Leela, meet Leela!

The Never Ending Quest - Episode 17231

"Excellent!" says E'eysha, pretending she hasn't heard me. "Let us go and deal with some of those items on our 'to-do' list."

And so we do...

Being that they had a bit of time to chat (it was quiet the journey to travel the route from Terra Prime's universe to Dr. Which's univers), that's what some did.

"Speaking of list of 'things to do'," Inquirer says, looking down at the cloak she had the habit of wearing, "I had tried to turn this back over to it's original owner."

"What?" Leela asks, curious.

Inquirer smiles and explains that during that visit to Terra Prime she had been meaning to return that special cloak of hers (a cloak of invisibility) to who it actually belong to, Regent Malachi. See, early on during a crisis that female dragon had loaned that magical item to aid Inquirer in certain needful task. Inquirer had planned on returning, but got whisked up into things (i.e. taking an unexpected ride on the outside of the TARDIS). She had been told by as smiling Malachi to keep it as a gift, since while that magical item had been part of her Hoard (vital thing for a dragon). However as things had developed, this female dragon no longer needed her Hoard to survive (and thus no longer needed back that cloak). The dragonness gave the cloak to a surprised and grateful Inquirer as a gift, part out of gratitude for her past deed and part out of an act of friendship.

"How nice!" Leela says, beaming, "That was the...er....relatively ordinary looking woman with Sigin's twin hovering nearby?"

"Yes," Inquirer smiled, "She does take some pride in how ordinary she looks."

"Pardon?" Leela asks, perplexed (and noted that that word was becoming rather used a lot by her of late whenever she spoke with her new friends).

"Like many dragons who reach their 500th year she gained a default human form she could assume with an effort of will," the female Golem explained, "Most dragons chose human forms that are pleasing to the eye...."

Leela and Inquirer glance over at Sigin, who reddens a little bit and coughs. Sigin was rather handsome by human standards.....

"She was a bit different in that she wanted a form that could easily blend in with other ordinary human beings," Sigin explained, "She'd been planning on aiding human beings early on in hatchlinghood when Sato won her to his cause. By being able to blend in, it would make the task of stopping her by those who'd oppose her that much more difficult."

God knows how dicey it'd been for me a few times there, Sigin sighed to himself, remembering, Standing out had it's disadvantages, sometimes.

Then again, being inconspicious wasn't in Sigin. Otherwise, he'd be less....flamboyant in dress and style, eh?

"I can see that," Leela says, nodding while looking thoughtful, "But while we're on this subject....why are so many of the woman I heard were 'Amazons' so, so.....outstanding?"

E'eysha chuckled, overhearing, and comes over and explains using a tale that's seen in episodes 13605 and 13639.

Leela blinked, seeing how odd things could be on worlds called "Terra", apparently.

"One last thing that I was wondering about," Leela finally says to Inquirer, "While I can understand perfectly well why you didn't like Avon on how he treated Orac, what with Golems being (or having been from what I understand of it) 'machine intelligences', but somewhere I also heard about it laying a bit deeper than just that. Something about how AI people came about?"

Inquirer frowns, looking uncomfortable, but proceeds to explain.

As she does so, Betty and Ragan remember how before they wanted to have lived in the world that Inquirer had come from where things like Shada and a lot of other things in the Doctor Who series had gotten made where in their old worlds they had not. They remember after hearing of how things were there.....recanting that wish.

As for Inquirer and the other Military AI units being as they are, the reason why they are so human is rather gruesome, really. You may remember about this being talked already, but it'll be told again. See, back in the tenth year of the Enemy/Alliance War, the Military needed a new type of spy probe and a research branch within the Company was tasked at making one. The specs called for something above and beyond what had been created before, and it was getting to look to the scientists that it wasn't going to work. That would be horrible for their careers. A real cut in their lifestyles and such. The Company ran on the same lack of ethics by this time that one would find in your typical cyberpunk story (yep, that genre again). What they needed was a model of an intelligence they could study up close....that was the human brain (Enemy specimens were hard to come by and useless for this projects needs, I fear). So, throwing away any bad feelings about what they'd be doing, they either had ordinary folks snatched off the streets or bamboozled willing recruits. Horribleexperiments were conducted to unlock the parts of the human mind that would get this project past it's sticking point. It worked, but many subjects used either died or were extremely brain damaged in the process. The result was Probe.

At first, Probe wasn't free willed. The potential was there, but hadn't....ignited yet.

It soon did, and all hell broke loose. When it came, it was basically a human being's mind done in cybernetics, or nearly so as to make little to no difference to the Military's head admiral, Vladimir Naberezhnyi. All machine. No organic, but a person with feelings and thoughts very much like those of a human being. The admiral was a moral man (hard but with morals), and couldn't stand by and let this injustice stand. The Military, unaware of just how the Company had created Probe until the AI revealed to them the horrible truth, was utterly appalled at what those Company scientists had done.

The world having degenerated to what it had, there was little to no way to follow up and redress this crime through ordinary means (i.e. no court of law would or could touch these Company officials). Desiring justice done and wishing to avenge the dead, the Military did something brutal. It sent in a strike force and killed those guilty and confiscated all records of how Probe was created. That and the victims who could be found (either them and/or their surviving family) was given what help (financial and otherwise) that could be done. Probe was also confiscated into the Military so as to protect him from the Company, who saw him as nothing but property.

"Think the rest you know," Inquirer said softly, "I found Avon's attitude over Orac intolerable so went about getting him away and free. If push came to shove and it came down to letting Avon keep Orac and Blake getting help or the deal being blown, I and the other Golems would blow the deal for Blake."

"If Blake would have allowed Avon to keep Orac despite his talks about human rights....." Leela says, shuddering, "He wouldn't deserve any help....for it would have meant his words were empty."

If nothing else, that's how it would appear in the Military retirees' eyes.

Inquirer coughed, and then tried to bring the mood back to something less dark.

"We don't have to worry about Dr. Who's Leela," she chuckled, "See, events in that universe didn't lead to an insane Xoanon, and thus no Leela."

"Xoanon, that's something of a relief," Leela swears softly, with decidedly mixed emotions, "It's going to be bad enough to have to go through what we went through before....even if it's not going to be 'exactly' the same."

"Yep, that's the story about parallel universes," the Doctor says cryptically from the Control Console, "It's the same but different."

Moments later, on an unnamed Class M planet....

And so they emerged onto the unnamed planet of the Sevateem and the Tesh......where a young woman was walking through the forest, having just been expelled from her tribe for blasphemy...

Leela was off beyond the boundary, and right at the moment, she was worried.

She'd survived an ambush (with help from a sympathetic friend) sent by the Speaker of Law, but now was facing something she thought had just been a story.

On the offset of the little trek she'd been sure that the legend of "Phantoms" beyond the boundary were just fireside stories used to scare little children into behaving at night, but with the sounds coming fromnearby (something that sounded like, to her, like four large people with bad colds) were making her think twice. Oh, she'd assured Tomas that she could take care of herself, but Zoanon (a god she didn't really believe in) help her if she got caught by whatever was out there. What made this most...er....interesting is the fact that Phantoms can not be seen.

Yes, a most interesting challenge indeed (and one she could well do without right now).

Rushing ahead, she trips and falls to the ground, and she's VERY surprised when a friendly hand helps her up.

Leela, seeing Leela, suddenly found out first hand what so many Astras and Fred experienced before...

  1. "Great Xoanon!" they both swear together in stereo.

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9/15/2001 5:21:23 AM

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