"Figured it out yet?"

The version of Alyssa native to Kat's universe said this in a strangely-familiar tone. A particular teasing tone she'd known long before ever stumbling into any other universe. It brought to mind someone she not only idolized like many others, but had the amazing fortune of knowing at a personal level as well. Or so she thought.

Kat's mouth opened wide at the realization, and Alyssa smiled. Closing her eyes, Alyssa got to work on changing to the look of hers that Kat recognized. First, she rattled her head and shook out a fountain of long neon pink hair, reaching all the way down to her feet, and with a single toss of her head, styled it into two long ponytails in an instant. Patting her shirt as if she was brushing off dirt, she made a spot of the same pink color, which spread across her entire outfit, at the same time lengthening and merging her pant legs together into a long skirt, which she then merged with her shirt to form a dress by patting out the seam with her hands. One final twirl surrounded her with sparkles, creating golden-yellow designs all over her new dress. "Tada," she said.

Standing before them was none other than the revered celebrity, Anistasia "Stacy" Lynn.

"No WAY!!! Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!" Kat jumped up and down and squealed in excitement, looking back at the other Alyssa, who was also visibly excited. She looked back at Stacy, then back at Alyssa, and was reminded of how similar they looked and even sounded. She was surprised she hadn't made the connection until then.

"Wait, what's going on?" asked Tara. "Who is that?"

"Remember last night when Kat told you about that girl Stacy?"

"That's her? But she's..."

"...me in another dimension? Apparently!" Alyssa finished for her, giggling. "That's...pretty amazing."

"Heh, deja vu," Stacy muttered to herself, barely audible, recalling a fuzzy memory of an odd dream she had the night before.

Kat eagerly ran over to Alyssa and gave her a big hug. "Oh. My. God! You're Stacy???"

"Well...no, I'm not. But I guess she's Alyssa!"

"Mm-hmm," smiled Stacy. "But—"

"Still!" Kat continued jumping up and down. "Wait, let me just make sure." Kat fiddled with her phone a bit and then pointed it in Stacy's direction. It chimed and displayed the word "verified" with a green check mark. "Cryptographic identity verification," she said, noticing her extradimensional friends' confusion. "Useful in a world where anyone can look like anyone they want," she laughed.

"Didn't you say you've been to her house before?" asked Alyssa. "Why are you acting like this is the first time you've ever met her up close?"

"Wait, you've been to her house?" Tara said incredulously. "Didn't you say she was famous? You know her outside of that or something?"

"Oh, it's something I do for my biggest fans who buy front row tickets in my hometown." explained Stacy. "But you're the first to know my...secret identity," she whispered playfully, quickly and fluidly shifting back to her Alyssa form for the brief period she said those last two words. "And there's actually another reason I do it, not that making my fans happy isn't good enough already."

Kat squealed in excitement some more at the prospect of being part of her exclusive "inner circle", where no fans had previously been allowed.

"So, Alyssa," Stacy laughed at what felt like addressing herself. "You came here from another world?"

"How did you know?" Alyssa gasped in amazement.

"If I ever ran into my own doppelgänger I'd say it's a pretty good guess," said Tara. "...Actually, no, forget I said that," she laughed.

"I know because I've been watching you, Alyssa." Stacy said matter-of-factly.

"What??"

"No, not really," Stacy smiled at Alyssa. "I heard you mention it to your friend here. What was her name..." Stacy looked in Tara's direction, her eyes briefly glowing a brilliant purple. "...Tara?"

Kat looked at Alyssa and Tara, her mouth agape, as if to say, "you seeing this?" Their reactions indicated that yes, they in fact were, and there apparently really was much Stacy could do which, for an unknown reason, she never showed anyone, despite performing such demonstrations literally being her profession.

Stacy looked back at Alyssa. "Well actually...there was one...silly idea I had, actually. If you actually are from another world...well, let's see how well I know this version of you and where you came from."

