Crossing of the Paths

Book 1: Desert Wind - Chunk 1

The Crossing of the Paths
Second Edition
By MMM/AJ
Part I: Desert Wind

A/N: Hey again everyone! New readers will notice that this "chapter" in reality contains several actual chapters, and that's because I like to break up my work into many smaller chapters, but I upload it in larger chunks with 2-3 chapters per chunk so that my readers still get a substantial portion to chew on with each upload. This is a tradition I've kept since the rough draft, I feel it helps enhance the overall flow of the story. Returning readers from the old version will notice more changes abound as we move into Desert Wind, and one of the biggest changes is that I'm entirely removing the old italicized Flavor Paragraphs that used to be included in the start of every chapter. Now before you worry that all that content is lost, I can tell you that I plan to write it into the main body of the story itself via a few interesting storytelling segments! I've also made significant changes and upgrades to the setting to make it more Zelda-y and at least a little bit less of a Dune ripoff. I've been borrowing inspiration and design elements, as well as the Gerudo Language, from Breath of the Wild, but please remember that this fic is still based solely on Ocarina and Majora. Thanks again to everyone for sticking with me and reading my stuff through all these years!

Chapter 1: The Divergence

Mewtwo was greeted by a truly beautiful sight when he dove through the portal. The space between dimensions was filled with a chaotic soup of glowing multicolored energy which seemed to part in front of him as he flew. The stuff looked like some form of super-heated plasma, if plasma came in a full spectrum of bright rainbow colors. Thankfully Mewtwo's shield managed to block out most of the intense ambient heat of the place, but he could feel the air inside his shield bubble starting to gradually warm up. The point where the plasma seemed to part in front of him was roughly 50 feet ahead, and it was forming an almost perfect cylindrical tunnel shape for him to pass through with plenty of clearance. Mewtwo looked back briefly and saw that the plasma was closing up behind him too. When he looked closer at the walls of the "tunnel" around him, he could see that they were studded with small openings that showed views to starry black space inside other realities. Thanks to Mew's training, he knew that these were small latent gateways to other universes which he could pry open with his psychic power and fly through. Each one had slightly varying amounts of additional glowing plasma energy pouring out of them from around the edges. That freshly arrived plasma also came in a myriad of colors and rapidly commingled into the walls of the tunnel around it.

Almost immediately Mewtwo felt a powerful lurching force starting to draw him forward, even through his bubble. He began to pick up speed without expending any sort of psychic energy to do so, almost like this place applied some sort of natural acceleration onto his shield bubble. Thankfully the pocket of open tunnel accelerated with him, so he didn't immediately slam into the chaotic plasma. Still, the jolt of acceleration was enough to immediately wake Mewtwo up from the mesmerized state he had been in. He glanced around at the dozens of different latent gateways to different realities and tried to pick one out to try, but most of them were identical. One or two occasionally were pitch black, and he even passed one that was spewing a column of blindingly bright white light. These were easy to discount as potentially unsafe. But their presence planted a scary thought into Mewtwo's mind: what if he opened a portal inside a solid object? Or a different universe where the laws of physics didn't apply in the same way? What if he chose a realm where psionics didn't work and he lost his shield bubble while out in the vacuum of space? Even if something like that didn't happen, what if he simply ended up wandering the depths of space for hours or days until his reserves of psychic power ran dry and his shield failed? A cold, sinking feeling of dread pooled in Mewtwo's innards as he realized how reckless and rash he had been to just rush into this without preparation!