Day 8
Moving through the halls of Xalax felt a lot less like leisure after that discovery.
In the deep of the lower city, the silence was absolute, even the machinery barely made a sound beyond the occasional unnerving whirring – More than once, he'd found himself startled into alertness by little more than an activating ventilation duct, and felt immensely grateful that there was no one here to witness him, screwdriver drawn, attack stance assumed, infamous eyebrows flaring, death glare prepared, getting so worked up about literally thin air that he had to take a moment to calm his furiously beating hearts before he could resume working, leaning against a nearby wall with a hand over his bony chest, long fingers slipped under his hoodie, spread over the fabric of his jumper.
He took a long, deep breath.
Most likely, he was simply overdue for another dose of shut-eye, but he doubted that he would be able to sleep right now.
He soldiered on, his steps a lot more swift and concise than they had been before, covering a considerable length of corridors with far less time granted to diversions such as stopping and staring, far less assured that he basically owned the place and could take as much time as he deemed fit.
He had to get to the bottom of this, if need be, quite literally.
Distantly, he privately expressed a certain detached fascination for how the knowledge of how he ought to be very deep underground and isolated from pretty much all natural life on this world somehow made it worse and not better, surprised that after all these years, he would still have seeds of such an irrational, primal instinct left inside of him – if his species had evolved in a subterranean cave system, he would be just as likely to find this comforting and a wide expanse unsettling, but his mind already knew this, and the simpler parts of himself lacked the faculties to comprehend its persuasion.
In the meantime, his earlier speculations were stewing in his mind, and very much getting the better of him.
He would have chided himself for forgetting that he'd performed extensive scans early on and found no life down here, but on such occasions his supposedly brilliant mind would commonly work against him and remind him that the instruments he used might not have penetrated down to the deepest of the tunnels, and before long, misplaced instruments, misremembered details in the tunnel layouts, vague noises and shifting shadows readily strung themselves into a narrative that he never too seriously believed, but did keep humoring and adding to somewhere in the back of his mind.
He would find ways to outwit himself, to poke holes in what he knew to be sound logic, draw examples of unlikely events from his experience to explain away the logical impossibilities.
If there were still someone living down there, it would indeed be a major discovery and offer untold possibility, but right now, it was simply so very, very unlikely as to equal wishful thinking at best, although not completely impossible.
If it were true, it would explain that lone, unused mannequin amid the green robes back in the street he'd passed through who knows how long ago. Unaccustomed to having to actually buy his possessions, it had taken him a fair bit of marching to recall that shopkeepers in department stores usually sold the clothes off their shelves, and rarely straight off the mannequins. He was a bit embarrassed of himself for that, having once been the significant other of someone who worked in a shop like that. You'd think he'd know more about shops.
Sure, you'd also think that someone with his level of creativity might be able to come up with a million more explanations that made significantly more sense without assuming unnecessary elements like some hidden away leftover resident just deciding to steal this one robe.
Maybe it was just curiosity for that period in Xalax' history where the residents had remained underground in the city, hidden away from their world, before the surface towers were built.
He might go and visit it, if he wanted to see a cut-off underground colony so badly, but then again, if something had been done before, this increased the chance that someone might have the same idea again.
He still didn't rate the probability for such a scenario very highly, but, one mark of a mature mind was the ability to entertain an idea without immediately accepting it.
Meanwhile, the Doctor had proceeded further down, and just like the upper city had blocks and towers in different art styles paying witness to various aesthetic movements and variations across a long history, the lower city came in layers that hailed from different time periods, when the Xalaxians had gradually built upward after being trapped underground.
What surrounded him right now was rather like the art style of those statues he'd seen near the playground, tending toward combinations of various stone or metal materials in differing colors and ornamental gold-like workings on the walls, using baseboards and skirtings instead of strictly rectangular corridors and darker, more 'indoor-like' rooms in general.
The corridors here were smaller, more labyrinthine – After the resurgence of the underground populations, the central portions of the structure had been heavily reworked to allow up and down transit between the major parts of the city, but apart from the larger ducts and the main access shafts that had been incorporated into the design, large parts o the historical city had been left as they were, when they were the upper outskirts of the place, "suburban" sections of less density and more comforts –
As one symptom of this, there were pictograms engraved in many of the walls that might have looked temple-like to a foreign onlooker, but were ultimately not too different from the statues in the eyes of someone who could actually read them, and recognize just how different they were from mere carved stone, nor even fixed in their current shape, but something like a three-dimensional billboard, and more than that – One swing of his outstretched hand, one or two seconds of his sonic whirring, and something like a cricket ball sized circle in the middle of an elaborate painting lit up, glowing symbols visible through the material of a larger area, before it began to recede, and a doorway with an arc-like top over its rectangular base shape.
