It was a dark and stormy night... Well, no, not really. It's wasn't really stormy since there was no rain. Or clouds. Or any wind blowing.
Wait. There wasn't even a sky!
It shouldn't really come as a surprise since there wasn't supposed to be any in the rift between worlds. People have often portrayed the place as The Void, The Abyss, The Rift, The Bridge, The Multiverse, The etc. etc.
Different beings have portrayed it as such. Humans, Monsters, Gods and the like have seen and perceived the place as listed above. Then again, different creatures see it differently. Their perceptions vary depending on their culture and the world or dimension in which they reside in.
Two particular creatures see it as one, GIGANTIC, COLOSSAL Tree. It was how they've perceived it after the first world that they've traveled.
The Roots are where everything began, the Origin of Everything; the Trunk is where everything is processed, calculated, decided, where creation of worlds start; the branches represent the Realities, the different worlds; the Leaves that are on every branch represent the timelines, their microscopic veins being the route of multitude of possibilities, they grow, expand, diverge, and intersect.
It was a beautiful concept, with the tree glowing white as snow. The Branches weren't solid, they flow like water, dripping the energy of existence down to the Leaves to make sure that Timelines continue to thrive.
It was all so wonderful!
If only it weren't for the fact that Me and my partner were the size of a bacteria trying to surf the rapids of the branches.
Oh, the rapids weren't bad, per se, it was just that traveling takes TIME, and since that concept was hardly reliable in a place where it wasn't relevant, it could take seconds to reach one world, but it could also take YEARS!
You see, there's a problem being an Anomaly that travels between worlds. Being something that "Should Not Be" in Reality, you lose your place in the Records of Existence. The concept is like going to a party with a bouncer at the door.
You know how that is, right? Think of the one where you need to be on the list if you want in, but the party's already too big to just be contained inside a building so some of the party proper had to be moved outside. Oh sure, you could party outside with some of the crowd, but being able to enter the building means that you could get a Membership Card. That means that you could walk right in at anytime and no bouncer would kick you out.
Membership Cards are the Anchors which me and my companion use to return to the previous worlds the we've already visited. It means that we have the Right to be in that world, and that we weren't Anomalies anymore; so no bouncer could kick us out of the world if we begin to change things too much.
The problem with getting the membership is that it could take time. Sometimes, there are some pre-requisites required to fully get Anchored in a world. They vary between different worlds; being transformed into a baby or turned back into a child and growing up to your original age, being turned into some penguin creature with peg-legs and earning enough 'EXP' to reincarnate to your old form, getting sealed inside a holy sword and being labeled as an evil spirit and waiting for the 'Hero' to pull it out and set you free... you get the idea.
They aren't all bad, but some take years while others take generations. The fastest one we've encountered so far took us only a few weeks, but that was only because we were turned into computer virus AI and hijacked some robotic bodies for our own. That world was pretty futuristic.
So, anyway, me and my companion have just finished going through another world and were on our way to another one. The last one we were in was a place where certain people wield giant magical Keys that could unlock almost anything with... well, a lock. Unfortunately, we didn't get to wield any of these 'Keyblades' that some people had, but instead we were trained (and treated as go-fers) by this cranky wizard, Yen Sid.
I forget what number that world was. They also have a strange concept where they also travel to different worlds, yet at the same time, they don't travel to different worlds.
Think of marbles contained inside a fishbowl. The Fishbowl is their universe, while the marbles represent the different worlds, or planets, and each marble contains a different type of world from the other marbles.
It's hard to explain when you don't know the basics of the Multiverse Theory.
Anyway, here we are now, surfing the tides of Reality, traveling to the great beyond to discover what lies ahead. We don't usually travel this way unless we wanted to go into a new world we've never been to before. There are a lot of different ways to get from one world to another, but this method always had a 100% chance of getting to a new Universe. And we get to choose if we want to enter one world or skip it!
Sure there are portals, gateways, and rituals to rip a whole in Reality and utilize that method for travel, but those are kind of randomized unless you've already calculated the trajectory of your destination.
That is NOT a reliable way to travel. You may as well have shot yourself out of a cannon from space towards Earth while aiming blindfolded. There's even the chance of missing the planet, all together.
There are MILLIONS of worlds out there, with UNLIMITED number of timelines; Canon and Alternates. Every story written and told exists somewhere out there; children stories, fiction books, cartoons, anime, video games. Everything exists, period.
How did this multiverse travel started? It was a painful one. But the pain only lasted for an instant before everything went black.
