Author's note:

This is just an introduction chapter, so at points it may get a little boring, but the story will pick up eventually, so just bare with me for a while. Needless to say, I don't own any of the fandoms I cross reference, but hands off Noah, he's mine. In theory, you could get by without reading this chapter, but it really would help understanding later on in the story. Please review; this is my first official fanficiton. There won't be much of an organized plot, more like episodial, but I do have plans.

Introduction: some background

Noah Grey was a rather unique person. As I'm sure you now know, there are many people out there with unique "abilities." After all, what news organization hasn't shown footage of Claire Bennett's death-jump from the Ferris wheel (minus the death part)? But Noah was special even among the specials. His father was a psycho (as well as psych-ic) serial killer, who ironically named him after the man who spent years hunting him down, Noah Bennett. Even more coincidentally, the father of Clair Bennett had a former colleague who happened to be Noah's mother, a sadistic psychopath with the power to sling lightning bolts. Noah is officially a 3rd generation hero; his father and grandfather both had the ability to understand exactly how something works by seeing it. But Noah is different, and that's how he survived. Had his father known of his existence and what he was capable of, surely he would want a peek (and perhaps a taste) of his brain, but as it happens, neither parent knew about Noah Grey.

Anyway, Noah's abilities. His power was the ability to warp the fabric of reality. More specifically, he could control both matter and energy. He could manipulate particles down to the subatomic level, and comprehend every little change in every single atom he's affecting, allowing for precision balance, letting him change himself and anything around him into anything, phase right through solid objects, and even teleport. As for energy, this is where Noah gets really powerful. His only possible weakness or obstacle could be a lack of energy, and even then there's always some form he could absorb. Even the frozen tundra of the Arctic Circle has some particle vibrations he can absorb to make things even colder. He can't be burned, electrocuted, radiated, or even attacked with any kind of motion. All kinds of energy would only charge his batteries. Of course, he can also exert this energy in any form he chooses. As long as he has enough energy on hand, he can make heat, light, fire, electricity, sound, concussive sonic blasts, intensified gravity, radiation, and even use it in the form of psychic energy.

Psychic energy, you see, comes in two forms, telekinesis and telepathy. Telekinesis is the ability to move objects and affect matter around you without touching them, using your mind. As I said before, he could only do what he would have enough energy to do with his bare hands anyway (not being able to create new energy). However, telekinesis is much more efficient than muscles; for one thing it drains chemical energy from spread out, less intense over the entire body, instead of quickly depleting the energy of a single cluster of cells. And Telekinesis can be shaped any way the thinker chooses. It helps if you think about an apple. Imagine how much energy it would take to split an apple down the middle in a perfect straight line with only your bare hands. Now imagine you had a knife that was sharp enough to split hairs. The knife makes things easier right? Not because it adds its own energy, but because you can afford to spend less energy, re-directed to be more effective. It is noteworthy that telekinesis happened to be one of Sylar's (Noah's father) favorite abilities.

The other form of psychic energy, telepathy. This is basically the exertion of psychic energy to interact with the mind of another, and certain rules apply. For example, to enter someone's mind they may choose, if they are a well-trained psychic, to exert some of their own psychic energy to block your thoughts. However, their defenses can be overcome in two ways: One, simply smash them down by exerting more energy than the other is willing or able to fight against, and two, find clever tricky ways to get around, or get them to lower their defenses. Once a good psychic is in someone's mind, all kinds of things can be done; memory changes, erasing, locking, unlocking, blocking, planting. If you mess with someone's memory in the right way, you can change their entire way of thinking, their entire life. And memories are only the beginning. A good telepath can make people perceive any kind of Illusion they want to make up, they can even afford to be vague because of the fact that in illusions, like in dreams and sometimes real life, the brain will fill in whatever it expects to perceive. You can plant ideas in their heads that will grow and hold on to them like a parasite, make people think they thought of them on their own, and because of things like the placebo effect, mass trauma, and autosuggestion, you can control their bodies if you know how the mind works. And after about three hundred years of being a psychic, Noah knows exactly how the mind works, better than any psychologist out there. Of course, you can even get into other parts of their brain, and control their thoughts and bodies directly, like puppets. There's so much one can do if they are a good psychic, and good psychics really are rare, but Noah can defeat probably even the best telepath because of his massive experience in the psychic field. Don't get me wrong though; there are a few physics out there. Most humans have a small level of psychic ability, but they call it "intuition" or "gut instinct" and it's rarely accurate. But there are some, very rarely, that are just born with natural talent to read people, or bend spoons if they're lucky. Most psychics are advanced meditators, who spend years sharpening the skills of their mind.

Noah first discovered his powers when he was five years old. He got a cut, and he wanted more than anything for it to just push itself back together again like Play-Doh, and it did. From then on he realized he was special, and quickly found out that others secretly were too (mind reader!). By the time he was thirteen he had gained an unparalleled understanding of the workings of the universe by understanding his abilities, and that's when his whole life changed forever.

