Determined not to screw up this time, I focused on dreaming about Jody and Victoria on a date and got just that. We were in Victoria’s dreamworld, but the doorway was there into mine, and the other covered ones to Mona’s were there too.

We didn’t actually do much, but I used the time to see how far into Victoria’s past I could see this way. And it was what wasn’t there that stood out. There were memories, and more memories of Victoria’s than I could ever remember exploring before. I could actually follow my Victoria back a bit further now in her mind, before I could remember ever having dreamed of being Victoria, though not all the way back to when I first invented Nancy before we had even started school. But this Victoria, the one who I grew up being in dreams, was not, no way, no how, the same as alt-Victoria that I brought into the world the other day. Even if she had some of the same personality traits, it was clear that she followed a different path.

Even early on, things were different. This Victoria went to elementary school and even kindergarten with Nancy and with many of the same kids I did. Pansy was not there, because Nancy had been invented to replace her, to be the friend Pansy had refused to be. The other Victoria we knew only from her diaries had never known either Nancy or Pansy; she had invented Nathan to replace a boy named Peter who spurned her at a similarly young age, and in her dreams she went to school with Nathan. Peter and Nathan were never characters in my life or my dreams.

Alt-Victoria had excelled in school the way I had, gone to college and gotten the same degree I did, and took the same job I did. The Victoria who lived in my dreams all those years did attend those classes, but not consistently. Some of those dreams that covered a day in Victoria’s life, which included time at school if it was a school day, included her going to classes, but they were much more likely to focus on Victoria socializing at lunch than actually learning. On going to and leaving classes rather than on the content of the classes. The exceptions, and there were many of them, were when I had difficulty learning something. In those cases I’d get a complete, detailed repeat of the class session, study session, or whatever was appropriate. The rest of the day, for all I knew Victoria slept through her classes. She did take a full load of classes and I could remember her being in every class I was, at least to enter or leave the classroom, since the start of middle school when I started having that sort of hourly class schedule. But I rarely saw her turning in homework, taking exams, or getting grades.

While trying to explore her school life in the dreamworld, the older she got, the more likely all the real faces were blurred and the only people I could see clearly were the ones solely present in my dreams and the few closest real-life friends I had classes with. Watching Victoria’s memories in college was even more difficult. She never went to class at all except when I needed a refresher on something. She spent plenty of time with Nancy, and sometimes with the other characters, doing stuff on campus. Anything but learning. Somehow she did my job in some dreams, but I didn’t see how she could possibly have gotten hired.

How is it that there are two different Victorias? I certainly didn’t figure out an answer to this before the dream ended and I was lying in bed on the morning of Saturday, July 29, both of me, Jody and Victoria. So that was confirmed; using Doris’s portal was intimate enough to summon someone I dreamed about.

The other times I had Victoria here, we rarely talked to each other. I thought certain thoughts as Victoria or as Jody but even when I seemed to be running Victoria on autopilot, my consciousness was still in both bodies and I knew what we both were thinking whenever I wasn’t intentionally blocking Victoria out to focus on something important, such as driving. The words Victoria said her first day in Pedro’s presence, the words when I woke up with her for the second time, and a few things she said to other people on our outing in town are the only ones I ever uttered with her mouth in real life before today. But today I thought that having a dialogue might help.

“Victoria, before we awoke, I was thinking about the fact that there were occasional dreams of teenage Victoria in school. They weren’t the norm, but they were important because by that time you were going to school with certain specific girls who I never encountered except in those dreams. Do you remember them?”

“I’m trying to remember. I do know the girls you are talking about, but they are hard to recall. I think one of them was named Jessica and she was my closest friend from the group.”

“Yes, Jessica was one of them. Who was it who told you what a Sybian is?”

“Oh, that was Kimmy!”

“They had a third girl they were often with and when you were with the group, the four of you often ate lunch at a table together and shared gossip, which I sometimes found out was also circulating at my school, but I heard it in the dreams first.”

