Day 5
'Back to base' meant , first and foremost, 'back to where he'd left the TARDIS', although he did set up a bit of a presence around it, mostly instruments and scraps of technology that he'd dragged out of the TARDIS and assembled into bizarre blooms in the vicinity of the ship, mostly for the sake of a few preliminary scans – He was seldom one to bother with safety, but if he was going to be running around here by himself with no one to ask for directions, he'd rather know where the interesting bits were.
And while he was at it, he might as well collect data about the greater layout of the structures, their stability, density and lots of specific things – to be honest, he got a bit carried away, it had been a while since he'd gotten a chance to prove his skill in the discipline of the long-range scans or detailed general measurements in general, even if was mostly because he'd acquired a good knack for knowing what to scan for to quickly disprove or confirm a given working hypothesis.
So he set himself a challenge, mostly for it's own sake: Let's see how much pointless random data of the Xalaxian towers he could collect, at least enough to try and see if he could spot some surprising pattern in there, attempt the same by running some of his favorite classification or analysis algorithms on it, or at least make some artistic three (or more) dimensional replicas of the lost city.
For that he had, perhaps quite appropriately, set up camp in what used to be an observatory, museum, or combination there of.
He kept the TARDIS in what used to be a huge showroom of sorts, a dome of a brass-like material that could be opened to reveal the sky or used for projections, but was also engraved with a very detailed likeness of the constellations as seen from Fabron – Or what they had been like when this facility was still operating. Since the dome was too far up-high for most visitors to appreciate just how exact the engravings would have been, the Doctor surmised that this was yet another attempt to show off to the rest of the planet.
Beyond a small stage, many padded seats in minimalistic, black designs and some extra classroom-style chairs he'd arranged on said stage and installed his contraptions around, the room also contained a large clockwork model of this star system that would have turned a good bit over the heads of the audience, displaying Fabron with its four brethren planets, three gas-giants (on one which hosted the only other life in the system on one of its moon, a rich and colorful flora of fungal and primitive plant-like organisms, shores slick with bacterial biofilms in interesting colors) and one barren, rocky world that circled its sun in a tight orbit, and in the back of the room, a large telescope system containing several individual instruments that registered different kinds of input, such as one which could pick up roentgen radiation, which the designers and architects in charge of this room and its wall treated with the reverence you would give an organ in a church when incorporating its large pipes into the complete design of the room that comprised almost all of this building's topmost floor.
The seats, of course, were also practical to sit down for some light reading, and as in any museum there were facilities for both guests and guards to attend to their bare necessities.
Lower on the walls, where the spectators could actually be expected to be able to read them easily, a few sets of more mundane star charts revealed and documented how the Fabronians had once explored their entire galaxy; But the technology available to them at the time of this writing would only carry them to roughly two-thirds of their own spiral arms, where their ancestors had become myth as much as on the world that gave birth to them, before the numerous wars gradually steered their interests and energy away from further space travel.
Even in their glory days, their ancestors never acquired the means to actually leave their galaxy, and neither did many of their other neighbors, before the arrival of outside visitors such as humans, Time Lords and (unfortunately) Daleks – The best anyone had been able to come up before that was the ability to cross between galaxies in Nevetina's local group; and all such civilations had become shrouded in myth by the time the humans came; Easy travel between various parts of the galaxy was already considered impressive. The neighboring Galaxy had given rise to a species known as the Aréal, that could reach Nevetina's spiral, and was, in fact, aware that the humans had not been the first visitors to their local group - In the age of the Fledgling Empires, at very least the Time Lords and the Eternals had visited and, in fact, contributed to the local energy beings – like the Aréal themselves - adopting a policy of using humanoid guises; The forms later natives and even later human colonists were met with were not meant to emulate them, nor the fully corporeal species the Aréal had evolved from, but the Gallifreyan explorers they'd first made contact with long before the oceans of Nevetina's planets spat out anything multicellular; The Areál world itself had been the oldest conventional life in its own Galaxy, with the only older – and similarly energy-based beings – having always existed in energy form and dating back to the processes of the early universe that had given rise to things resembling life without taking the detour to a planet.
(They, too, took Time Lord-like forms for the sake of communication, but the negotiations kind of broke down back in the day. To paraphrase, a humanoid representative of the continuum – which might be the appellation of their race, their society, or one particular individual using some kind of interface or avatar, they weren't exactly forthcoming about which one it was – showed up as a doppelganger of one particular Time Lord, and explained in perhaps more clumsy than truly haughty what they had done for the attempt of communicating with them and why they had done it.
The Time Lord, perhaps assuming that the continuum were better at communicating than they truly were, stopped listening at what loosely corresponded to "We were here first" or, "Although you are puny fleshy blobs, you don't seem half stupid" and responded with something that could only be accurately abbreviated as "Your Mom!"
The continuum probably didn't even have a mother, but if they'd had one, they'd probably have valiantly defended her honor to the bitter end, so, the negotiations for any sort of alliance or cultural exchange fell through.
When the non-interference policy was established, the continuum decided to ignore them – and most other humanoids - right back, and both species found that they would most rather not involve themselves in the matters of the others, each thinking the other unprepared primitives – the ability to travel in time was unlikely to impress beings who could easily transcend it and weren't held up with matters of linearity, which the Doctor himself always found quite ironic – you'd think that not having to worry about out-of-sequence meetings would have made a partnership easier.
In any case, whether it was something to do with their different perspective on the universe, their personal opinion or just plain-old big-headed ignorance, the continuum did not think the Time Lords' abilities to travel all the way from the Milky Way in an instant to be particularly impressive, even though they themselves seemed to be unable or uninterested to extend their scope of influence beyond their home Galaxy.
If anything, the records suggested they might've been puzzled as to why anyone would find it worth bothering.
