As it turns out, it is not possible to grow penicillin in the kitchens of a feudal Japanese castle. Granted… I had no idea what I was doing, and as easily as things had molded over in my fridge in modern Japan, it is not as simple as leaving food in a warm place and hoping for the best.

"What are you trying to do, Kats… er, Kaya?" Yuki peered at the bowl of yuzu peel that … hadn't developed any mold in the three days it had been sitting out.

"Ummm, hopefully something medicinal." At Yuki's expression of complete skepticism, I added, "It's better than doing nothing." By this point, Aki had been delirious for over a day, and prior to that had had little energy for much talking. The evening he and I had arrived, Katsuko had managed to claim his attention for one, long private meeting. As much as I knew she deserved her time to be with him, to rebuild whatever it was that made things awkward between them, I didn't miss out on what might be his final days. I was the one who pulled him off that battlefield. I was his daughter too.

"I don't know. When Shingen was still sick, some of the medicines he tried made him sicker." He poked at the hardened peels. "Seems like a waste."

"It's not like anyone eats this part of them anyway." Probably they just would have been tossed into the baths to make them smell pretty. "And don't touch them. I'm trying to grow penicillin, not boy germs."

"Peni… um, boy what?" He made a face. "You're weird. You look like Katsu, but you don't really act much like her."

Well, we hadn't been the same person for seven years. Or eleven, depending on which date we were using, and… "This whole situation is weird."

He scraped his hands through his hair. "I'll say. But you're still weird."

"Did you come in here just to poke at me, or was there an actual reason?" Although at least he was willing to talk to me, even if he was kind of rude. The way most people here at Tsutsujigasaki castle avoided me, I was beginning to feel like the Yokoi that my sort-of nephew had accused me of being. Even the servants, who thought I was Katsuko's younger sister, did their best not to look at me.

"Oh. Yeah. I was right. Sasuke got here already." And then, because I was already halfway across the kitchen, he yelled after me, "Does this mean I can throw these out?"

By the time I caught up with Sasuke, he was just about to enter Aki's room. "Greetings and salutations, Alternate-Katsuko." His face was as impassive as the Sasuke from my timeline, but I was just happy to connect with someone who didn't treat me like I was a demi-demon. "Katsuko-prime and Shingen have filled me in on the situation."

"Um, hi, Alternate-Sasuke… um… do you have any idea how to make penicillin?" If anyone could, it would be Sasuke. Well, or Toshiie, but he wasn't due back from China apparently for several weeks. Aki could not wait that long.

"Er… no, it's not something I've thought to attempt. I have considered making a battery out of a potato, but it's going to be another fifteen years before potatoes are cultivated here… so… hashtag time travel goals." He glanced through the doorway where Aki was fitfully sleeping. "On a more serious note, I am happy to meet another Katsuko, even though it's not under the greatest of circumstances. Has there been any improvement?"

I shook my head. Two days before, Shingen had fetched another healer – one who hadn't fainted at the sight of Aki's shoulder. She had packed the wound with some sort of poultice, which stabilized him somewhat, and the other-me had proven skilled at getting him to swallow willow bark tea, explaining that she had had a great deal of practice with that.

But now, even the effects of the poultice were gone, and no matter how much tea we forced down his throat, Aki's fever still raged. "It feels like we're running out of options… here."

"I can hear you." Apparently having one of his moments of lucidity, Aki signaled us to enter. "Hello Mister Mikumo."

Sasuke greeted Aki formally, which was all the conversation that my father had energy for. Immediately he dropped off into sleep again.

"Ah. I see the need for antibiotics." The smell of Aki's wound permeated the room. "Although I am a theoretical physicist, not a doctor." The joke was stated with just a slight quirk at the side of his mouth to indicate the humor. "Have I made that joke to you before – your timeline's alternate version of me?"

"No." I was not in the mood for humor. "What about modern medicine? I mean, I'm not a doctor either, but doctors in our time can cure infections, right? You can help me get him home, can't you?"

After all that had happened, I refused to let Aki die.

