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Donnie arrives home, coming in through the sliding glass door from the back patio.  A light in the kitchen and the sound of someone there draws his attention.  He sees his mother, making a sandwich.  She's dressed in jeans, with a sweater and sturdy boots.  As he comes into the light she looks up at him, and for a moment it's as though she's seen a ghost.  "Donnie?"  her tone is slightly jittery.  She reaches in her pocket, taking out a cell phone she flips it open and looks at the display.  A tear rolls down her cheek, and she puts the phone away.  "You hungry honey?"  she asks, continuing to work on the sandwich on the counter.

Donnie pulls off the leather flight helmet. "Mom, what are you doing up so late, and why are you dressed like you are working in the garden? It's 1 AM."

"I couldn't sleep, so I went for a walk.  Was the party fun?"  she asks, "And you never gave me an answer about that sandwich."

"Yeah, it was a blast. Sylvia and I talked and patched things up. We are at least friends again. What's wrong? You were crying.."

She looks at him for a moment, then smiles and wipes her eyes.  "Just one of those things, when you realize that the world isn't what you thought it would be.  Nothing to worry about."  She puts the sandwich together, and slices it in half, offering him one half.  "So, Sylvia.  I'm happy for you, you seem really happy.  How are things otherwise?"

He takes the half sandwich and sits at the counter, taking off his leather pilot gloves. "Fine actualluy, really good. Remember when that kid attacked me with a baseball bat earlier this year? Well, he's still expelled but the girls responsible for goading him into it have gotten their come-uppance. I think I can relax a little more at school and not be looking over my shoulder all the time."
He chews his sandwich meditatively for a minute, then starts gently "Mom, you are usually brutally and sometimes painfully honest with me, but why do you lie to me about yourself?"  

She squints for sa moment.  "I do?"  she says, like the concept is alien to her.  "Well, like how?"  She goes to fetch a pair of glasses and pour them some milk.

Donnie sighs, rubbing his eyes tiredly. "You deflect any questions about you away, and avoid answering them."

"I'm sorry.  Is there something you want to know?"

"Why you are walking around at one AM on a Saturday night wearing heavy boots and gardening type gear, crying and nervous. You practically jumped out of your skin when I walked in, even though you knew I was at the party." Donnie stares steadily at her.

"If I answer this one, no matter how crazy the answer sounds, will you answer one for me?"

"Yes, as long as we're being honest. Sounds fair."

"I'm in the wrong house."  she says, reaching into her pocket she takes out the cell phone she looked at earlier, flipping it open she shows Donnie the display.  It's not the display of any cell phone he's ever seen.  A line shows a long number at the top.  Beneather that is a count down timer, with only a few minutes left.  "I must have misdialed the coordinates and ended up in the wrong dimension." she closes the phone and puts it back in her pocket.  "The reason I was so suprised when you came in, was that my son died a few weeks ago.  Someone at school beat him to death with a baseball bat."

Donnie goes "Guh."  and stares at her with a wild-eyed look. After he looks at her phone, he says "What the hell?"  as he slides off the bench seat and backs up a few steps. "You're... from another..dimension?"  

"Yes.  Is it so hard to believe?  You were always talking about other worlds with dragons and knights.  It's the same, just not quite aas romantic as youo always made it out to be."  She frowns.  "I've upset you, I should go.  It's almost time for me to jump anyway."  She sets the unfinished sandwich down.  "I'm sorry Donnie, I thought if anyone might understand it wouold be you."  She gets up and goes towards the dining room table, where Donnie notices a trenchcoat hangs across the back of one of the chairs.

Donnie follows her, holding his hands up placatingly. "Hey, w-wait. I'm sorry. It just surprised me is all. The fact that you aren't my mom, but you really are and stuff. Hold on a sec, would ya? Didn't you want me to answer a question?"

She stops and turns.  She smiles, "You mentioned a girl, Sylvia.  Tell me about her, what's she like, does she make you happy?"

Suddenly Donnie is bashful. "Yeah, she rocks my world. She's a cheerleader, believe it or not. She's gorgeous, but really quiet. My mom, uh, the one from this demension, thinks she's too good for me, but we go together like missing halves. We had a disagreement earlier in the week, and I thought it was all over, but we are patching things up. She has two moms, and her and her older sister were adopted from China.I never told my parents about her moms being gay, cause she would flip her lid, but we're being honest here."

