"Just as I thought. More of those weird chunky flowers," said Hikari with a sigh. "I swear they grow faster than weeds."

"And you're sure there is nothing in your records that matches their description?" said Artemis, trying to maintain a stoic face.

Hikari took a knee and held her analyzer pad up to one of the plant specimens. "Not unless they're some kind of hybrid. But if we were simply comparing their appearance to things the Academy has seen before, we could be making wrong assumptions. Going with gut feelings based on looks is sloppy science."

Artemis could relate to that, but she didn't want to bore her red-headed companion with yet another story about how someone back on her homeworld mistook her for a demon or a dragon. She simply glared at the strange plant with quiet suspicion.

The plants had been popping up on plane after plane for the last several weeks, ever since that quantum rift in the void appeared and opened up paths to "new" worlds that "shouldn't" exist. Artemis's plane, colloquially called Hydaelyn after its protector goddess, was one of them. One moment, Artemis and her adventuring party were fighting a villainous Ascian, and the next, that Ascian had channeled a source of immense power and flung her through that very quantum rift. She would have died were it not for the intervention of Academy researchers who were observing what was, from their perspective, the apparent birth and rapid aging of the worlds on the other side. At the behest of Hikari, the Academy turned Artemis over to Head Count to nurse her back to health and find a safe way to get her home.

One would assume that being stuck in another part of the cosmos, with no guarantee she could ever return to her native space and time, would have traumatized Artemis. But for some reason, she didn't show any signs. Perhaps, after all she'd seen, she had the utmost faith that her new friends would help her somehow find her way back to her old ones. But the plants presented a different problem that actually visibly worried her. If Artemis's crossover into Head Count's realms was heralded by the xenoflora, and they were indeed siphoning large quantities of aether from every world in which they'd rooted, then it's possible that trouble had followed her through the rift, and she and Head Count were running out of time to prevent a calamity.

*************

Uh-oh. The worlds, they are colliding. IP lawyers be damned, Artemis somehow slipped through the cracks in the fourth wall and must adapt to life on our side of it. Hopefully the weird mutations in the plantlife are just a coincidence~

Have I mentioned how much of an upgrade Clip Studio Paint has been to my workflow? ^^ This is the most fun I've had drawing in years.

~Az