AN: I have some followers! Very exciting! Thank you BSwifty1997 for the review. I'm excited for this story too! I don't promise scheduled updates. Life is not so organized as all that. I describe the school for part of this scene, but I honestly could not remember some of the details of its appearance, so I made them up. I like the way my version sounds though.
So the BBC owns Doctor Who. But who owns the BBC?
The birds sang outside the holographic windows. Their voices were familiar to Clara's terrestrial ears, but their melodies were indescribably alien. Gallifreyan avian life. She wondered if they even looked like Earth birds. It sent bright shudders down her spine to think that in some other life, these strange songs and their singers had been more commonplace to her than robins and blue jays.
She still sat at the worn table, clutching her cup of tea. A churning mass of excitement filled the pit of her stomach, far more violent than any butterflies. She took a few breaths in an effort to steady herself.
"So how do we do this?" Clara spoke aloud to the empty room, her eyes locked on the fiery landscape beyond the window.
Simply. Close your eyes.
Clara obeyed. It was strange though. With her eyes shut tight, she still saw the kitchen, in a way. Like a hazy afterimage of colorful smoky outlines traced across her eyelids, she could make out the vague shapes of familiar objects. She directed her weird smoke gaze to her own hands, holding them out to examine them. Purple and blue swirls of blurry light that slowly shifted through green and yellow outlined what she supposed were her fingers and palms. Clara began to shake. Something had to be very wrong here. The possibility of her own insanity crept back into the corner of her brain.
"What is this?"
Welcome to your mind's eye.
"What? How is that -"
The mind's eye is the place where you visualize ideas and images. If you aren't actively imagining any particular thing, it usually just contains this sort of vague awareness of whatever space you happen to occupy. That is what you are seeing.
"But I'm not supposed to actually see what I imagine, it's just in my brain! How can I be seeing this?" Clara waved her hand at the ghostly mirage of the kitchen, her movement leaving the now orange and red smoke trailing in arcs across the air.
I am sending the signals of the imagery directly to your visual processing centers, instead of letting them wander around your grey matter like lost puzzle pieces.
"So you are playing doctor with my brain right now. Great!"
Don't panic, it's not permanent and it will have no lasting side effects. Once I let the signals go back to their original directionless wandering, it will be like nothing happened.
"But now there are two conflicting signals coming into my brain at once. What happens if I open my eyes? Let the other signal come through?"
Why don't you try it?
Clara bit her lip, then cracked her eyes open ever so slowly. The smoke trails remained, superimposed over the real objects they represented.
"Wow."
Your brain processes both at once. Interesting. Just so you know, I will be redirecting signals for your other senses as we go deeper, but probably just gradually. For now, close your eyes again.
The normal kitchen disappeared as her eyelids dropped, leaving her with just the ghost outline of the space. "Why can't I keep my eyes open?"
It will start to get confusing when you visualize something other than this room. Now, imagine a long hallway lined with doors.
Clara began to form the image, and the rainbow trails of glowing mist danced through the air, abandoning their forms to take the shapes of doors, knobs, floor, walls, and ceiling. The new picture pulsed with shifting colors, still hazy from its recent creation.
Good! But the more detail you add, the easier this will be.
She wasn't entirely sure what "this" referred to, but Clara decided not to question the powerful telepathic being with psychic powers currently controlling the basic functions of her brain. She pictured the hallways at her school. There were long lines of thick metal doors painted a dark green. Along the left hand wall, the doors had large glass windows installed above them, reaching from the top of the door to the tall ceiling, which let rays of late afternoon sun drench the space. Smooth walls painted a creamy caramel brown stretched into the distance. The floor was a mosaic of white and brown tiles. As she added details from her memory to the image, the shadowy outline behind her eyelids was filled out, spreading in swirls of color like watercolor paints across a primed canvas, darkening with each stroke of her mental brush.
At last the hallway was complete, and Clara felt as though she were gazing at a photograph of her school. Actually, even in its completed state, the mental image didn't quite seem real. There was a roughness around the edges that reminded Clara of a sketch or drawing, or perhaps a dream.
Not bad for your first time. Smart to pick something familiar to you.
"Thanks! But why did you have me do this?"
Imagine that this is your memory. Behind any door, you will find and experience a memory sequence. Some sequences are more familiar to you than others. Some sequences are less pleasant than others. They are all your memories, however.
"But there are so many doors here!"
Yes. You have had many memories, even just in the one life you know of now.
"So how do I know which one to enter? Do I just start opening doors?"
No, don't be silly. That's what you've been doing. This time, you will have help.
