesturing to the darker-haired, harder-looking man with an eye patch, Daniel introduced, "Alexander Harris, formerly a demon hunter."

"Just call me Xander," added the man with a slight smile.

"And finally, last but not least, Jimmy Olsen, an investigative reporter in his own world. He also comes from a world with superpowers," explained Daniel. The grinning redhead gave them a small wave, seemingly the most excited to meet them out of the crew.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"Is this the place?" asked Kevin as the van pulled to a stop in front of a warehouse.

Randall looked at the paper on the dash. "Well, it's the address Metis gave us. Doesn't look much like a spaceship hangar, though."

"I think somebody would have noticed it if it actually looked like a spaceship hangar," added Linda. She had stayed in human form, as Kevin and Randall hadn't bothered with their balaclavas. Metis had said secret identities weren't really an issue for these folks, for some reason, and she trusted the lizard implicitly.

Metis pulled up alongside the van, and Kevin rolled down the window. "This is it," said the black reptile. "Saurial and Raptaur are inside with Danny. Dragon should be here in about an hour...she had to finish something up before she could leave the Rig."

"So, who are we here to meet?" asked Randall.

"Saurial called me earlier, and told me that an alternate version of Taylor Hebert and a wizard named Harry Dresden had shown up at their house," answered Metis. "Apparently, they came here in a spaceship that's inside that warehouse."

"Wait, Harry Dresden?" asked Kevin. "You know that's a fictional character, right? Wizard P.I. in Chicago? There's a whole series of novels."

Metis nodded in reply. "I know. I looked it up online right after I called Dragon. The name sounded familiar, but I couldn't place it."

"You think that's on the level?" questioned Kevin.

Linda whacked him on the arm, which caused him to wince slightly and twitch back on reflex. "Dude, you live in a compound with a family of giant lizards, one of whom could eat a fucking Endbringer for a snack. What's with the arbitrary skepticism? I want to get inside and see this spaceship." She could feel her power gearing up for an epic Tinker session in anticipation of getting to work on an actual spaceship.

"You heard the lady," said Randall as he opened the driver-side door. "We're off to see the Wizard."

Metis suddenly shifted her head to look at Randall. She had just had the strangest feeling of deja vu. After a moment, she shrugged it off and headed for the door while the others got out of the van.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Saurial stared at the group of fictional characters who were quite obviously not fictional. She was about to say something when she heard the sound of a van pulling up. Instead of her previous thought, she said, "I believe our team is outside. We called in some technical experts...people who are skilled in advanced technology and assisted in building our own wormhole device, among other things."

"You have engineers capable of understanding our technology?" asked O'Brien skeptically. "Isn't this version of Earth just at the start of the 21st century?"

"Actually," replied Daniel, "they've got superheroes here called Tinkers that seem to be capable of science and technology far in advance of the baseline industry here."

Peter nodded in agreement. "Yeah, my world had a number of inventors that were easily capable of Federation-level tech...people like Reed Richards and Tony Stark. Superpowers throw the whole technology tree out of whack."

Jimmy also added to that. "Same here. We had groups like S.T.A.R. Labs, and of course the Justice League had access to alien technology from several different races."

"What exactly do you hope to accomplish here?" asked Ripley warily, speaking for the first time.

Saurial answered as Raptaur went over to let the others into the warehouse and guide them to the ship. "Harry and Taylor said you folks are having a hard time finding your home universes. We have a few ideas on how we might be able to locate a specific target universe. The Family has some expertise in multidimensional mathematics and wormhole and portal travel."

"Wormhole and portal?" asked Jimmy.

"One is primarily technological, while the second is magical," explained Saurial. They seemed to all accept that explanation, probably because their group included a wizard and a demon hunter in addition to engineers and scientists.

Raptaur came back leading a group including a black lizard with red highlights, presumably Metis, two men and a woman. After introductions were exchanged, one of the newcomers, Randall, asked a question. "How did you people all end up travelling together, anyway?"

"That," answered Daniel Jackson, "is a long story..."

 

[Derek M]

Chapter 4: Naked Rescue

Chief O'Brien finished repairing the microfracture, then slid the conduit back into place. Deep Space 9 may have been back in Federation and Bajoran hands, but there was still plenty of work to be done clearing away the vestiges of the Dominion occupation. The station had already been a mishmash of Cardassian, Bajoran and Federation tech, and the Vorta had complicated things by making repairs with Dominion parts. The war may have been over, but the work wasn't. That was usually the way of it after each conflict, something O'Brien knew very well. He was feeling ambivalent about the end of this one. The Dominion forces in the Alpha Quadrant, "surrendered." The end result was really just a return to the status quo before the war, which seemed a pretty bland outcome to spend all those lives to get. Cardassia was, "free," by the Cardie version of that word. O'Brien found it hard to care too much. He had fought the Cardies too many times and lost too many friends to care. He had also been a target for Cardassian "justice," but that was a dangerous path of thought...and triggered too many false memories.

He was happier for Bajor. It was a nice planet, and of course for Nerys it was home. To him and Keiko, Nerys was pretty much family. She and Keiko bonded over the baby, of course, but Miles also appreciated that Nerys had been in her share of battles. He'd fought a larger number of different foes -- Borg, Nausicaan pirates, Orion Syndicate thugs, Cardassians, Klingons, Breen and Jem'Hadar -- but Nerys had spent most of her life fighting. It was also pretty certain that Bajor would end up joining the Federation sooner rather than later. Having such a prominent Fed world close to Cardie space was good, and he was pretty sure the Bajorans weren't going to be complacent about any shenanigans. It was too easy for worlds like Vulcan to do the practical thing and turn their attention away.

O'Brien finished packing away his tools, and checked in with his repair teams. His next stop after this was the USS Amazon, yet another replacement Federation runabout. The ships just weren't durable enough to last long in a war zone, in his opinion, and DS9 was on the front lines even before the war officially started. This one had had several problems, probably as a result of a rushed production and deployment. Misaligned warp coils, reduced throughput in one of the plasma conduits, and some annoying problems with the LCARS interface on the main console. Having your controls change back without warning to the deployment default while you were in the process of maneuvering was a recipe for disaster. Most of that had been fixed, but one of the starboard maneuvering thrusters was still cutting out intermittently.

He managed to discover the problem pretty quickly, a faulty sensor in the thruster housing. The thruster itself was fine. He tapped his communicator. "This is O'Brien. I'm going to take the Amazon out for a check flight." The voice of Kira Nerys came back from the ops center. "That's fine, Chief. Traffic's pretty light right now." O'Brien reflected that he was going to miss some of the people here, but teaching at Starfleet Academy was going to be a much better posting for him and his family. He was pretty tired of fighting, and his children deserved parents who weren't in danger of getting possessed by Pah-Wraiths, or running missions into the Delta Quadrant. Molly was a brave girl, but he truly hoped Kirayoshi wouldn't need that trait quite so much.

Miles had been running the runabout through its paces automatically, lost in his thoughts. That distraction ended quickly when an alert began to sound from the console. The sensors were detecting a very unusual subspace anomaly. The anomaly itself was unusual, to the point where the computer was having trouble identifying what was happening, but so was the location. They were nowhere near the usual trouble spots -- the Bajoran wormhole and the Badlands. Without warning, O'Brien was thrown to the side by a sheer force strong enough to overwhelm the inertial dampeners. As he tried to skew back on course, he tried to contact DS9. "DS9, this is O'Brien, the Amazon's encountered some kind of subspace turbulence that's tossing the ship around hard." The response was not encouraging. "zzzz...Chief...shh...trouble read...crk...out?" He was checking the ship's comm system when the artificial gravity gave out. He tapped his comm badge instead. "DS9, this is O'Brien requesting emergency beam out!" A glance at the front screen showed the stars tumbling around as the ship moved. He tapped again. "DS9, do you read me?"

There was a sudden flash from outside, and then the ship's proximity alarm began bleating. The ship shuddered and lurched again as there was an impact. The Chief was surprised to see that the runabout was somehow suddenly much too close to a planet. More disturbingly, the planet was obviously not Bajor...and didn't look particularly much like anything in the Bajoran star system. As he struggled to bring the ship back into some type of controlled descent, he wondered idly if he had somehow gotten sucked through the wormhole and back into the Delta Quadrant. He stopped worrying about creating a galactic incident before the virtual ink was dry on the Treaty of Bajor, and started worrying about whether or not he would survive the landing. The transporter was down, so there would be no emergency beam out. Half the ship's thrusters weren't responding. As the ground got closer and closer, he felt frustration that this was happening now, just when everything was starting to work out. The world went black with the impact.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"Ugh," muttered Daniel. He opened his eyes and then quickly shut them again when he realized he was lying on his back, staring straight into the sun. He felt around himself with his hands. He was lying on dirt. He also discovered he was naked. With a start, he turned his head to the side and opened his eyes in shock. He had a physical body again! The other ascended must have made him human again! He began to remember.

The other ascended had not been happy with him for interfering with Anubis on behalf of Earth and Abydos. They had made it clear that his punishment was going to be regaining his humanity...without his memories, including the memories he had before his ascension. Something had obviously gone wrong with that part if the plan, as he still clearly remembered his life on Earth, and his death after the radiation accident on Kelowna. He also could remember bits and pieces of his time ascended, including the fight with Anubis. The memories were fuzzy, and a lot of the details...especially the ascended knowledge...were missing. He did distinctly recall this sense of getting pulled out of the ascended realms, and in a way that apparently was not at the direction of the ascended, if their sense of outrage and shock was anything to judge by.

Daniel frowned. He remembered enough that he could somewhat understand their position. The Ancients were so terrified of becoming like their cousins, the Ori, that they chose to completely disengage from mortals. That was understandable, to a degree. As an energy being possessing massive knowledge and awareness, it was impossible to continue to think and feel like a mortal being. The only way to stay in touch with these things was to watch the mortal realm and continue to follow events. Immortality, though, had a way of driving such thoughts away. As the beings you knew passed into death, and the galaxies themselves shifted to be different from what they were, you just couldn't bring yourself to care so much for such lower things. The immorality of drawing power from the mortal realms started to seem less of a concern, despite the consequences. THAT was why the penalties for interference were so dire -- interference was a risk to everything. Daniel, and others like Oma Desala, had felt that there had to be a middle ground between abusive god and disinterested observer, but they were in the minority. At a minimum, he felt the ascended should take responsibility for their discarded pre-ascension technology. That technology was a primary reason for the Goa'uld's place atop the galaxy's power structure.

He pushed himself up to a sitting position and took a look around. Wherever he was, the terrain was barren, without much in the way of vegetation. There also weren't any birds or other animals visible, although a few insects buzzed lazily through the air. Compared to most of the terraformed worlds in the Milky Way, this place was downright unpleasant. Scattered across the landscape, there were piles of scrap, most of which seemed to be parts of crashed spaceships. Some of them seemed partially intact, while others were so scorched and twisted that it would have been impossible to tell what they had once been. His attention shifted up to a fireball falling through the atmosphere in the distance. It seemed to be heading closer to him, though it was obvious it would still land a bit of a walk away. When it crashed close enough that he could hear the landing, he decided the crash site would be as good a place to go as any. There wasn't a Stargate in sight, at least. His first few yards walking over the rough terrain convinced him that doing this in bare feet was going to be really unpleasant.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Miles O'Brien groaned as he regained consciousness. He was lying on his back, with something soft under his head. A voice nearby said, "Take it easy. You may have suffered a concussion during the crash." Miles blearily opened his eyes...then stopped moving to stare at the naked man watching him from where he was perched on a nearby rock.

His throat felt dry, but he croaked out, "Where am I, and why haven't you got any clothes on?"

The man smiled, then answered. "Your guess is as good as mine as to where we are. The reason I'm naked is that that's how I appeared on the planet. I was sent here by...well, I'm not sure, and it's a bit of a long story. Does your craft have medical supplies? I haven't had a chance to look. Mostly, I wanted to get you lying flat with something to support your head."

Miles went to nod, then thought better of it. "The medical supplies are in wall panels marked with a red cross. If you get the emergency medical kit, I can walk you through the treatment."

"I'll go get one, then. By the way, my name's Daniel," said the man.

"Miles O'Brien," said Miles, returning the courtesy.

Daniel got up to go search the runabout, muttering something about remarkable coincidences in symbology. When he returned, Miles walked him through treatment for his head injury, which shortly had him thinking clearly again. Miles returned the favor on Daniel's feet, which appeared to be cut up from walking across the rough terrain without shoes. The next task after that was to survey the damage to the runabout. It was bad. The hull was torn up to the point where she would never be space-worthy again.

"You didn't happen to come here in a ship, did you?" asked Miles.

"No, sorry," replied Daniel regretfully. "There is quite a lot of wreckage around here. We might be able to find something, though I'm not sure what we'll do for food and water..."

"We have emergency rations, and there's still some emergency power, so I can probably get a replicator going again. That would get you some clothes, too. You need shoes, at a minimum." Having a working replicator would help with repairs, too, O'Brien knew.

"Can you create eyeglasses?" asked Daniel.

"Eyeglasses?" asked O'Brien quizzically.

"I...can't really see that well without them," admitted Daniel reluctantly.

O'Brien shook his head. "We can probably work something out. Normally, we would just correct your vision, but I'm not a doctor and I certainly don't have the tools for that in a crashed runabout. What planet are you from, anyway?"

"I'm from a planet called Earth. You may know them as the Tau'ri?" said Daniel.

"Earth?" said Miles, surprised. "You're from Earth and you need corrective lenses on your eyes?" That oddity distracted him from the unknown word Daniel had used.

That in turn led to a fairly lengthy conversation, during which the two realized they may have even more problems than they thought. A tricorder scan of quantum signatures rapidly confirmed to both Miles and Daniel that, as a certain smart ass Colonel would have said, "they ain't in Kansas anymore."

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

There turned out to be a lot of scrap, and there were ships from dozens of civilizations. They even found one with a fully intact hull. It was sitting on its landing struts as if it had been parked and abandoned, rather than crashed, though there were signs of combat on the hull. The ship had had shuttle craft, but both of those were missing. Unfortunately, it also didn't have a faster-than-light drive, either the warp drive from Miles' universe, or the hyperdrive used in Daniel's. That led to a more extended search...which led to another ship which seemed to be their salvation.

