Flappity, Floppity, Flip!
The mouse on the Möbius Strip.
The strip revolved,
The mouse dissolved,
In a chronodimensional skip!
~o~o~o~|
"Oh god, no! Not again!"
I screamed as the time-dimensional shift closed around me. It felt like I was being ripped apart at a molecular level and then... nothing.
Blankness.
Only the sound of a spinning disk drive and servomotor, and then it all came in focus.
Thedas? Again?
I picked myself up, noting my dress. Jeans, sneakers, shirt: normal stuff. But not them. No, they were not dressed in normal stuff. I recognized that leather armor, plate mail, that elf and those humans. Oddly enough, one of them recognized me.
"Shit!" the red-haired woman shouted. "You're me!"
She, Lucy, goggled at me, looking very close to fainting. Oddly enough we looked nothing alike though we were (are?) the same person. Was? At some point we stopped being the same person and her life became her own outside of mine. But yes, she was me, trapped inside the body of one Elissa Cousland, a noble woman of Ferelden.
How does this happen twice? Hell! How did it happen once? Very long story... 300,000 words or so, actually.
"Yes," I said, measuring my words slowly. "I am you. In fact... I wrote you. Look, I think I'm here for a purpose. I need to warn you..."
I was cut off by a loud sucking sound and I whirled around to find myself confronted by yet another copy of myself.
"Wait... what? Where'd you come from?" I shouted at... me.
"I come from the future to warn you not to warn yourself," the newest copy of me said.
"What? Why not?" I asked. I was becoming extremely confused.
"You'll..."
There was another loud whoosh and yet another copy of me appeared.
"NO! Do not say another word... you're already..."
The crowd of me's looked at one another, each of us afraid to say anything lest another me be created.
"I think we've clogged the drain of the space-time continuum. We shouldn't all be here," one copy of me said.
"What's so bad about me warning Lucy she's about to walk into a trap?" I just had to ask. If there was one way to unclog a drain it was to take the biggest plunger you can find and jam it into the toilet, past all the stuff blocking the exit and work it up and down. Worry about shit later. Works great for unclogging toilets.
"Nooooo!" The crowd of me erupted simultaneously; shock, alarm, and horror painted on their faces.
With a terrifically loud clap of unnatural noise a gigantic squid-like spaceship suddenly blotted out the sun. It's mechanical tentacles unfolded as it landed.
"Reapers!" we cried. Well, most of us did: Lucy looked completely lost. Of course, she'd been put here before I had played Mass Effect. She wouldn't have any idea.
The reaper's eyeball slowly opened and a laser beam of immense proportions sliced open the landscape and it was about to render us all into piles of steaming long-pig and smoking fat.
~o~o~o~|
"Cat... Cat... shush. It's all right, baby. It's okay."
I opened my eyes and saw Kaidan's handsome, scruffy face hovering over mine. Oh gods, I'm home. Back on the Normandy.
I'm back in Cat Shepard's body.
I'd trade places, any day, with Lucy/Elissa.
Any goddamn day.
~o~o~o~|
Notes: Written for a Cheeky Monkey's challenge to do a self-insert. Of course, I'd already done this with "A Southern Californian in King Cailan's Court" so I figured it'd be more fun to have a self-insert into a self-insert. Then I imagined them being stacked into sort of a recursive loop and resolving into the dream of another self-insert (Mass Effect). Hope it wasn't too confusing!
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