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The Murder and the Thief
The universe and time.
Every different decision shapes a different outcome for all. Parallel universes and the alternate timelines are the possibilities that come out from a different set of circumstances. Alternate timelines have been likened to a river, with each new decision leading off into a different fork and then branching out into a new reality. Sometimes these changes are natural, sometimes they are caused by chance or by design. The Time Lords of Gallifrey, knowing that the creation of an alternative timeline drastically shortens the life expectancy of a universe, frown on these changes. But they can happen. This 'river' of possibility always flows, but it can be interrupted, diverted, and shaped.
Sometimes these events are like dropping a brick or a stone into the river, where it creates ripples that reverberate everywhere and everywhen. Whenever something ripples across the river's surface, anything can and will drastically change. This time...the events and the changes were caused by a Time Lord who was never meant originally be involved with a single woman...but did. It was not a fixed point.
The balls held by the Lungbarrow family were usually lavish occasions while the creme de la creme of Time Lord society attended. Inside the dimensionally transcendental ballroom, dressed in their robes the Time Lords milled around with the Time Ladies and exchanged pleasantries, but the ball was like many other Time Lord affairs. It was purely political. Many a family feud had been started at a ball, and many had been resolved in much the same way, but the balls on Gallifrey were traditionally used by the Time Lords as a means of gathering intelligence on rivals or friends.
More often than not the balls were just a way for the Time Lords to make contacts and open connections which would help them later in life.
If there was one thing the heiress of the House of Lungbarrow was thankful for it was the fact she didn't need to wear the traditional Time Lord ceremonial garb, but that didn't mean she wasn't wearing robes.
Theta had never liked the head collars and the skullcaps - both were symbolic, of course. It seemed everything on Gallifrey was symbolic in some fashion - the ceremonial garb with the long robes, the head collar and the skull cap depicted the original spacesuits the original Lords of Time had worn when they'd created the Time Vortex and the Eye of Harmony.
But the Time Lords didn't need to wear the same garb at every event, and Theta was thankful that also covered the balls her family usually threw, and she cursed her father, not for the first time, for making her attend the ball.
Dressed in the long red robes that denoted the Prydonian chapter, the robes were much lighter and less heavy than the ones Theta had worn over the 364 years of her life so far, but the robes didn't exactly show the young Time Lady's athletic figure, the skull cap hid her long dark brown hair but didn't hide her pretty face with the hazel eyes. Still in the prime of her first incarnation, Theta mingled with the rest of the crowd, doing her duty as the heiress of the Lungbarrow family even if she didn't want to be there.
She also used the opportunity to avoid her parents.
Theta was not stupid; balls like this one was a good place to set down the foundations of a marriage contract. But it was too bad Theta didn't want to get married any time soon. She hadn't spent 100 years of her life as part of a TARDIS crew to spend the rest of her lifetimes as a porcelain doll, meant to be put on display but never touched. She hadn't been spending her days since then working in Temporal Control and learning what it meant to be a Time Lady.
She wanted to leave Gallifrey.
She wanted to become a renegade Time Lady, free to live her life the way she wanted, and why shouldn't she? She was a Time Lady, a member of the most oldest, most revered species in the universe. She should have the right to decide what to do with her life without having to parade up and down like a trophy on the arm of a Time Lord husband chosen for her by her family.
It was almost incomprehensible for any Time Lord to want to leave Gallifrey, but Theta did.
Theta wanted to grab a TARDIS and just leave the planet, but she wasn't ready yet because she still had so much to do, and so little time to do it, but that didn't mean the dream was old. It was still very much alive.
Theta had become bored and fed up with the Lundbarrow family for years, even before her father's treatment of her had landed them into the present state of their relationship; non-existent. Oh, Quences had never abused or beaten her, but he was emotionally negligent. He never bothered to hide his annoyance the heiress to his family was a female, and he had never hidden his desire to see her married to another powerful family, combining their fortunes and political interests with his and creating some kind of dynasty.
That was typical of Time Lord existence.
For all the Time Lords postured and preached, they were the Lords of Time, and the academicians of history and science, they were a very political people, and Theta despised it.
She didn't want to be the brood mare for another family. She had her own interests, and they didn't extend to doing what other Time Ladies who forgot their training at the Academy did with themselves.