It was when this one guy was walking down the street, then the sun reflects off something on the ground. When he looked down, his life was changed forever.
Oh, and there was a shiny coin on the ground. But that wasn't what started it.
Sure, the coin was set up to distract him, but it wasn't that. It was when he tilted his head down that someone grabbed him in a Twist of Fate...
...
...
You know the wrestling move, right? The Twist of Fate? Jeff and Matt? The Hardy Boyz? No?
Well, I can hardly blame you. It's been years since the last I saw a good wrestling show. Oh, hey! There's actually a world where wrestling is real and they actually try to kill each other for sport and fans. How morbid is that?
Anyway, the guy gets a Twist of Fate and blacks out. When he came to, he didn't know where he was. The shocker, though, was that his body regressed to that of a seven year old. So after a panic attack and a slap to the face, he met the person who found him in a ditch.
It was a woman, about in her mid-twenties. The adult-turned-child recognized her from somewhere, but he had no idea where. It was after she introduced herself that it finally clicked.
Aozaki Touko, or Touko Aozaki for western standard naming.
Confused, Fearful, and Skeptical, the man-child asked for proof. He got a raised brow in return, but she complied...
He almost got eaten by a suitcase familiar.
From there the journey began. He got poked and prodded by the woman on the mechanics of the Alternate worlds. When she got nothing out of him, she decided to just let him go. Or at least, that's was how she made it look like. Since he didn't have anything on him, or even an identity for that matter, he was left no choice but to tag along with the woman and become her apprentice (read: slave).
Supposedly, he could do magic! At an average level, nothing impressive, really, but he could still do magic! He had what was called 'Magic Circuits', the network that allowed him to use Mana/Prana. He didn't have them before, but who was he to question why they were there?
Since then, he's come under the strict and grueling tutelage of what he thought was the most sadistic woman in the world (but that was only when she was tinkering with something new). Sure, he learned a thing or two, but that still didn't change the horrible things that she made him watch. He will never be able to look at bunnies the same way again.
So, years passed and his body and mind grew. He met different kinds of people and monsters, running away from more than half of them, and trying to ignore those that came with them. He even met his teacher's sister, the infamous Magician that could level a mountain in a childish fit. The two sisters had some bad blood, so he chose to hide whenever they accidentally meet randomly.
He learned the basics, and the most common of practices of every Magus, but he was never given the research of his teacher, or even her old, scrapped notes. Even though they've grown close over the years, she still kept her research hidden from him. Given that he lacked the talent for any kind of field, he was forced to hone and rely on what he had learned over the years, as well as a few combat training he got from her in case he got into a pinch he couldn't get out of.
Hey, she was doing real supernatural investigations at the time, he had to find some way to pull his weight.
He had three favorites; most used, most versatile, and honed to the point of near perfection: Structural Analysis, Alteration, and Projection.
The first skill allowed him to gain information on any item he touched, so long as it didn't have any anti-magic charm on it. He could see blueprints, diagrams, manufacturing process, components, individual material, history, and so much more. It's helped him a lot over the years.
The next allowed him to, as the name suggests, alter any material to any physical shape he wished it, so long as it doesn't have any anti-magic charms on it. But it wasn't the ability itself that was impressive, any hack of a Magus could do it. No, it was how fast he could mold the shape of an object. After years of practice and non-stop use, he could turn a fist-full of rocks into a sharp knife in a blink of an eye. It's saved him more than a couple of times during an investigation.
The last one, though... well, you could say that it was a solution to someone like him who had no talent in anything more complicated than the basics,
In that world, Magi who used Magecraft the way he did were immediately branded as a heretic, a defiler of the common way of Magic. They abhor the latest technologies, and stuck to the old, dying, mystic ways. While they called him a heathen, he called them fools. His teacher didn't care what he did, so long as it didn't get them killed, but she still didn't copy his methods, she was rather stuck with the old ways, as well.
Projection is the art of using Mana/Prana and turning it into a solid construct. It's a rather tricky, not complicated, but a tricky art to follow. A Magus has to create an image in their mind, and turn that image into a solid material using their Prana. Most Magi use the method as a substitute for some materials for rituals, but they hardly bother with the art because of the waste of energy used to create the construct when they could just use Alteration to make a better, and less Mana/Prana consuming method. There's also the fact that all Projected items created disappear after some time when Reality erases the fake item from the world (Altered items don't). Most have reduced it to a simple concentrating exercise.
He, however, turned it into a weapon.
