"Double Catastrophe"
by Maggie Fitzgerald
*Disclaimer: The premises and characters I used in this story are the
property of St. Claire Entertainment, and this story will be used for
entertainment purposes only.
Chapter Two
The long trudge through the dark forest was enough to drag Wade's spirits even lower than
they had been already. After the initial jolt of seeing her sister again after three years, she
had wanted to throw her arms around Kelly's neck and have the other woman tell her that everything
was all right. That they would never be separated again. But the distrust that Kelly had shown toward
them made that impossible, and Wade's heart ached to see her sister react that way instead of showing
the deep kinship she and her real sister had, back home. Even though she knew that this wasn't her sister,
still...She felt Quinn's arm slip around her shoulders, and she looked up to see him giving her an
encouraging smile. She tried to smile back, and she managed it well enough to satisfy his concern.
The trees abruptly parted into a round clearing, where the moon and stars could clearly be seen.
In the center of the clearing was a house that looked small and comfortable, yet important and powerful
at the same time. No chimney graced its roof; but, through the windows, Wade could see shadows from
firelight dancing on the walls.
Quinn's double led them up the narrow stone path to the door. He opened the door with a key and
stepped inside, followed by the others. The sliders looked around the warm, cozy room to see a
disembodied blue flame burning brightly in the corner.
Wade stared, mesmerized, at the fire. "How does it do that?"
Quinn's double looked at her for a moment, then smiled slightly. "I keep forgetting you don't have
magic on your world. It's a simple trick, for the Sorcerer."
Being a scientist, Quinn was, of course, interested in all new things. "Why only for the..." He
hesitated, feeling uncertain about calling the Professor's double something that sounded so strange.
"The Sorcerer?"
Quinn's double absently picked up a fist-sized violet stone from a coffee table. "It has to do
with an individual's type of magic. I wouldn't be able to do that, because my magic is of the mind.
The Sorcerer's magic deals with the...tangible. The corporeal, physical nature of things."
"Well, how come it's blue?" Rembrandt asked.
The Sorcerer looked at him strangely for a moment. "It's magical," he replied matter-of-factly.
Then he paused. "I suppose I'll have to explain it to you?" The four of them nodded. "Very well," he
said. "Every person's magic has its own aura of a certain color. Mine is blue, which is the color of
the material magics, such as the flames you saw." He glanced at Quinn's double hesitantly. "There is
a terrible man by the name of Donovan who rules the Shadow Realm, which is in the town of Los Angeles.
All of the dwellings in that town belong to his followers. His aura...is black."
There was an uncomfortable silence, broken finally by Rembrandt. "I always knew there was something
wrong with Los Angeles."
Wade wasn't sure she knew quite what that implied. "What's so terrible about him? I mean, what has
he done?"
The other two seemed to have given the floor to the Sorcerer, for neither of them offered any
information to answer the questions. The Sorcerer cleared his throat. "Donovan is trying to...dispose
of Mr. Mallory and the rest of us because he wants the vortex to take control of other worlds...and
because we present a threat to his plan to conquer the rest of California."
"Conquer California?" Wade said incredulously. "What kind of government do you have on this
world?"
"A monarchy, just like the rest of America," the Sorcerer replied, although like the others
he seemed to be having a hard time speaking directly to Wade. Once again, the sliders wondered why,
but they said nothing about it just yet.
"On your world, there is no monarchy?" Quinn's double asked.
Wade smiled. "Well, not in America," she said. "England has a king and queen, but most countries
are run by democracy or communism now."
Rembrandt was getting impatient with the small talk. "You still haven't said what it is that this
Donovan character does that's so evil."
Quinn's counterpart became grim. "You wouldn't believe some of the things Donovan's done. Or some
of the things his Shadows have done."
Rembrandt didn't like the idea behind that statement, whether it was inadvertent or not. How would
you know what we'd believe? Have you been sliding for two years? Didn't think so. "You'd be surprised at
just how much we have seen."
Kelly coldly broke her silence; she hadn't said a word since they had arrived. She spoke crisply,
without emotion, and without once looking in Wade's direction. "We once saw a group of Shadows take someone.
All it had to do was touch him, and he just disappeared. We found him a half-hour later near the outskirts of
L.A." She paused to drive her point home. "All of his flesh had been ripped from his body."
