"Aaaand, there," Gadget dusted her hooves. She backed away from the ramshackle hut she'd constructed. It was far from anything she'd really even want to call 'good', let alone perfect, but... yeah, probably best to leave it at that.

She ducked into the interior of the hut. Given the complete lack of climate here in the void, this place was really more for the sake of familiarity and a place to store things than anything else.

Also, working scraps of a destroyed SUV-sized rocket into a weird house thing is not fun.

Whatever.

Gadget sat down in front of her makeshift shelf. She stared into the empty helmets she'd set on one side.

No, she mentally slapped herself. She couldn't waste time dwelling on stuff like that. She had things to do!

First and foremost, tracking down that other rocket that made it through where hers didn't.

Gadget sighed, setting aside yet another orb. She flopped onto her back, letting out a loud groan to nobody in particular. That was... what, a few hundred now? Out of...

She didn't bother to even begin counting the glowing little dots surrounding her.

At this rate, things were gonna take a while. A long while.

Or... maybe. She wrinkled her brows, rolling back to her hooves and stepping around the pile of discarded orbs. Back when they were designing the portal and the pod to take her and Delmar through it, they weren't even aware of this place existing. It was supposed to just take them in one portal, and out a corresponding one forced open on Equestria's side. Maybe--

Gadget galloped back to her shuttle hut, ducking back inside and throwing aside some loose items until she was once again faced with the remains of the dashboard.

If the portal on the other side already existed beforehand like how it seemed with that other rocket that flew past, then that meant that the mechanism they thought they were using to force it open must also be able to locate it!

She dug through the slag that much of the dashboard had been reduced to by the explosion that apparently took both her life and Delmar's. If it was undamaged enough, maybe she could...

Her sights fell on one particularly bloblike hunk of slag.

So much for that.

Gadget forced a smile. No matter! She had time. She had... all... the time.

She trudged back out and fell to her haunches, once again gazing to the ocean of lights filling the void around her.

There were so, so many, yet not one of them so far felt right. There was like, this feeling of familiarity that drew her toward some of them. Thus far, the one she and Delmar had come from was the one with the strongest pull. If she was to find the one that led to Equestria--her Equestria.

Of course, there were others that were getting there. Ones that very much looked like Equestria--even ones that contained humans! Given both her own weird partial transformation thing that left her flickering every now and then, maybe that meant she came from one of those Equestrias with humans in them. Would explain why she was a unicorn filly on a clearly unicorn-free Earth, after all.

Still, it was never quite right. Several times when she'd opened the portal and stepped through, she found herself following around some alternate version of herself. Some were ponies, others were people. But what mattered was that they were there, meaning that wasn't where she belonged.

Actually, come to think of it--didn't that mean that the reality she called home for most of her life also contain some native version of her? She'd have to look into that another time.

She swung her legs over the edge of the 'porch' of her hut, resting her chin on the makeshift guardrail made from a real guardrail she'd salvaged.

A thought drifted into mind.

Why did Delmar get so hungry and weak in here? Was there something about him that caused that? She hadn't even thought about eating or hunger since she'd arrived here, aside from when he mentioned it himself.

...actually, come to think of it. Maybe she was feeling kind of hungry. How long had she last eaten? She'd been in and out of more worlds than she cared to count at this point. Sure, she was of course nothing more than a ghost in every single one of them, but in here she was still a living, breathing being! And she spent, what, maybe a day or two? Just hauling scrap multiple times her size around. She should've been--

She doubled over in pain as her stomach tied itself into a knot.

Alright. Just... stop thinking about food or eating. At the very least, not having any specific craving would help maybe a little.

Think about anything else. Ooh, like how there was some human version of her that was like, the rich daughter of some tech company CEO guy! She looked pretty bored sitting around in the lobby though. She sorta just hangs around at the front desk doing her homework and stuff, and them sometimes talks to the people that walk in. Though, wasn't that kind of a child labor thing, having her work the front desk like that?

She didn't really look much further into it before she left that world. Though, she did set aside the portal ball thing that led to it for another time.

