Part One: The Worst Loading Screen Ever
The last thing Marcus Chen remembered was his gaming chair.
Specifically, the lumbar support that he'd been meaning to fix for three months, which had finally given up the ghost at 2:47 AM on a Tuesday, causing him to lurch forward mid-mission, spill an entire energy drink across his keyboard, and—in a desperate, flailing attempt to save his peripherals—accidentally slam his palm down on the Operator's meditation focus interface at exactly the wrong moment.
Or, apparently, the right one.
Because one moment he was staring at his Nova Prime Warframe obliterating a Corpus facility with a particularly satisfying antimatter drop, and the next—
Void.
Not the game's Void. The actual Void. He could tell the difference because the game's Void didn't typically smell like ozone and old blood and something ancient that had been dreaming for longer than human civilization had existed. It also didn't typically scream.
The Void screamed. Or sang. Or both. The distinction seemed academic when the sound was happening inside every atom of your being simultaneously.
And then—
Light. Blinding, golden, wrong-colored light. Not the amber of Coruscant sunsets or the blue of a holodisplay. This was the light that existed between moments, the illumination of a space that shouldn't exist, packed with every frequency that had never been invented.
And then—
Thud.
"Ow."
Marcus lay facedown on a metal floor, which was at least solid, which was at least a point in its favor compared to the infinite screaming void he'd just passed through. The floor smelled like industrial lubricant and ozone and something vaguely biological that he chose not to identify. It hummed with the subsonic vibration of large engines.
A ship, some part of him registered. I'm on a ship.
He became aware, in stages, of several things.
First: he was significantly shorter than he'd been thirty seconds ago.
Second: his center of gravity was entirely, profoundly, bewilderingly wrong.
Third: he appeared to be wearing a Tenno Operator suit, which was—fine, actually, that was fine, that was the kind of transmigration detail that made sense, he was the Operator, he'd been playing as the Operator—
Fourth: he had hair. Long hair. His own hair had been buzz-cut short for the last four years.
Fifth: the armor suit he was in had been designed for a body that was not, had never been, and would require extensive biological reconfiguration to become, male.
He lay very still with this information for approximately four seconds.
Then he sat up, looked down at himself, and said, with extraordinary calm: "Oh, you have got to be kidding me."
His voice came out higher than expected. Not squeaky—not embarrassingly so—but definitively, unambiguously, the voice of a young woman rather than a twenty-eight-year-old man who'd been meaning to start going to the gym. It had a musical quality to it that he suspected was Void-adjacent, like someone had autotuned his soul during transit.
He put his hands on his face. Small hands. Fine-boned. He spread his fingers and stared at them.
"Okay," he said to his hands. "Okay. Let's… inventory this."
He was, based on tactile evidence and a frankly mortifying self-assessment, approximately five foot two. He was female. He was young—late teens, maybe, which was the standard Operator age range, which made a horrible kind of sense. His hair was white, shot through with faint Void-blue highlights, and fell to his shoulders. His eyes—he pressed his fingers to his cheekbones—felt somehow different, and he suspected if he found a mirror he would see the distinctive pale coloring of a Tenno Operator rather than his own brown eyes.
He was wearing an Operator suit. A real one. It had the faint, barely-there luminescence of something that wasn't quite physical matter, and when he flexed his hands, he could feel—
Oh.
Oh no.
He could feel the Void.
Not the abstract, game-mechanic concept of Void energy as expressed through cooldowns and ability meters. The actual Void. It was inside him. Had always been inside him, in the way that a river had always been inside its banks even when you'd never noticed the river before. It was vast and cold and ancient and singing, and it recognized him with an intimacy that made his (her? his? this was going to require a whole separate internal breakdown) breath catch.
"Right," he whispered. "Right. So that's real. That's a real thing that I have now."
The ship lurched. Something exploded, distantly. There were voices—human voices, male, shouting in clipped professional patterns that resolved, after a moment, into—
Clone trooper comm chatter.
Marcus stopped breathing.
He knew that cadence. He had consumed enough Star Wars content in his twenty-eight years to identify clone trooper comm chatter from a dead sleep. And if those were clones, and this was a ship, and there was an explosion—
"The Clone Wars," he breathed.