Sure, he couldn't use it to make any mystical weaponry, but he could still create mundane weapons out of it; like guns. Projection is a tricky art to master because the construct is always flawed. Since it's nothing but an image made from the thought of a human being, there are always key components of it the are missing and could not be imagined by the mind.
He. however, thought of a way to get around that problem. Using his proficiency with Structural Analysis, he's created a way to move past the problem with the missing information by downloading the information he gained from the spell and pouring it into the mental image. By doing this, he was able to prolong the existence of his creations by tricking the world into thinking that it was an actual construct naturally created from raw materials of the planet.
With these three skill, it made him formidable even to some of the inhuman beings of the world.
Years, again, passed after that point in his life. He went separate ways with his teacher after she got branded a Sealing Designation after creating a perfect clone of herself, thus prolonging her existence in the world for another few centuries with the help of a soul transferring process.
In that world, the Nasuverse, if a Magus were to be able to achieve something unbelievable that only a rare few could do, they were given the dubious honor of being given the Sealing Designation.
A Sealing Designation is, what Magi equate to as, a Death Sentence. They would be held against their will inside some facility, always to be watched and observed by the Magus Association. Even though they would be supported in their research, they would lose their freedom and would be held as Prisoners for the rest of their lives.
That is, if they didn't outright just dissect you and learn the process from your corpse.
So, yes. She ran away from that. He often helped her out whenever she called for it, but most of the time they've agreed that they shouldn't associate themselves with each other until... well, one of them "expires".
He lived through his life after that under the employs of the Church as a mercenary, and sometimes accepting contracts from the Mage's Association as well. As expected, though, he was branded as a Heretic by the other Magi after they found out the ways of his work. He used guns, bombs and other modern technology as a way to dispose of non-human threats and the casual Magi fugitives.
It was after he learned how to etch tiny Arcane Runes into his bullets using Alteration that he was branded the infamous title of "Magus Killer".
Decades before him, the title was common to Enforcers who worked for the Mage's Association. But after a while, a man named Emiya took that title and turned it into something that left most, if not all, Magi wary. The man was ruthless, and a cold-blooded killer. No life was safe as long as he could take out a target. Civilian lives lost were considered as 'Acceptable Losses'.
And he gained the title just because he used modern weaponry, just like the first Magus Killer, even though he never once took an innocent life... deliberately.
Those were the basic highlight of his life. Oh sure, there were plenty of other of his stories to tell, but those don't really matter. Let's just say that he met quite a few super-humans, vampires, immortals, spirits, once-in-a-lifetime-people, monsters, and Gaia's pet dog.
It was when he was old, frail, and dying that he went to see his still young, fair-skinned, and snarky teacher. She was able to complete the process of soul transfer and actually succeeded in prolonging her life. She wasn't truly immortal, she could still get killed, but the soul can only hold on to a physical body for so long until it starts to deteriorate and causes the person to go insane. she had no delusions that she could find a way around that, but she was going to live as long as she liked until it was really her time. She offered him the opportunity to live longer with her, and if that wasn't a marriage proposal, he didn't know what was.
But of course, things didn't go as planned.
What they forgot was that she was only able to test the process on a being from THAT universe, not on something that was from another entirely. It didn't occur to them that maybe, JUST maybe, something could go wrong.
You know, souls are a funny thing. You'd think that after years of research using mystical methods, you'd think that you have it all figured out. The thing about souls are... even in different worlds, dimension, timelines and improbabilities... they all exist EVERYWHERE.
Basically, what I'm saying is that... souls are under the jurisdiction of Reality. You don't mess with it unless the world allows it, EVER.
So, whilst in the middle of the transfer, magical nonsense happened. A sort-of allergic reaction was formed when a soul that was stuck inside a vessel was being pulled out after it had settled in nicely for over 80 years. You'd think they'd learn what happens when you try to pull apart two pieces of paper that were already glued firmly for eight decades.You know what happens when you pull two pieces of paper apart?
It rips.
And out pop this handsome devil!
Oh, and this guy...
Guess who these two evil looking dudes are!
When a soul is ripped apart into two completely symmetrical halves, do you know what happens to it? What about if it still has a body, what happens to that? How about the memories if it's life? All the experience? Does it all just simply disappear and go poof?
Usually, the person just dies.
But then again, the process that Touko used was for the purpose of switching the soul of a person to a perfect replica of a human body that's compatible to the soul. Since the core of the soul had already settled inside the old body, it got stretched and confused since the compatibility rate of the new body was the same.
