3. Tantalus.
Chloe enjoys taking Simeon to different planets to accustom him to her means of instant travel.
As she prepares to take Simeon on one outing, her Wristwatch Tardis fails to work.
"I'm sorry, Simeon, I'll have to find out what's wrong."
She heads straight for her experimentation room and mounts her wristwatch in a clamp. She connects several tiny cables and starts to diagnose the problem.
"Simeon, there's a shortage of power."
"I'm not surprised," Simeon responds. He laughs. His perception is that the whole thing runs off a watch battery!
"No, Simeon, the power collector is near a star in the Andromeda Galaxy, and it's malfunctioned."
"The star or the power collector?" he jests. .
"The star of course!" Chloe retorts, deliberately incorrectly. "No, Simeon, the power collector! I'll need some rare elements to repair it." .
"Where do we need to go?" Simeon asks.
"We need to go to Tantalus," Chloe concludes. "Sorry, Simeon, it's not a great place. It's a Human settlement on a planet rich in rare elements, but it has some great shops! We'll have to use my Mum's Tardis."
Chloe's mother, Crystelle, had acquired her Tardis from beneath the latest destruction of Gallifrey, regarding it at the time as rescuing the Tardis (ref. 12).
"I've never travelled in a Tardis before," Simeon says. "I never expected to. I worked in a Tardis factory, but I never had any expectation of travelling in a Tardis - they were only intended for the elite."
"Never mind all that," Chloe gently brushes aside his low expectation for a moment. "Are you up for it?"
"Wow, I'd love to," Simeon stares wide eyed at Chloe. "This is a treat!"
Chloe messages her mother asking to use the Tardis and they walk to where Crystelle last parked her Tardis and go in.
Inside, it looks like the cabin from a passenger jet airliner with rows of seats along one wall, but the Tardis Console unit is still an island in the middle of the Console room.
Simeon drinks in the view. "So, this is what a Tardis looks like inside?"
"No, it's just what this one looks like," Chloe tells him. "You can change it to anything you want. This is how this Tardis looked when my mum acquired it, but she likes it – it reminds her of her old career job as Trainee Spacecraft Pilot, so that's how it's stayed."
Chloe approaches the Tardis Console. The big blue button glows before her with its functionality emblazoned across it, Voice Control. She presses it. Without it she would be totally unable to fly the Tardis or use it.
"Tardis, please can we go to Tantalus?" Chloe always feels she ought to address the Tardis respectfully whenever she can; in return she finds the Tardis can be extra helpful at times.
A slight zizzing sound is their only audible sign that anything has happened. It is adequate for Chloe to know they have moved as she has travelled in this Tardis before. Simeon, though, expects much more. He has no idea they have moved.
Chloe leads Simeon by the hand to the door.
"Have we forgotten something?" Simeon asks.
"No, why?"
"We just seem to be going back to your house for something."
"No, Simeon, we're on Tantalus," Chloe says, laughing.
"What? But we didn't move!"
"Yes, we did. Look, I'll open the Tardis door and you'll be able to see."
Chloe opens the Tardis door and Simeon takes in a sharp breath. "Wow, it's true, the Tardis worked!"
"Of course it worked! Simeon, you've spent your life working on Tardises, or dreaming about them, of course they work!"
"I'm sorry," Simeon says. "It's just that I've never actually travelled in one. I'm thrilled!"
They step out and close the Tardis door behind them.
"Will we be able to get in again?" Simeon asks. Quite a valid question.
"Yes," Chloe reassures him. "My touch will open the door."
They stroll through a retail park containing three very large stores.
They stroll past the first store, labelled "Being" in white letters in a light blue oval on a white background. Chloe is pleased to enlighten Simeon as to their contents. "Anything from home furnishings and doors to biscuit boxes." She relates what the Doctor has told her.
They approach the second store labelled "Doing" in bold red letters on a yellow background. "This store is a Do-it-yourself store - build your own space craft. It's where we're going." .
"What's the third store for?" Simeon asks.
The sign on the store says, "Planting World - Heavy Plant for All."
"You can get all sorts of heavy equipment there, some of it's secret," Chloe summarises briefly as they enter the Doing store.
"We're looking for the Rare Elements section," Chloe announces.
"You've been here before?" Simeon asks.
"Oh, yes, plenty of times."
Simeon notices an interesting aisle. "There's a whole Graphene aisle there! Strengthen anything, from concrete to clothing! Concretene?"
As they round a corner an overhead sign says, "Rare Earths". .
"You're Earth descended, aren't you?" Simeon says. "That's rare here!" he grins. .
"Yes," Chloe pauses and turns towards Simeon, "and, if I'm reading things right, you're Earth descended, too."
Chloe chooses this moment to kiss Simeon and tell him about one of her most interesting finds.