The Void inside him shivered, and so did something else—a cascade of memories that weren't his began to unspool at the edges of his consciousness like a corrupted data file trying desperately to defragment itself. The Zariman Ten Zero. The face of a woman who had been a mother, briefly, before the Void took her and gave back something with her face and her hunger and nothing else—
Marcus slammed a mental door on that with enough force to make himself dizzy.
"Not now," he told the memories. "We'll unpack the trauma later."
He stood up. This took longer than expected because his legs were also redistributed, and his usual method of standing—the unconscious, habitual physics of a specific body carried over twenty-eight years—was simply wrong now, calibrated for a center of mass that had relocated itself to regions he was resolutely not thinking about.
He steadied himself against the wall.
"Okay," he said. "Clone Wars. Beginning of. Because if there's a theme here, it's maximum chaos. I've transmigrated into a science fantasy franchise at its most actively terrible, in a body I've never operated, with powers I've only experienced as game mechanics, and I have—" he patted himself down, and felt the familiar weight at his hip "—oh good, I have my Amp."
He drew it. The Mote Amp, the basic starting weapon, which had felt entirely metaphorical in the game and now felt very, very physical in his hand. It hummed with Void energy and fit his new hand perfectly.
"And apparently I have one Warframe," he said, because he could feel that too—the connection to Nova Prime, the quantum entanglement of Operator and Warframe, the suit waiting in his orbiter like a loaded weapon. He reached for the other connections, the other frames he'd spent years collecting and potatoing and forma-ing—
Nothing. Just Nova Prime. The singular, solitary, antimatter-flinging, wormhole-generating Nova Prime.
"Of course," he said. "Of course it's Nova. Because being able to detonate the molecular structure of basically everything isn't enough of a liability in a universe where I'm supposed to be subtle."
A door at the end of the corridor banged open. Three clone troopers in Phase I armor ran around the corner, stopped dead, and stared at him.
He stared back.
One of the clones—CT-7734, his armor said, though Marcus had no idea how he knew that, the markings were just numbers—slowly lowered his blaster.
"Uh," said CT-7734. "General? There's a… kid in the maintenance corridor."
"I am not a kid," Marcus said, with great dignity.
"How'd you get in here, little girl?"
The words little girl hit Marcus Chen, twenty-eight-year-old man with a graduate degree and a mortgage, with the precision of a targeted strike.
He took a very slow, very careful breath.
"That is a complicated question," he said, "that I will be happy to answer after you tell me what ship this is, what battle is currently happening, and whether anyone named Palpatine is in the vicinity, because if so I have some very important feelings I need to express."
The three clones looked at each other.
"She talks funny," said the second one.
"Put the shiny thing down, sweetheart," said the third, approaching with his hands raised in the universal gesture of please don't make this weird.
The Amp hummed in Marcus's hand. The Void shivered.
Marcus put the Amp down.
He also, perhaps inadvertently, released approximately four percent of his Void energy in a concentric ring that radiated outward from his body, passed harmlessly through the clone troopers, and caused every electrical system in the corridor to flicker and reset simultaneously, including the clones' HUD displays.
All three clones' visors went dark and then rebooted with an error sound.
"Or," said Marcus, "you could just… take me to whoever's in charge."
There was a long silence.
"Yes ma'am," said CT-7734.
Part Two: The Part Where It Gets Worse
The ship was the Negotiator.
Marcus knew this the same way he knew the clone trooper's designation number—not from reading it anywhere, but from some deep, instinctive Operator awareness that had apparently come packaged with the transmigration. He could feel the ship the way he'd been able to feel his Warframes in the game, a kind of proprioceptive sense of a thing that was adjacent to him.
This was either very useful or profoundly alarming, and he hadn't decided which.
The Negotiator was Obi-Wan Kenobi's flagship.
Marcus had exactly enough time to process this information—Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Obi-Wan Kenobi, actual canonical Jedi Master, human person, existed— before the door to the command deck slid open and he was ushered inside by his clone escort, and there was Obi-Wan Kenobi, standing with his hands clasped behind his back in a posture of supreme, beatific patience, watching a tactical holodisplay.
