After Kat, Alyssa, and Tara flew away, Lily, Rachel, and the other Alyssa set off together in the first direction they thought to go. Lily stepped onto what looked like a conveyor belt on the ground, and invited Alyssa and Rachel to follow.
"This is cool," said Rachel, appreciating how fast they could go on the moving sidewalk. "We don't have that in my world."
"What, the auto-walk?"
"They have something like it at the airport but that's about it," said Alyssa.
"Weird," said Lily. "So, Kat told me about how you showed her a clothing store," she changed the subject, laughing a little at how absurd the idea of a "clothing store" sounded to her.
Rachel giggled a little as well—to her, of course, it was such a normal, mundane thing, that the idea of showing one to someone as if it were something interesting was what seemed a little silly.
"Yeah," replied Alyssa. "You have something in mind to show me?"
"Wait," Rachel broke in. "Was that when Kat imprinted on the dress I was trying on?"
"Yup," smirked Lily, "She told me all about that," she said with a laugh. "Wasn't that Tara though?"
"It was," explained Rachel. "There was just one of us then, remember?"
"Ah, right," said Lily. "Duplicating isn't that common here; I forgot you'd share her memories."
"Well it wasn't where I live either until recently," Rachel laughed.
"True!"
Suddenly Alyssa's phone rang. She didn't recognize the number, but she answered it without much thought. "Hello?"
"Wait, I thought Kat—" Lily muttered before being interupted by Alyssa.
"Interview? You don't mean—hold on, this is Alyssa Nitanni; did you mean to call me? ...Sorry, bye bye." She hung up, disappointed. "Wrong number, Something about going on the news or something."
"You should do it," smiled Lily. "Kat said you make a cute weather girl."
"Yeah," Alyssa giggled. "I just thought for a second that it was someone back home wanting to interview me about what's going on there. Thought maybe I could use my new phone to get a message there, to one of the other Taras or something."
"Why does your phone even have service here? Kat told me hers didn't in your world."
"I don't know," said Alyssa. "Yeah, I shouldn't have an account here. Weird."
Rachel gasped. "Try calling someone! Maybe you really are connected back home!"
Alyssa perked up. "Maybe! This phone is kinda special." She scrolled through her contacts and picked someone she knew from work, putting it on speakerphone. After only one ring, there was an answer.
"Peter's Pizza Shack, would you like to hear our special today?"
Once again Alyssa was disappointed, Rachel too. "Sorry, wrong number." She hung up.
"Yeah, that's a small chain around here," said Lily. "Sorry. Weird that you have service though."
"Well I created this phone from something else with those powers; maybe it's still kinda magical or something?"
"You...but that's..." Lily stammered. "Never mind, that's just too much to think about right now."
"Wow, the people here are all really...Is that a unicorn?" Rachel asked.
"Ah!" Lily proclaimed. "Yes it is."
Alyssa looked over. "Is it real???" The idea of a creature from her own dimension's mythology existing as an actual animal here would be interesting; it would suggest that somehow people had seen into other dimensions before.
"Well, kind of. That's what I'm going to show you," said Lily.
"Ooh, what?" asked Alyssa.
"It's called a body shop," Lily started to explain.
"Like a car mechanic?" asked Rachel, a bit confused.
"Ha, that's what that means where you're from? Anyway, no. Basically, it's a store that sells..." Lily considered how to best describe it.
"Bodies?" joked Rachel.
"Yeah, basically," said Lily. "That unicorn is a human imprinted on a substitute body. Sort of like a costume. But it is a living, breathing unicorn."
"Why's someone just walking around in a costume?" Alyssa quietly asked. "Is there a convention in town or something?"
"Why not?" Lily retorted. "It's fun. That weird where you're from?"
"I mean, people will look at you funny...though I guess there really isn't anything wrong with it," noted Alyssa. "Actually," she observed, "people from my world would think you're in a costume...I think you look cool though."
"What?!" exclaimed Lily. "Why not just let people be whatever they want?" She laughed and shook her head. "Give me a break."
