CHAPTER SUMMARY: Genesis secret is finally revealed while the Pythia is putting to work her plans to secure her future through Vael.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: The last part with Vael and the Time Scaphe is something I pulled directly from the book, "The New Doctor Who Adventures - Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible" by Marc Platt. That bit of writing goes to Marc Platt. Everything else is mine. I wanted to pull some bits from the book because I thought they would add to the story which this in inspired from.
The Founders of Gallifrey
Chapter 5: A Crack in the Foundation
He wasn't the only individual, that was something he was certain of now.
Feeling her mind close away from the telepathic link all Gallifreyan's shared, it was something only a special few could do. Like him. No one was ever truly alone in their own mind...except for the Individuals, who could turn it all off as they pleased. They were stronger than the others.
But this raised a question, why were there two of them? There should only be one, and HE was the one!
Vael paused, thinking over his interaction with the young woman. She had red-hair just like him, the other sign of an individual. And her mind was strong, but not as strong as his. He thought back to her surprise at him being able to see her...as if she had been sneaking peeks at him before.
His fists curled up, the untamed anger inside him boiling again. It was decided then, the next time he saw her, would be her last .
A sudden chill crawled down Omega's back and the overwhelming pressure of anxiety began to tighten his chest. Instantly, he knew something was wrong and rushed out the door, going to find his sister.
"You saw him again?"
Genesis nodded, sobbing. "And this time he could see me." She was like a deer caught in the headlights. It took all her strength to get away.
Omega took her into a hug. "It's okay."
"He knows what I am now." She shuddered. "He knows we are both individual's."
"I knew it!" a new voice entered the room, surprising them. The siblings turned to see their two friends walking into the room and Patience joining them. "I mean it was a guess really from your ginger hair." The Other said. "You're one of those Individual's."
Rassilon went over to the siblings, giving a disappointed scowl. Genesis felt a chill go down her back. "Why didn't you tell us, most of all me? I've known you both all my life."
"Razz…" Omega sighed, glancing at his sister. "It wasn't for me to tell."
"He was trying to protect me...from the Pythia." Genesis finally confessed, biting her lip. "He didn't want the Pythia finding out about what I could do."
"And what exactly can you do?" Rassilon questioned carefully.
Genesis looked to her brother, awaiting his nod to show them. They could feel her mind bending around the room before everything in it began to levitate in the air, completely in her control. The Other and Patience looked in amazement and Rassilon looked completely shocked.
And then her telepathic bond with them began to fade as everything came back to the ground shakily, some furniture crashing. Then Genesis' mind seemed to disappear from the telepathic web altogether. She wasn't in control of her powers fully yet. They frightened her.
"Whoa. Okay, that was cool." The Other commented, taking his best friend into a big hug. "How long have you been able to do that?"
"I only just discovered it not too long ago. A few months." She looked to her brother, sharing the thought of when she first saw Vael. That was when she started to figure it out. Omega cleared his throat uncomfortably at it.
Rassilon was silent, looking upon his best friend and his sister with an unreadable look. His head raced with all different kinds of thoughts, causing Omega to speak. "Razz...Don't think that."
"And why shouldn't I? You've thought the same thing too."
Genesis looked down uncomfortably, sensing the tension beginning to boil from Rassilon.
"I've been trying to prevent that from happening!" Omega snapped. "Why do you think I suggested we teach her at home instead of sending her to the Academia? I've thought about her becoming the next Pythia multiple times, but it won't happen if they don't know she doesn't exist."
Rassilon scowled at them and in that moment, Genesis felt like running away. She had never seen them fight like this before...and she felt bad because it was all due to her.
"Ah, but you forgot to mention the most important detail you're skimming over, there are two Individuals! Your sister and that young man, Vael. How did you know about him? Where did you get your information from?" Despite his best efforts, Rassilon read Omega's mind. He turned to look at Genesis, walking straight up to her. "You."
Genesis gulped, glaring. Her mind was completely blocked from him, but her brother couldn't do the same. His mind was left open for Rassilon to finally put all the pieces together.
"You saw him, that's how. You witnessed him killing that student and you told your brother." Genesis' silence only proved his answer true. "The Other and I felt a disturbance in your telepathic bonds and came rushing here...but I see now that it was only because your sister seems to be connecting with another of her kind. A cold, blooded killer."
His words cut her cold and deep, making her feel like she had been punched and the air was knocked out of her. All that remained was a painful and gut-wrenching feeling. She didn't need to open her mind to Rassilon to know what he currently thought of her. He made it obvious.
"Hey Rassilon-"
The Other was interrupted by him. "No! Everything we've been working for is in danger now because of her, because of them! The Pythia probably already knows about them."
Genesis looked to her brother with wide eyes, knowing Rassilon found the one thing he was looking for the most. I'm sorry, sister.
"You've already been in contact with her." The Other looked at her with the same surprise. Rassilon scoffed, beginning to walk from the room. "Let's hope your sister hasn't ruined our plans by sharing them with the Pythia."
"I've located him." The Pythia revealed, sitting in her cage above the steam coming through a crack in the planet's structure. "He's getting aboard the Time Scaphe as planned. The Neo-Technologists don't even know our spy is aboard."
The sisterhood cheered in celebration as the Pythia grinned.
"Show me the future, Vael, my predecessor."
The rusty surface of Gallifrey, blotched with brown lakes and dusty-grey clouds, spun beneath them and was eclipsed by darkness, devoured by the vortex void into which the Chronauts were hurled. This brief and unexpected mental image, so startling to the first-ever time travellers, still came as a shock to all those who followed on later missions.
