Avanti and Loth - cloned sibling pairs

Though Woody and his wife had never been able to have children properly, once the Protectorate started dealing with other universes on a regular basis, he got the idea - and the ability - to create a clone child from his wife's dna. Avanti is the result: a pair of precisely the same girls with Georgia's youthful appearance. Their minds are intimately connected to one another, the cloning process leaving them as telepathic as most dragons are with their riders, and then some. They are both considered smashing successes, they complete one another's sentances, and if one might get hurt, the other does feel it. If one were to be killed, it is almost assured that the other would want to die as well. They work not only with their father in the lab, but with the security of Eden's Gate. The only way they can be told apart is if they are wearing different colors of clothing, but they freely interchange those, so it's impossible to say which is which at any given time. They do not care which of them is being addressed. So they are known as "Avanti".

Loth and his brother Loth are in the same boat, genetically speaking, as Avanti. Formed from the cells of one man named Neill, and with the success of the prior clone trial. They are quiet men, always speaking softly to one another if they are not completely silent and speaking mentally. They are adept with hospital techniques, and often are called upon to help calm patients - even though they look physically frail, they're not all that weak, and together they are one man with two bodies. For convienence's sake, let's call them LothEL and LothAR - left and right.

Loth and Avanti, while they do hang out together, are not two pairs together. They in fact are only grouped together by most people by way of their being cloned. Their clothing reflects the unique status they have. (And technically, yes, the others prior to these *were* clones, not brothers, sisters or aunties... But don't worry. It doesn't matter now.)

"He's been on a rampage since early this morning," Lothel said. Lothar nodded and completed, "but he's getting tired now. It's about time."

Woody looked up from his intense study of a skin sample in his high powered microscope, and grunted. "Who?"

Loth looked at each other and sighed. It would be one of those days. When Woody didn't realize who it was they were talking about, it was not a good sign.

"Ripley," they said at once. Woody nodded slowly, realizing the mistake of having done what he'd done... It was too late, no one could just ask they kill him, but ... If the man-clone didn't stop doing these little temper tantrums of his, everyone would simply unload their crossbows or beat him to death with their staves. It wasn't going to be a pretty sight. But then, Ripley wasn't a pretty sight.

Ripley was a clone. One of the first, and to most people's eyes, a total failure. Unlike the Jenns, Ripley bore enough resemblance to his prime to be recognized occasionally as someone he wasn't, but since his prime had been killed before he was created, he had only his prime's basic genetics to go by, when building his brain. And apparently, Ringo's brain was riddled with mixed up patterns, grey matter that formed itself into an adult even in the child's-level clone vat.

Avanti and Loth had been there to watch this mess grow up and out of its containment unit. They were among the first to have to chase him down, too. Finally, Woody came out of his reverie and told the pair of Loths, "Go find him, tranquilize him, and bring him back here. We can't have him loose."

As Loth left the clone master in his room, they conversed. "We'll have to use a higher dose than last time," said El. "I agree, it's probably too much to ask that he remain unconscious for more than five minutes at a time." Ar said. They walked down the long straight corridor to the exterior of Eden's Gate, where they'd last seen Ripley. He was still around, they could hear him.

Without even a word, they moved around to each side of the large grove of trees where Ripley was making odd noises. Silently, the two black men with but one mind came around a bush and tree, respectively. But they froze, they didn't realize how dangerous this would be.

Ripley had a knife, Ripley had a victim.

"Why! Why couldn't you have just left him dead?!" Triia - gold riding Triia who thought that this mess was long since over - yelled. She paced around the small office of the clone master, until they heard a knock at the door. Triia threw it open, but was surprised to see the pair of blond girls, Avanti, looking past her at their 'father'.

"Medical," said one, "Emergency," said the other, and they vanished down the hall.

Triia glared at the brown-haired clone master. "Do you see, this is what you've started. All over again. As though Ringo wasn't bad enough before." She started to leave the room, following Avanti into the medical quarters, but she paused. "Now he's undamaged - I saw the scans you made of his brain. No lesions - no more illusions about the voices in his damn head."