But come the Time War, and it would be left to him and his weary body (which, despite all of his insistence of working only for himself and for his goal of preventing and mitigating further harm, was still quite demonstrably Time Lord and thus likely to invite distrust) to convince both the Aréal and the continuum that the very corporeal Daleks were an actual threat to them, and get them to work with various splintered human factions and diverse Nevetina Galaxy natives, not all of which could even breathe the same atmosphere – At least, the continuum's communication skills had somewhat improved, and he was met with two identical-looking representatives who introduced themselves as something akin to twin sisters, which he figured was a close enough equivalent, although not the metaphor he would have used – Maybe it was the last vestiges of his inner physics nerd, or the simple fact that his Time Lord senses allowed him a somewhat better glimpse at what they actually were, immediately, without delay or the need to glance at screens; He would probably have compared them to an electron/positron pair arising out of the vacuum. 'Sisters' implied parents, some origin in a smaller version of their current form, even meiosis –
He was also not quite sure if one of the 'sisters' was correctly described as a 'dissenter' rather than a manifestation of a different aspect of the same thing, but he honestly preferred dealing with that one – His perception of like-mindedness might have been truth, or, it might have resulted from him interpreting some of the things she said and did as alike to himself in a way that might have the other one going, 'Geez, Humanoids' (paraphrasing, of course), but in any case, he was fairly certain that she found taking corporeal form, or mimicking the properties of 'chemical life' as they called it, somewhat interesting and seemed to unexpectedly enjoy pouring booze into it, taking a liking to a yellowish concoction from one of the local planets.
While she was only so forthcoming with the information, she came off as somewhat eccentric, and she seemed more willing to learn and understand the corporeals' cause and why they might have a problem with the continuum's approach, nay, seemed actually interested in the universe at the matter level and even came to acknowledge that the continuum might have something to learn from them;
By the end of it, he could almost said that he felt a certain kinship with the ageless energy being and wished he'd met her at a different point in his life, when he could still have offered her to come with him for a while and just give him her perspective on the cosmos – a concept that she only seemed capable of understanding in a detached, intellectual manner. For her kind, the Time War was like a spot of thin ice on the surface of spacetime, a dangerous spot to be walked around and avoided. For him it had become a tar pit that was impossible to escape, and he was left having to secure the continuum's aid in saving the rest of their galactic neighborhood from that fate.
Even with his long history of diplomatic experience, he didn't think he could have pulled it off without a certain wide-faced colonist girl and her perspective on the Galaxy's inner political workings – she's said that while her ancestors hadn't evolved here, she considered the Nevetina Galaxy her home, the colony planet her world-
And that was a sentiment he could understand all too well, quite ironically –
Of course, by then, she'd put two and two together and deduced from his words and mentions here and there that he'd been to the – at this period in time – long lost home world of the human race (or Ravalox, as it had been known by then) and demanded to be told about it.
(Sweet, sweet Earth – The War had not allowed him to visit for a long, long time. )
In any case, he Time Lords then were most likely the first humanoid-like civilization to come up with advanced space-flight and visit other Galaxies. The closest to trans-galactic flight in Nevetina itself came not from the main Galaxy but an associated smaller one, sort of its counterpart to the Magellan clouds, by the scions of the long lost planet Lendara, and they had in turn encountered first the Aréal and then the Fabronians, assuring that the builders of this place had heard of the Milky way's existence in the form of legends at least, but that's all they knew of it, scholars all over the Nevetina Galaxy had frequently debated whether it was a real place, and even when the humans arrived as living proof of sorts, the connection between the place in the legend, and wherever these ingenious, fast-breeding new arrivals might have come from was rarely drawn.
It was too far away to be seen, even with the most powerful telescopes – but the Fabronians' telescopes had been powerful indeed, so they were at least aware that there were civilizations in other Galaxies, having picked up the lights of their cities – the last few paragraphs of the charts and info posters were devoted to speculating about them, but even then, the authors of the text had probably never expected that the last ever person to actually read their poster would be one of those off-galaxy life forms.
All things considered, he'd found plenty of ways to amuse himself even in the very room he'd first landed on, but if he wanted to leave this institution, he'd have to walk through a few more floors' worth of museum, which he seldom managed without getting distracted amid paintings that had barely faded inside their preservative frames, artifacts of simpler forms of technology documenting the civilization's progress during distant times, and skeletons of long-gone animals about which knowledge had now also become lost – some were juxtaposed to animals that had still been extant at the time the museum had last been frequented, but has ceased to be by the current time period; The charts had been kept from even catching dust by dutiful cleaning robots that still made their rounds at a specific time in the evening when the museum had presumably closed it doors to the public.
Other exhibits would have told the attentive onlooker about the city's long history, garnishing artifacts from the various time periods with little plastic models of the city's perimeter and how it had expanded sideways, upwards and downwards over the course of it's long, long history.
As the Doctor took in the many texts and artifacts, he made mental notes of which places and time periods might be worth a visit, which legends and unusual accounts might be worth investigating and witnessing.
In that sense, it was probably rather fitting that he'd wound up here - He'd always felt at home in museums. As a child he'd been drawn in by the seemingly endless amount of fascinating objects and histories to go with them; Now, over 2000 years later, he still felt that wonder (on his better days, at least), but with the proud distinction that he'd already found out many of the world's secrets, and didn't need any charts or guides to know the secrets all those object held, in fact, he often knew better than many a professional expert, and some of the things might even bear the handprints of his interference (not here of course, at least not yet) – So when he walked through one of these collections now, he felt a little like a nobleman proudly overlooking the splendor of his realm, or perhaps rather like the leader of a band of thieves overlooking his 'territory' – "All mine!", in the lightest, least burdening, most freeing sense of the word.
The eclectic assortments of artifacts from throughout the ages might be the closest thing to his own existence that could be assembled in one room at one time, so the affinity he'd felt as a boy had only grown stronger. Who knows? He might indeed end up living in, and curating one in his last days – perhaps he might even succeed at getting Romana (who, one might imagine, would be an old lady by then) to say that one of his expositions trumped his brother's art collection.
But before that, he'd have to give this city's past a thorough visiting, and then come back to this place to 'keep score'.
He might just offer office-man to take him there If he ever did go back to bring him his flowerpot; If he was happy to have the thing back, he could tell him to assist him as a sleuthing partner for compensation. From what his living quarters revealed, office-man didn't seem particularly adventurous, the Doctor doubted that he'd ever bothered to visit this museum. But office-man's meticulousness suggested that he might be attentive, and as such, useful. Or, he might as well turn out be complete rubbish.
Or not all that grateful for the return of his amateurish flowerpot in the first place.
