The Doctor opened his eyes and sat up and for a moment thought he was with Marco Polo again, but then everything cleared up into focus when he observed the Early Dorom beassi staring at him with Constance kneeling by his side. He knew they were Early Dorom beassi because the climate they were in was mild, if a little cool, with an abundance of flora. They had not yet migrated to the Dry Lands to become nomadic and develop thinner layers of fur, which would be the Dorom beassi. They were all also mostly quadrupedal, either paw-knuckling their arms in a squat or hunched up their long bodies as they tried to stand on two squat legs. The Doctor also noticed that a few of them still had the long-faces and weren't entirely humanoid.
A little ways off was a creature fading in and out of reality, humanoid in shape but with pigment-altering abilities. At a guess he would say some sort of Magnoliophyta, they were recently (in terms of evolutionary scale) evolved from algae, younger than most of the species around them although a lot more complex clearly. And considering the quantum fluctuations that were phasing the particles while maintaining the fundamental forces, even anchoring them to this plane of reality, they could likely be from a defunct time track where they were the dominant species. If applying the basic humanoid evolutionary track they were at least two species distinctions ahead of the Early Dorom beassi, they would be the Proto-Coot beassi.
'Doctor, you said that aloud,' said Constance. She didn't point out he also pushed himself into the furry creatures' faces as he spoke, hoping he would realise he had done that.
The Doctor found himself leaning on a tree, examining the fading creature with determination. He looked away and found the nausea fading.
'Problem with being time-sensitive, you get the worst headaches in a paradox,' said the Doctor. He fixed his coat and smiled that very warm, but still superior, smile at the Early Dorom beassi. 'Hello, I'm the Doctor.'
Constance told him to do the gesture, but then saw the Early Dorom beassi had backed away, cowered and were muttering amongst themselves darkly. Even Sudden was upright, Determined had backed away, hidden behind some of the others. Wiggle wiggled.
'What did you do?' asked Constance.
'They speak with gestures. The TARDIS translates telepathically. Time Lords have natural talents with that, so my translation is more pronounced. My words speak louder than my actions,' explained the Doctor. He neglected to mention the psychic influence he also had. This one at least knows the meaning of discretion.
'And who are you?' asked the fading creature. They stood, proud and tapping at the cage they were in.
'I'm sorry my dear chap, but if I look at you I may not be able to think. You see, what afflicts you, I am sensitive to, so forgive my rudeness by not looking at you directly.'
'That's never stopped you before,' said Constance, also not realising she said that out loud and refused to meet the Doctor's playful, if a little serious, glare.
'Very well,' said the fading creature who we'll call Jane (Flip does later).
'Do you know what's happened to you?' asked the Doctor.
'Brian tells us we are the last tribe to ascend, we are left to protect and purify the land before we transcend,' said Jane quite dryly, then became flippant, 'but Brian says a lot of things like that. I'm pretty sure this is a curse or disease.'
'Well I can't say for certain how you obtained it, but disease or curse is accurate enough. You are in a state of quantum fluctuation. This fading in and out business is you removing yourselves from the world. For whatever reason, you are partially anchored.'
'But when they touch us, we aren't anchored and we disappear?' asked Poison Nose.
'Yes. You… are contaminated with the disease. But it's not airborne or passed through biomes, but particle contamination. Yes, you breathe the same air, but the particles that are part of the ghosts flicker out of reality before they can take anyone else with them. I suspect the fundamental forces working as a collective whole… almost like a gravity well barrier.' He actually sounded as if he was impressed with his own answer.
Stars, do you ever get the feeling they just start speaking until they sound convincing enough?
'They have been chasing us to the Dry Lands,' said Determined, 'but they are the ones who don't belong here?'
The Doctor looked at Determined, straight in the eye, and Determined buckled so quickly. They were not good at eye contact at the best of times. 'They have been chasing you into the Dry Lands?' asked the Doctor.
'Should they not have been?' asked Constance, very much used to aliens being where they weren't supposed to be in 'established history.'
The Doctor shrugged. 'How many are there of you, dear chap?'
'Call me Jane,' said Jane.
She didn't actually say Jane, it was another unpronounceable name which not even the Doctor was able to speak with his heightened telepathic senses and guttural physiology.
'Jane, how many are there of you?'
'Thirteen, we used to be twenty, but they have… ascended.'
'And how long have your people been like this?'
The Doctor kept going like this with Jane, explaining how it all happened—as far as she remembered anyway. There was The Escape, that's what the adults called it, and while they stayed in the Nursery everyone was fed and didn't fade, but as soon as they left the Nursery the world cracked open and the adults began to fade and flicker. Some were there longer than most, there never seemed to be any reason for it, but they did not stay long. At most, they lasted a decade. Then it was just the children on their own until they became adults themselves and began to fade.
From the remnants of the Nursery, its shell and furniture, they made their home in the forest. At least a year went by before they encountered the Early Dorom beassi, of course, calling them demons, and began to fight.
The Doctor was silent for some time as the hunters and gatherers of the Early Dorom beassi elders talked amongst themselves, planning how to hunt and gather before turning to the homestead and making their journey into the Dry Lands, or even planning their next attack.
'Well, Doctor?' asked Constance, expecting the Doctor to not only have the answers, but a solution.
He looked at her a little distractedly, still in thought clearly.
'Refugees from a defunct time track. This Nursery must have been some exodus ship. Though I don't know why they would have known to build one capable of moving through time tracks without some… other intelligence behind it.'
'The Rani?'
