"You've got to be kidding me," Crazy Doc Sanger said, looking at a pile of files that the admissions office had delivered to him. Opposite the big glass coffee table from him, Sanger's room mate Angelino Gabriella sat with a bit of a smirk on his face.

"Looks like you get around some, my friend."

"I always do, but usually I'm ... using some kind of protection." Sanger looked at the mess of names, dimensions, places. "I don't even remember having been to half these worlds."

"It probably wasn't you, it was more likely their local Sanger. You know how you get around," Angelino chuckled. He stood, "well I have to get ready for that recital, are you coming?"

Distracted, Sanger shook his head. "No, no, I have to straighten this out. It could really be bad if I don't."

The angel Gabriel leaned over the back of the leather couch, gave Sanger a brief kiss on the top of his head, and patted his shoulder. "It's all right, everyone knows you can't keep it in your pants."

And the Doc would have complained, if not for the blatant truth sitting in a number of manila folders before him. It was not a disaster, it was just - odd. That all of a sudden a large number of kids were applying to Carramba High School, and all of them had his surname. It wasn't that Sanger was an unusual name, of course, but aside from a few historical others, in this dimension anyway, the Sanger name had always lent itself to shapeshifting, genius, and insanity.

And sex. Lots and lots of sex. Now, this particular version of Sanger knew that he'd been having sex with the larger part of the staff at Carramba, and a couple of the local bored housewives on the side. Shh. Don't tell. One of them even asked him to come check up on her husband too. That was after a good summer's Tantric By Design adult course.

As he pointed out to his room mate though, he usually was either purposefully altering his body chemistry so he was 'shooting blanks' or actually using protection. How then, did it come to this?

Eight kids - two sets of twins, and two pairs of siblings. He figured one for a local 'accident' but... When? These kids were fourteen, fifteen years old! He was well aware of the time distortion he and some other non-local immortal inhabitants had experienced, but this was just weird. Carramba High usually accomodated that. Somehow.

Best not to think on that, temporal distortion and nexus flux were things that he didn't have degrees in. He could have, but there was always something else to know. What he really wanted to know, then, was who the mothers of this batch of kids were.

He glanced over the records, and decided that Raul and Rowena Sanger were the place to start. It was five weeks before the beginning of the school semester, so he had some time to work this all out. Their address was local, but not one he recognized.

He gave a mental whistle and Umpteenth flapped up to the courtyard below. Where are we headed? Asked the electric blue dragon.

"Off to find some people I ought to know a little better, I think." He went downstairs, taking the folder with him.

They flew off over the low buildings in the neighborhood, startling a number of sunbathers and causing a near riot of cheers in the local park. They always loved it when dragons from Carramba flew around. He hoped that people didn't come running after to follow him.

I will take care of them if they do, Umpteenth said, he liked a lot of attention. They arrived at the address where these kids supposedly lived. It was a warehouse, not an apartment.

"Hello?" Sanger said, wary. Though he'd lost a lot of his nervous energy and twitchy 'suddenly triggered to kill anything that moves' quirks, the instincts he had were all telling him this was wrong. Maybe it was a setup. He'd been ambushed by people before. Yet he'd also always come out of it perfectly fine too. He could hear something inside the building, but it was indistinct, not voices, it might have been a machine.

"Well, you stand guard. If something happens you'll know what to do." He told Umpteenth. The dragon nodded, and sat with his tail curled around his forepaws.

Sanger went to the entrance to the building, and tried the door. It opened, weirdly, and was darker than expected inside.

Of course, any normal person would have just reported that the address was a fake and moved on. But something about the whole situation struck him as worth investigating. He stepped inside, and his eyes tried to adjust to the darkness. They normally would have - if there had been any light whatsoever coming into the room. Even from the open door, it was as though there was a soft barrier keeping the exterior outside.

"Hello?" He said again, quietly. There was another sound, more like a thump bump, that he recognized as someone standing and walking. He stood straighter, worried but relaxed.