Something pulled at her skirt, and Clara looked down. She couldn't see anything that would have caused the tugging, however she realized that she was standing inside the imagined hallway instead of sitting in the kitchen, even though she could still feel the chair beneath her and the mug of tea between her hands. But how was that -? Her reaction was to blink in surprise, but she just ended up briefly scrunching her eyes tightly shut since, of course, they were already closed. Immediately she felt foolish.
"I picture myself inside the hallway, so I am."
That's right. Good catch.
"I'm impressed." A voice spoke from behind Clara, and she jumped, turning to face the source. A young girl stood in the center of the hallway, just inches away. The child, no more than 7 or 8, appeared to be anatomically identical to a human girl. However, her skin was not any natural shade of brown and pink – it was a deep blue, and her eyes glowed like golden trails of regeneration energy, or more probably, the heart of the TARDIS.
"What do you think?" the girl spun around, making her standard issue school uniform skirt swirl around her knees. "I'm projecting an image of myself onto your brain, but normally I don't have much of a corporeal form, so I made this up. I think it will be easier to help you this way. Physical guides are more reliable. Probably."
"Um, actually it's a little unsettling. Do you think you could make the eyes less – glowy?"
TARDIS girl pouted, "But I really like the eyes! Rose got to have them! Before she nearly destroyed the universe…" She had started staring into the middle distance, recalling something, but now she glanced back at Clara; "I'll change them if it'll help."
Immediately the light dissipated, leaving the TARDIS with golden irises. She blinked. "Oh, well now I look like one of those little aliens from Platform One! That was an interesting day. The Doctor got a parking ticket for me." The girl giggled, and the sound reminded Clara more of the wheezing of the engines at take-off than a human voice.
"Why did you choose to be a child?"
The girl locked eyes with Clara, and her breath caught in her throat. For a moment, Clara was lost in that gaze. She had thought the Doctor's eyes were old. She had been so very wrong. These eyes were as ageless as the universe, their owner having seen all of time stretched out before and behind her from the moment of her conception like a tapestry of stars, space, planets, people, beginnings and endings. For one stuttering heartbeat, Clara could almost see it too.
The universe is massive and full of wonder. Who would not choose to see it with the awe of a child?
The TARDIS girl clapped her hands, swiftly cutting the tension between them like a rubber band; "So! Back to the adventure at hand. I've never really gotten to go on the adventures before. Except that one time, I suppose, but still! This should be fun!"
Clara shook the moment off with more difficulty, but managed to give the strange blue child a smile, "Ok, where do we begin?"
"At the beginning, of course. Come on!" she reached out, beckoning Clara follow. The young woman did so, slipping her hand into her guide's much smaller blue hand. The pair began walking down the hallway, passing by dozens of identical doors as they traveled farther into the limitless corridor. After what felt like mere minutes, they had passed more doors than Clara would have believed if she hadn't given up counting after 500.
"How are we going so fast?" she asked before a second thought occurred to her, "And am I wandering around the TARDIS back in reality?!"
The child scoffed, "No, of course not, silly! The farther you engross yourself into your mind's eye and the more I connect your senses to it, the more you can control this place and the less you are aware of the outside world. At some point, you stop consciously controlling your body. You haven't physically moved since you tried to blink earlier," she snickered a bit, glancing up at Clara, "That was pretty funny, actually." Clara just raised an eyebrow at her, which only made the TARDIS girl laugh harder. A few deep breaths later, she had found her composure once again, "Anyway, we can walk so fast because you believe we can. We could fly if you decided and imagined it."
"Really?"
The girl shrugged, "It's your mind."
Clara thought about that as they continued to walk. She could do anything here. Any image she imagined could appear. Literally anything… A thought suggested itself to her, pushing out from the back of her mind. What about…? But she quickly stuffed that idea back into her subconscious. Not with the TARDIS also here. That would just be embarrassing.
"Ah ha! Here we go!" her hand was suddenly abandoned as the girl bounced excitedly up to a door just a little ways ahead. Someone had painted a large red X over the green, and what might have been a name was outlined below it in the same color:
OS
The Maker
Above the X, a small note had been written in a child's handwriting:
Note to self – start here!
-Love, TARDIS
PS – Have fun!
Clara threw a quizzical look at the little girl next to her, who just shrugged. "I already know where it was, but needed some way to find it again. There is a lot of hallway here!" The young woman rolled her eyes, but smiled briefly. Then she squared her shoulders and touched the door knob. It seemed to hum under her hand, and she swallowed, suddenly nervous. What was she going to find on the other side? Was she really ready for this? Another glance to her small companion revealed that she was grinning enormously, excitement radiating off her in waves. It was infectious, and Clara soon found a matching expression spreading across her face, chasing away her doubt. "Ready?"
"Always! Just open the door!"
"Ok. 3… 2… 1…"
The knob twisted easily, and Clara stepped forward into an explosion of light.