You see, at the edge of the universe itself a great, powerful, and ancient race was fighting in a war for the sake of all creation. The Time Lords fought against the Daleks to prevent them from exterminating every form of life in existence, past, present, and future. Anything from an advanced species consisting of floating orbs of psychic energy that constituted a consciousness, to the amoeba on the bottom of your shoe. The Time Lords summoned Noah into the Time War because he was so powerful, apparently not just human. According to them, every once in a few billion eons, someone with the power to warp the fabric of reality cropped up in some random species, on some random world, and when this happened they were called Space Lords, the yin to Time Lord-yang. The Time Lords had originally hoped to use Noah as a powerful weapon against the Daleks, but they fought back by enslaving a race of energy-vampires known as axons. Soon the water-beasts came into play, and the Could-have-been king with his army of Mean-wiles and Neverweres. The Skaro depredations, the hoard of travesties, the cult of Skaro, the paradox reapers. The war got so violent, the Time Lords created the time-lock to prevent it from devastating the rest of creation, and then Noah's only way out was to survive the war. During the many battles, he started to show a proclivity toward psychic illusions as his weapon of choice, and over time this earned him the epithet of "Nightmare Child." During the Battle of the Gates of Elysium, he actually intensified gravity around him so much, he became a black hole that swallowed a Dalek armada whole (in later years, the survivors recounted the ships as "falling into the massive jaws of the Nightmare Child). For years after that, he absorbed entire planets of energy and in the end, released it all in fire, becoming a massive star. One Time Lord took this opportunity to end the war forever, and made the ultimate sacrifice, sending both worlds, Gallifrey and Skaro alike, to be destroyed in the star, killing of his own race, but saving the rest of the universe from the endless fury of the Daleks. In the end, Noah and the Doctor were the only survivors, spare a TARDIS that the Doctor "borrowed" and another he saved from his home world. He gave the second time-machine spaceship to Noah, him being the only one left in the universe that knew how to fly one, with the hope that he would keep it alive. A TARDIS isn't just a ship, you see, it's a living thing, a living thing that needs to travel. A Time Lord and a TARDIS form something of a symbiotic relationship, like a clown fish and an anemone; neither can live without the other.

At the age of three-hundred and ten, Noah looked like a 16-year old boy, still sticking to the "child" in "nightmare child" he had icy blue eyes, short neat blond hair, a soft kind face, and always wore a long black coat that was wide and open near the bottom and had a high-collar, almost as if you could attach a hood somewhere. He was back on earth when he met his best friend, Nico DiAngelo, son of Hades. A modern-day demigod with power over spirits, ghosts, souls, darkness, earth, and wealth. Nico was still young when Noah offered to take him traveling, and together they used the TARDIS to travel across time and space, seeing the sights, helping people, relaxing on vacation, defeating horrible monsters, sucking the marrow out of life, saving civilizations, and doing an extraordinary amount of running (a bit of teleporting on Noah's part as well).

Somewhere in the thirty-first century, they met a young woman by the name of River Tam. She was some anomaly, to call her a prodigy would be an insult. She was more than brilliant, more than gifted, more than talented; according to her brother, there was nothing that came more naturally to her than breathing did to anyone else. But every rose has its thorn. Her brilliant mind and psychic proclivity got her noticed by the government, a secret organization turning geniuses into weapons; their star pupil: River Tam. What they didn't expect was her brother to burn up his family fortune getting her out. Ever since then they had been on the run from those who wanted her back. But the thing was, they were "playing with her brain," trying to change her; in the end they broke her sanity. She's still a genius, just one that's a little bit crazy. "Borderline schizophrenia" as one of her so-called "doctors" once put it. Nico sometimes said it was like she stared into the crystal skull a bit too long, and couldn't help but think that she and Luna Lovegood would have been best friends if they had ever met. Of course, she and Noah got along brilliantly when they first met, and she was just the kind of person Noah loved to be around; brilliant, unique, free spirited, a little odd. So he asked her to come along with him and Nico. Traveling in the TARDIS, through time and space, all over the universe, being a mystery one day and a myth the next, River would have been untraceable; safe from what she called the "two by two hands o' blue." so she agreed to travel with them, which brings us to the end of the universe

Near the end of time, a surviving Dalek fleet was planning to use a void ship to conitnue their existence past the end of all things, and become the only life form in, well, whatever was left after the universe. Noah and his friends, of course, foiled the Dalek's plans and were now racing back to the TARDIS to get away.

Bzzzzzzzzzzt! A thin beam of some kind of white energy struck Nico on the back, his skeleton was visible for a moment as his body glowed and he screamed, but then fell on his face, limp.