“Cleo! She was actually named Cleopatra but never wanted to be called by that full name, unlike Kimmy who didn’t mind being called Kimberly. Cleo was the mistress of gossip.”

“Now I want you to think about the memories you had that include any of this group.”

“I had several classes with Jessica and Kimmy. Cleo was forbidden from taking classes with any of the rest of us after she got called out for talking in class too often.”

“Good. Keep thinking about those classes. Did you graduate from high school?”

“I think I did. Oh, yes, the four of us have a picture together in the high school yearbook!”

Victoria felt certain her yearbook was here for some reason, so after breakfast, we searched her dream-bedroom for it. I noted that the room was back to being hers, and not alt-Victoria’s; Nancy was present in the class photo rather than Nathan. We found the yearbook among many other things in her closet.

My yearbook wasn’t in my dream-realm, because I had kept it with me. However, when I realized just how tiny the houses here were, it was part of what I stashed in a storage locker in town, so I resolved to go get it today. For that matter, I didn’t need to do that anymore; I had a whole empty room in my dreamworld house where my parents’ stuff was supposed to go, not to mention other rooms and a whole castle in Mona’s world that I could use, so I decided to bring all that stuff back here and shut down the storage locker rental. Before we left, I measured the doorways, using some pencil marks since I only had a regular ruler, not a tape measure. It wasn’t like I was doing regular home-improvement stuff up here!

I drove us to town, and we cleaned out my storage locker. Elsewhere in town I found some vertical art panels I could hang on the wall which were big enough to each completely cover one doorway. They wouldn’t be an exact fit, and wouldn’t fit inside the doorway like a door, but they’d cover them. I checked the mail and did some other errands, and we came home for lunch.

Victoria’s dream-yearbook was weird; many of the photos were blurred just like the people in town. But when we put the two together and leafed through them, the photos cleared up, and in most cases matched photo for photo. Of course, Victoria wasn’t in mine and I wasn’t in hers. Victoria was in photos in places in her yearbook where I was in mine. Where there were other real people with her, they were also in the photos with me, except Pansy in my yearbook was replaced by Nancy in hers, because hers was a dreamworld yearbook and mine was from the real world.

Where Jessica, Kimmy, and Cleo were in pictures in her yearbook, they were in place of three boys, Jeremy, Tim, and Arturo, who had been close friends of mine in high school. So somehow, in addition to the changes with Victoria and Nancy, three other boys had been turned to girls in her world.

“I guess that makes sense, if they were your friends. It doesn’t look like any of them were attached to any boy, but those friends of mine didn’t have girlfriends, either. Jeremy and Arturo came out, just within our group, as a gay couple our junior year, and I already suspected it before that, though they were still in the closet to everyone else.”

“I wonder if Jessica and Cleo were a lesbian couple. Kimmy was the one with the Sybian; maybe she preferred that to guys.”

It was getting increasingly weird talking to my other body, though only for me, as nobody else would know. I spent a good long time exploring Victoria’s memories for more about this group, and anything that might have followed, but didn’t get much. No indication that Jessica and Cleo were lesbians. I saw more of Victoria’s high school classes than I ever remembered from dreams, but there was still nothing more from college.

After a break for dinner, I let Victoria take over for sex. While she bounced on top of me, I thought about how today and last Saturday’s summoning of Victoria had differed from the previous one. It no longer seemed like Victoria was trying to manipulate me. If she was doing it, she was being extremely subtle about it and I didn’t sense it when I looked into her mind. Instead, she and I had found common interests in learning more about how my ability works and about her past.

That night, to test the theory that my Victoria and alt-Victoria were different characters, I tried to bring back alt-Victoria and Nathan by dreaming about Victoria and Nancy, and I did dream about them, but I ended up on Sunday, July 30 as Jody in bed with Nancy. Did that fail because Victoria was here yesterday? Did that mean alt-Victoria was the same as my Victoria after all?

I posed the question to Nancy after catching her up on recent events.

