The Shattering of Tecteun. (The Stranger Timeless Child)
-8-
She was done. She'd had enough. Did Tecteun truly think for one minute she was just going to take it, being tortured and dissected week after week, day by day, year by year, going through so many faces, being somebody else so fast, going from young, middle-aged, old, male and female, one skin colour after another that by the end of the year she'd racked up so many different faces, so many personalities she was barely able to work out who she was.
But this time she had planned it out; she had tried to escape from Tecteun's clutches more than once, but the woman had caught her each time, and she would punish her - she would not think about that nightmare when she had lost six of her lives in such quick succession she was rendered unconscious in a healing coma for a long time, even after the 15th-hour mark - but this time she was sure it would work.
When Tecteun had brought her to the lab to see if she was any closer to cracking the secrets of regeneration, which made her lose another 19 of her lives, Thasia had managed somehow to hang onto her mind, and she'd stolen a few tools from the laboratory and snuck them inside her cell. Tecteun had left her alone after that, although if it was because of any remaining maternal love, Thasia didn't know and didn't care.
She had called that heartless monster mother? Ha! As if Tecteun could be a mother, she was a cold-hearted, evil monster. But she was a brilliant scientist in her own right. She had made so many discoveries when she had left Gallifrey, all those years ago, but back then she had been an explorer; a dedicated researcher, who wanted to explore the new frontiers surrounding Gallifrey, before returning to enrich her world with her discoveries. She had taken chances and risks, delighting in the adventure of discovery.
And then she had found her, on a planet underneath a wormhole leading off into another reality. Thasia had been standing underneath the wormhole, lost, alone, and frightened, trying to find her parents before Tecteun arrived and offered to take her along for the ride.
Thasia had gone with her and received her name from Tecteun. Being with her then had been amazing; Tecteun had taught her so much, but Thasia had done the same, and thanks to her instinctive knowledge of space and time, the Shobogan had uncovered many new mysteries.
Fascinated by her, Tecteun had examined her many times, seeing and sensing a compelling mystery about her adoptive child, but aside from her twin hearts and telepathic abilities, Thasia had been reasonably normal. And Tecteun had accepted her, and so had her friends on Gallifrey….
And then it happened.
The accident.
The day everything changed.
Thasia remembered the fear of falling during the accident, the pain of the impact as her body hit the rocky ground below the cliff, and the sadness she was going to die, while Tecteun stood over her…
And then…she died and was then reborn in a flash of painful light.
And then after that, Tecteun stopped being a mother, she became her jailer, her torturer. She began dissecting Thasia, experimenting on her, triggering one regeneration after another. At first, she had tried to stop Tecteun, terrified as she began regenerating over and over again until finally she stopped begging the woman. Tecteun began treating her badly, slapping her,and torturing her by forcing one regeneration after another. This had been going on so long, that Thasia had almost forgotten what it was like to live a normal life.
Gone were the dreams and hopes she had, of living on Gallifrey, having children, maybe becoming a scientist although she wanted to go out into the universe for herself, and see everything for herself. That person, long gone, buried deep by so many regenerations with different faces and personalities which didn't have the time to properly flourish, had become tougher, and more hardened to the realities of the life Tecteun had forced on her.
She was a laboratory specimen; an animal used in testing. Nothing more than that. She didn't have a clue what the long-term plan for her was. She didn't know if Tecteun even planned to let her go, or continue to dissect her once she had cracked open the mysteries of regeneration by herself, and knowing Tecteun as well as she did, Thasia knew she would be lucky to get out alive. It had been so long since she had seen the actual light of day, instead of the artificial lighting of the laboratory and her home. She hadn't seen anyone other than Tecteun for years. No, the Shobogan scientist seemed to have just gone dark, as far as her social life went.
Thasia worked furiously, cursing her new incarnation's lack of dexterity, even as she worked on the lock of her cell; she had regenerated yet again a few days ago, because of Tecteun's obsession with unlocking the secrets of the changes, but this was the clearest post-regeneration she had been in in a while, so she was much clearer head than she had been for quite a while. But she loved her new persona; she had come up with the scheme to escape this hell, once and for all, despite the experiments. But sometimes Tecteun would not trigger a regeneration, instead, she would just examine her, take samples while her new mind and body settled down.
Tecteun had locked this door with electronic and physical locks, but against the laser scalpel, the small devices she was using as a lock pick, and the plasma torch and the scanner she had repurposed into an electromagnetic device, Thasia was able to unlock the door. She closed her eyes, hoping Tecteun hadn't secretly installed a silent alarm.