He supposed that in that case, he'd have to go get someone who could be relied upon, some of his other friends and associates... He was fortunate enough to know quite a bunch of extraordinary people, but for most of them, it was a long, long time since he'd last seen them, and their next parting might always be more painful, or more permanent, than the last.
One way or another, the past of Fabron had quite a bit in store for them:
At first, the city began as a group of stilt houses along the shore of a lagoon, it's founders little more than simple fishers looking to feed themselves and their families; It was only with the advent of ships that the crossroad of rivers going in and out of the place led to the settlement gaining greater importance, and a name: 'Xalax' was derived from the word 'ksalat' in one of Fabron's ancient tongues, meaning 'salt', or depending on the time period, condiments in general (likely one of the most important goods to be traded here), so this was literally 'salt pillar city', quite fittingly, when you considered the sparkly white material that had been used for many of the uppermost spires.
As a trade hub, the settlement grew in influence and power, and over time, formed a ring around the body of water that radiated outward like sunbeams; Later, large gates were built at the entrances of the Rivers, and fortifications decorated the strip that once separated the lagoon from a long bygone sea. Had the lagoon been smaller, a ring-shaped city might have proven impractical, but in the case of Xalax, the circumstances were just right for something unique to be created, and transport per ship made communication between the various parts of the city easier; It was perhaps only a matter of time until the various small islands in the center of the lagoon were settled, first by the occasional lighthouse, then by newer, shinier buildings of stone instead of wood. By then, trade had become the citizen's main route of income, with craftsmanship being on the rise – after all, the artisans here were in a position to sell to much of the nearby land provided they were good enough, and the lure of prosperity lead the best and brightest of the region to swarm to the blossoming city state.
It wasn't long until the islands were completely covered in white stone, boulevards and streets ending right next to the sea, with increasingly resplendent and architecturally advanced bridges spanning the gaps between them, finding further ways to build further and further into the lagoon.
Over the course of a few centuries, a city of canals was created, the whole place, one single work of art, filling the lagoon until only a large ring of water, a sort of ginormous traffic circle for ships – remained uncovered. There were volumes of novels written about the bands of thieves that reportedly lived beneath the stilts of the city, hiding in houseboats at the lightness surface of the water. As the city grew, the bodies of water became more and more buried beneath, and integrated into, the lower levels of its architecture, every year faster as the inhabitant's blossoming technology allowed them to dominate their environments more and more, to divert and rectify sources of water, and, eventually, even pump it away from whee they didn't want it, and use it for factories, or even filtered as drinking water.
Ambitious noblemen had the infrastructure arranged in circular rings that were imitated by architects all over the continent, and later, the planet; Ready to boast of their city's riches, progress and their mastering of nature, they encouraged the lavish decoration of the buildings and supported the arts and sciences; Wealthy traders invested in the furthering of industry that allowed it's citizens to live comfortable lives. They admired their ancestors, so the city's concentric circles and white, stone-ike buildings were retained and imitated, but while it wasn't apparent, sophisticated materials replaced marble and sandstone bit by bit, and before long, there came a time where the globe of Fabron was no longer dark when its face turned away from its mother star; The glowing circles of cities lit up so brightly they could be seen from space, and its children learned to identify mega cities as yet another type of biome like deserts, oceans or forests.
On earth, Venice is famous for having but one single bit of greens, the park one Austrian empress famously got married in – Xalax, even in its iron age-like period, had none, not on the islands, anyways. And even back then, an Empire spread out from the watery ring of the city, and, with its conquests, spread order, unity, education and technology across the globe, something it would not have been able to do if it hadn't left easy ways for the people in the new territories to contribute and earn citizenship; and in turn, the influx of the planet's many cultures turned Xalax into a center of cosmopolitanism – it's origin as a trade city and a place of opportunity for everyone didn't completely preclude or expunge xenophobia, but it did put a damper of tendencies that could have torn the empire apart.
The city was populated by people from all the local tribes to begin with, it was born as a point of exchange between those – So having people from different continents coming there was little more than an extension of that.
'Xalaxian' was not an ethnicity; It was an idea, a set of values.
Before long, the Fabronians were planning to mark the moons of the outer planets with such circles; Literature depicts the moons as covered with one big city, hosting billions of Fabronians – but they grew proud.
War erupted, between the Empire of Xalax and two other large factions. Small countries were easily annexed, but a situation where those countries had to chose which empire to join, or fear to become a battleground between them, things looked different. The strong identification of the Xalaxians with their empire led to polarization, a strong us-or-them mentality, for if you were bound by a creed, and not blood, wasn't anyone choosing a different empire rejecting, nay, spitting on that creed that they had come to associate with civilization itself?
It was a was not even a war of ideologies, as the horrors of war drove the governments to the same extreme acts; But there was a tendency for the people to define themselves in opposition to the other factions, with members of the same ethnicities – of the same families even! - fighting on both sides, in patterns that were compared to the spread of conversion-based monotheist religions.
The actual religions, however, were also split among faction lines, with the practitioners often killing each other for the same gods – One side to protect a holy site in their faction's territory, another, to conquer it from their rivals.
With the world too small for them, and yet, all to themselves, the factions of Fabron acted like giants, breaking everything around them with their reckless stomps, and the wounds of hatred and resentment left by that conflict never fully healed – In those days, it was probably decided that Fabron would become a world whose very advanced inhabitants really hated each other, who would fight even when they met other factions in the vacuum of space, despite the many attempts of brave individuals to break the cycle, or escape the madness.
The colonies on the outer planets' moons remained, and kept fighting another on a smaller, not quite as dramatic scale, but Fabron itself was completely engulfed by the deluge of war, and nuclear bombs left their cities in dust and their empires sinking into the dirt.
Xalax itself was thoroughly desecrated by enemy troops, ransacked, pillaged and burned, an it is likely that large stretches of the architecture eventually collapsed into the lagoon when they were left in disrepair following the invasion, leading it to resemble a crater – But the common account that the inner structures were swallowed by the angry seas was most likely mythical.
The incident threw the planet back for centuries, but even then, people didn't abandon Xalax; Refugees kept living in the half-collapsed glory of their ancestors, scavenging, hiding from storms, suffering thirst while the poisoned water festered right before their eyes.
Slums nestled into the hollows of the ruins like molds, and many died in misery; Vines and weeds took back the urban area without anyone to stop them, and many locals tried to farm in the uncovered mud.
