Round 1 Action

The Tournament

Round 1 Harry Brown (offense) vs Eli Vaquez (defense)

1-25-2035

A blue wormhole appeared in an alley. Fortunately no one was there to see it or what emerged from it.

The first person to emerge was Quinn Mallory. He hit the ground hard and rolled out of the way before his friends could crush him. Wade Welles came next. She kept going until she hit the far building wall with a painful grunt. Rembrant Brown was next. Professor Eli Vaquez came last, his portly frame smashing into Remmy and slamming the singer's face into the nasty alley ground.

"Aw, Professor!" Remmy complained.

"I'm sorry Mr. Brown." Eli soothed. "You know I have no control over where I land when I come through the wormhole." He would have added that interdimensional travel was so beyond imagination already that complaining about minor inconveniences suffered in the process was like complaining about airline food during the miracle of traveling across the country in three hours. The pioneers would have laughed themselves to death at such a thought.

"You better get some control before you smear me across the pavement of one of these freakish worlds!" Remmy whined.

"So how much time do we have until our next Slide?" Wade asked, rolling her eyes at the other two.

"Two hours and twenty minutes." Quinn said, looking at his timer.

"Enough time to explore." Professor Eli said happily.

"Don't you think we should just lie low? We could almost spend two hours and change here in this alley." Remmy cautioned. "After the drama of the last couple worlds, I need a break."

Eli snorted pompously. "But what if we're back home at our true Earth? We'll never know unless we give it a try."

Quinn and Wade glanced at each other, shrugging.

"Very well, onward and upward Mr. Brown!" Eli enthused, leading them towards the street.

Professor Eli stopped when he caught sight of the main street. People were running to and fro, some of them bloody, most of the screaming, all of them running for their lives. Chasing them were naked men, all of them tall and skinny. In fact, each of them looked identical to the rest except for wounds inflicted by their adventures today. Their eyes rolled in their heads, their long scraggly gray hair hung in lumps, and their long yellowing nails were ragged and in most cases blood soaked.

"What in God's name?!" Eli exclaimed before he could help himself.

Several of the feral clones turned at this. Their rolling eyes focused on the Sliders and they broke into identical grins.

"Nice move Professor!" Quinn snapped, turning on his heel and running back down the alley.

Remmy and Wade followed, leaving the Professor standing there for a second. Eli finally got his massive body in motion however, and was soon nipping at their heels.

"They will dance pretty!" The raving clones called out as they gave chase.

They looked too skinny to have the stamina needed to follow the well fed Sliders for long, but they ran like possessed jackrabbits. Professor Eli, who was fast losing his wind, couldn't even hear them gasping for breath. This in contrast to his breathing, which sounded like that of a chainsmoking geriatric pulling a traincar up a hill.

Two blocks into their retreat, Professor Eli realized he was going to have to stop and make his stand now, before he was so winded he would stand no chance in defending himself. "I - I - have to stop." He gasped as he did so.

His friends heard and stopped themselves, but they were a good dozen feet ahead of him.

The hyped up jackrabbits, however, were right behind him. As Eli stopped and turned around, the three who'd given chase were already on him. Clawing at his clothes and slobbering on his hands.

"Get off me, you crazed mendicants!" Eli shouted, pushing them and punching one to the ground.

"Kitty shouldn't hit!" One of the clones snarled, exposing yellow teeth that looked like they had been filed down.

The other one still standing grinned in reply. His teeth looked like they had been filed as well. "No, kitty shouldn't have!" He agreed.

Professor Eli braced himself for their combined attack. Somehow he knew they were going to try and bite him. The thought of them sinking their yellow teeth into his flesh was revolting enough. The fact that they would be rubbing their greasy, naked bodies on him while they did so was too much.

Quinn and Remmy appeared from his right, attacking the savages with their fists and kick quicks. Eli hadn't thought about how effective simple kicks with dress shoes could be against people without the protection of clothes or shoes. Professor Eli's two male friends drove back the three attackers before he could even join the fray.

He turned to check on Wade, just in time to see another one of the feral clones sneaking up behind her. "Wade! Watch out!"

He was too late, the sneaky savage grabbed the woman and sank its filed down teeth into her exposed shoulder. "Wade!" Eli called out, running to her.

Wade screamed as blood gushed from between the foul creature's unclean teeth. She twisted and pushed, but its grip was as strong as its jaws.

Eli reached her. He kicked out, satisfied to hear a bone snapping. The clone moaned, stumbled back, and started to stumble away. The Professor saw why as he took Wade into his arms, Quinn and Remmy had ran off the others and were coming this way.

"That nasty mother bit me!" Remmy complained, holding up his hands. "I need a rabies shot now."

"We can only hope that's all you've been exposed to, Mr. Brown." Eli said tightly.

"This is your fault." Remmy complained, cradling his wounded hand. "I knew we should have just laid low in the alley. I doubt any of them would have even noticed us in the time before we Slid again.

"No sense dwelling on it now." Eli countered, leading Wade to a door that was ajar. He peeked inside. It was the storeroom for what appeared to be an abandoned hammock shop. None of the hammocks were set up back here, but the piles of them looked comfortable enough. "Come on, we can wait it out in here."

The other followed him, barricading the door with several crates when they were all inside.

