Day 2
Despite their abandoned state, the tall, interconnected structures before him were not ruins; What lay before him beneath the pale light of an overcast sky was the metropolis of Xalax on the planet of Fabron, once one of the largest, most illustrious cities for most of the planet's civilized history, and also one of the oldest – Having been densely populated since its beginnings as a major trade hub, thousands of years in the past, its spires were now empty, abandoned centuries ago after one war too many, and never reclaimed after it was placed in a neutral zone between two factions, ironically because its symbolic and religious significance was too large for any faction to concede defeat if the city were awarded to another – According to most of the major religions, a large natural cavern beneath even the lowest reaches of the tunnels was where life had first originated, and where their goddess' remains had been buried after she was finished with creating the universe and dotting it with life, much like a woman dying in childbirth.
The citizens of Fabron, then, were her last and unintentional creation, having spontaneously sprung from her blood, and built the city to be her grave-marker.
The very presence of underground complexes and life on other planets in the legend made it apparent and, in the Doctor's opinion, fairly obvious that the story wasn't even as old as the city it was supposed to explain, but being himself a scion of a civilization that had been advanced for so long that even its legendary founders lived in a world with space flight, and having seen it chose the leadership of that tyrant of the past over that of a vastly more competent young woman, it didn't surprise him that the legend was believed, and led to the very thing it was setting up to be treasured being left barren.
But while no Fabronian had set foot in the city's premises for a long, long time, their ancestors' ingenious advanced technology stood the test of time, leaving Xalax and other sites like it as the last monuments to this world's former glory in the days before reckless wars tore it apart – All the machinery, automatic devices, household appliances and urban transport facilities were, in fact, still working, waiting for someone to give them a reason to activate - With a natural life span of about 300 years, the Fabronians had some motivation to built long-lasting infrastructure to begin with, and Xalax was, in its day, the planet's jewel, it's capital, it's oldest, largest, most modern creation of its inhabitants, often hailed as Fabron's 'eternal city', later hailed as Fabron's Rome by the first human explorers to reach the planet, which might have almost been accurate, if Rome had magically morphed into Tokyo at some point in its history, and then suffered its designated fate in almost every other Sci-Fi movie, and become known as a kind of Atlantis that somehow still had a widely known physical location.
Except that Xalax had been preemptively evacuated in the days of its fall, not a single bomb had tarnished its structures, and since his arrival here, he'd had the chance to personally try out what sort of computers the Xalaxians were using, what video games they played, how they had showered and moved around the city in hover pads and train-like structures, had access to actual water, read some of their books and downloaded entire libraries to the TARDIS computer, knowing that no one else might ever come to access these documents, and the fraction of Fabronian thought, art and culture contained therein.
He treated himself to the music they had turned to in their last days, highly electronic like their architecture, make to resemble scrambled or corrupted data through they were not.
Most of the city, from the spires to the lower regions, was in fact still fully habitable, a monument for their builder's reliance and cherishing of technology above more perishable materials: Much of the city was made of the same, blueish-white material that appeared in state resembling crystal or carved stone with a pearly glimmer to it, and everything within its walls had obeyed the will of the inhabitants – Some buildings didn't even have doors, just walls that would slide open if an authorized person gestured toward it. When they'd left, most of them had carelessly discarded the curious small crystals they'd uses as keys or means of recognition, worn around their wrists or necks in decorated studs.
He still hadn't been able to determine what they were made of (which, together with the fact he'd needed to reconfigure his equipment at all was probably a huge testament to the city's occupants and their ingenuity), but figured out how to configure his sonic screwdriver to emulate their signals a few hours after his arrival, and then, he could make the infrastructure obey him, too, and basically invite himself to a comfortable holiday while he investigated the place to his hearts' content, stopping in the nearest abandoned apartment whenever he needed anything.
A childish little part of him felt unexpectedly elated at having this whole, gigantic complex all to himself, all the little catwalks, all the hidden rooms, the sanctums of their temples and the assembly rooms and offices of the richest and most influential members of their society, all the places little boys weren't allowed in, every playground he was supposed to be too old for, and nobody to tell him "No", nobody to stop him from taking anything he wanted because nobody would ever miss it.
He had vague memories of going on longer explorations like that by himself sometime after the events at the Medusa cascade, of visiting environments that would have been too harsh for Donna, Martha, Rose or Mickey and, after having traveled in the company of humans almost continuously for a long while, feeling newly-reminded of how little he actually needed to get by now that he didn't have them with him. Back then, he recalled it as a horrible feeling, like they had been more alive than he was, and he a ghost haunting the ruins of a lost civilization that should long have faded and gone to face the others where his judgment awaited, not that he expected it to be anything other than oblivion. He almost thought that if he didn't keep moving or talking to himself, he might just forget that he was supposed to be alive and stay standing there like a tree or a statue, fading so slowly it might be mistaken for static as the birds and insects that lived in its branches hatched, mated and died.
In cynical retrospective, he's tempted to quip that a far more likely cause of death on his part would have been to find the embrace of madness in the wide expanse, or alternatively, good ol' Sandshoes being too distracted by all the shiny around him to notice dehydration or prolonged exposure creeping up on him ever so slowly, leaving the natives to discover him and wonder what absurdly skinny creature that skeleton could have belonged to.