The ship was clearly an Ancient design, although it was not one Daniel knew. The bad news was that the hull had been cored through by some type of powerful energy weapon. The good news was that the power and drive system was salvageable. Daniel's memories provided enough information to know it was some kind of wormhole drive, different from the type of drives used by the Goa'uld or the Asgard. Miles was fairly sure he could make something work with the Ancient drive and the remnants from the runabout...enough to get the one intact ship they had off the ground. It took a couple of weeks, which was about a quarter of the time Miles expected. Surprisingly, every time Miles ran into an issue merging the different technologies, Daniel seemed to be there with a vital piece of information or a brilliant suggestion. Eventually, he explained about his past, and Miles reciprocated. The two were fast friends by the time they were ready to turn on the new drive for the first time.

 

[Derek M]

Chapter 5: Collapse, Kidnapping, and Chicago

Xander slowly regained consciousness. That he did was surprising to him. He hadn't really expected to wake up again. His luck seemed to be doing its usual, swinging back and forth between extremes of good and bad so quickly it made his head spin. Without opening his eyes, he listened carefully to see if he could hear anybody (or anything...which was an oh-so-important qualifier anywhere near Sunnydale) moving about. Other than an annoying dripping sound barely on the edge of hearing, it was silent as a tomb. Why the Hellmouth his brain had to come up with THAT metaphor, Xander couldn't say. Willow would probably have said, "quiet as a library." Buffy would have said, "quiet as something not making any noise." Maybe he was being unfair. He was still a little pissed at Buffy.

He was lying on a pile of rubble, which, sadly, was far from an unusual experience for him. In fact, he seemed to be in the rubble of a collapsed building...the high school? Patting himself down, he seemed to be uninjured, which was more unusual. His life was really kind of depressing when you thought about it that way. His ax was lying next to him. There were no signs of life, but he did see somebody's feet sticking out from beneath a collapsed wall. The brown robe hem he could see suggested it was a Bringer, which meant Xander was more than OK with him being buried by a wall. Those assholes were why he had gone back to rescue Anya (and Andrew too, but mostly Anya). He had just managed to arrive in time to block the strike of a Bringer that would have cut her in half from behind. Getting everyone out had been more of a problem. When the building started to collapse, Xander had been cut off from the other two. He had told them to run, and that he would find another way out. Anya clearly hadn't wanted to, but there was no time. He had almost made it, too, but the floor had suddenly suffered an extreme case of not being there.

Now, he wasn't sure what had happened next. Had they closed the Hellmouth? Had the others made it out of the collapsing building? Was the surface of the Earth being overrun by super vampires and other Hellspawn? Inquiring minds wanted to know.

There was nothing to it but to dig himself out. After poking around for a bit, he managed to find a point in the enclosed air pocket he was in that would shift, thankfully without collapsing the rest of the debris down on his head and killing him. His construction background was proving useful. He could tell where some of the load-bearing elements of the building were still intact. Using a pry-bar made from re-purposed rebar, and some scrabbling with his hands (with work gloves -- a smart builder always had gloves with them), he managed to burrow a passage out of the collapsed building and into the open air. What greeted him when he made his way out was a field of rubble easily encompassing an area half the size of Sunnydale. The whole town looked like it had collapsed. The entire area seemed to be bathed in an orange glow, like there were massive fires burning, but he confusingly couldn't see any flames or smoke. It wasn't until he looked up that he noticed the glowing, orange sky.

"Well, shit."

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Jimmy Olsen was having a bad day. Metropolis was kind of a magnet for bad days, come to think of it. It seemed to suffer more than its fair share of super-villain attacks, alien invasions, dimensional incursions, weird super-science accidents, and the occasional bout of superdickery, as he liked to call it. Despite all that, the traffic was still very bad. You would think all of that would drive down housing prices, but then people still lived in Gotham City, so what did he know? He also was obviously spending too much time hanging around Lois if he was able to ponder housing prices while stuck in the armpit of a paradaemon. He would have tried calling out to Superman, who was nearby fighting hordes of the same, but the paradaemon had shoved most of his fist into Jimmy's mouth. Paradaemons tasted disgusting, which was something that was neither useful to him nor something he had ever wondered about.

Jimmy didn't really start to worry until a Boom Tube opened up nearby, and the paradaemon began to head toward it. He knew enough about Apokolips to know he didn't want to be even a temporary guest. His captive pulled an egg-shaped device off of his belt as he was getting ready to enter the Tube and pushed a button on the side. Just as he was about to throw it, there was a flash of metal, and a batarang impaled the creature's hand. The egg device, which was starting to beep ominously, and Jimmy both fell toward the Boom Tube. Jimmy's last sight of Metropolis was of a comically horrified Nightwing, watching helplessly. Then the beeping stopped.

"Well, shit."

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Xander discovered that one of the buildings that had been sucked into wherever he was had been a convenience store. This scored him a backpack, as well as a whole pallet of bottled water and various snacks, including the glorious golden treasure that was Twinkies. He wasn't in any danger of starving to death or dying of thirst, at least. In fact, there was quite a lot of useful stuff buried in the ruins. Whatever had happened to Sunnydale had happened fairly quickly. He had even found working cell phones and radios, but there was no signal of any kind. Radio Free Hell apparently didn't exist yet. One thing he hadn't found any sign of was the Magic Box, or any other kind of magical paraphernalia. While magic and Xander were generally non-mixy things, he couldn't really think of any other way to get OUT of this place short of a lot of luck and the right grimoire. He had kept an eye out for any signs of Buffy's house, or homes for any of the practitioners he knew like Andrew or Amy Madison. Nada. Zilch. Nope. Please try again later.

Over the better part of a week, based upon the calendar on his watch, he spent his time wandering around and checking out the ruins. There were some intact cars and motorcycles in the piles, but the roads had not survived; he was pretty much stuck hoofing it around. He also didn't find any people, which wasn't that surprising given how the town had cleared out prior to the apocalypse. Even the demons had headed for the hills, for the most part. If there were any more bodies, they were likely buried, or left behind on Earth. He had located a stash of comic books, which was a better distraction than talking to the feet of a dead Bringer like a demented inter-dimensional Tom Hanks chatting up a volleyball.

He was in the middle of taking a Twinkie break on top of the remains of a dry cleaning store when there was a bright flash, followed by the sound of breaking glass and a clatter of collapsing rubble. Xander grabbed his backpack and stumbled down the ruined shop as quickly as he could, homing in on the sound and the small cloud of dust. He also loosened the ax on his belt as a precaution. As he rounded a pile that appeared to be the front facade of a car dealership, he found a red-haired young man lying prone. The man on the ground gave off a quiet, "Ow..." Xander went to his side and did a quick assessment. The guy seemed to have some shallow cuts from the plate glass he had smashed through, but otherwise seemed surprisingly intact. "Dude," said Xander, "you seem to have found the biggest remaining piece of plate glass around here to smash through."

The man on the ground turned his head to look at Xander, and Xander thought he looked younger than he had at first glance. "That seems to be my luck these days," the redhead replied. "I think I need an ambulance."

"Yeah," winced Xander, "that may be a bit of a problem, seeing as you and I seem to be the only two human beings anywhere nearby."

"Where am I?" the injured man asked.

"You're in the ruins of Sunnydale, California," answered Xander.

"Sunnydale? Is that near Coast City?" was the response.

Xander laughed, thinking he was joking. "Here, let's see if we can clean and bandage those cuts. I've got a medkit here. My name's Xander Harris, by the way."

"Thanks. Jimmy Olsen," answered the other.

Xander started looking at a moderately deep slash down Jimmy's left arm, and pulled out some disinfectant. "Wow, your parents must be big fans of Superman."

"Mom is. Dad spends a lot of time complaining about collateral damage from superhero battles. He's in insurance, so, yeah..." said Jimmy.

Xander grinned as he started putting butterfly bandages on the cut. "I can see that. I'm in construction, and super-humans having a fight can do a lot of property damage." He was thinking back to the number of times he had had to fix Buffy's house after some demon decided to burst into her home and attack the Slayer. It would probably be even worse for insurers and repairmen if superheroes actually existed.

Jimmy started to unbutton his dress shirt to get at some of the other cuts. "You folks have a lot of problems with villains in Sunnydale?" He wondered if Xander's town was near the Teen Titans' area of coverage. He could ask Superman about it when he was inevitably rescued.

"Mostly vampires," answered Xander. They were stuck in some kind of Hell dimension, so revealing the existence of the supernatural wasn't really much of a concern.

"Vampires?" asked Olsen. "Has anybody contacted the Justice League? I know that Batman has standing orders to be immediately called in for any vampire problems after something bad happened in Gotham City." Standing orders from Batman typically implied that he had tripwires on all of the League communications channels that would let him or Oracle know when something of interest happened.

"It would be nice if somebody else could show up and deal with our issues," said Xander as he started cleaning Jimmy's other injuries. The kid seemed to be taking the whole comic book joke a bit far, but growing up with the name Jimmy Olsen probably wasn't easy.

"No, seriously, has anybody called the Justice League?" Jimmy looked earnestly serious as he asked the question.

Xander stopped what he was doing and stared at Jimmy. He took in his red hair and earnest face. There was a nagging feeling at the back of his mind that was pushing him to either start squealing like a fanboy, or start gibbering and embrace his oncoming madness. Instead of doing either, he finished up with the last few cuts, then quietly went to his backpack and pulled out the comic book he had been reading on top of the dry cleaner. Jimmy watched him curiously. Xander handed him the issue of Action Comics. On the cover, Superman was holding up a helicopter that contained two people, one of whom was obviously supposed to be Lois, while the other was a red-haired youth holding on old-style flash camera.

Jimmy stared at the cover. He turned his head and stared at Xander. "Why is there a comic book with a picture of me on the cover?"

Xander wanted to be sure. "So, you actually know Superman, as in, you've met an actual Kryptonian with a red and blue costume who can fly, has super strength, and moves faster than a speeding bullet?"

The redhead looked confused again. "Yeah, of course. I won a Pulitzer for photographing him. I assumed that's why you asked what my parents thought of him?"

"So, I've got some good news, and some bad news," said Xander.

"What's the good news," asked Jimmy with a sinking feeling.

"The good news is that between you having the Justice League on your side, and me having a massively powerful witch as a best friend, the odds of us being rescued sometime in the near future are actually pretty good."

"And the bad?" prompted Jimmy.

"We're actually stuck in some kind of Hell dimension, in the ruins of a town that used to be on top of a literal portal to Hell, and my home dimension is different from the one you're from. I'm pretty sure most of the heroes in your world are actually comic book characters where I'm from..." Xander didn't mention that he probably knew all of their secret identities by heart, as that would paint a huge target on his back if anybody in that reality found out.

Jimmy sat and absorbed this for a moment. He then gave a little shrug, which was a mistake as it pulled on his cuts, and said, "Well, it's far from the strangest thing that's happened to me."

Xander reached into his bag and pulled out a bottle of water, which Jimmy accepted with thanks. Then he said, "Can I ask you a question?"

"Sure," said Jimmy.

"What's Superman really like?"

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Jimmy and Xander together explored most of the ruins. The piles of rubble ended at a hard, forbidding plain of blackened rock that looked extremely inhospitable. On the plus side, the roving hordes of demons that Xander half-expected to appear were absent. Jimmy also commented that it was still a nicer place than Apokolips. The two of them swapped stories. Jimmy thought Xander's tales of the Sunnydale nightlife were every bit as exciting as life in Metropolis, which caused Xander to look askance at him. Xander had a slightly sanitized view of Jimmy's home, which was understandable if most of his knowledge came from comic books. He did seem happy that Jimmy could confirm meeting many members of the League at one time or another. Both of them agreed that Wonder Woman was too good for either of them.

The two of them were sharing a meal of tinned beef stew about four days after Jimmy's arrival when there was another flash of light and a loud splash of water. Going to investigate, the two of them found a tall, unconscious man wearing a long leather coat. He was soaking wet in ice cold water. He also seemed to have a fair amount of blood on him, though they couldn't find any injuries. He stayed unconscious for most of a day before waking up, and his story was grim. His name was Harry Dresden, he was a wizard, and he had just ended a war by sacrificing a woman he loved.

"The White Council of Wizards was at war with the Red Court vampires. This was a war that I had started by violating a truce to save Susan's life. The Red Court had been coming out on top in most of our engagements, and they were getting ready to perform a ritual that would have taken out one of the White Council's heavy hitters, the Blackstaff. In my world, the Red Court controlled large swaths of Central and South America, so some friends of mine and I went down to stop it. As it turns out, luring me in was part of the plan. What I hadn't known was that the target of the ritual, a man named Ebenezer McCoy, was actually my grandfather, and this was a ritual that targeted family lines. They needed me as the sacrifice," explained Harry.

Xander asked a few clarifying questions at this point. Dresden's vampires weren't quite the same as his world's, but they were close enough. If there was one thing Xander could empathize with, it was being the target of a ritual. That was one reason why he was thinking about swearing off dating.

"Susan was part of a group resisting the rule of the Red Court. Susan was half-turned, meaning she wasn't yet a full vampire. A member of her group betrayed her and sacrificed himself to finish her transformation. As the youngest of the Red Court, she took my place in the ritual, and the entire Red Court was destroyed," finished Harry.

They talked for a bit longer. Harry had been attacked at a marina after returning home, which explained why he was soaking wet when they found him. Dresden tired relatively quickly, and went to sleep. Jimmy stayed up to talk to Xander about the new arrival.

"That's horrible," said Jimmy. "I can't imagine having to watch somebody you love die like that." Jimmy had seen people die, but he had been lucky that he hadn't lost anybody close to his heart.

"It's actually worse than that," replied Xander hollowly. "That kind of ritual requires an active sacrifice. I guarantee you that it wasn't a member of the Red Court who completed the ritual in a way that would have doomed the whole lot of them."

"Then, who completed it?" asked Jimmy with a sinking feeling.

"Dresden was supposed to be the sacrifice. He was probably the closest person on the side of the angels who could finish it. He would have known how, and what it would mean," said Xander.

"So you mean he...?" asked Jimmy, hoping he was missing something.

Xander nodded. "He killed her. She volunteered, and he killed her."

The conversation died down after that, and the two retired to sleep soon after.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

The sky broke open, and a spaceship flew out of it. It dipped down a bit before the air-burning engines caught and started to push it forward. On the bridge, Daniel and Miles gripped their stations. The artificial gravity in the original ship had been closely tied to the ship's original engine. They had had to strip out some major components of it in order to fit the Ancient power drive in...the power leads all terminated at the engine room, which made that preferable to installing it into the cargo hold, for example. Miles had had to salvage gravity plating from the Amazon to compensate, but they only had enough to equip the bridge, engineering, and the crew common areas. They had plans to replicate parts for more, but hadn't had the time yet. The new plates didn't integrate as smoothly into the various propulsion systems as they would have on a warp-capable ship, either.

