Tarys sits unmoving, legs stretched out before her and her hands clasped over them.  She watches Axander with dark, unblinking eyes.

"I fear that may speak rather less to you or I or this TARDIS being in any way special or suited to the task, than it does simply to us being the implements that are to hand,"  Tarys uncoils and stands and starts to pace, with the close-bound energy of a cat.  "I have been across the battle-lines of that war to see stars torn apart, the songs of entire species silenced.  You may see that as evidence that the armies of Gallifrey are as cruel and terrible as those I have struggled against; I see it as a sign that we are losing and increasingly, few and far between."

She stops, and for a moment her shoulders slump.  She can't do this alone, not even if she takes this man's home from him by force, and flings it through the Vortex after those last fading echoes of the Doctor.  All the paths that run that way are short and bloody and fail.  She knows far too well that she lacks the knowledge, the wisdom, the compassion of the Doctor: Marsillanon made her a weapon as much as anything else that he made of her, and while there is a place for weapons in war, their uses are strictly defined.

"There is one thing that we share, however: one thing I know even though I do not know why you feared my arrival, why you have stayed here and safe, even though I have not yet heard your name.  We have the responsibility to do this because we have the knowledge, we have the means, and because if we do not there will be no one to take up this message and act."

She falls silent.  There is more she could say, but it would not matter, she thinks: either those basic facts would move him or they would not.  But then, she realizes, that is not strictly true: if she would be more than a weapon, then she has to reach beyond necessity, to her self as a living, feeling person.

"Help me," she murmurs.  "Please."

That got him. He was barely holding onto the conversation at that point, sinking into a spiral of terrible thoughts that went along with such things as "the Daleks have won", but Tarys managed to pull him out of his own head. When she asked him for help, his eyes went to hers from the hypercube. A long moment passed before he gave her a nod.

"I'll have to link with the ship before we begin. She was dead before you arrived, you know. Mostly, anyway. Ten years. Can you believe it?" With some effort, he rose to his feet and gave a sigh. This wasn't an occasion for joy. It was a call to battle.

"Here in Summerton I'm Xander Santerri. I'm a student at the local university, studying people through fiction. I suppose that doesn't matter much right now, or won't if we fail. My name is Axander Fermot ix Anterrris. I do wish we could have met under brighter circumstances, Dame Tarysevanemila. I'll go get us ready for dematerialization."

When Axander says her full name back to her, Tarys can't help but smile.

"Perhaps 'Tarys'," she suggests.  "By the time you were done shouting 'Tarysevanemila', the Dalek would already have shot me."

She clasps her hands and inclines her head.  "Lead on."

First names. Axander was starting to relax already. With a small smile and a nod, he started down a hallway. That hallway led to a corridor, which had some stairs leading downward. Another corridor, this one underground, came to a doorway. The place was huge, much bigger than it had been before, but still had generally the same layout.

Axander drew out a key from his pocket, very clearly Gallifreyan in design, and turned it in the otherwise normal-looking deadbolt lock on the door. One satisfying click later, and the pair walked into a completely sterile control room. Roundels in the walls, untouched console, and a softly glowing set of blue crystals set in the Time Rotor. Axander himself was stunned for a moment, but steadied himself and proceeded into the room. He looked with wonder and reverence down at the console controls, walking around the various panels until he stood where he needed to be.

"Ah... just a moment, and we'll have this all worked out." Hesitantly, he began reaching for the controls. The young man didn't seem to have a full understanding of everything as yet, visibly second-guessing himself a number of times. After a few switches and dials were activated, a flat sensor presented itself from the control panel. Axander placed his hand over it, and cast a quick glance at Tarys before steeling himself for the final few inches. With contact made, a little white light scanned down the sensor and ended with a little ding!

The sensor withdrew, and the lighting shifted and changed. Everything dimmed for a moment, while the Time Rotor grew brighter. The sense of non-reality common to Gallifreyan vessels grew briefly more intense, then the sensation subsided and the lighting returned to normal.

"Excellent, the architecture for the rest of the capsule has normalized, so now it should be a bit easier to find what you're looking for." That process certainly did wonders for Axander's disposition. Though it may have just been the excitement, but he became much brighter overall like a switch had been turned.

"Now that's taken care of, we can move to introductions. Tarys, this is Elona. Elona, this is our guest, Tarysevanemila, but we're calling her Tarys because it's more convenient. Elona, we've been given a mission by the Doctor. Saving the universe type stuff. That makes you officially a TARDIS from this moment forward, and there're no professors here to tell us otherwise." There was a certain level of youthful rebellion with a hint of pride. It was odd, considering the bookish look about him otherwise. He wasn't exactly punk rock material. At least he seemed pleased, though.

Tarys nods respectfully, keeping her thoughts about the propriety of giving a TARDIS a name to herself.  The sentience and sapience of TT capsules was a question of philosophy that might be impolitic to debate with Axander at present.