They were alone in the dark with only each other's thoughts to cling to. Hope and time trickled away into nothing.
There was a click. A toy sprung to life and whirled across the floor, followed by a giggle from the pilot. "This way," he said aloud, "be there soon."
Cascades of rainbow light streamed from a far point forming a tunnel along which the Scaphe passed through. The Chronauts reclined on couches that lay around the wheel of the chamber. Their heads that drove the ship rested against the wheel hub in whose hollowed centre sat the pilot, playing with his toys. Only occasionally, the child tapped his fingers on a hovering grid of coloured light that guided the Scaphe through time's convoluted vectors.
The crew watched the streaming light play in the pool above their heads as they traveled up-time or down-time. It was an illusion. No one alive had seen or could imagine the vortex real. It was an unproven dimension which existed only in theory- and so they were travellers within its boundaries, bootstrapping their way across its coursing tumult, bringing now to the future or the past, in concert with laws more akin to the superstitions of the suet workers in the city.
This was no different to a hundred simulations they had been through, but if they returned home from flight, they would be pioneers. If they did not, they were martyrs.
Captain Pekkary had no need to watch his companions. The fusion of their minds as a crew told him everything. The Scaphe's course had been chosen and presented. Ninety minutes immersion in a vortex, to emerge into real time ninety days after departure. Pekkary closed his eyes and could still see their passage through the vortex. They had simply to think 'We travel' and they went. Only the pilot thought separately.
'We travel.'
The thought core of the crew, bound and woven by three years of training, virtually eliminated the necessity for a reality. Six minds in one mind. A microcosmic pool of awareness. Shared thoughts in a harmonic ratio. Except…
The loss of Chronaut Taspar from the crew had to disturbed them all in its suddenness. A freak skimmer boat accident among the marshlands near the city, only sixty-one days before their mission commenced. Taspar, a proven quantum theorist and the crew's confirmed joker, who acted as their pilot's guardian, responsible for the young navigator's welfare. They had all loved him.
A hurried investigation blamed the crash on a corroded fuel plug and a pocket of volatile marsh gas. The mishap was unpredictable and unfortunate. Such are the ways of the gods. Since the time programme could not be delayed. Taspar was interred with full posthumous honour and the mission dedicated to his memory. All the crew had felt his scream and tasted mud as imagined water choked their lungs.
Taspar's replacement had been selected, Amnoni called it imposed, by the Court of Principals with no consultation with the crew. He came from a newly prosperous family in the pasture belt valleys and his hair was almost as red and flame gold as that of the crew's Pilot. He immediately proved himself an excellent time theorist. His shared thoughts could be abrupt and angry. Too much for the Individual.
In short, Chronaut Vael Voryunsti Sheverell was an intruder, and worse, the Pilot did not like him. The mission and all their lives lay in the hands of a four-year-old innocent who must not be provoked. And provocation seemed to be Vael's forte.
"The pilot is the only one concentrating," he spoke.
It was a habit Vael had picked up to annoy them when they excluded him from their thoughts. He watched them from his couch with the air of a dispassionate sneer.
They stared back awkwardly, hiding their feelings behind smiles of concern. Chesperl put out a thread of warmth and friendship. It was turned away. In his playpen at the heart of the ship, the pilot had become very quiet.
At that moment. Pekkary caught the first intimations of approaching danger. Since he sensed it, they all knew. With a smirk, Vael turned on his couch. Pulling at the monitor leads on his arms, he knelt up and looked over the top of the hollowed hub at the pilot.
"Hello, little one," he said coldly. "Still missing nanny?"
The child, knowing things grown-ups forgot, had been gazing up at the lights in the spheric pool. He stared at his tormentor with widening eyes and pulled his toys in close for protection. The ship's lights guttered and the hum of the power drive fluctuated for a moment.
"Vael." The warnings the crew sent out were ignored. The pilot whimpered in anticipation of a blow.
Vael's hand darted out and snatched away one of the toys. The child's eyes filled with a hatred that was frightening in one so innocent. The Time Scaphe lurched as the guiding concentration fell apart.
Pekkary struggled to assert an order. But 'We travel' was lost.
Reogus launched out of his seat. "Leave him alone, you little sheetsnacker!" he shouted, pulling Vael away by the head. The pilot screamed with fright. The chamber lights dimmed and the spheric pool filled all the chamber with the streaming light of the vortex.
The lights of the vortex reeled in Vael's head like scattered moments of the siren past, willing him out of reality into the safety of his memories. It was too easy and he knew it. A path had been cut through his studies to lead him inexorably to his current placement on the Scaphe. He scoffed as sacrifices of propitiation on secret altars were made on his behalf. But doors opened. Opportunity, never a lengthy visitor, called often. A hidden guiding hand slapped away all opposition.
Even now, as the primal energies of creation tore at the ship, he was not afraid. It was always with him. The eye that watched in his head. Sometimes the Sphinx, sometimes the wise woman, sometimes the copper moon Pazithi Gallifreya. And sometimes, when he best knew despair, the wild eye of that innocent girl wreathed in scorching smoke.
He had a power in him. A power to manipulate and inflict, to scorch and wither. They might call it a crime- those who thought themselves powerful. But she- the Pythia, the most venerable of all, sought this power, even came into his head after it.
She imagined she used him for her own purpose - whatever that might be. Perhaps, but he used her also. He was the Individual among Individuals . The power was his. And even he - until he understood the nature of his crime and could control it - even he was afraid of it.
Where would it lead? When would he fulfil a legend and have his own victory parades through the city?
His thoughts went back to the red-haired girl who was just like him. It seemed the Pythia didn't know of her. She was a nobody, and he would keep it that way.