Theta wanted to live her life and not spend her days sitting around dully, waiting for dull and witless Time Ladies while her "husband" went off and had babies with a string of mistresses; she wasn't stupid, she knew her father was guilty of infidelity. But then, Theta thought to herself darkly, mother's not exactly innocent. Those rumours about me not being Quence's daughter.… But she was content to remain in ignorance at not knowing if she had brothers and sisters outside the family. She didn't care. She wasn't even sure if she and her father were even related.
On Gallifrey, committing acts of theft was usually ignored unless you went after something really big. But truthfully, Time Lord security was incredibly overrated. Many Time Lords believed their race was the pinnacle of development, and protected by the transduction barriers they didn't need to fear alien attacks, but they had forgotten one tiny detail.
Their own people. How many of them were criminals? Every person was different, and there had been an underworld on Gallifrey long before Rassilon himself was born. This underworld did everything; assassination, theft, murder, murder for hire, protection, drugs, smuggling, prostitution, and all kinds of nasty crimes that modern Time Lords would've found disgusting. But then, they believed everything that wasn't in their rather narrow view of the world was disgusting and uncivilised.
When Theta had been younger, she had been bored; none of her younger siblings really wanted to play with her, her parents just foisted her off on others, so her interests turned to other pursuits. She had studied arts but her real interests were reading. And she came across pirates and piracy. Theta had been instantly hooked, and she became even more fascinated with pirates and thieves.
During her first years before the age of 8, she learnt how to pick locks and how to break into secure places. Despite being female and more vulnerable than most since kidnappers were probably going to be more experienced than her when it came to mental manipulation even though Borusa himself had praised her for her skill in being good at telepathy, Theta had learnt quite a lot about burglary. She only had to hide the fact she was attending the Prydonian Academy; the Gallifreyan portion of the planet's population really weren't fond of the Time Lords.
But the fact didn't change the fact than even when the elite of Gallifrey were Time Lords and the guardians of history, and they were sitting on top of the Eye of Harmony and had access to the Web of Time, there was still an underworld full of people who didn't give a damn about the Time Lords or their narrow minded views. Another thing, some Time Lords didn't care, but they helped the underworld by using their TARDISes to travel across space and time, and they would pick up all kinds of things to be sold on the black market and make a small fortune. The High Council didn't seem to care, either that or they had other things on their mind, or they believed it all beneath their notice. Theta Sigma believed that was the truth, and she had been committing burglaries for quite a few years during her time in the Academy.
When she'd first learnt from the shobogans how to become a more proficient criminal, Theta had not expected it all to be so straightforward. It was ironic, for what was considered to be the most advanced, most mighty race of the Universe, the Time Lords didn't seem to have a care in the world about the crime going on on their own home turf.
Theta had read books and heard accounts from the older shobogans about how life had been before Rassilon even during those Dark Times. What had entranced the people of Gallifrey in those days, what accounted for the virtually religious attitude of their accounts, were the opportunities. In those days the universe was still being explored, new planets were being colonised, new technologies opened doors to new possibilities.
What shamed Theta the most was the thought her people had forgotten all that, and became spoon fed little drones, servants to history and to the High Council who had practically banned their people from doing anything constructive or creative. It was one thing for the Time Lords to be told to stay unchanging because the Web of Time needed to remain stable, but Theta truly didn't think that stabilities should mean her people become so complacent that they ignored the kind of life that was going on out into space.
Thousands of years ago, solar systems were being charted, new bacterias yielded new medicines, new vaccines and new species were discovered everyday. Even during the Time Program where the founders of the Time Lords had gathered to transform Gallifrey and its people into the Lords of Time, where Rassilon and Omega had worked to create the Eye of Harmony and the Web of Time, and then when the first Time Lords went out in the early forms of TARDIS to explore history, the Gallifreyan people had grown and they had become more accustomed to their great powers.
Not anymore. In fact, aside from one or two sciences and technologies, the Time Lords had not really advanced for 10 million years.
TARDISes were practically the only technology that was advanced every century or so, and now there were dozens of models waiting to be used. But even with access to the secret of space time travel, her people rarely, if ever, went out of their way to use it.