Wade's eyes widened. She saw the others exchange uncomfortable glances, and she shuddered in horror.
But her curiosity soon won her over. Curiosity killed the cat, she reminded herself with dry humor. "What's
a Shadow?"
"We're not sure, Miss Welles," the Sorcerer answered. "They may be the spirits of the undead, or dark
magical creations of Donovan's own power. They have uncanny abilities to find a person, and they have many
ways of getting what they want."
Quinn felt that he should say something, anything at all helpful, but he was having trouble thinking
of something. He was rescued, however, by his double. "We've stopped Donovan from taking over pretty much
for good," he said, distractedly tossing his stone from one hand to another. "But if we all die, then he'll
be able to start over again. As it stands now, he's limited to L.A. and the surrounding suburbs, but he's been
sending his creatures after us for about three years now, and we needed to find a way to escape him."
"We knew that no matter where we went on Earth Donovan would eventually be able to find us," the Sorcerer
continued. "So Mr. Mallory tried using his magic to find somewhere alternative to go."
Quinn's double grinned. "And I came up with the vortex."
Quinn suddenly felt a stab of guilt. Guilt that, unlike his twin, he hadn't been able to take his
friends through the vortex--and back. Which brought up a question. "Why did you come back?"
The Sorcerer sighed. "We never slid."
"Why not, man?" The Professor couldn't understand why these people wouldn't leave the first chance they
got, and they obviously had the vortex in their hands.
"There's a problem with it," the Sorcerer said.
There's that word again, Quinn thought warily. Problem. He was sick of fixing other people's vortex
problems. When could he get around to fixing his own? "What is it?"
Quinn's double rubbed his eyes wearily. "It--wait, here it comes. Stay back." He closed his eyes and
clenched the stone tightly in his hands. Suddenly, a bright flare of violet light leapt from his hands and
coalesced into the familiar form of the wormhole--in a slightly different hue.
"Hey, why is it purple?" Rembrandt asked.
Quinn's double stared into the vortex almost longingly. For a moment, Rembrandt thought he hadn't heard
him, but the answer came. "That's the color of my magic's aura. Violet for the power of the mind."
Rembrandt smiled and shook his head. "Man, there you go again about that magic thing. That's a little too
weird for me."
They sat in silence, watching the violet ripples in the wormhole swirling outward from the center like
ripples in a pond. Finally, there was a sucking sound, and the interdimensional portal disappeared.
To break the awed yet awkward quiet, Professor Arturo stood and said crisply, "Well. This is all very
well and good, but you haven't gotten to the point. What is it that we have to fix?"
Quinn's double tensed, then sighed as though facing a point that he hadn't wanted to face. "There was
someone else who was supposed to slide with us. I was doing experiments on the vortex with the amounts of
channeled power and the mindlinks associated with the stone one day. She came over with Kelly, and I activated
the stone. I wasn't done yet; it was totally unpredictable. I didn't even know if it was going to work or not."
He paused, gathering all of his thoughts into coherent sentences. Then, unexpectedly, he smiled. "She always
wanted everything to be now. The present was the only time that mattered to her. She didn't want to wait. She
was so excited...she said she only wanted a closer look."
Suddenly Kelly laughed, an ironic, bitter laugh. "Well, that's what she got, isn't it. A closer look." She
kept staring piercingly at Wade, as thought Wade herself had done something wrong.
Quinn's double looked at them, and his eyes were solemn and fierce. "It grabbed her."
Quinn leaned forward. Another vortex he remembered had grabbed people, had been too powerful... "What?"
The Sorcerer blinked at him, looking as though he were fighting some strong emotion. "It pulled her in, man!
How hard is that to understand?"
Wade remembered how many times she had thought that she had lost one of her friends, and knew what their
doubles were feeling. "I'm sorry," she said. "I can tell she meant a lot to you. Who was she?"
Without losing any of the intensity of his gaze, Quinn's double turned to look at Wade. She felt like he
was trying to tell her something without saying a word, but eventually he spoke. "Her name was Wade. Wade Welles."
Wade gasped. Immediately the memories of how the doubles had reacted to her began to flash inside her mind.