By now, the events of Trenzalore had given him a much-needed reminder of his own ultimate mortality, and after having lacked the strength to venture all too far beyond the bell tower of Christmas Town for several decades and having consigned the idea of walking down the boulevards of Xalax before their eventual destruction to the heap of impossible pipe dreams, this chance to stride through the wide, resplendent streets in the shadow of the spires, to run his hands over handrails and columns, filled him with a boyish, heady gratitude that he actually allowed himself to express with a thin smile now that he was all by himself, a drive to move about in absolute freedom as an island unto himself that he hadn't felt this strongly since his oversized-scarf-wearing days, distantly related to the heady joy of dancing by himself in the mirror or singing in the shower.
The towers looked all the more pompous from down here, he had to actually lay down to see their tips from the ground level, just sitting down of craning his neck wouldn't do.
Centuries ago, this would have been a busy, crowded street, reserved for pedestrians given that the public transport took place in the interconnections of the towers above, but now, no one was stopping him from folding his hands behind his neck and simply leaning back in the middle of it, to stare up the various buildings.
Though this place couldn't have been more different, the inner city reminded him of that of an older European town, where you could assign the various buildings their approximate age based on the art style used, maybe you'd have a gothic church next to a baroque castle, a few art nouveau houses next to an engineer style train station or, depending on which part of Europe it was, a functional concrete building dating from the communist era – The Xalaxian spires, similarly, came in various distinct styles as well, some of them roughly rectangular in geometric forms, with rectangular or cylindrical protrusions, openly displayed tube sections and colorful statues interplaying with billboards; Others, contrary to what one might think, the later ones, resembled asparagus rods with many, many windows, ending in spiral tops or hazelnut shaped glass domes composed of multiple, petal-like pieces, their material lighter and their surface smoother – Some, owing to rival art styles existing at the time, had ring- or column like decorations instead of a purely cylindrical surface, others were sightly convex or concave in form with elaborate reliefs full of pictograms, and those became more and more common the closer you came to the central area.
Sometimes the skies would be overcast or it would rain, and then, the drops would slide past the surface of the material like from the leaves of a lotus plant; Once, lights must have burned in each of the tiny windows that covered the towers, but now, there was not even a fire burning for miles and miles, so the sky was so clear, so free from any other sources of lights that the disk of the Nevetina-Galaxy could be seen as a clear, milky stripe across the sky, a bit more yellow and distinctly broader than what you'd see on secluded places on Earth, the fluffy, cloud-like outline of a nearby dwarf Galaxy being visible on the edge.
He'd been here twice before, once on a previous visit to Fabron, in a time where these towers no longer stood and the atmosphere was too infused with toxic fumes to see anything but eerie silvery mist at night, and another time, to keep this Galaxy from becoming a battleground in the Time War. He'd succeeded at destroying the site that had been of strategic interest and convinced both human & local authorities to back his efforts, including various advanced locals that had been none too friendly with each other before, but at the price of fourteen star systems full of mostly human colonists, among them, a short brown-haired girl who'd given him shelter at her family's farm when none of the other villagers were willing to go near a Time Lord without torches and pitchforks, and later volunteered to assist him in his endeavors. Since he'd refused to give her a name to call him by, she'd quickly glimpsed at the battered leather jacket he had been wearing, and nicknamed him "Captain Nemo" after a character in a book she'd been reading, even commenting at a later point that her own role was quite a bit like that of Professor Aronax, curious about the mysterious solitary stranger and the life he led in the depths of the ocean, but also increasingly concerned about the personal vendetta he seemed to be pursuing at all costs; His vehement protests against the "Captain" part only seemed to encourage her.
– This Galaxy wouldn't have continued to exist without her efforts, either, but the great services she'd rendered to her people and all those they shared this galaxy with had not saved her own life, and at the end of this particular adventure, he'd been the one to pick up her charred corpse – Charred, alas, by the orbital weapons of a battle TARDIS, not a Dalek saucer – and tried in vain to make out her last few raspy words.
It was ironic, in a way, because she'd asked about the bandolier he'd been wearing, and he'd told her that it belonged to someone he'd tried to save, that he wore it to remind himself. It seemed to him that, if he was getting close to someone and allowing himself to forget that he was a monster, another remainder might have been too overdue to be evitable.
He'd laid her to rest in the burnt soil where her little colonist village had once been, on a planet so devastated it would never carry life again, a region of space so distorted by anomalies it came to be known as the 'blasted lands' and remained inaccessible to most forms of hyperspace travel for decades – even centuries after, by then casually referred to as simply the badlands after memory of the longer-lived races would call the 'grand devastation' for ages, had mostly faded from living memory in the younger ones, it remained impassable enough to become a popular hideout for criminals, refugees and anyone wishing to boast of their piloting skills.
Now, over a thousand years later, he had a pretty good guess at what the last of its legitimate citizens had been trying to tell him.
("Run you clever boy, and remember.")
He'd been thinking of taking a longer cruise across this Galaxy, a Galaxy whose history would have been erased, its future lost, if hadn't been for his intervention. As a general idea, limiting his scope might lead him to look at things he might otherwise have skipped right past because there was just so much to pick from in this whole wide universe – but what he found on his first visit had promptly dissuaded him, or at least, lead him to postpone this for what could have been indefinitely if he'd met his final end on Trenzalore, or Lake Silencio, or the Naismith Mansion for that matter –
For back then he'd begun his visit on this very same planet, under this very same sky – but when the gray clouds parted during the daytime, the material of the towers would shimmer in the colors of the sun and the sky, and, owing to some details in the composition of the atmosphere and the star heating it, that was mainly red, yellow or orange.
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