Author's Note: For those of you not familiar with the series, yes, Seo calls the Doctor "Father". No, he is not her father. This is explained better in Happy Endings. Seo adopts people as her family (for example, Torchwood becomes her family). I got that from my family, who actually does this. My sister, for example, has a set of "East Coast Parents" that she's basically adopted. My great uncle has an entire branch of his family tree that he calls his "honorary" family. And my grandmother used to tell her kids that all her students were their aunts and uncles, so my mom got very confused whenever she had to do family trees in school.
Seo opened her eyes.
Stood up, confused. Looked down at her hands and arms — whole again, without even a trace of blood. But she felt different. Sort of... fragmented.
She heard gunfire in the distance.
"Great!" Seo said to herself, running towards it. "That's probably where he is, then. He'll explain what's going on."
She stopped a short ways away, ducking down behind some fallen rubble. The shots she'd heard were from some kind of battle. Scattered all around were men and women with incredibly sophisticated guns shooting at Daleks with special attachments. Except that they all looked a bit weird to Seo. She couldn't really describe it. If she had to, she'd say they looked flattish, like paper dolls — except they were all using live ammunition.
And there, in the background, trying to hide — was one figure who wasn't a paper doll.
Someone real.
"That's him!" Slowly — carefully — Seo darted from hiding place to hiding place, dodging gun blasts and avoiding grenades as best she could. It was funny, how she could feel out all the weapons around her and buried beneath her, but every time she reached for one, it slipped through her fingers like smoke.
Well, fine!
What did she need guns for, anyways? Father would probably just take them away and make a big stink about it. He could be sort of a git sometimes.
"Surprise!" Seo cried, flipping down into his hiding spot and grinning. "Miss me?" The grin fell off her face. "Wait, you're not Father!"
It was a woman in a mud-drenched business suit, her once tidy hairstyle now disheveled and ragged, her face truly terrified. She plastered herself against the far wall, closing her eyes and trying to will herself invisible.
"No, don't worry! I'm here to rescue you!" Seo grinned, offering her hand. "See? You can trust me because I'm three-dimensional."
The woman opened one eye just enough to give Seo the 'what the hell are you talking about' look. Apparently, no one else could see everything looking all flattish and strange.
"Seek! Locate! Exterminate!" shouted a Dalek nearby, approaching their hiding spot. "Exterminate the Time Lords!"
Seo grabbed the woman and yanked her off the ground. "Talk time is over. Run time!" She practically threw the woman up over the nearby wall that Seo had jumped down, earlier. "The evil exterminatey pepper-pot shaped ones are the bad guys, by the way. They're called Daleks. But if you can't remember that, you can use one of Mom's nicknames for them! Like 'killy-killy-bang-bang.' Or 'mini-Calebs-with-better-guns'."
The Dalek swiveled its eyestalk around... in a lurchy, two dimensional, disconnected way... then spotted Seo.
"LIFE-SIGN detected!" It screamed. "Exterminate!"
Seo only just managed to scramble over the wall as it shot. With another shot, the wall began to crumble.
"Run! Run! Run!" said Seo, grabbing the woman by the hand and sprinting away from the shots. "We need to find Father. It's very important that we really annoy him. Otherwise, he'll see the Daleks and this battlefield and get really sad and depressed about all his friends who died. Self-esteem through irritation, that's my motto!" She glanced back at the woman, and frowned. "Sorry, you are...?"
"I need to talk to the Apos'alu," the woman said. "It's got this all wrong. I'm not who it thinks I am!"
"Well, I think you're a three-dimensional person, like me," said Seo, "and not one of the... paper... dolls..." Seo stopped in place, suddenly letting go of the woman's hand. She stared at her own hand, swiveling it and staring at it from all different angles. "But that's impossible." She pat at her own face. "I feel normal. I can still touch things!" She stared at her paper-thin hand. "But I'm like them. A paper doll."
"What?" The woman shook her head. "Look, I don't have a clue what you're talking about. I just want to find Andrew and get out of here."
"Andrew?" Seo asked.
"Andrew Lantro — the Time Agent," said the woman. "My friend."
"You mean the tall one with the blue chin and the dark uniform?" Seo asked.
The woman nodded.
"Yeah... your friends are more on the killy side," Seo explained, "so I think we're going to hang out with my friends, instead. You'll like them. They don't shoot people for no reason the first time they meet them."
"What are you...?" The woman shook her head, dismissing this. "Andrew can be a little... difficult. I know that. But I'm sure he didn't mean it." She bit her lower lip and looked out, searching the landscape for him. "I just want to make sure he's okay."
"And I'd like to tear his hands from his arms and shove them down his throat," Seo chirruped. "But I think neither of us are going to get our wish. So let's just scrap that and find Father." She began running. Then stopped, and turned around. "Sorry, what was your name again?"
"Zeera," said Kardeni. "Zeera Kardeni. And whatever you think — I'm not a Time Lord! I don't belong here. There's been a mistake!"
Seo scratched her head. "I'm starting to think you might have more problems than me." She spun around, and began running again. "Oh well. Time to go bug Father!"