Woody sat in the chair behind his desk and held his forehead in his fingertips. This was... very very bad. He'd known that Ringo was telepathic, but damaged by old wounds that scarred his brain and prevented proper empathic responses. The voices in his head that Ringo had always complained about should have disappeared when he impressed Light-Brown Khalbalahath - but they didn't go away. They got clearer.

Woody wished that he could just hear voices. Instead of his own, guilty mind's I-told-you-so echoing over and over.

Avanti and Loth had scrubbed down and were assisting Mark in the operating theater. The place had been rebuilt after the move through the Nexus, using modern - and otherworldly - technology. Mark adjusted well to the theories of basic medicine, advanced surgical techniques, and traditional means. But he was in way over his head now.

The messy body that was brought to him by the Loth pair (he'd learned later that the Avantis were dispatched moments later to make sure that Ripley stayed down and out for the duration) and Mark's heart sank. They'd cleaned her up - it was a girl, perhaps 17 or so, but she was in ... several pieces. Ripley and his knife (Mark remembered how Ringo liked knives, how dangerous he was with them. It was more than just genetics at work here.) had done amazing, horrible things with this girl.

Her arm, for instance, was completely severed. Ripley'd taken it off somehow sawing the bone clear through. Because there had been no warning outside, no screaming and blood-curdling yelling, Mark had to imagine that the girl had long before passed out from the other wounds that he'd inflicted on her. The back of her head was bashed in, but intact - he must have hit her with a branch or club. That might have knocked her unconscious too, but from the way Mark could see skin, hair and blood under the girl's nails, she was still up and running by then.

Not that she would ever run again.

The knife wounds went down from her shoulders, her torso, and her back. There were scores of them down her pale legs - but the one that Mark knew was going to be the problem was that there was a slice completely across her spine. Her hips were growing cold, along with the rest of her, but he knew with certainty that she'd been paralyzed.

Avanti and Loth cleaned her up carefully, one Loth administering oxygen and the other patching the stump of her arm with a kind of superglue that would keep what little blood she had left inside her. Avanti determined that though she'd been stripped naked, this girl had not been raped in addition to the other wounds - Ripley was weird but he might have considered himself above that act.

The other Avanti kept a close eye on the girl's vitals, while Mark paced around her examining each portion of her body in turn. "I feel like I'm doing a forensics exam," he muttered.

"She's still alive," said Avanti at the heart-lung machine, "so she will live."

"We have faith in your abilities," the other Avanti said. The Loths nodded in unison.

"I don't." Mark said flatly. "I have to summon someone, some help. I can't do anything but keep her alive. She's not going to want to be, unless I get some help."

Mark quickly left the room, knowing that if Loth and Avanti saw something amiss they would get him or Woody quickly. They remained silent, not needing to communicate. Even between the pairs of them, they were able to detect intent and meaning, if not direct words or emotions.

Loth finally sighed, "I'm worried she'll have permanent brain damage."

"She's going to have vision loss," the other replied. Avanti gulped back a bit of a sob.

"She's young - who do you think she is?" Asked one. "She looks kind of familiar, too."

And indeed she did, she was pale skinned not just because of blood loss, but beacuse her skin was quite white - almost but not quite "clone white". Her hair was the thing that had them all thinking, though. It was a dark orange-red, with black ticking and stripes through it.

They were brought back to reality when Mark entered the room again, this time prepped for surgery and ready to sew up what he could on the girl. Proficient with these tools as well, Loth moved around and Avanti took up two positions to monitor and keep blood pressure up.

Avanti and Loth helped Mark out of the surgery. It had been more than eight hours, and Mark had been awake long before then. The clones had to wonder where their own reserves of strength had come from too.

Waiting for them outside, were several riders and some other people that they recognized from other dimensions. They'd traveled from worlds so similar and yet so far away... Two riders, Kalkin and Vanya, were as clones themselves. Both blue riders, but also both genetic engineers. Gnome Kiite, whose girlfriend was also a rider (and related to Shard, imagine that) was present from Dawnlight's future incarnation - he was going to help patch together the girl's brain.

But it was the engineers who were going to be making some... needed changes. The pair of tall dark-skinned blue riders went into the room where the girl lay asleep. Their long, deft fingers would find that the stitching Mark did was almost on a par with their own, they would see that her legs were indeed never going to move on their own again. The arm could not possibly be reattached without some psionic healing - and that was not available to either of them.

