Chapter Text
The isolated, unyielding laboratory, after extended dormancy, displayed signs of life, its systems beginning to murmur, at 08:29:45 TRC. The pulsing of electrical impulses through cables, through neurons. The clock’s second-hand once glided inaudibly, but now, in accompaniment to the waking person’s heartbeat. Golden lights, having long faded, returned to illuminate the frigid chamber at last.
The young woman lying down by the bed—that lame makeup of a bed—woke up like it was any other day, expecting, perhaps, the sun, or some familiar ceiling.
Artificial lights greeted her, along with the centralized air conditioning that had just been turned on upon her rising.
She blinked, and wiped her eyes away from last night’s woes. The scenery before her didn’t seem to change—not that visions could change so easily, even for all their technological advancements. But the woman had a hard time processing her surroundings, eyeing the labstation and the many drawers in the room with unkind skepticism. Her hands were frantically patting across her body, as though something should pop up—a clue to whatever mystery clouds her mind.
The Eye watched quietly from the corner. Everything else in the room was indifferent, the only thing casting a semblance of warmth being those dim lights.
The woman rose from the bed, heading for the desk—the closest desk to herself. Every desk in the room held different purposes, as is to be expected of the pragmatic scientist. The main labstation housed various state-of-the-art laboratory equipment, and next to it was several rows of storage, labeled only in code that no one else should be able to unlock, let alone figure its contents. Another counter had a different group of lab materials to work with—poisonous liquids and pipettes of various sizes. One desk had plenty of glass monitors and scanners, a hub for analyses. The desk closest to her bed had but one monitor, a tower of files, and a single piece of paper next to it, too conspicuous to be ignored. It hadn’t been printed out, but rather, contained messy handwriting that undoubtedly belonged to one whose mind worked faster than lightning.
As she took her time to take in the contents of the paper, many expressions flitted through the woman’s face—scrutiny, understanding, disbelief, suspicion. She put it back down with a determined look, not unfamiliar to the Eye, not unlike that of the scientist’s: she had a mission to investigate this matter immediately. The rules, after all, had all been laid out for her in the very letter she held.
For the first time in several days, the door to the lab opened, and the woman who spent her living days holed up in that remote cave exited her solitude. She was greeted, of course, merely by the hallway that connects the lab with many other laboratories.
She continued down the hallway, finding the pantry. The pantry was just as hollow as the lab, devoid of anything warm and colorful—spare for a person with purple-blue hair tied up in space buns, making something by the stove.
The stranger turned to her, and let out a smile of relief, as well as considerable surprise. “Never thought there’d come a day where I don’t have to pull you out of your cursed lab. Another inspiration break?”
“Yiren?”
“Mhm?”
The woman paused, earning her the incredulity from the one named Yiren. Something was off, clearly, about today—off about the scientist; off about the course of the stars.
“Can you… take me to the library?”
Yiren looked at her with further perplexion, before her jaw hung. These scientists, never taking long to come to an epiphany, as it appeared. She muttered under her breath something like, “You made it work,” and the same reality clicked in the scientist, a test that had been passed.
“You are Fu Xuan, yes?”
The scientist, Fu Xuan, nodded. Not that she could’ve become anyone else overnight, of course, not when she hadn’t left the lab in days, perhaps weeks.
But she had, hadn’t she? She was Fu Xuan… but not quite.
“Well, of course you are. I shouldn’t be surprised—no one comes out of their room in days and asks for the library before the food, except for the Formidable Fu Xuan.” Yiren chuckled, already pulling Fu Xuan down to her seat, hurriedly organizing a meal before her. “No matter that you’ve just woken up in a different world. Eat up, now—everything else can come later.”
Fu Xuan—a strange Fu Xuan—cannot stop her blinking. The world around her, tangible, and still all too dreamlike. Soft blue lights, the pristine white of laboratory equipment, steel tables and chairs—none of these spelled home. But Fu Xuan was still breathing, her heart beating too heavily, too erratically, in the foreign space.
“Am I really…”
On the 28th of October, at 08:29:45 TRC, after her year-long experimentation, Fu Xuan—the scientist Fu Xuan—had finally proven the feasibility of her displacement theory, successfully switching the lives of her and an alternate version of herself, one from a different universe. Who else but the ingenious Fu Xuan could have achieved such a feat?
Whoever yet would expect that her true dreams lie further than distant universes, that her hand reaches for strings too thin and frayed to hold her weight?
So does her story begin, driven by the fear of the end—the odyssey to secure an undying star, to write her perfect tale.
(A most foolish pursuit, indeed.)