Theta had counted the various types of TARDIS, each one with different Type models, some of them rotting away that it made you ask why the Time Lords had even gone to the trouble of creating them. It was such a waste, but Theta planned to change that when she left Gallifrey. But the weird thing was, even with all the evidence surrounding them, and all the proof there was, none of her generation or those above or below her really saw that what had rendered Gallifreyan life so dull were the Time Lords themselves.
The chief villain was Rassilon himself. It was thanks to him and not being clear about the Web of Time needing to remain stable that her people had just not bothered to really advance for so many centuries.
That was one of the reasons she wanted to leave Gallifrey, to escape the boredom of Time Lord life. Theta wanted to continue her criminal career and see if there was something better than what she was doing now. It was one thing to be a successful burglar, but in truth it was becoming harder and harder to burgle anyone anymore, because in the last two years since her graduation from the Prydonian academy the Castellan had started doing his job and going above and beyond the call of duty to catch her.
Another was because she was fed up with the constant ceremonials, the elaborately costumed rituals being forced onto her and the never ending talk of her getting married and having children of her own.
Although Theta put on a brave face that didn't show her feelings, she didn't let it get in the way of one of the means she had at her disposal to forget her family's pushiness. She walked around the room, looking idly around the hall before she found the next mark. It was another Time Lady, and she was taking a ladylike sip from her wine goblet.
Theta crept up behind her, using her telepathic expertise to shield her mind from the others, though that didn't mean she couldn't be seen, and she deftly used the head collar she was wearing and the one the other Time Lady was wearing to shield what her hand was doing. There wasn't anyone in front of the Time Lady who was still drinking copiously though somehow still managing to remain ladylike about how she drank. There was a long, beautiful, diamond and pearl necklace around her neck, and the scanner Theta had used to scan it earlier during the ball's opening had told her the diamonds and pearls were genuine.
Deftly unclasping the necklace, Theta managed to remove the necklace, but she had more problems taking it away without being noticed and rustling the jewels. But the Time Lady was still drinking, and Theta could still hear her voice - in such close proximity it was easy to hear her mental voice - and it sounded like the words of a babbling woman. Rassilon, she's drunk. Theta took the chance and unsnapped the necklace, and gathered them up quickly before they rustled more than a second, and she secreted them into the inner pocket of her robes where it joined the other pieces of jewellery she had managed to take from the rest of the guests.
Theta walked away with a smile on her lips, and headed out to look for someone else.
She quickly found another one, this time a Time Lord wearing an expensive looking ring. Theta walked towards him, and in the appropriate manner he took her gloved hand and kissed it out of respect for her being the heiress of the Lungbarrow family. Theta managed to twist her fingers around and clasped the ring, and gently slid it off his finger without the Time Lord noticing. Oh, he'd realise it was missing sooner or later, but since Time Lord custom was to kiss the gloved hand of a lady, particularly those belonging to the Houses that were the most important and most powerful, there was a plethora of suspects.
The first thing you needed to know about Theta Sigma beyond the fact she was slowly but surely being driven insane by the near constant pressure of her parents demanding she get married, all for political gain, of course, and not for the little thing that was love and affection, she was a thief.
That wasn't supposed to be glib. Theta had found she had the talent of taking things and not returning them, never mind feeling nothing about taking something that wasn't even hers. It had taken a long time but eventually she had become more and more used to being a thief.
As a child, Theta had devoured all the literature on thieves throughout the history of the universe, and she had fallen in love with pirates of numerous cultures, particularly human criminals.
During her studies, Theta had heard of the Japanese ninja and she had fallen in love with them, and had devoted a lot of her time and energies into studying them and being like them.
Another thing was what she had seen in the Untempered Schism.
Children on Gallifrey were taken from their families by the age of 8 to enter the Academy of their chapter, but before they did that they had to look into the Untempered Schism, a gap in the fabric of reality which showed the Time Vortex. The Time Lords had many ways of accessing the Vortex, and travelling along it to reach other times and places, but the Untempered Schism was the only portal the Time Lords had which showed nothing but the Vortex.
There were no portals, no views of other places or times in the past or the future, but time was relative and Time Lords were taught other events didn't matter.
Children would be expected to stand in front of the Schism, in a draughty cavern lit by traditional sconces fuelled by chemicals to burn them, and they would look into the Schism where they'd then be exposed to the raw power of time and space, all under the watchful eyes of a statue of Rassilon, Omega, and the other Founders. Like many things the statues were a symbol, in the case of the Untempered Schism ceremony, they were there to watch the young Time Lords to be, and let them know of the proud legacy they were about to inherit.