She hands him the temporal trace locator.  "I believe this has a standard interface that should enable you to fit it with the navigational system," she says.  "It should be able to guide us to the wake of the Doctor's timeline.  If it does not find us any coordinates of use, I have... another means we might attempt... but the Doctor did leave us this; he should have known if it would be effective if anyone does."

It feels like an undertaking like this should have more in the way of ceremony.  Tarys remembers a passage from The Songs of the Old Time, from the verse called 'Inaugural'.  She closes her eyes to recite it.

(She has, as the closest thing to a keepsake among the few necessaries in the pack strapped at the small of her back, a tiny copy of the volume, with onionskin pages between thin leather covers.  But it feels to her like the well-known words are coming to her through the shards of memory she retains from her ordeal at the Untempered Schism, as if they had fallen through to her lips from the unnamed explorer of ancient Gallifrey who, tradition says, was the first to write them down.)

"We steel our hearts with courage taught
from age long past, in ancient rhyme
and trust our vessel, cunning-wrought,
to cross the wild seas of Time."
This message was last edited by the player at 20:23, Sun 05 July 2015.

As Axander introduced Tarys, the console emitted a very polite-sounding 'Bee-oo.' After centuries of working together, a lot of his mother Miran had rubbed off on Elona, and the TARDIS shared his wariness of the War and the military, both of which Tarys represented. But whatever she'd shared with the Doctor's TARDIS had prompted the TARDIS to help.


OOC:
Ancillary Power (Major System Damage) has been repaired. Elona has full Story Points.

The Temporal Trace Locator will go in the Homing Beacon Circuit on the Navigation panel.

Axander gave a chiding glance at the console, but didn't make any comment. Instead, he took the trace locator and started preparing for the trip.

"By your tone I assume your alternate option comes with risk? We'll see if it comes to that." He slotted the device into a plug on the Navigation console. It was going to take a minute. He decided to fill the time by plugging in a few more parameters into the architectural systems on another panel, but was interrupted.

As Tarys began the old song, Axander stopped and turned to look at her. Just to be sure it was the same person. It had been some time since he'd been quite that astonished. He absently pushed the glasses higher on the bridge of his nose, and waited until she finished before speaking. A few moments after she'd finished, actually.

"I remember stories and songs, from a time when our people had imagination, a sense of wonder and joy. Maybe once the Daleks are gone we'll see that kind of life again, eh?"

The temporal trace locator was a strange assemblage of loose wires, clockwork, and what appeared to be a hamster wheel, all bound together with duct tape and connected to a computer interface circa 5073. No doubt the Doctor had lashed it together in a desperate hurry – or more of a desperate hurry and crude lash-up than he usually worked in. Either way, the device whirred and stuttered and the hamster wheel spun around and around, and all it was missing was the hamster, and a result. With a sad boop, it stopped and flashed a message:

NO TRACE DETECTED

Tarys frowns at the locator.  "No trace," she echoes.

She takes a deep breath and carefully takes the Possible Knife out, holding up a hand to forestall any protest or alarm.  "This is far more than just a knife," she says.  "It is more accurate to consider it a talisman of the Time War, an artifact of desperate days.  Paracausal agents have projected into nearly every lost battle of the war, where the enemy is known to have unwritten armies, fleets, whole worlds from history.  Sometimes, they have been able to rescue refugees from those erased causalities.  Sometimes only tiny fragments of matter could be salvaged."

She holds the knife level above the console.  "This blade was forged out of some of that flotsam, brought back from places and from objects that really, truly, most sincerely have never been.  Among the ways this makes it so innately dangerous is that it can serve as a guide -- a bellwether for causal changes.  It could help us find where the Doctor has been and ceased to be."  She shakes her head.  "I am reluctant to try to use it as such.  I am a warrior and, I suppose, a spy of sorts; I am at best indifferent as a pilot.  I'm not certain that I would truly be able to do anything but get us more firmly separated from the Doctor's trace than we are even now."
This message was last edited by the player at 12:09, Thu 09 July 2015.

That was a disappointing result. After looking at it a moment, Axander gave a sigh and began sifting his thoughts to try and determine the next step. As he did, Tarys drew her knife again and the younger Time Lord's first thought was that he'd ended his usefulness. Her explanation kept his reaction to a flinch, and he composed himself shortly. Then he went from looking wary to...sad. The weapon's history was certainly a downer.

"Like a nail in water. Poetic, really. The tracer isn't doing any good, so this is really our only other option. I'm parked here because there's a time rip nearby, so perhaps the close proximity to the Vortex directly can help give a push in the right direction, eh?"

Tarys thinks for a moment.