But nothing happened.
Deciding to take the chance, Thasia left the cell and ventured outside.
-8-
The homestead was in its night cycle, but while it was tempting to run outside, Thasia wanted to do something important first. She had had years to see for herself what kind of tools and equipment Tecteun had access to, and as she walked through the lab, gently and carefully sorting through it all, she found a small torch.
Finding her way around and looking for any trip systems scattered about, remembering how she had been caught once before, and finding over a dozen, Thasia made her way to Tecteun's bed chambers. Walking inside, she began the next phase of her plan, even as she used the small torch beam to pick out the woman sleeping in bed. In this lighting, Tecteun looked old; the years had washed away her once beautiful face, leaving behind the ugly person underneath, with her wrinkled and lined face, and the greying hair which was gradually turning white. Asleep she was peaceful, awake, she was a callous monster.
But Thasia had to know the truth, and so she slowly looked around, looking for any kind of trip system in this room. Found nothing. She reached out and touched Tecteun's temple…
Suddenly, Thasia was in Tecteun's mind, telepathically keeping the woman asleep as she dove deeper and deeper, ignoring her memories of childhood, of her time as an explorer, the sight made Thasia despair at what she had become.
And then she found it.
She had often asked herself why Tecteun was doing this to her, what she wanted. Oh, she had tried so many times to get decent answers, but she never got them. But now she did.
Tecteun saw regeneration as a form of temporal immortality. She had spent years constructing devices to study the energy which came from a regeneration, ironically using some of the knowledge Thasia had shown off during their travels, when she had built a more efficient faster than light drive that shunted them through one universe with slightly different laws, allowing them to cross millions of light years in a flash, or when she had built that device that broke them out of that null-temporal zone. Thasia had never cottoned on to the fact that Tecteun was jealous, but she had learnt a lot, and she had turned that knowledge back on Thasia.
She had constructed a scanner which helped her study the regenerative energies and discovered it was temporal in origin, and she found each time a regeneration happened, a quantum clone of an alternative version of Thasia appeared. Thasia blinked mentally at the discovery, but she supposed it made sense and deep down she knew it to be true. It explained why she was able to go from tall to short, too fat, too thin, to plump, why her skin colour changed, why the transformation was random, why she had regenerated into a body which suffered from leukaemia to another with diabetes, and why she'd needed a wheelchair once.
But as she plunged deeper and deeper into Tecteun's mind, Thasia learnt what the Shobogan had in mind. Tecteun wanted to transplant regeneration into herself while giving her people a watered-down version of it; she selfishly wanted her people to regenerate twelve times, granting only thirteen lives, while she lived forever, so she could achieve greater greatness. She wanted to rule her peers, transform them into a technologically advanced race, and break down the barriers of time and space and reality, after seeing for herself what Thasia could do, how she had an instinctive knowledge of time travel after regeneration. Tecteun wanted that, she wanted her people to dominate time, forever.
She would create elites with her 'discovery,' rewriting history so then Thasia herself/himself/themselves…would have never existed. More memories came, Tecteun had lied to her friends, saying the fall had killed her, but all the time…she was here, in the lab, being experimented upon while they grew up and had lives of their own. The loss of her friendships saddened and infuriated Thasia more than anyone could imagine, and it was a fight to keep herself from lashing out.
But Tecteun's plans for her nearly made her explode with fury, and she would wish she had, so her rage could burn out Tecteun's mind forever. Tecteun didn't know if there was any way to kill her, but she didn't want to. No, she wanted to wipe her memories and give her a new life, so she could serve the new Gallifreyan elite, where she would live as a slave, giving her knowledge away to help them master time and space.
One thing became clear, and truthfully she was amazed with herself for even thinking she mattered to Tecteun outside of her experiments, Tecteun had never loved her, she had taken her away from that planet, that portal because she wanted to discover new horizons and frontiers; regeneration had given her what she wanted, but it wasn't enough for the evil woman. She wanted Thasia under control forever, a slave to Gallifrey. Tecteun had it all worked out, she would force Thasia to regenerate and then wipe her memories at regular intervals and force her to relive her lives and work for Gallifrey. She would let Thasia largely do whatever she/he/them or they liked, but would then manipulate them.
Thasia had to fight to keep her composure. She had always had a terrible temper which she would self-internalise, but when she lashed out, everyone quaked at it, as she looked into Tecteun's sick mind, she knew she couldn't let the Gallifreyans have regeneration. Tecteun was evil, pure evil.
