| "Who are you?" Xoanon asks, perplexed. More perplexed sounding,
frankly, than his TV counterpart......
The Doctor answered that question. Answered it several times as Xoanon's
unknowingly repeated the very same lines. But there was an undercurrent
of....desperation and more confusion than ever was heard by Betty or Ragan
as they listened in from the other side of the ship's bulkhead. Desperation
and confusion. More thought on this matter can't be spared because of the
distraction from a Tesh patrol provides........ The others are taking care
of that, but still....the noise!......
Oh, things go basically as they remember, alas. That can ever be a blessing
or a curse. But at the end (after a brief aside where the Doctor revealed
to Xoanon that he was from a different reality than Xoanon.....which the
mad machine laughed and called the Doctor mad for having said such nonsense),
in a final breakdown of rationality.....
"Then who am I?!" Xoanon screams at the swaying Doctor, who'd
barely been able to raise magical mental shields before this onslaught.
"Where are we?!" the mad machine screams, the face of Tom Baker
(or the Fourth Doctor....depending on what universe you're from) forming
on many of the black slabs on the wall. "HOW DID I GET HERE?! WHO
AM I?"
I do believe that I've gotten a measure of this machine.....and woe
to me for having to have seen it, a small part of the Doctor's mind
thinks, pitying that creature that Xoanon had become. It was a rather sad
thing. Somehow, the Doctor gets the feeling that the trauma of suddenly
being translocated to a different locale did little to nothing to help
matter, either. Right now, though, the rest of him is more concerned with
the problem of mere survival, however, right now!
"WHO AM.......?" Xoanon screaming question cuts off as
the Doctor dives through the door back into the passageway outside the
Sacred Heart (or the Main Computer Control Room as some in the past called
it).
The Doctor looks up at the direction of the sound of gunbattle....with
a question on his lips, only to pause in another question when there is
shout of fear.....and a crackle......and the lights outside turn a dim....angry
red. The Time Lord pushes himself up off of the unconsious form of a Tesh
who lays within the hallway.....
The smell of ozone....
"Xoanon shorted main power," Ragan explained before the Doctor could
get a question out, "The walls are electrified....just in case that you
got out alive, I'm afraid."
"That's a bit haphazard for a trap," the Doctor muses, "Why not electrify
the floor?"
Betty casts a spell on the unconsious Tesh seconds before the body jerks.....as
if it was a puppet controlled by strings. Glowing tendrils of energy form
a net over the prone form, keeping it bound.
"Probably would have interferred somehow with the machine's basic functions,"
Betty says, shrugging, "That and with the Tesh around to possess......"
-
 Meanwhile,
Leela looks on as the Tesh run.....shouting about the end of the world
and about "this" happening before the time of land.......
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