(Again, this is a pretty heavy canon-intersecting plot, so expect lots of linking to the fan-wiki and spoilers for certain 'classic series' story arcs)
"Everything is proceeding as you predicted. The death of the Master, the retrieval of his ashes."
"As much as it pains me to be right, this will be a sign to the others that I speak the truth. What I have already seen is coming to pass. Which means we must prepare."
"I thought you said recruiting the Master could have prevented his death, diverted the future."
"I said it might, commander. I said it might. But it was too much to expect the cheetah to change its spots."
"Excuse me?"
"Never mind. But we need to begin moving. The Doctor is about to undergo a difficult regeneration and that gives us a window. The Master's data from Skaro approaches, and I need you to bring it to me. We'll need that if we are to survive the Time War."[0]
Cue theme song. [1]
We begin with the characters in the console room, returning to Gallifrey. The Magpie, worried about something happening, has made sure a copy of the information they found about the Master's experiment is rigged to be transmitted to the Doctor if something happens to them if he doesn't specifically stop it. Just as a fail-safe, because he's worried that the High Council will bury the information where nobody will see it until it's too late. But once that's done, they approach Gallifrey and go through the usual security checks, 'air traffic controller' type stuff, head for a particular landing bay, and all that. Because of the sensitive information they carry, somebody will be there to escort the quartet on their way to get the information to where it needs to go.
So they land, their escort is waiting outside, but when the Magpie goes to leave the TARDIS doors refuse to open and the shrieks of the damned echo out of the corridors leading out of the console room. The group wonders if their strange, haunted TARDIS knows something they don't, or if it's just being strange and haunted. They recognize that this should be taken as a bad omen, but what are they going to do? Besides, they have the fail-safe set up. So with a sharp tug on the doors they open normally and meet their escort, Commander Maxil of the Chancellery Guard.
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| This asshole |
Maxil explains that he is to take them to the Keeper of the Matrix to have their information uploaded into the Matrix, where it is to be studied and made available to the right Time Lords to counter whatever plans the Master and the Daleks had. He leads them through several corridors to an office where the Keeper takes the portable drive they brought with them and plugs it into the computers. As it runs through a series of security checks, anti-virus protocols, and so forth, he makes casual small talk with them. Mostly about the upcoming, seemingly-inevitable war with the Daleks. You know, the sorts of stuff Time Lords chat about these days. The group, to put it mildly, has gotten a weird vibe off of him.
It doesn't help that as they talk, he makes a comment about the Master tinkering with Dalek DNA and trying to build himself a new body, even though he hasn't actually seen the data the group brought him. He tries to play it off like it's stuff that's easy enough to predict the Master would do in that situation, but it's still a little shady. It's pretty clear he knows more than he should realistically know. Galaxion's manage to refine the strange vibe he got off him, and tries reading the Keeper's mind to confirm his suspicions...
At which point the Keeper looks right at him and calls him out on it as Galaxion sees the truth: This is not the Keeper of the Matrix, but the Valeyard; a being created during one of the Doctor's future regenerations, where he will try to purge himself of his darkest traits by shunting them off into a separate entity of pure evil. Said entity would later come back and help the High Council of the time cover up their crimes by foisting it all off onto the Doctor and get rid of him, and in return the Valeyard would receive the rest of the Doctor's lives.
 |
| And now this asshole |
And the Valeyard spells it out for them at this point. There is a war coming, a massive war between the Daleks and the Time Lords. And he's making plans to make sure he survives it, because nobody really wins that war. He's bringing certain other Time Lords with him, if they're willing to follow his leadership. Naturally, the group asks about the Doctor's involvement, and he tells them that the Doctor will not save Gallifrey. He can't lead the Time Lords to victory over the Daleks. That he will hide, and then eventually he will fight, and in the end he will save nothing.[2]
The group is shocked and horrified by this revelation, having trouble believing this is true. The Valeyard offers to let them join him, that he has agents all over the Citadel, and they could be part of that secret society. Galaxion, faking it, says he's in for this if it means his survival. The Magpie, however, just can't muster such a thing and refuses to play a part in it -- especially once it comes up that the Valeyard is planning to find a way to perfect the Master's Time Lord-Dalek hybrid bodies to become functionally immortal. So the Valeyard looks at the others, particularly Eska (who has a blaster rifle strapped to his back), and tells them to kill the Magpie.