"What we can do," Kalkin said to the group when they came back out, "is manufacture some biowear connections that will help your side out."

Vanya added, "and blood," he glanced at Mark's smock which was covered almost entirely in the girl's shed blood. "She'll be needing a lot of it, but it'll have to function as hydrolic fluid in the future too. We can get her body prepared for that."

"Are you going to do this here?" Avanti asked.

"No," Kalkin said, "we're going to take her with us, to the Den. There are emergency people waiting, you did a good job. All of you."

Loth and Avanti all bowed a bit, but then all four of them turned to congratulate Mark. He was practically standing up asleep. The adrenallyne keeping him up during the surgery was crashing, and now he needed sleep.

"We'll bring her back," Vanya said. "Gnome? You coming?"

"You've got the electronics I need, you bet I am."

The odd people left, apparently to bring the injured girl with them on a stretcher, to their dragons.

After a day like this, both Avanti and Loth knew that there would only be bad connotations. Especially for Woody.

It was true - the girl was alive, stabilized, paralyzed and in a coma. And Woody looked like he'd have traded places with her in a moment if only he could be out of this mess. He was at one end of a large table, and the others involved gathered around it. No one quite remained near him.

Triia sat at the opposite end, flanked by the two people that Woody really dreaded being there.

Hollis and Shard. Hollis had been involved with Woody because he'd been cloned several times. Shard, because he'd had run ins with the man's work constantly. Loth and Avanti were on hand, as were Mark, Gnome and the Sengihrs. The two dark men had the least to say about things, but they offered their condolences to whomever required them. Lastly at the table were Rue - because she'd killed Ringo in either world where Dawnlight existed - and Tandri, Triia's son with E'tan. Neither of them said a thing, but it appeared that they were keeping notes in different ways.

"The patient sustained what appears to be permanent spinal damage," said Kalkin. "We've arranged for the limb transfer, attachment and rehabilitation, but..." He trailed off, and his taller darker Zekiran companion continued.

"But we don't even know if she will regain consciousness at this point. Her visual processing will require extensive repairs and her eyes are going to be replaced with cyberoptics. Her face is not going to be the same," he sighed, "and it's a shame, because she certainly was a pretty young lady. Very interesting genetics."

"Do we know who she is, yet?" Asked Avanti, "she looks so familiar..."

"Until she wakes up," Mark said, with another deep sigh and rubbing his eyes, "we won't know. If someone came forward about her, being missing? Maybe. But no one has yet, and I doubt that they will. We can't just advertise it in Dawnlight - missing child found? Injured and possibly paralyzed?" He shook his head, "it just wouldn't fly."

"Especially with Taljorra," Hollis pointed out. "He has been looking for a way to shut down Eden's Gate for years. And honestly?" He turned to Woody, who shrank, "this is an ideal moment. Word will get out, you know. It's not possible to keep secrets anywhere. Especially not with dragons around."

"You are riders," Lothar said, "why not ask one of the dragons to find out who she is?"

"It's a good idea," said Shard, "but we already tried that. She's so far unconscious that even Korea's queen can't reach her." The legendary dragon-healer pair who shared a den with Hollis and his spectacular bronze Synesth couldn't do it... perhaps it couldn't be done. That was not something that Triia or Woody wanted to hear.

"So we wait," Vanya said, "until she wakes. I do wish I could bring some of my people in, but they're not available."

There was a silence, and then Woody stood up. "I'm sorry." He stated, flatly. He fiddled with his hands, and opened up a piece of paper which he'd written something on. His writing was appallingly bad, and only he could decipher it. Perhaps Avanti could, but they were not privy to his private letter to himself. He often wrote such things. He could hardly remember yesterday - his brain was brilliant, but degraded by certain drugs and ravaged into a morass of forgetfulness. "I seem to have done something horribly wrong, and I want to apologize for it. I know this is ... about Ripley."

At that, nearly everyone - unconsciously - turned their eyes or head to look at Triia. She had her amber colored eyes fixed on Woody, unblinking.

"And I made a mistake. He should have remained ... remains. I do not suppose that any of you understand the ..." he furrowed his brows, looking for the right words. "The temptation, involved. I can hold life in my hands, but it's my duty to keep that life intact. Not to destroy it."

