I mean, option 1 doesn't have to be "evil doppelganger" either. There's a lot of ways to have fun with it. Here's a common one.
Leah Snow rubs the bridge of her nose, and stares down at the blueprints in front of her. The machinery will work. The calculations are correct. The senior Dr. Quill and her bodyguard might be reachable, even Dr. Chin. But there's just no way to stabilize a portal! Charles Palmer can get there, but that's fraught with peril.
A happy accident trying to reach the Clarenverse revealed the existence of another parallel dimension, on the "other side" of the continuum. Maybe the team has parallel selves living there. Leah wonders what she'd be like in another universe, under another set of circumstances.
She looks behind her, toward the shared sleeping area, at the sleeping form of Flamma. She bites her lip briefly.
God, he's so hot. The two have had a rocky relationship - sometimes friends, sometimes more - ever since his creation. The android was made to be a workmate and friend, but Leah let enough of her secret desires and frustrated dreams into the mental matrix that he emerged as someone quite different from what she expected. Still, how things are now isn't so bad. He's still with her, eager to assist her research, able to calm her down after a frustrating day in the laboratory, always there with a kind word or understanding touch. She's not sure she likes how Medea Quill sometimes looks at him, but such things can be forgiven among teammates. As long as nothing happens.
Is there another Flamma in that universe? She's not sure how she'd handle two good-looking android boys.
Enough of that, girl. People are counting on you. You're a genius. Get back to acting like one. To balance the dimensional aperture, something else is needed. A third connection? To that far-off dimension, past the Clarenverse? If there is another Leah, could she reach her and convince her to work together? The Clarenverse isn't stable, but Leah's home dimension is, and maybe that one is too. Two stable universes, with a bridge through to the Clarenverse between them... And maybe those people are trying to retrieve someone too, depending on how similar their world is!
Alistair Chin left behind quite a bit of dimensional data, quite by accident - maybe, the team is still soberly debating that - when he attacked Medea Quill through her nano-bits. Leah's preferred field is robotics, but she can quickly get up to speed on any science she can study. Would the people in the other universe have had similar experiences? Maybe. Hopefully. But just in case, she starts writing up a primer for her other self, for a girl who might not have studied dimensional engineering.
I wonder if she's had as much trouble with her mother as I have.
