Author's note.

Most of the stargate stuff starts in the second chapter. This first chapter is meant to introduce the original character and her personality.
Edit: First chapter has been updated with a bit more prose.

impious-imp on Deviantart for images of Kylee and any other characters I might use in this thing.

On Archive of our own / /works/15880536/chapters/37003203 For the Illustrated version


The multiverse was real.

Kylee wouldn't have believed it even a year ago – maybe even a few months – but now…

Now that she was trapped in a no win situation, staring down the biggest bad she's ever laid her baby blue eyes on. It occurred to her then that she probably could have avoided this if she just had stayed home that day, which was ironic considering how multiverse theories worked. Every choice made had the potential to spawn an alternate timeline in which the opposite happened, or something totally ridiculous. Heisenberg, eat your heart out. Simple enough to stay indoors, eat cereal and watch reruns of some bingable show online and see what all the hubbub is about. Instead she went out for a run.

And she loved to run.

"She" being Hightail, college student and part time superpowered do gooder, capable of breaking the sound barrier and charging a phone just by being near it. All in all, it was amazing. The near permanent runner's high and the feeling that she could run forever. The only serious drawback (although there were more than she liked to admit) was being sucker punched while she was answering a text.

Obviously she knew she really shouldn't be bringing her personal phone on patrol for security, but on the rare occasion… well, it was kind of easy to take her safety for granted. To be fair, she'd thought she was pretty safe as she had and nobody could really even touch her while she was moving at mach two (unless they're a speedster too).

And yet that was another bad choice that had piled up just right by the end of the night.

The real kick-off event started with Zephyr, another super human like her; a tall guy who wore a suit resembling that of a motocross outfit, but with a furry collar like those old pilot jackets. Like her, he had super speed, and he wouldn't know the meaning of 'good intentions' if it bit him in the butt. She'd had altercations with him before, enough to know that she and the other speedster were polar opposites, more like water and oil than anything else. When they came together it usually tended to cause a flurry of chaos as they dashed through the streets trying to knock the other down (or in Kylee's case, shock him with enough of a jolt to stop him in his tracks). Usually she had the advantage due to the nature of her electrical powers, and that time should have been no different.

Except it had been.

Neither one of them had seen the traps - too busy exchanging banter with each other to remember rule number 0 for speedsters: WATCH WHERE YOU'RE GOING.

The next thing she'd known, her body had been wrapped in a cord that somehow short-circuited her power, both speed and electricity. She'd gasped as she recognized the sudden feeling of weakness inside her that testified of her power being suppressed. She hated that feeling. It had only happened a couple of times since she'd gained her high-speed power, but it never got easier or better.

And she'd still fought despite feeling drained and weak, little good as it did her.

After that, she'd only been able to watch as the enemy, a lizard-beast-man looking more like something someone would see in a Saturday-morning cartoon than anything, grinned sparkling, pointy teeth at her and then reacted to Zephyr's super speed. The lizard-man had somehow managed to blast a hole in her rival's leg armor, burning him pretty badly from she scream he'd let loose and the resulting patch of red skin she'd seen later.

Then the lizard guy had caught the other speedster by the throat, choking him as he'd then dropped her and slapped something onto her rival that had to be some sort of power drain. The smarmy son of a gun would still fight otherwise and he'd only struggled just about as uselessly as her at that point.

Obviously Lizard-man had a keen mind a ruthless streak that had his hungry grin growing wider as he surveyed his catch, seeming to enjoy their struggles as they both tried to get away from him.

The next thing they'd know, they'd ended up in an arena known as the 'Infinity Cascade' as contestants in a gladiator-like sport. They'd been forced to fight each other, privacy being the least of the violations as they battled – often to the death – for others' entertainment with their freedom being the ultimate prize. She and Zephyr had struck a temporary truce (that very likely wouldn't last a moment after they got back to Earth) and tag-teamed their way into the final battles.

But it had been difficult to say the least. She liked the other contestants (well, most of them), each brought from a different dimension in the multiverse, all supposed heroes in their own right, or enemies on similar standing, and hated the idea that her own freedom would come at the cost of theirs. Apparently, she wasn't the only one. Morale had been low among all the contestants and it had gotten to the point that many had just given up, sinking into depression and stagnation. Eventually, Kylee had come up with the idea to simply stop participating, supposed freedom be damned. She'd just wanted to see what would happen, hoping that they'd be brought before the Infinity Cascade's boss to make a stand.

Which brought her to this point.

Her eyes widened as she stared up at the Lovcraftian horror in front of her.

Too bad the boss was this... thing. The 'Host', as it called itself, was a giant mass of tentacles and teeth as it towered over the group consisting of herself, Zephyr, a couple of other heroes and a contingency of alien guards. That didn't even begin to describe the smell of the thing, cloying and disgustingly sweet, like rotted flesh while its skin was a patchwork of mottled, putrid green that made her want to vomit.

Beside her, Zephyr swallowed. "Hightail, I'm reminding you that this was your idea," her long-time rival said from beside her. He sounded far more subdued than he usually did and for once, she really couldn't blame him. They sat in power suppressors looking up at the 'Host' of the arena they'd been dumped into an indeterminate amount of time ago (they didn't exactly have days and nights here). For all she knew, they could have been contestants in the gladiator-like games held here for days or months or anything in between.

