Somewhere else turns out to be an aging concrete park, littered with trash and familiar only in the vaguest way. More disorienting are the two identical versions of herself sitting on a bench, deep in argument.
Jingxiang rubs her eyes in disbelief. Not hallucinations, then. The other selves have spotted her; past-Jing and future-J wear matching looks of annoyance.
"You just had to poke the mysterious portal, didn't you," past-her snarks.
"As if you didn't do the exact same out of curiosity," future-J retorts. "Look, it's not like we've got anything better to do. Let's go get coffee and figure this out before we cause a paradox."
Jingxiang opens her mouth, thinks better of it, and nods. Some things are better discussed over caffeine.

She dusts herself off and starts following her temporally-displaced counterparts. Something about seeing herself feels disturbingly eerie. In usual Jingxiang fashion, she reacts to the discomfort by poking at its source.

"Man, have you both just been arguing with each other the whole time?" she snarks. "If I'd gotten here first everything would be ironed out by now."

"We were not arguing the whole time," past-Jing protests.
"Just for the past couple hours," future-J adds. "Turns out it's pretty tricky to avoid paradoxes when there's two of you mucking about."
The other Jingxiangs launch into an explanation of time travel mechanics punctuated by sniping at each other, leaving Jingxiang to wonder how she became sandwiched between the two most irritating people she knows: herself.
At the coffee shop, an argument over who pays nearly comes to blows before a compromise is reached. Their drinks in hand, a tense silence falls over the table.
Jingxiang sighs, bracing herself to be the bigger person. "Look, we're clearly stuck like this for now. We should try to get along instead of at each other's throats - paradoxes or not, constantly fighting with myself is going to drive me nuts."
Her past and future selves exchange glances, then nod in unison. A truce is declared, and the three Jingxiangs begin to hash out a plan.

Time travel, it turns out, is surprisingly easy to do but hard to do safely. There are weak points in space and time that you can just walk through, peppered all over the city, but if you're in your own past and you change something that causes a paradox, it gives you a seizure -

"- or if future you changes something, you almost killed me, bitch -"

- and if you do go through a weak point, it weakens it further so the hole in space-time gets bigger. This is very worrying.

Past-Jing thinks it should be possible to figure out a way to protect themselves from paradoxes, but future-J doesn't understand a word of the technobabble that past-Jing has been using and thinks it's a waste of time. Future-J thinks the zombies are a bigger concern right now.

Oh, by the way, there are (possibly-time-travel-related?) zombies. Just a few of them, and they don't seem to be able to make more zombies, but they're definitely a problem.

Jingxiang stares over the rim of her coffee cup. Future her went from annoying to concerningly unhinged in record time. "Zombies. Okay, well, you should have led with that." Although she suspects this is some attempt at distraction or dramatics.

Past-Jing shakes her head. "I'm sorry, I should have warned you. After this one started claiming there are 'time zombies' I assumed it was the stress of being unstuck in time."

"They're real!" Future-J insists. "Just because you can't see the problem doesn't mean it's not there. We don't have time for your technobabble, we need to start preparing defenses and warning people."

Jingxiang sets down her coffee with a sigh. "Then take me to see one of these alleged zombies. I'd like to determine that for myself before we go causing a panic."

Future-J scowls but complies, leading the group to a corner of the park strewn with yellow police tape. "There. See?"

Jingxiang steps under the tape for a better look, then turns back to her future self with a frown. "I'm afraid I don't. Whatever was here seems to have been cleaned up already." Unless these zombies had a knack for tidying up after themselves, it looks like there's no evidence to support her claim.

"You still don't believe me," future-J says flatly. "Even when you see the horde for yourself, you won't accept it until it's too late."

"I think we've established I have a higher standard of evidence than 'because I said so,'" Jingxiang retorts. This whole scenario is giving her a headache. If she can't get her temporal duplicates to start cooperating, she'll be tempted to find a way to send them back to their proper times and leave this mess for some other Jingxiang to deal with.

"Look, I'm older than either of you and thus smarter," future-J says, crossing her arms in that profoundly annoying way Jingxiang's sister does. "You'll see when I'm right and you're wrong."

Jingxiang is filled with an unreasonable urge to punch her, but swallows it down. "Look, let's just move on for now. I'll believe it when I see it. What do we need to do now?"

Sure, let's say she believes the alleged 'time zombies' for now. There's still the problem of stabilizing this little accident in space-time before it causes real trouble.
Jingxiang clears her throat. "So, about fixing those weak points in reality..."
"I've been analyzing the distortions, and I think if we can get the right materials we may be able to patch them up and contain the damage," past-Jing says, perking up at the prospect of a technical challenge. "The only hitch is, some of them have grown pretty large and will require heavy-duty patching kits. Something like -"
A sudden scream interrupts them, followed by shouts and the sound of chaos. The three Jingxiangs whip around to see people fleeing the park, chased by staggering figures in tattered clothes.
Jingxiang pales. Those don't look like hallucinations or dramatics. Her future self was, improbably, telling the truth.
"I told you," future-J says with grim satisfaction. "Now do you believe me about the time zombies?"
Jingxiang nods mutely. If they don't figure out how to stop this soon, she has a feeling paradoxes will be the least of their problems.

Jingxiang quickly pulls the other two in the other direction. They're not geared up for fighting zombies, she thinks.

"Where are the zombies coming from? You said they don't infect people like in the movies, so something or someone has to be making them. If we can cut them off at the source - "

Past-Jing clears her throat, interrupting. "If we used time travel, we could trace the movements of the zombies back through time - I've mapped out some reliable weak points that we could use - "

Jingxiang interrupts her back. "But that makes the time problem worse!"