When the darkness parted, it was barely lighter on the other side. There was in fact a barrier, not made of any cloth or metal - it was made of something different. Magic? Something like that. A tan skinned hand pushed it aside like it was a drapery.

"Ah - I was wondering when you'd be coming to see us," said the young man. He was only about five-seven, but he looked quite young too, so he wasn't done growing. His hair was brown-tan, put into cornrows and draped over his shoulders thickly. While his lips and nose spoke of negro features, he still had bright blue eyes and much lighter skin than any black woman that Sanger knew. "Come on in," the boy said.

"Thank you," Sanger replied, and noticed well that the boy's voice sounded a lot like his own when he was younger. There was a large room, draped literally with the magical barriers that kept the light and sound out. It equally kept the sounds from getting out of the room, soft music was playing but it had clearly just been turned down - it was punk of some kind. It sounded faintly familiar.

There were two shabby couches and a pair of chairs in equal disrepair, but they were all servicable and didn't seem to smell or break up close. An end table was between the chairs, and a cinderblock-and-plywood table sat between the couches. Lamps, mostly unlit and rarely with shades anyway, were scattered around on the floors.

Absently Sanger wondered where the electricity was coming from, since there was no obvious plug on this side of the drapery.

"Hi, I'm Rowena, and this is my brother Raul," the other inhabitant spoke up, rising from the chair she'd been sitting in. She too had the full lips, pleasantly wide nose, and dredlocked hair of her brother, as well as those bright Sanger Blue Eyes.

"Do I know your mother?" Sanger asked, outright. That seemed to both please them and slightly distress them.

"Not you, particularly, no." Raul said. "But she knew a Van Sanger back in high school or so she said."

"She didn't quit school or anything," Rowena said, "but it was a teenage pregnancy."

"Do try not to spread that information around, please?" Sanger said.

"But you were a teenager too," Raul commented, and handed his sister something. She put it down, Doc Sanger noticed it was a kind of high-tech looking knife. "Just in case, some people do try breaking in here, you know. Happened twice last week."

"Then you should move," Doc Sanger said, "or put a lock on the door."

"Sucks that people can't be trusted," Rowena said.

"That is true," Sanger said. "But they can't. Not even here in Crescent, it's a nice place," he sighed, "but there are still enough criminals to keep everyone occupied. Now... Where exactly are you from?"

They all sat down, and Raul brought out a map. It was faintly different than the one that Sanger was familiar with. For one thing, the Angeles/Talon/Diego triangle was missing. "We thought this might come in handy," Rowena said, "to explain things."

"It's different enough," the Doc said. "So..." he didn't want to press his luck, they seemed quite nice, "what do you know about the others?"

Both kids tilted their heads. "Others?" Raul asked.

"Yes," Sanger replied, with a smirk. "The others. There are... six more of you. Waiting for admissions approval. Fortunately the situation was brought to my attention before it got out of hand."

"Six more?" Rowena said leaning back and slurping on a juice box, "you got busy, dad."

***

With the promise that they'd get a good lock on the door, Sanger left the pair and headed home. That warehouse might turn into a far more important location in his life, if things went well. Raul and Rowena were one set of the twins, both fifteen years old. Their mother, as they said, had gotten pregnant in high school and still graduated at the top of the class. They didn't know what had happened to their Sanger after that - they'd never met him. Their mother, Rae, sent them here when she'd been approached by some interdimensional school recruiters.

Sanger knew that had to have been one of the dragon riders. While it was common for Carramba to go out and recruit on other planets, it was fairly rare to take students from alternate realities unless they had a good way to get home. Or, if they came from relatively tame alternate realities.

Raul and his sister seemed like they had their act together. They were bright, but not super-intelligent. Which meant to the Doc that his alternate hadn't had Hyperintelligence treatments before siring them. They'd still go far - after all his family did have a strong educational background. And if Rae was any indication, they'd be dedicated too.

It was their taste in music that bothered him. The song playing while he was there was distinctly one of his other-worldly son's. Pandering Uranus was hardly a group that he wanted to endorse a fourteen year old to hear.