He proceeded.
So far, no sign of any mystery inhabitants.
If he were being sensible, he might be getting bored or vaguely disappointed by now. Or perhaps he already was, and that's why he found himself making up this nonsense.
Dispassionately, annoyed and a little bit embarrassed, he took note of the continued symptoms of tension and agitation present on his person.
He was fairly sure that he could probably will his heart rate down if he just took the time to stop, focus and concentrate, but dignifying it and its reason with that much of a remedy would have felt like a surrender.
He knew what this was, lack of sleep, survival instincts on overdrive and whatnot, and he was not new to managing that sort of thing; Recognizing this in itself should have been all he needed to correct for it without wasting further time on it.
So, he continued, on and on, step after step, quickly exchanging one corridor for the other until they seemed to melt into a whole of edges and jagged lines as he breezed through different styles, widths and purposes, and always the glowing, moving pictograms omnipresent in buildings of this 'era'. Besides the supple 'indoorsy' style of residence areas, there were its functional counterparts, also covered in the same strange cross of ancient tomb hieroglyphs and printed circuit lines, but with reflective, stone-like surfaces and proper sharp edges and straight angles much unlike the rounded corners prevalent in the levels above. He did not necessarily encounter less interesting details than in his wanderings before, but he paid a bit more mind to his cynical inner suppositions that he could probably correctly deduce just what would be awaiting him there, and how there was nothing new or surprising left under the sun – Even if there were survivors here, it would not be anything new.
Yet, he felt on edge, 'spider sense' tingling, unease making its nest all over his narrow form.
A while ago he'd tried to shut up that particular worry by pulling some of those 'sweet treat' nutrition cubes from his pockets, but if anything, the expected sugar rush had only bolstered his diffuse discomfort.
All by himself, he could never be fully sure that he wasn't imagining or wildly assuming any of his perceptions or suppositions. It shouldn't matter, no one could ever be sure that they weren't actually a brain in a vat, just that it was exceptionally unlikely. The universe simply didn't spit out such clear answers – where is that one electron at any given moment? Was there someone, or something still living down here?
There were only probabilities, and that was simply the deal.
Knowing with 99% certainty was not the same as knowing nothing.
Yet, he couldn't shake this impression, and over time, it solidified, took firmer shape, assumed clearer form.
He found himself looking over his shoulder, glancing at the corners of his eyes, choosing to do things manually if he could avoid thickening his data trail.
At first, he had vaguely suspected, but by now, the sensation was rather specific and almost palpable.
He was being watched.
Or was he? Was he getting warmer, or was he just getting carried away, chasing after his own shadow again?
It was quite possible that his visit to the council chamber slash control room had tripped the locals off, if they indeed existed – his path through the city had not been exactly subtle, either, whole streets springing to life, boulevards lighting up like Christmas Trees just for one man to pass through.
He'd acted under the presupposition that there wasn't anyone here to notice him, but if there was, it was practically impossible for his presence not to draw attention as he made his way down.
Perhaps, they were all hiding from him, just out of sight – they'd have to, if their sanctuary had been breached after such a long time. Maybe they were cautiously watching him, afraid that they might be discovered after such a long time. Perhaps they were staying out of his way, hoping he would go away on his own.
Did they know that he was a stranger to this world? If they were indeed Fabronians, they should have the means to determine that, this place was full of advanced technology, and a simple bioscan should reveal him as an off-worlder. But after all this time, under circumstances like this, who could truly know?
They might be generations removed from the original stowaways, having long come to regard the technology of their ancestors as magic and the accounts left in their databanks as legends.
They could have forgotten that there were other worlds for him to descend from, or that there even was a world or a surface beyond the subterranean labyrith.
There was, of course, also the possibility – the very likely possibility – that the whole thing was just as bonkers as it seemed, and that he'd been chased by some kind of stack overflow error for several decks. Wouldn't be the fist time, not even in recent history.
Perhaps it was quite good that Clara wasn't here, for she'd only shake her head and look at him with that mixture of sadness and exasperation that he'd been seeing quite a lot recently.