"Okay..."

"Hmm..." Stacy considered what to ask Alyssa. "Ah, I know. Tell me if this looks at all familiar to you." She calmly closed her eyes and imagined a holographic scene into view around the rest of them.

"Ooh!" Tara marveled at the effect.

"Wow, no way! I didn't know you could...Wait, isn't that—"

Alyssa interrupted Kat. "That's my house!!!" she burst out.

"Wait, really?" Stacy opened her eyes, and just like that the view of Alyssa's house wobbled out of existence.

"Like, in my dimension! How did you...is that live? Can I—wait, no, the stuff I changed isn't there..." continued Alyssa.

Stacy looked just as surprised as her extradimensional counterpart. "I...whoa, that was really a long shot..." Stacy scratched her chin using some stray strands of hair which she mentally sharpened, while sitting in a chair with her hands behind her. "I never thought...that is really interesting."

"What is it?" Alyssa implored.

"I'm still not convinced this isn't a real big coincidence...but I guess we'll find out."

"What isn't?"

"Sometimes..." Stacy explained. "I often like to imagine myself living in other worlds."

"So?" asked Kat. "I love relaxing on my extraterrestrial beach, or having fun as an evil witch in my castle, ha ha. Doesn't everyone do stuff like that?"

"Wait, you're not saying I'm just..." Alyssa knew where this was likely going.

"Actually just last night Alyssa and I saw you in one of those imaginary performances I like," Kat added. "It was fun."

Stacy smiled at Kat.

"Was that what you were doing when I thought you were unconscious?" asked Tara.

"Tell me, Alyssa," Stacy said. "You've had a good look at this world. What's the most...what stood out about this world to you, more than anything else?"

"Well the whole place is just so...I mean, this city is a work of art, I love it. It's so..."

"Mm-hmm," Stacy thought for a moment. "Nothing stood out about it as...impossible though?"

"Well yeah, there's the imprinting and stuff, but Kat showed me how to do that before I got here."

That was a curve ball to Stacy. She wasn't sure how to process that reply. It raised way more questions than it did answers.

"Something wrong?" asked Kat.

"No, just...she's saying she knew you before she came to this world? That's what it sounds like."

"Yeah, you didn't hear?" answered Alyssa.

"I was driving home from your show last Friday night, all the sudden there was this light, next thing I knew I crashed into this tree that wasn't there before and I didn't know where I was," Kat elaborated.

Alyssa finished: "Then she met me, I offered her a ride home, then took her to my house when I couldn't find her address. But she wasn't used to the cars they have where I'm from, and...well I was confused too, but when I let her show me the kind of driving she was used to...I had no idea what in the world I was seeing!" she laughed. "I'd never seen it before in my life, nothing like it at all; I didn't know what was going on!"

"She imprinted on the car?" Tara guessed.

Alyssa nodded. "Mm-hmm. I thought I was going crazy!"

"Ha, you're not the only one," recalled Tara. "Remember when we met at the store?"

Alyssa and Kat smiled.

"But yeah, that's how Kat and I met."

".......Huh," replied Stacy, intrigued. "You said this was right after my Friday performance, didn't you?"

"Yeah, why?" Kat answered.

"Okay," Stacy began. "This is going to sound very...unbelievable...and I'm not even sure it's true myself."

"Well, we've seen some pretty unbelievable things," said Tara.

"I'm sure you have," replied Stacy. "But...Kat.....I think that might have been me."

"What???" gasped Kat in disbelief. "But how?"

"Well, I mean...right after the show I went inside my head to relax, and I'd been wondering what it would be like if everyone had the impression that their bodies had to follow the same physics as everything else—well actually there's more to it than that which I'll get to—and, well, I decided to try that out, imagined a world like that."

"So, are you saying...the world we're from is..." Tara stammered.

"Maybe—that would be pretty cool, no?—but who knows, maybe I just...tapped into a dimension that already existed cause it was close enough or something, I don't know."