Then: "Axander... you have a rapport with 'Elona' that I would not presume to challenge.  If we do this, it should be you at her controls."  She circles around the console to the mean free path tracker, presently blank.  Focusing on its display, she lays the blade of the Possible Knife flat against her palm, so she can feel every shiver and twitch of the journey before them.

"I will watch here, and try to guide us.  We may not need a clear set of coordinates, just to begin: if there is anything that one knows about the Doctor, it is that he rarely knew what his next destination was going to be.  Just take us into the Vortex; we can find our way as we go."

With a sigh and a nod, Axander moved around the console to begin dematerialization procedures.

"I would be more than happy to. Though in the interests of full disclosure, I've never operated a capsule on my own before. It was all simulations and teamwork operations at the Academy. This should be both interesting and educational." There were a few times he reached out to a control and flinched the moment he touched it. Apparently his bond with the ship was giving him the insights necessary to not create any black holes, or reverse the dimensions of the thing, or anything else instantly fatal.

"Let's see. Helmic regulator at zero, harmonic stabilizer functioning normally, temporal coordinates ready for input, Time-Space Vortex clear of obstruction, ready for dematerialization. Three, two, one..." At "zero", he braced himself and activated the circuit, looking to the Time Rotor excitedly.

Inside the TARDIS:

For a moment, there was a quite tense and pregnant pause as nothing happened. The TARDIS had sat immobile and timeless for too long, and the dust of ages lay thickly in its workings. But, at last, the ancient engines beneath groaned and shuddered, something thumped loudly, and finally they fired into vigorous activity. The long-held time rotor snapped, shooting up like a rocket, before falling down erratically, and eventually settling into a steady rhythm, rising and falling as if the TARDIS was breathing.

And with it came a sound only a Time Lord could love, the rough and ever-rising roar of a TARDIS dematerialisation. It was almost triumphal. 'Vworp! Vworp! Vworp!' Elona sang.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g99SvIodNDw


OOC: Since Axander is a first-time pilot, and the TARDIS is rusty, I'd like a TARDIS navigation roll from Axander to enter the Vortex. That's Ingenuity + Technology + Vortex (2), plus any other relevant traits (Technically Inept) and AoEs (TTCs).

Difficulty is 18 (up from 15 because of circumstance). Apply −1 if Tarys helps pilot (as per the crew rule).

Let me know if I'm getting any of this wrong, I haven't GMed TARDIS operation before.
This message was last edited by the player at 12:09, Fri 10 July 2015.

Outside the TARDIS:

There was a distant wheezing, groaning sound, and the old manor house on the hill began to fade in and out of the world, getting further and further away. Then it was gone, fallen out of the world altogether. An empty void was left, and air rushed in. All that remained was an empty field and a bare patch of dirt where it had once stood.

Neighbours would report louder-than-usual wind, or a plane going overhead, or maybe a truck driving past. But, on that dull weekday afternoon, there'd been no-one outside to see what had happened. City authorities would investigate, trying to determine the discrepancy between an empty lot and local claims there'd once been a house there. But no one could steal a house. And no one had ever really paid that much attention to it while it had stood, and locals disagreed on how big it was and the colour of its roof tiles. Soon, they came to agree it had been demolished at some point, years ago. The errors in council records of the property were duly updated and the matter forgotten.

There'd been no-one outside to see, and she watched the TARDIS vanish with a smile. The woman with the four-o'clock flower on her suit checked her wristwatch. 'Right on time.' she said to herself, satisfied. She walked away, humming. 'Ti-i-ime is on my side...'

OOC: Ye gods, is Axander somehow worse at piloting than Tarys is?

That's hilarious.

Although I do have to ask, does the GM really want to make it this hard to find the plot?

[11:26, Today: Axander rolled 17 using 2d6+12 with rolls of 1,4. Ing+Tech+TTC+Vort-Inept.

Piloting for the first time, that's not half bad. :D With Tarys's help, that should bring the difficulty to the 17 I just hit, right?]

Inside the TARDIS:

Axander made a rather smooth entry into the Space–Time Vortex, and felt rather pleased with himself – except he'd missed the spatial stabilisers, and the room lurched abruptly sideways. Axander stumbled backwards, while Tarys fell over the console, her hand landing on the interface panel of the telepathic circuit.

A set of coordinates appeared on the navigation panel.
This message was last edited by the player at 09:33, Fri 17 July 2015.

Tarys looks at Axander.  She slowly straigntens up, and then he sees her eyes roll back in her head, as her knees turn to jelly and she collapses to the deck.

Axander was pleased enough that anything was happening at all, and he laughed as he stumbled backwards and dropped to his back. The excitement was shifted quickly to worry when Tarys fell, and he managed to scramble over to her, if slower than he'd have liked.

"Dame Tarysvil--oh goodness, you were right about that, weren't you? Tarys? Can you hear me?" He didn't have too much in the way of medical knowledge, but he did know enough to check her eyes and pulse.