"I've already checked." Sasuke pulled out what looked like a hand sewn notebook and flipped through it. It was full of numbers and calculations. "Honno-ji won't open until the winter solstice – Togakushi a month later." He didn't mention that Aki couldn't wait that long, but the unspoken words hung in the air.

"So Shingen and Katsu didn't tell you about the device?" A device, that during Aki's lucid moments, he explained was a prototype. Maybe they'd forgotten (unlikely) or decided to leave that story up to me. "It… I'm not sure how, but it opened the wormhole that dumped me onto that battlefield."

"Device?" He slapped his forehead. "I didn't even think to question how you ended up here. But of course, if there had been wormhole activity, I would have known."

"There was a wormhole, but before that, it wasn't." Once again I explained how I had ended up in 1586, this time to an audience who had scientific questions that were far beyond my patchwork high school attendance. After my third 'I don't know,' I gave up and turned the device over to him.

"Fascinating." Sasuke pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. He cautiously flipped the thing over in his hands, but it still just looked like a somewhat advanced version of a cell phone. He glanced at Aki. "He said it's a prototype? That suggests that it's still a beta. Do you have any objections to me studying it?"

"As long as you don't zap us all into prehistoric Japan. I don't think my heart could take the Jurassic period." I paused, waiting for Aki to interject whether or not he had problem with Sasuke taking control of the device, but if he did, he wasn't saying. "This" I waved my hand to indicate my alternate's home, "is already unsettling enough."

"You mean the rare experience of meeting another version of yourself?" Sasuke seemed almost envious. "Have you noticed any unusual physical phenomena? Do you find yourself fading, or do you feel like you are losing parts of your memory?"

"No. In fact it feels like I'm instead gaining memories I've never had." I wasn't sure how to explain it further, although it had been a relief to confirm my theory that those odd moments of deja-vu-esque images were not my memories, but some kind of multiverse effect.

"Yes." Katsuko entered the room carrying another pot of tea. "Me too. Like the memory of a spider crawling down the front of a pink kimono - and I don't even own one."

"I've not had that one, and I do have a pink kimono." Well, I did have one. I'd left it behind with Mitsuhide. "But a spider never crawled down the front of it." Just a kitsune. "Aki yelling at me for jumping out of a tree."

That one had been pretty vivid. Katsuko tapped her chest. "Actually happened. And then he abandoned me there." She sent Aki a look that was half anger, half exasperation. "It turned out to have been a con, but of course he didn't warn me first."

"How very Mitsuhide of him." That dang kitsune. We'd been apart for over a week (not counting that one hour at Genba), but he was still hacking my brain.

The ninth thing I hate about Mitsuhide, even when I'm four years and an unknown number of timelines away, I can't stop thinking about him.

She looked at me. "I have questions about that but-" She sighed. "It feels so surreal to talk to you."

Ah. That's why it had been so easy to avoid her. She'd been avoiding me, too. "I know. We're not twins, or clones. I've been trying to think of you as an older sister." Since this Katsu would have to be four years older than I am. Or maybe just three? Yuki had told me she'd been stuck in the wormhole (or a wormhole) and missed a year.

"Could you guys not talk over me?" Aki muttered, in another moment of lucidity. "I haven't departed this Earth yet." His eyes flicked over to Sasuke and greeted him as if he had not done so just twenty minutes before. "Hello Mister Mikumo. Still climbing things?"

Ok, not as lucid as all that then.

Sasuke bowed to him again, as if he had not done so before. "Professor."

"Katsu. I told you. Don't bother me unless the world is ending. Don't bother me then either." He closed his eyes again.

"Not yet old man," Katsuko set the teapot down with a clonk, and poured a cup of willow bark tea. "Time for your medication." With Sasuke's help, she propped him into a sitting position and got him to swallow the tea, before he slumped back on the bed with a moan.

Again, I swallowed that feeling of envy that she, my other-self, had managed to get Aki to obey her. It wasn't important. The important thing that was he had drunk it. That everyone was doing whatever we could to keep him alive until Sasuke could figure out how to get the device to open the wormhole.