Nancy pointed out. “Remember, alt-Victoria dreamed of Nathan as an imaginary friend, rather than Nancy. But Nancy is in your Victoria’s yearbook, rather than Nathan, so I think the two Victorias must be different. Your Victoria never developed the ability to bring fictional characters from her memory to life by having sex with a doll.”

“But she doesn’t have sex with a doll!” I protested. “If she did, she might have the power, too.”

“Maybe. Hmm, we can’t even test it, because Victoria doesn’t get to sleep in this world. You already proved with the camera that the moment you fall asleep, your partner turns back into the doll. And none of us have ever fallen asleep, not fully, while you’re awake. Even when you left Victoria lying in bed the first day you summoned her, she was awake the whole time.”

“That’s it! That’s the difference. Alt-Victoria exists as a real person in some other world. She actually has the power, and a version of Jody existed only in her mind in that world until she developed the power. My Victoria is just a pale imitation of her.”

“Do you think you were actually alt-Victoria the other day? Or transported yourself to her world?”

“Maybe. But it’s also possible I just got a more faithful imitation. It’s hard for me to know, though. She’s never pulled the real me into her world, unless it was that day, because I’d know.”

“But she has more control over who she summons. She never summoned the real you, because she knows exactly how to summon her version of you.”

“Right. So either I screwed things up the other day for her, too, or I was just a more faithful copy of her than the Victoria I usually summon is.”

“We’ll only know when we next see her diary. But that’s another point to consider. Those diaries were only here and in Victoria’s dream-bedroom the day you were alt-Victoria.”

“If you really brought her here, she might have memories of the experience. The doorways. The discussion we had about alternate selves and multiple universes.”

“I doubt it. I remember being alt-Victoria in this world, but I don’t remember being Jody for a day over in her world, one where she never made doorways. I did get to access alt-Victoria’s dreams through the doorway that day. But yes, when we see her diaries again is when we’ll be able to answer the question of whether I affected her life.”

“Speaking of which, you’ve covered the doorway over.”

“Yeah, I think I did a pretty good job. I had to buy everything including the screwdriver, but the hinges are hidden behind the panels so you wouldn’t even know they are hinged.”

I opened up the panel to show the doorway behind it, and pushed open the panel on the other side. I had installed one in my home in Alaska covering the doorway into my dream-bedroom, two in my dream-bedroom covering both the doorway to Victoria’s and the doorway to the real world, and one in Victoria’s dream-bedroom covering the doorway to Jody’s dream-bedroom. It was now possible to be in any of the rooms without knowing there were magical doorways into other worlds, if you didn’t open them. I didn’t do anything for the doorways into Mona’s world, since they had locked doors that looked like regular doors.

We went through into both dreamworlds, and just like we expected, Nancy’s house was dark and empty in both. It was Nancy who noticed the difference.

“Usually when I come into these dreamworlds, I feel like a foreigner in Victoria’s dreamworld. Today it’s happening in your dreamworld.”

After thinking about it a bit, I suggested, “Maybe you’re Victoria’s Nancy rather than mine.”

Nancy responded, “Yes! That’s it exactly. We’ve read so much of each others’ memories that we are essentially identical now, but it’s still possible for me to tell the difference between us. Today, I have the full run of memories of Victoria growing up with me and I have to delve into what I think of as the other side of me to access memories of being with Jody. I have to do what I usually do to access Victoria memories to access Jody ones.”

“In past summonings I have dreamed about you with Jody, but this time I dreamed about you with Victoria. When I dreamed about that before, I got alt-Victoria and Nathan. But Victoria wasn’t eligible to come today, so I got you.”

“That makes sense,” Nancy acknowledged.

“I’m still curious about this world,” I said. “The yearbooks suggested that the blurred faces were because I didn’t know who the people were, and when I figured out who they were, I could see them. But that’s not something I remember happening in the dreams.”

“But did you have anyone in your dreams you didn’t know?”

“That is a good question, and I am trying to think of a time when I did.”