Sanger collected another manila envelope, and looked it over. This time he'd be leaving the dimension, so he decided to take himself through the Magic Studies department instead of flying. It had a back door that led directly to where he wanted to be.

"Zora, you've got a visitor!" Called one of the students, followed by a cackling ghost. When he entered House Domina, he could feel the fact that another of himself was there: Lucas Kalkin.

Shortly the wild-haired and madly grinning head of the Magic School appeared in a puff of purple smoke. "I should have brought Lucas!" She said.

"No, no, though he'd be able to explain this a little quicker I suspect..." Doc Sanger embraced the woman warmly, she was always up for some kind of physical attention. Then he blinked.

There were in fact two more twins, short black hair and big blue eyes, standing behind her.

"Ah, so you want to see the new additions?" Zora said. "We've put up a tower for the astrology class, and-"

"Zora are these mine or Lucas'?" He asked.

"Oh they're yours, would you like to have a tour of the new sub-basement? We've got a haunted well there!" Zora continued, flouncing through the halls. The pair of little carbon-copy Sangerettes drifted behind, both smiling and staring at Doc Sanger.

"How can they be mine? I've - I don't even remember being here to-"

"It wasn't here, darling, it was at that party that Dean Lethe threw. You remember that?" She said, winking. Her hair turned brilliant violet, and her dress shimmered into a tattered ragdoll version of itself.

He remembered, but... "Zora, that hasn't ... happened to me yet." He held his forehead, suddenly Sanger thought he might have to go for that refresher course in temporal distortion after all.

"What? Oh, crap. I'm sorry! All that moving around, you're hard to pin down." She laughed. "Anyway, we've also put in a real Quidditch pitch, your little monsters are quite good at it. Beaters both of them."

Sanger stopped, and with him the twins also. "You ... play Quidditch?" He asked. They nodded in unison. The girl looked a little wilder in the eye, the boy more friendly. They too turned out to be fourteen and applying for Freshman year. "I can't fly very well, even with my dragon. Heights," he said.

"I understand," the girl, Lucrezhia said. "I had to get over that. He," she thumbed at the boy, Lucien, "just jumps on a broom and goes. Whoosh."

In the background, somewhere down the wide stone walled hall, Zora could still be heard talking about the ways they'd improved the House. "You'll let us go there, won't you?" Lucien asked.

"Of - of course," Doc Sanger said. "We've got access to the portal here, at the Magic Studies building. It won't be hard to get you to and from your classes."

"I don't want to study magic much more," Lucrezhia said, putting her hands on her hips. "It's not boring or anything, I just want to play around with the Muggle world a little."

"We don't have a proper math teacher yet," Lucien said, "the Arithmancy class just makes my skin crawl. I want to learn geometry first. Then how to break it, right?"

Sanger nodded, smiling. This was actually turning into a more fun adventure than a dreaded meeting of the offspring. He loved kids - anyone who taught as many as he had, and in his many forms sired volumes of them. But these were something of a treat.

They were like him, only not. Maybe the others would be different, but at least the two sets of twins were doing okay.

***

With a groan, Doc Sanger tossed in his wide bed and realized that he was being watched. Instead of freaking out or leaping to his feet and attacking, he instead drew his strong muscled arm over his head and covered his eyes with his wrist. "Tell me that I've just been dreaming..."

"Sorry," said Gabriel, "but you've got another journey ahead of you today. You even told me to remind you." Sanger could hear the grin spreading across the angel's face. "So I've cooked you breakfast and you'll be on your way shortly. It's not that far, they're, well, you'll see."

I know where to go! Get up! I want to meet them! Umpteenth demanded, and with that, Doc Sanger stood and stretched. True to form, there were a number of 'accidentally looking through their windows from across the courtyard in the other tower oops we can see right into Doc Sanger's Bedroom window' people, and had Sanger been more awake he would have grinned and done a little show for them. However, he simply got into the shower and sped on his way to the next engagement.

And it was true, Umpteenth and he didn't have to go very far - in space. But in terms of what world they were on when he touched down again it was clearly not quite the same. For one thing, while the street name was the same, Beach, there was no school on that street. Instead, there was a huge structure that rose blockily into the air, and from it...

