Infinite DC

Ten hours going, and Shel still continued trekking across the wasteland under the scorching sun. The sonic screwdriver loaned to her by Sanders helped her all through the way, steering her right to the signal from Min’s outpost.

The journey was treacherous.

Not only did the sun challenge the endurance of her Time Lord biology but so had the fierce sandstorms she fought through. She moved her plaid shirt from around her waist to a wraparound on her head, keeping her long, sweat-drenched hair as dry and cool as necessarily possible.

Fourteen more hours later, and no outpost in sight.

Was she right to have distrusted Sanders? The very woman who did whatever she needed to succeed, even align herself with a family of gangsters?

She really did leave her to die, wandering this barren landscape and endlessly searching for a place that possibly only existed in her mind. Still, it made no sense. They were the same person. It was like committing temporal suicide.

Her vision turned hazy; she finally reached her limit.

Before she collapsed into the sand, she could somewhat see a person and a car in the distance. She tried calling out, but her throat was too dried out to utter so much as a syllable.

Thankfully, the stranger detected her, as he or she drove his or her vehicle to her, immediately after her fall.

She drifted into unconsciousness, just as her new friend lifted her from the sand.

An unstipulated amount of time passed before Shel regained consciousness again.

This was the second time as of late that she woke out of an insentient state; it was beginning to become tedious.

She discovered herself no longer plagued by the harsh wilderness she was in moments ago. Instead, she was placed into the comfort of a plush white bed, complete with sheets and a spread. She was still in her clothes, dirtied from the outside environment, though her shoes were removed – judging from how bare her feet felt beneath the sheets. Her hair, free of her makeshift turban, was dry and even well-conditioned by some means.

It was all confined within a spotless, white-walled room with decorative T.A.R.D.I.S. roundels.

Was she back in her T.A.R.D.I.S.?!

It was certainly a T.A.R.D.I.S.

The room’s only automatic door slid open, permitting a young black gentleman to enter with a tray of food and water, palpably for Shel. His clothes were a stark contrast to the unblemished interior of the room, dressed in jeans, a dark beige welding jacket, and brown boots.

“Hey, Shel,” he said in the friendliest tone of voice. “How’re ya feelin’?”

Shel flinched at his awareness of her identity. “Who’re you? And how do you know my name?”

“I call myself ‘Philip Gipson.’ I’m your father.”

Shel blinked blankly a few times. “What?”

“Actually, I’m his final regeneration,” Gipson explicated. “Would be nice to have more lives though – that way I can continue doing what I do best: traveling and tinkering.”

Shel felt like she was back out in the sweltering heat, her head spinning madly from the hullabaloo Gipson spouted.

“Philip?” She heard the voice of a thickly-accented Australian woman.

One in fact stepped inside, a tall blonde wearing black yoga pants and a fitness jacket to match.

But she did not come there alone.

Shel almost could not believe her eyes.

Standing with the Aussie woman was her father – her real father – Steven Curtsinger. He looked slightly younger than she last remembered him, dressed in his scarlet Arcadian robe, which she only had the pleasure of seeing him in from old photos of his first trip to Earth so many years ago.

“Gipson,” he addressed his ultimate successor. “What are you doing to our lovely young guest here?”

“I was just going to give her something to eat,” Philip innocently said.

“Well, you just let me take care of that, eh?” The Aussie blonde insisted, taking the tray from the young Time Lord. “You get back in the control room and help the others with the project.”

Gipson willingly accepted his order.

He took one last glance at Shel, smiling.

She returned it with half of one, still uncertain as to how the young man could be the final regeneration of her father.

Once he left her alone with Steven and the Aussie blonde, she went right away to asking questions: “What did he mean he was your ‘final regeneration,’ Pop? Are…Are you a Time Lord?”

Steven sat at the foot of the bed, deeply sighing.

“Yes, I am,” he verified to Shel’s immediate surprise. “And Phil really is my last regeneration – as far as I know.”

“Does Ma know?” Shel queried.

Steven nodded. “She did long before you – or the first you – was born.”

Shel’s eyes went to the tall Aussie blonde, focusing on her for the second time since she walked in. “And are you…another regeneration of him?”

“Actually, I’m a direct regeneration of you,” the Aussie told her. “Your eleventh one, in fact. I call this one ‘Lindy’.”

Shel smirked. “I figured. We seem to have a thing about turning Australian.”

“I’ve noticed,” Lindy said with a giggle. “She’s here with us, too.”

“And where is ‘here’?” Shel questioned. “Is this Min’s outpost? Her T.A.R.D.I.S.?”

“It’s my T.A.R.D.I.S.” Steven clarified. “Min brought me fresh out of Gallifrey, when things got out of control. In this point of my lifespan, I’m still living there with you, your mother, and your twin brother.”

“My what?!”

Her reaction sincerely baffled Steven. “You mean you don’t know about your brother?”

“Until this very second, I didn’t know I had a brother! I grew up an only child!”

This disconcerted Steven. “Then that only confirms what Kristin and I have been planning this whole time. We’ve been making considerations on your brother…to give him away.”