I realized that usually I didn’t, because they simply weren’t in the dream. Even though I had dreams with real people in them, and sometimes a lot of people, they were the people I knew. My friends, my teachers, and even my enemies, such as bullies at school. I knew who they were, and if I looked them in the face in the dream, I saw their real faces. If they weren’t important, I didn’t look at them at all.

After a few minutes’ thought, I told her, “I’m not sure that I ever did. Let’s test the other theory, and go to the high school, where I should be able to find one of the teachers. Some of the ones I knew should still be there.”

We started walking there, and I let Nancy lead the way while I kept thinking about any time I might have seen the blurred faces in my dreams, and failed. Then we arrived at the school way too soon.

“Huh? Here already?”

“Yeah, here we are,” Nancy replied.

“But it’s more than a mile to the school. It should have taken a lot longer to get here. It’s only been about three minutes... I think.”

“Maybe it’s like the dreams,” Nancy commented. “Time can speed up and skip the boring parts.”

“Even when you are trying to make use of the time,” I muttered, somewhat upset at the way it worked.

We went inside, with nobody stopping us from entering even though I know it’s not like that today. Together we went down the hall and found the room for our high school history teacher, Mr. Rubio. We walked in and stood at the back of the room. Nobody noticed, and Mr. Rubio went on talking. I could see his face. I walked around to the side of the room where I could get a view of the students, and they were all faceless. I beckoned Nancy over so she could see the same thing.

“I’m going to call this idea confirmed,” Nancy said. “We can see a face when we locate someone we know, and any other people we happen to see who we don’t know just look faceless.”

We walked out of the classroom, none of the people inside ever having seemed to notice us.

“Come to think of it, this is Sunday. Why is there a class in session at all?” I commented.

“And it’s summer. There’s a class because you wanted there to be one so we could see Mr. Rubio,” Nancy replied. “In the dream, it’s whatever time you want it to be.”

“Right. Just like in actual dreams. That explains why, when Victoria and I went to go see a movie in the dream world, they were showing current ones, not ones from when I was in high school. I wanted to see a current movie and I did. You said it right, it’s whatever time and whatever year I want it to be here.”

We went back home, picking up some food on the way because Victoria and I got too distracted yesterday to do it, and had dinner and a little sex in the evening.

This reminded me to research that movie Victoria and I watched in the dreamworld. It did appear that we saw the right movie. The major plot points were all right.

I was inspired the next week to experiment further with who I could summon.

I tried to bring Tracy Shanks on Monday, July 31. She was my last girlfriend before coming up to Alaska, the one who broke up with me rather than move here to live with me. But it did not work. I’m guessing this means I can’t summon real people.

I was going to take this opportunity to wash the doll components. Since the time I first created it, I would take the doll apart and wash all the pieces in one of the bags with the laundry service every few weeks to remove all the sweat and worse that got into them, usually just when I noticed the smell. Since I had a woman here instead of the doll most days, and I was thinking about how it had been more than a month since I washed it, I thought to do it today. But it didn’t smell in the least. Either the transformations themselves were cleaning it, or when the summoned characters took showers that was cleaning the doll as well. I guess it’s something I no longer need to worry about.

Tuesday, August 1 I brought Kimmy here. She’s one of Victoria’s high school friends, and she might be real in alt-Victoria’s world. She’s not a real part of this world, though, just like Victoria and both Nancys. Maybe that is it; Tracy is here somewhere on this world and I can’t bring another of her, or kidnap the real one. If that’s right, it might mean bringing back someone who is dead might work, but I had not experienced the death of a young friend and the idea of bringing an old dead person wasn’t appealing at all.

Kimmy was the artistic one out of Victoria’s group of friends, and I had her do some things for me while I worked. I dug out my birth certificate and handed her my Social Security card, and provided her with paper, scissors, and what pens and drawing supplies I had, and I asked her to draw imitations of the documents for herself, with her own information. When I got home, I found the documents she produced were pretty reasonable looking, but you could still tell she had drawn them rather than them being the original documents. The intent was, like the ID, to make something realistic enough that it’ll turn real for the women I summon, or as real as any of them gets. I gave her an envelope and had her fold up the birth certificate like mine was, and she put both documents away in her purse, not her real purse, of course, but the purse all my women shared.

