It was a hell of a sight, and one I could hardly believe I was seeing. One minute I was talking with Doug, the next I was an invisible sprite. An exploding wall of stars and crescent moons cascaded over my sight like a screensaver, pixelated and changing, creating a distracting fog through which I struggled to see.

Myself. I saw myself waving at Doug, taking off out the door walking in a stance that suggested I worked out a lot and wasn’t used to the heft of my own body. What the heck was going on here? I reached out a hand into the mess of magic in front of me, and noticed that it was all dissipating. My own presence was feeling a bit different as well.

Somehow more grounded, perhaps?

Doug had locked eyes with me and now I returned his gaze. The feeling of being a real boy had settled over me, and even though I didn’t understand this Pinocchio-complex one iota, I knew for a fact that Doug was behind it.

“What did you do, asshole?” I asked. He laughed, then the door to his bedroom came flying open and a second Doug came walking out to join us.

“A magician never reveals his tricks,” they both said in unison. I scoped them over, no differences. Absolutely perfect clones.

“Dude, cool trick. But this is unbelievable. You made a copy of me and sent it out on a mission to lead my men?” I shook my head and balled my fists. Doug was a mental case, a real soup sandwich. And he was going to get us all killed.

The second Doug answered. “Do I look like some idiot decoy?”

“What about me?” the first Doug asked.

I was starting to get a headache.

“You both look quite punchable if that’s what you are asking. But, no, alright, I get it. That me is me. So can we skip all of your theatrics and get to the point. What the hell just happened here, and why shouldn’t I be putting a boot so hard through your ass that it spits blood for a week?”

Doug seemed mystified by the question.

“Surely,” they both said in unison, “a kick of that force would kill me well before then. Is there some game debuff that I do not know about?” The two of them turned to face one another, the same exuberant look over their faces. “We can make a spell for it!”

“Foot’s getting itchy,” I informed them.

The first Doug waved the second Doug away, who in turn bounded off giddily, happily repeating the words ‘spits blood for a week’. “Ah, yes. So, you see, this is a sort of temporal displacement spell. Takes a ton of mana. But fortunately the guys downstairs figured out those potions of theirs. So, hell, I cast it twice.”

I frowned.

“To the point. Yes. I made two of you. Basically I took one you from another timeline as defined by the game errata of our current surrounding system, and I put him here. The timeline is only different by about two hours, so he does what he was doing there while doing it here simultaneously. That, of course, let’s you go on to do something else.”

My frown dissipated. “Are you saying that there are two me’s that are absolutely the real me, with the same thinking, same biceps, same Patches waiting for us to go kick some goons in the can and get us all out of here?”

“Yes.”

“Holy monkey nuts,” I spouted. “Doug, I actually really thought that I’d have to knock your face in for a second. But now, now I think you're back to strike one. That sounds like an awesome spell to have in our arsenal. Question, though. How do we get rid of him at the end of this all? I’m not going to have to put a bullet in him, am I?”

Doug did a little kick flip and pushed down from the ceiling to my center of gravity, landing gracefully next to me. “I think I can explain it perfectly if I show it to you, sped up and brief. My research has me up to a 2 hour duration but I can shrink the duration pretty much at will.”

Duration. Good. Then I wouldn’t have to spend time battling rival me’s over and over again. Though, then again, if it had been some sort of permanent cloning spell then I could simply make an army of me’s and send them out instead of the rest of the humans I was protecting.

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Honestly this temporal stuff was giving me a little bit of a headache. I followed him as he led me deeper into his sanctum. It was impressive how his escher stuff really expanded the space he had available. We entered through a sort of porthole that was in either the ceiling or sticking out from a wrong angle of wall. I really couldn’t tell anymore.

To be honest, my turned-about brain had a flash of thought. I wondered if we couldn’t do this same thing to the apartment building without scrambling the residents’ brains or making them suicidal.

I’d have to investigate the idea later.

The place after the porthole reminded me of orange flexible tubing. I’m not sure how to describe it better. Like, imagine being on the inside of a ribbed and flexible, circular hallway that rose and dropped at strange angles, and you can get a sense of what I am talking about.

It felt extradimensional, like we were looping through the cosmos.

At the end of the weaving corridor, there was another porthole that Doug opened without any hesitation. And we entered into the shiny white tiles of an actual laboratory. Like, one with safety suits and protocols. I saw the other Doug clad in the pristine white-white jacket and pants of a consummate lab professional and it left me agape.

