Chapter 12

Thursday, July 23rd, 1987

Hill Valley

6:38 P.M.

"Clara, he is adorable."

"Just a doll."

"He is so cute. . . ."

"Sweetest little thing I've ever seen."

Marty-2 rolled his eyes as Clara's friends cooed over baby Verne. "Women."

Jennifer-2 gave him a look. "Come on, he's a very cute baby."

"Sure, but I don't think you have to all get so mushy about-"

Verne suddenly turned to look at Marty-2, and cooed gently. Marty-2's heart melted. "Awwwww. . . ."

The girls giggled at Marty-2's sudden turn-around. Mystie fluffed up the few wisps of hair Verne had. "Bet he grows up to look just like his father."

"You really think so?" Clara asked, looking to Doc for his opinion.

"We'll just have to find out," Doc smiled. "Although he'll probably resemble me more just because of the blond hair."

Jules climbed up onto the couch, tired of playing with his blocks. "Vahnie," he said, looming over the baby, "my turn for Mommy."

Nobody could resist a slight chuckle. "Most kids I know would just try to shove the baby out of the way," Mysteria noted.

"Well, we raised him to be polite, and that extends to Verne, thankfully," Clara said, shifting her newborn around so she could put her arm around Jules. "I'm sure he's a little jealous, though. There's never enough lap for both of them."

Jules nodded. "More lap."

"Would you like to sit with me, Jules?" Josie offered with a kind smile.

Jules shook his head. "Vahnie sit you."

"That's just fine with me too," Josie grinned. "May I, Clara?"

"Certainly." Clara gently passed Verne over and let Jules into her lap. Josie happily rocked the newborn. "You are so cute. You and your brother are the cutest kids I have ever seen." Verne cooed while Jules blushed and hid his face.

"Well, they're the cutest for the moment," Mystie teased, giving Josie's belly a quick poke.

Josie giggled. "Yeah. Hopefully my kids will end up looking like these two." She suddenly felt a dampness on her lap. "Whoops, someone's had an accident."

"Well, you know where the bathroom is," Clara said with a wink.

"Oh, ha-ha."

Mystie frowned. "Actually, Clara, do you mind telling me where it is? I'm feeling rather - you know."

"Certainly. Down that hall, third door to the left."

"Thanks." Mystie left the room, listening to the other girls coo over Verne some more. A look of sadness passed over her face. Damn. Why couldn't I find the perfect man to settle down with and have kids? Josie's not the only one who wanted to be a mom. Oh well, you have to take what life gives you.

She did her business, and was just about to head back when she suddenly heard something. Something odd. She paused, frowning as she listened carefully. It sounded to her like - movement. Coming from further down the hall. Her body tensed. As far as she knew, everyone was in the living room in front. Who could be back here?

Besides an intruder, that is.

She glanced toward the living room, wondering if she should just run in and warn everyone. Probably should - but I suppose it won't hurt to linger for a moment and gather information. We'll want to know what we're up against, after all. She snuck a few steps closer, making full use of her vampiric hearing.

"Ow! Be careful, you just stepped on my foot."

"Sorry, I can't see in the dark like you can."

"They're not going to like us sneaking in here, you know. What are you looking for, anyway?"

Mysteria blinked. It sounded like Doc, Marty, and Jennifer were back there. She turned around and listened again. Yup- she could clearly hear them in the living room too. What the hell?

Then something else hit her. The scents coming from the living room and the room down the hall - Doc and Clara's bedroom- seemed to match, except for one very key difference.

In the living room, Doc was clearly a vampire, while Marty and Jennifer were human.

In the bedroom, it was the exact opposite.

Mystie slumped against the wall, trying to make sense of the situation. Are they - identical twins? No, that can't be, even identical twins don't have the same scents. And I'm sure Josephine or Clara would have mentioned that before. Clones? Don't be silly, Mysteria, Dr. Brown is a genius, but I doubt he got that far. How did these other Marty and Jennifer end up vampires? Why are they hiding back there? She put a hand to her head. I have to talk to Clara or Josephine about this. This is just too weird.

Both Josephine and Clara zeroed in on Mysteria's puzzled face as she finally re-entered the living room. "Mystie? Anything wrong?" Josephine asked politely.

"Um - well - can I see you in private for a moment?" Josie exchanged a glance with Clara, then handed Verne to Jennifer-2 and got up. She and Mystie headed into Jules's room. "Josie, something really weird just happened to me, and I gotta talk to somebody about it."

