Seo, meanwhile, is hopelessly lost.
And hopelessly confused.
She races through landscapes and doors and things, trying to find at least a door that'll lead to the outside. But no matter how much she unlocks or throws around or changes, everything seems strange and bizarre and weird.
"I am Pandax I," says one specter, approaching her. "Cease causing this chaos."
"Anthrax the first?" Seo asks, looking at him, confused. "You look more like Nearly Headless Nick to me."
Poof!
Pandax I, deceased president of Gallifrey, has now turned into Nearly Headless Nick!
"Ack!" Seo cries, backing away. As the hallway and environment around her starts to morph into a scene from Harry Potter. She spins around and runs, trying to find a way out of there. Flings a door open, shouting, "I'm not in Harry Potter! I'm... nowhere!"
The door opens to complete whiteness.
Seo looks around, freaking out. Even the door behind her is gone. "No, it's just my eyes, not able to see through the light," Seo decides. Closes her eyes. "If I just open them, again, I'll be able to see..."
She opens her eyes.
Finds herself in a theater, watching "End Game" by Samuel Beckett — which is a play that involves people popping out of trash cans and a man getting wheeled around in a wheel chair.
"Samuel Beckett?!" Seo complains.
A bunch of rhinos storm the stage. Two tramps enter, one dragging the other by a rope. Then a lady and her husband appear, arguing about a son that doesn't really exist.
"I'd say this was absurd," Seo says, backing away. "But I'm afraid that's too literal even for me."
"Not literal, literary," says a man behind her, and she spins around.
Finds Rupert Giles handing her a book, in the middle of a large library.
"Just avoid the Pandora section of the library," Giles explains to her, handing her the book — which looks exactly like the one he gives Buffy in the first Buffy episode, except it's titled 'Time Lords'. "Dark partition. Very dangerous."
"What are you doing here?!" Seo cries. "I thought I was on Gallifrey."
A wind blows, and all the books turn into sand — as does Giles. The view looks exactly like the one that Seo first saw, back when she and Jenny had first landed on Gallifrey.
Seo freaks, turning this way and that.
"Please, you must take the book," Giles insists, again. Handing it to her. "We are all Time Lords. You must stop changing us."
"You're not a Time Lord! You're Giles! You're human!" Seo shouts. "I don't understand!"
"Seo!" comes Jenny's voice.
Seo spins around, but can't see Jenny anywhere. All she can hear is Jenny's voice.
"Jenny?" Seo shakes her head. "Don't tell me you're caught in this mess, too! What is this? Some interrogation unit? A trick? A prison?"
"You're in the Matrix," Jenny's voice explains. "Stuck in a computer simulation!"
"Matrix?!" Seo cries. "What, you mean like with Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss and that bloke who wound up on CSI?"
All around Seo, the landscape shifts into a Matrix-style Chicago simulation, complete with Agent Smiths saying, "Mr. Anderson!" and ghostly dreadlocked hippies and machines who look like gigantic metal squid.
Seo winds up getting chased up a flight of steps in a creepy building, only just barely missing barrages from an insane number of semi-automatic weapons that seemed to be fired at random. Also, there's way too much leather and Seo has no idea why people are wearing sunglasses when it's night out.
"No! And stop doing that!" Jenny shouts, through the air. Seo still can't see her. "Everyone out here is going mad. You've invaded the Time Lords' central computer system, and wound up getting yourself tangled right into its inner workings. Worst of all, you're the Key — so somehow, you're able to change the environment and everyone inside of it. Including all the memories of dead Time Lords who ever existed on Gallifrey!"
"Whoa," says Neo, emerging. He looks at his hands. "This isn't right. I'm supposed to be a Time Lord. Not… this…" He looks around himself, again. "Whoa. What's happened to the Matrix?"
Seo feels a horrible sinking sensation in her stomach. "You mean… I'm not just trapped in a computer program… I'm trapped in a psychic matrix of dead Time Lord memories, and I'm… changing it, somehow?"
Jenny clearly can't hear her.
But Seo is starting to realize… it's true.
Then Agent Smith appears and starts blathering on about a Keymaker, and Seo knows it's definitely true. She also ponders why they seem to be taking so much from the second Matrix movie, when she really hated that one.
"What happened to the spoon boy?" Seo demands of the world around her. "I liked the spoon boy!"
A Time Lord with a gigantic collar and stupid hat appears before her, holding up a gigantic staff, which bends in the middle. "The trick is to realize there is no Rod of Rassilon."
Seo decides this is just getting silly, now.
But before she can complain, the semi-automatic gunfire starts up, again, and Seo finds herself running for her life.
"Brilliant," Seo mutters. Then chides herself to, "Stop thinking!"
"Since you haven't changed the environment, I'm guessing you've figured out what's going on," Jenny's voice says, through the air. "Listen, Seo. There's a situation, out here. We found a device called a Ma'erissa, and the Time Lords need to talk to you. We're trying to open you up a Matrix Door, so you can get out of there. But you need to stay calm and keep the landscape stable. All right?"
Seo barely throws herself around a corner before Trinity and a bunch of agents in black suits blow her head off.