Alyssa looked around the room, unsure what to think. The idea intrigued her especially—if her world was truly a product of Stacy's mind, unlikely as that really seemed, what did that mean about her own place in that world? She'd essentially be a physical manifestation of that world's creator deity. Which would be a perfect explanation for her sudden, inexplicable, fleeting ability to alter things around her freely, if not for Tara developing the same powers not long after. Though it also wouldn't explain why she was able to do it in this world as well, even for just the brief period she managed to hold on to the ability.

"But what happened to me?" asked Kat.

"Yeah, well one thing I wanted to try was, who knows, what if someone from the world I'm used to were to show up there? How would that play out? And...well, I'd been practicing my trick with..." Stacy suddenly vanished from where she was sitting mid-sentence.

"...teleportation..." Kat jumped as she suddenly heard Stacy's voice behind her, as she leaned toward Kat. Then she suddenly reappeared where she was.

"Specifically, teleporting other people," she continued, demonstrating with a quick but gentle point in Kat's direction, prompting Kat to vanish from her current location and, to her visible surprise, reappear on the arm of Stacy's chair in an instant. "And I guess when I imagined the first person I thought of, my favorite fan of mine, appearing in this imaginary world, I somehow did that by accident...maybe?" Stacy finished, patting Kat on the shoulder. Kat melted from excitement at that compliment from her idol, and she probably would have done so literally if she still could at the moment.

"Can you do it again?" asked Alyssa eagerly. "I don't have any way back home right now."

"Well, if I did it once to Kat, I could probably do it again to you, but..." Stacy hesitated. "I'm not sure that would be the best idea, because I'm not confident I'd be able to bring you back, and I'm sure you'll want to come back here once in a while, right? At least to see Kat if nothing else. I don't want to be responsible for permanently separating you from your friend. Or...wait a sec, how did you get here in the first place? I'm at a loss for what could have caused that."

"Oooookay..." Alyssa laughed. "This'll probably sound crazy...though actually I'm not quite sure if you'll think that. Basically...when I woke up this morning, I found that I could...and I totally understand if you don't believe me...but I was able to literally change anything I see however I wanted."

Upon hearing this, Stacy looked as if she did believe Alyssa, and in fact looked very interested, as if she had heard of it before.

"I took...what was it...actually I think I pulled a chunk of wood off my bed like clay...yeah, and just by touching it and molding it," Alyssa made a motion with her hands like she was molding clay, "I turned it into this." She reached into her pocket and got out her phone. "Huh, he called back, that's weird," Alyssa said to herself, noticing she had a missed call from the same number that misdialed her earlier. "Didn't hear it ring. Oh, yeah, that reminds me, I even have service here somehow! See?" Alyssa showed Stacy the screen, showing a clear five bars of signal. "Kat didn't in my world."

"Wait..." Stacy looked closely at the screen. "You know John?"

"Who?"

"My agent John! You haven't even been here for a day, why's he calling you??" Stacy almost didn't finish her sentence due to her laughter.

"Just a wrong number. Funny you know him!"

"Ahh...yeah, though, small world!" Stacy commented as her laughter died down. "To be honest I could totally see him reading a client's number wrong."

Meanwhile, Kat was on the other side of the room with her eyes closed, absorbed in a mental conversation with her sister.

"Hey, you wouldn't be able to bring Lily here, would you, Stacy?"

"Oh! Yeah, that shouldn't be a problem, one sec."

"Wait, shouldn't I tell you where she is?"

"Nope," she said with a smile, calmly closing her eyes.

Two or three seconds later, Lily appeared in the room with a pop. "Whoa, what the hell?? Kat?" she shouted in surprise, looking around to see where she was. "...A-Anistasia??? What's going on? How did I get here?"

"Watch," said Stacy with a smirk. She blinked her eyes firmly, and Lily found herself on the other side of the room just as quickly as she got where she was a second ago. Another blink, and Lily was back where she was.