Meanwhile Rachel had been marveling at the cars passing by, which, as Alyssa had noticed on her previous (simulated) trip here, had very fancy, elaborate designs and materials. Vehicle designs that by her standards would be one-of-a-kind showpieces, or heavily-modified rides driven by car fanatics, seemed to be the norm here. And strangely, some of them were very small, similar in size to the miniature cars children sometimes drive around on the sidewalk, seemingly too small to accommodate an adult driver. Maybe a car mechanic's shop would be an interesting thing to see here, she wondered. It wasn't just the cars that were extravagantly-designed, but those especially appeared to have a special uniqueness to each one, almost as if each car was designed specifically with its owner's personality in mind. Of course, she quickly realized why this actually was, which also explained why seemingly none of the cars had drivers, another thing she had been wondering about.
"Oh, here we are," said Lily, pointing at a building they were just approaching. "In here."
The trio stepped off the conveyor and followed Lily inside the building. This building was taller than all but the tallest of skyscrapers, known for their height, in Alyssa and Rachel's universe, though by this city's standards it was about average. Like the other buildings, the exterior was a sight to behold as well—as basic rectangular buildings seemed to be taboo here, this one had a corkscrew shape, like someone took a regular building and twisted it several times. Multicolored windows covered the building, all changing color in regular patterns.
"I want to see this place at night," Rachel commented as they walked in.
The ground floor of the building was laid out like a food court at a mall, with fast-food counters on the outer walls and tables in the center. As usual for Kat and Lily's city, bright colors were plentiful. The tables all glowed in different colors, as did all the floor tiles, making the floor resemble a dance floor at a nightclub. The walls and high ceiling were black, with a glowing rainbow border at the top of the walls, its colors gliding around the perimeter of the room. While neither the tables nor the floor tiles regularly changed colors (though likely for no other reason than that it would be distracting) the latter did temporarily turn white as they were stepped on, the white color even rippling to the adjacent tiles when one lifted their foot back up.
Lily led Rachel and Alyssa past all this, however, to a pole on the opposite side, like the one they (except for Lily) had used to get to the ground floor in the apartment building. Lily referred to an electronic directory display located next to the pole, rapidly scrolling through the list by waving her hand near the screen.
Rachel gasped in excitement. "Wait, you can do that? Just wave your hand and control..."
"Well yeah, but only cause there's a camera on it," said Lily, pointing at a tiny dot above the screen and waving her hand in front of it, making the display scroll some more.
"Oh," laughed Rachel. "I thought it was like...you know, more weird magic stuff." She tried herself, and it came real naturally, as if the computer could perfectly understand the intent behind her motions like a person would. "Wow, it's real responsive."
Alyssa leaned over and looked at the list on the display. It was filled with the names of businesses, each accompanied by a floor number, next to which was a thin vertical line with a glowing mark that seemed to indicate approximately how far up the building each floor was.
"It's voice-activated too, pretty standard," said Lily. She turned to the screen and demonstrated. "Forms with Function," she requested. Instantly the text flew downward at blinding speed, scrolling to a line near the top with the name she asked for, which became highlighted. The list shrank to cover only half the screen, making room for a map of floor 116, where Forms with Function was one of two tenants, indicated by a line connecting the name of the store to its location. An advertising blurb for the store appeared, along with a small slide show of pictures. Lily, already familiar with the store, ignored all this and reached right for the pole, imprinting on it and zooming upwards. As Alyssa finished reading the description of the store, Rachel followed after Lily, appreciating how, as the pole, she somehow had instinctual knowledge of where to get off for the selected location.
"Ooh, I know some of these characters," Rachel remarked as the three of them entered the store. The walls and shelves were lined with inanimate figures similar to puppets, mostly life-size ones. Many resembled real or mythological animals, some were based on TV or video game characters (though no particularly human-like ones), and a few didn't really look like anything in particular, other than various abstract forms that would be interesting to imprint on.
"Really?" asked Lily, intrigued. "That's kinda neat."
"How come?"
"Eh, I don't know. I just always imagined other dimensions as being completely different with things like pop culture. Like--"
Alyssa gasped, interrupting Lily. "Look what they have!"
Rachel and Lily turned to see where Alyssa was pointing. "Whoa, that looks like that bird thing you turned into before!"
"I know!" Alyssa picked it up and looked at the price tag. "Three hundred dollars???"
