It reacts with the fast, unhesitating reaction of an immune system that has fought off every kind of dimension-hopping virus possible in the wide, wide world. It turns the entire area around her intrusion into undifferentiated hot plasma, and then ejects the resulting plasma into orbit.

Or, to simplify a complex behavior driven by the evolutionary threat and counter-threat of different diseases and immune system reactions into human terms: it sneezes.

Zebrawood grabs some of the plasma and stabilizes her orbit, high above the planet. The reaction was unexpectedly violent, which might provide a clue to how the crystal is designed, actually. It's lucky that she was able to hold onto the portal, and therefore the link to her other selves.

"I think that was a success," she transmits, even as she pulls more mass through the portal and uses it to dodge a relativistic blast from the planet's surface. "But whatever it is, it is really not happy with me."

She starts accelerating away, even as the planet starts throwing clumps of anti-iron at her. A moment later she curses as it releases a beam singularity in her direction, which she is only able to dodge because of the faster-than-light sensing capabilities of her crystal.

A moment later, a deep pulse of spacetime rolls out from the planet, and her captured portal winks out.

"... shit."

She burns out of orbit as fast as she can, dodging increasingly powerful and esoteric attacks. By the time she's a light-minute away, the planet has mostly calmed down. She tweaks her trajectory to slingshot off this solar system's Mars and drop into the sun in a few months, staying well away from the planet.

It absentmindedly stops scratching, returning that locus of its attention to one of the other little people it's watching.

"... okay, maybe that was a bad idea," Zebrawood says, once her backup is woken up. She watches the last few moments of sensor telemetry that made it through the portal. "Hickory, you were totally right," she messages her, although it will take a few minutes to get a reply.

"So going through the portals is definitely a no-no until we can phase through that crystal material."

"Actually — we got some much better measurements from that. I think that it may be impossible in principle to phase through that crystal; they're way too information-dense to handle with our current generation of processor," one of her other selves pipes up. "So until we can figure out how to replicate portals ourselves, I think we're stuck on this one planet."

Yellow Birch glances at the timer that counts down to when they'll be able to cover the Earth.

"... and that means doing our best not to upset things too much while we wait."