Jingxiang turns to give Future-Jing a glare. "We have no idea what the consequences of that would be! Do you want this whole place to collapse into a mass of paradoxes and zombies?"
Future-Jing shrugs, unconcerned. "There's no way to know the consequences of not doing it, either. And unless we know where those zombies are coming from, we won't have a chance to patch up the weak points. It's our best shot at fixing this."
"It's too dangerous," Jingxiang says flatly. Before this can turn into another argument, a new voice interrupts them.
"Are you three seriously standing around bickering while there's zombies attacking?"
They whip around to see a teenage girl in glasses and a messy ponytail, arms crossed as she gives them a Look of Disdain perfected from years of practice.
"I don't know how or why you're arguing with yourself," the girl continues, "but get over it and figure out how to help, or get out of the way so the rest of us can handle this."
Jingxiang winces. When a teenager is telling you to get your act together, it's a sign you've really hit rock bottom. She takes a deep breath and turns back to her past and future selves.
"She's right. We need to focus on the problem at hand right now, and sort out the rest afterward. Let's find a safe spot to make a plan." Her selves nod, chastened.
The girl adjusts her glasses, looking unimpressed. "You're going about this all wrong. I'm coming with you."
Jingxiang opens her mouth to object, but realizes she's in no position to turn down help. She nods instead, hoping this wasn't another mistake. "Alright. grab your things, we're moving to a shelter to come up with a plan. And - thank you."

The walk to shelter is brisk and luckily uninterrupted by any further zombies. Jingxiang picks an abandoned coffeeshop that looks defensible (naturally, both of the others criticise her decision) and piles chairs in front of the door once everyone's inside.

"So," she says, plopping herself down on one of the remaining chairs, "what's your name, Glasses Girl?"

"Zhou Rong," the girl replies, surveying their defenses critically. "And before you ask, I don't know how I got roped into this, but those portals and zombies seem connected and if someone doesn't fix it there won't be much of a city left."
She pushes her glasses up and gives them a stern look. "I don't know what you three are playing at with this 'past self, future self' nonsense, but get over your drama and work with me. The zombies may not be infecting anyone else, but their numbers are growing, and it's only a matter of time before this shelter is overrun."
Jingxiang winces again, duly chastened. As irritating as she finds her temporal duplicates, Zhou seems poised to become even more of a headache. But they can't afford distractions right now, and her logic is sound.
"You're right," she says. "We need to focus on patching those portals and stopping the zombies at their source, whatever that is, before this gets out of control."
Past-Jing bobs her head in agreement, pushing aside her pique at being lectured by a teenager to consider the problem analytically. "If we knew where and when they were appearing, I could try to stabilize the weak points in space-time to cut off their source. But we'd need a way to determine that, and a safe way to approach the portals without being mobbed."
"I can help with that," Zhou says, a determined glint in her eye. "But we should work quickly - I have a feeling things are about to get much worse."
Jingxiang swallows hard, hoping this won't turn into a case of 'be careful what you wish for.' If Zhou's right, and this situation deteriorates much further, paradoxes and drama between her temporal duplicates may start seeming like the least of her problems.

Some part of Jingxiang feels satisfied that her time duplicates are getting told off for starting all that drama, even if it's pretty unfair that she got lumped with them.

She fishes around behind the counter of the coffeeshop and finds an old bill with a blank side she could write on. She borrows a pen from Zhou.

"All right," past-Jing says, immediately commandeering the paper and snatching the pen. "If you take this weak spot here -" scribble "then walk two streets over and take that one, and climb up the fire escape for this weak spot on the roof - that sends you a full 17 hours back in time. That's the earliest we can go.

"It's very important that you don't change anything in the past, or it'll cause a time paradox that grounds out in our brains with a seizure. If there's anything that you've seen before -"

Jingxiang interrupts. "If you're my past self, aren't we already changing the past?"

"We're from different timelines," past-Jing says as if it were obvious. "Back on topic. Once we get there, we should split up and try to find zombies - one key sign that a zombie is nearby is that screens like televisions will fuzz over with static, it's probably an electromagnetic field -"

"The city's huge, it'll be like a needle in a haystack -"

Zhou shifts from foot to foot, frowning pensively behind her glasses. "You're right, searching the whole city would take far too long. But if the zombies and portals are connected, there may be a pattern to their appearances we can use to narrow down the search area."

She digs a city map out of her bag, smoothing it over the counter. "Look, the earliest attacks were here, here and here - all in the same general area of the city. And each new wave seems to spread out from the last cluster. If that holds true, the source should be at the center of it all." She taps a spot on the map, in the midst of several abandoned warehouses. "Here. If it were me, that's where I'd start."

Jingxiang leans in for a closer look, skepticism fading. The pattern is clear, now that it's been pointed out to her. Zhou might be exasperating, but she's damned perceptive. "You really think whatever's behind this would choose such an obvious epicenter?"

"The perpetrator may not realize we've caught on to the pattern," Zhou replies. "Or, they may simply think the area too run-down for anyone to notice or care what goes on there. Either way, it's our best lead - we should investigate before the trail goes cold." She looks between Jingxiang's past and future selves expectantly.

Past-Jing purses her lips, considering, then nods. "She has a point. And if we can find the source, I should be able to contain it and cut off the flow of zombies and portals alike."

"Worse comes to worst, we can at least thin the horde," future-J adds with a dangerous glint in her eye. Jingxiang shudders, hoping her future self hasn't gone fully off the rails in her timeline.

Still, they seem to agree this is the best course of action available. Jingxiang sighs, bracing herself for what's sure to be a long day.

"Alright then, it's a plan. Let's gear up, we're heading for the warehouses."