Simeon can't protest his lineage is Gallifreyan for a moment until Chloe stops kissing him.
"I thought I should tell you," Chloe continues. "I've found evidence that Gallifreyans are also Earth descended."
"How can that be?" Simeon grasps at his slight knowledge of Gallifreyan history. "We've been on Gallifrey for thousands of years, well before time travel or space travel was discovered."
A cafe for travel-weary space visitors is nearby. They find a spare table and sit down, wiping some slime off the table top. .
"Yuk, what was that from?" Simeon asks in disgust.
"Something dripping with globs of something sticky," Chloe says. She's no idea what type of lifeform it might be from, but she's seen a few dribblers in her time! .
They settle for a few moments before Chloe starts telling Simeon of her information. "I've been reading lots about the early days of Gallifrey recently," Chloe says.
"Where did you find that from?" Simeon asks.
Chloe sighs. She can see that there are still a lot of things she hasn't told Simeon about.
"From the Gallifreyan Library," she says. This isn't the entire truth - about her mother having an entire copy of the Gallifreyan Library (ref. 9), but it feels close enough for the time being.
"When did you go there?" Simeon asks.
"Oh, occasionally," Chloe tells him, trying to brush aside his minor interruption to her major story. "But I've discovered that Gallifreyans may well be Earth descended."
"How could that happen?"
"There's a story about a rift that a group of bronze-age villagers from Earth walked through and arrived on Gallifrey." (Ref. 28.)
"Wow, they never told us about that at school!"
"I don't think anyone else knows about it, it was rated top secret!" Chloe says carelessly.
"Then how did you gain access?" Simeon asks inquisitively, trying not to be too intense.
Suddenly this seems more insecure than Chloe had thought. "My mother is very good at decryption," Chloe says.
But did this help? Simeon seems annoyed at the intrusion into his planet's history. "How can Crystelle have any access to Gallifreyan Library information at all?" he asks as gently as he can. In the light of the Doctor's request, Simeon feels this might be a good moment to challenge the ownership of the Gallifreyan documents.
Chloe decides she must start a little earlier in the story. "You know that she was involved in the rescuing of Gallifrey?" she asks - to check that Simeon can be on-side (ref. 9).
"Yes, she had a role," Simeon says.
"Do you promise not to tell anyone, not even the Doctor?" Chloe asks.
Simeon loves Chloe and he can see that she has something important to tell him, and she has said that they will have no secrets.
"Yes, of course," Simeon promises.
"My mother's role was to rescue the contents of the Gallifreyan Library while the Doctor rescued the people."
"Ah, I see, so your mother got the Library contents?"
"Yes," Chloe says.
"And you're reading them now?"
"Yes," Chloe says.
"I thought all that information was restored back to the new Gallifreyan Library after the restoration of Gallifrey."
"Yes, it has been," Chloe says, "but my mother kept a copy."
"But that's Intellectual Property of Gallifrey" Simeon says gently. "She shouldn't have retained a copy and she shouldn't continue to keep it either."
The legal position feels ominously difficult to justify now. Simeon has stated the legalities clearly, however gently. Had her mother been tempted to keep a copy, or had it been thrust on her? But Crystelle isn't there with them just now to defend herself.
"Simeon, I'll have to ask my Mum about how this all came about, I'm sorry." What more could she say?
"That's alright, I know it's been put to good use. I'm really sorry, I didn't mean to alarm you," Simeon says. "It'll all get sorted out, I'm sure."
"We should look for the Rare Elements section," Chloe says as she stands up again. "Then I'll have to get it processed into the form I need." They amble on towards another sign. She feels uneasy with the challenge, yet her love for Simeon wins out; she fully accepts his apology for unsettling her.
Simeon has a burning question about her Wristwatch Tardis failure. "What if it had failed when you were away from home?" he asks.
It's a simple question for Chloe, but clearly one she appears to have overlooked. When away from home she wouldn't be able to diagnose the problem and they wouldn't be able to get back.
"Can I make a suggestion?" Simeon says. "We could take a spare Tardis summoner for your mother's Tardis."
They breathe more easily again. The power failure had alarmed Chloe, but she had grown too confident in the capabilities of her Wristwatch Tardis. She had assumed it would function perfectly forever like a Gallifreyan Tardis, which can carry all the spare parts it needs – if they are re-stocked, that is!
Fixing the Power Collector.
Chloe's Wristwatch Tardis has still got power problems. The power collector has malfunctioned near a star in the Andromeda Galaxy and Chloe goes to fix it in her mother's Tardis, but its power won't be on-line for a few days until automated re-commissioning has completed. So, Chloe can't use her Wristwatch Tardis until then. This doesn't seem to bother Chloe or Simeon as they can use her mother's Tardis, at least for now.
This probably won't stop them from doing much!