Prologue
She’s falling, falling through something indescribable, like a wormhole, white, purple, blue lights rushing around her, enveloping her, dragging her somewhere, whatever these lights are, they’re alive.
Pulsing with intent and power, its suffocating.
She doesn’t know how long she falls for, a second, a moment, an hour, an eternity, she doesn’t know, time seems like no concept but she feels it pass, like a viscous substance, a resistance.
For as long it lasts, it ends in a blink and she finds herself in an open field, void of life just dead grass and trees, a gun barrel against her head.
Wait! What?
“Who are you?” the owner of the gun snarls and she turns her head to see Hestia, a senior in school and a decade long friend glaring at her.
Her gut churns when she realizes that isn’t Hestia, she looks like Hestia but isn’t, she's younger, more...rough at the edges, cold, no magic swirls beneath her skin.
In fact, there is not a single wisp of magic surrounding them, an impossible feat as Magic was ever-present even in the Abiotic components of their planet.
All Zoya can do is stare, eyes wide, breath labored, bile rising in her throat.
——————x———x——————
It has been two days since she's somehow successfully done accidental inter-dimensional jumping, if Damian was here, he'd either be proud or she'd lose her access pass to the Archives of the Department of Mysteries. She sighs, sitting on a log near the outside of the campfire, they're near Corvium. She doesn't remember much of how she ended here, just a loud bang and a blinding white light before she was falling.
They don't trust her, they're afraid of her, and she's not even sure why they let her accompany them, but she's here.
When they'd calmed down, exchanged names (along with a few pleasantries from the dimension's actual habitants) and she'd stopped hyperventilating, her mind had started piecing together what she knew, and now two days later, she's...somewhat made peace with her current situation (at least till she find's a way back home that is, she's not spending the rest of her life here)
There were protocols established for such incidences, natural portals were rare as they came and more often than not were unstable, but if your Fate was having a picnic and you somehow managed to come across a natural stable portal, and ended up falling into a time and place not your own, then your first priority was finding the right authorities and making them aware of your situation. (Unfortunately for you, a person with horrible luck in recent events, the authorities concerned are likely to be inbred, high on their horses, arseholes.)
So, the hidden magical quarter- if it exists- is definitely going to be a kick in her non-existent unmentionables.
The second priority was to make a list (preferably not a physical one) of the things you know about your predicament and the third one was to stay away from the inhabitants of that reality.
(A little difficult that would be, considering her immediate encounter with them and the factor of their presence being the confirmation of her little accidental inter-dimensional jumping incident)
She has made a mental list of everything she knew;
1) She was not in her home universe (probably the most repeated and important on her list)
2) The Organization she is with, was definitely Anti-Government (she respected that), criminally inclined or not was yet to be determined.
3) She's getting a weird sense of Deja vu with their names and motives, but she can't place where exactly she knew them from.
For a moment she had given herself hope that she wasn't in an alternate reality but this was all a creation of her sub-conscious mind, however as soon as that idea had came it was abandoned, for if truly you were comatose strapped to an uncomfortable metal table in an old probably abandoned basement-turned-prison, you would not realize that your surroundings were a fragment of your imagination.
She refuses the urge to sigh and pinch the bridge of her nose, feeling the tell-tale signs of an oncoming headache.
She can only hope that the Magical Authorities do exist in this Universe, and hope her Patronus reaches them, she doesn't know their address, doesn't have an owl to send a letter, so the best option was using a long distanced messenger trick invented by the Chinese and not Dumbly-fucking-whore to get her message across.