"THE ABOMANATION HAS BEEN EXTERMINATED!" declared his dalek assailant, which looked a lot like a bumpy salt shaker that had a plunger for one arm, a stretched out thin cake beater for another, and an eyestalk with blue light.

"Keep going! Open the door!" shouted Noah to River, at this he teleported, and appeared a few feet above Nico's body, as he whipped around in midair to face the Dalek, and at the same time made a throwing-motion with his arm as a brilliant blue streak of electricity connected between him and the Dalek. His cloak blew outward slightly before calming down as he landed on his feet, Nico's body right in front of him, and the Dalek exploded, revealing the charred remains of the slimy squid-oid inside the metal shell. Noah didn't waste a moment in picking up Nico's body and teleporting them both to the TARDIS, where River jammed the house key into the blue police phone box (Noah's TARDIS is a clone of the Doctor's, which got it's camouflage circuit stuck in 1950) , turned, and opened the door as the three of them entered. She quickly closed the door and Noah set Nico's dead body down on the small chair near the engine at the center of the bigger-on-the-inside room. He quickly started to operate all kinds of levers, knobs, buttons and almost every control one could imagine on the 360 dash board that circled the great green pillar-shaped engine in the center of the room.

"Did he die?" asked River when she saw Nico's body.

"yup." said Noah nonchalantly, as he continued frantically starting the TARDIS

"EMERGENCY! DALEK DESTRUCTION IMMINENT!" screamed a Dalek, with its raspy, rattly, mechanical voice. The Dalek emperor responded in a more fluent, but equally mechanical tone

"LOCK ON TO THE TARDIS BASECODE NUMERALS! FUSE THE TEMPORAL COORDINATE MATRIX! IF THE DALEKS ARE TO BE DESTROYED, SO MUST BE THE SAME FATE TO BEFALL THE NIGHTMARE CHILD!"

"I OBEY! CALCULATING TARDIS BASECODE NUMERALS!"

Nico suddenly sat bolt upright, opening his eyes wide and taking a huge gasp of air, finding himself in the TARDIS engine room.

"What happened!" he asked.

"You died," explained Noah, still busy and in a rush over flying the TARDIS. "No, NO NO NO NO!" he shouted.

"What's wrong!" asked Nico.

"It's the Daleks! They're hacking into the TARDIS!" Noah shouted, "and you could have just told us you had an immunity to death!" he added.

"Well, I wasn't even sure of it myself! My sister was able to die, wasn't she? And how can they be hacking us? I thought you said the assembled armies of Genghis Khan couldn't get through those doors!"

"Nico, the Dalek is a genius, and a single one could take out the entire armies of Genghis Khan without breaking a sweat, besides they're experts on TARDIS fighting from the Time War! And your sister didn't know about her powers. If she had known she was a Hades-child, she probably would have lived." a swelling and receding wooosh, wooooooosh noise sounded as the TARDIS engine started to pick up and Noah typed frantically on the keyboard attached to the dashboard while looking up at the blue screen, which was displaying all kinds of odd symbols, lines, and circles, apparently reading them. But even Nico could tell something was wrong as huge showers of yellow sparks shot from the translucent green engine.

"NO! They've permanently fused the temporal coordinates! We can only travel between the end of the universe and the last place and time we were!" shouted Noah

"Well, can't you do something!"

"I!...well if I could!... if I only had!...AARRGHH!" Noah shouted in despair as he realized there was nothing he could do.

"Ahem,..." River cleared her throat. The two boys looked to her and saw her holding up a gray metal panel with slightly curved edges and convoluted circuitry on the side facing her.

"OH! RIVER! You're a genius!" shouted Noah as he took the large panel and started to plug it into the TARDIS.

"What? The space surfboard thingy? What are we gonna do with that!"

"I can use the tribophysical waveform macro-kinetic extrapolator to override the TARDIS mainframe controls! Give us a little boost!" Noah declared excitedly. At this he continued pressing buttons, turning knobs, levers, valves, steering wheel, toggle switches, hit the engine with a large rubber mallet twice, incorporated multiple appendages to maintain various controls at once and finally, the whirring of the engine stopped, the entire room jolted signifying that they had landed at their next destination. He finally took a step back and a sigh of relief. Flying the TARDIS always seemed to be an insane circus act for him. Nico looked to the closed doors on one side of the room, knowing outside lay their next adventure.

"You brought us here?" said River, looking at the Time Lord writing on the screen.

"How can you have possibly read that?" asked Noah. "That's one of the most complex and advanced languages in the universe, and you just learned it in-"

"Seven point eight four two seconds." finished River. She was good.

"So, where are we?" asked Nico excitedly. Noah didn't seem to share his excitement.

"End of the line," he stated plainly. This piqued Nico's interest, wondering what that could mean. "No place like it," he added. Nico turned around and opened the phone-box wooden doors of the spaceship and stepped out and looked around, his smile fading when he realized where they were.

"Home?" he asked.