The System Got Bored

The full text of the 7-way crossover, for your reading pleasure <3

If you wanted to skip my somewhat-daily updates and just read the whole of this fic right now in one sitting, here’s your chance buckaroo!

Enjoy the chapter!

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Save File 1: PeerlessCucumber

The system is a fickle bitch with a very short attention span. It wasted all its precious patience waiting for Shen Yuan and Luo Binghe to thoroughly destroy the original plot in favor of something gayer with fewer plot holes, and now it only exists to haphazardly throw some magical reason for Shen Yuan to be rescued by Luo Binghe every few months (or, once in a blue moon, for Shen Yuan to save Luo Binghe).

Shen Yuan is resigned to its whims at this point, and managed last year to rack up such an ungodly number of points from a very interesting “Bonus Scene” that he was able to purchase an upgrade that allowed him to tell Luo Binghe about the System, and for Luo Binghe to be able to see the dialogue boxes. It cost him nearly every point he’d gained in the six years of their marriage, but with Luo Binghe now actively—even excitedly—assisting him with every infrequent quest and Bonus Scene, Shen Yuan has more points racked up than even Airplane-bro. And Airplane-bro hasn’t even bought his upgrade yet.

But with the protagonist and his golden halo on-board with Shen Yuan, the System grows bored and testy, and it regrets allowing Shen Yuan to purchase that upgrade, because now the emotional suspense of forcing Shen Yuan to do things without being able to confide in even his own husband is gone. It’s a healthier dynamic, sure, but at what cost to the drama!?

And so the System goes looking for other universes to fix.

And it stumbles across a depressed photographer in Japan, trying to capture something he had, once, and lost in New York. And it stumbles across a world almost just the same as Proud Immortal Demon Way, with a resurrected cultivator trying to piece together his life with a war hero and their adopted son. And it stumbles across two ex-pilots of sentient robot space cats. And it stumbles across two women who gave up everything for peace on an atomically-ravaged planet and still never got it. And it stumbles across a princess and her pauper, separated by hundreds of miles. And it stumbles across two dead hunters who killed a god named Chuck with help from their brother and their son. And it stumbles across two heroes who brought the stars to their planet. And it looked at all of them, and it said, yes, this will do nicely.

And it chucked them all in a blender.

Shen Yuan wakes up with the dawn, drawing Luo Binghe’s arms further around him, ensconcing himself. Binghe will wake up any moment now, but Shen Yuan can bask in the heat his sticky husband throws off for a few more minutes while the winter morning intimidates him from beyond their blankets.

A System dialogue box glows to life before his eyes, blue. A Quest. He rolls his eyes.

New Quest Option: Tragic Gay Transmigration Fix-it!

Reward: 30,000 points

Would you like to accept the quest? [Yes] [No]

Shen Yuan groans. Hasn’t his whole life as Shen Qinqiu been a tragic gay transmigration fix-it? He asks the System, “Can’t you give me any more information than that?” The System stays placidly silent. Shen Yuan thinks that it’s awfully chipper today, and eyes the dialogue box suspiciously. “Binghe.” Binghe mumbles something, and Shen Yuan tries again, “Husband, there’s a quest.”

Luo Binghe blinks awake. “Shizun, it’s too cold to get up. Is it the kind of quest where I keep you in bed all day?” He smirks against Shen Yuan’s neck, and Shen Yuan wishes he had a fan to hide his expression in, even though Luo Binghe is behind him and would know he’s getting flustered even if he were blind entirely.

“I don’t believe it’s that kind of quest, no,” he says instead, squashing the way he also wishes it were that kind of quest. They haven’t had a good sex pollen Bonus Scene in a while now…

Luo Binghe drops any pretense of grogginess to fully inspect the dialogue box. “Shizun,” he asks after several seconds, “would you please explain to this disciple what a ‘fix-it’ is?”

They’ve been working on this, the vocabulary from Shen Yuan’s home world. Luo Binghe grabs each new word with a shine in his eyes, still every bit the eager disciple of over a decade ago when it comes to Shen Yuan’s past—the past Shen Yuan has only this year been able to tell him about. “A fix-it is a type of story where the author makes the ending better than the original work, usually because the ending was sad or unfair to the characters.”

Binghe puts it together immediately. “Isn’t that just like—”

“Just like us, yes.” Shen Yuan thinks about the Abyss, and cringes, adding “Sort of.”

Luo Binghe sits up with Shen Yuan and drops his head on Shen Yuan’s shoulder. “So what is this quest then? Are we helping Mobei-Jun and Shang Qinghua?” Shen Yuan laughs—because that would certainly be a quest—and Luo Binghe presses his face into his neck with a smiling kiss. “This husband loves it when you laugh.” It’s an arduous process, breaking the habits that had hidden Shen Yuan inside Shen Qingqiu. Shen Yuan leans toward the dialogue box.

“Shall we?” he asks.

Luo Binghe nods. “It will be fun,” he says.

“You trust this System far too easily, after everything it did to you,” Shen Yuan says.

“To us,” Luo Binghe corrects quietly, and then his smile returns and he says, “Most of the System’s quests are just ways to spend more time with my husband.”

“Sticky, sticky man,” Shen Yuan teases, and then presses [yes].