Xalax rotted. Fabron stagnated. Here and there, previously provincial regions became safe heavens where people enjoyed a somewhat better standard of living, but many of them rejected technology as something demonic and evil, refusing to accept that it was not the thinkers, but the fanatics who were to blame, perhaps because it was easier to see them as an 'other'.
Xalax' renaissance came not from within, but from above: While the planet was nowhere near rebuilding, the guerrilla-fights in the asteroid belts and ring systems had continued, until one faction stumbled upon the means to drive the others out of the system, and yet more; One hazardous experiment in one remote research facility would turn the tide with force: From the skies, they returned to the planet, and wiped away the ascetic settlements that, to their eyes, were blasphemous. They washed the perimeter of Xalax free of the rubble, and rebuilt the city in a form that, to their eyes, honored both the style and ethos of their ancestors, but also reflected the space-dwelling lifestyle of its new masters: It was the birth of Xalax' vast underground structures (and down there, the rivers supposedly still flowed, though they could no longer be seen at the surface, forced into aesthetic pathways and artificial waterfalls in the lower city)
The megapolis was envisioned as a completely independent, self-sufficient, if not downright space-worthy colony that rebuffed even the rain and sunlight as beneath it – the new circles of Xalax were contained beneath a large, domed structure, a large, black lentil-shaped object just marring the landscape with its absurd size and the far-flung glory it would earn.
It was in those days that the Fabronians' reach extended all over the galaxy, and the power their civilization had in those days was nothing short of legendary, the tales of their feats making it hard to discern where history ended and myth began. It is said that they shaped the world like gods and unraveled many of its final secrets – At least by the standard of this one galaxy they didn't leave, and their descendants that never surpassed them.
Tales of that era's glory were never complete without warning of that era's arrogance, the decadence and corruption their power led to, and the horrific wars the could fight once 'provoked'. Having witnessed the Time War, he didn't even need his imagination to picture what they had been like – in fact, he had probably seen worse.
But whatever one might say about their society, the promises of their architects held up.
There was, amid the warfare, an incident that was known as Xalax' 'second sinking', but these words were an ironic echo at best – The complex did indeed become dislodged from the surrounding bedrock and sink a fair bit to where the ground of the lagoon had once been, but throughout that event, the entire complex remained intact – the corridors held, the power kept running.
It became buried under the molten rock, and when it had cooled, after they'd fearfully hidden in the complex for a long, long time (this, too, while writing or at least inspiring much poetry) their descendants had emerged and built the surface towers, including this one – The lower levels never went out of use until the city as a whole was evacuated much, much later, although legends of hidden mechanisms, tunnels or chambers – for example, the cavern were that goddess was supposed to be buried – abounded until the end, and indeed remained a popular subject long after the actual look and feel of the tunnels had become inaccessible to living memory, the art styles that depicted it afterward had gone through several styles that had probably less to do with the ancestors they both feared for the warnings of their foolishness and admired for their power and more with their own aesthetics and beliefs, indicative of what... would actually have been 'contemporary' to this period where the city had laid there abandoned, taunting any faraway passerby with the unfading whiteness of its immaculate spires.
Among all the untouched desolation, it was easy to forget that somewhere out there, beyond a certain perimeter, people still lived, time still passed, there was a fair chance that some of the paintings he'd seen a long time ago in the future were currently being painted as he stood there. Then again, everything could be 'current' if you only set up your telescope at the appropriate distance, and you didn't need a time machine to extrapolate and arrive at the conclusion that nothing really was. Albert Einstein needed little more than paper and a few equations to dispel the illusion of simultaneity, which, incidentally, was rather different from his Fabronian counterparts – while humanity had predicted things like antimatter, time dilation and the higgs field on paper long before they had the capabilities to detect them, the Fabronians first encountered these phenomena when they caused pesky, unexpected errors with their, at the time, ever advancing technology – Satellite and probe orbits that didn't allow themselves to be calculated with full accuracy, orbital clocks that went slower than they should have, mysterious radiation from above interfering with their instruments, mostly surprise discoveries like the discovery of the microwave background radiation on Earth.
The famed Lady Roxas, who had the honor of coming up with an explanation and a mathematical framework to describe the phenomenon, thus making her name known to countless future generations of Fabronian Schoolchildren, was not a theoretical physicist, but an experienced inventor and engineer looking to circumnavigate its effect.
He'd come across various mentions of her, including a curt biography in a little aside to one of the informative little texts, but mostly learned about her from references in the books he's read, from simple mentions in pop-culture to her actual papers, of which there had been many, many more. From how she'd approached the oddities and handled the equations, she seemed like an industrious, straightforward person with a consequent, pragmatic approach to problem-solving, more interested in what knowledge would allow her to do than any far-flung implications, and yet, not afraid to present and accept counter-intuitive conclusions if they were what the data suggested.
Her style, both in writing and equation-deriving, had certainly piqued his interest to an extent; She might be a more interesting figure to go and meet than the Trade Princes and Noblemen who ran this world into the ground and had their exploits and the duration of their reigns detailed in exquisite detail alongside the exhibits belonging to their time periods.
The heavy piles of jewelry that had been excavated from their tombs didn't do much to endear them to him.
At the back of the exposition hall, there was a wall lined with bones of the Fabronian's evolutionary ancestors, aligned chronologically as if to highlight the species' ascent to sapience, with a few educational texts on a few less successful cousin species.
The last skeleton in the row showed signs of heavy augmentation, holes drilled into the ribs, and in its skull, openings to accommodate for a number of implants, among them one he was able to recognize as a psionic enhancer or resonator, a device to boost an individual's psychic capabilities far beyond their natural levels. He'd seen the Master use one to broadcast his hypnotic powers on a planet-wide scale, and knew that his people had used significantly stronger ones in those early, more warlike days that gave rise to the Death Zone, one such artifact being the legendary Coronet of Rasslion that he'd had the personal misfortune of encountering, but even then they hadn't dared to wear one as a personal implant – Granted, the Time Lord's situation was a bit different than the Fabronians', for one thing, time travel and augmentation didn't really mesh well, as being struck with a technical defect far away from any compatible technology could easily mean death, and then, there was the matter of regeneration to contend with, the questions of how to perform extensive modifications without triggering one, assure that the new hardware wouldn't disrupt the process in case of an emergency – at the very least, those factors would likely create a preference for bioengineering over cybernetics as it had with the forefathers of the Time Lords.
