A/N: Hey guys! :) Sorry, I haven't touched this fic in forever. I'm not abandoning this fic, I promise, lol. But I was going back through it, and realized 'Holy sh*t, what have I done? This sucks! I need to make it right', much like earlier versions of Into the Fire, my first fanfic. I'm redoing Quigley's Quagmire one last time after Season 3 comes out in 2019, which is where we meet Quigley on screen for the first time (yay! XD). Hopefully, with info gained from said season, I can make the story more interesting, not OOC, and more Netflix series-oriented, a phrase which here means "it'll be better than this monstrosity, I promise". Lol.

I pray this's the last time I redo this, I hate going through this more than you guys do. Why you guys tolerate me and even stick around to still read my sh*t is beyond me, but I'm incredibly thankful for each and every one of yous and your patience/understanding ^_^ I'm still a noob on here, so I still got much to learn, but I promise I will get better with time. And with your guys' help. Thanks again for still giving me a chance. We were all there one time, right? XD This author's note will change when this chapter has been updated.

Before we begin, I gotta thank all my awesome reviewers that I have not gotten back to yet: Son of Whitebeard, CHEESEPUFF fg, and Guest. You guys rock!

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Son of Whitebeard ––– Yeah, Jacques's awesome! Why did he have to die? T_T

CHEESEPUFF fg ––– Yeah, I reread QQ 2.0 and thought that too. Dunno what the hell I was thinking at the time. *cringe* It doesn't even flow. I'm gonna change that.

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Will he mention Kit and Lemony? Guess you'll have to read and find out! XD

Guest––– You prefer the old version too, huh? Gotcha. Nothing wrong with that. I just thought nobody would get behind a shy Quigley. That and from that little tidbit we see of him in Season 1, I took him to be a wiseass, 'cause Duncan was all quiet and stuff. That's mostly why I changed it. I'll watch Season 3 when it comes out and see how Quigley really acts. And I'll base story Quigley off of that personality. That way it'll be loyal to the Netflix series and not so OOC. But at the moment, I don't have enough information to portray him accurately, so I'll have to wait a little longer before I can fix this story.

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Yaaaaaaay! Cookies! XD *munches happily* Mmmm…delicious, my friend, delicious. Can I has seconds? :D Lol

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Disclaimer: Dude, why're there lawyers on my doorstep? I told you, me no own ASOUE! Y u no listen to me?!

WARNING! RATED T FOR: LANGUAGE

Quigley's Quagmire

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Chapter 1
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"Ugh…" I groaned, slamming my pencil down on my desk and cradling my head in my hands, running my fingers through my short dark hair. God, this map was taking forever! I'd been charting the different trails in the Mortmain Mountains in my notebook ever since Mother and Father told us about taking us on a vacation there this fall. Truth be told, I was stoked. So many caves to explore, so many sights to see… Isadora was pretty excited, too. Duncan? Ha! He's afraid of, like, everything outside the house: sports, pranks, girls, you name it, he's afraid of it. Me? I ain't afraid of anything. I'm always causing trouble: at home, school, anywhere. Anytime. No moment in my life was boring.

Wait a minute…

I lifted my head and listened. Silence. Hang on a minute…I gotta go make the house chaotic again. I stuffed my notebook and pencil in my dark red sweatshirt pocket and headed out of my room, looking around for a target. Now that I think about it, the house wasn't even chaotic once today. Wow…I was slipping. Then again, I was up all night last night working on that map. Only explanation I can think of as to why today was so tranquil. Either way, I wouldn't have it.

"Ugh, what rhymes with Ruben?" I heard Isadora groan.

A light-bulb lit up over my head and that trademark, devilish grin of mine slowly started spreading across my face. Perfect. I tip-toed in her room as ninja-like as I could, preparing myself. There she was, sitting at her desk like usual, her back to me, her head resting on her hand in frustration. Sweet! She was in complete writer's-block mode, too focused on her work to even hear me creeping up behind her.

"Ruben…Ruben…" Isadora mused. "Lubing?" Here, I fought not to laugh hysterically. …Hey, I'm thirteen, don't look at me like that! "No! God, no… Tubing?" She was quiet for a moment. "Ugh…don't tell me I'm going to have to reword the whole thi–––Quigley!"

Snickering, I bolted out of her room and down the hall with my prize. "Write 'lubing'! That's a good rhyme!" I hollered over my shoulder.

Isadora thundered after me like a runaway freight train, her face beet-red from embarrassment. I ducked into my room and leaped up onto my bed, my sister lunging up after me. "Quigley! Give it back!" she roared in my face, her hands balled into fists, fire raging in her eyes.