"Easier said than done!" Seo says. "What's this door supposed to look like?"
She keeps running until she bursts into an apartment building, which is run down and horrible-looking, but has a red arm chair right in the middle, and a man with sunglasses and a black trench coat, sitting on it.
"Oh, no," Seo says, realizing exactly what the door will look like — something that'd match with her current conception of the world. "You're the door!"
"You take the blue pill, and the story ends," says Laurence Fishburne. "You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."
"Thanks, Noland from Predators," says Seo, frustrated. "I'll keep that in mind!"
Through the air: "Seo, can you see it? The door out of the Matrix?"
Seo sighs. "Right. I see. That's my choice, then, is it? Take the door and go out into the real world, into Gallifrey and Wonderland, full of rabbits who wear ridiculous clothes and obsess over time. Or stay in here…"
She remembers the Ma'erissa.
Remembers Giles, in his library full of books warning her of the dark partition. Dark Partition… of the Time Lords' super computer.
Remembers what the Moment told her — how a Key sees a lock.
"This is more than just a psychic matrix," Seo realizes. "If I could unlock the armory… and I can change around anything in here at a whim… then it must be the computer system that controls everything on Gallifrey. And I'm the only one with a special master-key to unlock it."
The Ma'erissa.
Someone on Gallifrey is a traitor.
"Someone's trying to kill the Time Lords," Seo says. "But I'm never going to find out who, out there."
She heads over to Laurence Fishburne. Who repeats what he'd said, before — with a few slight changes.
"You take the blue pill — the story ends. But if you take the red pill, you leave the Matrix, stay in wonderland, and follow all the white rabbits."
Seo grabs the blue pill.
"My story isn't ending," Seo tells him. "It's just beginning. That's why… I'm staying in the Matrix."
The pill turns into a book in her hands — the same book Giles tried to give her, in the library. Then she spins around on her heels.
And throws herself out the window.
As she falls through the air, she twists and manipulates the landscape around her — so that she drops into a stack of soft pillows, waiting down below. With a whole stack of locked boxes, all around her, just waiting to be opened.
Jenny's voice echoes through the air, again. "Seo! What's happened? Did you miss the door? Do you need us to make you a new one?"
Seo shuts off Jenny's entrance into the Matrix.
And seals away any other doors or entrances than anyone might have access to.
"There's a traitor on Gallifrey," says Seo. "Someone who's been hiding here for a very long time, playing a long game. And will now try to hand Gallifrey over to the Daleks. So, to finding out who that is and what's really going on — it's time to break into a few Time Lord secrets."
She climbs down from the pillow pile.
And opens up some of the locked cases.
…
Outside the Matrix, the Time Lords figure out what has just happen, and start getting desperate.
They can't let Seo gain access to their secrets!
They just can't.
They try to seal Seo into a partition in the Matrix, but she manages to unlock all their attempts and bust her way through their defenses — easily. They try to scoop her, but she can avoid all their scoops.
Now that Seo knows where she is and why she can manipulate it, she's completely in control of the Matrix and its powers. So there's nothing anyone can do to stop her.
"She's the Key," Jenny says. "Nothing can stop the Key."
"Except, perhaps," Braxiatel says, reaching up his sleeve, "the Key of Rassilon?"
He then reveals that he has the Key of Rassilon. Which he stole a while ago, basically because he wanted to stop Rassilon from having it.
...
First, they use the Key of Rassilon to run a full biodata extract on Seo — to make sure she hasn't been taken over by the Ma'erissa.
Braxiatel immediately discovers something that startles him — namely, why the Matrix sees Seo as being familiar. But he quickly dismisses it, and pretends that Seo wiped the information herself. Actually, Braxiatel has wiped it, but we only discover this later.
It does become clear, though, from Seo's DE, that she isn't made very well at all, and certainly is an imperfect Gallifreyan. Beyond that, though, she's part… everything, really.
"Traces of Cyberman," Braxiatel reports, "of human, of dimensionally nodal engineering, bits of higher-dimensional elements… even a trace of that infant used to trap the Wyorin, during the War."
This alarms people.
But Romana dismisses it — as the Wyorin trace is negligent and clearly dormant. No. Romana finds out something else from that DE.
"She originated in the Axis," Romana says. "She shouldn't exist. An anomaly."
...
In the Matrix, Seo manipulates the landscape over and over again, to gain access to more and more secrets. She gets into pockets of the Matrix so secret and hidden that nobody has ever seen them for many centuries.
Then she opens an inconspicuous-looking door.
And discovers a great big huge bomb in the middle of an empty room. A Matrix bomb. Hooked up to all the Time Lords on Gallifrey. And it's ready and waiting to go off.
...
That's when the Time Lords manage to use the Key of Rassilon to force Seo out of the Matrix. But the others have already seen it — a bomb that had been locked away so far down that not even the Time Lords have detected it. All the Time Lords recognize the technology that created it, and they're all scared.
It's Dalek.
A traitor has been on Gallifrey since the end of the Time War, and they placed a bomb inside the Matrix, which was to be triggered by the Time Lord ascension if it had gone through. It would send out a psychic pulse, using the Matrix, to target every Gallifreyan on the planet, and implant the Time Lords with Dalek ideologies.