Donnie stands for a moment, as if trying to decide about something, then rushes forward and embraces he alternate dimension mum. "I know I would have wanted to hug you goodbye, so bye mom."

Tears sting his eyes and a lump forms in his throat as he kisses her cheek and backs away, worried about getting caught in the dimension-tripping machinery.

Her eyes are overflowing with tears when Donnie steps away.  "They say that there are infiniite possibilities in the multi-verse.  I'm just glad I got a chance to meet you Donnie, and know that there is a Donald Douglas that's happy."  She lifts her coat from the chair and puts it on.  A second or so later the phone in her pockets begins to beep.  She takes it out and looks at it.  "I should get going."  she says, stepping out into the backyard.

She opens the phone, and pushes a button, which causes a large swirling vortex to appear a few feet in front of her.  A howling wind blows as air is sucked towards the vortex.  She turns and waves, "Maybe I'll see you around."  she turns back to the vortex and leaps in, vanishing.  A few seconds later the vortex closes behind her.

"Woah."

The Usual Suspects are so totally not gonna believe this.

He pulls out his cell-phone and dials Sylvia. He has to tell somebody, and she's first on his list. "Sylvia? It's me. Sorry to have woken you. But you won't believe this..."

Sylvia was wide awake, staring at her ceiling and playing out the best parts of the evening, with slight rewriting and professional costume design.  This particular mind flick was a period piece, taking place at an Austro-Hungarian costume ball shortly after the Great War.  There's Donnie with his dapper uniform, and there's Sylvia in her--

The phone startles her out of it, and she tries to suppress the upsurge of giddy joy in her voice when she sees Donnie's name.  "What?  What is it?"  She tries to focus and realizes how bad this could be.  "Witches?  Something else?  Do you need me there?  Should I wake Kel up?"  Not that Kel is home or sleeping, she suspects.

Donnie says "Nonono! Nothing like that! I just met my mom. From another dimension." Cue music. Dun-dun-DUUUUUUUH!

Donnie tells her of the strange meeting, excitement and a little fear in his voice. About him being dead in another dimension.

Sylvia's end of the conversation involves a lot of "Uh-huh.  Uh-huh.  Right.  Another dimension, you said?  Did she have a beard?  Don't trust her if she had a beard."

Then, at the end, "Donnie, where's your mom?  Your real mom?"

Donnie stops his pacing on the back porch. "Crap! I forgot to check! Hold on a sec."

He runs inside and over to the Master Suite, quietly opening the door to check and see if his parents are in bed.

Mom is asleep in bed, but dad is nowhere to be seen.  Not unusually lately.

Donnie closes the door quietly and heads back out to the kitchen. "She's in bed. Dad's off $^&%ing his secretary again, I guess" The disgust in his voice is palpable.

Sylvia draws her breath through her teeth, unsure of what to say.  Mitzi and Carolyn are so solidly together that, to Sylvia, adultery is like something only people on TV do.  "I'm glad she's okay, but you said this lady had been there for a couple of weeks?  What was she doing?  Where was she?  How did your mom not notice her?"

"No, I think she just dialed in tonight. She was dressed oddly, for mom, and had a trenchcoat. I think she just appeared tonight. Hey, wan't there some dimension-travelling show in the nineties that had some soert of tunnel that was activated from a cell phone or something?"  Donnie sits on the porch outside, leaning on the cold [patio chairs and staring up at the stars. "In this other dimension place where I died, I never got to go out with you. I got the impression my alternate self was not a happy person either."

Sylvia grimaces, and there's a long pause while she tries to figure out how to say this without sounding like too much of a self-centered twerp.  "Um.  You're not saying you'd fall down dead if we hadn't gone out, are you?"  She hates to think Donnie was that unhappy with his family life.  Is that unhappy with his family life.

"I think I didn't have the guts to ask you out until after the baseball bat incident. Maybe my other self didn't have dragons, or never met Sammy. Maybe he never met you. Ugh. My mind is twisting itself into knots here. I dunno. I just got the imperssion from Alternate Reality Mom that her Donnie was an unhappy person. She seemed kind of different, personality wise than my mom. Didn't smell like gin. Didn't dress like she might be caught on film by a photographer for the Rich Person Times cover." Donnie grabs his gloves from the counter and heads back outside again, enjoying the cool air enough to stay outside, but didn't want frozen fingertips. He tucks his blue scarf around his neck and snugs the pilot's cap back on his head.

