Editing Ninjas Mages And Lost Cities/Alex (section)

==Background==
 
Alex Roland was just your typical Infinity Patrol agent. Well, a little above average but not too extraordinary. Started as an I-Cop in the Security Division. After several years of protecting Homeline from being infiltrated and preventing The Secret from being discovered by outtimers he decided he wanted to broaden his horizons and transferred over to the I-Scouts to serve in Contact. He had a few years of interesting but not too extraordinary work.. Then came the incident which changed his entire life. It was supposed to be a routine trip back to Homeline after a successful mission. But something went wrong during transit, something unprecedented.

No one thought collisions while transiting were even possible, let alone how it could happen. But happen it did, not with just another parachronic traveler but with four of them! Four other versions of himself in fact. A mage using Plane Shift to go from the Material Realm to the Astral. A World Jumper departing from a successful heist. A musician who traveled the back roads of the multiverse, who had managed to hitch a ride of a shiftrealm when the crash happened. And a self proclaimed "scientific adventurer" who had somehow managed to create his own parachronic technology and was in the middle of giving it a test drive. Beyond all odds, not only did they somehow intersect each other but they emerged from the experience unharmed.

Unharmed but not unchanged. What each of them soon discovered after they dug themselves out of the debris of Alex's and his inventor counterpart's conveyors was that the incident resulted in them being "briefly mingled together metaphysically," according to the mage. "Quantum entangled" was the term the scientist used. Even now that they were separated they each "retained some of each other's essence," as the musician put it. Each found they had the ability to utilize the skills and abilities of all the others involved in the crash. Not the totality of everyone at once, but just a portion at a time. Despite that limitation, it was quite an impressive result.

Impressive enough that, after Infinity decided their scientists had learned all they could from the battery of tests they had performed on him, Alex was returned to field duty. After all, you didn't keep a player so valuable on the bench if you could help it. Rather than being assigned back to Contact though Alex found himself transferred to a division that didn't even officially exist. The one only whispered about in the ranks, the subject of myriad rumors. The legendary ISWAT.