He looked exactly like the movies. Exactly. The beard was exact. The robes were exact. The air of exquisitely maintained serenity was exact.
Marcus, who had watched Revenge of the Sith nineteen times and could quote the entire opening sequence from memory, experienced a sensation he could only describe as reality having a stroke.
Obi-Wan turned. He had very kind eyes, which Marcus noticed from his new height of five foot two with a perspective he had not previously had access to.
"Ah," said Obi-Wan, taking in Marcus with the calm assessment of someone who had, presumably, seen stranger things than a white-haired teenage girl materializing in his maintenance corridor. He had not, in fact, seen stranger things than this. But he didn't know that yet. "Who do we have here?"
"She appeared in junction seven, General," said CT-7734. "No sign of how she got aboard. No ship docked, no airlock opened. Just… appeared."
Obi-Wan's left eyebrow moved approximately 1.5 millimeters upward. For a Jedi Master, Marcus understood, this represented something in the range of profound astonishment.
"I see," said Obi-Wan. "And are you quite all right, young lady? You look as though you've had quite a journey."
"You have no idea," Marcus said.
Obi-Wan studied him with the patient attention of a man who made his living sensing the truth in things. Marcus became aware that he was being assessed by someone who could read the Force, who could presumably feel… whatever the Void was radiating off him. He braced himself.
Obi-Wan's eyebrow moved another half millimeter.
"Interesting," Obi-Wan murmured, almost to himself. "You're… not…" He paused. "I can't quite feel you at all."
"Cool," said Marcus. "I'm going to need food, water, and the location of the nearest female hygiene supplies, in that order."
A long beat.
"Of course," said Obi-Wan, with the grace of a man who had chosen his battles. "Captain Cody, could you see to our guest?"
"Sir," said Cody.
And that was how Marcus Chen, twenty-eight-year-old man transmigrated into the body of a teenage Tenno Operator girl, came to be standing in the Negotiator's medical bay, wrapped in a Jedi utility blanket, eating a ration pack, and having the single most surreal experience of his life—which was saying something, given what the last forty-five minutes had contained.
He stared at the ration pack.
He stared at his small hands holding the ration pack.
He stared at the medical bay ceiling.
"I used to be six foot one," he informed the ceiling.
The ceiling had no opinion on this.
From his orbiter—which he could sense, distantly, existing in some adjacent space that was neither here nor there, tucked into a fold of the Void like a bookmark—he felt a presence stir. Multiple presences.
Ordis.
Marcus would have known that flicker of anxious, glitching digital consciousness anywhere. The Cephalon—the ancient, shattered mind reconstructed into a ship AI—was there, present in the orbiter, along with the Kubrow and the Kavat and every piece of equipment Marcus had accumulated across hundreds of hours of gameplay, now apparently real.
"Operator," came a voice—not out loud, but directly into his mind, the way Ordis had always communicated in the game. It sounded exactly as he'd imagined: warm, eager, slightly unstable, with the quality of something that had been broken and reassembled and still had cracks running through it. "You are—this unit is so very pleased you're—KILL THE ENEMIES—relieved. Yes. Relieved. This unit was concerned when you entered the Void transit."
Ordis, Marcus thought back. We need to talk. Quietly. Without anyone hearing.
"This unit can do quiet. This unit is VERY good at quiet. Whisper-soft, like a lullaby. Would the Operator like a lullaby? No? A tactical briefing instead? What is our mission? Where are we? Why does this ship smell like—"
Ordis.
"…Yes, Operator."
We are in the Star Wars universe. The Clone Wars era. I need you to not broadcast anything over any comm systems.
A pause.
"…Oh." A longer pause. "This unit will endeavor to keep all communications… contained."
How are the others?
"The companions are well. Helios is cataloguing everything. The Kubrow is anxious. The Kavat has already found something to knock off a shelf."
That tracked.
Marcus finished the ration pack and became aware that two of his clone escort were watching him with the specific, tentative gentleness of large military men who had been asked to supervise what they believed to be a lost child and were treating her accordingly. One of them—the second one from before, who had a blue stripe on his armor—was holding something out.
It was a candy bar. The Star Wars equivalent. Some kind of compressed sweetened nutrition block that clones apparently kept in their armor pockets.