"I wasn't expecting us to break out in atmosphere...where the hell are we?" asked Miles.

Daniel was manning the sensors, a strange mix of Ancient, Starfleet and some of the original equipment. "We're over a planet...I think?"

"You sound like you're not sure," said Miles.

"According to these readings, the surface below us extends to the maximum range of the sensors," clarified Daniel.

"That shouldn't be possible! Are we over some kind of massive Dyson's sphere?" queried O'Brien.

Daniel knew what that was thanks to spending time with Sam. "The ground just reads as normal earth. There are some trace elements, but overall the surface is remarkably flat and boring. The only thing of interest is a pile of ruins about one hundred and fifty kilometers straight ahead."

A warning light began to flash on the pilot's station. "That's not good...there's something in the air here that the engines don't like. It won't effect them with brief exposure, but I wouldn't want to spend hours flying over the surface in this atmosphere," explained Miles.

"Why don't we head toward the ruins. We can check them out and see if they have any clues as to where we are, and spend some time checking over the drives and working on better integrating all of this technology," suggested Daniel.

Neither of them wanted to open another wormhole at random, and lacking any other target, they decided upon Daniel's suggestion. Daniel took the flight time as an opportunity to revisit an earlier conversation.

"You really served on the starship Enterprise?" he asked O'Brien.

Miles looked at him. "Yes, really. Why is that so hard to believe? I told you I was in Starfleet!"

Daniel shook his head. "It's just, the Enterprise is kind of iconic. It's probably one of the best known fictional spaceships in popular culture. One of my team mates was always wanting to name new ships after her."

"Well, she wasn't fictional in my universe. She was a beautiful ship. You didn't realize there was a television show about my reality in your world until I mentioned the Enterprise?" he asked.

"I didn't watch a lot of television. Honestly, your uniform and technology looked vaguely familiar, but I've actually seen a lot of different civilizations capable of space travel. The name reminded me of Jack's fixation on it, though." Daniel smiled briefly as he remembered O'Neill's antics. "He would have been happy to see the real thing, I think."

"You and your team were close, huh?" asked Miles.

Daniel nodded. "We served together for years...spent our free time together, and saved each others' lives more than once."

"The command staff for DS9 was like that, and so was the Enterprise crew. You're lucky when you find a group like that. Not every crew gels the same way," mused Miles.

The ruins were rapidly approaching. Miles set the ship down beyond the edge of the ruins, with a good two hundred meters of empty space. If anything lived there, they would have ample warning if it charged out at them. The sensor readings were inconclusive on life, mostly because they still hadn't properly integrated all of the different sensors from the three ships. Miles had communicator badges, tricorders and hand phasers for both of them. Daniel was happy with the first two, and accepting of the last, though he secretly thought it looked a bit too much like a hand vacuum and found firing it a bit awkward. He did like the option of a stun setting that wouldn't accidentally kill the target with a second shot, unlike the Goa'uld zat'nik'tel.

The two descended the cargo bay ramp and began walking toward the ruins. They were both scanning as they approached. Miles reported, "the ruins are from a technological civilization, probably pre-warp. I'm detecting electronics and plastics, but no subspace technology." Daniel was focused on the life sign readings. "I've got three life signs, and they appear human if I'm reading this correctly?" Miles looked at his display. "Yep, that's right." Nobody was in sight, but then their approach in the ship probably hadn't been subtle.

"Hello?" called Daniel loudly. "We mean you no harm! We just want to talk to you!"

"Look over there...that looks like English," said Miles. Daniel stopped peering around looking for movement and looked at the wall Miles was indicating. It was an advertisement for the Sunnydale Copy Center, with a telephone number in the US and Canada format. "Not only is that English," answered Daniel, "but it looks like it's from Earth, and from somewhere around my century."

"This whole place just seems like it was picked up and dropped in the middle of nowhere," said O'Brien. "Look at the foundations...they don't extend into the ground. Some of them seem like they're cut off at a certain point, while others look to be ripped out of the ground somewhere else."

Daniel walked over to what was clearly a knocked over stop sign. "This is an American town...or what's left of one."

"It was one," said a voice off to the side. Miles and Daniel turned to see a tall man in a long leather coat standing against a portion of wall that was still intact. "Sunnydale used to be in California, though, not in this dimension."

"Is that where you're from?" asked Miles.

The man scoffed. "Do I sound like I'm from California? Like, for sure, dude. No, I'm from Chicago. How about you folks?"

"I live in Colorado, but I grew up in several places...I was in foster care," answered Daniel.

"I was born in Ireland," added O'Brien. Which was true, though it was quite far from where he currently lived.

"So," said the man, "what's an Irishman and an American doing wandering around these parts?"

"My name is Daniel Jackson, and this is Miles O'Brien. We were both stranded on a mostly empty planet. We managed to cobble together a ship from a number of damaged vessels. Our first hop brought us here, though. Do you know what planet we're on?"

The man just stared at them for a moment. "My name's Harry...Harry Dresden. I think I need to bring you in to meet the others."

Harry led them into the ruins into a small camp where two men in their twenties were waiting. Harry performed the introductions, but everybody was surprised by Daniel's reaction.

"Wait, Xander Harris, like the character in Buffy the Vampire Slayer? The TV show?" said Daniel.

Xander stared at him. "There was a television show about Buffy?"

"Yes...wait, these are the ruins of Sunnydale, where the Hellmouth was located?" asked Daniel.

"I thought you didn't watch television," interjected Miles.

"Well, I don't, usually, but there were some fascinating interpretations of traditional folklore and myths throughout the series..." said Daniel, stammering slightly.

Jimmy felt slightly smug, thinking back to how Xander had reacted to meeting a comic book character in the flesh. "I'm sure Xander would be happy to tell you all about what it was really like." The one-eyed carpenter shot him a brief glare.

Xander proceeded to explain what had happened, and that he believed them to be in a hell dimension. He admitted he had no idea what would happen if they tried to actually reach orbit in their ship, or if that was even possible.

"I think we need to maybe load up on some supplies," O'Brien said, looking at the pallets of food they had in the camp, "and try our luck in another dimension. Just a few minutes of flying here was enough to start corroding the engines."

"Um..." interrupted Harry. "Not to be a spoilsport, or anything, but I don't do well with technology. I can't really use computers or fly in airplanes."

"It's all right," replied Daniel, "there's nothing to be afraid of..."

"No, it's not that," said Harry, shaking his head. "I'm a wizard, and my magic tends to interfere with technology."

"You're a wizard?" asked Miles, a clear look of disbelief on his face.

Harry put his hand out, raised his thumb, and said, "Flickum Bicus!"

Miles and Daniel both stared at the tiny flame dancing over Dresden's thumb.

 

[Derek M]

Chapter 6: Stranded and What to Do about It

'OK, this is getting repetitive,' thought Peter. 'How many different Kingpins in different universes are going to try and get their family back by destroying New York?' He had already had not one, but two trips into the multiverse. The first had been to a world where there already was a perfect Peter Parker, but Kingpin had killed him. The kid who replaced him had been a little rough at first, but eventually he had stepped up and gotten the job done. Peter got home and started fixing things, starting with his failed marriage. Then a guy named Miguel O'Hara had shown up with another multiversal crisis, also involving the Kingpin (albeit an alternate future Kingpin). Pete was still a little self-conscious about pointing at people after that adventure. Now, his New York was glitching in a very familiar fashion. For once, he had gotten ahead of it. He had the goober. He knew where the particle accelerator was located. He was also keeping his mouth shut and his head down, as he expected that this world's Kingpin would be just as homicidal about his family. Unfortunately, it hadn't stopped Kingpin from cornering him before he could get to the right spot.

"Spider-Man...how good of you to join us today," said the gigantic crime boss in his deep, rumbling voice.

Peter decided to go for the direct, logical approach, which was admittedly a little off-brand. "Kingpin. Tell me something...are you planning to give up crime?"

"What?" asked Kingpin, obviously confused by the question.

"Are you planning on giving up crime? I know what you're trying to do. You want to get them back. But when they're back...what are the chances that they'll find out you're a crime boss again?" While he was talking, Peter was moving one of his web-shooters to line up on a dangling bit of technology close to the panel he needed for the override. His question actually seemed to give Kingpin pause for a moment. The barrel of his pistol even dropped down as his face turned thoughtful. It tracked back to Spider-Man soon after, however, as Kingpin answered, "You may have a point, but I can worry about that after they are back!"

Peter sent a web out to one of the technological stalactites in the cavernous central area of the particle accelerator, then yanked himself off of the catwalk, flipping to avoid the bullets his spider-sense told him were coming his way. Half-way to his intended perch, he had to dodge a pumpkin bomb from Hobgoblin, which put him slightly off target and forced him to move farther away...only to receive a solid knock in the ribs from one of Doc Ock's tentacles that sent him back at Kingpin. 'The problem with spider-sense is that it doesn't help when literally every path is equally dangerous,' thought Peter as the giant mobster loomed closer. A quick kick and a follow-up web swing allowed Peter to knock the gun out of Kingpin's hand, which at least made him less dangerous at range.

He re-evaluated that as Fisk tore a chunk of the catwalk railing off with a metallic screech and hurled it at his head. Spider-Man jumped over the flying metal, then flipped down and over the catwalk, hitting Wilson Fisk in the chest and sending him through the open space in the railing that he had created with his improvised missile. Kingpin began to topple, prompting a mental snicker that quickly turned to alarm as the man reached out and grabbed Peter's ankle, pulling him along in the fall.

Peter shot a web line at the catwalk, but Fisk landed a punch on his shoulder that forced him to drop the line. Peter kicked away to get room, but his eyes widened as he saw the particle beam coming up fast. 'Not again!' he thought as he passed through the event horizon of the beam intersection. His awareness spread out. He could sense the multiverse, and the other members of the spider family. This time, he made a conscious effort to NOT reach out to them. With a little luck, he might be able to get back to his own universe without having to go through the whole glitching out of existence thing repeatedly. As he tumbled through the edges of the multiverse, he could feel a slight pull back to his own. It was the same pull that brought him back the first time when he had re-entered the stream. Peter could feel himself moving toward it, back to the fight, and back to MJ. That was when he sensed her. She didn't feel exactly like another spider...but he could sense her. She was terrified and lost, and he could feel her mind was starting to fray at the edges. 'I could just go back...I can't save everybody in the multiverse.' Even as he had the thought, his gut told him that wasn't going to happen. With a mental sigh, he veered toward the mind he could feel even now starting to lose hope. He pushed through, well past his local part of the multiverse and into a space that somehow felt darker. As he got closer, he could tell she was young, just a teenager, and she had no idea what was happening. With one last effort of will, he pushed himself at her and grabbed onto her psyche, pulling the two of them out of the stream and through the barrier of another universe.

They hit a metal floor too fast. It was dark and cold, and the air tasted of dust and age. For a moment, there was no sound but a desperate gasping for breath from two people. Peter was about to speak, when he heard the rescued girl say, "What the FUCK just happened?"

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Miles looked at the readings on his tricorder. "All right, Mr. Dresden, can you do something else with your...magic? I want to see if the readings are the same."

"People who let me ride their spaceship can call me Harry," replied Dresden, remembering with a slight smile a similar comment made by Carlos Ramirez during the Word of Kemmler mess. He pointed his hand at a pile of rubble and said, "Fuego," sending a line of fire at the bricks and dirt.

Miles looked at the readings with interest. "How much power can you output? On a scale of one to ten, how much power was that last spell?"

Dresden considered the question. Magic was heavily driven by emotional state and intent, so it was very difficult to assign numbers to it. "Maybe a 2 out of 10? That's for normal situations, though. Stressful situations can push up the amount of power I use dramatically, though it tends to wipe me out after."

Miles nodded. "That's fine. I don't think we're going to have a problem from what you call a normal usage. I can see why electronics at your level of technology would have a problem with it, but starship systems are shielded from subspace interference, which maps pretty closely to what you seem to be able to call up with an act of will. It's interesting. I've got a friend back home, Julian, who I'm sure would love to speak to you about it if we ever get the chance."

Daniel added from the side, "The Ancient systems have similar protections. We may want to check the ship's original equipment, but even that would have shielding from cosmic radiation."

"And you think your spaceship will get us out of this dimension?" asked Xander hopefully.

Daniel thought for a second. "Well, it got us into this dimension, so unless there's something actively keeping us from leaving, I don't see why not."

Jimmy Olsen took a deliberate look around the campsite. Other than the fire-pit made from broken masonry, there were a couple of pallets of supplies -- bottled water, warm soda, snack foods and canned goods. Xander's rescued comics full of uncomfortable revelations sat in a box. There were a couple of sleeping bags they had pulled from a sporting goods store. There was no cover, as there hadn't been a need. The temperature here stayed at a cool room temperature, they had yet to see any precipitation or even clouds, and there was no animal life to be found. Jimmy was glad Xander had been here first, or he would have found the whole thing boring as hell, no pun intended. "We should probably make a list of what we want to load up from the ruins, here. There's potentially a ton of useful salvage, and nobody around to dispute ownership," he added.

"We can give you a list of materials to scavenge. There's plenty of cargo space left, as the only things in the hold are parts we took off the runabout and the other ship," said Miles O'Brien. "Most things we can replicate, but there are a few materials that would save us some time, and of course reading materials and such would be nice. My original ship didn't have a full entertainment database like the Enterprise did."

Harry Dresden looked up at that. "You served on the Enterprise, like, with Captain Kirk and Mister Spock?"

O'Brien shook his head. "Kirk's Enterprise was almost a century ago. I did get a chance to see it, though." He also got personally chewed out by Kirk himself. He wasn't really supposed to talk about the details in public, though. He bent down to start putting a list together on a pad.

"He was on the newer Enterprise from the sequel series that went on in the late 80's," added Jackson helpfully.

"Sequel?" said Harry. "Sorry, I think there was an animated version at some point, but we didn't have a new show. Was it any good?"

Daniel shrugged his shoulders. "I never really saw it. The actor who played the captain was quite good in general. I saw him on stage in New York once, and he was great. It was an English actor named Patrick Stewart."

Miles paused the work he was doing on a data pad, wondering how the French-born Jean-Luc Picard could have been played convincingly by an English actor. The only thing remotely British about the man was his fondness for tea instead of coffee. Putting it from his mind, he finished up the list for the others. "Here's a list of the materials that would be most useful. I'll give you a tricorder set to scan for them, so you won't have to identify the rarer materials by sight."