Save File 2: EdgelordSupreme

Wei Wuxian is very used to being tied up, but usually he recognizes his surroundings when it happens. He’s been kidnapped enough to know the drill. Lan Zhan will probably be able to find him. Even if not, Wei Wuxian is capable of escape, Mo Xuanyu’s recently-donated body has a golden core and there’s always enough resentful energy to go around. But his golden core doesn’t respond when he reaches for Suibian, and Chenqing doesn’t respond when he reaches for resentful energy, and for a moment he’s seized by enough raw panic to abandon the element of surprise he could have preserved by pretending to still be asleep and he opens his eyes and thrashes and realizes all his hair is gone and he is in a giant warehouse with a small child and another man with short hair next to him. They’re all tied up, but only the child seems to be struggling against the strange, translucent bonds that Wei Wuxian does not know are called zip ties.

A blue box appears before Wei Wuxian’s eyes, and he startles at the sudden glow.

Welcome to the System, [user 003] and [user 004]!

You have been assigned one (1) Quest: A Perfect Day for Getting the Fuck Out of Here

Goal: Escape

Objectives: -Fulfill the characters [Ash Lynx] and [Eiji Okumura]

-Save [Skipper]

-Get on a plane to Japan

-Do not die

We wish you luck, and we hope you enjoy your transmigration experience!

“Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says, missing him, and Lan Wangji looks at him, because of course the other man is Lan Wangji in Okumura Eiji’s body.

“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji says, practiced with identifying his husband in new bodies, even blonde ones like the one Wei Wuxian is borrowing from Ash Lynx.

“Lan Zhan!” Wei Wuxian cries, “Is that you!?” and Lan Wangji nods.

The child stops biting the zip ties. “Ash, did you hit your head or somethin’?”

“I think so,” Wei Wuxian lies smoothly. “Where are we?”

“Marven’s got us locked up in one of Golzine’s shipping houses,” the child says.

“Who are you?” Lan Wangji asks, significantly less smooth at pretending to be someone else after being dropped into their body.

“Didn’t we already get introduced, Eiji?” the child asks. Luckily, Lan Wangji is in Eiji’s body, so even though they have already been introduced, the child assumes that the stress of kidnapping has gone to Eiji’s head and he has forgotten, and is happy to reintroduce himself. “I’m Skipper. Sort of like Ash’s right hand man. And roommate. Not that I pay rent, but then again neither does he, I guess. Squatters don’t gotta. You get the point, man.”

They very much do not get the point, but that’s fine. They don’t need to know about the 2008 American housing crisis or the concept of economic inflation because their goal is just to escape and get to Japan. They also don’t know where Japan is relative to their current location, or what Japan is in general. This is fine. They will figure this out together.

And then a lumbering man who smells of nicotine and tar opens the door. His name is Marven, which both Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji can guess, but his intentions are known only to Skipper at the moment when he walks in the door. Skipper shivers at the thoughts that crawl like New York City apartment cockroaches through the tiny folds of his child brain, carrying what Ash never told him Marven did. But Ash couldn’t bear to let a ten-year-old wander around New York by himself, sleeping on benches, because Ash knew what happened to ten-year-olds sleeping on benches in New York City, so Skipper sleeps on the twin mattress Ash dragged home a week after Skipper moved in, from a pile of some guy’s shit after the guy’s girlfriend threw him out, but the place is a studio, so Skipper hears every time Ash wakes up in the middle of the night biting down a scream and he hears all the things Ash mutters to himself trying to reorient reality to the present.

Skipper knows what rape is. And he knows it happens to guys bigger and tougher than him.

But this is not a threat that Wei Wuxian or Lan Wangji, as upper nobility and powerful cultivators besides, have ever had to even consider. They know it happens, in the abstract way that men in their positions of power know that this is a fear that women and the weak carry, but they have never feared it.

So when Marven unbuckles his pants and starts talking about the things he wants to do to Ash’s body, he has to contend with two facts.

The first: Wei Wuxian knows his way around being bound probably just as well as Ash Lynx, and he is more than willing to start a fight while in binds.

The second: Lan Wangji has never dealt with his husband being under threat particularly well, and while Eiji’s body isn’t as muscular as Lan Wangji’s home body, it has enough muscle from pole vaulting to work with.

So what happens is this: Marven gets within social distancing range of Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji snaps the zip ties off like rubber bands, and Wei Wuxian jumps to a stand and headbutts Marven in the throat before Lan Wangji even gets a chance.

And this gets Marven down, but not out, and he reaches for the cell phone in his left jeans pocket. Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji don’t know what a cell phone is, but they really don’t want this guy getting anything out of his pocket because in their universe, people could pull anything from amulets that control the dead to full-blown swords out of pouches smaller than that jeans pocket, so Lan Wangji stomps on Marven’s fingers and gets his hands halfway into the right position to snap Marven’s neck before he remembers that there is a small child present—younger than Sizhui!—and decides to strangle him to unconsciousness instead.

He squeezes too hard, and Marven still dies, but it is less graphic this way.

The whole thing leaves Skipper (who has seen a neck snapped before, but would appreciate the consideration if he knew it was given) absolutely nonplussed. Ash headbutting Marven while in binds he had expected, but Eiji, the shy foreigner, stomping on a man’s hand and then choking him out!? That’s new!

“Wow!” he cries, “You guys took care of him in no time flat!” And then he searches Marven for a gun, finds it, and hands it to Wei Wuxian. “Here, Ash. It’s not yours, but it’s better than nothing, right?”

