The door to Artie's office swung open.
Myka and Pete strode in, concern across their features as they beelined for the armchair that had been moved into the center of the room. Steve was kneeling at its side with a damp washcloth in hand, dabbing it on the forehead of an unconscious form.
Leena sat at Artie's desk, a few feet away in the cramped space, fingers plinking across the computer keys at an almost leisurely pace. She glanced up at the new arrivals.
"Did you do it?" She asked.
"Yes, the artifact is snagged, bagged, and tagged, so would you mind giving us the details of what happened here?" Myka said, kneeling alongside Steve.
"The artifact tracker clonked Claudia in the head out in that field by the plane," Steve said, face grim. He dropped the cloth in the bowl of water and sat back on his heels. Claudia had been propped upright, a bandage wrapped around the back of her head and her arms hanging limp over the sides of the chair. Her face was still absent color.
"Yeah - we saw that thing on the way back, is that all part of...this?" Pete waved his hand, gesturing at Claudia and her surrounding space.
"Artie had me check for artifacts missing from our collection, and I only found one that might be involved," Leena chimed in, "Though it doesn't tell us much."
The three agents gathered behind Leena as she pulled up several windows on the computer screen. She clicked through them until finding a Warehouse data entry page, with a small, curious image. Pete's eyebrows shot up, and Steve folded his arms in discomfort.
"Lous-Andreas Salomé's whip," Leena read, "Augments the effects of other philosophically based artifacts."
The image showed a woman kneeling in a cart drawn not by horses, but by two men. A rope had been tied around the crook of an arm on each man, and its other end hung in a loose loop in the cradle of the woman's hand. She was leaning forward, one hand on the rope, and in the other she held a small whip with her wrist bent as if to flick its end against the rears of the gentlemen. Myka brought a hand up to her mouth to veil an amused smile. Time had obscured the clarity of the photograph, the faces becoming washed out, yet it almost seemed as though the woman was grinning too.
"Looks like a hell of a party." Pete said.
Myka let out a snort of laughter, before quickly clearing her throat. She began with renewed composure, "Salomé was the driving force behind a great number of psychologists, philosophers, and poets...some argue that had they never associated with her, they wouldn't be half the men that history remembers them as."
"Can I take a wild guess as to what 'associated' means here?" Pete asked.
"Intellectual discussion, though yes, some of the relationships were romantic. Though you can't argue with her methods if that was the only way a woman could be heard by important men in that time. I mean, you have to hand it to someone who can woo a sexually disinterested philosopher in order to speak through him," Myka gestured at the moustached man drawing the cart.
Toward the office windows that faced out over the Warehouse, a figure raced through the air with decelerating speed until landing squarely on the balcony outside, nose just inches from the glass. The heavy figure swayed, unclipping a harness from around its body and detaching from the zipline that stretched along the length of the ceiling to the balcony. Artie stumbled through the open door, leaning an arm against a cabinet to steady himself as he surveyed the agents in the room.
"The whip is gone, it may have been taken days ago, there were no signs of forced entry into the building," he panted, "Is Claudia awake yet?"
"Still out cold," Steve said.
Beginning where the man plucked the string and she blinked away the world, and ending someplace far away, Claudia's mind began a frame-by-frame journey to piece together the space in between. It was like watching the passing of a train, following the pieces, eyes jumping from car to car and glancing over the empty air in between. She felt as if her nose were pressed up against it all, the images before her consuming the entirety her vision, and she realized they were fragments - no, entire existences of herself in unfamiliar places, all whirring past her. Her stomach churned.
What are these?
Her head began pounding, bombarded and overwhelmed by the images in a manner that seemed to echo the waves that had filled the space around the string. The fluctuations became more pronounced, and as they did her mind slipped in and out of the images going by, as if she too had been plucked and was resonating with it all. Her mind raced over the images, wobbling up and down to skim their surfaces, yet each time she dipped deeper and felt herself slowing against the resulting friction, compounding the difficulty of extricating herself again. The difficulty grew, until she finally ceased fluctuating, and plunged down into one particular universe.
She found herself in an armchair in the office of the curious man with the bristly goatee.
For a fraction of a second, Artie's office was horrifically warped, and the agents within it would never be able to describe precisely what they saw. The event was so brief that it might've been attributed to a mishap within the brain, a misfiring of neurons that incapacitated the senses, and when experienced in full it had the effect of rendering all present people momentarily paralyzed. The prior incidence as recorded by the durational spectrometer was manageable by being carefully controlled and examined, but when the entirety of one's surrounding space was twisted, it was utterly bewildering.
This occurred at the precise time that Claudia sat up in the armchair with a yelp, and Myka collapsed against Artie's desk.
Voices rang out for both parties as Pete grabbed hold of the faltering Myka by an arm and Steve rushed to Claudia, knocking over the cloth and water bowl in the process.
"Holy wow," Claudia wheezed, "Wish I could've been asleep for that."
She struggled to stand as Myka did the same, the latter extricating herself from Pete's support.
"Hey, take it easy Myka," Pete urged, but Myka stumbled away from him, confusion etched across her face.
Steve attempted to nudge Claudia back in the chair, but she pushed his hands away. She stumbled to her feet, glancing wildly about the room. Her head pounded with the sudden movement, and she felt along her hair to the bandage.
"Is Myka here?" she asked, careening around. Myka had backed up against a shelf away as far away as possible from Pete, her eyes scanning the office in apparent shock. Claudia stepped toward her, and recognition flashed across Myka's face.
"Did you see the other places-?" Claudia began. The woman nodded vigorously, and Claudia breathed a sigh of relief. The remaining agents in the room regarded the two with increasing skepticism, Leena most of all, who was eyeing them both with an intensely piercing gaze.
"Wait, was I the only one who saw everything turn to funhouse mirrors?" Pete asked. "Myka, what did you see?" He made a movement as if to approach her, yet she sidestepped to Claudia's side.
"Claudia?" she asked in a hushed tone, "If what the man said is true, if we are actually, truly in a sister universe...please don't tell me that I'm married to that man." Myka whispered, "This would be the worst of all possible worlds."
"That's not our Myka," Leena said. "It's happened to her too. She's been switched."
Artie, who had until this point remained fixed to one space in the ground, rushed forward to stand squarely in front of the two women with his brows quivering in fury.
"Who are you people, and where are you coming from?" he hissed.
The room fell silent. Pete's mouth hung open, a slow fear building behind his eyes, until it melted away into a profound expression of loss. It was the same gaze that Steve had given Claudia, and that he still continued to regard her with, and Myka's defiance seemed to vanish at this realization that she was, in every sense, now inhabiting a body of an unknown self. This life, for all she knew, could involve any number of unfortunate possibilities.
Claudia's voice caught in her throat, yet again confronted by an angry Arthur, who regardless of incarnation seemed to always wield the power of making her regret her own presence. Myka placed a hand on her shoulder, as less of a gesture of reassurance and more to steady herself in the dizzying circumstances. Though, this time Claudia did not balk.
"This isn't your Myka," she said, "And I'm still not your Claudia." She glanced at Steve, whose expression remained unchanged.
"We came here from the same universe, and we didn't come alone."