Okay, so a little behind schedule but here we are with another Doctor Who session. Not sure what really needs to be added, commentary-wise.
The gas company maintenance worker follows the gas lines through the Cardiff sewers, ignoring the strange sights and smells -- as one quickly learns to do when working in the Cardiff tunnels -- until he comes to the alcove where he can smell the gas. It's easy enough to spot the rupture in the gas line. A minor one, but measurable and relatively easy to repair. He pulls out his phone and calls the office, only to hit the voice mail.
"Hey guys, this is Gareth Coleman. I've found the gas leak, and it's a small one, but still a miracle nothing's gone off yet. Should be a simple fix. I'll be down here a half-hour or so, but when you get this, make sure everything's logged, just in case."
He hangs up and produces a wrench from his bag of tools.
"Okay, now where's that shutoff valve..." He stumbles as he steps on something slimy and moving. "Wait, what's that? Did I step in something?"
The thing he stepped on, now recognizable as a tendril, wraps around his ankle with a wet squelch noise.
"What's that squish--" he starts, trailing off into a pained scream as the tendril sucks the life out of him.
Cue opening theme.
Meanwhile, up on the surface, the quartet of Time Lords downloads the data they have into Galaxion's sonic screwdriver so they can track the creature they've identified as one of the Degradations they learned about on Skaro. They're trying to figure out exactly what they can do to disable it for a recapture, though. Eska's pretty sure he can't just shoot it, since these things are supposedly unkillable. Galaxion is pretty confident he can psychically assault it. The Magpie and the Dreamcatcher are both just utterly terrified, and instead focus on figuring out how to operate the containment unit they found. Which, they discover isn't too hard -- after all, this is something meant to be handed to a soldier on the front lines, not a specialized technician. In terms of defining a strategy, the Magpie argues that when the time comes, he will be best deployed behind everyone else.
They make sure they've got what equipment their equipment ready (including putting a shoulder strap on the containment unit) and do a Power Walk (warning: TVTropes link) out of the TARDIS. Galaxion's screwdriver can only get a solid fix on the Degradation well enough for vague directions, but it's enough to take them through the alleys of Cardiff until they can find an intersection of a couple of alleys where a crater marks where the containment unit landed. There's a visible slime trail leading to a nearby manhole cover. The Dreamcatcher looks over the area and recognizes where the containment unit bounced off a few buildings on its way down, and the Magpie notices that the crater is too large for the containment unit to have caused on its own -- but there's no other gadgetry extant. The group files that away and the Magpie takes a sample of the slime trail to try and create a compound that should at least slow it down.[0]
So, into the sewers! (after Galaxion makes a quick trip to a nearby pharmacy to buy some gloves and 'medical booties' for the Magpie to cut down on his bellyaching about the mess)
The group stalks through the sewers, following traces of the Degradation with the help of Galaxion's sonic screwdriver. The Dreamcatcher also has a pretty solid base of survival skills, and puts that to use following physical tracks -- and also finding signs of other nonhuman life in the sewers. So they're making their way through, and at one point find a side-room with light under the door and apparently music coming through it. A local? Galaxion can sense a human-like mind (but definitely not human, and almost certainly high on cocaine) on the other side of the door.
The Magpie knocks and the door opens a bit to reveal a fish-like humanoid in a chamber he's taken over. There's a bit of back and forth, wherein he tells them that there's something new and scary in the sewers. He also tells them about how there's a human gas company worker wandering around somewhere. They give him five pounds (and a tip to maybe try and find some better accommodations), and he tells them in which direction the guy went and warns them to 'watch out for the Weevils' (and they have no idea what that means).
The gas company worker seems to have gone in the same direction as the creature, and they follow the trail until they found an alcove with a human corpse and a small pocket of natural gas created by a rupture in the gas line.. The body is dessicated, sort of, just... drained. The Magpie gives it a once-over and determines that something grabbed onto the guy's leg and sucked the life out of him.
"It was hungry," the body says as it sits up, making them all jump. The creature apparently manipulating the body says that the characters 'smell like the Vortex' and assumes they're Time War refugees like itself. It explains that the Time War between the Time Lords and the Daleks destroyed many worlds, including the creature's own, and destroyed their bodies as well. It is one of the Gelth, separated from its people and residing where it can. (In this case, it was hanging out in the gas pocket from the line rupture until a creature killed the gas company worker and it jumped into his body.) It also explains, if I recall correctly (this could be a failure in my recorded notes) that the Time Lords and Daleks wiped each other out. It gives a vague description of the creature as this tentacled beastie.
They offer to help it find a place where it can go. Galaxion in particular is interested in trying to find a planet where they can take it, and maybe even see if they can build it a new body. He can't imagine it being particularly pleasant to be a disembodied consciousness on Earth.