Look at them all! It's amazing! Umpteenth sent, and the sentiment was echoed in his bond.

It wasn't flitters or dragons that flew from ledges in the building. It was people. Brightly colored costumes abounded, spandex wonders. Capes fluttering, visors gleaming.

It was a world of superheros. That wasn't so different from where he'd heard Talon's Doc had visited many times - but it looked to Sanger as though these people were coming and going from offices. They were doing jobs, they were on the clock.

"Weird," Sanger said. He didn't even get a second glance when Umpteenth landed in the parking lot, for there were two other dragons there too. Not like Umpteenth, for some reason they seemed 'local'. Sanger walked toward the building, with confidence. There was a reason he'd worn the leather pants, after all.

"Hello, is there anything we can help you with sir?" Asked a pretty receptionist. She alone looked human and normal. Until she looked at the phone and 'answered' it by blinking. It hovered and came to her ear, and she held up a long-nailed hand to indicate Sanger wait. She took a call and routed it to someone upstairs (so she said) and then turned her attention back to Sanger.

"Actually ... I'm here to meet two kids," he said. He looked back at the manila folder just to seem more official. "Thomas and Tamsin Sanger?" He almost hesitated when he said the name, it just felt weird.

"Ah, yes, they're upstairs in the testing rooms. If you would, please sign in and leave any weapons at the counter." She said, her attitude was both professional and pleasant.

He signed the paperwork releasing the company of any damages incurred while in the testing chambers. A quick read of the paperwork told Sanger that this world was habitually destroyed and rebuilt. Property values must fluctuate wildly.

Sanger recieved his last instruction from the woman, "in the second floor Test room three," she said. He went to the lobby and waited with a couple other people who looked a bit beat up. They entered the lift and went up two floors, and Sanger exited, leaving the others behind.

To anyone else, the hallway was filled with a mildly soft amount of background noise. But to Sanger's sensitive ears he was bombarded with interesting sounds. Gunfire? No, that couldn't be - or could it?

He found the observation chamber where several adults stood watching through a large glass window. Below them was ...

"That's a danger room?" Sanger asked, startling one of the inhabitants but making the others merely nod. The first indicated he pull up a seat.

"Yes, ah - those are your kids there? They look like you." He turned back, entranced apparently. Below, not only Thomas and Tamsin were there. It was a group of six or seven, bolting around a complicated bunch of gears, boxes, cutout villians and firing weaponry. One of the kids had a force field up, which fell now and then to allow someone in or out. Another was apparently twice the size of any normal teen, and was busy bashing her way through one obstacle after another. A third had a bright red aura and seemed to burn with a violent bubbling. Next to that one was Thomas, who would place his hands behind the boy's shoulders and did ... something. Along side him, facing someone else, was Tamsin, who did about the same thing - apparently nothing visible. Her charge had a pair of bracers and a gigantic electric bolt emerged from her hands. Their last member flew overhead barking orders, and occasionally firing off a darkly tar-like substance from her hands.

Eventually their exersize was over, and the group was allowed out. The other parents exited as well - and Sanger followed them.

"That worked really well," Tamsin was saying as they came from the room, "Dolores told me her energy whip goes way farther when I'm ... Oh, hi!"

Splitting up from the others, Sanger stood and looked at the pair. They were fairly small, though their files said 14 and 15 like the other two he needed to meet up were. Tamsin had a simple smock on, and pulled her hair up into a pony tail then covering it with a bandana. Thomas shuffled out last, and bumped into his sister. "Hey," he said.

"Hello," Sanger said. "You're... Different."

They weren't any more different than any Sanger had been - light tan skin and faintly Spanish features. Thomas looked a bit disheveled, while Tamsin seemed to be quite pretty and prim. Both had his eyes. He wondered who 'he' really was.

"They said someone would be coming to pick us up," Tamsin reminded her brother. "To the other school."

"But we're almost ready to join a team," Thomas said. "Why are we practicing here if we're not even going to be able to do that?"