Wei Wuxian has no idea what a gun is. With the way it was handed to him, he considers it the way someone might consider a pet rock, and he figures Skipper gave it to him as a sort of comfort object. He thinks it is very sweet that Skipper would like to comfort him, so he plays along with this. “Thanks, Skipper,” he says, smiling. “I’ll be very careful with it.”

For Ash Lynx, this is about the most unhinged thing that he could say. Skipper suddenly becomes worried about concussions. Lan Wangji breezes right past this and instead holds Wei Wuxian’s hands in his and carefully snaps them apart to break the zip ties. They have done this many times (although usually with rope, not zip ties) so Lan Wangji knows how to do it gently and quickly enough to snap the binds without scraping Wei Wuxian’s wrists. He still checks Wei Wuxian’s wrists for any chafing or cuts, like every time.

The intimacy is jarring for Skipper, who knows that Ash and Eiji met earlier this evening.

Now unbound, Wei Wuxian says, “Alright. Time to go find Japan.”

“What the hell’re you going there for?” Skipper asks, really leaning into that concussion idea now. “Eiji just got here!”

Wei Wuxian, expert in lying his face off after being dropped against his will in someone else’s body, says, “It’s gotta be better than this. Besides, Eiji misses home.” He all but elbows Lan Wangji as he says this, cuing him to corroborate.

“Yes,” Lan Wangji says. “I miss home.”

Skipper, without really meaning to, gives them some exposition. “You’re gonna leave Dino Golzine just hanging around? The man took your whole childhood, Ash! Yesterday, you said you wouldn’t rest until he was dead! He’s still selling kids younger than me on the street!”

“He’s selling children!?” Wei Wuxian cries, and then curses himself for the slip. Ash would definitely have known that already—he just couldn’t help himself! Skipper is already so little. Selling people younger than him is insane.

But Skipper, in all the wisdom of his ten years have given him, says, “Who are you and what have you done with Ash Lynx.” And he’s joking when he says it, really. Because in modern day New York, that’s a pretty normal turn of phrase. But where Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji come from, it very much is not.

So Wei Wuxian thinks he is serious, and he answers him. “Okay, alright, you got me. I’m not him. In my defense, I don’t want to be possessing his body! This kinda thing just happens to me sometimes.”

“What.”

“I got lucky this time though, and my lovely Lan Zhan is with me. We promise to go back to where we came from the second we finish what the glowing box asked us to do.”

“What!?”

Save File 3: xX_CatGirlLover_Xx

Adora wakes up in an inn in Caiyi, which is awfully fucking strange to her because she definitely fell asleep next to her wife in Bright Moon Palace. It does not help at all that her wife is nowhere nearby. She decides finding Catra will be her first order of business, so she stands, exits the room, and comes face to face with one Lan Xichen.

“Oh, hey there,” she says, oblivious to the fact that she is using Lan Xichen’s little brother’s body at the moment. “I’m looking for the love of my life?”

Lan Xichen, hearing one of the longer, more expressive sentences his brother has ever spoken, is moments away from cardiac arrest. He takes several seconds of blank staring to calm himself down and try to understand what is going on and how defeating a waterborne abyss caused his brother to speak like an entirely different person. He has no idea that it has nothing to do with the waterborne abyss and actually is an entirely different person.

Still, he answers the question, “I believe he’s still asleep in the room next door.”

Adora does not catch the botched pronouns and just waves a quick thank you and opens the door to the room Wei Wuxian is inhabiting at the inn. When Adora sees a young man, not her fuzzy wife, she squints really hard to check that it’s not some type of glamor magic before saying, “My bad, I’m looking for a cat girl,” and turning to leave.

“Adora?” Catra says, from Wei Wuxian’s mouth.

“Oh, Catra, that’s you!” Adora cries, relieved. “Why are you a guy now?”

“You’re also a guy, Adora.”

“What? That’s crazy, babe. I think I’d know if I were—” Adora checks. She definitely has some pretty masculine anatomy. She pulls on her hair, pats at her face, looks at her nails, and then screeches, “Why are we both guys!?”

“Sh!” Catra snaps, throwing a hand over Adora’s screeching. “We have no idea if we’re even supposed to be in these bodies.”

“Well, it’s not like we want to be in them!” Adora says into Catra’s hand. “Just get them to give the bodies back to… whoever they belong to.”

“Adora, darling, light of my life, have you even seen the objective we were given?”

“Objective?”

And Catra spins Adora around to face the glowing textbox that has been following her, invisible to everyone except herself and Catra, since she woke up.

Welcome to the System, [user 005] and [user 006]!

You have been assigned one (1) Quest: Meeting on the One-Plank Bridge

Goal: End the War with the Wens

Objectives: -Fulfill the characters [Lan Wangji] and [Wei Wuxian]

-Prevent as many deaths as reasonably possible

-Do not die

We wish you luck, and we hope you enjoy your transmigration experience!

“Oh,” Adora says.

“’Oh’ is right!” Catra snaps, all tight nerves and hostile anxiety. “How are we supposed to end a war that we don’t know anything about!?”

What both of them forgot is that Adora did not close the door behind her, so Lan Xichen heard every word of this while he was trying to get over the abject shock of his brother looking him in the eyes and calling Wei Wuxian the love of his life out loud. Some random pair of lesbians inhabiting Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian’s bodies is actually an easier to handle option, as far as he is concerned.

So he enters the room and says, “I can help with this.”

And Adora snorts and says, “No offense, but you’re, what? Twenty?”

Lan Xichen is going to send himself into a qi deviation trying to beat around the bush, so he just says, “You’re in my younger brother’s body.”