"Well, you're getting more than just a big plush toy," explained Lily. "It's made of realistic, high-quality materials—and birds and stuff like that are usually aerodynamically-designed so you can actually fly inside them."
"That's cool," remarked Alyssa.
"Still though, $300 does seem like a lot..." agreed Lily.
A young woman wearing jeans and a red T-shirt with the store's logo overheard and walked over. "You know why that's so expensive? I think...here, let me see that for a sec."
Alyssa handed it over to the staffer, who immediately went inside it. After floating in mid-air for a second, flapping her wings, she suddenly deflated, becoming almost flat and gliding to the floor like a dropped piece of paper. Her face appeared on the top. "Yep!" She emerged from the deflated bird, coming out on two feet in an odd way so she was holding it in her hand.
"It's...inflatable?" asked Alyssa, puzzled.
"Oh, you haven't heard of the collapsible models yet?"
"Ooh! Those are awesome!" Lily resounded. "I've wanted one since they first started working on them, but I still haven't decided what kind I want!"
"What's so special about them?" asked Alyssa.
The saleswoman answered her question. "You saw how I made it flat? You can keep it under your clothes or something," she pretended to demonstrate by holding it up to her side, "and it's always there." She placed it on a nearby counter. "So you can switch forms at a second's notice, without having to think about carrying it around. It feels like you're a shape shifter; it's pretty awesome." In a blink of an eye, her body seemed to collapse into a single point, leaving the form of a bat, which flew up to a cable running across the ceiling and hung upside-down from it. After sitting there for a moment, Alyssa and Rachel beaming, she flew back to a spot above the floor and collapsed, her body exploding from the deflated bat leaving it entirely hidden. "I bet you never suspected I was a vampire," she joked.
"That's awesome!" cheered Rachel. "I want one!"
"The thing is," continued the woman, "the collapsible material is a really new technology and still pretty expensive to make, but we still get lots of people who want it. Like you!" She smiled. "There's a whole shelf of them over there," she said, pointing across the store, where Rachel immediately ran. "Feel free to try them out if you want, but make yourself a sweater or something if you actually want to put it under your clothes, so you don't get the merchandise sweaty," she called over to her.
"I'm gonna go check out this other place," said Alyssa.
"The game store?" asked Lily. "Oh wow, yeah! You wouldn't have the kind of games we have."
"Mm-hmm, I know!" Alyssa smiled and nodded.
Before entering the game store, Alyssa walked over to a window at the end of the common area between the shops, curious what the view was like. Being that the window was 116 stories high, she naturally expected to see an amazing view stretching past the edge of the city, made even more amazing by the fact that it was in a whole other universe, one a lot more advanced than the one she was familiar with. However, the view she got was not too different from what she saw through the window outside Kat's apartment, as most of the buildings around her were still of similar height. The (to her) unique design of the buildings still made it interesting, of course, even if it wasn't quite what she was hoping for.
The entrance area of the store was dominated by a display showcasing the latest hot new release, a massively-multiplayer online game titled Sur-Reality. This display included a live demo of the game, much like the one with the racing game Alyssa played back in her own dimension. Except there were no controllers here, so Alyssa almost mistook it for nothing more than a TV screen showing gameplay footage, until she remembered and took a closer look at the place under the screen where the controllers would be. In lieu of controllers, there were four metal insets shaped like handprints, along with the words "JOIN THE CHAOS!"
"Ooo, I love this game!" exclaimed Lily. "Alyssa, wanna try it with me?" Lily placed her hand in one of the indentations. "You go in through here."
"What's it about?"
Lily took her hand off the display. "It's such a simple concept, but it makes for something insanely fun," she explained. "It's just like when you go inside your head and play around there, but you're connected to people all over the world and you can all mess with the game world like that. It's always a new experience, and it's always total chaos!" Lily laughed. "Wanna try?"
"Sure!" Alyssa and Lily both placed their hands on the marked spots and willed themselves into the game.
Inside, Alyssa looked just like she did outside, but Lily looked like a bolt of lightning with arms and a human head, made of what looked like pure darkness (in the literal sense) but glowing and sparking with bright green streaks. Not to mention she was floating in mid-air, as ethereal energy beings tend to do. "What do you think of this form?" Lily asked, posing. "Pretty cool, huh? Why don't you come up with something for yourself?"