“Uh,” I gasped. Doug was a man of many jackets, apparently. Too many. The damn man was a kaleidoscope of unexpected personalities and abilities.

There was a flash and Doug’s clothing changed to parallel that of his other self. “Doug,” he said, nodding to his associate.

“Doug,” the other returned, scurrying over to a shelf full of beakers, bunsen burners, and a cage full of very angry-looking purple jelly. It butted its pseudopods against the wire bars in apparently angry protest.

“Come! Follow! Don’t pay attention to my assistant. He is not nearly as well-versed as I am in the wonders of mana and the universe!” I followed him to a marble top. There he had constructed a maze out of aluminum. But unlike the mazes of normal mice, this one seemed chock full of danger.

“Uh, Doug, are those spike traps?” I asked.

“Indeed! So observant, Poombah! There is no wonder as to the mystical why of your leadership.” He winked and I wondered briefly if he was mocking me. “To be honest, I ran the numbers yesterday, so the mathematical proof is available to any naysayer that might dare oppose you.” He wasn’t mocking me. He was just crazy.

“Flame traps?” I asked, bending over and giving the small ports that appeared on this maze wall and that a hard squint.

“Of the finest yet miniscule caliber!” he boasted.

I was interested. I wanted to see this maze run. It covered most of the tabletop so I estimated a good six feet by 3 wide. I wanted to see the little mousey warriors run their way through, see what happened, see what the hell Doug was up to here in his quest to make me understand the spell.

And then it happened. I toggled a switch and I watched a dozen mice spill into the starting section of the maze. He waved his arms, spoke some words, and suddenly there was a spot of smog over each of the places where one twitched and sniffed. Hitting a second toggle, I saw the main part of the maze open up and witnessed the fuzzy little furballs charging ahead, the scent of cheddar no doubt hard pressed into their nostrils.

And then, where the fog was, there coalesced exact copies of the initial twelve.

“This is bonkers man. So, what happens if any of those first twelve die?”

“First off,” Doug said, “temporal anomalies begin to occur if one of you sees the other.” That accounted for the headache. “Next, definitely don’t interact with your other self.”

I raised an eyebrow, looking over my shoulder to where Other Doug was happily stabbing small metal stakes into the seething blob of purple. He felt our eyes upon him, and he waved.

My Doug opened another wall in the maze and the other set of mice took a different path.

“Since we don’t want to break the space time continuum or have paradox police come and shut down the operation, we won’t even let the rats come into contact with one another.”

“What the hell are Paradox Police?” I asked.

Doug frowned. “A hypothetical, Poombah. The sort of thing that almost certainly doesn’t exist in the real world, but might exist here because, you know, game rules and all of that.”

I sighed, then did a double take. “Ya, gotcha. Understood. But, uh, Doug, aren’t you an NPC?”

He nodded and shrugged, adding to the mystery that was his kit and kaboodle in this brave new world. I opened my mouth to speak again, and then shut it when he broke into sudden action, stabbing a bit of purply magic down into the cage. The ray of energy hit a rat from the clone group, blasting it into oblivion. One of the originals suddenly stopped, took a few drunken steps, then collapsed on its side. I peered closer, and found that it was still alive, its little chest was heaving, but it was at least very dazed.

“I would advise against taking lethal damage,” he said.

I watched, dumbfounded, as the horde of mice continued forward, getting stabbed here and charred there. There duplicates in the second group slumped into their own various conditions. Some outright died. Others, like the first, got knocked into breathless almost-comas. One exploded, bloody splatter reaching up and out high and hard enough to leave droplets on Doug’s white lab coat.

“Are these NPC mice?” I asked. The explosion of meat and gristle had me feeling a bit hollow all of a sudden. It was that cold knot of fear that hit ya right before an operation.

“Not at all!” Doug exclaimed. “At least, not as far as I can tell. Isn’t it amazing?!”

I grimaced, feeling like a man strapped to a bomb, the timer slowly ticking down to zero. “Doug, cool spell. Great explanation. But next time I’m gonna need you to tell me all of this sort of stuff before you cast any new magic on me or anyone else,” I growled. “Understood?”

Doug nodded and bowed, his mind already off elsewhere.

“Eureka!” the other Doug exclaimed and we both turned to look. From the purple blob sprouted a pair of perfectly human-looking butt cheeks. I shook my head and sighed. Doug was effective. But damn was he hard to live with.