"I do know," Vanya the Zekiran said, quietly. "It's a very difficult job to remain merely a doctor, simply a breeding assistant." He glanced at Triia, who looked as though she were going to swoop down his neck and throttle him. "I say this only because I know how he came to the decision to do this thing. Creating a new life, out of the ashes of the old. It's ..."

"It's playing god, is what it is," Mark spat. "It's not what we're here to do, it's not right."

"We know your feelings about this, Mark," said Shard in a calmly warning voice.

"It is his profession, is it not, to produce viable life?" Asked Vanya, and Mark nearly slapped the table in anger.

"It's not our profession - we're meant to be doctors."

"He is hardly the same as a medical practicioner," Kalkin pointed out. "The same as I am a healer more than Vanya is, and he is to me, well, almost precisely what Woody is to you. With access and permission to use certain devices and processes, I've certainly entertained far more options than I had before." He paused, "but that's not what is at issue here. This meeting is meant to be about the errant creation of one person. Not in general."

Mark leaned back, and nodded. Exasperated, he said, "Ripley needs to be put down."

"And I will not do that," Woody said.

"Then I will," Triia hissed. Everyone grew silent. Even Shard's arm spines stood up at the edge in her voice. "Because that bastard already did enough damage - here, in his second life, and in both worlds where he was a living Prime." She gritted her teeth, "There have been cases, many of them, where a clone has managed to undo the damage of their Prime, where a clone has actually surpassed the Prime's memories or conditions to make their way better than the first. But Ripley - is - not - one - of - those - people."

Woody nodded slowly. "He... Is pure. What Ringo would have been, without damage. I ... I'm sorry, Triia. I thought that he went insane after his accidents. Not before them. I was wrong. There was no way to know that."

"You could have asked someone else," said Rue, very quietly. It was not like her, to be hesitant. When she spoke, it was with authority - she was a harper, a reporter in the other world. Shard pulled in a slow breath. Something was significantly happening here.

Triia felt it too, the dry hot tang of the desert. The desert of Etan's mind. Where was he? His son Tandri looked up sharply, then at Rue, and then hesitantly at his mother. "Mom, I'm sorry."

She shook her head, "why?"

Rue looked over to Triia. They were friends, not remarkably close ones, but good friends through Shard. Even Shard, though, did not know what Rue had to say. Tandri it appeared, did.

"You could have asked his family about it. Or found someone to ask," Rue said with a hush to her voice. She looked almost ashamed to be speaking.

"How could I do that? No one knew where Ringo came from, he was adopted." Woody said.

"He was adopted, yes," she replied.

The Avantis looked at each other, and at their father, in turns. Something ground around in their stomachs, it was a faint unease of telepathic contact outside their private channel. Loth had the same look on their faces, as though neither of them could place the voice of a speaker that was in another room, muffled.

"Well those people are probably still on the Old World," Shard said, nervously trying to steer this away from something - he didn't even know what.

"He was adopted by a pair of people who didn't know where he'd come from," Rue said flatly, "and he was given a home because they were told to do it. They complied, because they wanted children of their own, and couldn't have any. He had no foster siblings. It was a private arrangement."

"Rue?" Shard said, and Hollis put up his hand a bit, to let her continue. Rue was in a trance of some sort, almost as though she were not the one truly speaking.

"It was an arrangement that worked out well until Ringo's mental powers shifted. He was in an accident - but it was not an accident, it was a failed attempt on his life." She paused, looking at the table, speaking words that even she didn't know would come out this strangely. "One of his real family tried to do it, and failed once. They'd managed to hurt him enough that his powers wouldn't surface properly. If they did, they'd probably have led to a mass murder on a much larger scale than he really wound up with."

"Sounds too close for comfort," Vanya muttered to his otherworldly twin.

"It is," Tandri said, dismally.

"Tandri?" Triia asked, "honey, why won't you say what's on your mind?"

Rue leaned back, apparently done speaking because Tandri was now to bear this weight. She was relieved. Not entirely, for she still bore the knowledge. In fact she'd borne it for ages. Ever since she was asked to kill Ringo.

"Ringo was," Tandri paused, apparently either thinking for himself, or interpreting something that was being said to him from afar. "Ringo was my nephew."