But most of all, the types of mechanisms that allowed those internal enhancers to work would need to be wired directly into the brain and had a tendency to be notoriously volatile and dangerous to both the user and their surroundings, and it was highly unlikely that the creations of the Fabronian engineers had been any different.
The Device itself was on display in a glass box next to the skeleton, and one of the few technological objects in this compound to fully display sighs of advanced age, and with a brief assessment, the Doctor was able to conclude that it probably allowed for high-throughput long-range telekinesis, granting its user – most likely some kind of elite soldier, judging by this kind of hardware – the ability to level entire villages by himself, or worse, depending on the man's own innate level of ability. (and judging by his mostly intact pelvis and the abrasions on the bones, it was a man, tall, long-limbed and accustomed to intense physical activity)
It was this technology that had allowed the colonists from the outer system's moons their reconquest of the entire system and the rebuilding of Xalax to what would become its 'big black dome' period, but that was a long, long time ago.
Both the implant and its owner were dated as having been dead for over fifteen centuries, hailing from what was labeled the 'second period of florescence' by the Fabronian historians – The person who wrote that sign would now be considered to have lived in the third – This was also one of the few places where the Fabronians of that time period had depicted themselves, if only for educational purposes – It was obvious enough from their clothing, their furniture and what he'd seen of their descendants that they must have been humanoid, but at the time the upper city's spires had been erected, they had a cultural taboo against depicted their own form, seeking to distance themselves from the excessively opulent art of their prideful ancestors who had already come close to leaving the planet in ruin several times.
However, educational purposes had been enough of a justification for a row of illustrations, the earliest of which depicted the primitive creatures the Fabronians had arisen from, all the way for simple, shrew-like ancestors to upright beings with flat faces. The first creature to have been depicted with a spear already bore a fully manifested, standard issue humanoid form, a somewhat less streamlined version of the space-age Fabronians – The skeleton next to it belonged to a young male hunter, who, according to the archeological findings about the time, would have been likely to have been wearing necklaces decorated with pierced animal teeth, light blue body paint, and a mottled loincloth and overcoat fashioned from the strung-together skins of many small mammals-like creatures.
Scraps of genetic evidence left inside the bones suggested luscious dark skin and a fluffy cloud of tightly-coiled dark hair. The illustration depicted him in a bit of a triumphant posture, but given that his early demise had likely occurred on the hunt, one might have surmised that the young man would have been better of if he'd lived in an era that did not require him to be sharp enough to deal with huge animals – the fractures on the ribs could be distinguished from post-mortem ones by the way they showed slight sighs of healing, but either infection or lung-related complications must have brought that to a halt despite his family's best efforts – microscopic evidence of plant material suggested that they'd treated the youth with herbs.
The family might have had further children and thought of this boy as one of those unlucky ones who didn't get the chance to achieve much or leave behind a legacy, but unbeknownst to them, something as simple as the composition of the soil that they chose to bury him in would assure that his remains would bear witness of the existence of their family for generations to come.
The next skeleton, between the hunter and the augmented warrior, was taken from a lavish child grave chock full of expensive offerings, food and spices and jewelry which the grave's occupant – a lithe girl on the verge of puberty – had likely never worn, even though the illustration, for want to anything else to show her in, did depict her as wearing them.
During that particular era, it was typical for the grave good to be newly-bought or crafted rather than things the deceased actually used and assigned a sentimental value to, particularly if the deceased was wealthy, and this girl had apparently been the only daughter of a rich merchant couple.
However, the paintings on the outside of tombs and markers would still often still depict them with the things they had been buried with (which had the later Fabronian archeologists confused for quite a while), perhaps to allow the grieving families to visualize their loved ones chilling out in the afterlife endorsed by the local superstitions, so the way she was drawn here might have been fairly appropriate.
Having lost children of his own, the Doctor actually found himself feeling a connection to her parents – those long-dead merchants from a long-lost, bronze-age-level civilization.
The excessive amount of money they must have invested in financing the girl's unthrift burial might have seemed foolish or pompous to some, but he suspected that it was the parents' way to assuage the feelings of guilt that invariably accompanied any situation where you outlived your offspring.
It was probably less that those two were such firm believers, or that they wanted their daughter to brag of their wealth all over the next world, and more about convincing themselves that they could still atone or make it up to their child, or at least do penance and punish themselves through the sacrifice of their baubles.
Or maybe they couldn't, or wouldn't accept that she was really gone from this world, couldn't bring themselves to let go of her small body unless she was snugly tucked in and sufficiently provided with shinies, maybe they needed the comfortable illusion that they could still somehow care and provide for her to get on with their lives.
Of course, it was fully possible that this girl really liked jewelry when she was alive, but that, too, contained an understated tragedy, for the concern to look pretty and possibly show off her material possessions to her peers was the sort of goal or dream a young girl would have – Even if it stood to reason that she would have really appreciated her parent's gifts, they were the sort of gifts someone asked for when they had just outgrown toys.
If she had lived, if she had gotten a chance to grow into adulthood, her grave might have wound up containing items related to her profession, an artisan's tools, a merchant's weights and measuring rods, perhaps even an apothecary's vials or a scribe's brushes. Maybe she would have learned a musical instrument and taken it to the grave, or taking to hunting, which was a popular sport for the wealthy of her time. Maybe she would have taken a husband and been interred with his bones next to hers, or there might have been little tokens of affection from her children and grandchildren among the offerings, or even the traditional offerings reserved for honored elders; in that sense, the generic expensive gifts could be seen as a very literal manifestation of the parents' loss and helplessness, a distraction for the things the former owner of these bones might have become if they hadn't been consigned to decay in the midst of their maturation process;
And he did not lack the imagination, they did not lack the potential, for him to envision dozens of unlived futures for Adric or Jenny, the limitations they could have outgrown and overcome, the things they could have done, the differences, changes both massive and minute they could have left behind in the frameworks of the world – It was not exactly the same with those older half-siblings of hers whom Jenny had so painfully reminded him of: Even before his fateful departure, he'd seen the eldest of them live longer than Clara could hope to have left the last time he'd visited her; He'd seen them graduate, take up professions, even starting families of their own, choosing paths unlike his own and he hadn't kept himself informed of their various going-ons for a long, long time – and even now, when there was a real chance that at least some of them still lived, or had been cheated out of their allotted time by something other than his own hands, the long shadow of the ultimate betrayal he'd at least considered – however well-justified – might hang between them forever.