Tamsin rolled her eyes and returned her gaze to the much taller Sanger. "It's true, we are almost ready for teaming, but we've applied to Carramba. Aren't there heroics classes there?"

"... Yes, there are actually," Sanger said. "So, if you don't mind me asking, what is it you... do?"

"It's what I do, and what he doesn't do," Tamsin said with a smile. Thomas was busy changing into street clothes, never mind his rumpled hair and clothing. "I amplify powers - Kelly can usually only produce a small spark when she's alone. But I can make her power as strong as you saw. And Thomas can nullify or mute powers. Bruce's aura and burning attack are really powerful, he needs dampeners on his costume just to keep him from melting through things. In a combat situation, Thomas and I would be able to control damage and regulate powers that others haven't learned to yet."

"That is extremely handy," Sanger said. "Come on, I want you to meet my dragon. He is quite excited about-"

"Dragon?" Thomas perked up. "You've got a dragon? Is it one of those new models? Cool!"

"Actually," Sanger said as they left the building and Umpteenth walked up to them, "he's a Ryslen special. None have ever hatched just like him."

"Hatched!" Tamsin said, "that's a flesh dragon, Thomas! It's a real dragon!"

"Those aren't real?" Sanger asked. The two dark-scaled dragons which stood at a lazy attention shifted their wings occsaionally and moved their tails in soft arcs, they looked around and blinked. They looked a bit dullwitted.

They are machines, Umpteenth said, I tried contacting them but all I got was radio static, they are just like cars only shaped like me.

"While that's revoltingly clever," Sanger said, "I think I prefer the real thing." He patted Umpteenth's neck, and the kids swooned over him. They eventually all piled onto the small blue - somehow - and flipped to where Thomas and Tamsin's dorm was. They were orphans, apparently, recently their mother had suffered from the collateral damage of a large villianous plot to drown the city. Where 'he' was in all this, Sanger almost didn't want to know. He was probably dead, as usual.

They collected the kids' things, and - because they were already slated to head to school and exit the training program - they didn't need to stop off or even say good bye. To them, the training sequences with random groups were just that - random. They weren't close friends, only business associates. What a strange world, Sanger thought.

They left and returned to Carramba's campus instantly - faster than normal. It looked like Tamsin's power worked on dragons too.

***

When the last of the eight actually showed up in the lobby of the Towers, Sanger was almost relieved. It meant he didn't have to keep flying around, while he should have been starting class preparations. It was now only three weeks to school and everyone on the staff was gearing up for the new year. Admissions this year were heavy, the graduating senior class alone numbered three hundred fifty. Next year, if everyone returned, it would be four fifty.

Soren and Sophia stood together looking rather impressive. They appeared a bit Oriental, with more yellowish skin than tan. Soren was as handsome as Sophia was elegant. With his thick hair curled and styled, Soren looked like a hotshot rock star. Pretty Sophia batted her huge turquoise eyes and smiled to melt Sanger.

"Come on in," Sanger said, "I'd just like to know a little about each of you. And don't you dare call me dad." Apparently Gabriella was attempting to wedge that into his vocabulary, to little success.

"Well, since our father sent us here I would think you mean don't call you mom," Soren said with a disarming grin. They entered the Tower and immediately got settled once they were in the apartment.

"Nice view from here," Sophia said, "do you think we could get an apartment up here? I bet I could get us one," she smirked and batted her eyes again.

Sanger never felt more like he ought to take a cold shower. "So, your ... 'me' is female, then?"

"Catches on quick, this one does," Soren said. "I guess that's odd then?"

Sanger nodded weakly, and then shook off whatever strange effect they were having on him. "So, it seems like you both have some kind of, er, empathic power?"

Seemingly surprised the pair looked at one another and toned it down. They finally seemed more like 'kids' and not 'leather monsters come to seduce you'.

"That's right," Soren said. "We do. Is that going to be a problem?"

"Only if you try using it to get things like, oh, say, apartments that cost a bundle or good grades. Otherwise have at. Use protection."

***

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