I won't bore you with the details, but the core of the matter is, he was originally an alien to the world with his body only regressed to a child and not really recreating it from scratch so that it could Anchor itself faster into the dimension. Like a chemical experiment, no matter how similar one element was from another, you can't use it as a substitute for the procedure.
This, thus, created the Anomaly.
We were two souls with two completely different bodies. No matter how similar we looked, our core essence were altered to keep us alive. The World tried to correct us by trying to erase our presence, but... well, we were stubborn. We fought for weeks just to stay together, and alive.
After the acclimation settled, we got two new lives; two that were vastly different from the old singular entity. We adopted some of the 'Original' personality, but some urges were stronger than the others'.
You got ME! The Wild! The Happy! The Funny! The guy who likes to pull out Projections from out of his behind just because I like to pretend that I have Hammer Space back there!
Then there's HIM! The Cunning! The Brooder! The Straight-Man! The guy who prefers to use Alteration while pressing his hand on your face just so that he could turn your head into paste!
We were new, different, fresh, rejuvenated, delivered straight from mommy's factory, a pain in the rump, aggravating, curious, misbehaved, and just plain childish.
We spent another couple of years under the nag. She poked and prodded us like a cat on a dead rat. We found out that once in a while Me and Him liked to try and kill each other in a one-on-one death battle. We don't know why, but it was just an urge, a horrible itch that wants to get scratched, a ripe pimple that you just want to pop, the turd that you just want to poke with a stick, the butt-hole you can't help but prod-- EW!!
I don't swing that way! I'll just shut up about that for now.
Long story short, again, we got picked off by the guy who could travel between dimensions. He decided to make us apprentices after his old ones died from old age. If you didn't already guess, he was a vampire. That's why he could outlive his students.
He said to us while we were gagged and bound: "You're my new entertainment!"
We were compatible with the process of alternate world travel! Shocking, right? Not really. The old vampster told us that because of the circumstances of our 'Birth', our ties with Reality were a little fuzzy and needs years to calibrate so that we would share the same frequency, or something. And even if we were able to match the 'Frequency' of the world where we were, we could easily jam that frequency and slip out into the spaces between worlds.
It was because of that perk that we were able to stay on worlds almost permanently than the vampire. Also because of our circumstances, our Existence was taken off the list where our souls would be 'Cleansed' as after we die. Meaning that when we kick the bucket, we don't get to ride with the other dead people to the road of incarnation, we get booted out of the world and into the Void and our bodies' 'Ages' get... reset to the time when we were 'Born'.
That's what it means to be an Anomaly. We're off the record, an accident that Reality just wishes to forget.
But we weren't immortals. If it wanted to, The Root of Origin could easily 'Delete' us.
Like anything with a mind of it's own, Reality has these things that we call Antibodies. They enforce the rules in worlds and make sure that Fates that were decided were to happen exactly as predicted, or as close to it as possible. There are some points in Worlds where some things are supposed to happen. You can influence it ever so slightly, but you can't out right change it or prevent it. In order to make sure that nothing interferes with the recorded destiny, any multiverse traveler that decides to visit a whole new universe is given a sneak peak of some things that are to come.
We get to read the 'Script', as it were. Think me as Deadpool ]and you'll get the idea.
After learning everything we could from the old blood sucker, we went back to our 'Mother'. We had a rather emotional farewell with Touko when we told her of our plans or multiversal travel.
We didn't really have anything to do, any destiny to fulfill, or even an Absolute End to reach. All that was left for us to do was travel across the vast space of Reality. We decided to learn, grow, have fun, meet new beings, mark our Existence into worlds all on our own, without the help of the Records.
The old vampire said that he would be watching. We don't know how, but we didn't really ask. He's been doing this kind of thing centuries before the 'Original' was born. And after making peace with the Nasuverse, we departed.
We already had a first destination in mind.
We didn't stay that long in that dimension, we just wanted to do one harmless prank before we really get started. All we needed, really, was an empty street in the late afternoon and a shiny coin. We looked for a target, waited for the right opportunity, tossed the coin in his path, and I went in for a knock out Twist of Fate.
The story sounds familiar, doesn't it?
After we kicked the unconscious body into the new world, we began our epic quest of making names and going to different worlds. We first read up on some books, watched TV, surfed the internet, and gather as much information that we wanted on whichever world we wanted to visit.
And so, we found ourselves here, in the tides between worlds, off to our next adventure. Next stop: MY LITTLE PONY! Friendship is Magic!
Queue end song!
Author's Note
So.... this one's still a work in progress, so it might not be that good. But then again, it's for entertainment, so have fun 