As such, he could well imagine that furnishing their daughter's grave had not really done these long-dead Fabronian merchants the closure or satisfaction they'd hoped for; That was a part of why he rarely stayed for the 'cleanup' stage of any misadventure. He knew what had been lost each time, no use to dwell on it, examine in detail what was painfully obvious.
In the end, he girl's remains had not even stayed in her fancy grave, its contents long since unearthed by some meddlesome archeologist, and, ultimately, carted off to this museum, where, as luck would have it, the last person to draw the girl's portrait was not the artist her parents had hired, but whichever illustrator made the educational drawings for this place – and they'd quite successfully given her the kind of stature her skeleton suggested, even featuring in the additional information minute signs of daily wear and tear added to the simple sizes and proportions of the individual bones.
The light, azure, sleeveless robes reaching just past her knees and the numerous glass beads in her hair or hanging off her as parts of miscellaneous jewelry were pretty much what the typical formal garb for a girl her age and station would have been in the time period in question, and since her skull shape suggested that she had indeed been a native of this continent, the saturated ebony skin tone she'd been depicted with was most likely accurate, but it must have been his own misplaced patriotism that led the artist to envision her as a native-born Xalaxian specifically, and according to much later second-florescence-era beauty ideals:
While the people descended from the tribes that had founded Xalax in the first place never had any special legal privileges, nor even a majority anywhere after the early stages of the imperial period, having such ancestry always carried a certain prestige, as the many diverse citizens of the empire all supposedly had its founders to thank for the creed they all followed, and most of the nobility belonged to that group.
The Founders of Xalax had been just one already mixed subsets of the tribes that lived in the area before it gained its later importance, but by the imperial period, the entire economy in the area was centered around trading with or providing for the capital, and by the time of the empire's first manned space missions, all of what had once been those tribes' territory had been subsumed into Xalax' urban sprawl.
Compared to the continent's other inhabitants, they were just as tall, but, on average a bit more slender, with somewhat narrower skulls and noses, their skins tending more toward ashen midnight-taupe than 'warmer', and more rufuous shades of brown – by human standards, the closest equivalent to their facial features might have been an Indian or middle-eastern person. Another trait fairly exclusive to these original tribes was a genetic variant that caused an individual's hair to be pure white or silver from birth. This wasn't even universal among the 'native' Xalaxians themselves – in truth, a good 60% of them sported the same shiny black as their (none too distantly related) neighbors, but the trait became associated with the group and its cultural connotations, and so, a beauty ideal was formed, which probably moved the artist to give this citizen of before-the-wars such pure white hair.
Beyond that, both the merchant's daughter and the stone-age hunter to her right was drawn with a few characteristic traits common to all Fabronians: That cluster of violet spots on their foreheads – a vestigial leftover of a temporary structure from their embryonic development – and their eyes, uniformly aquamarine irises that reflected incoming light like a cat's.
The illustration corresponding to the last skeleton in the row of exhibits – the cyborg soldier – was drawn with long, flowing silver hair – and given how advanced the technology had been back then, and that structures from that era still made up the lower levels of the city, this wasn't some frivolous flourish of later romanticism, but what the 'owner' of these bones was actually looked like on recordings of his person, or, at least, of others in his profession.
If he had that impractical hairstyle, then most likely because he was just that skilled, precise and powerful and knew he could afford it; And judging by the impressive hardware they'd drilled into him, the man's haughtiness might even have been justified.
What's more, having been focused on assessing the man's augmentations himself, the Doctor only belatedly spotted a metal plate affixed to the plinth on which the heavily modified skeleton was displayed, the sort of obvious-yet-not-obvious thing that Rose or Donna would have noticed right away (Ouch.) , the letters on it slightly protruding, forming a text that detailed how this fellow had lived to the ripe old age of 275 while looking like he was barely hitting middle age, and wearing it with grace, too (a side effect of his ample catalog of augmentations), until not an enemy combatant, but some other side effects from his modifications finally did him in, most of all – to little surprise for the Doctor – the various measures taken to enhance his psychic abilities way beyond what any single life form should be to possess, let alone safety use – beneath one the explanatory texts, there was a photograph of his autopsy record, challenging the very nerdiest of museum-goers to try and read the tiny print:
He had pushed his powers to the limit after having already exerted himself far beyond even his considerable capacity earlier that day – his capabilities had reportedly been obscenely prodigious even before his augmentations came into play. Accordingly, he succeeded in whatever he was trying to do, but at the cost of burning out both his organic body and some of his hardware;
The coroners could not conclude what specifically killed him because there were far too many contenders – he was most certainly dead by the time an overheating implant cooked part of his much-abused brain, though a few ruptured blood vessels could have done him earlier, if they didn't just burst as a side effect of his losing consciousness atop some elevation, or possibly while levitating; The fall itself, though quite capable of ending your average baseline humanoid given enough bad luck, would be very unlikely to kill him under normal circumstances, but it was another matter entirely when he was already weakened and a good amount of his mechanical components were somehow compromised, not to mention that the shock from his last feat could have knocked him straight unconscious.
Or perhaps, his death had even preceded the fall and was actually its cause – His innards could have simply shut down on him after a lifetime of risky augmentation, performance enhancing chemicals and the actual combat, including the backlash and energy drain from his unnaturally amplified psychic powers – he might not have looked, moved or even felt like it, but he was an old man and though he'd kept both hard- and wetware upgraded, not all of it could be indefinitely easily swapped without repercussions; All the years and operations might have caught up with him when he pulled that crazy maneuver, and, indeed, so had the recklessness behind the lifestyle that his life choices indicated.