"Sure thing. What happened?"

"Well, I just went to the bathroom, but when I came out, I heard a noise down the hall. I thought it might be an intruder." She held up a finger as Josie turned pale. "I decided to let my senses do a bit of investigating before I alerted you - see if I could pick up anything useful, you know. Josie, I heard Dr. Brown, Marty, and Jennifer back there."

"That's impossible, Mystie. They're with us in the living room. You must have gotten a bit confused, that's all."

Mysteria shook her head. "I heard them in both places, Josephine. And I smelled them too. They smelled practically identical, except that the back-room Dr. Brown was a human, and his Marty and Jennifer were vampires!" Mystie ran her fingers through her hair a few times. "I haven't a clue what to make of it all. What do you think, Josie?"

Josie just stared at her a minute. Then she groaned loudly and put her head against the wall. "I think I was right in telling Emmett the others shouldn't have hung around here. Even in the garage."

"What? Others?" Mystie grabbed Josie's shoulder. "Are you telling me you already knew about these - twins?"

Josie looked into her eyes. "Mysteria, it would probably be a good idea for you to just forget about all that," she said firmly.

Mysteria broke their gaze. "Don't you try to hypnotize it out of me. We're friends, and I have a right to know the truth."

"At least keep quiet about it until I can get Jill and Lorraine out of here, then. I don't want all of Hill Valley knowing about this." Mysteria nodded her assent, frowning suspiciously. She and Josie rejoined the original group. "Everything okay?" Jill asked, concerned. "You seem a little tense."

"I thought I heard an intruder," Mysteria explained. "We found it was nothing." The other women nodded, and went back to cooing over Verne. Josie mouthed a quick "We're busted" to Clara before joining them again.

After Jill and Lorraine had been sent on their way, Mysteria got up from her seat. "Okay, now can you explain what's going on?" she demanded.

"I'm a little confused too," Clara admitted. "What did you mean by 'we're busted?'"

"Josie, what happened?" Doc asked firmly.

"Mysteria smelt our your doubles," Josie said with a deep sigh.

Doc's eyes went wide. "Oh." He sighed too. "Well, I guess we have to let her know."

"Let me know what?" Mysteria demanded. "Do allof you know about these weird doubles?"

"Well, yes," Clara admitted. "You might want to sit down, Mystie. This is one strange story we're about to unleash on you."

"I've no doubt," Mysteria said, sitting. "Does it involve cloning, like I think it does?"

"Not really. . . ."

Marty-2 went and fetched the doubles from their hiding spots. They shuffled in guiltily. "Now what were you doing in the bedroom?" Clara asked, glaring at Doc-2. "I thought we agreed for you all to stay in the garage!"

"Sorry," Doc-2 said, his face bright red. "I remembered some notes that I to share with my twin later, so I snuck in. I guess I made too much noise."

"We tried to stop him, but he figured he could just grab them and get out," Jennifer sighed.

"Nothing we can do about it now," Doc shrugged. "Just have to roll with it." He turned to Mysteria. "So - I'm assuming the reason you're so confused is that, despite my being a vampire and his being human, we have identical smells." Mystie nodded. "Well, that's because, technically, we're the same person."

Mysteria stared at him. "What? That's not possible."

"It is if one of us came from another dimension."

Mysteria blinked, then slowly stood up. "O-kay. I think I'm going to call the nice men in white coats now."

"I know it sounds insane, but it's the truth," Doc-2 said. "Does it really go against what you already know?" Mysteria hesitated. "Just let us finish our story, and you'll understand."

She sat. "This had better be good."

"It is, although a very long story. We'll try to keep it as short as possible. Back in October of 1985, I constructed a time machine out of a DeLorean. Marty was the first human to ever use the machine, albeit by accident. He went back to 1955 and almost prevented his parents from meeting and falling in love. Luckily, he and my younger self were able to fix that situation and send Marty back. Once Marty had safely returned, I went to the year 2015 to continue my experiments with the DeLorean. There I discovered that Marty's son had made a major mistake and was in jail. I traced Marty Junior's mistake back to the source event, and went back to retrieve Marty and help save his son. Jennifer happened to be with him, so I was forced to take her along. When we got to the future, she started asking some rather probing questions about their eventual fate. I panicked and did two very foolish things. One, I knocked her out with a special device from the future - a sleep-inducer - without even bothering to give her a warning. Two, I left her in an alley, thinking it would be safer than leaving her in the car with me as I attended to Marty Junior. After all, if all went well, we'd only be away from her for a few minutes."