"You should eat more," said the clone, awkwardly. "You're very small."
Marcus looked at the candy bar. Looked at the clone. Looked at the candy bar.
I used to be six foot one, he thought again. And now a soldier is offering me candy because I look twelve.
He took the candy bar.
"Thank you," he said, with dignity. "I appreciate this. Please never speak of it."
"What's your name?" asked the other clone, the one with the red stripe. He had the particular quality of being a clone who had developed a Personality, which Marcus respected.
"…Marcus," Marcus said, then reconsidered his audience. "Well. The people who knew me… some of them called me something else."
What had the Operator been called? In the game, she'd been given no name—nameless, ageless, sleeping. The Drifter had been the same. But Marcus had named his Operator. He'd named her the way you named characters in games, with a slight air of ironic detachment that didn't conceal the fact that you'd spent forty minutes on it.
He'd named her Lyra.
"Lyra," he said. It sat differently in his mouth now. More real. "My name is Lyra."
The clone with the red stripe nodded solemnly. "I'm Waxer. That's Boil." He indicated the one who'd given him candy. "We won't tell anyone about the candy bar."
"Appreciated."
Obi-Wan returned ten minutes later, which Marcus spent conducting a careful, private, extremely necessary physical inventory of his new situation, the results of which he chose not to detail even to himself because some things were better processed through aggressive denial for the immediate short-term.
The Jedi Master sat down across from him with the air of a man preparing for a conversation he'd been unable to anticipate.
"So," said Obi-Wan. "Perhaps you'd like to explain how you arrived aboard my ship?"
Marcus looked at him. Looked at the face of Obi-Wan Kenobi, a fictional character who was standing three feet from him and emitting the quiet gravity of a person who was genuinely real and genuinely alive and genuinely deserved better than the next twenty years of his canonical storyline.
Don't tell him, Marcus thought. Don't tell him you know how it ends. Don't tell him about Anakin. Don't tell him about—
The memories surged. Not his memories—Lyra's memories. The Operator's memories, bleeding through the partition he'd slammed shut in the corridor.
Gold. Everything was gold. Orokin gold, the color of civilization built on cruelty, and a face—a man in a golden mask, beautiful and terrible, and the sound of transference, the wrenching of consciousness into a Warframe body, and the voice of the Lotus saying sleep now, sleep and wait—
Marcus pressed his knuckles against his eye socket and breathed.
"Are you all right?" Obi-Wan asked.
"Fine," Marcus said. "I get—" how to explain this "—I have memories that aren't entirely mine. They surface sometimes. I'm sorry."
Obi-Wan looked at him with an expression of such gentle, genuine concern that Marcus felt something in his chest do something he was going to attribute to the transmigration stress.
"You have nothing to apologize for," Obi-Wan said. "Take your time."
Marcus took his time. He breathed. He put the Zariman back in its box and locked the box and sat on the box and refused to acknowledge the box.
"I'm from somewhere else," he said finally. "Another universe, I think. I don't fully understand the mechanics of how I got here—there was an accident involving Void energy, and I ended up…" he gestured at himself, at all of himself, at the comprehensive catastrophe of his current existence.
Obi-Wan absorbed this. "Void energy," he repeated.
"Not—" Marcus held up a hand "—not the Force. Completely different thing. I know you can feel the Force and you can feel that I'm not… in it. The Void is something else entirely. Something from my universe."
"I see." Obi-Wan stroked his beard. "And the… energy discharge in the corridor? The electrical reset?"
"That was me. Sorry. I'll try to control it." He paused. "I have quite a lot of power and I'm still recalibrating."
Obi-Wan looked at him for a long moment.
"Are you a danger to my crew?" he asked, with the directness of a man who had long since decided that the most elegant solutions often lived in simply asking the important question first.
Marcus thought about Nova Prime. About antimatter drops. About Molecular Prime, which caused the molecular structure of enemies to propagate chain-reaction detonations that could theoretically strip the hull off a Republic cruiser if he completely lost control.
"Not on purpose," he said honestly.
Obi-Wan nodded slowly. "That's a more reassuring answer than you might think," he said. "I've worked with Anakin Skywalker for three years."
Marcus choked on his candy bar.