Disclaimer: I don't own Andromeda. I don't get paid. This is purely a work of Fan Fiction.

I noticed that when I saved this file as a text file that I lost a lot of my question marks and periods. I don't know why. Anyhow I fixed it.

When All Else Fails

Harper was worried about Trance. Although he still missed his Purple Princess, he had finally gotten used to her being different. But lately he noticed her acting a bit peculiar, even for Trance. In the past week, he had only seen her on the command deck. He was beginning to think that she was avoiding him for some reason. He tried to think of something he might have said or done that could have offended her. He couldn't think of anything, … well he couldn't think of anything serious enough for her to be avoiding him. He hadn't even came onto her for well over two weeks. "Could that be it?" He wondered. "No that's silly"

He decided to go see her.
First he went to med deck, but she wasn't there. He then tried Hydroponics, but she wasn't there either. Finally Harper went to her quarters on Andromeda, but when he buzzed her room he didn't get an answer.
He was starting to get more worried.

"Andromeda." Harper called.

"Yes Harper." Andromeda answered, as her beautiful holographic image appeared before him. "Can you tell me where Trance is?"

"Trance is on the Maru Harper. Why? Is something wrong?"

"I… uh,… I think I upset her Rom Doll."

"What did you do Harper?" Andromeda asked accusingly.

"I don't know Rommie, but it must have been bad, because it seems like she's been avoiding me. I've probably only seen her five times in the last week."

"She has been spending a lot of time on the Maru lately. Perhaps she's just been busy with a new plant or something."

Rommie didn't like seeing her engineer upset. Especially when there was a chance that there was no need for it. She hoped Harper was mistaken about Trance being mad at him. She knew how much they meant to each other, mainly when she was still purple, but their relationship was getting better.
Harper brightened up a bit.

"Thanks Rom Doll. You're probably right. I'll go to the Maru and talk to her. Maybe I can help her with whatever she's working on. You always know how to cheer me up Rommie."

"You're welcome Harper"

Harper leaves, heading for the hangar deck, where the Maru is berthed.

"I hope you didn't get his hopes up only for them to be crushed." Andromeda's screen persona said.

"What could he have done that would cause Trance to avoid him, and he not even realize he did it"

"We are talking about Harper." Screen Andromeda said.
A worried look fell across the face of Andromeda's hologram.

"Is there any way we can talk to Trance before he reaches her"

"No. The Maru is not currently linked to any of our systems"

"What about our Avatar?"

"I'll contact her, but I don't know if she will make it to the Maru before Harper or not. He does have a head start"

"Yes, but she is faster than him." Holo Andromeda added.

"We'll see."

On the Maru, Golden Trance is sitting on her bed, legs crossed and eyes closed. Her Banzai tree is on a shelf next to her bed.
She is in a trance. Within the depths of her mind she sees a small light off in the distance. Then another one appears, and another, and another. Finally there are billions of small lights all around. She recognizes them for what they are. Stars. She watches the stars for a while, then they start to move, slowly at first, then much faster. The stars all rush towards her. As they near her she realizes that they are not full sized stars, but only about the size of a large Beach Ball like she had seen on Infinity Atoll.

"Hello?" Trance says. "Who are you?"
The multitude of stars now surround her. One nearest her begins to take humanoid form. Trance quickly recognizes the form.

"We are you." The star says, after finishing it's transformation.
Trance looks around, and sees that all the stars surrounding her have also taken on her form. Some looked as she did now, some as her younger purple self of the past, while others were red, blue, and even green. She knew the significance of each color, but she didn't understand what was going on.

"Why are you here?" She asked. "Why am I here?"

"You are here because you did an injustice to your past self."

"What are you talking about? I did what had to be done for the greater good, and for the perfect future."

"TRANCE GEMINI!" Her identical twin said with anger in her voice and fire in her eyes. "Do you know where you sent your innocent counterpart?"

"She,… she went to the future that I came from." Trance said in a low voice.

"Did you honestly believe that she was prepared for what she would find in that future, and what she would have to endure?"

"I,… I never thought about it."

"YOU NEVER THOUGHT ABOUT IT!"

"All I could think about was saving my friends, and fixing things. I figured what happened to her,…me,… was an acceptable sacrifice. Anyhow, I figured she could cope….I did." She added quietly.

"You were wrong." Came the answer from another of her twins. This one looked like her younger self, tail and all.

"After you switched places with her, she entered into a universe that she had only seen in her worst nightmares. Andromeda was destroyed, Dylan was dead, Tyr had betrayed his friends, and the Commonwealth as well as her perfect future was gone forever. But the worst of all these, and I'm sure you already know what that is, was the fact that Harper, her best friend, your best friend, was gone, and there wasn't a darn thing she could do about it. You figured she could COPE? Well cope she did, but it wasn't in the manner that you thought"

"How did she cope?" Trance asked.

"She decided that she could no longer exist in a universe that could be so evil. She also decided that a universe so evil didn't deserve to exist."

"What? She didn't! I couldn't!" Trance could hardly believe what she was hearing. Sure when she originally lost Harper she was devastated and heart broken, and when Andromeda and her crew were destroyed she had thought about,….But she couldn't! There was still some good people left in this universe.

"Trance we are the Avatar of this universe. When you sent your younger self into that future, she didn't have your experience to deal with such traumatic of an ordeal. Becka tried to help her, but you know as well as I, that the Becka from that time period had become somewhat cold when it came to matters of the heart. She had long ago lost the ability to love, and unfortunately the ability to comfort a friend. Seeing how much Becka had changed was hard on her, but what drove her over the edge came about a week after the two of you changed places."

Trance didn't want to hear anymore, but she had to ask. "What happened?"

"It seems that some of Becka's cybernetic implants were black market items. They were poorly made and flawed. Smugglers would often hide these black market items with other illegal items. It seems that her artificial eye had been hid in a container of flash. She died"

Trance is speechless. She had no idea her younger self would be so unprepared for what awaited her. She then scolded herself. "How could she be prepared? She hadn't lived through the horrors that I had. I lost a little piece of who I was with every tragedy. She was thrown into it all at once. Did I even stop to question what would happen to her? Had I fallen so far that I didn't care"

The others watched her as she stood there speechless fighting the tears that were building up in her eyes.

"That's not the worst part." Yet another double said to her. This double however was red.

"What,… what do you mean? What can be worse than what I've done?"

"What can be worse?" The red Trance asked. "What about doing what you did in vain? You thought that changing places with her would allow you to fix things and everything would work out for the perfect Possible future, but you were wrong. Even you cannot help our friends defeat the Abyss and the world ship. They will try,…but they will die."

"No! This can't be true! This can't be happening! I can fix this! I know I can. I have to. I,.. I,…please, …help,… me"
Now Trance was openly crying. After everything she had done, all the pain she had caused her younger self, she was still going to fail. She wasn't a child anymore, but she couldn't stop the tears from falling. She felt so hopeless. What could she do? Everything was all wrong.

As if sensing her thoughts, her golden double says softly, "There is still hope."

"What?" Trance asks, wiping her tears away. "How?"

"We can intercept the Teserect portal in which your younger self went through and bring her to your current time. With her help, your chances of defeating the Abyss will be greatly increased."

"But not assured." Trance added.

"Nothing is guaranteed Trance, but this is the best we can do. It is the only hope we have left."

"When will she arrive?"

"Soon."

"Thank you."

"Your task is the same as ours. If you fail we all fail. If you perish, we perish. We are Trance Gemini, Avatar of this universe."