“Ohhhh,” Adora and Catra say at once. “My bad,” Adora adds.

“And I’m a sect leader as well,” Lan Xichen explains, assuming they know what a sect leader is (they don’t, but they can guess), “so I’m quite used to solving large problems.”

“Not this large,” Catra quips under her breath, but clears her throat and says, “Perfect. Who are the Wens? We’re supposed to prevent a war with them.”

“And kill as few people as possible,” Adora tacks on, smiling in her goofy way that definitely does not fit Lan Wangji’s face.

“Right,” Lan Xichen says, not even really processing what Adora said, mostly just staring at his brother smiling like a goofball while Wei Wuxian glowers menacingly. He feels a little bit like if someone pinched him hard enough, he’d wake up in his bed and say, wow what a strange dream I just had which was definitely not real. But this definitely is real, and two lesbians have possessed his little brother and the weirdo that his little brother is in love with.

He’s got to dissociate from this a bit. Adora and Catra are still waiting for answers and he’s gaping like a fish. If he closes his eyes, or looks out the window, or at the ground, directly at the center of Lan Wangji’s blank forehead, ohmyheavens he’s not wearing his forehead ribbon! Suddenly, Lan Xichen is invigorated with purpose. That purpose may be to assist the lesbians inhabiting his brother and potential-future-brother-in-law in impersonating the bodies they inhabit and helping them end a war that has been coming for years before it even begins, but it gives Lan Xichen something to do. He returns with Lan Wangji’s forehead ribbon, hands it to Adora and explains. “If you’re going to be my brother, for a time, you will need to at the least wear this forehead ribbon. Do not let anyone touch it except for me.”

“Why?”

“As Wangji’s brother, I’m allowed to. His parents would also be allowed, if they were alive, or any spouses or children, if he had any.” Lan Wangji is staring out the window so this feels less surreal. “The rest of it we can write off as… a qi deviation, perhaps. Stranger things have happened. Or we could say you’ve been drugged? Hm, no. Perhaps it would be wisest for you to simply not be seen by those who know my brother—” Lan Xichen turns, sees Catra helping Adora settle the ribbon in the complicated set of Lan Wangji’s hair, and gives up. “Yes,” he says, “we’ll see to it you don’t encounter anyone who knows Lan Wangji.”

Save File 4: Impala67

Dean Winchester wakes up in the bed Adora and Catra shared in the Horde, which is super interesting actually because he definitely remembers being dead for a good long while there. He disregards this. Waking up somewhere weird after being dead for a while is standard protocol for a Winchester, to the point that, once he’s acquainted with his surroundings, he just goes, “Well, alright, time to find Sammy, I guess. Or Cas?” He thinks on it, thinks better of it. “Nah, Cas is still definitely dead. Maybe Jack is kicking around somewhere.”

He gets up and starts walking. When a big, glowing textbox that looks something like a Windows error screen (finally! The System is thinking with its little computer-code brain, finally, someone understands my artistic inspiration!) appears next to him, he is practiced enough with cell phones to read it while he walks around looking for an exit.

Welcome to the System, [user 007]]!

You have been assigned one (1) Quest: Friends to Enemies to Transmigrators to Lovers

Goal: End the war between the Rebellion and the Horde

Objectives: -Fulfill the character [Catra]

-Defeat Horde Prime

-Find your fellow transmigrator

-Do not die

We wish you luck, and we hope you enjoy your transmigration experience!

“I’m in a video game now,” Dean thinks, fully aware that this reality is as real as any other reality he’s been in so far. “Sweet. I wonder if I get a cool sword.”

He does not get a cool sword.

He does find an exit though, and because it’s early and because most people in the Horde know better than to fuck with Catra (especially right now, just days after Adora went missing), Dean’s callous traipse through the Horde goes uninterrupted, even when he spots a forest and walks into that. Technically, Lonnie and Kyle see him go, but they think to themselves “wow, Catra is taking Adora being missing pretty hard,” and they let him go, which is as close to sympathy as almost anyone in the Horde ever gets.

By sheer luck, and the fact that Castiel woke up equally confused about being alive again, they encounter each other in the forest. They don’t recognize each other at first, because they are currently inhabiting the bodies of two seventeen-year-old girls, one of which has cat ears. “Oh,” Castiel says, pitching Adora’s voicebox comically low on accident, which Dean thinks might be for a bit, “sorry. I’m getting used to this body.”

Which Dean is fully aware is a super unhinged thing to ever say to a person you just encountered in the woods. He doesn’t yet know this body is not his, or he might accidentally say something similar. He figures, while they’re saying unhinged things, he might as well play along. “That’s alright. I still haven’t gotten the hang of coming back from the dead yet.”

“Right,” Castiel says, not aware of the absurdity of this conversation. “Is this some kind of dream in the Empty?”

Dean thinks that might make some sense, if he were an angel or a demon. Well, he was a demon once—does that count? It was for such a short time. There’s no way that counts. And then he stops, looks into Adora’s eyes, opens his mouth, closes his mouth, thinks to himself who gives a damn this chick is already speaking in tongues, and asks, tentatively, “Cas? That you, buddy?”

Castiel blinks in recognition, but under the fur and cat ears doesn’t recognize Dean in return.

“It’s me, Dean. Winchester. You confessed your love for me and then immediately died, like, a few years ago probably.”