Even Hollis gave out a sputtering noise. Everyone knew that Tandri was Etan's son - and ...

Triia drew pale. "What do you mean," she asked in a very faint voice.

"I mean, that ..." Tandri sent a strange look at Vanya and Kalkin. "You aren't going to like this much either."

"Why drag us into this?" Kalkin asked. "We're not even on your world."

"But Renaud is, was, and that's Ringo's father. My half brother. On this and several other worlds including Zekira and Pern." Tandri finally said, abruptly. As though if he could get the words out any faster they would go away and leave him alone. They clearly would do no such thing, now that he'd said them.

Triia shook suddenly, her eyes squared up open and angry. But her expression was fearful, and she lept out of her seat to run out of the room.

The two Sengihrs both were quite still, however. They had the same mannerism of grinding their jaws a bit, and then running their long fingered hands through their dark hair.

Kalkin stood first, and followed Triia out of the room. Whether he went after her, no one knew. Vanya followed him.

"Woody," Mark said, "you're so fucking dead."

Fortunately for the clone master, no one allowed Mark to follow through on any threats, and Georgia, Woody's wife, was asked to keep track of him for the duration of the next few days. Just in case he forgot that he was on thinner ice than ever.

Avanti and Loth kept close watch on the patient, now that she was stable enough to be brought back. Covered entirely in bandages and on more life support systems than either pair of clones had seen before, but still there was a shape of a girl under them all.

Her head was wrapped carefully, but was bulky in the front and made the Loths wonder what they'd done to her. Her arm and legs had been entirely removed, and replaced with something out of a science fiction story - mechanical limbs that worked on the same liquids that her whole body had... Artificial blood?

It seemed that the dual pair of clones came to the same conclusion at the same time. "This is too strange," Avanti muttered and was echoed by El and Ar.

What was stranger still, though, was that shortly after she'd been brought in to rest, the bandaged girl began to stir.

(( Formerly on avan-loth2.htm added here for ease of use now in 2023))

Avanti and Loth were taken, after being abruptly 'searched' by some of the folks with dragons (they knew they were all riding material anyway, it wasn't a surprise, not even to Avanti) to Planet Malnev's dragonry. Avanti set about helping with organization and hunting, while the Loths assisted where they could in the infirmary. They passed the time quickly, it wasn't long before the clutch - an unusual one to say the least - began to hatch.

They'd never seen dragons like these before, only the Old Worlders, assorted Alskyrans, and whatever else the Nexus might occsasionally drift by Eden's Gate. So when the hatching began and the colorful creatures were still new to the world, Avanti began cooing like a mother, and Loth chuckled at them.

They knew about the hatching more quickly than some, but still they were as thrilled to be there as everyone else. Even the hosts seemed a bit jumpy at this one.

The first egg shattered. The tangle of limbs, wings, and tails immediately suggested twins, and the malnevian dragons in the stands cheered. Twins were a lucky beginning to a hatching.

They were quickly stunned into silence as the twins sorted themselves out and they were more clearly visible. One was green, with red wing sails; the other was red with green wings! Both had a deep brown crest and tan horn buds. They stood together, and without even looking at each other, and barely glancing at the candidates, they dashed to the cloned siblings known as Loth.

"We are Mayphwar and Blaephwar and we are yours," the twins said in unison. The Loths looked at their companions, then headed to the feeding cavern to wait there while their new bonds ate.

They were clearly happy with the results of this bonding, Loth didn't distinguish only execpt that the one with the green pants seemed to like the green-bodied dragon a little more, and the other way round for the red-panted/bodied pair.

 The third egg, hatching at almost the same time as the second, also revealed a female, but not just one. The second set of twins was almost as strange as the first, though their colors were a bit closer together. One was red with purple wings, and the other purple with red. Both had a golden yellow crest and bronze horn buds. Not seeming to want to copy their brothers, when they approached the cloned sisters, Avanti, each spoke her name separately. "I am Thechadra," the red said, while the purple spoke, "I am Elmchedra." Then they added, in unison, "We are going with you!" They led the clones out, looking for food.

This was absolutely the best day in the world, Avanti decided to herself, and had to hold their dragonets back from scarfing down too much food.