Shel was stricken by this revelation but nonetheless intrigued.

“What’s his name? My brother?”

“We named him ‘Christopher,’ after my favorite Earth explorer, Christopher Columbus,” Steven divulged. “I truly wish we could raise him, bring him back to Earth with us…it’s just…the circumstances of his birth left us with no other option.”

Shel’s curiosity grew. “What was wrong with him?”

For a brief moment, Steven deliberated continuing his story of the brother Shel never knew, but he diverged.

“How ’bout we instead get you fed, young lady?” He asserted, shielding his discontent behind a warm smile. “You’ve gotta be famished from your long journey out across the wasteland.” His tenderness turned to baffling displeasure when he asked, “Why didn’t Sanders bring you here herself?”

Shel tried not to sound too reticent as she answered, “She’s been… more preoccupied with other matters.”

“Well, I hope she won’t be gone too long,” Lindy expressed. “She’s just as integral to our plan as the rest of us.”

“The plan to lure Dalek Vec here and blow him back to hell?” Shel recounted. “Yeah, Sanders told me all about it, before she left me here to find you guys.”

“That was our plan, until Davros’ ugly face showed out of nowhere,” Steven informed her.

“Davros,” the alarmed Shel uttered the name she knew all too well. “Oh, god. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse.”

“And they have,” Steven said. “He and his armada of Daleks discovered where we’ve been operating. It’s only a matter of time now until he—”

“STEVEN!”

He was interrupted by the sudden reemergence of Philip, this time accompanied by a dark-haired woman with definitive cheekbones and dressed in a denim vest, a black bra, black shredded leggings, and brown boots; a pair of dirtied goggles was strapped to her forehead.

“He has them,” the woman alerted with bated breath. “He’s got the other versions of Neas!”

The Slayer was the designation of the Dalek flagship that the seven Gladiator regenerations were transported to, along with their Type-Z T.A.R.D.I.S.es and companions. It loomed in Earth’s orbit – the biggest saucer in a mass armada that someway found themselves in the present parallel dimension.

They were all thrown into a holding cell already occupied by two earlier regenerations, Margie and Lindsay. Along with them were their own confidants, including – to their horror – one Kristin Curtsinger, their mother.

“Ma?” Neas whispered.

He saw her to one corner of the increasingly crowded cell, arms folded and with a very pissed-off expression concealed on her face.

Before he could think about going to her, he was caught off guard from the sudden embrace supplied by a middle-aged woman with light brown hair and in fitness attire. She planted a long, wet kiss against his right facial cheek.

“You beautiful man,” she said. “So happy you’re here! I know you’ve got just the plan for gettin’ us out of this!”

He gawked in the direction of Kimbyr, who he noticed stifling a snicker.

“Have we…met?” He asked the woman still hugging him.

Her overjoyed face morphed into puzzlement. “You don’t recognize me? After what we went through in New York? With the Global Lockdown?”

Neas shrugged underneath her lasting embrace. “Sorry. Don’t have a clue.”

She finally let go of him, her bluish-hazel eyes glaring. “Who are you? What’ve you done to the real Neas? Are you a Zygon? Is that it? We kicked your butts the last invasion! Don’t think I won’t now in this room!”

Kimbyr could no longer hold it in, bursting with the loudest snort.

“And what’s the deal with Megan Fox over here?” The woman asked of the guffawing Kimbyr.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she calmed herself, holding her sides. “Oh, man! I forgot how much I loved your company, Dwonch!”

The woman called “Dwonch” glowered. “Have we met?”

“Not yet,” Kimbyr established, then gesturing to Neas. “And, from this big guy’s perspective, he hasn’t met you yet either.” She then introduced, “Neas, meet U.N.I.T. General Yvette Dwonch of the U.S. branch. She’ll one day be your very best friend.”

He looked to the woman with newfound interest.

“U.N.I.T., eh? Heard a lot about you guys from the Doctor. Your founder was the Brigadier, right?”

Dwonch nodded, taking on a more formal address with him. “That’s affirmative. His daughter, Kate Stewart, is the new Chief Scientific Officer. I keep in touch with her every now and then.”

“Well, I wish I could say that we did come here with a plan – seems like I’m good at coming up with quite a few of them in your point of my timeline,” Neas discerned.

Dwonch glimpsed back and forth between the tall black gentleman and the emerald-eyed woman dwarfed by him. “So, you two are the same person? Just different regenerations?”

“Yup,” Kimbyr conceded. “And so are they.”

She gestured to the other captives in the cell, specifically Margie, Lindsay, Mandy, Sanders, and Gen.

“Oh, man,” the overwhelmed Dwonch mumbled. “I’ll need a chart to keep up with all of you!”

The audible hiss of the cell door attracted everyone’s attention just as Davros himself returned with Dalek Vec and a woman sporting a black, short-skirted dress with skulls and roses printed over it. Neither Neas nor Kimbyr recognized her.

“Who’s the chick?” Kimbyr asked Dwonch.