He knew that she was probably one of the best people to help him make sense of all this and that he could always count on her help, and he had no choice but to count on him when there was more at stake than just him, but, given the choice, he really didn't want her to see him like this...
Or, if anyone had to he'd prefer it if it was her, but, he didn't want her to think any differently of him because of this; He knew she already did, in some ways, and he'd accepted it, but... not the important things.
Some things may just have been rendered impossible now, but, if nothing else, he wanted to remain known to her as her friend, not some burden she put up with out of a sense of obligation or an echo of the past or some dirty little secret she was getting much too old for.
But of course, it wasn't really her who had changed – She'd stayed exactly as he'd remembered her.
He was the one who was distinctly past his expiration date these days, as both Clara herself and especially the ever delightful Mr. Pink never ceased to rub into his face.
No, thank you very much, he could handle this ancient and possibly-not-quite-abandoned city on his own, it wasn't exactly his first one and experience had to count for something, at least.
Whether he found something or not, just from what he'd seen so far he'd get enough interesting anecdotes to at least reasonable compete with whatever PE had been up to over the weekend, and besides, he would probably do well to get used to solo investigations for a while, in case the happy couple decided to tie the knot; Something told him that Mr. Pink would be far less amenable to an intergalactic honeymoon than Mr. Pond had been.
No, no, there was no helping it, no use getting all mushy and sentimental here, back to work!
Just where was he? Right.
Underground city, moving wall paintings, possibly very shy hermits.
Assuming their were hermits, would they be wiped out in a few hundred years, when further nuclear explosions would melt away the surface towers, or would they survive that, too? The many layers of city rock and metal could have shielded them, that is, if they ever existed in the first place.
The whole thing was getting rather silly, he could have been conducting valuable studies instead of getting worked up over nothing;
There were better uses for his time here than merely running wild here, chasing ghosts without watching where he was going.
Where had he been going?
Well, he had entered into a wider all, the walls still covered in shifting mechanical lines, as was the floor, bundles of lines flowing various ways, perhaps suggesting paths to follow, blinking lights glimmering in various corners of the room, perhaps indicative of certain functions... which functions, he could not discern at a glance, but technology, no matter how alien, could be expected to follow some more or less successful concept of user-friendliness.
It wasn't supposed to be cryptic; Bad design abounded everywhere in the universe, of course, but by and large, devices everywhere were designed so that their function would be somewhat discernible by intuition, if not necessary human or Time Lord intuition. In the specific case of Fabronian intuition, though, there was no reason to expect that its makeup would be very much different from that of most other humanoids, if perhaps with a little less caution.
Which was a complicated way to say that the Doctor chose to follow one of the circuit line paths on the floor until further notice.
Then, of course, he saw it, embedded, no, engraved in one of the walls, insofar that the shifting lines could be said to do that.
He saw it, and immediately upon seeing it, had the impression of having seen it somewhere before, sometime long, long ago, longer than he could say or affix with a clear number of linear years, torn free from all of its context, a stone plate catching dust in a museum's extensive collection, displaying the emblem of an egg.
He knew it's meaning of course, he'd encountered the idea behind it and variations of the symbol all over the last few days, and indeed, he'd encountered it before, on his previous visits to the Galaxy, but the connection to that previous, faraway sight occurred to him only now that he was seeing in portrayed in this characteristic, hard edged, blocky art style as opposed to the more fluid styles of later generations.
There was, of course, a possible conclusion to this, a rather easy explanation, and if that were true, it might mean that the ancient Fabronians had gone way further than even their descendants knew about – that, or the stone tablet he'd seen must have had quite the extensive history behind it.
He couldn't quite say where he'd seen it, just that he distinctly recalled the familiar atmosphere of a museum, the distinctive smell of dust and knowledge, and the blurry outlines of other exhibits at the edges of his vision.
Perhaps it had been during his first visit to the the Under-Gallery, where the image had briefly captivated the flow of his bitter musings as he'd stood in a corner, distantly aware of his so-called older selves squabbling with each other while Clara, still a stranger and yet never without a glow of familiarity, was trying to get them to focus;
Or, it had been much earlier (later?), the vaguely-remember group of people being comprised of the Ponds, whose questions he could not recall because his attention had been captivated by the sight of their daughter, curly mane tied back, her dust-covered skin glistening with sweat in the desert sun as the worked to expose the stone tablet with a brush, the scene moving him strangely, not because he ever cared too much for the craft of archeology but for a variety of other reasons – Perhaps it was River herself, looking focused and concentrated as she worked, dedicated and passionate about a profession that was once just a means to track him down, a stark contrast from the rowdy younger version he's stumbled across all too recently, or it might have been her mention of getting the tabled to a museum once she was done with both its excavation and the neutralization of the local trouble, the familiar mental image of dust and museums that this covered up, the distinct mental image of what the apparent stone tabled might look like when it got there, himself too busy making excited observations on that thought to catch much of River's at the time somewhat uninteresting-seeming explanations as to why it was not actually a stone tablet.