Eska proceeds to unsling the rifle from his back like he's going to follow the order, and unload it into the Valeyard.[3] While he's pretty sure he's disrupted the Valeyard's regeneration process such that he's not going to come back, Galaxion argues that they don't know how thoroughly the Valeyard has infiltrated the Citadel and they don't know who they can trust. The only option the group can think of to get back to their TARDIS and try to contact Romana directly on their terms.
They go out into the hallway, where Maxil tries to confront them for all of a few seconds before Galaxion peels his mind like an orange and all but enslaves him. He makes Maxil escort them safely back to the TARDIS -- which he does -- and the group gives him a copy of their data on the Master's experiment and Galaxion gives him instructions to directly contact Romana, confess everything, and make sure she has the information.[4] That said, the others are more than a little creeped out by Galaxion's casual mental domination of another Time Lord, not just in how easy he did it but in how he seemed to have no compunctions about doing so.
Anyhow, alarms are going off in the distance, and all agree to take their TARDIS' opinion a little more seriously in the future, and as if listening to them the doors open. They go in and try to contact Romana directly from the console, but only the Valeyard's face appears on the screen. He points out that he's become the Keeper of the Matrix, and he has contingencies that don't require having a body. He tells them he's going to lock them away until he has some use for them, and the TARDIS shuts down. Everything goes dark. Nothing works. The Magpie suggests a means by which they could probably get the power working again, and as Eska goes off to try and implement the plan, the TARDIS suddenly switches back on and they have a very rough crash-landing. Stuff's smoking and sparking, and it's obvious the TARDIS is damaged.
They go over the instruments and figure out that something time-locked their TARDIS, and then something broke the time-lock and they were ejected, like being flung off a roller coaster at which point they were deposited on the nearest planet. Galaxion, whose specialty is more about expanding his mind than technological know-how, wanders off to take a swim in the TARDIS' pool while the techies figure it out. So while he's out, Galaxion and Eska get the scanners up and running to figure out when and where they are.
They're on Earth. Specifically Roald Dahl Plass, Cardiff, Wales; even more specifically, they're next to a massive crater where something exploded a while back and repairs are still ongoing. December 26, 2009 CE, early afternoon. They try plotting a trip back to Gallifrey, but the systems are telling them that it's not there. They can't go back. They take another look at the scans, hoping it's just damage to the TARDIS and with some repairs they could make it back. While the Dreamcatcher goes to get Galaxion from the pool, they do an assessment and determine that there's some problems with the computer and the dynamorphic generators (which affect the TARDIS' ability to refuel), and that Gallifrey is almost certainly actually missing. Given that they don't know how long they were sealed up in the Time Lock, it's possible that they're seeing the future the Valeyard 'predicted' and that Gallifrey is gone. Or maybe hidden.
They try to contact the Doctor, with no success, and Galaxion jokes that he could use his mental powers to try and take over the planet because that would certainly bring the Doctor running. The others awkwardly chuckle at the joke, looking uneasily at each other because they're not sure just how much he's joking.[5]
But regardless of who they can get in touch with, the TARDIS clearly needs repairs. Eska can do most of the work in a couple of days, but fixing the dynamorphic generators will require parts that he doesn't have and almost certainly can't acquire on Earth. They rack their brains for ideas on where, and the Magpie knows of a world called Calibris that's a major transportation hub where they can almost certainly find what they need. They file that away, start of a distress signal, and decide to just hang out on Earth for a while as Eska works on the TARDIS.
They dress up Galaxion in some Earth fashions in the wardrobe, the Magpie specifically trying to steer him towards 'fratboy douche' in overall appearance. They also suggest a more Earth-like name to use for him, and after trying out a few they settle on 'Bret,' just to match the outfit. They go outside (discovering their TARDIS has taken the form of an electrician's van) where they immediately see a newspaper headline about some incident the prior day where the world suffered massive hallucinations blackouts and while nobody clearly remembers it there are instruments that suggest a planet manifested right next to Earth. The planet image shown in the paper is obviously Gallifrey, but the official word from scientists is that it was a cloud of gas or something that came too close to Earth, hence the blackouts.