"Like what?"
"Well, it's just like inside your mind; you can be anything you imagine!"
Lily was, of course, referring to the lifelike type of daydreaming that comes natural to anyone with any experience imprinting. Alyssa had shared an imaginary trip with Kat the night before, but there Kat was in control, able to wield all manner of powers to reshape the simulated reality to her every desire. Taking any form she could think of was, by those standards, one of her less interesting abilities. While, contrary to Lily's assumption, Alyssa had never gotten around to trying this type of daydreaming herself, she did of course have experience using that very ability in the real world previously. And, sure enough, it worked here exactly the same, allowing Alyssa to instantly turn into a ball, melt into a puddle, then snap back to her regular form as she experimented. But what form did she want to take here?
Oh well, she figured, she'd be able to change it whenever she wanted anyway. And besides, she was just playing a demo of the game at a store. She decided to extend her shirt into a long, loose gown that trailed behind her, and turn her legs into a ghostly, cloudy tail. Turning her attention to her hair, she grew it to about as long as she was tall, turned it white, and made it float in the air as if gravity did not exist. Finally, on a whim, she grew to about 1.5 times her normal size. Alyssa floated in front of Lily and posed. "How do I look?"
"Wow, real creative!" Lily gave a thumbs up, her hand growing to easily five times its size to emphasize the gesture before shrinking it back to normal as she put her hand down.
"So...what are we supposed to do?" asked Alyssa.
"You just mess around and have fun!" Lily laughed and took off, launching herself through the air like lightning toward an area where some other players were having a conversation.
Alyssa floated toward Lily at a more gentle pace, while looking around. This was by far the strangest place she'd ever been. It was as if someone threw the whole world in a giant blender and mixed everything up. It made no sense at all. The area she was floating in looked like a severely distorted city block, littered with random objects of all types among the randomly-thrown-together fragments of buildings making up the city. An office building with multicolored waterfalls for windows, topped with half the dome of the other-dimensional equivalent of the United States Capitol (though Alyssa didn't recognize it as such) sat next to a small suburban house that had somehow been twisted and warped into the shape of a random person while maintaining its structural integrity. The street was made not of asphalt but of an odd mosaic of random materials, from carpet and glass to even things like cheese. A bridge made of pink cotton led out of the tiny city above a river of beer, where a miniature car floated by, somehow propelling itself with its wheels as it would on land. Beyond the bridge lay a short road, ending at the towering wall of stone that was the cross section of a mountain range, a mountain range that was partially deleted from existence to make room for the city block. In the sky flew a flock of literal flying squirrels—regular squirrels with wings—one of which was playing a miniature electric guitar with its paws as it flew.
Noticing a distant speck in the sky, far above most of the debris floating in mid-air with no regard for gravity, Alyssa floated upwards, her idle desire to satisfy her curiosity propelling her faster, until she came across a solid gold platform the size of a small park, containing a lush botanical garden underneath a glass pyramid. Alyssa floated to the top of the pyramid and looked down through the glass, where she saw a brunette woman in a long, goldenrod-colored ball gown, wearing a tiara, sitting on a luxurious bed in the center. As Alyssa watched, a mischievous look appeared on the woman's face, defying her perfect, innocent appearance, and she snapped her fingers. Alyssa was startled as the entire platform instantly began to free fall, the woman inside laughing as she floated in free fall with it. Instinctively, Alyssa started floating again and rocketed down to the city block where it was about to land. In a knee-jerk attempt to save this "city" from its impending doom, Alyssa raised her hand and created a giant cushion in the air which sparkled into existence. The pyramid structure landed on the cushion harmlessly, and by the desire of the woman inside, faded away with more sparkles.
"Hey!" chided the brunette woman. "You're no fun." She stood up on the cushion and took off, going back up to the sky where she was before.
Lily, hearing the commotion, flew over. "What's going on?"
Alyssa explained.
"You were trying to save the city?" Lily laughed. "Who cares about the city?" She threw up her arms for emphasis. "Having fun is all that matters here!" Lily did a twirl in mid-air and swung out her lightning "tail", which struck the tallest building with a booming clap of thunder, setting fire to the building and making Alyssa reflexively cover her ears.
