Chapter Text
The corridor smelled like antiseptic and something burnt, with an undertone of whatever regret sweats out through your pores at two in the morning.
Lumine sucked in a sharp breath as her boots scuffed against the polished floor, her club tapping lightly against her opposite palm in a steady rhythm. The walk back had been dull. Mercifully so after the day’s chaos, but now the silence gnawed at her nerves. Her escort, the unnervingly restrained version of Dottore, said nothing, his footsteps eerily quiet despite his deliberate pace. Each step felt measured, like he was counting tiles underfoot, and it only made her count them too. One, two, three. Gods, she hated him.
“Could you at least pretend to be human?” she muttered, her voice cutting into the silence with a frustrated edge.
The mask turned slightly toward her, a flicker of acknowledgment before returning forward. No response, of course. Any more dead air and she might actually combust just to spice things up. She adjusted her grip on the club. He probably wouldn’t even flinch if she whacked him with it. Not this one.
They rounded a corner, and there it was: the door to her waking nightmare, the room she started in, looming at the end of the hall. Lumine slowed her pace, dragging her feet deliberately now. Great. Back to the box of existential dread. Maybe they’d redecorated while she was out. A Hang In There poster, perhaps, with an Aranara dangling from a branch.
Her thoughts derailed as a figure darted across the hallway ahead of them. It was so fast, a flash of teal and white slicing through the sterile quiet. Lumine froze mid-step, her thoughts skidding to a halt. No, no way. That couldn’t have been—
“Hey!” she barked, her voice cracking through the silence like a whip.
Her legs moved before her brain caught up, propelling her down the corridor after the blur. The polished floor squeaked under her boots as she closed the distance, blood pounding in her ears. Her grip tightened on the club. Whatever this was, whoever this was, it wasn’t getting away. Not without an explanation. Not without a concussion.
The figure turned sharply into an adjacent hallway with the kind of speed that suggested complete disregard for mortal physics. Lumine came careening around the corner after them, her breath hitching as the teal-haired man snapped into focus. He was unmistakable: broad shoulders, that calculated posture, the black mask gleaming under flickering fluorescent lights.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Lumine hissed.
With every ounce of frustration from this too-long, absurd day fueling her swing, she brought the club down like justice rendered in wood. The satisfying thunk of impact reverberated up her arm, the shock carrying straight into her shoulder.
The man stumbled forward from the force, laughing. Laughing?
He whirled to face her, his mask tilting at an angle that almost looked smug, if masks could manage it.
“Oh, finally!” he crowed, straightening with a kind of wild energy that rattled something loose in the air around him. His posture shifted, weight sliding onto the balls of his feet. He looked ready to pounce, but not out of anger. No, this guy was excited. “I was wondering when you’d stop holding back, Stardust!”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Lumine barked, swinging the club again because apparently talking wasn’t going to cut it.
He ducked under her swing, fluid as water, spinning away with an agility that definitely wasn’t natural. His laugh echoed in the corridor, sharp and grating and full of gleeful menace. “Oh, I like this version of you! Feisty! Unpredictable!”
“There’s more than one of you?!” she yelled, her voice cracking under the weight of disbelief and mounting fury. She swung again, harder this time, even as her brain reeled from what she’d just said. One was bad enough. The universe couldn’t hate her this much.
Lumine’s grip on the club tightened. “You’re lucky I don’t have my fucking sword!” she snapped, driving another swing with all of her mounting frustration behind it. The wood whistled through the air and clipped his shoulder, sending him stumbling into the wall.
“Oho! That temper! Always a delight!” The Dottore she had just bludgeoned clutched his shoulder with one hand, his hunched posture betraying more exhilaration than pain. He didn’t even try to straighten before looking up at her, tilting his head at that infuriatingly jaunty angle. “Imagine what you could do if you were trying.”
A slow, deliberate clap echoed from down the corridor. Lumine whipped around, her gaze locking onto two more figures standing side by side. They were identical in every technical sense, tall, masked, and teal-haired, but their postures could not have been more different. The unnervingly restrained one stood with his arms crossed, his mask angled just slightly in her direction, the posture of a scientist observing a particularly vigorous lab rat. The one from when she first woke up had not moved at all, hands clasped loosely behind his back, radiating the quiet authority of someone who had never needed to.
“Fascinating,” the still one murmured, his voice low and studious, like he was diagnosing a particularly stubborn illness. “Her reflexes are better than I anticipated. Adaptive, as usual. Alpha, congratulations are in order. You’ve singlehandedly managed to botch the simplest observational experiment in the history of Teyvat.”