Though, now that he came to think about it, he may have been confusing something, not just the time, the setting, but the archeologist; There may have been an actual museum, rather than just the story of one. It could have been any museum, any single ones among the many, many he'd come across in his travels, or it could have been a particular one; It could be destined to find its way to his far future self at the national gallery, or perhaps he had seen it at the Braxiatel Collection, in the possession of another Lungbarrow brother, but even there, he couldn't be sure –
Had it been long after his departure, the impatient young person in the background being Ace rather than Amy, and the archeologist who was talking about the hoops she jumped through to obtain it Bernice rather than River?
Had his older brother been standing there with his short dark hair swept back and his half-moon glasses, in what he'd at the time perceived as an impudent yet distinctly more refined knockoff of his own outfit, making a sarcastic quip about his lack of attention, or had Irving been standing there in fine red-and-orange robes and an ornate collar piece, his shoulder-length, mouse-brown hair interspersed with streaks of grey, directing his curt observation instead at his nieces and nephews that had come here to visit, the wife he wasn't quite giving his full attention being not River, but the President's Daughter, though her father had no longer been in office at the time, both of them having been here in order for their children to spend some time with their uncle?
Whenever it had been, it was far too long ago –
These impressions could all be true, or their could all be false. They could all contain different stone tablets, or just this one, which may or may not have been the same one in front of him right now;
Perhaps, there had never been such a tablet at all, and he was only confusing it with a vaguely similar one, or experiencing a sudden sense of deja vu, or some other lapse of attention induced by lack of sleep and just generally spending too much time in a catacomb under a ruin in a desert, no wonder he was having visions of archeologists –
Still, the common denominators in all those half-remembered scraps of memory were, one: that he'd seen it before, associated with a strong mental image of a museum, and two: that he'd been inexplicably captivated by it at the time.
It was, perhaps, the kind of thing that was intended to and carefully crafted to do so captivate, a symbol, a representation supposed to convey a complicated message with but a glance;
– At first, it was merely the surreal yet archetypical nature of the image that had stood out at him, be it right now, or sometime in the past, but these days, he knew it to be a symbol central to Fabronian Culture, meant to depict an idea at a glance, but hold so much more for anyone privy to further knowledge, an encapsulation of a philosophical, transcendental concept, the archetype of the "world-egg" embodying the contrast and connection between macrocosm and the microcosms, but also, the vast world contained in us all, the way people, cities, ideas and everything could be so much 'bigger on the inside', as an acquaintance of his had once put it, smaller worlds within larger worlds like islands in the sea, in image that played a central role in many of the world's religions but held significance far beyond the reach of the superstitions themselves, and in addition to that, it doubled as the city emblem of Xalax, its 'crest' if you will, its symbol unfailingly incorporated in each and every of its official logos by its various governments over time, and like with the city of Athens and the goddess Athena, no one knew which of these had existed first and then inspired the naming of the city.
– in this iteration, right here before him and possibly in his past, the art style reminded him vaguely of the Nazca Lines in its use of rectangular elements, some of its meanders perhaps comparable to Greek keys, an instance of the Second Period of Florescence imitating the first in order to connect to its legacy, but very much doing its own interpretation thereof, like the once garishly colored temples of Earth's antique period becoming immortalized in its blanched out, serene reproductions in the renaissance.
He knew that there were other iterations of it, from abstract, emblematic depictions reduced to a mere swirl of lines, two curved, three-pronged forks one of which was contained within a circle or oval, to elaborate, hyper-realistic grotesque depictions of half-formed embryos or, in older art, unscientific interpretations of what the Fabronians had imagined them as; At its heart, the basic shape was that of a grand tree, embedded in the ground by great roots, nourishing in its branches an egg, or bubble, or some other container of primordial waters that was usually drawn translucent, showing the embryo of a large, winged creature developing within – It was not exactly a 'bird', for example, upon closer look, it had a long, tooth-filled jaw rather than a beak, but it conformed to similar archetypes and associations about freedom and mastery, and through convergent evolution, resembled a bird the way a cactus resembled a spurge, the way scale trees, great ferns, conifers and the leafy trees of flowering plants had independently arrived at the same build, or, like how humans, Time Lords and Fabronians could be said to be alike.