A big smile crept on Alyssa's face as she realized the truth of what Lily said. She laughed at herself for actually thinking this city, if she could even call it that, was worth ruining a person's fun to save. In the real world? Obviously, without any question. But this was just a video game. All that mattered here was that people had fun, and none of these surreal structures needed to remain intact for that to happen.
"Still..." Alyssa joked. "We could use a flood to put out that fire." As she thought it, Alyssa's body burst into a massive tidal wave and crashed into the building, quenching the flames but at the same time collapsing the top chunk of the building and flooding the rest. Green sparks flew around Lily as the resulting mist of water conducted her electricity.
Alyssa's face appeared on the standing flood water for a second, before vanishing. The surface of the water then formed what at first looked like a bubble, but then quickly grew upwards to form the shape of Alyssa's body out of water. Except she was more than ten stories tall.
An idea struck Lily. Turning herself yellow and glowing brightly, she flew away briefly at blinding speed, a glowing yellow blur, then shot back toward the very bottom of Alyssa's body with a blue aura around her, entering her watery body and spiraling up to her head, where she burst out, causing Alyssa to explode into droplets of water that rained down.
"Sorry, I just had to do that," she laughed, turning back to her normal color.
Alyssa was giggling as well as she reformed her body from the water on the ground, at normal size. "That kind of tickled!"
"Let me clean up all this water," said Lily, taking the shape of a giant green sponge the size of a bus in a puff of black smoke. She landed in the water, soaking it all up, before turning back into her normal self—normal for this game, anyway.
With a wry smile, Alyssa nonchalantly waved her hand in the air, covering the previously-clear sky with dark gray storm clouds, sending down a downpour of rain that flooded the area once again, with water that rose faster than it seemed it should with that amount of rain before staying where it was once it reached the level it was at previously.
"See, isn't this fun?" Lily cheered. She looked up at the sky and flared up her eyes with green energy. Thunder rumbled above, and a green lightning bolt crashed down, remaining on the ground as a second Lily, who high-fived the first one. Several more lightning bolts flashed all around, the same thing happening each time, until there were as many as ten copies of Lily floating in the air.
"Yeah, it is!" exclaimed Alyssa. "Hey Lily, I'll be right back; I'm gonna go tell Rachel where we are."
"Good luck with that," said Lily.
"Huh?"
"Oh, you didn't know?" Lily approached Alyssa menacingly. "The only way out of the game is to be the last player standing. And I'm sure as hell not going to die here."
Alyssa looked around in terror, not sure what to say. She hadn't known Lily for very long; was she not the friend she thought she was?
Until Lily started laughing hysterically. "Alyssa, I was kidding! Ha, you should have seen the look on your face!" Lily's eyes glowed and projected a hologram of Alyssa's scared expression from before. "See?"
Alyssa let out a massive sigh of relief. "I was wondering...I got out of that other game just fine, and I couldn't imagine they'd...phew!" Alyssa faded out of the game and reappeared in the real world, watching Lily fly around on the screen for a second before she went back into the lobby area between the stores.
"Alyssa, there you are!" said Rachel excitedly. "Look what I got!" Her body appeared to shrink to a tiny point near her waist, and she landed on the ground as an inch-tall version of herself, looking up at Alyssa. "Hello up there!" yelled Rachel in her tiny voice. She returned to her normal size by emerging out of her smaller form.
Rachel reached into her pocket and pulled out a miniature nondescript human figure made of plastic, only an inch tall. "They had a big bin of these at the front of the store for like 25 cents each, but my money's no good here and my credit cards don't work, so she just gave it to me for free. And now I can turn tiny whenever I want!" She became small again, then back to normal, several times in succession. "I love it! Also, watch, we can still do this." Rachel closed her eyes and changed until she looked identical to Alyssa, before changing back. "I can't turn into anything non-human though, and I had to take off my regular clothes first and make new ones."
"That's nice, but...we have no money here?"
"Yeah, I know, it sucks...by the way, where's Lily?"
"Inside that game." Alyssa pointed at the game kiosk.
"Inside the—whoa, yeah!" Rachel ran over to the kiosk. "So I just imprint on it, right?" She did so without waiting for an answer.
Alyssa followed after her and rejoined the game herself.
"Kat, wait up!"