Jenny and Yimi reappeared in a room that looked a little like the console room of the Doctor's TARDIS — except it was black and silver, covered with emblems of Rassilon, and surrounded on all sides by an extensive array of holographic monitors — most of them blank or filled with static. Jenny caught her breath, swaying slightly.
"I really, really didn't think I'd be able to reprogram it that quickly," Jenny said. She regained her balance, then ran to the central console — and four circles of auxiliary consoles, around it — in the center of the room. "This is it." She began flipping switches and pressing buttons, and the scanner screens attached to the consoles filled up with text. A smile spread across her face. "This is really it! The control center for everything!"
Yimi looked down at the vortex manipulator — now abandoned on the floor. It was a burned-out wreck once more. She picked it up. "What did you do?"
"Assumed that whatever got inside our heads was boosting its signal using the telepathic circuits of this TARDIS," Jenny said, adjusting a lever and checking the results on a scanner screen. "Which is why the signal was so delayed. It was coming from Galia-3." She shook her head, and tried flipping two more switches, then checking the readouts again. "I knew the timezone of the access point, and tracing the psychic energy, I could compute the coordinates. Very quickly." She shook her head, and unflipped the switches. "You know, the readouts are all still written in that mistranslated Gallifreyan. It's really annoying."
Yimi didn't know what most of Jenny's words meant, so she just nodded and pretended she did. She vaguely wondered who Zeera was, but figured it probably didn't matter.
She began to walk along the outside of the room, her eyes searching each holographic panel, in turn, to find anything she recognized. There was the version of her world that was empty, save for a strange scar across the landscape. There was the small prison cell where she'd been with the Doctor and Lantro. There was the world where Seo was chained to that rock. And... there...
As Jenny kept fiddling with the controls, Yimi watched as another hologram popped up — filled with a swarm of creatures, halfway between birds and mammalian rodents. Each of their feathers blazed with fire, and their eyes were vicious and venomous.
Then, suddenly, the fiery-looking birds were gone.
Yimi stared in horror as birds began to fly through all the other screens — even the ones filled with static or darkness. A knot appeared in the pit of her stomach, as she realized what this must mean. "Jenny..."
"Just a minute!" Jenny called back, squinting at the scanner screen. She began pointing at words. "What does that mean? Peas? Maybe it's split. Division. So 'Prisoner temporal division in spending...' That's probably 'in progress', judging by the hourglass icon... 'Please wait until the zucchini finishes pinecone'." Jenny scowled, and began pressing buttons. "Yes, but I don't want to wait until the zucchini finishes pinecone!" she shouted at it. "Where's the cancel pinecone button on this...?"
She suddenly trailed off.
Yimi spun around, just in time to see Jenny step away from the console and run at her, expertly leaping through the air and tackling Yimi to the ground, hands reaching for Yimi's throat. Yimi, panicked, head-butted Jenny the way she'd seen Jenny do last time.
The moment she did so, Jenny let go and leapt to her feet.
"I'm so sorry! I don't know... what...!" Jenny grimaced, then offered Yimi a hand.
Yimi decided to get up on her own. She figured she should probably keep her distance from Jenny, from now on.
"That's the second time that's happened to me," Jenny realized, running a hand over her head. "It's so... strange! Not at all like I'd expect to feel from someone taking over my mind. More like someone's sneaking in the back door and quietly rearranging all my thoughts and memories so I only do what they want." Jenny frowned, fixing her eyes on Yimi. "Why didn't it affect you?"
"I don't know," said Yimi, still backing away from Jenny and keeping her guard up. "But it's the Apos'alu doing it. I'm sure of that."
Jenny ran back to the central console. "The Apos'alu! Zeera mentioned that. She said it has incredible mental powers."
"The Doctor and his friend imprisoned it here," said Yimi.
Jenny gave a short laugh. "Typical."
"The Doctor said his friend, Biv, wanted to kill the Apos'alu, but he talked Bivazeer out of it," said Yimi. "The Apos'alu really hates Bivazeer. She kept..."
"Biv?" Jenny asked, looking up. "Dad had a friend named Biv?" She pat the console of the Battle TARDIS. "The same Biv who left a long message in Old High Gallifreyan on this TARDIS?"
Yimi shrugged. "I don't really know. Sorry." She turned back to the holographic panels again, skimming her eyes across each one. As she looked, more and more Seos were starting to run around each of the remaining landscapes on the holographic screens. "The Doctor was right. Seo really is being split into pieces."
Jenny blinked. "Wait, what?"
Yimi gestured at the holographic projections around her, explaining to Jenny everything the Doctor had told her about the way he and Biv had imprisoned the Apos'alu and about Seo and the fob watch. By the time she finished, Jenny was standing beside Yimi, her eyes fixed on one of the holographic screens.
"Right," Jenny said, taking this all in. "That must be the reason I can actually see her on the cameras. It's not a sight I'm used to." She paused. Then spun back around to Yimi. "Wait. That splitting apart thing only applies to Seo, right?" Spun back to the screens. "Meaning that, if I find Dad and Zeera on one of these screens — that's where they all really are." Jenny grinned and sprinted back to the central console. "I have to find a way to make a call on this thing."