But this gets into a discussion about the Time War itself. Is what the Valeyard told them true? Galaxion believes it, especially since he got a glimpse of it in the Valeyard's head. Eska is less convinced, and is sure there has to be something else going on. By all accounts, if such a war did happen, the characters here somehow missed it. But if it's a war through all of time, then how can there really be an 'after'?[1]
The Dreamcatcher gets them back on the subject of dealing with the monster. They tell the Gelth that they'll be back to help it later. And they get back on the trail, following tracks and traces to an intersection with a pair of humanoid creatures, correctly assumed to be the Weevils referred to by the fish-man earlier. And something interesting comes up... there's the slime trail left behind by the Degradation going one way from the intersection. But there are Weevil tracks going the other way, and those tracks also lead in the direction of something giving off energy traces like it's been through the Vortex. The other device that came down with the containment unit, perhaps? They file that away for later and focus on the monster that could eat the planet if left unchecked.
They follow the slime trail to a chamber that seems to be a basement full of crates and such. Galaxion tries reaching out to it with his mind to confirm that it's in there. His mind 'brushes' against its, and it notices him... and he gets a glimpse into its head. He gets a glimpse of the raw horrors of the Time War, filtered through the most intense hatred ever conceived by a mind in the universe, as the metaphorical abyss gazes back into him. He resists the sanity-shattering intrusion at the cost of a psychic nosebleed and a brief seizure. He comes out of the seizure certain this thing needs to die some day.
And now it's aware of them, and moving around. Galaxion tries to provoke it out, and they see the shape of it moving around in the basement. They're outside the doorway, with Eska holding the containment unit in front of the others, and it slimes its way over to them. The creature is roughly in the shape of a Dalek mutant, but the main body is easily the size of a large human, and its tentacles move and shift like it's made out of some liquid rather than a consistent mass. It reaches out and grabs the doorframe to pull itself closer, and they see a bulge run down the length of each of its tendrils. The bulges open up, revealing themselves to be eyes, and the Degradation is full of them.
It pulls itself free of the room and lunges at them. The Magpie uses his compound to try and slow it down, spraying it with gas. It quivers and shakes, and briefly changes color and slows. Eska activates the device to try and suck it in[2]. He barely catches it in the containment beam, and as it gets sucked in it lashes out at him with a tendril that forms an almost-human hand on the end. But between Eska's personal force field and the Magpie's gas slowing it down, he remains safe as the creature is sucked into the machine.
So now they have it, and what to do with it? Killing it is probably not an option, so they talk about places where they can stash it and keep it out of the way to stop anyone else from getting at it. While they're talking in circles around a plan, the Dreamcatcher tries to use her memory-camera to retrieve any of the thing's memories, but the Degradation blue-screens the gadget. In the end, they come up with the plan to hang onto the containment unit until they can talk to the Doctor.
They go back to follow that alternate route to see what the Weevils dragged off. The Dreamcatcher carries the containment unit to free up everyone else's hands, rather than take it back to the TARDIS and risk having something happen if they leave it alone there. They follow the Weevil tracks into a chamber where a bunch of them are sleeping around a pedestal of sorts made out of boxes and junk upon which sets something that looks not unlike a huge cylinder from a revolver pistol, with six empty chambers... each the size of the containment unit they have.
The Magpie throws together a simple sleeping gas to keep them unconscious while they go to retrieve the thing. (The Dreamcatcher half-jokes that they could always just wake up a couple and have Galaxion mind-control the into carrying it for them, provoking nervous laughter and awkward glances from everyone else.) So they retrieve the unit, which is lighter than it looks but still really awkward for one person to carry.
They go through its systems and Eska determines that this is another layer of security for the containment units, meant to hold six securely at once. He finds its error logs and determines that while it's about as durable as a typical TARDIS, it simply wasn't meant to be exposed to the raw Vortex and slammed around. So as a result, five of the six containment units within it have been scattered across time and space with the sixth one crash-landing in Cardiff.
They haul everything back to the TARDIS where Eska creates a special room to put the Degradation containment equipment, labeled the 'Anathecarcere Vault.' He then gets back to work fixing the TARDIS computers -- but they'll still need to find special parts to repair the dynamorphic generators. But that's a problem for another day. In the meantime, they put together a gas container thing into which the Gelth can comfortably reside while they figure out a more permanent solution, basically sort of a gas-filled aquarium.
But once the computers are repaired and the Gelth is squared away, they decide to take off and track down the Doctor and get some answers. So they look up the coordinates for the time and place they told the Doctor they'd meet him if things went wrong.
Earth, Germany, Berlin. November 9th, 1989 CE. The day the Berlin Wall fell.
Cue outro.
[0] -- I can't recall if I've established it clearly, but just in case, here's a refresher -- the Magpie has a device that functions like a portable chemistry lab, which looks kind of like a fancy Earth cigarette holder. It's a quirk of the system that all Time Lords are assumed to start with a Gadget of some sort, and that's his. (The Dreamcatcher's is her memory copying/alteration device, Eska has a rifle with a built-in forcefield generator, and Galaxion has a good old-fashioned sonic screwdriver, as seen in the first of these posts.)
[1] -- The real issue is that people assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint -- it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.
[2] -- As an aside, we've been comparing the containment unit to something like a ghost trap from Ghostbusters, though it looks a little more like the bastard love child of an Airzooka and the Medi-gun from Team Fortress 2.
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