Galaxion, to find out more about what happened, decides to 'psychic some pleb' and reaches into the mind of someone on the street to comb through their memories. He can't confirm much more than that their mind was temporarily overridden by another entity (though he did recognize a Gallifreyan presence at work). They swipe a newspaper for later and Galaxion spends some time panhandling for money without telepathically violating the populace, mostly to prove that he could. A bit of time and a hundred pounds later, the group buys some local cuisine, including bringing a munchy box back to Eska who's still hard at work.[6] Of course, they go back in and find Eska blasting heavy metal through the TARDIS speakers (which is weird with the church acoustics) as he works.
This leads into a conversation about how they're going to spend their newly-found free time in Cardiff. There's some talk of clubbing or just hitting a local pub, and the Magpie is a little disgusted that Galaxion's basically looking to get some action in the local clubs. Again, not using his abilities or anything, but the Magpie still considers Time Lords cavorting with 21st century humans like that to be like looking for a sexual partner in a petting zoo. Not that humans are dumb, as such, but Time Lords have certain advantages that potentially make them good at manipulating people. Galaxion, however, is of the opinion that they're still sentient beings and physically compatible (which leads into worries that he might knock up one of the locals), and as long as their free will isn't subverted at any point it should be fine.
They agree to disagree and split up. Galaxion hits up the local clubs while the Magpie and the Dreamcatcher go to try the local beer and try to drink some humans under the table. After a couple of hours, a random homeless guy with a plastic garbage bag approaches the Dreamcatcher, offering to sell her something he found a few hours ago. He explains he'd normally try to sell the junk he finds to Torchwood, but he hasn't been able to find them since a gas main explosion took out the plass a few months back so he's been bugging random strangers. The Magpie comes back from the bathroom, joins the conversation, and they see what the guy has. It's a piece of Time Lord technology about the size and shape of an Airzooka. They buy it off the guy and the Magpie recognizes it as some sort of containment and capture device.
They haul it back to the TARDIS and run some scans over it. It's a containment device for a creature, designed for a very particular biology. He looks at the data and recognizes the biology, and lets out a 'little girl scream.' He explains to the Dreamcatcher, and shortly afterwards to Galaxion once he's returned (having, as the Magpie put it, "ruined a beautiful creature" by sleeping with one or more humans)... The device was used to contain one of the 'degradations' they learned about on Skaro. It was designed to contain a particular one and that about the time the group arrived in Cardiff, it popped open and the creature escaped! After some grumbling from the Magpie about spending more time in the sewers and quietly taking off his scarf, he goes over the data to get a better idea of the capabilities of the creature and discovers they can probably track it.
But it was getting to the point where we had to wrap it up, but that just means that the next session will begin with a monster hunt!
[0] -- Sadly, while I'd planned to do a cold open for my group, actually sitting down and writing it slipped my mind until it was too late. So adding it to the write-up will have to do.
[1] -- I've decided to use this as the 'generic' theme music for when the game's plot doesn't intersect with a particular Doctor. It's the opening theme to "The Light at the End," a Big Finish audio story featuring Doctors 4 through 8, with original voice actors reprising their roles, and some recast cameos of Doctors 1, 2, and 3.
[2] -- Of course, assuming the current series ever revisits the Valeyard (after all, they've foreshadowed his existence somewhat), the Valeyard will almost certainly be aware of the events of the 50th Anniversary special, where it's revealed that the Doctor didn't destroy Gallifrey after all, but we have to assume he's got a plan to just get out of the Time War without having to deal with Gallifrey being misplaced and all that, and is just BSing the group.
[3] -- I'm not going to insult anyone's intelligence with some false tension over whether the group will kill one of their own. At least not at this point.
[4] -- There was some concern about whether he could make Maxil act against his own interests like that, but given that Maxil is normally very by-the-book, getting him to betray a shady conspiracy he's been seduced into isn't that difficult. Also, Galaxion got an absurd roll in any case.
[5] -- According to Andy, Galaxion was 80% joking.
[6] -- Just for the record, I know munchy boxes are mostly a Scotland thing. But I just wanted to have that conversation with my group over what a munchy box is (because it provokes some hilarious looks on faces) and so I handwaved it.
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