There was a common belief that the Untempered Schism changed the personality of the children who looked into its depths, and saw eternity. In a way it did, but it affected the brains of children who had different beliefs and different mindsets. Theta had grown up cunning, learning how to hide and sneak about, and when she looked into the Schism she saw herself becoming great…..a great thief. Not a bored trophy wife, perpetually bored and living one regeneration after another living the same way, but a criminal who was daring.
Children were inspired, children went mad, and some children ran.
Theta was all three of those things - she was inspired to be a great thief, and she was going to run from place to place, and she was mad to do it all.
No one had been told what she had seen, it was one of her closest secrets, but it wasn't compulsory for the child to speak about what they saw since, for some children, the experiences were different for everyone.
Theta was willing to spend her time in the Academy, learning how to be a Time Lady and she had made friends there, and more than a few rivals, but that was childhood for you. And all that time she practiced learning how to be a thief, with plans to leave the planet and make a living as a criminal, mad to try and inspired to make it happen.
There was not a chance in hell of her staying on Gallifrey. She was going to start checking the TARDIS cradles and find a suitable, advanced TARDIS model and then leave Gallifrey, and hopefully never come back.
Another thing you needed to know about Theta was that she had no idea if her father was really her father. The suspicious looks on her father's face, the looks of detachment and the general lack of care had been bad enough, but it was the arguments she had heard between her mother and Quences. The thought the man wasn't her father was both horrifying and yet comforting to Theta because the man was so detached.
He also seemed determined to get rid of her, to marry her off to another family.
You also needed to take a good look at the young Time Lady to know something else about her; she had once been obsessed with pirates as a child. Obsessive is too kind a description; she loved pirates and thieves, and she had taken it out to the next level. Theta had spent years learning how to be a thief, and she had carried out a few burglaries. Tonight wouldn't be very special either.
"Theta? Theta!"
Theta jerked and turned to face her father. Like many other Time Lords, it was impossible to tell from the outside how old or how young he was in comparison to other members of their race. The races outside Gallifrey took in the physical appearances of their people to tell how old they were, wrinkles, loss of hair, colour of the skin or the eyes, etc.
But with Time Lords, a race that could regenerate - their bodies broken down into energised plasma and their minds uploaded into a data slice where the body would then be adjusted according to the choice of the Time Lord before being downloaded back into the body and returning to life - it was next to impossible to work out.
A young Time Lord could have the body of an ancient, hunched individual, and an old one could appear to have the body of a hyperactive young person in the prime of life. Physically Quences resembled a tall, elderly looking man with a gaunt face with ice blue eyes, and his skin was as wrinkled as an old apple. He was only a few thousand years old.
Theta bowed her head. "Father," she said respectfully, and then her eyes widened when she saw the Time Lord near him. "Anzor?" she whispered in shock.
Quences smiled and stepped back to let the two of them look at each other without getting in the way. "What are you doing here?" Theta said, surprised, but rapidly getting angry that he was here.
Anzor smiled back at her. "It's good to see you too, Theta," he said.
"I wish I could say the same, but as we both know that is an utter lie. I remember the last time I saw you," Theta snapped back, recovering quickly. "You threatened to turn that Galvaniser on me at full power."
"Youthful enthusiasm," Anzor waved a hand, as though the matter was forgotten. Theta snorted. She might have been terrified of Anzor like everyone else at the Academy, but it wasn't until she'd read a pirate book that she realised that she shouldn't be afraid, so she'd devised a plan to make him pay the price for his actions.
Quence's angry cough redirected Theta's attention. "My daughter, you will come with me," he said evenly, but she would have needed to be deaf not to realise he was angry. "Why do you constantly defy my wishes for you to get married? You are supposed to become one of the most influential members of our people," he all but shouted at her when they were a good distance from Anzor.
"And you think getting me and that stuck up, cowardly bully is going to help me with that?" Theta countered, knowing it was a testament of knowing just how angry her father was if he was resorting to verbal speech to deliver his point. Usually he spoke telepathically, always clouding his mind to stop others from eavesdropping.
But not this time.