'No… well, not exactly. It does rather have an odd smell of Time Lord interference. I suppose it doesn't matter how they came to be here, but how I can get them out.'
'Back to their original time tack?'
'No, no, that would destroy them. If I can get back to the TARDIS I might be able to stabilise them in this dimensional plane.' Then he remembered what planet he was on and considered the possibility it was just Kessas Aen being temporally sensitive and not a Time Lord plot and nothing suspicious.
Some little telepathic aftertaste distracted him and he chased it, but it vanished.
'Could they stay here? Wouldn't that change history?' asked Constance, as quietly as possible, very wary that the TARDIS was translating to both groups of aliens.
'That settles it,' said the Doctor loudly, 'I'll bring them somewhere else.' He turned to face Jane, was thrown back by the force of his time sensitivity and fainted.
Constance had so many eyes on her.
Flip was escorted by two Yssimarb she dubbed Darren and Lisa to bring Dreamer back to the Early Dorom beassi. She didn't want to risk Darren getting in trouble and so didn't enquire about the doubts they clearly had about Brian. Lisa was the second-in-command, or so they liked to think of themselves, Lisa aspired for the metal spear next.
'Repeat the plan, Flip,' said Lisa, with only a little superiority.
'We go to the hills, call out to Dreamer's family and then tell them we'll trade Dreamer for your friend,' said Flip, she had decided to call this captured one Jane, as I said earlier.
'Good,' said Lisa. They faded out of reality and dropped their pointed stick, when they came back into reality they picked it up.
'Why carry it if you keep dropping it?' asked Flip.
'While we're part of this mortal world we are weak to attack. We need to keep protected.
'It also is a good symbol,' said Darren. 'An anchor, a weapon, a means of aiding a journey.'
Flip, having given them the name Darren, didn't really expect that insight from them.
Lisa gave Darren a look Flip couldn't understand. Darren continued on. 'Or is that interpretation a blasphemy?'
'I didn't expect you to care so much,' said Lisa.
'About us as a peoples? Of course, I do. Just because I don't always agree with Brian and you doesn't mean I don't care.'
They returned to silence, Flip considered what her next move should be, the boredom was a greater motivator than the caution. 'So you lot don't always agree on things?'
'Of course not. Do your people?' asked Darren with slight disgust.
'God no, you all just seem… to work together.'
'We are a peoples, we are the last tribe, the chosen tribe,' said Lisa.
'We are also few, we don't have time to argue,' said Darren.
Flip caught a look from Lisa that she couldn't read, but then was asked by Dreamer: 'What are you all talking about?'
'Noffin', just that they're the last of their tribe.'
'Oh. That's so sad,' said Dreamer, and something in their animal brain sparked, much in the way they can't quite comprehend spirits and ghosts, they couldn't quite comprehend the sense of loss that they were feeling. Dreamer knew it missed those family it couldn't see immediately, knew it longed to see those it hadn't in a while, but as a species, they had yet to comprehend the difference between someone who isn't there and might be again, and someone who isn't there and won't ever be again.
Dreamer tried to grasp this, tried to think of their family/tribe all vanishing, and tried to imagine what it was like to never see them again. But they knew this wasn't doing it justice. It would be knowing there was only your family/tribe and no outsiders mating into the family. Nothing. Just the family/tribe in this little expanse of land and nothing, not the nomads in the Dry Lands, not the supposed ones further on, in another lush and verdant land.
Dreamer did not want to dream something so terrible.
"The others must know of this," thought Dreamer. They wondered, too, if telling the others might make something if they could feel the uneasiness would make them understand it more.
'Does it… understand that?' asked Lisa quietly, unable to understand Dreamer's thoughtful expression, but could see they were more distracted.
Flip looked closely, she couldn't get a read on it either. 'I don't know. Maybe.' She knew she shouldn't humanise aliens, empathise certainly, but to mistake them for humans was a mistake. But even then, when she considered the monsters humans were capable of being. Flip shuddered at the memories of Bath in 1756.
'Is that important to you?' asked Flip.
'What do you mean?'
'If he can talk and think and understand, would that bother you?'
Darren liked Flip, she had the attitude that Darren, themselves, liked to think they had. Darren liked to have their ideas challenged. They also knew Lisa didn't, they were curious to see how Lisa would react to someone like Flip, someone who doesn't need to eventually submit to Brian.
Lisa bristled, but not in the way you'd see a human do so, their skin tightened as the vascular system that directed phylum and such around their body pulsed. Lisa's body made them quick to anger, but they talked themselves down quickly. Although knew the visible tightening of skin, the excitable jitter of their hands, Flip had seen and stepped back.
'Are you okay Lisa?' asked Darren, well aware this would wind them up further.
'Yes. I'm just… thinking.'
They had stopped walking. Flip had to pull Dreamer back from not wandering off.
'It wouldn't. I think it might mean they aren't the unthinking animals we thought they were, but they are still demons.'
'Demons do not think. We think, therefore we are not demons,' said Darren. Quoting a very important discussion they all had that.
'I know, but we lost the sense of what thinking is. Maybe thinking is too strong a word. They might think and communicate, but we… philosophise and talk.' Again, Flip had that slight pain in her brain, again the telepathic translation was working very hard.
'Do you want to explain the difference between them?' asked Darren.
Lisa began walking again, Darren followed and brought the two with them.
'What, is that it? You just gonna let her strop off?' asked Flip.
'No, they're just thinking. We like to take our time to think.'
"Treebeard," thought Flip and accepted it.
They continued in silence, with Lisa in the lead and Darren taking up the rear.
