Furry Freak-Out

Krissy had seen episodes of Star Trek a couple of times, mostly late at night when she had nothing better to do. She'd seen the "beam-up" many times--people just flashing out of one location and into another. It looked easy and simple. She didn't know just how disorienting it'd be to go through. First she was rushing through the wind in the centaur's arms, then the lurch into nowhere, where she could only sort of feel her own existence. Then she was elsewhere. Namely, she was in the transporter room in a starship. With a centaur. They both collapsed to the floor. There was a woman working the transporter controls in an honest to god Starfleet uniform with a hijab in the same colors, black with a yellow stripe in front. So Krissy wasn't just in a spaceship, she was in honest-to-god Star Trek. OK.

"Get them to sickbay," said an authoritative older woman, who Krissy recognized through the blur as Captain--what was her name again? The lady one. From Voyager. Which was kind of a weird show, but Krissy always thought she was cool. Oh yeah, Janeway. Krissy found herself taken up in a stretcher through the starship. All around her were those pointy eared guys, the Vulcans, a blue skinned guy or two, some people with weird foreheads, furries..

Furries? That was the last thought that passed through Krissy's head before she blacked out. Somehow, through everything else, she'd been convinced this was real, but the furries were just too much. She knew she'd wake up back home, with Scott and her two children--no, she had three children. Didn't she? Well, she'd be back home and everything would be normal.

But she woke up in the Voyager sickbay, with boopy starship noises all around her. "OK," she said to the nurse who was looking after her, an owl furry, "I want to talk to Scott."

"Hi," said the man standing beside her. It was Scott. Well. His face was different, but his voice, mannerisms, everything else were exactly the same. But he was also so much more mature and assured than her own Scott. "I'm Scott Chen," he said.

"No you're not," said Krissy. "Scott Chen is not your actual name. You were Scott Alan Childers, and you took your friend's last name after that disaster of a basketball game. Remember?" [72660]

He shook his head. "I'm not your Scott. Maybe that's true where you're from--I know the Writers have changed some things since my time--but I'm the original Scott. From Game 3. Or I used to be, anyway." The awful thing was that Krissy sort of knew what he meant by "Writers" and "Game 3." They were inhabitants of a strange pseudo-reality, part of a cosmic system, mirrored by a interactive stories on the internet, that subjected them to bizarre random events and reincarnated her within the mysterious Staircase Room. It was controlled by capricious beings known as Writers. Game 3 was the story that Scott and many other people she knew had originally come from.

"What am I doing here?"

"I don't know. It might have something to do with the the Dark Tower breaking down."

"The Dark Tower? You mean like the Stephen King books? Those are real?" Scott nodded. She remembered reading about the Tower--a cosmic structure which encompassed all of existence, gradually falling apart, causing rifts called "thinnies" and other nastiness "So--what about the shit weasels in Dreamcatcher? Are those real too?"

"Wouldn't be surprised," said Scott. "I've seen some things."

And then Krissy remembered. There was this rip in the air--and this weird whining noise, which pulled her in somehow, even when Astra tried to hold her back. It was like it was speaking to her--come away, come away. Krissy had walked into it and felt herself falling away into nothing, and-- "Shit. I fell into a thinny. Just like those books."

"Yeah, not surprised," said Scott. "Probably, you were saved by the inherent 'Chaos Energy' of Addventure-type worlds--just like what I used to have--but it looks like it's gone now. You've been Individuated, like me--you're not part of the Staircase Room anymore. That's good news and bad news, I guess--it means there's no way you can go back to your old life."

"Bullshit!" said Krissy. "I'm married! I have kids!"

"How many? And what are their names?"

"I--oh--I--shit. Shit." She started sniffling--damn it--and Scott hugged her stiffly.

"It's tough, I know," he said. "But you can make a whole new life here." Maybe in the past Krissy would have wanted that, but she'd done that enough times. She needed something she could hold onto.

She needed to think about something--anything--else. "So... How did *you* get here? Why... All this?" She gestured her arm around her. "Why..."

"The furries? That took some getting used to to me too. Well, it's a pretty long and complicated story [summarized in 5862] but.. I wound up in another dimension and got picked up by the Voyager here, and then they joined up with the furry versions of them, who were escaping from an evil Janeway. She was bald. Anyway, I joined the crew, grew up a bit, and got married."

"You're... married. OK. Who to?"

"Ensign Samantha Wildman. She's sweet. She has a kid, too, and I've been taking care of her. That's the furry one, by the way."

"The... OK." That's when Krissy realized just how lost she was. She'd hoped for a bit that even if she couldn't get back, she could just pick things up with this Scott and go on the way they were before, even if she was in a spaceship full of furries. Now she know it was over for good. There was nothing left for her except nasty, ugly crying. So Scott left her behind to do that.

1. Once Krissy was all cried out, she decided she'd go and face this bizarre new world. Maybe figure out what was the deal with this centaur Astra...

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