"I take it things didn't go well."

"Not really," Marty-2 admitted with a shit-eating grin. "I did stop my kid from going to jail, although it got pretty complicated. Long story short, the bullies that were bothering him ended up crashing into the Clock Tower after a hoverboard accident, courtesy of me. But when Doc and I went to pick up Jennifer, she'd been found by the local police, who tried to take her 'home' - our future place. We had to follow and rescue her."

"Not a fun experience," Jennifer-2 said with a shudder. "Our future wasn't the brightest one then - I found out a lot of things I didn't want to know, like we had eloped. Thank God that future's gone now."

"After rescuing Jennifer, we returned to 1985. What we didn't know was, while we were busy-" Doc-2 shot a reproving look at Marty-2, who blushed "-the older verison of local bully and auto detailer Biff Tannen had stolen the DeLorean and used it to give his younger self in 1955 an almanac containing all the sports scores from 1950 to 2000."

"Biff Tannen? That creep who was hitting on me at last year's Halloween party?" Mysteria made a face. "Let me guess - he used the sports scores to get rich, and Hill Valley became some sort of hellhole because he was in charge."

"Exactly," everyone in the room echoed. Doc-2 continued with "Legalized gambling, a chain of toxic waste plants, Nixon still president, the Vietnam war still raging, libraries closed down-"

"And this is where we come in," Josie said. "That's the dimension we're from."

"Seriously?" Josie, Doc, Marty, and Jennifer all nodded. "Jesus. What happened to you all? How did you meet?"

"I'd been committed to Southdale Sanitarium in 1983," Doc said.

"I was attending a boarding school in Switzerland," Marty shrugged.

"Selling myself on the streets after my parents were murdered in a gang war," Jennifer whispered.

Josie patted her on the back. "And I was being shuffled from asylum to asylum on the advice of my sister. It was pure luck, I guess, that I ended up in Southdale in November, 1985 - and that they had to pair me up with my Emmett due to a room shortage." She smiled dreamily at him. "One look into those liquid chocolate eyes, and I knew he was the one."

"I didn't know that at first," Doc chuckled. "Josephine honestly gave me quite a scare those first few couple of days. But then. . . . She helped me feel again. She looked out for me, took care of me. The feeling was mutual within a matter of days."

Mystie pouted. "Two Emmett Browns, and they're both in love with other women."

Josie smiled weakly. "Sorry Mystie."

"No, it's okay. I mean, if this is the case, I guess he and I were never meant to be." She got a thoughtful look on her face. "Unless you guys have a third clone running around. . . ."

Both Docs couldn't help but chuckle. "We're not aware of one. Anyway, Josie ended up changing me to a vampire so I could escape. She was supposed to follow me, but there was an accident."

"They tried giving me electro-convulsive therapy," Josie said, wincing with the very thought. "Sent me straight into a healing coma. Of course, the humans thought I was dead - and my bitch of a sister took advantage of that and tried to have me cremated."

Mysteria's eyes grew to the size of dinner plates. "You survived a cremation?" she breathed.

"Barely. I broke out of the room just in time. And even then, I might not have made it, if I hadn't met Jennifer." She slid a loving arm around her "daughter." "I killed her pimp for her, and she helped me heal. She saved my life." Jennifer blushed, embarrassed. "Well, it's true. In return, I made her a vampire so we could be together forever."

"In the meantime, I had returned to my old home and tried to make it liveable while I worked on completing my version of the time machine," Doc said. "Shortly before Christmas, our Marty ran away from home and ended up in my house. I agreed to shelter him."

"Home being Biff Tannen's Pleasure Paradise. I couldn't stand him or my alcoholic mother another minute," Marty elaborated. "I had to get out of there. We ended up getting pretty close." He smiled sadly. "Dad was the first person in a long time to show me any affection."

Doc patted him on the shoulder. "We lived in relative peace until January, when Marty was gunned down by one of Biff's cronies while on a supplies run. I was forced to vampirize him so he'd survive. We moved into the mine where I had stored the DeLorean-"

"And guess where we were staying," Josie grinned. "Emmett and I ran into each other once we smelt each other out. As you can imagine, it was a very happy reunion."

"I can," Mystie nodded. "I'm glad you found each other again."

"Us too," Doc said, kissing Josie's cheek. "We regrouped, and in February of 1986-A, I finally finished my time vehicle. We decided to escape into the past to avoid Biff's regime. But somehow, during the time travel process, we switched dimensions as well."