She glanced at her sister's double, and regretted it; Kelly, upon hearing her Quinn speak the name of her vanished
sister, had buried her head in her hands and was sobbing quietly. Wade, however, was shocked enough that she needed
several minutes to recover. When she was finished, she looked again at her dejected sister. "I--I'm sorry," she
stammered, not knowing quite how to respond to the news of what came out to, in the end, her own disappearance.
She suddenly realized that her own sister, on her home Earth, must have felt the same way when she slid with Quinn
and the others, and guilt welled up in the pit of her stomach.
Kelly wiped her eyes and looked up. "I don't need your pity," she said through her tears. "I don't even know
who you are."
Wade sighed. "I guess you are different people," she said, knowing that her sister in this situation would
not turn away from her friends. "But I understand how you feel, even if you don't believe that I'm your sister."
She remembered a double of her father that they had met once, on a world where greed was the predominating emotion
and her double had died as an infant, along with her mother.
"Maybe." Kelly turned away from her for a moment, and when she turned back her face was dry, and there was no
hint of emotion.
Suddenly Quinn's double stood, alarmed. His eyes held a look of urgency, but also of being the hunted deer,
staring into the barrel of a rifle. "We have to get out of here," he said. "Now."
They all stood with him, but the sliders were puzzled. "What?" Rembrandt asked.
"Now!" Quinn's double cried. "Come on! Out the back door, this way. Hurry!" He led the seven of them through
the house and out the door, running into the woods behind the clearing. When he stopped, they looked back through
the trees in time to see the house erupt into red flame laced with black smoke.
Before anyone could react, Wade pointed through the foliage. "Look!" she cried. They followed her gaze to see
a hunched black figure retreating from the inferno in the opposite direction. They trailed after Quinn's double, who
had hurried back to the clearing to catch the culprit. But when they got there, they found him standing empty-handed,
staring after the shadow. "We can't track him now," he said resignedly, sitting down on a boulder. "It's too dark."
The Sorcerer put a hand on his shoulder. "And by morning he will be far away from here."
Quinn's double ran a hand through his hair in frustration. "Damn!"
Quinn was thoroughly confused by this time. He had followed the others, and he had seen the shadow and the fire,
but what did it all mean? "What happened?"
"That was one of the Shadow creatures," Kelly replied. "It used its magic to destroy Quinn's house, because it
thought he was inside."
"How did you know it was coming?" Rembrandt asked.
Quinn's double looked up at him for a moment, confused, and then he smiled slightly. "I keep forgetting you don't
have magic on your world. Mine sensed the Shadow."
"Somewhat like radar," the Professor muttered to himself.
His double raised an eyebrow. "Radar?" he asked.
It was Arturo's turn to smile. "Technology. Something from our world instead of magic used for detection."
Quinn decided it was time to address the situation at hand. "Look," he said to his double, "I'm really sorry about
your house."
"It's okay," the other replied. "There wasn't anything of real value in there. I have the only thing I would need."
He held out the hand that still contained the violet vortex stone.
Quinn was amazed at how lightly his double was taking the destruction of everything he had. His only guess was that
the other Quinn had his mind on sliding, and figured that he wouldn't need his house anyhow.
His thoughts were interrupted by Wade. "They didn't wreck your house because of us, did they?" she asked. "I mean,
maybe they tracked our vortex or something."
Quinn's double shook his head. "No," he said. "They can't track your vortex; it's not a source of magic. That's
what they're looking for. They probably sensed a large amount of mindmagic being used, which was when I opened our vortex."
He suddenly pounded his fist on the palm of his other hand. "I should have known better than to open the vortex without
shielding! I thought Donovan's resources would be down after his latest effort."
The Sorcerer tousled Quinn's double's hair. "Now, you can't go blaming yourself, my boy," he said in a fatherly voice.
"There's work to be done. Miss Welles' house is the closest, so I suggest we travel there and analyze what our next course of
action will be, and perhaps find a way to modify the wormhole so that it can be used successfully. If, of course, it's all
right with you, Miss Welles?"
Kelly hesitated. Then, finally, she sighed. "Fine. Let's go." They began to walk through the thick forest, Kelly
leading the way. She was followed closely by the sliders, who didn't want to lag behind for fear of getting lost in
unfamiliar country. The Sorcerer came after them, and Quinn's double was last, glancing watchfully over his shoulder in
case anything was trailing them in the darkness.
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