5

"ThunderTank to Cats' Lair," blared Lion-O's voice from the radio.

Wilykit, sitting right by it, jumped about a foot in the air, then hurriedly turned it down. "Cats' Lair, go ahead, Lion-O."

"Any signs of Pumyra or the others?"

"No. And me and Wilykat even scanned the whole area, with the scanners on their highest. No Thunderian life forms but us. And Tygra."

Lion-O sighed. "Bengali's gone too. He's not within five miles of the Tower of Omens."

There was a silence as Wilykat and Wilykit looked at each other, frowning. Then Wilykat took the microphone and said, "Nowhere? Not at all?"

Lion-O shook his head in the ThunderTank, even though the visual was not on. "Nowhere. And since you two say he was there minutes before we arrived, I have no idea where in the name of Thundera he could have gone, or how he could have gotten so far away in that little time. We'll be there at Cats' Lair in a few minutes, Wilykit."

"All right, Lion-O. Cats' Lair out." She set down the mic and looked at her brother. "What's going on here?"

Wilykat shook his head. "I don't know, Wilykit...you think Mumm-Ra's a part of this?" He asked this doubtfully.

Wilykit shook her head. "I don't know, you know he always has to come and gloat, or else he does things personally so he can gloat. Either way we'd have him in here gloating at us."

"Yeah, you're right." Both young ThunderCats fell silent then and sat back in their chairs.

Moments later, Lion-O came back inside. "All right, kittens, your shift is up. Cheetara, were you or Panthro next today?"

"I think it was Panthro," Cheetara said. then she corrected himself. "No, that was yesterday. It is my turn." With a smile to the twins, she sat at a console and checked it over quickly. Wilykit and Wilykat gratefully stood and stretched. "I'll send Snarf to watch over the Tower of Omens," she added gravely. "He is not going to be pleased to hear about this, especially since his nephew is missing as well."

"All right," the young ThunderCat lord said. "That's a good idea. The rest of you? We're going for a ride. In the Feliner. We are going to search every inch of Third Earth if we have to. And if we don't find them by then..." He shook his head. He could not finish the sentence, because he had no idea what they would do then. "Well let's get going. Cheetara, you know that if you need us, the radio frequency is always open."

The cheetah laughed kindly. "I know, Lion-O. I'll be all right. You go on and find the others. I am sure they are in far greater danger than I."

A little embarrassed at his gung-ho instructions, Lion-O grinned and nodded. He led his little band outside the room.

Once in the hangar, Lion-O and Tygra opened up the Feliner, while Panthro hit the controls to open the Cat's Paw. The twins had decided to take their hoverboards. However, the twins did not get that far. Wilykit bent to pick up a pellet that had fallen from her belt, when suddenly Wilykat wasn;t there.

All heads in the hangar turned at Wilykat's startled scream, and they saw Wilykit staring in shock at thin air. Thin air, where Wilykat had just disappeared into. "Where am I, where AM I?!" Wilykat's panicked voice could be heard from somewhere, as if from a great distance.

"Wilykat!" Lion-O said, shocked. He leapt out of the Feliner, and he and Panthro rushed over to where Wilykit stood, still staring with a frown of complete confusion.

Tygra looked closely, and saw something the others did not.

The capsule from Wilykat's belt lay on the ground, but only half of it was there. The rest was simply gone, and Tygra could see into the sawed off half, and saw that it was a grease pellet. He narrowed his eyes and quickly ran several simultaneous scans on the Feliner's computer as the tohers broke into a babble of comfused voices.

There! The scanners were set to pick up a variety of things, inter-dimensional rifts being one of them. They were something that the ThunderCats had dealt with before, although not often, and the need to detect that energy was deemed necessary. But it was weak; not only was there a rift in space, but something else as well that was messing up the reading...time maybe? But why then did nothing show up at the Tower of Omens, or outside it where Lynx-O and the others had disappeared?

Meanwhile,. Wilykit had come out of her daze. She shrieked her brother's name, and heard him call back faintly, "Is that you, Wilykit?"

"Yes! It's me, where are you?!"

"I-I don't know!" came the helpless reply. He sounded scared. Wilykit frowned and took a step forward.

"Wilykit, wait!' Lion-O said.

"It's okay, I'm not going--Great Jaga!"

Lion-O's jaw dropped, and Panthro gaped. All of a sudden, Wilykit's right leg and her bent-over upper body was not there. On the other side of her, Tygra could see her innards, still working, pumping blood, and moving air. Though he had seen the inside of a body before assisting a healer in an operation on Thundera, seeing it like this was a little too weird. He fought the urge to vomit.

The others saw none of this, but Panthro was greatly alarmed, and rightly so. He grabbed Wilykit's arm. "Wait Panthro!" she shouted. "Wait, Wilykat's in there! It's okay, just...keep a hold of me..." Her voice was faint and far away.

At Lion-O's terse nod, Panthro did as the young cub asked.

What Wilykit saw was almost nothing, but her foot was set down on what felt like a hard, wet, dense sponge, saturated with something thick like old engine oil or swamp mud. The air was unbelievably heavy, and she had to work to get any oxygen out of it. There was another kind of gas here that made her lightheaded, and the atmosphere was thick, very thick. She could her Wilykat panting as well.