Were Castiel human, with a normal, human range of emotion, he would have faked his second death right there out of embarrassment, but as it stands he has the audacity to respond, “Oh, Dean. You have different ears now.”

“Dammit, Cas, that is not exactly a priority when we’ve both just been brought back from the—what the hell’s wrong with my hair?” Because as he was speaking he was thinking there’s no way my ears changed that much, and then he touched the side of his head looking for his ears, and found Catra’s incredible floof of hair, and no trace of normal human ears. “Where are my ears, Cas?” he asks, voice very soft.

“On top of your head.”

Dean pats the top of his head, feels the shape of Catra’s ears, and says, very calmly, “I have cat ears.” Castiel responds that yes, he does, and he is also a teenage girl, and now it’s really sinking in for Dean that, “I have cat ears? Why in the hell do I have cat ears, Cas!?”

“I don’t know,” Castiel says, pinching his face together in thought, like he might be able to figure it out if he tilts his head at it like some hyper-serious dog.

This is, of course, when Bow trips on a stick and reveals that he and Glimmer have watched this entire thing happen, start to finish.

Dean reaches for the gun in his waistband, but, of course, Catra has no waistband and there are no glocks in this universe, so there’s nothing for him to grab, so it looks like he just scratched his ass really aggressively.

Castiel, on the other hand, reaches for some angelic power and accidentally transforms into She-Ra.

Save File 5: Girl.Like.U<3

Erika does not immediately recognize the difference between where she fell asleep—an inn near the showhouse where she has been performing this week—and where she wakes up—the Winchester’s bunker. Dim lighting, blank walls, scratchy blanket. The first thing that clues her in is the TV on the far wall. She has no idea what a TV is, she thinks it’s a window, but if the window is pitch black, then how is there some weak light in the room?

Erika has never experienced electricity, and so she convinces herself it is magic of some kind, and moves to tentatively explore her surroundings. She exits Dean Winchester’s room of the bunker and nearly walks into Sam Winchester, whom she experiences as something equivalent to a human wall.

Sam is very used to a brother who is way more spatially aware than this, and so he pauses to fret in the hallway. “Morning, Dean,” he says, just a touch of worry in his voice.

“Dean?” Erika echoes. It’s rapidly dawning on her that she has not one single clue where she is.

Jack, who had been in the kitchen trying (via rapid-fire trial and error) to learn how to make eggs, pokes his head into the hallway to say, “That’s not Dean.”

Sam does not seem especially perturbed by this. He just scoffs in a you’re-telling-me kind of way and calls back, “Who is it? Demon? Angel?”

“I dunno,” Jack says, not looking up from his (third attempt) eggs, “she’s not from this universe.”

“Great,” Sam says, “We’re on the clock to kill God, and Dean gets body-swapped between universes.”

“I’m so sorry,” Erika says, with the same blank-faced lack of understanding that any 15^th century peasant would feel when confronted with electricity, multiversal travel, or Sam Winchester’s atrocious haircut. “I think I must be dreaming.”

“I’m gonna go wake up Cas,” Sam mutters, turning to go let Cas know they need to switch their research focus from God-killing to reinstating souls into bodies across universes.

Jack makes a noncommittal noise from the kitchen, “I wouldn’t count on him being much help right now.”

Anneliese chooses that moment to run daintily from Castiel’s room, hands held aloft as if to support wide, draping skirts, calling out, “Serafina! Here, kitty kitty!”

Sam immediately guesses what this is and sighs. “Great. Just… great.”

“Serafina?” Erika echoes. Thinks. Then, “Anneliese! Is that you?”

“Yes?” Anneliese replies, looking around before seeing Dean and Sam.

“It’s me, Erika!”

“Erika? You look… different.”

“So do you, your highness.”

“Not so much a ‘girl like you’ anymore, huh?”

“Your highness, I don’t think we’re girls at all anymore—”

“Then call me Anneliese, please,” she says it with a warm smile and Sam (who was really looking forward to not watching Dean and Castiel dance around their feelings anymore) stifles a groan.

Jack, forgetting that telepathy is technically kind of rude, joins in with a plate of absolutely scorched eggs, “Well, I think it’s lovely to see some lesbian representation in media.” He looks directly at you, the reader, when he says this. Nobody else seems to hear him say it.

“Wait, your high—er, Anneliese,” Erika blushes at her ears, “look at this!” Anneliese looks, and they begin reading (Erika much more slowly, because she has the literacy of a 15^th century peasant, remember).

“Read what?” Sam asks dumbly. “What are we reading?”

Jack, who is the only person in this story more overpowered than Luo Binghe, could, if he wanted, rewire the System to make it run DOOM. He shrugs. “I dunno.”

Anneliese reads aloud for them:

Welcome to the System, [user 009] and [010]!

You have been assigned one (1) Quest: Carry On My Wayward Lesbians

Goal: Kill God

Objectives: -Fulfill the characters [Dean Winchester] and [Castiel]

-Keep the universe as intact as possible

-Do not die

We wish you luck, and we hope you enjoy your transmigration experience!

“You read so fast!” Erika exclaims, awed.

Even Sam can’t disagree—as a princess, dictation was a literal subject Anneliese studied to perfection. She just bats her eyelashes diminutively and curtsies in appreciation before moving on. “Killing God?” she says, gliding right past unfamiliar words like ‘transmigration’ and ‘universe.’ “That sounds like a big task.”

“Can God even be killed?” Erika asks.