Xander took a look at the pad. "Some of these won't be a problem. Copper is pretty easy, and there's probably some gold and platinum in the jewelry store. I'm not sure about iridium or cobalt. We'll have to rely on your scanner for that."

"Not a problem. If we don't find it, we can get by with replicated materials. Metals just take more effort and power to synthesize," explained Miles.

"All right, campers," said Dresden in what Daniel thought was a very Jack-like way, "looks like we've got our marching orders!"

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Taylor was freaking out. She was lying on a cold floor in the dark, and she couldn't feel her bugs. There were a couple of spiders and smaller flies that had managed to survive still in her hair and costume, but everything else was gone. In the place of her swarm, she could sense another person. She had never been able to sense people with her power...and hadn't wanted to, because being a master of humans was a good way to get an unsigned kill order in a file waiting for your first screw-up. But she could sense this guy. She couldn't use his senses or control him, though. He was like a big blank spot in her swarm sense.

Today had already been a nightmare. The Endbringer sirens had heralded Leviathan's attack on her home town. She and the Undersiders had shown up to help protect their home, working mostly search and rescue. There was a lot of tension, especially with Armsmaster, but the Truce was holding. Leviathan seemed to be everywhere, running through downtown Brockton Bay and leaving destruction in his wake. Taylor had seen Glory Girl go down from a hit, and had run up to the roof of the building she was on along with Kid Win from the Wards. "This is Skitter. We've got Glory Girl down and she needs evac to Panacea," Skitter had said into her wristband. Dragon's voice had come back with, "We'll have a flyer to you for evac in less than five minutes." She had stood waiting slightly awkwardly with the tinker Ward, until an out-of-town cape had shown up and carried away Victoria Dallon in a bridal carry. "Need S&R in grid C-9," came the voice from their bands. Kid Win replied with an acknowledgement, and the two of them set out. C-9 was close to Leviathan, and the two could see the combat flyers sending attacks at the Endbringer. Legend and Eidolon were highly visible, while Alexandria was darting in and out of hand-to-hand combat with the monster. A handful of others, including other members of New Wave, were also circling.

The two had found the injured cape, a brute from out of town, under a collapsed wall, and had worked quickly to dig him out. Both of their heads popped up at a crashing sound. Leviathan had come straight through a building and was just down the street. "Let's get him inside," yelled Kin Win. The two of them grabbed the injured cape, and carried him up the stairs to the third floor, trying to get away from the flooding. Skitter moved toward the windows to try and see Leviathan, only to jump back seeing the Endbringer directly outside, it's asymmetrical gaze glaring hatefully at her. From what she could see, it looked like something had trapped the end of the beast's tail. As Taylor watched, she saw a cylinder strike Leviathan's hide and burst into what looked like a cloud of acid. Miss Militia was using some of the explosives captured from Bakuda with mixed efficacy. Leviathan kept pulling, trying to free his tail, while his afterimage thrashed around against his attackers. Injury and death alerts kept coming. "Accoustic down C-9; Armsmaster down C-9; Horizon deceased, C-9."

With a final jerk, Leviathan pulled out of whatever was holding his tail, leaving the very tip behind. The forty-five feet left in his tail whipped around and struck the front of the building Taylor and the others had used for shelter. The facade collapsed, and as the floor shifted, Skitter was dumped out into the open air. There was a thumping sound in the distance as Miss Militia fired another grenade...right into the arc of Taylor's fall. She didn't even have time to scream before the grenade exploded. The blast seemed to stretch out Taylor's perceptions, and then she felt pressed down. Later, she would describe it as feeling like moving very quickly through really deep water.

She wasn't sure what was happening. Her senses were assaulted with a strobe of bright colors. For an endless moment it seemed like there was a strip of wet pavement floating in front of her, which then tore in half and fell to the sides. The feelings of panic kept building as Taylor flailed her limbs around without effect. This sensory overload kept on for what felt like an eternity. It ended when she felt something strike her hard. There was a tearing sensation, and then she was suddenly lying on a hard floor in the dark. After catching her breath, she said, "What the FUCK just happened?"

A male voice said in the dark, "We just got pulled from the space between dimensions."

"Who said that?" said Taylor, pushing herself up into a sitting position.

"My name's Spider-Man. I was fighting super-villains and got pulled into a portal. I think I passed by you in transit, and it seemed like you could use some help...so, here we are?"

"You're a cape?" asked Skitter.

Peter paused at the odd term. "If that's slang for a superhero, then yeah. I'm your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, based in New York."

Taylor had never heard of him. "Do you work with Legend? He's the head of the Protectorate up in New York."

"No, sorry, that doesn't ring a bell. There was a mutant named Legion a while back... Is the Protectorate a new hero team?" asked Peter.

"You don't know what the Protectorate is, or who Legend is, and you've never heard the term, 'cape?'" asked Taylor.

Peter paused for a moment. The answer here was pretty obvious. "It sounds like you and I aren't from the same universe. Don't worry, I've jumped universes before. We just need to find a way to go back."

Taylor felt that feeling of panic start to build again. "We jumped universes? Where I come from, cross-dimension travel isn't easy, and I'm pretty sure it's illegal. I wouldn't know where to start looking for how to get back."

"Does your universe have high-tech inventors or mad scientists? People who seem like they can twist the laws of nature?" asked Spider-Man.

"Tinkers?" suggested Taylor. "Yes, we have them." Calling them mad scientists wasn't too far off, now that she thought about it.

"Well, that would be the first place I would start, assuming we're actually in your universe. You wouldn't happen to have a light, would you?" he asked from the darkness.

"I'm soaking wet. We were fighting Leviathan, one of the Endbringers. He uses water to attack," replied Taylor. "Wait, I might have something." She felt around for Dragon's armband. It had gone silent, but she thought there was a switch...there! A flashing red light began blinking on and off -- part of the bracelet's signal beacon. In the glow of the light, she could see her companion. He had on a stylized red-and-blue costume decorated with a spider motif. A pair of white eye spots looked back at her from his mask.

From where Peter was sitting, he could see the girl in the light from her wrist. She was young -- obviously still a teenager. Her costume was insect-themed, with panels that looked like body armor, and elements that seemed to be made of beetle chitin. Her mask was somewhat intimidating. Well, it wasn't like he could critique another hero for using an insect theme. He could see a small puddle of water around her on the floor. He turned his attention to their surroundings. They appeared to be in a mostly empty room. The walls, floor and ceiling were made of metal, suggesting some kind of factory, or maybe a ship. "I think we should try to figure out where we are, and then we can worry about trying to get home," he said to the girl. She nodded, and said, "My name's Skitter, by the way." 'Well THAT'S not a creepy name...' he thought to himself.

The room was off of a long corridor made of the same material. There were doors off the corridor at regular intervals. The first few rooms were mostly empty, although one of them had what appeared to be bunk beds, though there were no mattresses on the wire mesh. They hit the jackpot in what looked to be a food preparation area. None of the appliances worked, but there was a functioning sink, and a case full of what looked to be desiccated food packets. The writing on the packets was unintelligible, but the food inside was edible, albeit bland. The building was remarkably austere, with nothing in the way of personal effects or decoration. The sole exception was a few faded images of a double-headed eagle painted on walls in some of the rooms. The real discovery came when they found a room with a window and a set of lockers. Peter went to search the lockers, while Taylor went to the window.

"Spider-Man, I think you need to look at this!" she called out. Peter stopped halfway to opening the second locker and went over to look out the window. His eyes widened at the sight of the star field floating by outside in the vacuum of space.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"You're sure this is a good idea?" asked Daniel, looking at Miles.

Miles waved his hand back and forth. "Not SURE, but having warp drive would give us more flexibility. I salvaged the warp coils from the Amazon. The trade off is that we would have to replace the engines for traveling in atmosphere with warp pylons. It's the only way I can see to generate a warp field around the whole ship. On the plus side, we wouldn't have to replicate fuel for them after they were removed...we can use the Ancient power core for the warp drive." Miles hadn't salvaged the antimatter core from the runabout. However the new power system worked -- Daniel had said it somehow used zero point energy -- it provided more than enough energy without the risks of antimatter.

He and Daniel worked on dismounting the original engine pods and replacing them with some fairly crude-looking warp nacelles. While they were doing this, Harry, Xander and Jimmy were busy loading salvaged materials into the cargo hold. They had managed to find everything on the list. There was iridium at the jewelry store mixed with the platinum items, and at the stationary store in the more expensive pen sets. There wasn't a lot of it, but they didn't need that much. Cobalt turned out to be fairly common in lithium ion batteries. They also loaded a number of books and other materials that had survived from the Sunnydale public library, and stocks of preserved foods from the convenience store and another grocer. When it was all assembled, they met to decide on next steps.

"Well, the good news is that we're able to establish a stable warp field. That means we will have FTL capability in space," started Miles. "The bad news is that our in-atmosphere capability is now garbage. We also found out we can't use the wormhole drive while a warp field is running, so we have to shut it down to hop dimensions."

"In other good news, we did manage to extend the artificial gravity into the crew quarters. The only zero-G area now is the cargo hold. We also got the sensors to finally work together despite all the different points of origin," added Daniel.

"That sounds like we're pretty much ready to get out of this place. The question is, where we should go from here?" said Jimmy.

"Do we have any idea where we'll end up if we fire up the wormhole drive again?" added Xander.

Daniel shook his head. "We're not really sure. We collected some data on the trip when we came here, and we'll do the same when we leave. That will hopefully give us a better idea of how to get more control over where we're going." Unfortunately, the memories for exactly how to control the wormhole drive didn't seem to be in the memories Daniel kept...or was allowed to keep? He wasn't sure how much of it was chance versus design.

"We're going to try a lower power setting when we leave and see what the effect is on the transfer," said Miles.

"I would rather we try a higher setting," suggested Xander, assuming higher power meant they traveled farther. "We don't want to end up in another Hell dimension if we can avoid it. This place is pretty pleasant compared to what I've read about the others."

Harry agreed with the sentiment. Xander's descriptions of Hell dimensions were comparable to the nastier parts of the Nevernever. If they somehow actually managed to get into the Nevernever, then things could get complicated fairly quickly. On the plus side, Mab could certainly get him and maybe the others home. He wasn't sure he wanted to pay the price due, however. As Miles and Daniel explained that using lower power settings meant a greater degree of control, Dresden thought that that actually made it sound more like magic in a way that he found slightly comforting.

Jimmy brought up the elephant in the room. "Before we leave here...do we want to leave some kind of message behind? I mean, I've been here with Xander for a while, and we haven't had anybody from our home universes come to look for us. The Justice League, or Xander's magical friends should have been trying."

Daniel though about that. "We may be too far from our home realities. I would think my people or Miles's friends in Starfleet would also be looking."

Harry added, "I'm not sure my friends would have an easy path to search for me, but there are definitely some powerful folks in my home reality that would be looking for any sign of me." He had no doubt his grandfather would look, and might have some luck if Rashid were helping. What was more likely was that Mab would come to collect and force him to take up the mantle of the Winter Knight.

They agreed to leave a message in the center of Xander's camp, transcribed into English and Latin (for the more mystically inclined). It explained what had happened, and what they were doing. Hopefully, it would serve as a breadcrumb for anybody looking. Once that was done, they sealed up the ship, lifted off to a hovering altitude of about 500 feet, and triggered the wormhole drive.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

It was less than 24 hours after they arrived that Peter and Taylor decided to unmask to each other. It was simply too awkward when they were the only two human beings on what appeared to be a derelict spaceship in deep space. Views from various windows showed they were well outside the main body of the Milky Way. The entire ship appeared to be abandoned, and it was also huge. Peter estimated the length to be about a kilometer, though it was hard to tell for sure. There were several sections that were sealed off due to battle damage and hull breaches. The technology on display was mostly non-functional with the lucky exception of life support, and what remained was pretty incomprehensible. What samples of writing survived were not understandable to either of them. There was no way to get the ship moving, no way to exit it short of jumping into raw vacuum without a suit, and no working communications. The two were stranded.

In the absence of any workable plan to go anywhere, the two began sharing stories. Pete was a little surprised to find out Taylor was technically a villain, but he was sympathetic to her story. He knew a few folks in his own rogues gallery weren't criminals by choice. He was also shocked at how common violence seemed to be. His world wasn't peaceful by any means, but SHIELD or the Avengers would have worked to stop a roving band of murdering psychopaths like the Slaughterhouse Nine. The Protectorate as she described it seemed almost counter-productive.

Taylor, on the other hand, was intrigued to hear about a world that sounded like it had effectively integrated superheroes into daily life. Peter was an independent hero, and that sounded fairly common and normal in his world. She was also surprised to hear him talk about some of the villains he had faced with some degree of sympathy. Capes tended to be pretty black-and-white in her world, with little concern for their foes beyond the Unwritten Rules. Of course, not everything about his world was wonderful. She found the idea that mutants would be discriminated against utterly baffling. What difference did the origin of your power make? Treating people based upon what their powers actually did seemed a lot more logical. There were good reasons (mainly past abuse) why people were wary of masters and biotinkers, for example.

They both wanted to get home. Peter wanted to go home to his wife, and Taylor had her dad and her friends to worry about. Sadly for them, there wasn't really much they could do except hope for something to happen.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

The wormhole opened up in deep space and deposited a ship. It drifted for a bit before glowing blue lines of light began to illuminate the crude nacells on either side. On the bridge, five people were looking at the results of their trip.

"Sensors show we're in deep space this time, and we've got a positive fix that suggests we're above the plane of the ecliptic of the Milky Way galaxy," reported Miles.

Daniel added from his station, "We're really quite far out into the void. Even with warp drive, it would take quite a while to get anywhere."

"At warp 2, it would take us about...forty-three years to get to Earth from here," added O'Brien. Warp 2 was the practical maximum of their jury-rigged warp drive.

The group took this news is silence. "Is there anything nearby worth visiting?" asked Jimmy. "If not, it sounds like we should get our bearings and jump to another reality."

Daniel checked through the sensor results. "We do have one hit on active sensors. There appears to be a ship nearby. It looks derelict, though we are getting some indistinct life signs from it. It's pretty big...about a kilometer in size."

"How close is 'nearby' in Earth terms?" asked Harry.

Miles checked. "About...400,000 kilometers? That's not far at all with warp drive."

"Does anybody else think it's kind of odd that we trigger a random jump and come out right on top of a derelict spaceship? Quite a coincidence, isn't it?" asked Xander.

"Well, we have two choices. Either we go investigate the wreck, or we trigger the drive again and head off," said Miles.