What she did see was a world that looked like it was on the verge of blackest night, with no stars in the sky that she could see. She could hear sludgy sounds, like something flat and low slurping through the mess that seemed to be the ground. She saw a vague horizon that was a thick line of dark purple between a layer of black sky and black land.

As her eyes adjusted, her feline eyes better for seeing on this world than most people's would be, she saw her brother's silhouette. "Wilykat! Come to the door!"

"I can't see you!" Here, his voice was clear and loud. He was several yards away, where he had wandered in his panic.

"Come to my voice!"

"O-okay..." Wilykit watched anxiously, straining her eyes to catch the shadowy glimpse of her brother as he moved carefully through the slurpy ground.

There were creatures here, and Wilykit could see them. They scared her with their pure alienness, but as she watched, she saw that they had no mouths that she could see as some of them turned in profile (or what she assumed was profile.) They were low and flat, and they dragged themselves slowly through the sludge on legs that seemed only a foot or so long. There were many, many legs, and they walked sideways, reminding Wilykit of crabs. As Panthro held her arm, she used her other to pull out her light from her belt, and shone it on the creature, which happened to be right next to her brother.

"Wilykit! I see you! I'm coming that way!" Wilykat shrieked, seeing the creature right next to him, but when it did nothing, he relaxed...a little. He walked faster, as fast as he dared for fear of falling. Wilykit kept a steady report of what was happening to the others.

The creature, one of many in what she guessed was a herd, was a flat, irregular oval, of a nondescript grayish color. It had no mouth and no eyes, no ears, nothing. It had a couple of...appendages on what would have been its face had it been built like a crab, the closet thing Wilykit could think of to what it was. It must have no senses, she thought, not like ours! Maybe we don't even emit anything that their senses can understand! She did see that her light was causing the thing's very skin to sizzle, and though the creature did nothing, she turned the light hastily on her brother only. She did not want to harm the creatures.

Not even a sense of touch. How did they eat? she wondered. If they even did.

While Wilykit thought all these questions, and tried to keep her fear down and get her brother back, Tygra was also thinking hard. An inter-dimensional rift, maybe one of time as well? Well, time was a dimension, the fourth one. He had no experience with time rifts, and little personal experience with any of them to begin with. He had no idea what caused them, or how to avoid them, or how to get someone back that fell into one. None. He did tell the others what the scanners had picked up.

"Got him!" came Wilykit's faint voice in the silent hangar. "Pull us out, Panthro, this stuff if sticky!"

With a frown, Panthro pulled back, surprised at the amount of strength he needed. He was almost afraid he would hurt Wilykit if he pulled any harder, and the girl had to hold back an outcry as she felt somehting in her arm give, but finally she came free and they all tumbled back. Apparently the ground was easier to slop through in a slide than to get out of altogether.

Panthro made a face, and Lion-O stared at the twins' feet: Wilykat's feet, and the one boot Wilykit had in there were covered in a thick, unpleasantly dark red, gluey substance that looked disturbingly like blood. A quick smell told them it was not, but it was unpleasant just the same. "I-I'm gonna go wash this off, okay, Lion-O?" Wilykat asked. He also had the substance on his tunic, his hands, and some spatters on his face. He had fallen once and almost hadn't been able to get up. Both twins were trying to get their breathing to normal.

"Yes, both of you go." It was Tygra. "You don't know what's that's made of, it could be caustic." h frowned at Wilyki's arm, and saw now that it had been dislocated. the girl had a grimace of pain on her face as she looked at it. "And have Snarf tend that, all right?"

The idea of the stuff being caustic got them moving, though. With thick slurping sounds, they trudged back into the Lair, sticking to the floor at every step. "Wait for us though!" Wilykit called.

Tygra nodded. "Hurry up!"

"Okay, Tygra, what was that?" Lion-O demanded. Tygra shook his head. "I can't tell exactly, but it's some kind of dimensional rift. That was a world we have never heard of, Lion-O, I am going to ask the twins about it." Despite the seriousness of the situation, Tygra was actually very excited about the idea of a new world, one that was so different. It could have been in another universe for all he knew, if there was such a thing.

As Lion-O frowned in thought, Panthro stuck his hand out where Wilykit had been. The capsule that had made Tygra realize what it might be had been kicked away, and Panthro's hand encountered air. Nothing but normal air. "It's gone."

Tygra was frowning thunderously. The his eyes widened in realization. "That's it!' he finally said. "That's why our sensors picked up nothing at the Tower of Omens! Once someone or something is all the way through, or all the way back out, it must disappear! Wilykit dropped one of her capsules, that's why the door stayed open. The capsule acted as a doorstop, so to speak. Otherwise, Wilykat would have been trapped there."

All three were silent as they realized how desperate a situation that would have been, especially considering the world. "Then Lynx-O and the others..." Lion-O said.

"Yes," Tygra agreed grimly. "We have no idea where they are. We need to find out how to learn their whereabouts, and do it fast. And we must find out how many of these have opened. Because if some innocent citizen falls into one..."

"We must find out what is going on," Lion-O said, and climbed into the Feliner. When the twins came back, their boots and legs scrubbed clean and Wilykit's shoulder ehavily bandaged, they took off.

Part 4

Part 6

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