I grinned at her futile attempts to jump up and grab her notebook out of my hand. "Izzy and Ruben sitting in a tree, l-u-b-e-i-n-g," I sang loudly.

"Lubing doesn't have an 'e' in it, genius!" Isadora yelled.

"It does in my song," I replied simply.

"What's going on in here?" an irritated voice demanded.

Isadora and I looked to find Duncan standing in my doorway, trying to solve the puzzle of her frustration.

"Duncan, he did it again!" Isadora whined angrily.

Duncan's eyes flickered as they fell on me. Great…she'd brought out the big guns. Ha…can't believe I used 'Duncan' and 'big guns' in the same sentence. It's like saying 'Quigley' and 'behave' in the same sentence. Y'know, an oxymoron?

"Give it back, Quigley," Duncan ordered authoritatively, holding out his hand, trying to imitate Dad's famous scowl.

"I was giving her ideas," I protested, trying my best to look innocent.

"No you weren't!" Isadora shot back.

"I said write 'lubing'!" I repeated, louder this time.

Isadora flushed redder than my sweatshirt. "I'm not writing 'lubing'!"

"Don't be such a prude, Isadora. Plenty of poets wrote about sex," I pointed out.

"Name one!" she challenged hotly, planting her hands on her hips.

"Ovid, Catullus, Sappho–––"

"I said one!" she snapped defensively.

I paused. "Ovid, Catullus, Sappho–––"

Isadora growled loudly, rolling her eyes. "Well, I don't write about…you know…" she grumbled, crossing her arms.

"What, sex?" I asked.

"Quigley!" Isadora hissed.

"What? Then say sex!"

"There's more to life than sex, you moron!"

"Of course there is. You can't forget about beer! Gah-owww!" A violent burning flared up between my legs and I fell to my bed, dropping Isadora's notebook.

"Grow up, Quigley!" Duncan barked, snatching it before I caught my breath.

"You're the one who punched me in the crotch–––you grow up!" I squeaked, cringing as he handed my prize back to Isadora.

Just then, there was a sound of shattering glass, followed by nine more, almost in a rhythmic pattern.

"Great, now what'd you do?" Duncan scowled down at me.

"Well, sorry, I have to breathe in order to live!" I retorted.

"Not that. The glass breaking!"

"What? Glass breaking?" Mustering up what little strength I had left in me, I sat up and looked around. I don't recall setting up my automatic baseball pitcher today. I used it yesterday before Mother and Father got home from Peru, yeah, but I made sure to turn it off and pack it in the garage. And I didn't set up any other homemade pranks… Sure, Mother and Father were wild-cards (where do you think I get it from?), but I highly doubted they were bored enough to break their own mansion's windows, especially with Dad's broken leg.

"Don't play dumb with me," Duncan snarled, crossing his arms. "What'd you do this time?"

Puzzled, I got up from my bed slowly and staggered over to the doorway, looking around for clues. "Duncan, I swear, it wasn't me this time," I protested seriously, peeking down the hall. "The notebook, yeah, the glass breaking, no."

Duncan rolled his eyes with an irritated growl. "The five of us are the only ones here," he pointed out, he and Isadora following me into the hallway. "Isadora and I didn't do it, and Mother and Father aren't dumb enough to randomly break windows. Guess who that leaves? Oh yeah, you."

"It wasn't me!" I snapped furiously. God, Duncan, are you deaf? Idiot! "I told you, the only thing I did today was take Isadora's notebook, nothing else!"

Suddenly, a couple of thick black disks crashed through my window and the far hallway window, startling us. We shared a confused glance, not knowing what to do, then Duncan strode down to the disks in the hallway, Isadora following after him. He picked one up and examined every angle of it closely, then, before long, disks crashed through his and Isadora's bedroom windows and the hallway window closest to me. Duncan glared at me mercilessly. "Quigley, this isn't funny!" he screamed, holding the disk up for me to see.

"If it was me, Donuts, I wouldn't have smashed my own window!" I told him heatedly.

"Yeah you would! Only to make it look like you didn't do it! I'm not stupid!"

"It wasn't me!" I yelled at the top of my lungs, practically foaming at the mouth. God I wanted to strangle him right now!

"He's telling the truth," Isadora piped up after a minute, and Duncan looked at her incredulously. "He always grins when he's does something and he always owns what he's done. You know that."

Duncan sighed heavily, tossing the disk aside. For once, he and Isadora being thicker than thieves was actually a good thing: he'd listen to anything she'd say. "Well, if it wasn't him, us, or Mother and Father, then who's throwing disks through our windows, the Ghost of Christmas Past?" he asked sarcastically.

"I don't know," Isadora admitted with a shrug before heading back down the hall to where I was standing. "But let's go tell Mother and Father about it."