After some discussion, and some humanitarian urging from Daniel, they decided to investigate the ship. It was possible somebody needed help. As they drew closer, the derelict came into visual range. Unlike Starfleet vessels, this ship looked boxy and belligerent. The prow of the ship swept down and forward, and there was a large superstructure on top. The whole ship was covered in what could only be weapons emplacements. Large engines at the back of the vessel were cold and dark. The scanners showed several potential points of entry, and Miles decided to head in toward what appeared to be a secondary hangar bay.

 

[Derek M]

Chapter 7: What's in a Name?

The spaceship edged through the open hangar door with meters to spare in each direction, then settled inside. A force field sprung into being over the door to open space, and the hangar bay itself began to slowly fill with atmosphere. With air, sounds began to reverberate around the inside of the bay for the first time in a long while.

On the bridge, Miles checked an atmospheric sensor. "At this rate," he told the others, "it will take about twenty minutes to pressurize to the point where it's safe to leave the ship."

"Did the hangar trigger that automatically?" asked Jimmy.

Miles shook his head. "Naw, I'm sure it would pressurize faster if it did. I just set a force field over the entrance and started pumping out atmosphere."

"I'm surprised we have enough air on board for that," said Harry. "That bay is pretty big."

"We don't, not in the interior, anyway. We have reserve tanks as part of the life support, but I'm charging them with the replicator. It's standard operating procedure for Starfleet vessels as a safety feature," he explained.

"The life-signs seem to be about 300 meters forward of this bay," interjected Daniel. "They seem to be stationary. With the state this ship appears to be in, they probably aren't aware we're docking here."

Once the air pressure was safe, Daniel, Harry and Xander each took a phaser and a communicator, along with a tricorder for Daniel, and exited into the bay. Miles and Jimmy opted to stay behind and guard their only way off of the derelict. It was cold inside, having been exposed to vacuum until less than an hour ago and only heated by the warm air pumped from their ship. The fairly large bay was empty, any craft that may have called it home having left long ago when the ship was abandoned. There were bits of incomprehensible equipment here and there, much of it probably unworkable due to long exposure to space. There was a door that appeared to be an airlock that looked as if it led deeper into the vessel. There was no handle, just an unpowered control panel to the side.

"Do we cut through the door?" asked Harry.

Xander stepped up to inspect the doorway and the adjacent walls. "Back home, most powered doors have a manual backup in case of power loss. It would be kind of dumb not to have that on a warship."

Daniel began scanning with his tricorder. "If I remember correctly, a lot of the technology built by the Ancients didn't have that. They were arrogant enough to think it would never be needed." The tricorder detected what appeared to be an open space behind a panel to the right of the door. "In this, case, though, I think you're right. Try opening that panel there," he said while pointing.

Xander felt the panel in question, and a little manipulation proved it would come out with a snap. There weren't any fasteners, which made sense for something you might need to use in an emergency. There was alien writing on the inside of the panel -- Xander thought it probably told you how to work the door. 'Too bad I don't speak alien.' Inside the panel though was clearly some kind of hand pump. Xander put on his work gloves and grabbed it, feeling the cold even through the thick material. It took Harry adding his weight to get the pump to start moving, but once it did they could hear a groan from the airlock door, which very slowly began to open. Ten minutes of work was enough to get an opening that they could squeeze through one at a time, and fifteen minutes later they likewise had the inner door open.

Unlike the hangar bay, the interior of the ship was dusty. There were two sets of foot prints in the dust, so somebody had come this way fairly recently, but it also obviously was not a high-traffic area. Using the tricorder as a backup, they began following the prints. They passed doors at regular intervals, some of which were open. The rooms themselves held old equipment or furniture, in many cases without any clear indication of purpose. In one case, the room appeared to be a restroom of some kind based on the fixtures. To Daniel, that suggested that whoever had built the ship had either been human or close in body type. Either that, or they had drinking fountains that looked like urinals.

In a fairly short time, they came to an open area that looked like it lead to another airlock, with the corridor continuing on the other side. At the far side in the corridor entrance stood a figure. The figure was medium-sized and thin, and wearing a full-body suit that included an insect-like helmet. It stopped, and said in a voice that sounded distinctly female, "Who are you, and what do you want?"

Daniel noticed that there was a second life sign ahead, though whoever it was wasn't in their line of sight. He stepped forward and said diplomatically, "We were passing by and noticed this vessel was without power, but still had life-signs. We wanted to know if anybody needed help. We have supplies and medicine in our ship." Daniel noticed the figure reacted to his voice as if startled.

"You speak English with an American accent?" queried the voice.

Xander spoke up. "We're from Earth, from the good ole' U-S-of-A."

"Earth has starships capable of traveling this far?" asked another masculine voice from the top of the far corridor. Harry, Xander and Daniel all shifted their attention there and saw another being in a red-and-blue costume drop down from where it was crouched...somehow...on the ceiling and land on the floor.

Harry's eyes widened a bit in surprise as he noticed the details of the costume. He took a step forward and said, "Your name wouldn't happen to be Peter, would it?" Daniel and Xander glanced at him, clearly startled by his question.

Both figures opposite suddenly went still. The shorter one with the bug mask glanced over at the other. Finally, the male figure said, "How do you know that name?"

Harry smiled. "Let me guess. You got bitten by a radioactive spider, and woke up the next morning with superhuman strength, agility, and the ability to walk on walls. You created a costume and a pair of web shooters and decided to fight crime as your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man."

"You seem to know a lot about me," said the man.

"That's because in my universe, we have a comic book about you. Several, actually. There's The Amazing Spider-Man, Spectacular Spider-Man, and a couple of others, I think. There are even cartoons on TV, like Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends," explained Harry.

There was a moment of quiet, and then the figure in the bug mask put her head down. There was a clearly audible snort, followed by what was clearly a chuckle, which turned into a full giggle. The laughing figure bent over and put her hands on her thighs while she tried to get herself under control. Her companion in the spider costume was glaring at her. "It's not that funny..." he said.

"Spider-Man..." she answered, "...and his AMAZING friends!" She then broke down into another fit of laughter, having to lean against the wall at one point.

Spider-Man turned back to look at the three newcomers, who were now all trying to avoid joining in the laughter. He sighed. "Fine," he said as he pulled his mask off. "I'm Peter Parker, otherwise known as Spider-Man."

He ignored Taylor as she quietly added, "the AMAZING Spider-Man!" in between giggles.

Daniel decided to get the conversation back on track. "My name is Daniel Jackson. My companions are Harry Dresden and Xander Harris. If you don't mind, I'd like to know how you two ended up drifting on this hulk this far above the galactic plane?"

Peter scratched the back of his neck. The costume tended to catch a little there. "Well, that's a bit of a story." He proceeded to explain how they had ended up here, and that they really didn't have any idea where this abandoned ship came from or who owned it. Based on the food, the furniture, and a few other clues, they were probably human, but that was about all they knew. Taylor finally got her laughter under control and introduced herself, pulling her mask off. The girl underneath had old eyes, but she wasn't quite as intimidating when you could see her face. She was also younger than they expected. The other three explained that they were also from different versions of Earth, and suggested they go back to the ship to meet the rest of their crew.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Taylor looked around the dining area of the ship. This was without a doubt the oddest group of people she had met, and she spent her time hanging out with super-villains. Peter was a cape who apparently got his powers from, of all things, a spider bite. Harry was a wizard AND a private investigator. She wondered if he would ever add ninja and pirate to his resume. Jimmy was a journalist on a cape world who hung out with his world's equivalent of Scion. Xander was best friends with a witch and a mystically empowered warrior, and hunted vampires in his spare time. Miles was a non-commissioned officer in the space navy of a giant multi-world federation. Daniel was an archaeologist who explored alien worlds with a team of special forces soldiers. If she was honest with herself, she felt a little overwhelmed. She was the bug-girl super-villain who robbed banks for a living, and she was starting to wonder how much of her career with the Undersiders was just because of her own poor judgement and lack of heroic tendencies. Her self confidence definitely was suffering in her present company.

After the introductions, the group of them had swapped stories. Taylor had glossed over her trigger event and her life before becoming a cape, but she had been pretty straight-forward about her career since then. The others had been surprisingly sympathetic, and even outraged on her behalf over how Armsmaster had treated her and her desire to become a hero. Despite that, she was glad in a perverse way that she had ended her story with the fight against Leviathan. Defending her home against a giant monster was kind of her moral high note so far. Admittedly, not knowing if her friends or father had survived the Endbringer's attack was a constant source of worry that she was doing her best to avoid facing at the moment.

After everybody put their cards on the table, it became obvious that she and Peter would be leaving with these folks. They were all trying to find a way home in their hodge-podge dimension-hopping spaceship. Their only other option was to hang around on a derelict alien warship and hope for more visitors that were more to their liking. The odds of that happening were astronomical, with no pun intended. Those odds were actually something Jimmy wanted to discuss.

"There is a lot of evidence to suggest that we're being manipulated by somebody or something to meet up like this," started Jimmy. "Every single one of us has had some type of strange accident involving inter-dimensional travel. There are seven of us from seven different worlds. What are the chances of any of us meeting each other across the whole breadth of the multiverse? What are the chances that we all landed someplace free from hostile creatures or people, with our basic needs for food and water easily satisfied? Miles and Daniel, you've both made it clear that we don't yet understand how to choose targets for the wormhole drive. How is it that your first jump brought you to me, Harry and Xander, and our second jump landed almost on top of Peter and Taylor here?"

"It does seem improbably coincidental that this has all happened like this," conceded Daniel.

Jimmy nodded. "Let's also consider the group of skills we bring to the table. Miles is an engineer and an expert in space combat. Daniel is an archaeologist with a background in diplomacy, and happens to have pieces of advanced technical knowledge floating in his head. Peter is a veteran hero with super powers. Harry is a private investigator and a spell-casting wizard. I'm an investigative journalist who specializes in strange and bizarre happenings. Xander is a construction foreman, an expert on demonology and a skilled fighter." Jimmy waved down Xander's automatic protest -- he was used to the guy underselling himself. "Taylor here has probably the most bullshit overpowered superpower I've ever heard about, and this is coming from somebody who's spent quite a bit of time with a Kryptonian who can fly around carrying a loaded supertanker."

Taylor stared at Jimmy for a moment. "I control bugs. How is that bullshit overpowered?"

Jimmy looked at her and asked, "Can you tell me the range of your power?"

Taylor hesitated, unsure how much to reveal. She fudged her answer a bit. "Maybe three or four city blocks?"

"...and how many of the insects in that range can you control?" he asked.

"All of them," was the answer.

"Now tell me, and I think I know the answer based on your stories, but do you have to have all of your bugs doing the same thing at the same time?" asked Jimmy.

"No, of course not. I can have them do different things."

"Simultaneously?" he queried. Eyes around the room started to widen as the implications settled.

"Yeah, I can have each of them doing something different. Sometimes it can get tricky if I want them to do something complicated like talk," she explained.

"Great Caesar's Ghost!" said Xander, ignoring Jimmy Olsen's stare at the choice of epithet. "You can control each individual bug in a swarm that has to have thousands of insects, and make them form shapes, talk...you said earlier you can see and hear through them, too, right?"

"How is that even possible?" asked O'Brien. "The amount of sensory input and processing power required must be overwhelming..."

Taylor shrugged, slightly embarrassed, and said, "Powers are bullshit?"

"Taylor," said Jimmy, drawing her attention back, "with training you're probably one of the most dominant superheroes I've seen. With insects around you, you're pretty much a genius loci in your range." Taylor quietly considered that, though part of her wanted to protest being called a superhero.

Harry whistled. He knew exactly how much power a genius loci could wield in their area. Hell, at one point he had threatened Mab with one, and she had actually briefly looked worried.

"Anyway," continued Jimmy, "we're a little off topic. The point is that we have an amazing group of people deliberately brought together. That leads us to one question..."

"Why does somebody need a group like this?" stated Xander. "That was nicely summed up, by the way," he said to Jimmy, who smiled at the compliment and said, "Thanks, it's kind of what I do."

"So, what do we do?" asked Miles. "If somebody is controlling us, how do we stop it?"

"Well, I think the only thing we can do," replied Daniel, "is try to understand as much about our situation as we can. Learning how to properly target our drive system would be one of the first things. We also should take a look at this giant derelict. There must be some reason we're here. Miles and I appeared in a field of crashed spaceships that happened to have a mostly intact one, and Xander, Harry and Jimmy were stuck in the ruins of an American town filled with easy salvage."

"There isn't much on this ship, though," said Peter. "We walked most of the length of it, and didn't learn a whole heck of a lot."

"Well, we have time. Why don't we spend some more time looking around while the folks with tech skills evaluate the data from our previous jumps?" suggested Dresden. With the lack of any better suggestions, this became the plan.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"And we have yet another room filled with nothing but scrap and dust. If we were directed here to find something, it must be hidden really, really well," said Taylor to Xander. The two were paired up, doing a sweep of another section of the wrecked vessel.

Xander stopped to scratch his side, and said agreeably, "Yeah, we've probably done all that we can today. We should head back."

Taylor stretched her back. "I can't wait to get back to the...um...what's the name of your ship, anyway?"

Xander shrugged. "I don't think we ever got around to naming it, seeing as it was literally three different ships pretty much welded together..."

"We need to come up with something. Not naming a ship is bad luck," said Taylor. That's what her dad's friends from the DWU had always said, at least.

They began to head back to the ship. "Well, bad luck is kind of our thing, isn't it?" asked Xander. "I mean, you listen to our stories and you kind of get the idea that somebody up there has it out for us."

Taylor found it hard to argue with that. Who would have predicted that her best friend would betray her, then team up with a psychopath to try and kill her? Or that the head of the, "heroes," in Brockton Bay would turn out to be such an asshole that she ended up almost having no choice but to be a villain? Or that fucking Leviathan would show up, and she would get caught in a Bakuda special? Peter had told her all about his luck. Half of his arch-nemeses were his friends, professors from school, or work colleagues turned evil. "Does everybody here seem to really have such awful luck?"

Xander thought for a second. "Well, my ex was a thousand-year-old vengeance demon who made a career eviscerating unfaithful men. I ended up leaving her at the altar."

Taylor just stared at him.

"There were extenuating circumstances. Really. Of course, I also had a substitute teacher invite me to her house for, 'extra study,' only to find out she was a giant mantis demon who wanted to breed me and literally bite my head off. Then I took a girl to the school dance, and she turned out to be an ancient Incan mummy who had to suck the life out of the living to survive..."

