Okay, what the heck is going on? The last time she was awake she was in her nice little apartment and then she fell asleep and... woke up here.
Here being a tiny crag of blasted black rock in the middle of the ocean.
"Hello?" she calls. "Anybody out there?"
... no response.
Also, is it just her or is her voice higher —
Eva pauses.
She experimentally squeezes her chest.
She looks down at her crotch and flexes her pelvic muscles experimentally.
... Okay, she has bigger questions, like where did her dick go.
Seriously though, what is she supposed to be doing about being on a blasted crag of rock in the middle of the ocean.
"Hello?"
Something stirs amid the waves. Something with a fish tail, but the upper body of a human.
Its eyes are milky and sightless, but they fix on Eva all the same.
It opens its mouth, and sings a beautiful song.
(A faint snatch of another song clears her mind, as if sung from high above in the sky —)
She starts backing away. She does not want to tangle with an actual goddamn siren.
The siren slowly approaches. It's not adapted to come to land, but it sings, and with every note the compulsion grows stronger —
"Stay back!" She shouts over the song, trying to drown it out. "I'm not yours to — eat or whatever!"
And then the siren's song is suddenly interrupted by the piercing horn of an electric train locomotive. A strange craft, like a train that had a few cars folded up on each other into something long and sleek with a hint of blockiness, pulls up beside the rocks, splashing both the human and the siren.
A black-haired trans girl shouts from the engine's window. "Get in!" She jerks her thumb at the door behind her.
— Okay, she'll take it!
She piles into the trainship and slams the door in the siren's face.
"Better luck next time, sirens!" She pulls away the second her new friend is aboard, charging out onto the open waves in a spray of seawater.
Then she turns around with a smile, now that there's nothing around. Now that they're not in a life or death situation, it's viscerally obvious that the black-haired girl is like her, full of connections to other places, like an electric cityscape, a vast empty sky, a starlit forest, and what is unmistakably an Earth.
"Welcome aboard. I'm Sable."
"Hey, uh, I'm Eva."
Eva smiles hesitantly and offers her hand to shake.
"I'm sorry, I have no idea what's going on. I was having... dreams... and then I woke up on that crag of rock with no idea how I got there. Also I was suddenly a girl. I mean, I was a girl before, but now I'm really a girl — what am I saying. Sorry."
She giggles ruefully and shakes Eva's hand. "Lucked into a magical transition with the spiffy powers, sweet. W—I got this awesome trainship instead."
With a shake of her head, she continues, "I wouldn't say no to a magic transition, but I think one of my powers is doing a better-than-hormones thing gradually in the background. We'll see, though."
"You said you were having dreams just before you woke up on the rocks? Wow, you've got to be even newer than w—I am!"
Eva smiles. "Yeah, I literally woke up like five minutes ago. What've you figured out so far, because I've got nothing."
"We're travelers. We walk — or in my case drive — between worlds at natural holes between them, where they leak into each other. There are lots of worlds, and this one is all ocean, with rare exceptions like what you woke up on."
"Ooh. That's super cool. So we're literally in a different universe right now? That... would explain the floating train."
"Yep! The train's from an electric city world, full of stone and metal people, although folding it up on itself seems to be one of ou— my powers. It's... for some reason I just get the impression that the lever that controls that wouldn't work for someone else."
Sable sighs and facepalms. "Fuck. We just can't stop slipping on that around people we actually care about getting to know, can we?"
"It's cool! I, um. I have an awake character myself, she goes by Isabella. She's cool, you might get to meet her later. She's a vampire."
"Oooh," she grins, her cheeks turning faintly pink, "vampires are fun. We look forward to it. There's five of us. I'm Sable, the others are Hailey, Maya, Neo, and Ruby. So, heading anywhere in particular, or shall we just keep exploring?"
"I mean, give me a minute, my whole time here was basically spent trying not to get gutted by a fish. I haven't even figured out my powers yet. I assume I have some if you got a whole train and stuff."
She pauses, focuses.
"I think I can tell which way we're heading. West-southwest...?"
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