"Well," she said, hoping her voice didn't sound as small as she felt, "it worked... sort of."

The guard that had brought them here stopped speaking and Kylee was working on her restraints extra hard as silence fell. For a moment, nothing happened.

Then the Host attacked. Bound as he was, Zephyr was easily dispatched, as were the other prisoners and even the guards. Kylee managed to dodge the first blow by diving forward, but was in no position to avoid the glowing whip produced by the thing (as if it didn't have enough tentacles on it's own) as the weapon shot towards her, impaling her leg even through the otherwise durable material she wore. She let out a cry of pain as the whip retracted and grabbed at the blood seeping into her clothing. Well, it didn't feel like it had hit anything vital at least, and her high metabolism should take care of that pretty fast. One good thing about the Cascade is they knew how to take care of speedsters, even if it did take the form of a nasty kind of gruel in a pouch.

The pain distracted her and the monster grabbed her by the neck at that point, one enormous tentacle wrapping around her neck as it raised her up. She gasped as she looked down at it, and then her eyes caught the scene around them. The platform below her was obscured by the thing's bulking arm, but she could see the entire arena stretching out beyond that. It looked similar to a metal honey comb with each pocket holding a different type of terrain. They'd even somehow managed to set one up with what looked like lava pouring out of a volcano.

What the actual freak?

You dare?! A voice in her had that wasn't a voice at all and gave her the feeling of fingers being scraped against a chalk board burst through her thoughts.

"Yes!" she managed to get out, returning her gaze to and glaring as defiantly as she could at the Host.

The being screamed, both aloud and in their heads and she could help but wince as it shot her even higher, plunging her towards the stream of energy racing over the top of the Cascade. Fear shot through her body. She'd been warned to never go near that. Now it looked like she didn't have a choice.

Time seemed to slow and for just the barest moment before she was pushed into it, she felt it: the ebb and flow if the multiverse, ever changing and ever flowing, with untold potential so awe inspiring it took her breath away.

And then she plunged inside it and screamed.

The energy latched onto her immediately, raw and unfiltered as it was. If her powers hadn't been what they were, it would have torn her apart in an instant. But her body was used to energy flowing through it in one form or another. That didn't stop her from somehow realizing that this was too much and she couldn't stay there for long. It also didn't stop her from understanding that the energy gave her new form with infinite possibilities completely undefined as of yet.

It came so fast and so much that she couldn't think and her body was on fire and her throat hurt, was she screaming still? She couldn't hear, couldn't understand... couldn't make it out... couldn't do anything except pray for respite.

The next thing she knew, the pain vanished. No... not vanished, it was still there, she just couldn't react anymore. And she was floating away from herself. Was that really her? Was this what people referred to as an 'out of body experience'? She saw her body dangling – unconscious, she somehow knew – in the grip of the tentacled tyrant. Her body had gone limp in the thing's grip, but was otherwise a mirror image of herself. Had she gotten out? She didn't think so. Something had changed. She was different but the same...

She would so need therapy after all of this.

Right about then, reality shattered like glass. Or perhaps it was her soul. Either way, she no longer sensed anything. There was nothing to sense. She was nothing. Everything was nothing.

She had no idea how long she existed like that, strongly suspecting that 'time' was meaningless here anyway. And then, something reached out, plucking her straight out of the abyss. She saw the face of her savior for only a moment, an older woman with curly hair and muted robes. She spoke in riddles, the likes of which Kylee would have problems remembering even on the best of days, but despite this, the speedster understood the woman's intentions.

She wanted to save Kylee. All the young woman had to do was give an answer. Kylee opened her mouth to speak and gasped awake, stumbling forward.

The room around her pitched back and forth, and she could feel her knees buckling, her feet no longer under her.

A hand stretched out before she could hit the metal grating below her, managing to catch her. It was strong and sturdy – for which she was grateful – and clad in military fatigues. She clutched at it, trying to will everything to stop spinning.

Behind her, she caught a glimpse of a giant ring with a shimmering surface not unlike water in the center before interlocking metal plates slid into place before it, causing the beautiful light it to disappear from view. The movement did nothing to help her nausea.

Her legs felt like jelly, but this was an unknown situation and her instincts were screaming at her to not show weakness. Taking a deep breath, she forced herself to stand, thankfully with the assistance of the large man who had caught her. He towered above her and was built like a linebacker. She tried to give him a smile, but judging from the raised eyebrow he shot her, didn't succeed.

If her ears would stop ringing and the world would stop spinning around her, she might have been able to understand the surprised and panicked voices around her, maybe even figure out what was going on.

Vaguely, she noted that some of the soldiers in the the room had turned their weapons on her, standing in a defensive line that looked more than a little intimidating.

That was when she noticed the other three people standing and staring at her as if she'd grown two heads. Two men and a woman with blond hair and a strikingly beautiful – and all to familiar – face. The dizziness was getting to her, and her jelly legs had turned into mush. She felt herself begin to go down and knew she couldn't do anything to stop it. Instead she reached out towards the familiarity, barely able to focus on that long enough to speak one word before the world went dark.

"Mom?"