"Is romance usually that dangerous in your world?" asked Taylor in a slightly horrified tone.

"Only in my hometown. It wasn't all my love life. Let's see, I got possessed by a hyena spirit and ate the school mascot alive, almost got turned into a fish demon on the swim team, got hypnotized by Dracula..."

"Dracula's real?"

"On my world he is. And hey, it's not just me. Right before he showed up in Sunnydale, Harry lost the woman he loved in a way that was horrible, but necessary to end a war. That glove he wears on his hand is because of terrible scarring he got when vampires tried to burn him alive. Daniel lost his wife to aliens that implant themselves in your spine and take over your body. His friend had to kill her to save his life. Then he literally died of radiation poisoning and got accused of espionage because of it. Jimmy has been kidnapped, hospitalized, and humiliated so many times that his reaction when I told him he was trapped in a hell dimension was, 'Eh, not the worst thing that's happened to me.' Miles was falsely convicted of a crime, and he had the memories of a twenty year prison sentence implanted in his head. His best friend had to stop him from killing himself. And now I think I'm oversharing and would appreciate it if you don't let on I said all that to the others..." Xander's face had changed from a rant to a hopeful plea by the end.

Taylor was now more than a little horrified, and depressed on top of that. The others had treated her nicely. They were respectful and friendly. Every single one of them also seemed to have been shit on by the universe repeatedly. She said, "I won't. Just so you know, in my world, the thing that gives you powers is called a trigger event. It's usually described as the worst day of your life. Mine was...caused by somebody who used to be my best friend, and she did it deliberately." She reached up to her face to wipe away the tears that were starting to fall. She didn't protest when Xander pulled her in for a comforting hug.

They didn't talk much on the way back to the ship, but Taylor felt surprisingly light. She still didn't want to think about Ems...or the...place...where she triggered. Sophia could go fuck herself. She didn't feel like shutting down, though. Lisa would probably give her a smug grin right about now and tell her she should have talked to somebody earlier. 'God, I miss Lisa...and Dad...' She also took a kind of perverse comfort in the fact that her companions were people who would understand loss, and feeling like the universe hates you for existing. As the two of them were climbing the ramp to the cargo bay, she noticed a milk crate filled with cans of spray paint, and an idea came to her.

"Xander, you go on in. I'm going to stay out here for a few minutes, OK?" she said. He just nodded his acknowledgement and went inside. Once he was gone, she went over and looked at the cans salvaged from Sunnydale. She took a few of them back outside the ship and began looking for the right spot on the hull. After a slightly surprising discovery, she got to work painting. When Harry and Jimmy came back from their exploration of the derelict, they found her finishing up.

Painted on the hull of the ship was a name in red on a black background:

Ship of Fools​

"What's that for?" asked Jimmy.

"It's bad luck to have a ship without a name," answered Taylor. "My Dad and his friends told me that a long time ago."

Harry smirked. "Well," he said, "you certainly picked the right name." Jimmy just nodded in agreement.

The three of them headed into the ship as Taylor thought, 'She needed a new name. Calling her Serenity just doesn't fit anymore.'

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Daniel was exhausted. He and Miles were making progress on figuring out how to control the wormhole drive and target it at specific quantum signatures of different realities. The mathematics were insanely difficult, though. He kept getting flashes of insight from his ascended memories, but he was also getting a migraine. Painkillers weren't helping, and by the end he had tried taking Codeine salvaged from Sunnydale. It was a relief when he was finally able to lie in his bunk and drift off to sleep. Unfortunately for him, his dreams would not be so restful...

 

[Derek M]

Chapter 8: Astral Projection and Astronomical Chances

Daniel dreamed. He found himself standing in the corridors of Ship of Fools. Taylor's name had been accepted by everybody fairly quickly as appropriate to both their situation and their personal histories. The ship was quiet. Miles had setup a 24 hour schedule with a regular sleep cycle for everybody, and it was the middle of that cycle.

Thinking about Miles had Daniel suddenly standing at the foot of the man in question's bunk. There was a kind of hazy aura surrounding him that drew Daniel's attention, something Daniel's subconscious told him was the Starfleet officer's dimensional signature interacting with this reality's quantum foam. He focused on it, and suddenly he was seeing images. Miles' home dimension was filled with insanely powerful beings. Near O'Brien's home on Deep Space 9, there was a gate into the realm of the Prophets. Elsewhere, the Organians watched from between the Federation and the Klingon Empire. The Q Continuum remained preoccupied with their own matters. Daniel could tell that there were more beings than these...these first were just the ones Miles knew about. Overall, he got the impression that the powers in this universe were fairly benevolent, if condescending. The worst of them were mostly self-interested and cared little for mortal morality or ethics, but rarely went out of their way to interact with mortals. Unlike the powers in his own universe, some of them were actively helpful.

As his mind drifted to the ascended, his perception shifted to his own universe. The ascended in his own galaxy were largely descended from the Ancients, or their descendants, the Lanteans. A handful were from civilizations that had come after, aided by those like Oma who felt everybody should have the option to learn how to transcend physical form. He could see the outposts and craft of the Asgard, beings who had chosen to follow a different path from their allies despite having the necessary level of advancement. Shifting his vision, he found himself staring at a blank area of space...an area that he knew contained the Nox homeworld. Daniel was amused that their ability to hide apparently extended into dreams. Once he had finished with the Milky Way, his attention was drawn to another galaxy...one that was a fixation for many of the ascended. It was there that he saw the reality that was the Ori, beings that drained power from their followers based on a false faith, before that vision vanished in flames.

Jumping away, he found himself in a new location, watching Peter Parker restlessly tossing in his sleep. His aura was different from that of Miles, and Daniel found himself peering into it. His universe arguably had even more insanely powerful beings than O'Brien's. Daniel saw a being that seemed to be made of the sum of eternity, and a woman with the face of a skull. A one-eyed king sat on a throne over this universe's Asgard...who were VERY different from those in Daniel's universe. Daniel got the impression that Odin's single eye...winked at him? Elsewhere, giant beings walked the stars, focused on their own alien needs. He saw one giant walking the stars looking for planets to consume, his path predicted by a bright herald. Another appeared to make up an entire planet with one consciousness. As Daniel's point of view retreated from this reality, he could see powerful entities in adjacent realities that remained fixated on Peter's world...a dark dimension, a red cosmos, a chaotic Limbo and a fiery, hell-like realm all briefly ran through his vision.

Curious, Daniel shifted his presence to look at Jimmy. Was his universe similar to Peter's? Were superpowers dependent upon the interference of advanced beings? What he found was surprising. Jimmy's world had beings that seemed to match the Christian visions of angels and devils. Lucifer Morningstar, God's Vengeance, and the Archangel Michael were all active, if usually subtle, players in the world. There were other beings of power...manifestations of primal mental forces like Despair or Desire. The being known as Dream gave him a polite nod. Below that level were beings like the Guardians of Oa, the founders of the Green Lantern corps. Suddenly, a small man appeared in his vision. He looked at him, and said in a high-pitched voice, "I think that's enough voyeurism here, McGurk!" Daniel suddenly found himself back on the Ship of Fools.

Shaking his head in puzzlement, Daniel shifted his attention to Taylor's world. This universe felt...surprisingly empty when compared to Peter's and Jimmy's, with humans split across multiple parallel worlds. His attention was drawn to a multidimensional being...some kind of cross-dimensional worm. He watched as it shed pieces of itself down onto the Earth below. These pieces touched on humans in distress and somehow connected with them. His last vision was of a naked golden man with an empty look in his eyes. Daniel brought himself back to the ship, wondering why this singular being seemed to be the primary power in Taylor's reality, and what that meant for humanity.

Daniel decided for the sake of completeness to look in on the remaining members of the crew. Harry's world was filled with powers that swirled around each other in a delicate dance. The fae courts, the vampire courts, the Formorians, the White Council, the Fallen...Daniel was starting to see how difficult it must have been to navigate the supernatural politics of that world. God had his direct agents, as well. Daniel focused on the Nevernever, curious about those most relevant to Dresden's circumstances. He watched as the forces of the Winter Court held back the Outsiders, beings whose sole goal seemed to be to invade and destroy reality. He saw the Wild Hunt riding through the forests, chasing after a hapless soul. He quickly shifted his attention away from there, and looked in on the Court of Mab...only to retreat quickly when she seemed to look up from her task, as if aware that he was watching. Daniel shivered. In his sight, she had been deadly cold and winter's fury hidden behind a dangerously alluring face. Was that who was waiting for Harry to return?

Xander's reality seemed even darker than Harry's. The forces of light in the world seemed to be fighting simply to stay balanced with the dark. The Powers That Be moved champions like pieces on a chess board, trying to thwart the efforts of demon princes and supernatural forces of evil. The impression he got was that there had been a recent, staggering shift in the balance of power. He wondered if it was the closing of the Sunnydale Hellmouth that caused it, or if there was another reason. There were multiple portals to various hell dimensions, after all. Daniel looked at the crater in Sunnydale, and he could feel the tangible evil permeating the area even with the Hellmouth closed. Xander had grown up saturated in that environment. It was a wonder he was still sane. His last vision of that world was of a circle of black thorns obscuring his sight.

Having looked into the worlds of his companions, Daniel sat in his dream state and thought about things. Was there a purpose to seeing all of this? Was this why they were here, and the derelict just a distraction? Were any of these powerful beings from any of these universes responsible for their trip through the multiverse?

It occurred to Daniel that he still didn't know anything about their current universe. With another act of will, he focused on the Earth in this reality. A massive psychic presence drew him in...he perceived a powerful mind in constant pain, fighting to preserve a truly immense mass of humanity from horrors in the galaxy. This mind, which seemed to be trapped in a golden mausoleum, turned its attention to Daniel, and simply said: #LOOK#. Daniels attention was drawn to the Warp, an alternate reality parallel to the physical world...and he drew back in horror. There were things living in it. Monstrous, horrific gods that sought to corrupt and destroy everything. Everything negative about the universe was given form -- lust and envy, corruption, disease and death. With a jolt, Daniel realized that something had seen him, something both hungry and curious. Daniel woke up with a scream on his lips.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Miles felt somebody shaking his shoulder as he woke from a deep sleep. He had been dreaming about his family, so he wasn't happy to be woken so abruptly. Opening his eyes, he saw Daniel standing over him with a frantic look on his face.

"We need to leave NOW!" said Daniel, and the man started physically pulling him out of bed.

Confused, O'Brien stumbled to his feet. "What? Why?" he stammered.

"Something's coming. Something really, really bad...like..." Daniel struggled with something to relate it to for Miles. "Like, mass invasion by the Borg bad!" Miles had told more than one story about the cybernetic boogiemen of the Federation. They were easily as horrible as the Goa'uld, and not nearly as easy to outsmart.

Taking him for his word, Miles slipped his shoes on and climbed the ladder from his quarters. "How do you know?"

"I had a vision...it was related to my ascended memories somehow, I think," answered Daniel.

"What's going on?" said Peter, his head poking out from his own room. "What's all the yelling about?"

"Peter, go and close the ramp to the cargo bay, and hurry!" ordered Miles.

Peter had been a hero long enough to not question an order in an obvious emergency from the most knowledgeable person in the room. He quickly headed down to the cargo bay while Miles and Daniel headed to the bridge.

"How much time have we got?" asked Miles.

"Not long, and I got a very strong impression that we do not want to meet what is coming for us," answered Jackson.

"Start spinning up the wormhole drive. I'll use the thrusters and the air in the hangar bay to push us out into open space." O'Brien pressed the intercomm button. "Parker, how's that ramp coming?"

Peter's voice came back through the speaker. "It's closing now."

Miles hit the depressurization warning alarm, which would be heard by everybody on board. He then activated the thruster controls and dropped the force field blocking the bay. The floor of the Ship of Fools tilted out from beneath them as the ship lurched toward the opening, the turbulence of the escaping air shifting it around. There was a loud *CLANG* and a metallic scrapping sound as one of the landing struts smashed against the floor of the hangar on the way out. Daniel slipped out of his seat and landed on the deck with a curse. Quickly climbing back to the engine controls, he grabbed and fastened the restraining belt this time. Miles saw from the corner of his eye what appeared to be a can of spray paint shooting out into space from where it had been left outside the ship.

Out in space, far in front of the derelict warship, a tear began to rip open the fabric of space. Down in the cargo hold, Peter was holding onto the wall with his powers. Suddenly, his spider-sense began to SCREAM a warning of impending death and catastrophe. He pounded the intercomm. "Guys, something wicked this way comes! My spider-sense is going crazy." Out of the tear in space, a ship began to appear. The split prow of the ship served to emphasize how massive the vessel was in comparison to the derelict they had been exploring. The abandoned vessel could literally have fit in between the blood red front hulls of the appearing vessel. On the bridge, Miles could see the ship on sensors, and his eye's grew wide as it just seemed to keep growing in size, as if it was being pulled out of a hole in space. Just as smaller craft began to exit the larger ship, Daniel triggered the wormhole drive, and the Ship of Fools vanished from the galaxy.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Ussax of the Death Guard looked out the viewport of the Fortress of Agony, searching the stars for sign of what had brought him here. The only thing of note was an abandoned Imperial destroyer, long lost to the void. There had been an odd flash of light as they exited the Warp, but no signs of any other vessels. Ussax was puzzled. He had projects to complete, so why had he been called by Nurgle to bring a Despoiler-class Chaos battleship to what appeared to be an abandoned wreck? Nevertheless, he ordered a unit of Chaos Marines to head over and seize the vessel, and search it for any clues.

Luckily for the Ship of Fools, the detritus left on the derelict wasn't sufficient to let the forces of Chaos follow.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Xander Harris stumbled onto the bridge. "Guys, what's the what? Why are we suddenly shooting through space like crazy?"

Daniel started to explain things while Miles struggled to get the ship under control. "I had a vision while I was sleeping. I think it showed me the realities that each of us was from, showing me the beings of power in each universe. When I turned my attention to the reality we were in, I encountered a stunningly powerful mind that was trapped on Earth. He showed me that there was a parallel realm to that one inhabited by elder gods straight out of Lovecraft. Unfortunately, while I was observing," added Daniel with an involuntary shudder, "one of them noticed me, and apparently sent a servant to look for us."

"So you woke up Miles and got out of Dodge?" asked Xander. "I approve. Running away is a perfectly valid survival tactic, especially when dealing with hell gods." Xander thought back to Glory with a frown. She had been trapped on Earth with only a tiny fraction of her powers, assuming the Council's information was accurate. What Daniel described sounded more like what she would be like at full power.

