The Obligatory Disclaimer: Unfortunately, I don't own Doctor Who or any associated characters, creatures, features, gadgets, gizmos or TARDISes.
The Master's eyes followed Thes's, watching him carefully as he stared around the room. Analyzing his face, his expressions were almost unreadable, for a human's, but the Time Lord couldn't fail to miss how the young man's attention honed in straight away on the TARDIS in the corner of the room.
"Perception filters don't work on you," he observed, and Thes took in the words and thought for a few moments before nodding slowly.
"Those…those…ah…on people's-"
"They're called Time Beetles," the Master supplied. "And these ones have an aversion field as well – which would be particularly effective on you, I can imagine." Thes wasn't quite sure what to make of that and returned to scanning the room with his eyes, taking in a jagged, splintered hole in the door; the sumptuous carpet and furnishings; the computer that hummed on the desk.
"Do you know where we are?" Thes shook his head. "We're in the former Prime Minister's office," said the Master with barely a nuance of emphasis, although he could tell that Thes had noticed the choice of words. He sat down behind the desk, leaning back in the chair and resting his feet on the edge of the desk. It crossed Thes's mind briefly what his parents would say if they could see those dusty black workboots on the spotless varnish.
"I'm in the Prime Minister's office…" he murmured, his gaze sweeping the room again.
"Hey!" The room dissolved around them and the Master sat up, finding himself suddenly in a squashy red armchair in one corner of a living room. "Stop that!" he snapped at Thes, who was hurrying towards a door, through which voices could be heard. In a blink, they were back in the office and Thes stood with his back to the desk, hands pressed against the wall. He hung his head, and the Master laughed unpleasantly.
"What…what is it?" Thes choked. "Just explain it! Please!" He swung around, desperation in his eyes. The Master stood up, and the two were suddenly standing atop a flight of stone steps, looking out over a busy town square. Thes's eyes darted across the scene from person to person, while the Master watched, observing how the Time Beetles' aversion fields responded so strongly to the troubled human.
"Each one has created a parallel dimension around its host, and then reproduced in each alternate dimension, passing the offspring onto new hosts," he explained. "Now there's too many – it causes a strain on the fibres that hold universes together, and reality is falling apart."
"Did you cause it?"
"Oh, like I'd ever!" the Master chuckled sarcastically. "Actually, no - I merely took advantage of a situation…made sure no-one got in the way…"
"Like me?"
The Master shrugged.
"That depends."
"Everyone's got them."
"But it's still not enough…" Thes's eyes widened, and as if anticipating his inquiry, the Master added, "Just watch." A crack ripped its way through the paving stones of the square from the Master's feet across to the door of a little café and widened to become a gaping crevasse. The people crossing to and fro across the square moved on, seemingly oblivious, and Thes cried out in horror as several toppled forwards into the bottomless blackness, only to reappear on the other side and continue walking as if nothing had happened.
A wild shriek rang out across the square, and heads turned to see a homeless woman clad in nothing but filthy sheets who had been sitting at the bottom of the steps unnoticed. She pointed with a bony, trembling arm – straight towards the ravine that divided the square. Thes had been toying with the idea that the Master was somehow messing with his head, fooling him into experiencing elaborate hallucinations. He had heard of 'power of suggestion' and the like, and still in despair for an alternative explanation, he had clung to the thought. At that shrill sound of terror from the wretched woman, though, his heart sank and he stared into the blackness of the crack…so inviting…so very real… It snapped shut and he became aware of the Master's voice again at his shoulder.
"You see? It's not quite enough. There's some who can see it, here and there. And a few more who are starting to notice. But it's just little things, insignificant things. I need more."
"But why? Why do you want to do this?"
"You might learn that soon enough."
Thes shivered, feeling a pang of envy as his attention landed on a group of young men and women, about his own age, crossing the square. Maybe he knew them – he couldn't be sure. They chatted amongst themselves, moving obliviously across the square like they moved through their lives – with hardly a care in the world. Mundane worries and day-to-day concerns were their whole existence, and Thes longed more than ever to see through their eyes – or for them to see through his, just for once. Yes – why should he just step away from everything he was? Why shouldn't they be the ones to understand him?
The Master watched as Thes's eyes clouded over with a mood he knew intimately, and smiled to himself. The human was a nuisance, certainly – but at least the Doctor hadn't had a chance to put any heroic ideas into his head. There was still something of an enigma about him, though…
"Now you can enlighten me, Theta Sigma Moreau," the Master said. Thoughts interrupted, Thes started at the sound of his name spoken with a tone of significance that even he couldn't fail to miss. "It's a very unusual name – tell me, where did it come from?"
"My great-grandmother named me," Thes answered hesitantly, suspicious of the Master's sudden interest. "She died a week after I was born. My mother agreed, for my father – she was his grandmother."
"Is your father alive? What about his parents?"
"No – my biological father died when I was one. His parents both died before that." Uncomfortable under the Master's intense scrutiny, he turned his head, removed his glasses and began to polish them on the corner of his T-shirt. When he replaced them, the town square was gone and he was once again in the Prime Minister's office, just inches away from the anachronistic blue Police Box.
"What is this?" he asked, edging away from it cautiously. The Master was seated at the desk, focused on the computer, and replied without looking up, holding up one finger for silence.
"It's called a TARDIS. It's a…time machine, spaceship – use your imagination." A flicker of childhood memory crossed Thes's mind, and almost without thinking, he flashed a thumbs-up to signal that he had understood the sarcasm. Why couldn't the Master just answer the question, though, he thought with a surge of frustration. The Master sent him a baffled glance and then returned to ignoring him, and he stood awkwardly for some minutes, combing his fingers through his tangled hair, before approaching the desk and peering at the screen of the computer. An array of complex coding in unfathomable symbols met his eyes – although the text on the screen itself was incomprehensible to him, he couldn't help but wonder…
"What do you think?" the Master said suddenly, swiveling around on the chair to face Thes in a gleeful manner that seemed almost childlike. "Latvia or Finland?" On reflex, Thes opened his mouth to answer, and then clamped it shut again as the full implication of what he was being asked dawned on him. Seeing his discomfort, the Master folded his arms and leaned back in the chair.
"Go on – pick one," he grinned. Thes knew it would be futile to protest, and his mind whirled for several long moments, drawing blank after blank. He could feel the Master's eyes on him, waiting, relishing the internal struggle he had caused in the young man. At the corners of his vision, the edges of the room seemed frayed, his subconscious searching frantically for an escape while the Master held the world in place around them with an iron will. Finally, his brain seemed to settle into a calculated resignation and he found himself processing and comparing facts. Land size…population…
"Latvia," he said in a flat monotone, and the Master reached out and idly tapped a key on the keyboard. Thes's eyes lingered on the key and he registered the Master's words somewhere in a detached part of his mind that couldn't quite accept what the stroke of that key had meant for millions of people somewhere.
"Of course, I'm going to need Finland as well eventually. The virus is only a temporary foothold – someone will find a way around it sooner or later. The real control…well, this place simply isn't big enough." He gestured dismissively around himself with one hand, Thes's eyes darting between him, the computer screen and the TARDIS as he realized the scale behind the Master's words – 'this place'.
"I'm going to advance your planet's space exploration program by about 5000 years."