There was a gentle breeze in the sky as two vaguely human-shaped pockets of air named Kat and Alyssa blew across the city, followed by a small blue quadcopter named Tara. They were flying with a purpose: Kat believed that for all her life, she was supposed to have had the freedom to live whatever kind of existence she pleased. Anything she could ever want or need would have been hers, without anyone having to be bothered over it, not even her. She would have had all the tools she needed to start living her ideal life as soon as she decided what that would be, no matter how impossibly perfect. Everyone was supposed to have this freedom. Except, no one she knew of did, certainly not her, and she had a strong suspicion that not only was she intentionally for her whole life kept unaware of the single thing she'd need in order to enjoy this freedom, but it was part of her, and she and everyone else were being violated in order to keep it away from them. Having had a taste of what her life was supposed to be like, Kat wanted out of the shackles she now found herself in. And she wanted answers.
Alyssa and Tara wanted the same thing, but their immediate concern was returning home, as their powers were the way they got here, and without them they had no way back. They weren't so sure this loss of ability was something intentional, though the situation certainly appeared suspicious. When Kat helped them discover their innate potential they never knew they had, they not only matched the once-unbelievable abilities she demonstrated, but greatly surpassed them, developing powers far beyond anything even she thought possible. But Kat, who was from another dimension, couldn't do any of those things herself, and not for lack of skill; she could easily do it while imprinted on Alyssa. Kat had already reasoned that the extra abilities couldn't be the result of something special humans have in Alyssa and Tara's dimension. But when Alyssa imprinted on Kat, instead of the other way around, Alyssa temporarily found herself unable to use those abilities, which made it pretty clear that humans in the other dimension had something "special" with the opposite effect—a trait that the evolutionary process that created humans in both dimensions couldn't possibly favor.
Then, shortly after arriving in the other dimension, Alyssa, Tara, and Rachel found that they could no longer do anything particularly more advanced than what was normal in that dimension, just like Kat. They had no problems at first, but then something changed them somehow, and they felt it. Alyssa, interestingly, still seemed a bit more capable than the others, able to, with effort, duplicate some of her body parts and imprint on something protected by a barrier designed to prevent it, without having to practice. But even that was not unheard of; she just happened to be particularly talented like some were. But still, there was something affecting people in that dimension, blocking them from accessing their full potential, and when the newcomers arrived, it got to them as well. That much was clear, but whether this was actually intentional or just an unfortunate natural occurrence was yet to be seen. Of course, Kat was understandably upset either way. She couldn't even escape her shackles by inhabiting something else instead of her affected body—everything seemed to be affected, even the air.
But at least there was a promising lead for returning back to their home dimension; after all, Kat found her way there by accident! They were just about at the place where it happened, the section of road where Kat was hit by that flash of light and suddenly found herself on a collision course with an extradimensional tree. She didn't see anything particularly interesting about the area that would suggest a portal or something was open there—of course, she didn't the first time either—but they all noticed someone they recognized.
"Wait...Alyssa?" Kat said as she went ahead of the other two, re-materializing on the ground and having a chuckle at the coincidence of running into the other Alyssa here. "What are you doing here? This was where it happened!"
Unexpectedly, Alyssa remained silent, and in fact seemed a little confused, even scared to see Kat.
Kat looked around. "Where's Lily and Rachel?"
"...How did you know my name?" asked Alyssa.
"It's not her," said the other Alyssa, the one who had been with Kat. "Just someone who looks similar. She's in a video game with Lily and Rachel. Sounds like fun!"
As soon as she came into view from behind a wall and saw there was in fact another Alyssa there, however, she gasped.
As did the other Alyssa. "What?? But how did...here, come with me." She looked around, snapped her fingers, and suddenly, in a flash of light, Kat, Tara, and both Alyssas found themselves standing in an unfamiliar room, decorated mostly in Alyssa's favorite colors, with some yellow and pink thrown in for variety.
"How did you do that?" asked Kat, with renewed hope. "Where are we? And who are you? A third Alyssa?"
"Yep," she said.
"From where?"
"Not far from where you live." She smiled at Kat. "We've met before; you've been to my house."
Kat thought for a moment.
"I can do a lot more than I've let on," continued this third Alyssa, "and I'd like to help you. I think we have a lot to learn from each other."