That way, even if the Time Lords had destroyed the whole universe, they'd still be wiped out, and turned into little more than Daleks.
The only life left in the universe would still be Dalek.
As it turns out, though, the bomb never got triggered — first, due to the Moment, and second, due to the Doctor's moving the planet. The revived Daleks assumed that Gallifrey was gone, and didn't send out an activation signal.
Then Gallifrey had signaled the Doctor on Trenzalore.
And the Daleks had discovered they still existed. The Daleks used their proximity to the rift on Trenzalore so they could communicate through it, changing the programming trigger so that the bomb would go off the second that Gallifrey was pulled into the real universe.
Luckily, this didn't happen because Gallifrey wasn't pulled into the real universe.
Another lucky escape.
Seo, in finding the bomb, had wound up triggering the countdown. It also triggered a number of Dalek Servators around the capital, who hadn't realized they were Dalek Servators until this minute.
The Time Lords wind up taking these Dalek Servators down with extreme efficiency and ruthlessness, one that showed that they'd been fighting a long time against these kinds of things. They are furious at Seo for stumbling in and doing her best job of destroying their world for them, but… as Jenny points out, "Would you rather she hadn't found this bomb, and you'd known nothing about it until the moment you all turned into Daleks?"
They almost succeed in eliminating the bomb, by partitioning the Matrix, but Seo's fiddling has taken down all ability to properly partition.
The bomb explodes, and the pulse encompasses the entire planet.
Every single person on Gallifrey is affected — EXCEPT for Seo, who is too human/hell god for the pulse to recognize her as Gallifreyan.
Jenny, however, is affected just like all the others.
Seo throws herself back into the Matrix, to escape the Time Lord Daleks, and — using her special Key powers — finds a log of exactly what data comprised the bomb, and what happened when it exploded. While the Time Lord Daleks try to get her out of the Matrix, Seo hurries to create her own "undo" bomb, which will restore them all to normal, again.
She is found and they attempt to drag her off, just after she's finished building the bomb, but before she has time to construct it. She grabs something important (find important item and insert here), and chucks it at the bomb.
The bomb explodes, and all the Time Lords go back to normal.
The day is saved!
...
This proves to the Time Lords that Jenny is really one of them. She was transformed just like everyone else, so she must be a true Gallifreyan!
When Braxiatel suggests that perhaps Jenny would enjoy staying on Gallifrey and becoming a Time Lady, Jenny eagerly accepts. She's determined to be a Time Lady for real, and to learn about Gallifrey!
...
At the end of the story, everyone seems very happy and very grateful. Braxiatel excuses himself and Seo, then takes Seo aside and tells her that he's arranged everything — and she can leave.
Seo insists that she isn't budging.
Braxiatel tries to reason with Seo — Jenny will fit into this society, but Seo will not. She is a key to unlock dimensions and universes, and certain powers on Gallifrey are very keen to make sure she stays here forever.
"And not as a guest," Braxiatel informs her.
Still, Seo won't move. She insists that she's not going anywhere until she rescues the Moment.
Braxiatel knows that she's never going to be able to get the Moment. So he plays his final card — and tells her, "Seo. I know."
"You know what?"
"I read it in the Matrix," Braxiatel says. "Then wiped the records. It's why you could navigate the lower vaults. It's why the Matrix recognized you. Why this whole planet recognizes you — and is afraid of you."
Seo still has no idea what he means.
But you can see that a part of her is very defensive about the fact that she's Seo. And she doesn't want to be anyone else.
"Yes, you seem quite an amiable sort of person," Braxiatel concedes. "Perhaps you could even talk the other Time Lords around. But Rassilon is returning from Southern Gallifrey. And if you're still here, when he arrives… then this planet will become your tomb."
Seo leaves.
Braxiatel looks after her, intrigued. We discover that while Braxiatel had known about Jenny, he hadn't known about Seo.
"If you're here," Braxiatel mutters to himself, "then it means… you beat Rassilon, once before." He turns. "Perhaps, you'll be able to do it again."
...
Seo goes back to her own universe, and grabs up Dawn — who is, at this point, extremely pregnant with her third child (Will).
The next thing we see is Seo and her aunt inside of Oliver, trying to make a precision materialization inside a transduction barrier, an armory, and another universe. All three of which should be impossible, but are possible with Seo and Dawn together.
Dawn tells Seo that if this hurts her baby, she's going to literally kill Seo. Multiple times. Seo assures Dawn that this is going to be fine, and nothing bad's going to happen.
They manage to drop in and pick up the Moment, then immediately take off again and go back. The Time Lords are outraged but can't really do anything. Seo is very happy.
Seo tells the Moment, "You didn't think I was just going to leave you behind, did you?"
When the Moment reminds Seo that there's a price to be paid, in her own future, for this rescue — Seo replies that "that's the thing about my future — it's all what I make it. And I'm not going to let that price involve anyone except me."
She drops off her aunt back home.
And the story ends with the Moment telling Seo that she's a very nice, kindhearted person — and she doesn't deserve what's coming to her.
"Maybe not," says Seo. "But you didn't either."