When Axander touches her, Tarys comes to with a gasp, and for a few terrifying moments she doesn't know when or where she is, nor whether she is alive or dead.

Even when she does, she remains shaken.  This is far from the first time that Tarys has seen forward into a chain of possibilities that ends in her death, but this one has differed in a number of significant ways.  For one, there is the totality of the destruction at the end of that tree of events; for another, the branching and split perspectives that were carried back to her from the end of all things.

Of course.  It was the mental contact with this TARDIS... this 'Elona'.  Many capsules, particularly ones that saw long service and developed a complex empathic signature, became aware of their own omnicausal sensitivity, their deeply submerged knowledge of their own subjective experience from beginning to end.  And of course, the epistopic collection relays would assimilate all of Elona's local experience, drawing it in for transmission to a Matrix that had been annihilated at the fall of Phaidon.

When that overlaid on Tarys' intimations of her own timeline, it was no wonder that the effect was so dramatic.

"I remember," she breathes, and when Axander draws back, startled, she says, "You, me, us, all of us together with the TARDIS, going ahead together to the end of days."  She sits up.  Her eyes are red-rimmed and a little wild.  "My timeline, Axander, it's... a little cracked at the edges.  But sometimes that means I get a glimpse into those cracks and sometimes, it's more than my mind wants to handle.  Don't worry.  I can keep myself together.  It's just that it's a powerful tool; like any such tool, it can be treacherous when it is not respected."

She takes in deep, calming breaths.  "Where are we?"

Well that was certainly an unnerving thing to say. None of Axander's lessons at the Academy had covered that sort of possibility. Or rather, they did, but in the "that situation is the most horrifying kind of fatal" sense and then glossed over the details. Apparently they were wrong. Then again, they'd been wrong about a lot of things so far.

It took Axander a moment to gather his thoughts and glance up at the console's display.

"Ah...Right where we were, but in the Vortex. Seems your gambit paid off, as there sits a set of coordinates ready to plug in. You're alright now, then? What should I do if you have another spell like that one?"

"The first thing you should do is make sure nothing is trying to kill you; the second thing would be to concentrate on the task at hand; and if you have the attention to spare, I would be grateful if you kept me from biting through my tongue."  Tarys is quite matter-of-fact, but when she sees the look on Axander's face, she says, "Axander... I understand that you are an essentially kind and thoughtful person.  I appreciate that you would be concerned.  I would be horrified if you did something to save me that caused this mission to fail."

She gets to her feet.  "You mentioned coordinates."

There were indeed coordinates, though they weren't familiar to either Time Lord, they had no name attached, and didn't actually correspond with any known locations in the databank. Just some point in deep space in Mutter's Spiral, about two thousand years after their present time. Perhaps Tarys's trick with the Possible Knife had worked after all?

Heretofore unnoticed, there was a book lying in one of the roundels. If anyone cared to look, it was Harry the Poisonous Centipede by Lynne Reid Banks, which didn't seem immediately helpful.


OOC: Please make another TARDIS navigation roll, as described above, at Difficulty 15, to see how well you land (though it won't be adventure-disruptingly disastrous).
This message was last edited by the player at 15:17, Fri 17 July 2015.

That answer shifted Axander's worry from the urgent sort of confusion to a more subdued concern. Even so, he didn't protest.

"Sounds like you've had the discussion regarding the life of one weighed against the lives of everyone already. The people of this world have a fondness for that philosophical dilemma, and I can appreciate your practicality. Though if we could keep those funny turns to moments of no immediate danger, that would be ideal. Hardly dramatic, but drama rarely goes well for the beings inside it." Since Tarys was already recovered as far as Axander could tell, he returned to the console to read off the coordinates to her.

"Mutter's Spiral, some time in the relative future. Sounds like we're on the right path, if the Doctor's reputation is anything to be believed. Initiating Vortex navigation and rematerialization procedures." It was hard to tell whether the rigid declaration of what he was doing was rote from the Academy or simply too much Star Trek. One way or another, he turned dials, clicked switches, and eased up the helmic regulator to something resembling a time/space cruising speed.

During the operation, his eyes flicked to the roundel with the book in it. This wasn't the time to go grab it, but he decided to remember it was sitting there.

[11:23, Today: Axander rolled 20 using 2d6+12 with rolls of 2,6. Ing+Tech+TTC+Vort-Inept.

I believe that's a Good success. :D]

As Axander accelerated the helmic regulator, the TARDIS zoomed off on its trajectory through the Space–Time Vortex. But the journey was slow and ponderous regardless, and the capsule meandered and veritably dawdled through the Vortex. Even whey they finally approached the destination, it would orbit a few times before deciding on a place to land.

It was almost as if Elona was reluctant to go.

But at least it left the Gallifreyans with time to prepare and talk.


OOC: It is. Pity you needed a Fantastic to override Overprotective though. :p