Oddly, there didn't seem to be very many universes where she was a pony. Unique ones, at least. There were minor differences here and there at best, but almost all of them featured some version of her that lived in a lab as a sort-of-pet-slash-lab-assistant to the researchers that worked there. And in every single one as far as she could tell, they worked toward either forcing a portal open with the help of Twilight freakin' Sparkle after figuring out crossdimensional communication somehow, or going the route she herself went down with blasting a rocket through a portal only held open from one side.

...Given how effortlessly Twilight apparently opened said portal, maaaaaaybe she should've tried establishing contact with that mare herself instead of the whole rocket thing. Like, the version of her from that universe ran straight through the portal from the very moment it opened! And she made it out alive despite the complete and total lack of preparation! Twilight definitely knew more than a thing or two about safe portal travel, that's for sure.

Oddly enough, however, she couldn't follow any of her counterparts through those portals when they opened. And when watching from the outside, she didn't see anything shoot out of the glowing lights either.

It gave her a bit of hope. There wasn't just one way to do portal travel. If she could maybe figure out just how Twilight did it, then maybe that would be enough to bring both herself and Delmar back to the land of the living!

Maybe.

She did actually manage to find one world where she'd made it back, actually. Whether it was the one that that other version of her rocketed past and into, she didn't know. It did, however, stir a different set of questions. In that world, she not only made it to Equestria in one piece with Delmar, but turned human as well. Delmar, naturally, turned into a cute little pony.

A small smile spread across her face as she recalled that Delmar's fumbling over his hooves.

Gadget's gaze drifted to the soft glow emanating from her makeshift shelf. That was a world she'd be holding onto. That other version of her had a whole life to live now! Her name--her human name--turned out to be Zoey, and, like, she had this whole banishment thing going on. Apparently, her parents... or at least, her father, hated the fact that she was his firstborn. Something about wanting a male heir from how it seemed. And so, one thing led to another, and she was... gotten rid of by sending her to Earth.

It probably wasn't too far off from how she herself, the Gadget of the Void, wound up with Delmar as well. That version of her that made it through had such a weird version of Equestria, too! It was nothing like the Equestria she'd seen on TV back in the lab before all of this happened. That Equestria had a Queen Celestia, and a whole parliamentary system on top of it! Maybe the Equestria she belonged to also had a Queen instead of a Princess. Maybe not. Who knew? Not her!

She lifted her chin off the railing, looking down at what were currently her hands. At least now she knew why she kept flickering like this. Though, if she was meant to be human in the first place, then why did she keep her pony form at all? Was it just because of how long she'd spent as a pony on Earth across all those years she'd lived there?

Was her unicorn-ness going to wear off at some point for good?

Gadget kept her eyes on her hands, flexing her fingers one by one. It felt weird being in this body. Like, not in a bad way kind of weird. It was the sort of weird where she could look at herself and say 'yeah, that's me' even if it wasn't the version of her that she normally was used to. It was hard to really put it in precise words, but what mattered was that the feeling was there.

She leaned back, letting her thoughts momentarily drift back to her stomach. She certainly didn't feel hungry anymore after taking her mind off of the topic. Call it mind over matter or whatever. Probably some other quirk about this place that she'd yet to figure out in full. Maybe Delmar was starving 'cause he woke up thinking about food or something.

Not that it mattered anymore. Even if she wanted to, there wasn't anything around here to eat. Some odd glowy grass and some kind of snail thing here and there, yeah, but beyond that? Nothing edible anywhere around.

Also, for the record, the glowy grass stuff tasted terrible anyway.

Actually--come to think of it, why was there any kind of plant or animal in here? This was the void! Sure, she'd only seen like two or three clumps of that wispy glowy grass around, and out of those only one had the snail thing nibbling on it, but the fact that they were here at all, all while still very clearly being alive enough to form a very, very basic ecosystem...

Just like with Twilight's portals, it gave her hope. Somewhere out there, there must be some kind of crack. A fissure, maybe, where the grass and snails were able to travel through and settle into this place.

Maybe if she found it, she could finally escape.

Author's Note

And here we go, one more chapter, tying things in with Equestrian Human... but from an outside perspective!

...

...

Gadget needs a hug. So bad.

Unless otherwise indicated, Project Emphenom #13 and onward will return to being posted under What If. This anthology is therefore marked as complete until further notice.