There were versions of it in which the embryo of the developing animal was substituted for that of a humanoid Fabronian with or without stylized wings; There were also some in which the egg was shown to contain a depiction of the cosmos as either a starry dark sphere or a composition of miscellaneous drawings of everything contained therein, or versions in which it was the planet of Fabron itself, its older iterations symbolizing much the same as the 'star-sprangled cosmos' version did but acquiring a more patriotic bent in modern days, especially once visitors from beyond the Galaxy started arriving in droves.
The Symbol had its own name, a very specific, archaic term that had been used only in this particular context for an overwhelming majority of its history, but etymologically denoted the 'containment of infinite variations', giving the image yet more ubiquitous connotations.
The Tardis rendered the term one way, he'd personable render it in another, slightly tweaked one, and on his first visit to Fabron, he'd come to learn that the early human colonists had picked it up and mythologized it in their own way, inspiring some jokes comparing it to the all-seeing eye, the pentagram or even the IDIC (at this point, the original Star Trek was considered a classic akin to Homer, and, indeed not considered that far apart from him from the perspective of a time in which humans had been a space-faring species for ages), but also leading to the iconic, if a bit liberal idiomatric translation as the 'Nautilus Fantasia', (the first part referring to the 'enclosure' of a seashell in the expanse of the ocean, or the 'isolation' of a certain fictional submarine) popularized by a rather introverted author of at least partially human descent, who saw in it a metaphor for the seemingly impenetrable barrier between the inner world and the external, the paradox of a scholar exploring an immense vastness from the enclosure of one's private little, silent refuge, the indirect, abstract understanding of books and telescopes, the explosion of creativity contained within a tiny, finite, isolated mind and ultimately bound by its confined, seeing their ivory Rapunzel Tower in the stem of the tree, its branches as everything that contained their squishy, wobbly, watery Jell-O of the brain, lumping together their room and computer systems with the majority of their own body.
– and though he was much more of an in-the-thick, firsthand pioneer-explorer and had hardly ever lived up to his own pretense of seclusion, he thought he could somewhat relate the concept, spending his days cruising the endless oddities of the infinite dark in his little time machine, his personal little world seldom comprising more than a handful of friends and loved ones at a time, his little blue ship with palace-like comforts inside: It might as well be the TARDIS held within that world-tree's branches.
The same comparison , of course, could, and often had been made for the city of Xalax, at least, since its subterranean chambers had come to resemble the shell of an egg, or at least that's how it was commonly told – the comparision actually dated back to the period in which what were now the lower rings of Xalax had acquired a large dome, and was in fact, an adapted version of the religious legend according to which all life originated in a goddess' tomb below the city, the creator's coffin being 'reborn' as a cosmic egg.
Obviously, even that version had to be a modernization, for, how would their early, primitive ancestors even know about the caves, let alone life in the rest of the universe, when they first cooked up their religion?
Religions everywhere had diminished, but rarely ever quite disappeared with the advent of progress, instead always giving rise to never, improved versions to reflect the believers' increase in understanding and ethics, though of course, they would then turn around and claim that they'd always believed the newer version and that only a fool would 'take it literally', as they still took their legacy and justification from connecting to the past. It was the mind of the believer that gave rise to the god in order to satisfy them, so, if the believer suddenly learned that there was a void up in the sky rather than a marble castle with pearly gates, the deity would be banished to a 'different dimension' and this move then lauded as a form of higher understanding – and once other dimensions became a widely understood quantity in their society, their majesties the gods had to pack up and move once again.
Perhaps, the Xalaxians' faraway ancestors had, at first, thought that their goddess' grave was all the way down at the bottom of the lagoon, and that, in the beginning, the sepulchral chamber had cracked open like a literal egg to release all manner of creatures, the creation responsible for her lethal state of exhaustion being that of all the plants and mushrooms all over the globe.
When they understood that life did not simply spring from dirt and could not just have walked from here to other worlds, they had been inspired to come up with a grander story, especially once they'd first pierced its bottom with the stilts of their buildings.