Alpha, apparently, clutched the wall for support, still grinning like a lunatic despite the fresh bruise she’d just delivered. His posture oozed mock offense, head cocked at a sharp angle toward the one that spoke. “Aww, Beta, botched? I was merely engaged in field analysis,” he said with the airy confidence of someone who had never once considered being wrong. “Very hands-on.” He shot a glance at Lumine, his mask tilting just enough to drip with implied commentary.
“If by hands-on you mean getting thoroughly dismantled by your own test subject,” Beta replied without missing a beat, his arms still folded and, frankly, looking far too smug for someone who hadn’t even moved an inch. “Then yes, I suppose your methodology is faultless.”
The first doctor, standing as still as a predator waiting to strike, added with glacial calm, “Or perhaps he underestimated her. Again.”
Lumine pivoted slowly on her heel, staring down the surreal spectacle of three identical teal-haired disasters occupying the same airspace. Their collective presence felt so aggressively wrong her brain briefly considered quitting entirely. Three. There were three of them. She counted once, twice, just to be sure, but no amount of blinking could conjure a hallucination solid enough to explain this particular nightmare.
Her voice cracked under the weight of disbelief. “What. The. Fuck.”
Her grip on the club loosened for an instant, her body moving before her brain caught up with the cascading absurdity of the situation. She threw her hands into the air in a gesture that could only be described as surrender to some nonspecific higher power. “That’s it. I’m done,” she announced. The club clattered to the floor behind her with a dull echo as she turned sharply on her heel. It wasn’t running away, if anyone asked. It was strategic disengagement.
The hallway yawned open in front of her, stretching endlessly now that she refused to look back. Her footsteps hurried forward, fast and clipped, like she could outpace the sheer ridiculousness she’d just witnessed. She didn’t slow down, didn’t glance behind to see if the trio of nightmares was following. They probably weren’t; they’d seemed too busy exchanging snipes like terrible clones in a sitcom no one wanted to watch.
Nope. Nope. Nope. Not dealing with this. She was already halfway to convincing herself she didn’t need to deal with any of it when she rounded the next corner and promptly collided with something solid.
Someone solid.
The air punched out of her lungs as she stumbled back, blinking up at yet another teal-haired figure. Just different enough that her brain stuttered with recognition instead of filing him under the same problem. The impact jolted through her ribs like she’d run chest-first into a particularly exasperated encyclopedia.
“Watch it,” came the familiar yet dissonant voice, lighter, almost lilting. Teal hair, shorter and messier, escaped in feathery tufts from beneath his mask, which covered more of his face but exposed ruby red eyes. Somehow more whimsical, less threatening… and then the bowtie. Pink, absurd, smug in its very existence, perched on the pristine collar of a long white dinner coat that swished over polished boots. He looked half magician, half rejected orchestra conductor, and fully out of place.
She stumbled back, blinking hard, as if her retinas were trying to file a missing persons report for sanity.
“No,” she said, voice flat and exhausted. “Nope.”
The figure spread his arms with theatrical flair, the tails of the coat fanning out like an unwelcome invitation. “What, no applause for my entrance? Really, I thought this particular variant might elicit—”
Her hand shot up to silence him, palm outward. “Stop talking.”
He tilted his head, bemused, one gloved finger tapping lightly against the edge of his mask. “But I—”
“I said stop.” Her voice came dangerously close to cracking under the weight of her rapidly depleting patience. She stepped back, then again, her grip tightening on the club until her knuckles ached. Another one. Another one.
Then he… giggled.
It started small. A hitch. A crack.
Then—
“HAHA—ha—HEHEHE—HO—ho—”
It spiraled, pitching up, dropping low, breaking apart and reforming like it couldn’t decide what shape laughter was supposed to take. He leaned forward, clutching his midsection as if the sheer force of mirth might physically uncoil him.
Lumine stared, the club frozen mid-air. For a wild second, she thought he might split in half. Or multiply, like some demented amoeba straining under the weight of absurdity.
“What,” she managed to croak, her voice rough with disbelief, “what in the seven hells is wrong with you?”
He didn’t answer. Couldn’t, given how hard he was wheezing now, one gloved hand slapping the table as if to stabilise himself.
She narrowed her eyes at him, watching the way his movements lagged a fraction behind themselves, like his body was buffering. The others had drifted to the doorway to watch her process the newest variable, Beta breathing out an almost suffering, “Sigma…” as though saying it might be enough to reel the segment back in.
She flicked a glance to the three identical versions observing, then sighed, resigned. If he was meant to be her ‘Guide’ to reunite with her sibling and get the fuck out of Dodge, then she’d have to get used to it. Quickly. She gestured at the display before them.
“…When did you get… skrunkly?”