"Okay, how are you doing that?"

"Magic," she whispered, playfully wiggling her fingers to make multicolored sparkles flicker in the air.

Lily folded her arms in front of her. "Come on, you can't do something incredible like that and not tell us about it."

"How about you show us what you can do first?" Stacy asked, turning to Alyssa. "You sound like you're better at this kind of thing than even I am, and I still haven't seen you do it!"

"I wish," Alyssa bent her head to the floor in sadness. "I can't do it anymore, not since...shortly after I arrived here."

"Huh?" That made Stacy somewhat nervous.

"Yeah, we felt it," explained Tara. "Something about this world tried to...to change us somehow, and it didn't cross our minds as anything to worry about so we let it."

Stacy turned white. "No....."

"What's going on?" asked Lily.

"That's what I was afraid of..."

"What do you mean?" asked Kat.

"Wait, first, can you bring my...sister Rachel over here too?" Tara requested, not feeling like going to the trouble of explaining their actual connection at the moment.

"Sure." Stacy snapped her fingers, and at that instant Rachel popped into existence about a foot above the floor, before falling on her bottom. "Ow," she said.

"Oops, sorry," Stacy apologized. "Still getting the hang of doing it that way."

"You've got to show me how you do that," said Lily.

"All in time," smiled Stacy. "Rachel, did you need me to fill you in?"

"Nope, it's fine," said Rachel. "Tara's got me covered." She tapped a finger against her temple, hinting at how they were communicating.

"Wow, Rachel!" Alyssa was the first to notice. "You look amazing!"

"Yeah, where'd you get that outf—" Tara stopped herself mid-sentence. "Wait, never mind." She giggled; she knew exactly where.

Rachel looked at herself. She had on a sparkling royal blue leotard, paired with a skirt that, while short, flared out prominently. Her skirt was made up of several segments that were glowing and flashing in different colors, no doubt inspired by the city's trademark architecture, and it almost appeared to be made of glass. On each arm, Rachel sported a large bracelet that took the form of two square shapes rotating in opposite directions, while somehow floating such that her arm never actually touched it, and flowy multicolored ribbons of light flitted around her body.

"Huh, that's really cool," she commented. "Didn't know I'd still have it on when I exited the game."

"Usually you don't," said Lily. "Pretty interesting, probably something to do with Stacy pulling you out."

"So, Stacy, what were you afraid of?" asked Alyssa.

"Well..." Stacy thought a moment. "Okay, as I've been practicing through the years...you know, all the stuff I do," Stacy held up a hand and wiggled her fingers again, this time creating a miniature caricature-esque image of herself floating in the air above her fingers in a reclining manner, before dissipating into mist as she lowered her hand once more. "Well...there's something I noticed more and more the better I got. And that's that...it doesn't feel so much like I'm getting more powerful, so much as I'm just getting around something that's...preventing me from doing everything I'd normally be able to. I don't know what my full potential is exactly, but even just what I've discovered so far is an awful lot, as you've seen."

"Yeah, that's what we were thinking too," said Kat. "But why worry that much about it?"

"Well, whatever it is that's blocking me, it feels...almost like it's not a natural part of me. It's made me worried that maybe there's someone to blame for it. Like it's intentional. And if so...this person, or group of people, is certainly very powerful. And might not like what I'm doing."

Tara smiled just a little bit, as she recalled her similar worry about her own dimension, that turned out moot. So did Rachel, who naturally had the same worry as at the time, she and Tara were one.

"So anyway," Stacy continued. "This powerful...force, if it exists...whatever it is...probably wouldn't like me putting on shows, possibly inspiring other people, like Kat here, to erode its control over them as well."

Kat smiled at that. "You're...nothing's gone wrong yet, has it?" she asked out of concern.