It was even possible that the symbol the legend had originated in different local mythologies that had then gone on to mix once Xalax first became a trading hub all the way back in the ancient past – though both the symbol and the legend involved the basic motif of life springing from an enclose, the tree and the bird so prominent in the symbol were nowhere to be found in what had at the time just been the origin story of a small, tribal religion, one out of many others that had not gone on to be popularized and spread around by a massive sprawling empire, or become associated with what was to become its capital.
But whatever its history, in the end, it was just an arrangement of lines, a simplistic picture – A symbol became a symbol because people used it as such, it's power was all in its connotations, its associations, in the minds that listened to its call – And the Doctor's mind had listened, after all, the only reason he'd come here was to experience an afterglow of Fabronian Society.
So as he had been pondering all this, his steps had drawn closer to the reflective surface and the various shifting, glittering line patterns around the symbol itself, which remained constant.
He faintly recalled Benny... or was it River? ...explaining how it wasn't an actual pictogram, and having seen how all the other images around it had shifted, he would probably concur that the pattern hadn't been engraved into the material; Instead, the substance that coated the walls must have somehow been induced to chance state and form the actual grooves and lines in the surface, that still seemed pretty hard and flexible despite its malleable state.
Curious, the Doctor extended his hands, bringing the long fingers to the smooth and surprisingly warm surface, right on top the image of the bird.
No sooner than his fingertips has come to rest, he pulled them away in a quick act of instinct when he felt a kind of ripple moving through the surface, some semblance of activity in what had otherwise felt solid and crystalline.
Much like the opening walls from before, the parts he had touched lit up and then began to recede, ostensibly flowing outward until something like a door arch had been created. Meanwhile, the bits he was standing on in the flooring also moved, sliding him forward like a conveyor belt as he gawked, somewhat flabbergasted.
"So this is the same material that's used in the opening walls!"
He remarked, hardly reacting to the entrance melting shut behind him.
His new location revealed itself as a small, pill-shaped capsule when the circuit-line pictograms on its cylindrical walls came alive with light, continuing to illuminate them as they went through yet another transformation, a frighteningly thin layer of them detaching from the rest to form a translucent, glass like layer. The floor, too, turned transparent, except that in its case, there was nothing beneath.
"That's one truly impressive metamaterial!"
The reason he hadn't panicked was, of course, that he'd already worked out that he was in yet another elevator, or at least, that's what he would have told Clara if she had been here.
Then of course, the ride began, and the entire capsule began a swift downward race against the dark shaft it had just detached from, faster than he might have been able to appreciate if he didn't have additional senses that could measure his motion against space, and how much ground he was covering.
Combined with the symbol, there was really only one place this could be going: The Old Town, the Lower City, the historic dome itself.
He half expected the kind of spiking music and dramatic pan out that horror movies would accompany sudden trap doors with, but before such a sound would even have stopped playing, the motion stopped – With these distances, it was barely slower than a teleport, and the ride had been smooth, too – He'd bet his sonic screwdriver that there must have been some inertial dampening to avoid an uncomfortable collision with the ceiling.
Right in his line of sight, a dot of light appeared, heralding another 'opening wall' as the other walls simultaneously turned back to being opaque.
The Doctor was already pretty familiar with these at this point – the truly surprising thing was the soft golden radiance that fell into the hallway from behind that doorway.
You'd think that any abrupt encounter with any daylight-like illuminations would have been traumatic, but the engineers had evidently taken this into account, providing soft, red-and-golden illumination that roughly resembled, but by no means mimicked the sky outside.
The Fabronians were pragmatic about their bodies' positive responses to light, but they did not bow to them and might well have outdone their sun in its suitability for their kind – There would be no heat strokes or sunburns in here, nor was there any risk of incurring skin cancer.
Stepping out of the cabin, the Doctor took in the scenery before him, and allowed himself to be awed by it, forcing his ever-buzzing mind to quiet down and take a nice, long look at the sights before him. He was near the outskirts of where the dome was, close enough to its outer walls to see colossal tunnel entrances in its side walls that had once been gates to the outside or perhaps, to surface outskirts of the city.
The sheer size of them really could not been understated, each of them a monument to the city's wealth, history and culture, but also, it's bloody past. They each had their own name, taken from the architect who'd been assigned to design them when they were first built. The statues and ornaments that surrounded each of them was somewhat different from the others, though they all bore the lavish, jewel-encrusted style typical of their time period.