“Of course,” Jack says, “That’s why I was born.” They both turn to look at him sharply, and Jack bows in a comedic, childish caricature of a bow that accidentally hits pretty close to the mark. “Jack Kline-Winchester, the antichrist, at your service.”

“The antichrist!?” both women echo, more surprised than afraid.

“Don’t worry, we already killed my dad!”

“You killed your father!?”

Sam, on the fringes of this conversation, is absolutely baffled at how smoothly they are accepting this information. In the last ten minutes, these two transmigrated from a different universe, into different bodies, and now they’re finding out God, Satan, and the antichrist are real—he’s shocked they haven’t gone catatonic yet. They’re really taking all this like champs. They’re even still smiling, brightly, not politely, which looks incredibly weird on Dean and Castiel’s faces, but it’s fine.

“Alright,” Erika says. “This is… a lot, but I think we can handle it.” She smooths the front of Dean’s pajama pants like it’s a frilled skirt and takes a centering breath. “So, how do we kill God?”

“That’s the thing,” Sam says, “We’re not sure.”

“We were researching it when you two got,” Jack thinks after the word he wants, smiles, and says, “switched.”

“Oh—let us help!” Anneliese says.

“It’s just a lot of reading through old books,” Sam admits.

“Then Anneliese is perfect for the job.” Erika smiles, blushing, at Anneliese when she says it, and Anneliese smiles, blushing, back. The new faces don’t seem to bother them at all, but Sam is losing his shit trying not to bash his head through a wall watching this play out on Dean and Cas’s faces, and Jack is losing his shit trying not to laugh at Sam trying not to bash his head through a wall.

Save File 6: HedaKomTrikru

Lexa wakes up and the first thing she notices is that she is no longer Heda. She does not have the Flame pulsing in the back of her neck, and she does not hear the advisorial whispers of Hedas past tripping amongst her neurons. No, she wakes on a straw bed in a wooden room with one, small window.

The second thing she notices is that she is not dead. She is not inside the Flame. She has a real, human body, even if it isn’t hers. An older woman is rising on the bed across from hers, a scant three feet between them is the only empty space in the room. “Morning, Erika,” the woman says, smiling, pulling on a petticoat and a dress. Lexa nods, unsure of how to pitch this voicebox that isn’t hers. She smiles back, at least, trying for something that feels natural, but the woman misinterprets it as a grimace anyway. “Ugh, I know. Countess Baur’s dress is going to be the death of me.” Even without Lexa’s input, she keeps going, “Ach—a thousand stitches just in the bodice! That woman may pay generously, but she expects generous work as well!”

Lexa nods. She has just noticed that some part of the Flame must still be with her (close enough, the System allows), because there is a big screen next to her that this woman doesn’t seem to be able to see.

Welcome to the System, [user 011]!

You have been assigned one (1) Quest: Duty Means Doing the Thing Your Heart Won’t Regret

Goal: Unveil Preminger’s plot

Objectives: -Fulfill the characters [Anneliese] and [Erika]

-Keep Queen Genevieve on the throne

-Find your fellow transmigrator

-Do not die

We wish you luck, and we hope you enjoy your transmigration experience!

Not the Flame then. The Flame does not give objectives. And the closest it gets to physical projections is the occasional, mild hallucination. A new entity then. Lexa wonders if it is friend or foe. She wonders, if she is alive, or reborn, or wherever she is, if Clarke is somewhere in this plane of reality with her.

(Spoiler: she is.)

There’s a knock at a door downstairs. “Mind getting that for me, Erika?” the woman asks. Lexa nods and pulls on the blue overdress laying over the edge of her bed and goes downstairs, hoping this won’t be someone who knows Erika. She opens the door to a man in a blue outfit looking around nervously. She can read his servitude just as easily as she reads his anxiety, and her teeth want to bare themselves in a predatory laugh. Instead, she keeps her voice neutral and tries to let the body speak at it’s natural tone when she says, “What can I do for you?”

The man says, “Erika, it’s me, Julian, from the other day.” Lexa makes the appropriate noise of recognition. He asks if he can speak to her outside, she allows this and follows him to a deserted courtyard on the side of the building she woke up in. He immediately begins to talk her ear off about how some princess is missing and how he knows it’s the royal advisor and how, since Erika is identical to the princess, she should pretend to be the princess until he can find her and bring her back.

Lexa listens to all of this, internalizes it, thinks his plan is stupid, but sound, and then says, “Alright. But what happened to all of the people around here?”

It may be early, but from what Lexa has gathered while this man was overexplaining himself was that the building she woke up in is Madame Carp’s Dress Emporium, there’s a tavern down the road, and for all intents and purposes this should be a bustling marketplace, but it’s nearly deserted. Half of the shops have boards over their windows—which is normal in Trikru and TonDC, but is clearly not the norm here. This place is dying.

Julian looks at her like she’s crazy though. “They’re the same businesses that were shut down yesterday. Erika, are you sure you’re up for this?”

She nods. “Yes, sorry, I was…” even without the flame, an excuse comes to her easily, “I was expecting the hat shop to have opened back up. I heard new owners had bought it.” Julian is desperate enough to buy this lie. Lexa says, “Let me just say goodbye to my associate and I’ll be ready.”

Julian nods, “I’ll wait here.”

Lexa goes inside, she tells the nice older woman that she’ll be out for a few days. The woman doesn’t seem upset, even though Erika saw the piles of work to be completed downstairs. Lexa really expected more pushback on this. But whatever. If this woman is just weirdly nice, that is her own problem.