As I watched Duncan nod and follow her, something putrid wafted into my nose. Oh my…God what was that smell?! I wrinkled my nose, racking my brain for what could possibly be stinkier than my stink bombs. It smelled like…like…ugh, I don't know…rotten eggs? Duncan's attitude right about now?

Isadora stopped in her tracks, sniffing. "Is that…sulfur?" she wondered, looking around at Duncan.

I sniffed again. Come to think of it, yeah, sulfur did smell like rotten eggs. …Wait a minute, sulfur? What's sulfur doing in our house? Not even I could get my hands on sulfur for a prank. Where'd it come from? I didn't smell it earlier. I looked around. I didn't smell sulfur until after those things crashed through my window. Then, it hit me. Those disks were sulfur…or emitting sulfur, one of the two. The floor under my feet sunk ever-so-slightly, and I looked down. What the–––? What's going on?!

Suddenly, there was a blinding flash and a colossal explosion so intense it knocked me off my feet onto the floor, my ears ringing. I opened my eyes and blinked around at my surround–––OH MY GOD! FIRE! FIRE! EVERYWHERE! My eyes widened as I scrambled to my feet, my heart racing in panic. "Duncan! Isadora!" I hollered over the roaring of the eight foot flames.

"Quigley!" came both of their frantic screams.

There they were, on the other side of Hell's Wall, but the heat was so unbearable, the fire was so thick that I was unable to run through it without burning alive. But, I couldn't just leave my siblings here! Believe me, I was a jerk, but I wasn't that kind of jerk. I have morals. I stood there numbly, my face and hair soaked with sweat, anxiously looking for a way around to save them, but everywhere I looked was being consumed by the gluttonous, raging inferno. "Donuts, Isadora! Stick together, stay here, and lay down–––I'll find a way around to save you guys!"

"Hurry!" Isadora shrieked, and my heart sank. I could hear the fear in her voice, see the tears racing down her face… The Doomsday Clock beginning its countdown in my head, I whirled around and booked it to the stairs. I looked over the banister for any sign of help, but to my horror, the whole first floor had become the sun's surface. Ugh…I can feel the heat up here… So much heat… My vision started to blur, my lungs began to cook…

"Oh thank God you're okay!" a tall, aged version of my sister breathed suddenly as she seized my wrist tightly and lead me downstairs. "C'mon!"

"Mother!" I cried through my queasiness. "Wait, you forgot Duncan and Isadora!" I looked up at the hallway they were trapped in worriedly. "They're still up there! In the same hall I was!"

"Don't worry, we'll get 'em. Ray, Duncan and Isadora are upstairs!" Mother shouted as loud as she could. "I got Quigley!"

"I'm on it!" came Dad's deep, gravelly reply as he hobbled as fast as he could with his broken leg up the stairs.

We scampered as quickly as we could across the fiery floor, the flames lapping our legs hungrily. Already I could feel my shoe soles begin to melt. "Mother, what's going on?" I asked. "I smelled sulfur upstairs and before I knew it the whole second floor just exploded into fire!"

"Just a disagreement with some old coworkers of ours," Mother replied after bashing the library door open with her foot.

"A disagreement?" I repeated, my eyebrows rising. "You guys torch each others houses after you disagree?!"

"They do, not us," she clarified as she drug me to the center of the room and flung aside the exquisite rug.

What the–––? A trap door…? We had a trap door this whole time?! How come I never knew about it? Talk about a killer spot for rainy-day hide-and-seek!

She opened the door, the hinges squealing from a lack of oil, and set a piece of thick brass metal in my hand. "Quigley, listen to me," she began, gripping my shoulders and looking me straight in the eye. "I want you to wait down there for all of us, alright?"

"Uh…okay," I said awkwardly, my gut telling me to just go with the flow this once.

"Your father's emergency backpack of supplies should be down there as well," Mother told me as part of the ceiling fell to the floor behind her, crushing the life out of the only desk in the room. "Hold on to that piece of our spyglass, you'll need it. And if something happens, God forbid, take his backpack and keep looking around down there until you find a sign that says 'Montgomery'. He's a good friend of ours and he'll take good care of you." She planted a kiss on my forehead and helped me onto the metal ladder descending into a sewer-looking basement.

I hopped off the ladder onto the wet brick floor and stared up at her.

"Be safe, I love you, and we'll be right back," Mother said with a comforting smile, then she shut the door.

"I love you too!" I called back, hearing her race across the floor back to the foyer.

I looked to find Father's white backpack leaning against the brick wall by the ladder. With one final glance up at the trap door, which had a peculiar-looking eye carved in it, I headed over to the wall and flopped down on the ground beside it.

Now, I wait.