The ring gates, collectively called such because they lined the outermost 'ring' of the Old Town, were a display of not just beauty, but also functionality: They had been built so that they could slam shut in case of an invasion, and keep the domed structure stable and sealed even if it were flung into space or, as it had eventually happened, sank into the molten ground.
Later, after the ground rock had long since solidified, they had been opened again to continue building beyond them, leading to the creation of smaller city districts, each radiating out at an angle, named after the gate from which it could be accessed, the style of each subtly influenced by the art style of the gate it had sprung from, but overall closer to the lower middle city than the inside of the dome, being much, much younger – reflected in them was the pride of a young generation recovered from years of hiding and cowering in the forgotten, submerged dome, quite glad to have this hidden world to themselves.
Somehow people tended to have this idea that if they could only go live in a place with people just like themselves, all of their problems would be gone and they wouldn't have to deal with all the troubles brought on by individual difference. The Doctor thought it to be one of the more harmful delusions that sentient beings had ever devised – what actually tended to happen was that one came to realize that having a few traits in common did not make them exactly the same person.
Before long, Thought Policing and No True Scotsman fallacies would be thrown around before eventually, people grew up and accepted that they were different, or flipped into full us vs. them mode, and one way or another, society continued like it always did.
But at first, these young Xalaxians had really believe that they could create an ideal society without strife now that they were all among themselves and, despite their pride and a certain callousness toward the tragedy and destruction that had made their lives as they were, had made an admirable attempt at doing so and making the most out of their secluded freedom in which they were not beholden to anyone, and their fearlessly modern architecture and social reforms had reflected that.
By the time they started building upwards, they had returned to a more pragmatic style, perhaps in awareness that they might well be judged for the deeds of their distant ancestors and humbled by the fact that they did not at all know how the world might have changed and advanced in all the time they were hidden away, advancement being rather crucial to Xalaxian identity and hence, exactly the sort of thing they'd be collectively insecure about.
Continuing from the top of the dome, the central city had been built all the way to the peaks of the surface towers and by then, they were back to bragging with a few reservations that had simply been absorbed into tradition by then, like those reservations of depicting their own form, but since Fabronian generations tended to last a lot longer than human ones and the generally larger age gaps and persistence of firsthand memory led to each of these periods lasting fairly long, enough for many layers of ingenuous architecture to pile up in all directions, often making use of clever engineering tricks to realize the enormous dimensions in accordance with the laws of physics.
Facing away from the gates, however, lay the expanse of the Old Town, the Lower City, the true Heartland of the Xalaxian Empire.
To its citizens, it had been tantamount the cradle of civilization, the egg of the world – but even without adhering to such legends or delusions, the sight before him was dazzling, even to him – it was worth stating that he deliberately allowed himself to get lost in the impression, and could have chosen not to, but – it would have been fundamentally incorrect to liken the dome to any kind of regular natural cave or your regular colossal building.
Even in his 'line of work', structures of this size were an exceptional style – It was tall enough to form a horizon line, tall enough for skyscrapers to stand in from both directions and still have a plenitude of space left in the middle, though only the central part of the upper part actually did, reflective monoliths hanging down in the red and golden shine.
The dome itself was not actually a perfect hemisphere, but more of a wider, flattened, lens-like form, and the top would have done next to nothing if the lower half had not been embedded in a solid structure as well – Though it had never actually flown, all of the lower city was technically an enormous flying saucer, long since embedded into and connected with the adjacent compounds.
The top half of the dome was inhabited, too, and resembled a dark, glittering cityscape, star-like windows covering various tenebrous outlines, distinctly urban and thoroughly modern in nature, the kind of buildings a space-faring civilization would erect, but with the lower city, the Xalaxians had attempted to imitate their ancestors, or much rather, their own fantasies and interpretations of them, and realized the mythical land of their dreams.
The lift the Doctor had taken had brought him to the outer rim of the dome, and from here, he could overlook all of it, complete with the broad, ring-like structures inspired by the city's first iterations.
Unlike then, the lower half of the city somewhat curved downwards, with the temples, palaces, public pleasure gardens and government buildings in its center forming its lowest point, which made it easy to overlook from around the ring gates.
