-8-
Taslo.
It said something that every society was different and yet similar in so many ways. Taslo was bored as she sat in the prison cell Division had thrown her into on Gallifrey, but luckily they hadn't stopped her from getting too bored. Even the Time Lords wouldn't be that cruel.
And yet she did feel the effects of the prolonged isolation.
Taslo was just watching a 20th-century human TV series called Stranger Things when she noticed the security field just wink out. She tensed with fear.
Division was not a pleasant organisation, it was not beyond them to devise nasty and everlasting punishments for those who crossed them; if their enemies suffered then agents who failed or tried to escape them suffered twenty times worse.
But surely they weren't sick in the head enough to play 'killed while trying to escape,' were they?
Taslo closed her eyes, weighed her options, and decided to just risk it; with a bit of luck, she might even find a way out of here, and if she was even luckier, she could find a TARDIS and just get away from Gallifrey before she found a spaceship after abandoning the TARDIS somewhere for the Time Lords and Division to find, and then vanish; it would be a rubbish existence, jumping from starship to starship without time travelling, but since the Time Lords and Division focused on TARDISes, they ignored regular space travel.
And besides, Taslo knew there was a chance she could die, and she had so much she wanted to see, so much to do.
Carefully she left her cell, only to bump into someone she didn't expect.
"Hiya Taslo. You okay?" The Fugitive Doctor asked.
"Doctor?" Taslo couldn't believe it.
"Yeah, it's me. Look, do you want to get away from here?"
Taslo narrowed her eyes. "What's all this?" She demanded suspiciously; the last time she'd met her hero, things had not worked out very well.
"I'm getting you away from Gallifrey," the Fugitive Doctor replied, "but I want you to do something for me in return."
Taslo let out a long, disappointed breath. Why was it everyone wanted something from everyone else? Ever since she'd joined Division, she had learnt the organisation regularly manipulated events so they could do anything.
Which was why she was shocked when the Fugitive Doctor went on. "I need you to find my Division file, Taslo. Something is wrong," she said.
Tasks stiffened, seeing the way the Doctor's face tensed up. She looked around, half expecting guards or senior agents or even androids swarming nearby, but there was nobody.
"What's the catch?"
"I don't know yet, but Taslo, I need your help."
"Why?" Taslo thought it was a reasonable thing to ask. "After that mess with the colonies, I'd have thought you wouldn't want to see me again."
She couldn't mask her hurt; the Doctor was a Division legend, after all. And it had hurt her to do what she had.
"What's going on is bigger than that
The Fugitive Doctor sighed when she realised Taslo wasn't buying it. She lifted her hand slowly, trying hard not to make the younger girl react badly. Fortunately, Taslo only stepped back slightly before she realised what the Doctor wanted.
She wanted to make telepathic contact.
She sagged and nodded reluctantly.
The Fugitive Doctor pressed her finger against Taslo's temple. "Contact."
-8-
"Well, Doctor, this is the largest file on record, so large in fact when I got it out I was only able to get two-quarters of it before the alarms went off," Taslo commented later, her mind still reeling.
Taslo had been stunned by the Doctor breaking her out of prison, but when the older Time Lady touched her mind and showed her the recent encounter with an incarnation from the future, who didn't know about Division, Taslo's interest spiked, including how the Fugitive Doctor had just tried to run from Division only to be chased by that bitch, Gat.
After that the Fugitive Doctor took her to an antiquated Type 25 TARDIS and used it to get her to Division to get the file; Taslo was only able to download a small portion of it before they had to escape through the Untempered Schism, which was how the Fugitive Doctor was even able to get back to Gallifrey without being detected in the first place. They both went over the file when they returned to the Fugitive Doctor's usual TARDIS.
It was enormous, filled with holos of various faces, which stunned them both.
"Doctor, how's this possible? We only have thirteen lives, but I'm seeing….more," Taslo finished weakly.
"And there are more to come, remember that other me from Gloucester," the Fugitive Doctor commented.
"Look at the dates; they go back long before the Age of the Time Lords even began," Taslo whispered in disbelief, shaking her head, "but how is this possible?"
"I have some nasty ideas about that."
"Care to share them?"
"Not until we've uncovered more."
"There's another name attached to these files. The Timeless Child," Taslo noted.
The Fugitive Doctor felt a chill pass through her body. "The Timeless Child," she repeated before she stood up. "C'mon," she added.
"Why, where are we going?" Taslo stood up quickly.
"We're going to backtrack my future self. I want to know how many lives she's led, and if they have ever met anyone from Division even without knowing who they are."
-8-
It turned out that learning more about the Fugitive Doctor's future lives was not so tricky, after all. The Fugitive Doctor and Taslo arrived in the Library, the world that was essentially a planet of books. Going through the books looking for mentions of 'the Doctor.' It had not really taken long, and yet piecing the information together took them both some time.
"There's another one, a description of a man with spiky dark hair, brown eyes, and wearing a suit," Taslo said.
"That's the ninth we've found so far, but I've found one with two different men in 20th century Earth, helping an organisation known as 'UNIT' which stands for United, or Unified, Nations Intelligence Taskforce. They were monitored by another group known as Torchwood."
"I think I've heard of them, they're a group set up to fight aliens and to make the British Empire great. They were founded by one of their monarchs," Taslo noted.
"We can check that later," the Fugitive Doctor wrote down a note before she returned to her reading. "The two men described here, actually there're three men…one of them is a short man described as looking like one of the Beatles-."
"Beatles? An insect?" Taslo tilted her head.
The Fugitive Doctor laughed. "No, the Beatles were a popular music band, but they had recognisable hairstyles..it looks like this Doctor, if he is the Doctor, had his hair styled like that, wearing oversized clothes. The next Doctor was a tall man wearing velvet and a cloak, a bit of a dandy," she looked down at her own colourful clothes, "I guess we might get on, and the next one was a man with an extremely long scarf."
"That's twelve Doctors, thirteen if you count the woman you met," Taslo said before she shook her head and looked around the books surrounding them. "There's only so much these books can tell us. Let's get better info from Torchwood, UNIT, and the Time Agency."
The Fugitive Doctor was hesitant about trusting the Time Agency. They were a group set up by Division as a kind of dirty tricks, mercenary brigade. But they did have an amazing records office.
"That sounds like a good enough plan to me, Taslo; but we can track down one of those three men, and take a look at their timelines