By dreaming of him specifically, I brought Nathan on Wednesday, August 2, without turning myself into alt-Victoria, though it meant I arrived fucking him in the ass and did the same in bed that night. He didn’t really like that, but agreed it was worth doing it. “For science!” he said. His documents looked very real. He had the same address at birth as on his ID card now, which was the same as Nancy’s, and some Social Security number in the same range as mine, so it could have been issued around the same time and place as mine. I couldn’t determine if they were really valid, but they looked real enough at a glance. And his never-seen parents were listed as John and Jane Smithson. Might as well have been John and Jane Doe, I thought.

I couldn’t turn Nathan into Nancy the next day, Thursday, August 3, though; they’re the same character, even though one is male.

After the success with Nathan, on Friday, August 4, I tried summoning alt-Victoria by dreaming about her explicitly, together with another male character, Glen, a portal person known to live in Doris’s group-family in some of my dreams. That worked; Glen arrived fucking me, and I was the Victoria who had to work here.

More specifically, Glen had arrived fucking me in my ass. I immediately noticed that Alt-Victoria had a tampon in today. I assumed this was just how alt-Victoria dealt with periods, and that anal sex was fine for activating the power.

I knew from my experience as Victoria in those lifelike dreams that I’d have to change my tampon immediately after getting up, so I did. It was the first time I had inserted a tampon into a body I was using in real life, but all that experience in dreams made this no trouble at all. I did it as if I’d been doing it for years. Well, while I had been doing it for more than a decade, it was only in dreams, in only some of which I was female, human, and in a realistic enough setting to do so.

The birth control pills also confirmed Victoria was in her period. She was on the 5th of 7 days of the inactive pills that let menstruation happen. Of course, apart from my other visit as alt-Victoria, I’d never taken birth control pills before, but Victoria had friends in high school who were sexually active enough that they did, and from them, via Victoria, I understood how this kind of birth control worked.

I checked that alt-Victoria’s phone, purse, etc. were here and all things agreed that I wasn’t just my Victoria. She had one tampon in her purse already and I added a second to be safe. I also checked that Victoria had a Social Security card and birth certificate where I kept mine. Her Social Security number differed from mine only in the last two digits.

Her birth certificate was surprising, though. Same birthplace as me, but rather than my parents Anthony and Sue Davis, she was born to Fred and Rue Davis. And Rue’s maiden name was the same as my mother’s, Resnick. This meant that Victoria was born to my parents’ siblings who died childless in this universe, but in some other universe where they not only lived, but also married.

This also meant that Nancy was right about one thing: Victoria is not just my cousin, but my double first cousin through both parents, if the people from the other universe are equivalent to the ones here, and us having sex probably is incest, by almost all definitions. Oops. At least, alt-Victoria is my double first cousin, but I can’t imagine my Victoria being any further removed from me. We’ll definitely make sure not to have any children together.

Glen’s birth certificate was in the envelope under his wallet, and it looked realistic enough, but was different and listed a fictional place that must exist in his world. He had some identification cards as well, but they likewise listed places that don’t exist in my world.

It was a cooler day today, and I wanted a light jacket. When I looked for one in Victoria’s closet, I found she had a denim jacket. It was a woman’s denim jacket, clearly, due to the extra space in front for her chest. It had buttons at the bottom on each side that let the waist of the jacket be taken in, and these were already set to take it in one inch of a possible two inches on each side, which made it tight around her waist. The jacket had a fleece lining, and a paisley print fabric was sewn over the shoulder pieces. It was just long enough to cover the waistband of her jeans when she wore jeans that came up to her waist, rather than low-rise jeans. It was exactly the kind of thing I could have imagined buying if I had been shopping for a Victoria who went out into the oil fields, practical while still a bit fashionable. It wasn’t something my Victoria had ever worn in dreams, nor had I seen it in her wardrobe here before, but I already knew that this version of Victoria had some different clothes.