"Nope," said Stacy. "I do the shows I've been doing, and I seem to be okay. And I wanna keep things that way, so that's why I don't show everything I can do on stage. As awesome as that would be, if I were to show something too big, then, well, as far as I know..." Stacy appeared to waver like a liquid before fading away completely, though her voice remained. "Maybe I'll conveniently disappear or something. That wouldn't be good." She regained her visibility in a similar manner to how she shed it. "And I'd like to keep suspicions as low as I can, which is why I try to give the impression of openness with everyone. Like, if I had something to hide..." Stacy lifted a hand and snapped her fingers, and the next instant everyone (still in their chairs, if applicable) found themselves somewhere else, the place Kat had always known as Stacy's house. "I certainly wouldn't be so open with the public as to let my fans visit me at home, now would I?" she laughed. With yet another snap, she transported everyone back to where they just were a moment ago.

"...Seriously, this is just crazy!" exclaimed Lily. "I want to do that too!"

"Ooh, you have your own fans?" joked Stacy. "Go ahead, invite them over. I'm not stopping you."

Lily's blank expression spoke for her.

"Oh, you mean this, don't you?" Stacy snapped her fingers several more times, taking them back to her less-private home, then to the busy sidewalk in front of Kat and Lily's apartment building, then inside some random factory, then the rooftop of an office building in an entirely different city, then the middle of a desert, the polar ice caps, and finally a pitch black cave deep underground, before returning to where they started once again.

Lily's jaw dropped, understandably.

"All it takes is practice!" said Stacy in a sing-song voice. "By the way, you're all the first fans of mine to ever see my private home. Well, except my personal friends and family, of course."

Kat giggled a little more in elation.

"So what else can you do?" Lily asked in amazement.

"Watch this," said Stacy. Raising her hands above her head, she burst into a puff of pink smoke and golden sparkles, and where she previously stood now flew a flock of dozens of tiny pink and yellow birds, which then fluttered all around the room. As Lily watched in disbelief, they arranged themselves in a formation shaped just like a hand, which waved at them just as naturally as a real hand could. This hand then beckoned toward Alyssa with one finger, and the next thing Alyssa knew, she felt weightless, and an unseen force was pulling her toward the flock. The birds resumed flying in no particular shape, surrounding Alyssa in the air, and when they dispersed throughout the room once more, Alyssa was nowhere to be seen.

"Where'd she go??" asked Tara and Rachel in unison, smiling at each other afterwards.

"Lyss?" called Kat.

"I'm here," came Alyssa's voice in an echo that reverberated throughout the room with no obvious source, "Not really sure where 'here' is though..." she giggled. "This is cool!"

The birds rearranged themselves once again to form the shape of a door inside an archway. More birds appeared by flying out of the existing ones, dividing like cells and forming the name "ANISTASIA LYNN!" above the doorway. As the doorway wasn't solid, anyone could see that no one was on the other side, yet as the door opened and uncovered the seemingly-empty space, the form of Stacy appeared from nowhere, walking out and taking a bow.

"Wait, I thought she was the birds," commented Rachel.

With a wave of Stacy's hand in its direction, the door closed. As she pointed a finger at the letters in the air and swirled it around, they swiftly rearranged themselves to say "ALYSSA NITANNI!", in the process turning light blue and white. The birds making up the door changed their colors at the same time, and when the door opened once again, Alyssa stepped out with a huge smile on her face.

Stacy held out her arms, and all the birds flew into her body, making ripples as they passed her surface. As this happened, her form changed into an exact copy of Alyssa.

"...Wait, Alyssa? Are you...?"

Alyssa's rapid, excited nodding answered Lily's unfinished question.

To avoid confusion, Stacy changed once again, adopting her usual on-stage color motif but making only smaller alterations to her hair and her clothing, keeping it simple. Kat recognized this as the typical casual, offstage look of her celebrity persona.

"Anyway," Stacy began, smiling. "I think we have a lot to discuss about our situation, don't we?"