"What?"

"We're not sure what happened," Josie admitted. "When we time traveled back to November 12th, 1955, we ended up in this world. The only clues we have is that the DeLorean was shaking pretty violently when we went through time, and Jennifer says she saw some sort of ripple moving through the car."

"Not sure if I really saw it, or if that was just because of the shaking either," Jennifer said.

Doc-2 stared into space, looking reflective. "November 12th, 1955. Sometimes I think it must be the temporal junction point of the space-time continuum. After all, we had quite a bit of time travel activity there."

"Let me guess. You guys were there too."

"Twice over," Marty-2 said. "November 12th was the day I originally got back to the future from 1955. When Old Biff grabbed the Almanac, he went back to the same date, so we had to go there too to get it back from young Biff. I basically had to keep out of Doc'55 and my other self's way while I got the Almanac."

"Sounds confusing."

"It was. We eventually met our Hell Valley selves on top of the high school gym after a failed attempt to get the book. They'd ended up following us around out of confusion. While we talked, Biff managed to escape in his car. My Marty and I went after him, and I tried time traveling to gain back lost time. Due to a short in the time circuits, however, we ended up back in 1885, without any gas. Stranded, we set up shop, and I ended up saving and falling in love with Clara."

"They sent us a note, and we went back to rescue them after getting the almanac," Marty finished up. "We buried the book there and returned to this 1985. Since then, we've just tried to co-exist without letting anyone know we're different people. My Dad does Doc's late-night work with his scientific services business, and me and Jennifer will fill in for our doubles if they have some sort of situation. Other than that, we try to keep a low profile." He gave Doc-2 a look. "You had to go and step on my foot."

"Well, if you had kept your mouth shut. . ."

Mystie shook her head. "This is unbelievable. If I couldn't smell the differences between you two, I would have thought you were throwing a bunch of bullshit my way." She stood up. "You have my word I'll keep quiet about this."

"Thanks a lot," Doc said, relieved.

Mystie grabbed her coat. "I'm going to be heading out now - I need to get to my own job." Her eyes switched between the two Docs. "And honestly, I'm feeling a tad awkward. I'll be seeing you."

"Bye." The group watched as she went out the door. "Well, I really think we freaked her out there," Josie said.

Doc exhaled noisily and fell onto the couch. "I hope we can trust her. If she says one word about it, we're through."

"Mysteria's a good woman," Clara said reassuringly. "She wouldn't tell. She respects us." She smirked a little. "Besides, who would believe her?"

"True. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens."

Sunday, July 26th, 1987

Hill Valley

7:18 P.M.

Marty switched on the radio, feeling a little bored. "Who can it be knocking at my door?" it sang at him. Marty shrugged and settled onto the couch -

Only to hear some very real knocks at the door. "Son of a bitch," he said, getting back up. "That's weird." He went up and opened it a crack. "Oh, hi Mysteria."

"Hey Marty. Is your family around?"

"Dad's in the back, working on his DeLorean. Jennifer and Josie are out on another shopping trip for the babies. Why?"

"I just wanted everyone to know that I'm leaving Hill Valley for a little while. I sorta need a break after - well-"

"Finding out all this information on us?" Doc filled in, coming in from the garage. "I suppose that's understandable."

"Yeah. So I'm taking a vacation, try to get my mind off things. Maybe find a cute guy of my own," she blushed.

Doc smiled. He knew that Mysteria probably still had a crush on him. He wasn't going to press the issue, though. She knew that Josie and Clara had gotten to both versions him first. "Good luck. And enjoy your vacation."

"Thanks. I'm still not sure where to go yet, though. I'm kinda hoping Josie can help me with that bit."

"Actually, I've got an idea," Doc said with a playful grin. "Why not Germany?"

"Germany?" Mysteria looked dubious. "Well, I've only been to Europe once, and that was to Spain. . . ."

"I only mention it because that's where my father and uncle emigrated from. I think I still have family there."

Mysteria looked at him a moment. Then, slowly, she grinned. "Germany. I like that. And I can stop by Salem, Massachusetts on the way. Thanks."

"You're welcome. Josie's at Toys R Us in the Lone Pine Mall, if you want to catch up with her."

"Sure thing. Bye!" She flew off. Doc and Marty watched her go. Marty grinned. "I guess you like her if you're willing to risk her as an in-law."

"Hey, it seemed like the nice thing to do. Come on, I need some help with the flux capacitor."