Peter appeared in the door to the bridge. "What the hell was that? My danger sense was off the scale, and I couldn't even see what was happening."

Daniel was about to start explaining, then decided it would be better to wait for the rest of the crew. Before he could say that, though, a proximity alarm started blaring. Looking at the sensor readout, he saw that there was a spaceship quite close. This one wasn't as large as the last one, at slightly less than 400 meters in length. There seemed to be a fairly large heat source on board, probably a fire. "Miles, we've got a ship about 20 degrees to port, about 280 kilometers out. It appears to be in distress," he said.

Miles used the thrusters to change the orientation of the Ship of Fools so the bridge was facing the new vessel. They could see writing in English on the front of the vessel's hull: U.S.S. Sulaco.

"There's one human life-sign on board...no wait, something just happened," added Daniel. The sensors showed a pod of some kind being ejected from the ship. The sole life-sign was on-board. "The only crew seems to just have been ejected in an escape pod. It's heading toward a nearby planet...it isn't reading as especially hospitable. It also looks like its going too fast to slow down in time to land safely."

"Is there anything we can do to help?" asked Taylor as she too came onto the bridge.

Miles shook his head. "We don't have a tractor beam on this ship. The emitters from the Amazon would have had to have been mounted on the hull, and they were damaged anyway."

"We also don't seem to have any kind of spacesuits for EV work," added Peter.

"Actually, I do have something that would work for that...we have an emergency personal shield emitter in the rescue kit from the Amazon," admitted Miles. "If we could match speed with the pod, we might be able to capture it. We don't have time before it hits atmosphere, though."

"I'm pretty sure I could latch onto it with webs," said Peter pensively. "If you can get me a clear line of sight from the airlock."

"I could line us up, but the speed would shoot us into the planet's atmosphere same as the pod, and we don't have the maneuverability to handle that," answered Miles.

Daniel raised his hand as if he were in a classroom asking for the professor's attention. "What if we had more time? If you match us up, we could open a wormhole in front of the pod and follow it through. Hopefully, that would put us somewhere where we could get to the pod and bring it inside."

"We don't really have an idea of where we would end up, though," said Xander. "We could appear inside another hell dimension, or in the middle of a Star Wars space battle or something."

"Well, if Jimmy was right, then somebody has been skewing luck in our favor," said Taylor. "What's the chance of the passenger in that pod surviving a crash on that planet?"

"It's hard to say," answered Miles. "I would have to know more about how it's constructed, but I wouldn't say their chances were good. Ah, what the hell. Let's try Daniel's idea. Whoever is in that pod won't be any worse off, probably."

The Ship of Fools moved to intercept the pod, which was luckily moving at the right angle that they could do this without having to use the warp engines. They slowly gained on it as the planet loomed in their view. Daniel triggered another wormhole, which opened up perfectly, sending the pod through to another universe right before their ship followed behind it. The crew breathed a sigh of relief when it was confirmed that they and the pod were now safely in deep space, away from any planetary or solar bodies. With that, the group moved down to the cargo bay, with Jimmy joining them along the way. Peter got his web shooter on, along with the emergency force field generator, and did a test fire in the zero-G cargo deck. This showed a couple of problems. One was that the web couldn't shoot through the force field. Miles was able to make an adjustment to correct for that. The second problem was that Peter was not used to fighting in zero-G, so he shot toward the back wall rapidly on his first shot, being saved from injury only by his superhuman agility. It was fairly easy for him to stick to the surface firmly enough to keep stationary when firing once he knew what to expect.

Peter was able to attach a web line to the pod fairly easily, and was able to maneuver it into the airlock, as the ship and the pod were traveling at the same relative velocity. Miles helped Peter pull it into the main cargo bay and tie it down. Upon examination, it became clear that the pod was a cryosleep pod with a woman inside. That led to a lengthy debate on whether or not they should attempt to open the pod, as the one thing the crew acutely lacked was anybody with any medical knowledge. This was the scene that Harry Dresden walked in on, to which he commented, "Whoa, did I miss something?" Daniel proceeded to fill him in on the events of the last hour or so. As that was happening, Harry got this odd feeling. While Daniel was talking, he moved into the bay and over to the pod.

"Harry, what are you doing?" asked Xander. "Shouldn't you not be going near the life-preserving cryogenics with your anti-technology magical mojo?"

Harry just shook his head. "It's OK," he answered. "I don't know why...maybe it's because I've been touched by the powers of Winter, but I think I got this." With that, he rapidly pressed a series of buttons on the outside of the pod, and was rewarded with a hissing sound and a flashing green light, much to the surprise of the rest of the crew. After a few minutes, the door to the pod popped open, and the woman inside began to breath, and then cough.

"Welcome to Wonderland, Alice," said Harry with a grin.

With a rough voice, the woman in the pod distractedly corrected him with, "My name is Ellen..."

 

[Vyrexuviel]

Nurgle, the Plaguefather, embodies the concepts of resignation and acceptance of the inevitable. He's actually quite cheerful, and regards all life as his children, who will inevitably return to him in time.

Khorne, the Bloody Handed, is the god of battles, war, and bloodlust, but also honor and the strength to stand up to injustice.

Tzeentch, the Change of Ways, the Indecisive Molusk. He's a strange one, embodying infinite possibilities, and the rapid change between them. Intrigue and plots are his domain, but so is the ability to concieve of change, which directly opposes him to the inertia and entropy of Nurgle.

Slaanesh. The Prince of Pleasure. She Who Thirsts. She/He embodies excess in all forms, reveling in sensation, ALL sensation, including the negative ones. Cenobites would be her worshipful followers, yes, but she also adores those who merely can appreciate art, of any sort. The ability to derive pleasure from any source is his gift, but she demands that you always derive -more- pleasure from your surroundings. This leads to a spiral where things that used to please you now no longer do, and you must seek more and greater sensation to be able to feel -anything-.

Chaos is like that, insidious and demanding you always exceed your previous level to gain anything. Like a drug addiction, they drive their followers towards more and greater use until they're overwhelmed and utterly subsumed into their chosen god.

 

[Derek M]

Chapter 9: You're a Wizard, Harry

Ellen Ripley was sitting in the dining area of the Ship of Fools with a hot mug of coffee and a bowl of hot oatmeal. She hadn't said much as of yet. Harry, Taylor and Xander were keeping her company. Miles and Daniel had gone back to the bridge to try and figure out where they were. Peter and Jimmy had volunteered to clean up the cargo bay and strap the cryopod down somewhere out of the way. Ripley took another bite of oatmeal, and asked, "What happened to the Sulaco?"

"Daniel said there appeared to be a fire onboard. We arrived on the scene just as your pod was ejected...I'm guessing by some kind of fail-safe?" said Xander.

Ripley nodded her head, and replied, "They're designed to do that in the event of an emergency that threatens the integrity of the ship. What happened to the other pods?"

"Yours was the only one that ejected," said Taylor from the other side of the dining table.

Ripley looked up at Taylor. "There were four occupied pods on that ship. Me, Corporal Hicks, the unit's android, Bishop, and the only surviving colonist, Rebecca Jordan. We have to go back if their pods didn't eject..." Ripley began to get up from the table.

"Ripley," said Xander, "there was only one life sign on board when we got there. That was you."

Ripley sat back down and stared into her coffee mug. "Rebecca Jordan was only six years old."

Xander lowered his eyes to look at the table, and just said, "I'm sorry."

The four of them sat in silence for a couple of minutes. Then Harry asked, "What did you mean when you said she was the only surviving colonist? What happened to the rest of the colony?"

Ripley looked at Harry, momentarily distracted from her grief. "You mean you're not part of a rescue mission? The Marines didn't send you, or Weyland-Yutani?"

"No, we just happened to detect your ship while we were passing nearby," explained Xander.

Ripley stared at Xander. "That seems rather unlikely," she said. The likelihood of accidentally running across another vessel in space was exceedingly small.

Taylor replied, "It's part of a rather long and strange story filled with unlikely coincidences. I lived through parts of it, and I find it hard to believe."

"Honestly," said Harry, "parts of it you're probably not going to believe without proof. You're likely to think we're a bunch of crazies."

Ripley sat for a second in thought. "Regardless, I need to get in touch with somebody in the military or the government. They need to know what happened to the Hadley's Hope colony."

Xanded replied, "Daniel and Miles are figuring out our position and heading on the bridge as we speak. What happened to the colony that has you so freaked?"

"The Sulaco was a military transport. It was sent with a platoon of Colonial Marines to investigate why the colony had fallen silent. I was on board as a civilian consultant. Hadley's Hope was a terraforming colony on the planet LV-426. On that planet is a crashed alien ship filled with large eggs. The eggs hatch and the creature inside looks for a host to implant. After implantation, the host seems normal for a short time, but they die when the alien lifeform inside bursts out." Ripley paused for a breath.

"Back in 2122, I was a Warrant Officer on a commercial hauler, the Nostromo, that stopped on LV-426. Our XO, Kane, was implanted and died when the xenomorph burst from his chest. In less than twenty-four hours, the other four remaining crew members were killed off one-by-one. The creature was intelligent, good at staying unseen, was extremely fast, had claws, teeth, and a barbed tail, and had acid for blood which tended to spray when it was injured. I managed to blow it out an airlock, but in the process the Nostromo was destroyed, and I was stuck in cold sleep on a shuttle for 57 years, during which time the colony was founded," explained Ripley.

"They founded the colony not knowing about the danger on the alien ship, then?" asked Taylor.

Ripley's face turned angry. "No, somebody knew. My crew on the Nostromo were awakened from cold sleep and sent down to that planet. The android on our ship, Ash, had secret orders to retrieve a sample of that creature no matter the cost. The crew was considered expendable. When I got back to Earth, the whole thing had been white-washed. I was given a psych discharge and had my flight license revoked. The colony was founded after the Nostromo disappeared, and the colonists were ordered to investigate that same ship. Burke, the company rep sent with us on the Sulaco, had sent them out there deliberately so that the company would have a sample for their bio-weapons division. He later tried to get aliens to implant me and Newt so he could smuggle the creature through quarantine."

"Newt?" asked Xander.

The anger on Ellen Ripley's face changed back to sadness. "It's what we called Rebecca. She was traumatized by her experiences and wouldn't talk at first. Newt was what her brother called her." With a look of determination, she added, "We have to let somebody know what Burke and the others at Weyland-Yutani were trying to do. If those creatures got loose on Earth, it could be the end of everything."

"Let's head to the bridge and see where we stand," suggested Harry. They were going to have a problem letting the authorities know what had happened to Ellen, as they had jumped to an entirely different universe while rescuing her.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

The bridge was crowded. Peter and Jimmy had come up after finishing up in the cargo hold, and the four from the galley had just arrived.

"We have some good news," said Daniel. "According to our star readings, we're not that far from Earth. It's only about a ten day journey at warp 2."

From near the doorway, Ellen said, "Ten days? How is that possible? LV-426 was 39 light years from Earth."

"You were actually about 19 light years from Earth when we encountered the Sulaco," said O'Brien. "Regardless, we're now only about a quarter of a light year out."

"That doesn't make any sense...even a fast courier couldn't make it back to Earth so quickly from where you picked me up," proclaimed Ripley, "and even if you could, it wouldn't take ten days to then go the remaining quarter light year!"

Daniel looked at Harry questioningly. "You didn't tell her?" he asked.

Harry looked sheepish as he explained, "We hadn't gotten to it yet."

"Tell me what?" said Ellen slightly menacingly.

Daniel raised his hands placatingly and explained, "Our ship doesn't use the same kind of propulsion as the ones you're used to using."

"How did the Sulaco go faster than light?" asked O'Brien.

She frowned, and replied, "It uses a hyperdrive tachyon shunt. A quarter-lightyear would have taken less than a day's travel."

"The Ship of Fools actually has two drive systems..." O'Brien started to explain.

"Wait," interrupted Ripley. "Your ship is named the Ship of Fools?"

Slightly impatiently, Miles waved that away, and said, "We'll explain the name later. Anyway, we have two drive systems. One is a wormhole drive that provides for instantaneous transit, but it's extremely imprecise. The second drive is much slower. It works by warping space to go faster than light. Unfortunately, our version is jury-rigged from another ship that crashed, and so we can only go about ten times c."

Ripley looked disbelievingly at O'Brien. "I've been in space most of my life, and I've never heard of space drives like you're describing."

"Well," said Daniel hesitatingly, "when we say that the wormhole drive is imprecise, what we really mean is that when we use it...we kind of tear through the boundaries between parallel universes and end up in an entirely different reality than we started." Daniel was visibly wincing as he said the last part.

Ellen Ripley looked several times back and forth between Miles and Daniel before loudly saying, "You expect me to believe that PILE OF BULLSHIT? What the hell is really going on here? Are you people running from the authorities or something?"

"I told you she'd think we were crazy..." said Dresden quietly from the back of the room.

Jimmy spoke up before the conversation could degenerate further. "Look, we've got some time before we can get back to Earth. Just show her the drive systems and explain how they work. If she was an officer on a starship, I'm sure she can tell if she's looking at a real drive system, even if it isn't one she's seen before."

"Yes, I absolutely can tell the difference between a real and a fake," said Ellen harshly.

With little choice in the matter, Daniel and Miles proceeded to take her to the engine room and point out the various pieces of the drive systems. She didn't really start to believe them until she personally took readings of the output from the zero-point-energy power plant. Over the next few days, she spent quite a lot of time quizzing them about the theory and practice behind the drives. Ellen was impressed with Chief O'Brien's knowledge of warp theory and practice. She was less impressed with the apparently massive gaps in knowledge that Daniel seemed to have with regard to the wormhole drive. The whole interaction made Jackson uncomfortable, but Ripley grudgingly accepted the necessity of their situation once she heard the whole story.

She was less sanguine when she found out Taylor and Peter had superpowers, and simply refused to believe Harry was a wizard until he spent the better part of an hour demonstrating his magic. By the time they arrived at Earth, though, she was fully up to speed.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Harry Dresden was carving runes into the end of his new staff. The piece of aged oak had been sitting on top of the ruins of one of the nicer houses in Sunnydale. Xander had said it was the home of a girl with the unlikely name of Aphrodesia. Harry just chalked that up to being California. Luckily for him, the girl's parents had had better taste in building materials than in baby names. There were markings on the end of the oak beam that indicated it was from old growth oak in Ireland. The wood itself was fine-grained and quite beautiful once polished. Once the runes were carved, he would have to put it through another cleansing ritual. Using a staff made of wood that had been sitting on top of a Hellmouth for years wouldn't be wise without purging it of any evil influence. He had to use salvaged supplies from Sunnydale for the rituals. Interestingly, replicated materials seemed to lack any of the symbolic meaning so important for magic. He had made a note to look at them from an alchemical perspective if he ever got a chance, although alchemy had never been his strong suit.

