When he first saw her, Zethar thought he must be encountering a mirage. She shimmered in the distance like a hologram, but it was impossible. X3 was uninhabited.
“Ahoy,” he shouted at the mirage. Just to be sure.
Across dimensions, on a deserted beach in Isolde’s universe, the sound of his voice echoed through the night, startling her.
“Is someone there?” she called out, deepening her voice a few octaves to sound more like a man, and less like a lost woman walking alone in the dark.
“Ahoy!”
The sound came again. Louder this time. Further down the shore, Isolde could see a faint incandescent outline that looked vaguely like a man. She froze, pulling her shawl tight. She hadn’t been gone long. Maybe it wasn’t too late to turn around and run back to the house. To the party. And to Aurelian.
Instead, she continued to drift towards the voice as if pulled by an unseen tide.
Zethar could see her more clearly now. A woman walking to him, but ghostly. Suspended in another world that was not his own. For two revolutions, he had been on a solo mission researching X3’s dimensional overlaps without ever actually encountering one. Could this really be happening now?
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Approaching the glowing shape, Isolde saw that the voice belonged to a male figure, only he was barely there; his features flickering in and out like static on a television set.
His voice crackled, “I can see you. Can you see me? Can you hear me?”
“I can see the shape of you,” Isolde said, “And I can hear you.”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Isolde. Where are you?”
“My name is Zethar. I am a researcher, stationed on X3.”
“I’ve never heard of X3,” Isolde said. “Am I imagining you?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I believe we are in different dimensions.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “That’s not possible.”
“I’ve never encountered anything like this,” Zethar admitted. "But perhaps we were meant to find each other, across the impossible."