Stand back! He's trying science.

"I wondered where you were hiding." I looked up from my failed experiment (Yuki had not thrown out the yuzu peels as threatened), to see my other self, my older self, who had returned to the kitchen with the empty teapot.

"Well, I figured it would just be easier if I stayed out of everyone's way." I sat back and watched her bustling about with some kind of wooden contraption, before I realized that it was a pulley system that retrieved fresh snow from outside without anyone needing to trek out into the weather to get it themselves. "That's pretty cool." I'd never seen anything like it before.

She smiled. "Shingen built it. He's really good with his hands. Er… in an engineering kind of way." The blush on her face suggested he was good with his hands in all kinds of ways.

"Of course he is." Oh shit. I said that out loud. My sarcasm turned our moment into something seriously awkward.

"I'm jealous of you too," Katsuko eventually said.

"Me? Why?" This version of myself seemed to have it all figured out.

"Because Aki told you he was our father. He didn't leave you on the side of the road, feeling like everyone had abandoned her." She slammed the now full of snow kettle on the brazier. "I mean, I know he did it to fool Shingen into taking me. I learned pretty soon after that he didn't mean it. But it was cruel, and … he's said a lot of hurtful things to me that he apparently never said to you."

"Oh." I reached in my kimono and pulled out Aki's letter. It was the one thing I had on me when Iekane pulled us into the wormhole. "He didn't tell me. He disappeared, left me holed up in an Inn for weeks and when I finally went in search of him, I found this letter at Francisco's. I imagine, that if you were to go to Sakai, you might have this same letter waiting."

I sat back on my heels, and watched her read the letter, noticing when she smiled – she must have hit the 'cloud city moment' line. Finally she folded it up and gave it back to me. "Thanks. I don't know why it helps… but it does."

"Well, good. I'd hate it if I hated me. Er, well… you know." Yup. Still surreal.

"Yeah. I do." She paused…. Then. "Um I sort of don't want to know, but I also do want to know. What is up with Mitsuhide and you?"

Ugh, I can't even pass the Bechdel test with myself! "It's a long story that probably doesn't even matter, because he's in love with Mai. Unrequitedly, but it's still not something I want to hang around to watch."

She nodded. "Yeah. I kind of thought he was in this timeline too. But, I only met him for like two hours, during which he threatened to kill me, beat me at shogi, then turned around and gave me some really good advice."

Well…. That's on brand at least.

It was another day before Sasuke emerged from the room where he was mad-sciencing it all.

Once again, we were gathered in Shingen's private office, and again drinking tea that Yukimura had prepared and Katsuko had helped to distribute. Shingen also produced another basket of pastry that he claimed was from his private stash. Given that he always seemed to be able to produce a basket of pastry from somewhere, I suspected his 'private stash' was actually a sweatshop full of bakers kept prisoner somewhere on the castle grounds.

"First of all, some background on our wormholes. It isn't merely that the atmospheric conditions need to be correct, for the wormhole to actually form, there needs to be enough charged ions to, in layman's terms, shock it open." Sasuke took a moment to to gulp down some tea, and rubbed the corner of his eyes. "That's what Iekane's device does, it concentrates a jolt that opens up a corridor to the closest wormhole."

It kind of sounded like something out of Back to the Future…

"A mini flux capacitor?" There went Katsuko, voicing aloud what was in my own brain. Aki aside, I needed to get out of this timeline for my sanity.

"Flock's capacity? You want to bring birds into this?" Yuki bypassed the pastry and glared a bit at the double serving on Shingen's tray. "What will that do?"

The others ignored him beyond giving him a fond smile.

Katsuko nodded to Sasuke. "Makes sense. Thunder-snow. Yuki, do you remember there was thunder and snow when we encountered Iekane at Togakushi? But our timeline's Iekane didn't have a device – or I suppose he didn't need it. We were already expecting that wormhole to manifest."

"And unfortunately, we don't have time to wait for the solstice. Therefore, I believe our best course of action would be to try to use the device to send Kaya and Aki to the future. Her timeline." Sasuke pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "Theoretically, this timeline's Iekane does not have the prototype, or one would think he would be using it often."