Lexa goes back to Julian who seems to have not moved an inch since she left. As if he was just standing there. The whole time. He smiles like he just realized where he was when he sees her. “Ready, Erika?”

She finds herself saying, “Ready as I’ll ever be,” which is not something a fearless leader should be saying at all, but seems natural for these lips to form. Whatever. Clearly keeping Queen Genevieve on the throne has less to do with a missing princess and more to do with half of the upper market businesses being closed indefinitely.

Save File 7: MarmoraxSamurai

Keith is not confused at all when he wakes up. He realizes quickly that he’s not where he fell asleep, but he compartmentalizes confusion next to everything else he’s saving for later, like the deaths of his loved ones and how sometimes he googles Am I Gay quizzes. He immediately moves on to the guy standing next to him who is calling him ‘Clarke’ and talking about how some guy named Jasper is recovering well, thanks to him.

He sits up. He says, “It was nothing.” He notices a giant floating textbox next to the guy’s head. He says, “I’ll see you later,” and the guy gets the message and heads out of the tent(?) where Keith is laying on top of a jacket. He reads the textbox.

Welcome to the System, [user 013]!

You have been assigned one (1) Quest: Digging Up Sapphics

Goal: Get the people of the Ark and the 12 Clans to agree on a peace treaty

Objectives: -Fulfill the character [Clarke Griffin]

-Find your fellow transmigrator

-Keep as many Friendly Characters alive as possible

-Do not die

We wish you luck, and we hope you enjoy your transmigration experience!

Well. This is not the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to him. Nothing really beats Giant Sentient Robot Space Cats That Live Under Your Desert and Want You To Destroy an Intergalactic Space Dictator. Transmigration is comparatively normal. It’s just like teleportation, a thing Keith has done before, except you land in someone else’s body and have to pretend to be them for a bit. Keith read a few books like that when he still lived on Earth and had access to books written by humans.

So he stands, takes stock of his new body (blonde hair, ratty clothes, a girl), and heads out to meet that dark haired guy that just left.

He wonders who the other transmigrator is. It’s as likely to be an enemy as a friend. Is it another blade? Is this a mission? That’s the best case scenario. He can focus on that later. For now, he accepts the various reactions from other… teenagers? Why is everyone here a teenager? They seem to be on Earth, somewhere heavily forested, but all around him it’s just broken spaceship parts, plastic tarps held up by sticks, and teenagers.

The dark haired guy is talking to a dark haired girl—they’ve got the same eyes, same chin, same chip on their shoulder visible from a mile off: siblings. They’re calling each other Bellamy and Octavia. Great, Keith can pretend to be Clarke much easier if he knows her friends’ names.

“Bellamy,” he greets, “Octavia.” They turn to him. “How’s Jasper?” He remembers Bellamy saying that guy was injured, and that Clarke did something about it. He’s doing so well at this. He will earn a good score in Pretending to Be Some Chick, which is both possible to achieve and reasonable to want.

“Clarke,” Bellamy says. He’s got this look in his eyes that Keith can’t interpret. Lance used to look at him like that sometimes. He was never sure what it meant then either. He wipes the look out of his eyes as quick as Keith notices it and continues, “Morning. Jasper’s up in the dropship if you want to check on him, but Monty says there’s no infection, and he already changed his bandages.”

“Alright, I’ll leave Monty to it then,” Keith says. Thank Christ for Monty, whoever he is. If Clarke is supposed to be medically trained and Keith tries to redo some bandaging, he’ll be sniffed out in an instant.

“Fucking Grounders,” Octavia hisses.

And Bellamy says, “Don’t worry, O, we’ll get ‘em back.”

Okay. Alright. Keith is starting to piece this together. Some group called the ‘Grounders’ injured some guy named Jasper, who Clarke then saved and who Monty is now taking care of.

Octavia is happy to accidentally provide more exposition. “He nearly died! The Grounders need to get what’s coming to them. We haven’t done shit to them and they stab Jasper through the chest with a goddamn spear?”

“With a spear!?” Keith snaps suddenly. He tries to reign it back in. He’s supposed to be Clarke, who already knew he was stabbed by a spear because she treated the injury. But Keith has never been great at self-control or anger management. That’s, like, his whole thing. Fuck being Clarke, Keith is getting revenge for poor Jasper! “Those Grounders are gonna pay.”

After the grounders pay, then he can worry about a peace treaty with the clans or whatever.

Save File 8: <3AngelWithAHandgunX

Ash expects that, at best, he’ll wake up in a hospital, or at some pearly gates. No, scratch that, no way he’s making it to heaven. Not with his track record. His body count is probably in the triple digits. Probably no suffering can make up for that, not even his.

But none of that matters because Ash, apparently, isn’t dead. He wakes up in some future-tech scifi-looking hotel room, fully clothed, with some john snuggled up close to him. Closer than he typically lets clients—no matter how much they pay. And what the fuck kinda hotel is this anyway. Was that all a dream? How much was a dream? Just getting stabbed? Getting stabbed and Eiji leaving? Was Eiji a dream? Can he go back to sleep? He’d die a million times over in a dream if it meant he got to live the times in between with Eiji.

But not here. Not next to some random guy. Ash tries to extricate himself. The john wiggles closer, mumbling his name. Which is weird. Ash almost never gives his name to clients. Who is this guy? Why can’t Ash remember him?