No longer caring about the consequences, Thasia tore through the woman's mind, absently aware of Tecteun's sobs and whimpers and moans of pure agony, thrashing weakly about, while her intruder violently burned away her mind, ripping it apart as she came across what she was looking for. When she broke contact, Tecteun was dead, her eyes and mouth open, blood pouring out from the corners and all around.
Thasia didn't look down with any sympathy. "Goodbye, Mother," she spat the word sarcastically.
-8-
Thasia studied the enormous bottles linked to the timer she had rigged up; the laboratory had ben well stocked with chemicals and electronic parts, and thanks to Tecteun's death, she'd had more than enough time to build a bomb. Underneath the bottles made from dark glass were stacks and stacks of papers doused in flammable chemicals, papers of notes and experiments into regeneration.
Thasia smirked in satisfaction as she was almost finished, while she adjusted her new clothes. It had been over six hours since she had murdered Tecteun and stole some of her knowledge about the changes to the outside world; today vessels were travelling faster than light using the FTL technology already pioneered by the Gallifreyans, and what she had made so long ago. It had taken years, but the Gallifreyans were a bright people, they would have learnt how to reverse engineer and study the technology with enough time and sparks of talent.
There was nothing she could do about that, but discovering they were going out, and building an intergalactic empire gave her some cause for concern since they showed there was something significantly power-hungry about them, but right now she had a job to do, like all homes on Gallifrey, Tecteun had a connection to the power grid, and Thasia knew how to overload it, to trigger a much bigger explosion. It would cause damage to Gallifrey's own infrastructure, but she didn't care. By the time they fixed it, she would have stolen a ship of her own and escaped this planet for good.
Taking a deep breath, feeling her hearts both skip beats, Thasia set to work on the overload to trigger an explosion big enough to destroy this homestead forever, knowing Tecteun had stored enough knowledge of regeneration experiments into her home's database, before she focused on the smaller bomb. She had been standing in the doorway when it exploded, and she had to throw her hands up, as the entire room went up in flames. She laughed when she saw the destruction, but then she rushed out when she remembered the other big bang.
-8-
The lead investigators were baffled by the violent way the homestead of the scientist Tecteun was destroyed, but they didn't make the connection between the more serious shutting down of the power grids. By the time they received the message the homestead was the source, they discovered only skeletal remains, but they wouldn't be identified as Tecteun's for a long time.
On top of that, the spaceport discovered one of the explorer's vessels had been stolen, but there was no sighting of it.
-8-
Thasia whooped with glee, as her jumped through hyperspace. She'd done it, she was free at last. But she knew she had to be careful; thanks to the cruiser's computer, she knew where the Gallifreyan fleets were, and she began working on ways to avoid them, and she would need to think of plans to completely destroy them.
But right now she was enjoying her moment of freedom, but no matter what, she couldn't help but think about time travel. She had to admit it was an interesting concept.
-8-
More and more, Thasia began causing rebellions on the worlds conquered by the Gallifreyans, using her ship as a cover story, working on the transponders so Gallifreyan security wouldn't pick her up, and then she began saying the words which would unravel their golden empire for good, while giving the alien races conquered the means to really make them stronger before she created a bio-weapon and spread it throughout several galaxies.
And all that time, she began working on time travel. She worked out very quickly it was impossible to travel through time in the universe, the only ways of doing it were with wormholes towed around, or time dilation, or through anomalies, but you couldn't change time or history as you did. But she created a device on her ship, which would let you go back in time by a week, maybe a month in its own life cycle. But a real breakthrough came thanks to her instinctive knowledge of time and space, when she created the first time portal which allowed her to open a gateway to the Time Vortex which linked space and time together in a collection of realities. From there, she created the vortex manipulator and the time scoop.
Using this time travel technology, Thasia unleashed the bioweapon. She fought for herself for a while as she wrestled with her conscience. She didn't want to wipe out an entire race, for the crimes of a few, but then she remembered the oppression she had witnessed, the crimes of the Gallifreyans, and she did it.
She cried as she heard the screams via their communication systems, and she cried for a month.
-8-
Author's Note - I've wanted to write a crossover series between Stranger Things and Doctor Who before, with alternative versions of the Doctor, and then it struck me; what if the Timeless Child was the one who arrived in Hawkins? Please, continue to read; the next one-shot will see Thasia, aka the Timeless Child arriving in Hawkins. Welcome to The Stranger Timeless Child series.