Even if he still lived after hitting the ground and the bleeding didn't kill him, his body may have simply come apart from the unnatural strain imposed on it, long before his skull had transformed into a pressure cooker; when they cut him open, the veteran psychic showed some major organ damage, regardless of whether the organs in question were artificial, vat-grown or the ones he was born with; There were some trances of undesired metabolic byproducts that should have been broken down, which may have dated back to damage from his earlier exertions or indicate that activity did not cease on the spot, it was hard to tell with the mess he'd turned himself into – Bones were shattered and muscles had torn, and, in places, flat-out liquified, the artificial ones nearly as ruined as the natural ones; His very cells had protested the energy output that was well beyond what any single organism should be able to effect, down to the microscopic levels, there were signs of breakdown, erosion and what might be mistaken for starvation if he hadn't been a psionic.
Even so, even after this whole superhuman, rasputinian ordeal, things might have gone differently if they had recovered him right away – Though it took them a while to get to him, Fabronian medicine in those days was so advanced that they actually succeeded in reviving and stabilizing his body.
Except, by then, they'd lost too much of his brain matter to the heat and all the other numerous complication that had arisen, far more than they could meaningfully replace in one go – The physical seat of his mind had disintegrated, and his mind may just have been the only piece of him that they couldn't replace.
Such a fate was not rare among the high-performance psychic warriors of his time –
According to the sign, few had ever withstood the strenuous procedures as long as this particular specimen had, but the lure of glory, power and patriotic propaganda assured that the military was never out of recruits, same as any other military ever.
This one seemed harsh even by military standards, though – Under the rationale that this fellow was 75% government property anyway, his 'blueprint' 90 % military secrets, and his status as one of the most efficient one-man killing machines created in his generation of experiments 100% invaluable, his remains were not returned to his family or buried according to the traditional rite at the time, but ended up in a lab, and later, this museum;
Unlike the other skeletons on display, his much-perforated bones had not been liberated from his flesh when it rotted away, but rather, it had systematically stripped from them, cut into orderly pieces and frozen for storage and further research.
Even in Death, the military got one last use out of his broken form: Before, it had been the common policy not to equip personal implants of vital importance with an emergency shutdown, the rationale being that there was no point: Turning off the implant would certainly kill the person, whereas any malfunction contained by such a procedure might do the same but didn't have to if they got help in time, and besides, there was hacking to worry about – After this case, in which a hardware overheat rendered a valuable asset unsalvageable, they found that they had a better chance of recovering and 'rebuilding' their operatives if they risked the emergency shutdown – or at least, they'd get a lot more valuable information out of dissecting a psychic's brain if it wasn't partially cooked;
What little had been left of this man's thinking organ after the devastating injuries and the futile revival efforts that had followed did not contain any significant information on what it was that made him a prodigy in terms of intelligence, combat and psionic ability.
This, at least, had granted him the privilege of having his name and title recorded here: Not a standard-issue military rank, but something the TARDIS chose to render as Xanthos Helepolis – "Xanthos, Destroyer-of-Cities", the original word rendered in a dead tongue ancestral to many of Fabron's language, something the people of Xanthos' time would have treated as reverently as humans treated ancient Greek or Latin, or as the people of the own world thought of Old High Gallifreyan.
Despite his usual policy in that regard, the Doctor made an effort to commit it to memory – After all, the man way dead, felled by the consequences of his actions, and even vainglorious butchers deserved a minimum of basic decency – at the very least, he could make sure to avoid dear old Xanthos, if he ever were to encounter him in the flesh.
Literally.
Literally in literal flesh... on his bones, that he'd encountered already.
Where was Clara when you happened to have a great pun for her to laugh at? Probably dawdling around with PE, that's where.
And unlike Xanthos here, PE couldn't even melt things with his brain.
Which was probably a good thing, all things considered, but at least the potential for vast destruction might have explained what exactly Clara saw in him.
Personally, the Doctor was still mystified by the very concept, but then again, Clara had always had her ways of keeping him mystified, and that was a big part of what he liked about her.
He just wished he would do that in ways that didn't leave him fearing that she might fall out of his world and become another finite colorful splotch in the long patchwork tapestry of his life – or not even that, he never tired of observing her in her little world and he'd never want to destroy it or wish restraints upon her – but at least, he preferred the prospect that she'd stay at his side for the foreseeable future, and allow him to delude himself into thinking that it would last forever, at least in the vivid, fast moments where it was not necessary to acknowledge the opposite.
He'd seen usually courageous people like Rose, Wilfred , Amy or Martha be daunted by the long and shadowed history that for him was merely his life, and not even one he was all that proud of, and he never really knew how to deal with that when it was him who felt honored to get to partake of the scarce and precious good that were their years, and wouldn't have invited them into a scenario where they had to stand each other every day and trust each other with their lives if he didn't seriously love spending time with them or feel that they would be interesting to get to know;
He supposed that it was, perhaps, his own lack of skill at expressing his appreciation, or one of the many little price tags on the life he'd chosen to live, but the reality was that he always needed them more than they needed him, and that they never needed him as much as they thought – If anything, he was the one who only got to partake in a tiny part of their lives, in which they'd be the dead center of his – and then they'd go on to be just as amazing elsewhere (ideally, that is, if no untimely tragedy prevented them), when the brief strip of both their illustrious roads that they'd walked together was long past.
When he happened to be feeling generous with himself, he might say that t made sense for awesome people to know and hang out with other awesome people.
Most of the time, he wasn't, and blamed himself for having made everything harder for everyone involved with all of his selfish meddling – But it was always a certainty that somewhere, somehow, the end would come, and this was never as apparent as it had been with Clara – From the beginning, she'd always had a world of her own, not as a promise in the future, but her private here and now. Proud of what she did before their paths crossed and already having found and chosen a path, she saw no reason to stop doing what she'd been doing so far, and pursued their joint ventures as a hobby on the side.
Never oblivious that he had a huge world outside of her, she refused to be outdone, to have nothing new to talk of when they met up for their joint ventures, to be the one friend who didn't have anything planned on weekends. Neither was she easily impressed or reverent, ready to soak up useful skills and worthwhile experiences for sure, capable to let herself be but never even considering deferring as a default response, nor ever shy to put him in his place, or the one she had assigned him, so he didn't know what made him have illusions, except perhaps her career as his lifelong shadow, to her, long since over, to him, still partially to come, at the time, a pragmatic solution to a problem that had interfered with his being so deeply that it was impossible to stay wholly dispassionate about.