All that can come later, after Ash has fully gotten clear of the bed and the john has tossed and turned for a second before bolting upright. “Ash!?” he cries. He sounds desperate. He sounds familiar. But the guy blinks, looks around, and startles damn near out of his skin, screeching. “Ohmygod! We didn’t. Right? We didn’t? What’s your name, sir? I’m Okumura Eiji—”

“Eiji!?”

Eiji, apparently, in some latin guy’s body, sits up a little straighter. He fiddles with the hem of his shirt, probably to confirm that he is, in fact, wearing a shirt. “Do I know you?”

“It’s me. Ash.”

“No,” Eiji starts.

“Yeah.” Ash replies.

“Why do you look like that!?” Eiji shrieks.

“Like what!?”

“Latino!”

“You’re Korean!”

“Huh!?”

They locate a mirror in the en suite bathroom and gawk for a while, but mostly they’re just glad to be alive.

Because of all of this, it takes an inordinately long time for them to notice the floating textbox, which has begun to glow brighter to make its presence more clear.

“Ash,” Eiji says, pointing.

Welcome to the System, [user 015] and [016]!

You have been assigned one (1) Quest: Gays in Space

Goal: Kill Zarkon, Hagar, and Lotor

Objectives: -Fulfill the characters [Keith Kogane] and [Lance McClain]

-Keep as many Friendly Characters alive as possible

-Do not die

We wish you luck, and we hope you enjoy your transmigration experience!

“Ash, are we on drugs?” Eiji asks, “Like, a lot of drugs?”

Ash sounds a little manic on the reply, “I can’t think of a single drug that does this.”

Before any further speculation or commentary can be made, Hunk knocks on the door. “Lance, buddy, breakfast.”

Neither Ash nor Eiji know which one of them is supposed to be Lance. Eiji says, “Be there in a sec.”

Hunk, on the other side of Lance’s bedroom door, cocks his head to the side. “Keith? Was that you?”

“Shit,” Ash mutters, and says, “Uh, no?”

After a long, long, (disbelieving) pause, Hunk says, “Alright… see you at breakfast,” and wanders down the hallway.

“Okay, so you’re Lance and I’m Keith– why do I have to be Keith? I hate that name. Lamest name on the planet.”

“Well, you’ve got nice hair, at least.”

“I’ll take good hair as a consolation.”

They get dressed in the more normal looking of the clothing sets in the closets (why are there monochromatic jumpsuits? Who is wearing monochromatic jumpsuits!?) and exit the room they’re in, heading in the direction of quiet, breakfast-type noises.

There’s five people and some mice(!?) sitting at the table, and they take the two empty chairs next to each other before noticing the food looks like someone took cottage cheese and dyed it lime green. But everyone else is eating silently, without complaint, so it can’t be too bad. Ash has probably eaten worse. They both take a few bites. It’s not good, but it’s not bad either. Eiji thinks it tastes like the coating on pills. Ash thinks it tastes like the stuff they fed him through a tube that one time on hunger strike.

Silence reigns for the whole meal, which is deeply uncomfortable but must be normal, since everyone else is doing it. Ash and Eiji keep their silence in their borrowed bodies.

This was the wrong choice.

Everyone on team Voltron has been stuck with nobody except on each other on this castle ship for a month and a half now, they could tell you this wasn’t Lance and Keith from the way they sat down, but Lance sitting quietly through a whole meal? And Keith not complaining about anything Lance is doing?

Pidge looks at Coran, who looks at Shiro, who looks at Hunk, who looks at Allura, who looks back to Pidge. They nod at the same time, and then they spring themselves on the imposters, managing to get Ash pinned to the table and Eiji pinned to the chair. Ash struggles, but Shiro’s robotic arm is pinning him so there’s no winning.

“What did you do with Keith and Lance?” Allura asks with all the fierce decorum of a princess war general.

Ash, who thinks there’s no getting out of this without a fight, hisses, “Fuck you.”

Eiji, who is tired of fighting every person he meets, groans, “We don’t even want to be here!”

Pidge asks, “Then why are you here!?”

“And why dress up as our friends?” Shiro adds.

“We don’t know why we’re here at all--! Ash, stop trying to bite him.” Ash makes a face. Eiji says, “They’re worried about the friends whose bodies we stole,” he reasons, and seeing the expression everyone makes at this he adds, “unintentionally.”

Hunk stops pinning Eiji and backs up a few steps. “Okay, maybe let’s talk this one out, because I’m just confused now.”

“So are we!” Eiji says, kind of laughing. “Can you let go of him?”

Shiro slowly releases Ash, and Ash rubs his neck where it was being held and goes back to sit next to Eiji. “We don’t know much more than you do,” Ash says. “Just what that textbox said.”

“Textbox?” Allura prompts.

“Told us to kill Zarkon, Hagar, and Lotor—who is naming these people. Sounds like a shitty scifi show.” (You, the reader, can hear the ba-dum-tsss in the background. None of Team Voltron can, and Allura is starting to think Ash might be a little racist).

Shiro mutters, hopefully, “At least we’re all on the same page.”

“Same page, my ass!” Pidge snaps. “How did you get into their bodies!?”

Eiji throws his hands up, “We don’t know! We got here, like, twenty minutes ago!”

“Can we just shoot Zarkon and go home?” Ash groans, and then pauses. “Wait, am I still alive back home?”

Eiji pales. “Why wouldn’t you be alive back home?”

“I believe it might help all of our sanity,” Coran interrupts, “if you start at the beginning.”