Sylvia opens her window and leans out of it, thinking about how long it would take her to run to Donnie's.  The urge is there.  "This is weird.  We should call somebody who knows about this kind of thing.  I mean, you can't just say, 'My mom from another universe dropped by,' and leave it at that, can you?  Someone needs to check this out."  She thinks.  "Jack."  Her default go-to guy.  "No.  Jack's nuts, but he's no physi--"  Bingo.  "Banner."

"Should we call him? It's late and he's kind of... old. Is there anything we can do?" *sigh* "This is really wierd."

"No kidding."  She makes faces, thinking about how much paranoia is too much paranoia and what the consequences of too little paranoia are.  "Look.  I'm gonna call Banner.  Maybe he'll answer.  Maybe he can tell us how to make sure this lady was telling the truth.  I mean, how do you accidentally dial the wrong universe?  You'd think the area code would be completely different."  She might be joking.  Her sense of humor is dry as a bone sometimes, Donnie's learned.  She gets it from Carolyn.  "Stay on the line?  He'll probably want to talk to you."

"Holding. Stars are nice tonight. Sky is clear."

Sylvia dials the number David Banner gave her and it rings.  It rings twice, and is picked up by Betty Banner, "Hello?"  she sounds like she just woke up, but is pretty alert for having been asleep.

She punches in the number, and while it rings, she looks up at the sky, too.  "Other universes.  Other stars."  And with just as minimal a segue she says, "I would have gone out with you whenever you asked.  Well, maybe not when you were calling me a were-horse, but any time after that."

When Betty picks up, Sylvia says, "Hi, Mrs. Banner?  This is Sylvia Avery-Vaughn from Chicago.  I'm sorry to bother you so late, but we were hoping we could talk to your husband."

Betty wakes David up and a few moments later he's on the line.  "Yes, everything okay?  David doesn't sound nearly as a wake as Betty, but he still seems to be able to hold focus.  The cenference call allows Donnie to impart the information about the extra-dimensional visitor.

"Okay.  Not totally uncommon.  There are plenty of documented cases of this kind of thing.  So, how can I help?"

"Should I worry? This seems like a chapter out of a science fiction story. Will I receive more trans-dimensional visitors? Will they be looking for me or is this just another strange circumstance brought about by the Theory you were talking about at the meeting?"

"Well, it might be nothing.  There hasn't been widespread dimensional travel in a few years, So it's probably an isolated incident.  I could see her mistyping the coordinates, if she was in a rush.  In and of itself dimensional travel isn't a threat, but sometimes the people doing it can be.  You just have to go with the flow sometimes."

"Is there a way to make sure she was telling the truth?" Sylvia asks.  In all the TV shows she's seen, people who look like your mother, but aren't, are invariably ee-vil.

"Ah, this isn't maybe what you think."  David begins, "There are countless universes that run paralel with ours, and those that run at other angels as well.  From what's been written it's usually rare that a person is fundamentally different from one universe to the next, only the circumstances that have shaped them.  Some universes are so similar to ours you could be there days, or weeks before you noticed a difference.  some are so radically different it's obvious right away."

"Hey," Sylvia says, narrowing her eyes at the blameless oak tree outside her window.  "Are you implying that people here can travel between dimensions?"

"It's a well documented fact that they can.  the government tries to restrict it, since it is a bit dangerous."

"So in other places, they've got cell phones that can do this?"  She finds that disturbing, the idea of interdimensional travel on a whim.  "So it's nothing to worry about, you think?  Just, 'Wrong number!' and that's it?"

"Well, the technology is certainly smaller than I remember reading about, but it's been some years since anything has been published so advancements are sure to have happened, especially if she was from somewhere with a higher technological axiom than our dimension."

He hasn't answered the question about whether it's worth worrying about, and Sylvia is hard-headed enough to ask it again.  "Is Donnie in danger?"

"Probably no more than usual for him I would guess.  I did say that wierd was part of the lifestyle, didn't I?"

Donnie laughs. "Yeah. It was a 'good' cross dimensional version of my mother. Hopefully I got my one Cross Dimension meeting and no more will happen. Your turn to have something really wierd happen, Sylvia."

"Nope.  No weirdness for me, thanks.  I'm forwarding all my weirdness to Kel, who probably won't notice."