Either way, whichever system of reasoning or feeling he used, the bottom line was that he owed her gratitude and couldn't possibly ask any more concessions of her.
He'd set her free so she wouldn't be held down by her attachment to him, but now, he could hardly stand to see her actually believe, actually act as if it had all been a misunderstanding and go find someone who was free to reciprocate.
He'd left her out of this particular endeavor because he expected it to be time-consuming, but now, suddenly, without warning, he found himself acutely wishing she were here, burning to know what she might think of this lost empire, bursting with words and hopefully witty ways to describe to her the circumstances of the place's abandonment.
He stops his avalanche of thought with the thought of her asking if Xalax was ever recolonized.
It wasn't.
– and the 'Third Apocalypse' that entailed the abandoning of Xalax would not even be the last catastrophe to engulf the Fabronian civilization. It was the Fourth that finally rendered large stretches of the planet uninhabitable for good, forcing the last remainders of the population to find refuge in domed cities.
There were other settlements beside those, built upon the rubble of broken, once glorious civilizations, but they crumbled over time. Only the domes provided sufficient shielding from the poisoned atmosphere and the radiation; Only completely artificial, enclosed environments could produce food in these blasted lands, but the decline of Fabron's culture, civilization and people could only be slowed, no longer stopped.
The gene pool was too truncated, the survivors' genomes too shot through with radiation; The birth rates steadily declined, infertility, stillbirths, inborn disorders and hideous malformations were commonplace, technology and knowledge remained lost and buried in the sands,
It was in that state that he found this world on his first visit, and incidentally, how the human colonists found it when they reached the Galaxy.
At that time, some of the last Fabronian youth traded their barren and devastated world for the stars and scattered among the human empires, some forming small colonies or earning great renown, but their home world would never sing songs of revival.
In those days, even the small rodents littering the surface area now had dissapeared, leaving the humanoid Fabronians and their world's answer to sulfur bacteria as the only survivors. The once cultivated landscape, the lush gardens and fertile terrains had all transformed into deserts of yellowed, scorched earth and rust-like dust, with an acidic yellow haze floating in the sky in place of clouds, low and heavy like storm clouds about to burst open and release their contents.
It was the heat and fire of that last war that had finally made Xalax a ruin, broke open the dams and let the seawater flood back into part of the city area.
By the time he came here, much of it was already buried in sediment and the abandoned remains of a brief, later settlement that never got to thrive, ripped-open houses resting amid bent power line masts and half-submersed, headless copper statues decaying in the rusty-red water and salty white sand, the one or two story buildings not even worth mentioning amidst the half-melted remains of the surface spires.
Below, it was thought that the ellipsoid structure of the lower city was thought to be still largely intact, but buried forever.
The place had become known under the name "World's End", and become a monument to the folly and pride of this civilization – Parts of the white-red beach and large stretches of the adjacent hills had been covered in grave markers, diverse marble creations crafted with a certain individuality to them casting many shadows along the shore, here and there, tall, stark black columns would stick out among them; The bloody-red waves lapped on a bone-white shore crowded with grave stones.
His first thought upon seeing it was that it was aptly named for how a young child might imagine the end of the world, all space taken up by graves until there was nowhere left to bury people, no place left for living people, and no people left to bury – in truth, the site only continued for a few city block's worth of surface area, but the sight was still enough to leave an impression, even on him – back then, he still thought his own civilization had gone the way of the Fabronians, destroyed by one of their own, their splendor left to corrosion and decay by their pride, and the sight matched his mood – He'd come here on his own, in the days after losing Donna, perhaps in search for a place where he could ooze gloom without pulling anyone into his personal tarpit, or perhaps as an infantile, counterproductive sort of self-punishment that now merely embarrassed him. He thinks it was quite soon after Mars – He'd met this person he admired, because of her drive to colonize a new world, perhaps even feeling an affinity because of their similar childhood experiences, their common drive not to catch a once terrifying thing, but to follow and understand that glimpse of the world's deepest mysteries – And he'd driven her to end herself deprived her of her rightful heroic death, yet another inexcusable taint on his hands, and, when he came to Fabron – the taste of the air immediately reminded him of his visits to Skaro and the horrid creatures that had coalesced from its battlefields, and maybe that was what made him repeat that same mistake for old time's sake, namely, tasting it at all –
After not leaving their domes without hazard suits for ages, there were some areas of Fabron that, by the era of the human empire reaching the Nevetina galaxy, the immediate effects of the Fourth Apocalypse had subsided to the extent that some places could be visited without such precautions as long as the exposures were kept short and infrequent, with the few remaining Frabronians having grown somewhat more resitant than humans.
The former city area of "World's End" was not recommended as a place to go suit-free, but he judged from the readings that he should be able to hold out a good while.
But he was so captivated by the dreadful sights and their resonance with the oily black mood that had possession of him at the time, so powerless to break free from his ruminations of his own numerous awful deeds and his growing conviction that a place like this was exactly where he belonged, that he lost track of the hours in the empty expanse, and by the time he returned to the TARDIS that day, he had to wipe some of his own blood of his lips, an ironic little preview of the fate that awaited him later that year, and well enough to remind him just how miserably he'd been coping with his self-imposed isolation (Rose would probably have sensed his foul thoughts and found the words to defuse them, or at least, refused to leave his side so he'd have made a timely retreat for her sake at least; Donna would have had none of it and shot down any talk of him remaining out there by himself from the get-go, while Martha might've trusted him to mind himself, but insisted on hard numbers, and have been liable to put herself in danger to drag his sorry backside back to the TARDIS when he didn't show up in time, and he'd have owed her his life once again)
Useless over dramatic moping indicative of butt-hurt pride, he thinks, these days. Atonement would have been better served by accepting what he is and doing something productive. Or so he'd thought for many, many years; Concercing the question of 'what he was', the waters had been muddied all over again since he'd encountered Clara.
Perhaps, he thought, as he strode past the last few exhibits without more than a superficial glance to make his way back to the TARDIS, his prideful moping days weren't quite over yet.
The blue box, at least, is a familiar comfort of sorts, as far as such concepts apply to him.
He lets his hands rest for a moment, on its imitation of wooden doors, before pushing them inwards, not to depart, but to grab some more equipment.