Author's Note: It should come as no surprise that I am relying on Google translate for many of the non-English words I sprinkle about like confetti – but that comes with its own perils. If I make any mistakes, please let me know immediately, so I can correct them. Thanks!

Act Two

Dance of the Roses

Celtic Ceili: Detour

Rhosyn Tyler had been having a perfectly ordinary morning – right up till the moment the bulky stranger in the odd suit had grabbed her arm on Frenhines Buddug Stryd, jabbering at her in some outlandish tongue. She reacted automatically, tossing him to the side of the walkway with a practiced hip throw and then dropping into a ready stance. When he simply raised his eyebrows at her with a sour look, it took a moment, then her peripheral vision began to sink in, as well as the memory of that wild flash of light during the throw. Somehow they'd been transported from the busy, noisy, exhaust-fume-filled Stryd to a large open hayfield, the midday sun blazing stereotypically overhead.

She gaped about wordlessly as the stranger picked himself out of the newly mown hay (the scent of which, assaulting her nostrils, was providing the proof her eyes were trying to deny) and pulled out a mobile phone, jabbering into it with more of his incomprehensible gibberish. Then he grabbed her arm again – she was too shocked to protest this time – and the flash came again, this time accompanied by an intense squeezing-stretching feeling, as if she were being pushed and pulled through an invisible keyhole in an invisible door.

The hayfield disappeared again, replaced this time with the interior of a mad techno warehouse, complete with the clangs and beeps and oily metallic odor of Uncle Garvain's cargo ship. Yet another stranger was there, this time an intimidating character with vivid green eyes. He jabbered at her briefly with an air of quiet, menacing command while she stared silently back, then she was pulled roughly away and taken down a short flight of metal stairs to an obvious cell, for yet another mind-shattering shock.

For inside the cell were two other women, both of whom looked and sounded exactly like Rhosyn herself. Well, "sounded" if you only listened to the timbre of the voices – their words were as mystifying as all the others she'd heard in the last few head-whirling minutes.

"What in the name of all the Gods and Goddesses is going ON here?" Rhosyn demanded sharply when she finally found her voice, but of course, the other women just shook their heads, their lack of comprehension of her words in return obvious.

Behind her, the door opened again, and yet another lookalike was shoved in, as well. She seemed to speak the same tongue as the others did, though. And again, and again, until there were six of them there.

Suddenly one of the others (she didn't know which one – how do you tell your own mirror images apart?) swore in response to something another had said – in Germanic! "Scheisse!"

Rhosyn whirled on the woman and nearly pounced. "You speak Germanic?" she asked in that tongue. Please, please, let someone here be able to tell me what's going on! When the other woman replied with an astonished "Ja!" Rhosyn nearly cried from relief. Thank the Goddess I chose Germanic in school instead of Frankish for my foreign tongue requirement. She squashed the thought and concentrated on what was being said – something about different planets, alongside each other, each with a copy of herself? This didn't make any sense. There was only one Terra!

They didn't get any further, though, before the door opened yet again, and yet another woman shoved in. The Germanic-speaking duplicate seemed to recognize this one, somehow, and then she was turning back to Rhosyn to ask, haltingly, how many what? Oh, flashes of light and instantaneous movements they had taken to get here. She gave the answer, two, and the nonsense chatter continued.

Then the green-eyed man was there at the little window in the door, then another man, then the door was thrown open and yet a third man rushed in to scoop the last entry into his arms. Well, at least somebody had been rescued.

After they'd all filed back up to the outer room, the last double turned to her rescuer, motioning towards Rhosyn herself. Then he, a tall, skinny stick with shaggy hair and large, expressive brown eyes, turned to her and asked in that same odd Germanic the other had used, "What have you say?" When she began to reply in the same tongue, he waved her off. "No, talk in your tongue to please."

"In my tongue? I speak the Queen's Gaelic - " That was as far as she got.

"Brilliant!" he replied in her own tongue at last, grinning like a maniac. "Now we can talk!"

His Gaelic was odd, but at last he was able to explain that she'd been brought to a parallel world, and forward in time some fifty years, to boot, by the green-eyed man, along with all these other versions of herself from yet other parallels. It was like something out of a bad science fiction movie, but she couldn't argue with the fact that she sure as uffern wasn't on Frenhines Buddug Stryd on her way to work any more. She'd just wait to see if his explanation held any wine.

A very confusing half hour later, after much jabbering and fiddling with the various consoles and wristwatches, he turned to her again at last. "Hello. My name's Jared, by the way."

"Rhosyn. Rhosyn Tyler."

"A Rhosyn by any other name..." was his nonsense reply. She looked at him sharply, and he shrugged. "Never mind."

While everyone else moved off to one side to continue their chatter, Jared led her to the console and sat her in one of the chairs, straddling the other, and began explaining what they'd discovered, and what they – and she – were going to have to do in order for each to return to her own life in her own world.

"I have to go back in time and change history? To my history?" Her head was whirling. She kept waiting for some hidden director to yell "Cut!", or everyone to begin breaking up and telling her she'd been Punked.

Jared was running a buzzing flashlight's beam across her hand, the across the wristwatches he'd laid out in a row, finally picking one of them up. Consulting again with her doubles, he at last turned again to her with a smile. "Ah. Now I know which parallel you're from. As I suspected, yours was split off first, the farthest back in history. So your job..." Reaching a long arm across the console, he fished a single paperback out of the bundle he'd been given earlier and handed it to her. "...is to keep her from falling into the trap that killed her in our world. You must keep her from going into the last battle outlined in that book."

Rhosyn stared back and forth from his face to the book for several long moments, eyes wide. Finally, she whispered, "You're not joking, are you? This isn't a prank?"

"No," came the solemn reply. "It's absolutely real."

She gulped. Little Rhosyn Tyler, nobody, shop girl and Akido black belt (her one real accomplishment) had to go try to save the life of her personal heroine. She stared again at the famous statue on the cover of the book, the one she passed every day on her way to work, depicting her world's greatest warrior queen, standing tall beside her warriors.

Queen Boudicca of the Iceni.