He paused his work when somebody knocked on the hatch to his room. "Come on in!" he yelled. Xander had warned him how Sunnydale vampires could cross a threshold with something as simple as a welcome mat. Harry figured if there was a vampire on board the Ship of Fools, then everybody on board had bigger problems than access.

Ellen Ripley climbed down the short ladder into the room. She was still wearing the earth-tone jumpsuit replicated by O'Brien. Starfleet seemed to default to earth tones for clothing, like they were caught in the 70's. "I'm not interrupting anything important, am I?" she asked.

"I'm not doing anything that will explode, summon a demon, or turn you into an frog if it's interrupted," he answered.

"Are those common problems for you?" she asked with a quizzical look.

He thought for a second. "Not as often as you'd think, but more often than I'd like. What can I do for you?"

"I just wanted to apologize for putting you through the wringer earlier," she said. "I think I was having serious issues with my situation and was being too stubborn. I appreciate your patience." She had forced him to use enough minor magic to tire him out in order to prove his claims.

He waved his hand. "It's not a problem. I've met a lot of folks who don't believe in magic. It's really my own fault for advertising as a wizard in the Yellow Pages."

"Yellow Pages?" she asked with a confused look.

"It's a telephone directory," he explained. He should have expected a woman from the 22nd century wouldn't know what a phone book was. They were already phasing them out in Harry's time.

"So who's minding your business while you're off wandering around the multiverse?" she asked.

Harry's smile faded a bit. "Just before I ended up stuck out here, somebody blew up my office."

"Oh my God, I'm sorry," said Ellen. "Do you know who did it?"

"Yes," he answered, "and I made sure they won't be doing it to anybody else."

Ripley sat down on a stool that doubled as an end table. "Was somebody trying to kill you?"

"I'm sure they would have been happy if I had been caught, but they were sending a message. They also firebombed my apartment and destroyed my car," he explained. "I was caught up in a war between the council of wizards and one of the vampire courts."

Ellen got an odd look on her face. "That still sounds like something from a fantasy story to me, I'm afraid. How did you get caught up in the middle of it?"

Harry hesitated. "I actually started it. I violated a truce in order to save the life of a woman I cared for. The war didn't go well for my side."

"You saved her life, though?" Ripley asked.

"I did...but she died at the end of the war, right before I ended up trapped with Jimmy and Xander in the ruins of Sunnydale," he answered.

Ripley looked down at the floor. "My trip on the Nostromo was going to be my last trip before I took leave to spend more time with my daughter. It was supposed to be twenty months round trip. Instead, I spent more than fifty years floating through space in cold sleep. By the time I got back to Earth, my daughter had died." There were tears in her eyes as she recounted her biggest regret.

Harry put a hand on her arm in sympathy, and sighed. "Right before my life blew up, Susan showed up at my home and let me know that we had a daughter. She hadn't told me she was pregnant when she left."

"Well, now you have a chance to get to know her at least, right?" asked Ellen. "I mean, assuming we get everyone home soon."

"I'm worried about her. I have enemies that would go after her just to spite me. The plan was that she would live with some friends of mine who have children." Ellen gave him a disbelieving look, so he explained further. "You HAVE to understand, my enemies wouldn't just kill her. They would destroy her mind and her soul, and do it with a song in their heart."

"Her soul?" asked Ellen.

"One of my enemies is the leader of a group called the Order of the Blackened Denarius. The Denarians are called that because each one has a silver coin, one of the thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas Iscariot. Possessing the coin joins the holder with the soul of a Fallen Angel. Their leader, Nicodemus Archleone, has had that position for two thousand years. He hates me because I'm one of the only people who knows how to actually kill him. The first time I ran into them, they tortured a Knight of the Cross to death and tried to release a virulent plague in downtown Chicago. Every single one of them is a psychopath with tremendous power, and they're almost impossible to kill."

"Your world is very different from mine," said Ripley. "I don't know if I could deal with supernatural horrors like that. It's hard enough dealing with mundane greed and stupidity."

"I find that hard to believe. From what you've said, you've survived many encounters with these xenomorphs. Frankly, they sound as frightening as many of the worst monsters of faerie in my world." Dresden had a sneaking suspicion that he had seen one before. One of the phobophages at SplatterCon sounded an awful lot like the monsters Ellen Ripley had described.

"Maybe you're right," she answered, "but let me give you some advice. Not spending enough time with my daughter is the one thing I regret the most in my life. I should have made more time for Amanda. What's your daughter's name?"

"Margaret...Maggie. I left her with a friend of mine, Father Forthill, right before I was attacked and ended up here," said Dresden.

She put her hand on Harry's, and told him, "Do what you can to be a part of her life. Letting her have her father in her life is worth the risk."

With that, Ripley left Dresden's cabin. Harry spent quite a long time thinking after she left.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

The entire crew was present on the bridge for their arrival at Earth as the ship passed the orbit of Venus. Everybody breathed a sigh of relief as they saw the familiar vista of continents and oceans. Even Miles, who lived where Starfleet posted him, and Ellen, who was born on Luna, considered Earth to be the cradle of humanity.

Miles was reviewing the sensors. "This is weird," he said. "I'm not picking up any signs of orbital infrastructure. There aren't even any artificial satellites, never mind stations or spacedocks. There should be something above any of our versions of Earth."

There was a moment of silence as everybody absorbed that fact.

Ripley was the first to speak, albeit quietly. "This really is another universe, isn't it? If we were at my Earth, we would be seeing satellites, Gateway station...this is really real..."

Miles continued reading out the sensor results. "There are no signs of industrial pollution in the atmosphere. There are signs of cities and road networks, though. The Great Wall of China and the Pyramids of Giza are all visible."

"That only dates it as sometime after the 3rd century BC," said Daniel. "Are there any Naquadah signatures?" The presence of the heavy element would suggest they were in Daniel's universe, even if it was in the past.

"I'm not seeing any signs of advanced heavy elements," said O'Brien. "I'm also not seeing any signs of advanced energy sources. It looks like a low-tech civilization without any aliens, time travelers or precursor civilizations."

Daniel activated the zoom feature, homing in on Western Europe which was in daylight. "Give me a little bit of time to look over the landscape, and I can probably narrow down what historical period we're in right now," he explained.

"Why?" asked Taylor. "I mean, this isn't our Earth, unless we somehow traveled into the past."

"...and if we did," added Xander, "I don't really want to risk landing and accidentally killing my own grandfather."

Daniel looked a little disappointed, and said, "I just thought it was interesting."

"Can they see us?" asked Jimmy. "Wouldn't showing them a spaceship in orbit kind of risk changing the past?"

Miles shook his head. "We're not in close orbit. The only way they could see us would be to point a telescope right at us, which is really unlikely."

"Can we plot a course that avoids putting us between Earth and any of the other points of interest in the system?" asked Jimmy.

"I can do that, and that's not a bad idea," agreed Miles.

Slightly disappointed, the rest of the crew went off to continue whatever they were doing as Daniel eagerly scanned the surface looking for clues, and Miles took care of their course.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"We are agreed, then?" asked the man seated at the head of the table. He was wearing a tunic marked with a house crest, a lion rampant on a yellow and red field, on top of black hose. Continuing, he said, "We need to found an institute of learning, someplace safe from the church and the machinations of kings."

Around the table sat two women and man, each of which wore rich robes made with expensive fabrics. "I think we've made that clear, Godric. The question now is where to build it," said the woman in silver robes. "We need to find a place where the natural ley lines converge. That will make construction much easier."

"What about London?" asked the other woman. "Diagon Alley is set on a convergence of ley lines. That would make it easy for students to reach, as well."

"London is also the seat of the church in England, and filled to bursting with mundanes, Helga," said the man in the green-boardered robe. "It's the opposite of what we want in a sanctuary."

"I agree that London isn't suitable. How about Sarum? That's close to several druidic sites," stated the woman in silver.

As the debate grew more vigorous, Godric sighed. The four were good friends, but highly uneven in temperament. He had a sneaking suspicion this debate would last past this evening. He thought idly that it might be worth opening a cask of wine before things grew acrimonious.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Ellen Ripley had dragged both Miles and Daniel to the engine room, much to Daniel's chagrin, as he was making progress on his assessment. He was sure now that this was subsequent to the fall of the western Roman Empire, and Chichen Itza was a thriving settlement. That narrowed things down quite a bit. Ellen was fairly insistent, though.

She turned to address the two of them. "We need to better understand how this wormhole drive works. There could be an infinite number of universes out there. There has to be a way to determine where we end up when we activate it."

Daniel winced a bit. "We have looked at it, but the mathematics encoded in the drive system are exceedingly complicated. I don't have a complete memory of how it operates, but I do recall that altering the parameters without understanding things can have extremely bad results, bad enough that it was forbidden by the governing body of the Ancients."

Miles said, "I think I have to agree with Ellen on this one. We're not going to make any progress toward getting home without deciphering how it works."

Grudgingly, Daniel agreed. Internally, he felt irrational guilt over not having the answers. He was sure he could have explained it to them back when he was still ascended. Of course, he wouldn't have been allowed to explain it to them. Most of the flashes of insight he had were more along the lines of how Peter described his danger sense -- warnings of what was safe and what was not.

It took them three weeks of constant analysis before they made a kind of breakthrough when they realized that the drive actually created more than one wormhole. Prior to transit, it would open a handful of micro-wormholes in an attempt to verify a safe path. Daniel knew from personal experience that bad things could happen if a wormhole passed through a solar flare, for example. By looking at how the mathematics varied for the micro-wormholes, they were able to isolate the portions that were focused on spatial coordinates. By comparing the logs of past transits, they were then able to isolate the segments specifying the quantum signature of the target reality. It was a little unclear how they could translate Starfleet's quantum signature readings into targets for the Ancient drive, unfortunately. The first positive result, though, was that they determined that they could use the wormhole drive to move through space without hopping dimensions. That would make things much easier for traveling in realspace, as their limited warp drive was quite slow compared to what all of the space-farers in the crew knew from their personal experience.

Their initial test of the wormhole drive without changing realities accidentally dropped them in a low orbit over Scotland, much to their concern.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

The four horses made their way over the Scottish moors, looking for signs of anything unusual. The weather was rather damp and foggy.

"Godric, are we going to ride across the breadth of the Kingdom?" asked the other male rider.

Godric favored him with a cool stare. "Sal, you know why we're here. Those reports of lights in the sky in Scotland coincided with that feeling that we all had last month."

One of the women, Rowena, added her thoughts. "We have to investigate. Somebody could be working a major ritual, and none of the light wizards and witches knew of anything happening this far north."

Salazar knew they were right, but by Merlin, he hated the damp. Scotland made him cranky.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

With more test runs conducted outside lunar orbit, the crew were confident that they could use the drive for translocation within the same dimension. They only attempted one transit that fiddled with a segment of the math that Daniel warned against. That test had shifted them fifteen days into the future, and all of their subsequent tests were exceedingly careful to avoid changing those parameters. With increasing confidence, they ran a test that dropped them within 500 meters of the surface of the dark side of the moon. As a native of her universe's Luna, Ripley found the barren landscape of the undeveloped satellite both beautiful and disquieting. They also tested it over interstellar distances, dropping down into the trinary Alpha Centauri system. That time, it was Miles who found the empty system a unique experience. The final test was to verify that they could teleport within an atmosphere. They debated trying Mars or Venus, but the three from universes with superpowers, Peter, Taylor and Jimmy, argued that they needed some way to get from space to the ground on Earth. The Ship of Fools had no teleporters and no shuttles. While there were obvious docking points for shuttles, the craft had been long gone before they had found the ship. The derelict where they had found Peter and Taylor had also been completely bereft of small craft, giving them little option but to land the ship if they wanted to debark.

After some debate, they decided to try and open a wormhole deep in the wilds of Scotland. It was sparsely populated, and they could hopefully keep their impact limited to the same geographic area as their earlier accidental flyover.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

The four wizards and witches were awakened by a loud roaring noise and a disquieting feeling, similar but more powerful than the one that had prompted their search. From their camp, they could see bright light of a kind that indicated advanced sorcery. The four packed up camp, and hurried over to the location of the disruption. When they arrived, the air was still tingling, as if something had opened a hole in the magical field nearby.

"Do you feel that?" asked Rowena. "There's a lot of power concentrated here. There must be at least two, possibly more, ley lines running into convergence here. I don't think this place has been discovered, possibly not even by the druids."

Sal looked around the site. "This would be a good site for a fortification. It's naturally defensible, and there's a good site for a village nearby. The rise gives you a good view over all of the approaches."

Helga pointed off toward a nearby lake. "There's freshwater here, and that lake would be a perfect home for magical creatures. The soil seems good for Scotland, too."

Godric was more concerned about whatever it was that had brought them here. There was no sign that anybody had been here, but he was sure that something had been here in the early morning. "We still don't know what caused that disturbance that woke us from our sleep. Whatever it was may come back."

Suddenly, there was a flash of fire that startled the four. In the midst of them, a phoenix appeared. It flew over to Godric and hovered for a moment before settling on the large man's shoulder. For a moment, the four just stared in stunned silence.

Godric broke the silence. "Well, hello there, friend. What can we do for you?" They all recognized the phoenix as a creature of obvious goodness and light. When the bird began to sing, the sound made them relax from their state of alertness. Godric listened for a moment, and said, "She says this site is safe, and that it's what we've been seeking for our school. Hm."

"Well, I guess that's settled then. It would be hard to get a better endorsement than that of a phoenix. I guess the only question now is what we call it," said Helga.

That started another debate that lasted until it was time to make camp again.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"All right, based on our jump into Ellen's reality, we've come up with what we think might be able to get us back there with the drive," explained Miles.

"Why can't we just duplicate the jump that got us there?" asked Xander reasonably.

"It's not quite that simple," said Ripley. "The math changes based upon your point of origin. It's not so much like dialing a phone number as it is going to an offset from your current location."

"The Stargate network in my universe worked in a similar way. We had addresses for other worlds, but we had to adjust them for spatial drift on our own because our Gate had been disconnected from the network for thousands of years and hadn't been updated with the new stellar positions," added Daniel.

With that, everybody agreed that with their next jump, they would try to get Ellen Ripley back to her own universe.