I took a moment to assign Glen a task to read the recent entries in alt-Victoria’s diary, particularly as to what happened 8 days earlier. Was it a normal day for Victoria? Was it crazy? Did I interrupt her life by summoning her that day? Did the creation of the diary in this copy of her world stop the flow of entries into the diary, turning it into something I would have to update myself? He didn’t know everything to the degree that Nancy did, but the life alt-Victoria was living according to the diary we’d read before was simple to explain. With that done, I went to work.

The work day went fine, and after I got home, Glen confirmed there was no interruption in alt-Victoria’s life whatsoever according to her diary entries. In particular, Thursday, July 27th was a normal day for her and there was nothing to indicate the actions I performed that day. Also, he reported that alt-Victoria had planned her weddings, plural, to happen Friday to Sunday, September 15-17, with her parents. She was going to let each one of her three summoned men go through the wedding ceremony with her.

Once he finished that brief report, I practically dragged Glen through the doorway into Victoria’s dream world. The last time I had alt-Victoria here, I saw how Victoria’s dream-bedroom had clearly become the one belonging to this Victoria rather than the one I was used to. So I wanted to explore the rest of that dream world. Glen hadn’t been here before, but I explained things to him as needed, which also forced me to think through them again.

It had seemed like on past visits to the dream world, time changed to whatever time it needed to be for me to do what I wanted. So today I wanted to experiment with that. Could I go look at this Victoria living her life in this world, in high school and college? The answer was, yes and no.

By intending to walk to school at a particular date and time, I could in fact arrive there at that time in the dream world, and see a bunch of familiar faces among the crowd of blurred ones. But not Victoria’s own. A different phenomenon happened any time I entered a scene I should have been in: I took her place. When I did this, I remembered Victoria being in the scene, and without actually walking over to it, I jumped over to where Victoria should have been. Like at the lunch table with her cohort. Or in her seat in class. I could actually interact with other real people when I did this, but only in ways consistent with what Victoria would have been doing at the time. Trying to do otherwise, in effect breaking the fourth wall, caused me to pop out of the scene and I’d be back out in the hallway or wherever I was before joining the scene.

And I could see and recognize a lot of the faces. With over 1000 kids in the high school, naturally I did not know all of them and most of the ones I had only seen in the yearbook weren’t remarkable enough for me to remember them. But there were many I did.

Once I felt I had proved that, I jumped to the senior prom in high school. It turned out that Victoria went with one of the nerds. Not the smart nerds, a category that encompassed Jody and this Victoria, but the socially inept kind of nerds. Except that he wasn’t. Larry was that kind of nerd in my world, but he seemed considerably less so here. Given Victoria’s controlling personality, my guess is that she dated him for a while and trained him to look less inept. One thing that was clear was that Larry was following Victoria’s lead, rather than the other way around, though he managed to do it without looking awkward doing so.

This fit precisely with the picture of Victoria I’d developed. She’d found a guy who either couldn’t get dates, or was too timid to ask, and definitely would never have tried to date a hottie like Victoria, and turned him into the kind of guy she could enjoy being with and enjoy dating. I’m sure plenty of other guys were jealous of Larry, but Victoria had probably turned down those guys already and they very likely didn’t understand why she enjoyed Larry.

Next I tried a much more ambitious time-space jump to look at Victoria in college. Larry wasn’t around, so I assume he didn’t get into this college and she started over with somebody else. By jumping to likely date spots at dances, I found Victoria there with a guy several times, and with a girl once as well, but I didn’t know them and they were faceless. I am not even sure it was the same guy each time. It was hard for me to stick in these moments, face-to-face with someone I couldn’t focus on, so I didn’t get very long with any of them.

Maybe someday I’d figure out who Victoria’s college dates were, but I felt myself getting tired, and before I simply fell asleep right there, I used the walking trick to get us back to Victoria’s dream-house and through the doorways into my current actual house.