Professor Eli comforted Wade until she had calmed enough to try sleeping for the last hour until they had to leave this world. Soon she was sleeping fitfully with her head resting in his lap. Remmy was sitting in the corner next to the door, his bitten hand resting in his lap. Quinn was laying on a pile of hammocks several feet from Remmy and about the same distance from the Professor and Wade.

"So what do you think is going on in this world, Professor?" Quinn asked softly.

"It's hard to say. Infinite Earths, infinite possibilities. But even within that infinity, the laws of physics remain. So I would guess that science is blame here. We've seen worlds where they have successfully cloned human beings. What if such a program has gone haywire on this world? Perhaps combined with a general toying with human DNA ... our worst nightmare would be a genetic disease arising from poorly conceived or executed experiments on humans. A disease that spontaneously rewrites our DNA, for instance. Our DNA is the only thing holding us in our current shapes, such a disease could be devastating, and almost surely incurable. Perhaps something like that has happened here." Professor Eli sighed. "Or it could be something as mundane as the escape from a local mental ward of a set of quintuplets who shun clothing and like biting people."

Quinn smiled faintly. "But if it's the disease thing, we can't risk transmitting it beyond this Earth, right?"

"That's true." Eli admitted. "But there's no way for us to know for sure. Any one of our Slides could transmit a disease the next Earth is totally unequipped to deal with. That's the risk we take with each trip." He stroked Wade's hair absently as he spoke.

"I guess you'll see if anything happens to me and Wade," Remmy muttered thickly from his corner.

Eli glanced at his long time friend. Remmy didn't look so good. He was sweating profusely, and his bitten hand was swollen twice it's normal size. "You look dreadful." He gasped. "I don't think this gives much credence to the insane asylum break theory. You certainly look like you've caught something. Perhaps we should think about getting you to a hospital."

Quinn glanced at the timer he was tightly clutching in his right hand. "We only have 47 minutes left. Not enough time to reach anywhere that could help him before we Slide." He got up and went to the window beside the door. "Even if we could get through the naked biting horde to reach a hospital."

"Mr. Mallory, I want to reach our Earth as much as you do, but all the signs are pointing to a contagious disease. Look at Mr. Brown!"

Quinn did so ... and took a hard step back. Rembrandt Brown was no longer in the corner. In his place was a shivering, skinny white man with greasy, clumpy gray hair. It was pulling off its shirt, grinning with filed down, yellow teeth. "Kitty wants to Slide!" It cackled, eyeing Quinn's timer. "Kitty wants to spread the power!"

"Get away from it!" Professor Eli hissed.

Quinn backed farther away until he was standing beside the Professor, but his eyes never left what used to be his longtime friend Remmy. The horror that had replaced Remmy was pulling off the rest of its clothes now, burning gimlet eyes fixed right back on Quinn.

Something occurred to Eli and he looked down. Another of the skinny horrors was where Wade had been. He was cradling its head, still stroking its now lumpy hair, while it stared up at him with maniacal glee. "Kitty wants to burrow!" It screeched.

And before he could push it from him, it did just that. Right into his stomach.

Eli's screams broke Quinn's concentration on the other horror. Quinn looked down at what was happening to the Professor, cursed, and backed up a step. The Remmy-Monster leaped on him from its corner, shrieking with delight. "Kitty wants to feed! Kitty wants to feed!"

When the two horrors had finished feeding, they stood in the middle of the storeroom and waited for the holy transformation to occur. One of them, the one that had been Wade, bent suddenly and picked up the timer. The numbers revealed there was only 22 minutes left.

"Kitty wants to Slide!" It giggled.

A shudder passed through the world...

Eli opened his eyes. A wave of nausea hit him, but he forced it aside and sat up.

Harry Brown, a painfully skinny man with somewhat long gray hair, was already climbing down from his game bed. He glanced over at Eli and smiled slightly.

"Was that scenario taken from something?" Eli inquired, grimacing as the memories flooded back into his mind.

"It was an old TV show from the 1990s called 'Sliders.' There was a horrid movie inspired by that series about ten years ago. They changed Quinn to a woman and Remmy to an intelligent talking dog."

"Yes, yes, I remember that. I thought the movie was good, but then I never saw the original series."

Harry gave a shrug as if to say that was only to be expected. "Good luck on your next game, I enjoyed our contest."

"Oh, Harry." Eli said, putting a hand up to the reporters who were even now crowding to interview him. "How did you ever find out about the time I was locked in a hammock storeroom as a kid? Or about my biting phobia? I've played almost two hundred games and no one has ever been able to dig up those things about me."

Harry Brown gave his humble smile again. "It wasn't me. I have an excellent staff. I just try and stay out of their way."

Eli nodded, wiped his still perspiring brow, and turned to the reporters.

Home

Gabrielle Sallor (offense) vs Kurt Shilling (defense)

Damien Johnson (offense) vs Kyle Devore (defense)

Katya Floski (offense) vs Kim Jong (defense)

Anne Layden (offense) vs Sissy Crydom (defense)

Blake Ezor (offense) vs Julie Amore (defense)

Leo Rameriz (offense) vs Alyson Kerrigan (defense)

Max Fields (offense) vs Roland Windom (defense)

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