Down here, he finally saw what the Xalaxians had done with the water of the Lagoons: For one thing, it filled the concentric canals of varying thickness that divided the city into it's ring-like divisions, but even if you put that aside, it was ubiquitous: In between the gates, little waterfalls poured out of the walls; A plethora of fountains and aqueducts crisscrossed the multitude of reflective splendor that surrounded him, from the irrigation of pleasure Gardens to tiny decorative water clocks, the glittering deep-spring waters fed and animates everything, and through a technological burst of vanity, nearly all water within the city was kept clean and potable, except, presumably, the sewers.
Despite the old-timesy designs of columns and arches and carvings, the Fabronians could not help but show off their mastery of material sciences, creating both incredibly flimsy-looking, dreamlike buildings that seemed to defy gravity, and encrusting many a surface with artificial jewels that they could then synthesize en masse without any need to bother with the troublesome work of digging them out of the ground: The scarcities and limitations of nature were not the boss of them.
Even here, on the very edge on an area that, by itself, must have dwarfed most 21st century human cities, every building was a product of deliberate creation, intricate and loving individual works of art; Many of these had been private residences or the shops and facilities needed to provide such residential districts with all manner of luxuries, and as such, they were the works of a multitude of architects, much less unified than the pompous structures closer to the center; Wherever he could see, there were compositions of shapes, diverse forests of gold and marble, some of the buildings heavy and mighty, others elegant and filigrane, each of them easily a castle by itself or a light miniature of similar dignity, not necessarily big in size but certainly magnificent in sophistication; But if one were forced to name a common denominator, one could easily arrive at 'rococo' or 'baroque'; The symphony of distinct styles collectively had its frills and florishes cranked up to the max.
There were always more details left to discover, more intricacies left to please eager eyes and receptive minds; Stepping into the Lower City was like walking into a painting or experiencing the visual equivalent of an orchestra, a blossom of detail and arrangement unified by a common harmony that melted into a stunning whole.
Even the Doctor, who far more of a meaningfully framework to compare it to than most individual would have had, found himself at a loss to describe the splendor before her.
He'd thought that he would be making sarcastic quips when he got here, poking fun at the ostentatious luxury he expected to find, but here before him was beauty, however it may or may not have come to be, and jaded as he was, even he wasn't the kind of dead, desiccated being that would spit on it.
One might say that the splendor before him had been the product of vanity and pride, but honestly, there was no reason that the Fabronians couldn't have made all this and then desisted from blowing each other up – Indeed, one wondered why they would ever risk destroying their civilization if it could birth such marvelous wonders, just looking at this place should have made them want to throw down their weapons and share in its beauty, but, those darned ingrates had to take it for granted, didn't they?
Gold and glitter may be lies, but there was no arguing with the simple, sincere pleasantness of shapes and colors and the ineffable positive qualia contained therein; Some things just felt pleasant to look at just like there were things that sounded, smelt and tasted good; If it were otherwise, the whole vast field of purely abstract art couldn't exist.
'Pleasant', however, was an incredible understatement in this case, it was like comparing some vaguely nice ambient music to a live performance that brought tears to one's eyes; What these houses and streets evoked was a sense of euphoria and bliss, a flash of marvel comparable to the sort that could be chemically induced, but experienced with the full, conscious clear-headedness of the sober mind, with a full and intact sense of reality, insofar as it could be maintained alongside the heady feeling evoked by the sights before him, a city like a painting, or a whole museum made out of paintings, an artificial dreamland made all the more unearthly by the absence of its makers – far and wide, there was only beauty, stillness, and running water, its sloshing the only sound that permeated this womb-like expanse of red and gold, practically a world of its own, enclosed, lost and hidden away to all... well, except for him.
This world is full of wonders.
Once again of just why he'd chosen this life of travel and discovery, of why he'd chosen it over any other path when given the choice again and again.
His earlier tension and suspicion melted away from him, and he allowed himself to just exist in the moment, from one impression to the next, spinning around the sunken city in a giddy haze; Even the streets on these outskirts were wide, each side decorated with little streams of water and even trees that had somehow been kept in shape throughout the years, likely by gardening robots who had labored away for centuries even in absence of their masters.
The machines may even have kept replacing them – after all, even trees do not live forever, and the potted flowers surely didn't; Though they may have been genetically altered to bloom all-year round, their natural forms ought to have been of the sort whose life cycled spanned only a single year. Even if the Fabronians left a large stockpile of flower seeds for their robot gardeners to tend, what were the odds of the supply lasting to this day?
He supposed that this, too, could be attributed to those mystery stowaways, but he thought this in jest, no longer allotting that theory much credibility.