Shingen looked at Sasuke and nodded. "I trust your best guess. That said, we don't know where ended up after he and Katsu went into the wormhole, so my spies will keep searching for Iekane."

"As will mine." Katsuko grabbed a scroll and brush and jotted down a note.

"You have your own spies?" Not only does this timeline's Katsu have what appears to be a perfect partner, she gets her OWN spies?

"Birthday present," she murmured. Ok. That might blow Mitsuhide's gift of a lock pick set out of the water.

He also got you that pretty robe, and he played the flute for you when you were unconscious…

My inner voice was apparently feeling especially snarky today.

Sasuke brought out the device. "I've managed, theoretically, to override the device's initial coding." Sasuke proceeded to go in to a technical explanation that was at its basis, a pretty sophisticated form of hacking. "So, Kaya, all that I need is your thumbprint and you can use it to take Aki into the future."

That's all?

I was a bit nervous to have control over the device. "You don't want that honor for yourself?" After hearing about Katsuko's terrifying experience, I wasn't sure if I wanted to be the pilot on this adventure.

"While I would, in fact be otherwise thrilled to do so," Sasuke exchanged glances with Katsu and Shingen. "I'm afraid I could set it off course."

Oh right. If Sasuke had control over it, we'd just end up going to his future - which would be fine for Aki, but would keep me in the wrong timeline. Although at least if that happened I would never have to run into the version of Mitsuhide who was in love with Mai (although apparently he loves her here too, so… I was kind of SOL no matter where I went).

The thought was brief, and somewhat selfish. Who knew what kind of chaos would come about if I continued to stay in the wrong timeline? And, I still needed to return to my timeline's Sakai and follow up Aki's information on Toshiie.

"For a similar reason, I have come to the conclusion that I will be unable to accompany you on a journey to your own timeline." With a slight attitude of reluctance, he set the device down on Shingen's desk. "I would relish the opportunity to have a long discussion with another version of myself."

Was I imagining that everyone else seemed a bit scared of that idea?

He looked down at his paperwork. "However such a conversation could present a danger to the balance of the multiverse, and with no guarantee of returning to this particular timeline-" He gave a sideeye to Shingen, "although I am relatively certain between myself and I, I could figure it out- I have decided not to make the attempt."

Subtext: he had been planning to go anyway, and Shingen talked him out of it.

With Aki's condition worsening by the hour, we decided not to waste any more time waiting. Shingen and Yuki helped carry Aki to a deserted area behind Tsutsujigasaki Castle. In the distance were some archery targets, so I figured that was what it was normally used for. Good plan to leave from here – the castle inhabitants would avoid this area when Katsuko was out here, to avoid getting hit by stray arrows.

Although, since she was me, there wouldn't be any stray arrows. We'd both learned accuracy one stable wall repair at a time.

Sasuke handed me a packet containing his contact information and a letter I was to give to his other self. "I hope, that at some point, he will be able to figure out how to communicate with me – or however many versions of me there are."

Unlike me, Sasuke seemed not at all weirded out by the prospect of a multiplicity of selves.

While Katsuko took a private moment to say whatever she needed to say to our father, I gave my goodbyes and thanks to Lord Shingen and Yukimura. "It must have been strange for you two, thank you for putting up with me."

"Surrounded by another vision of my devil? Not strange at all." By now, I knew Shingen well enough to know that the flirting was second nature, as was a dry sense of humor, so I simply bowed to him again.

Yuki just grinned at me and punched me in the arm. "You're not so bad, dummy." High praise from that one.

Katsuko left Aki's side and I found myself in a long hug with my alternate… no this isn't weird at all. "Good luck. With everything." That was all she said. But maybe she figured I would know what she meant by 'everything,' since she was me.

Then, per Sasuke's instructions, I put my arms around Aki, activated the device, and once again, hoped there wouldn't be any dinosaurs.

There was that sharp buzzing noise, and the world dissolved into grey once again.

All sounds muffled, then faded out.