"Father, Anzor is scum. He tortured me, he tortured virtually everyone in the Academy, and he got away with it because he managed to threaten us with harm in case we fought back. One of us was brave enough to fight back, and he was encased in crystal and bounced from a high height for his troubles. It's a miracle he didn't die. And now you want me to marry him, especially after I went to all the trouble to document what he was doing?" Theta pleaded.
But her father was firm. "Theta, you will not embarrass this family by not making the effort."
In the end a reluctant Theta was dragged back to Anzor. Theta could see the smirk in his eyes, something he kept hidden from Quences, but she saw it since she had seen it so many times before.
"I shall leave you together, then," he announced and left the two Junior Time Lords behind.
The moment her father had walked away, however, things were not harmonious. Theta swung round and glared at Anzor. "If you even think of trying to arrange a marriage between us so you can make my life hell, I will kill you," she snapped at him.
Anzor smiled at her, showing his rather small teeth but it looked like a leer to Theta. "I don't want to marry you. I just want to talk to you, is that alright?"
"Good, because I would rather regenerate a thousand times in a supernova than marry you," Theta seethed. She had good memories of what had happened the last time this thing had wanted to merely speak with her, and the memory of the pain she had received was something that Theta doubted would ever go away. Not that her father seemed to care.
"Alright then, I'll listen to what you have to say," she replied, deciding to at least hear him out, "and then I'm going. That alright?"
Anzor nodded, but the look in his eyes made it clear that he didn't like being spoken to the way she was, but she didn't care.
Alone in the small chamber near the ballroom, Theta wondered what was taking her former schoolmate so long to come back. After telling him straight that she would listen to what he had to say to her before she left him alone again, Anzor had walked out, down a corridor leading to another smaller chamber, telling her he needed a few seconds to get his thoughts together, which was a bit odd since she had thought that he had already thought about what he had wanted to tell her, and he hadn't come back for a few minutes.
Theta suddenly lost her patience, and she stood up and was about to head back for the party when she heard Anzor's voice in her mind. "Theta…..why?"
Theta swung round, barely noticing that she wasn't the only person to have heard the voice spoken telepathically and beamed into her mind. Gathering her robes into her hands, Theta rushed to the corridor that linked the small chamber with the room she was currently in. The corridor was fairly short, only a few metres and she was at the door to the small chamber in no time, and threw the door open and she gaped in disbelief and horror when she saw what was on the ground.
She had wondered why Anzor had gone into this room of her home because it led to smaller utility room. She'd just bought his lie about getting his thoughts together, but she had never imagined it would lead to this.
Lying on the ground, covered in blood, a knife sticking out of Anzor's chest - Theta needed only a quick glance to see that the knife had gone through both of Anzor's hearts, killing him outright.
Theta was so surprised that when the small bucket of blood splashed over her, she couldn't do anything more than scream, and she looked down at her robes and hands. Her entire midriff and her hands were covered in blood, and she looked down at the body in growing horror.
She stood gazing at the body in shock a bit too longer; she could feel the mental energy of other Time Lords including her own parents behind her, and it took someone roughly grabbing her by the shoulder and throwing her around so fast her head began to spin that she realised the terrible truth.
They believed she had done it. She could feel and hear their accusations inside her mind as easily as she could see it all written as clearly on their faces.
Theta shook her head. "I know how this looks," she tried to explain, "but I didn't do this-"
"Yes you did, you stupid little bitch!" Theta turned to the speaker and found herself looking directly at Anzor's father. "We heard my son, my son, asking you why, why you were about to kill him, and we felt his fear."
"What? That's not what I felt," Theta argued, and she kept on going before the Time Lords could argue back. "I felt no fear whatsoever. I heard him ask why in my head, heard him telepathically say my name, and then I came here and found him-"
"That's enough!" Anzor's father snapped angrily. "The High Council can decide your fate. Hopefully, they will ensure you suffer. Quences, do you nothing to say to your…..daughter?"
Quences approached, his expression so stony that it could have been cut from solid granite. Theta felt her hearts break at his expression; she might have wanted to leave Gallifrey and her family behind, but she didn't want her parents to part with her on such bad terms. "I no longer have a daughter," he said.
Theta staggered back, stumbling a little over the prone body of Anzor, but the Time Lord holding her kept her steady even as her hearts broke, and she turned to her mother and saw the woman actually look at her sadly before turning her back.
She was alone.