“Calls herself ‘LeMarier,’” the general disclosed. “It’s ’cause of her sorry butt that mine got up here in this mess.”

Davros, Vec, and LeMarier did not arrive alone.

Guided inside by two more Daleks was Candace – Neas’s original incarnation, looking just the way she did shortly after leaving the Time War.

Her presence there in the cell drew dismayed gasps from her future regenerations.

“Yes,” Davros ravenously sneered, as if reading their minds. “We have obtained your original form, Gladiator. As such, the process of your extermination has sped tenfold. Her death will ripple across all your lives, wiping each of you from existence instantaneously.”

“Then do your worst right here and now, Davros!” Candace pugnaciously challenged, arms outstretched. “I’m so sick of when you freaks just talk and talk and never do a thing ’til the moment has passed! It’s no wonder you always keep losing!”

Davros furiously writhed in his chariot, tempted to accept the Time Lady’s dare.

But he kept himself composed enough to cackle right in her face.

“As enticing as it would be to exterminate you myself, I have a promise to keep for a new disciple,” he said prior to turning away from Candace and departing the holding cell with Vec and the other two Daleks.

LeMarier remained behind briefly to point at Neas with a larger, bulkier, and lethal sonic screwdriver-like device and say, “You. Come with me. Don’t refuse, or else I’ll have to use this on you.”

Neas froze.

All the attention swiftly shifted from Candace to him at LeMarier’s beckoning; all except for Kristin, whose focus was still on Candace, daunted to see her heavily grown daughter there with them in the cell. Earlier, he noticed how Lauren was the same way, seeing Kristin the second they arrived.

“It’s okay, hon,” he heard Dwonch whisper to him, after he unknowingly hesitated for some time. “We’ll still be here when you get back.”

He did not really need this assurance from her but was thankful of the thought regardless before complying with LeMarier’s request. He followed her out of the void white holding cell and into the dark, foreboding corridors of the Dalek flagship where they wandered, side-to-side.

A few minutes of uncomfortable silence passed between them.

Neas could not be certain if this was a cordial stroll through the ship or she was escorting him to a torture chamber.

“It’s called a laser screwdriver,” she eventually spoke in reference to the sonic screwdriver-like device she beforehand threatened him with. “It was gifted to me by a Time Lord known as ‘The Master.’ Have you heard of him?”

“Enough to know he was a madman who’s tried many times to kill the Doctor or anyone else that got in his way,” Neas stiffly said.

“Well, that’s your opinion,” LeMarier refuted. “I know him to be more of a hero than the Doctor ever made himself out to be.”

“The Doctor never saw himself as a hero.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, it is.”

LeMarier paused for a mordant snicker. “You would know him best, since you’ve traveled with him in the past. Hell, you’ve probably even known him more as a father than the one who gave you up to him.”

“Screw you! You know nothing of my father!”

“I know him way more than you think you do yourself! I know that English broad with the booty you came here with is his second regeneration – and one helluva regeneration at that! I wonder if his sick old mind wished really hard to earn that body on his deathbed!”

Neas could only stare at her questionably; no retort he could offer in response to her accurate observation.

“I know that you, when you were still that old blonde back in the cell, lived on a Georgia farm with the old man – the alien refugee from Gallifrey – and the human wife he tried so hard to keep from the Time Lords!”

“Who are you?”

LeMarier simpered. “I’m your twin…a mistake given up by good ol’ Ma and Pop Curtsinger long before they did the same to you. Only I wasn’t as fortunate to live the good ole life of a farm girl, as you did. Nope. The only mother and father I ever knew were the Rani and the Master. They tore me away from my adopted family on Gallifrey, killing them just so I could be raised as a weapon and cunning soldier. I didn’t get that blissful childhood most kids got. No, all my days were pain and suffering.”

She reached into a pocket on her dress where she retrieved an old Polaroid, handing it over to Neas.

He glanced at it, seeing that it was a photograph of a young black man that closely resembled Neas in his current ninth regeneration with dark curly hair and lightly tinted brown eyes.

“That was me, in my original form,” LeMarier identified of the photographed man. “The only photo I have of the part of me that was taken away. The Master and the Rani forced me to experience regeneration. They made me learn and remember how it felt, as if they knew it was going to happen to me again and again in my future.”

Her devastating story made Neas sick to his stomach, but no more so than seeing legitimate tears stream down from her eyes as she recounted it all.

This broken woman – his twin sibling – was family.

“I’m so sorry,” he supportively told her. “To be raised by the worst criminals of Gallifrey…you didn’t deserve that.”

LeMarier sobbed right in front of him.

He was compelled to take her into his arms, consoling her as she wept into his shoulder.

When she began to subside, she looked up at him, her mascara partially ruined.

“Escape with me,” she pleaded. “I have a ship stashed in the dimension we’re taking all of you. As soon as we get there, I can take us out with my vortex manipulator.” She tapped at the brown leather-strapped tool on her left wrist. “We can leave all this behind us – Davros, the Daleks, and especially our old man! We can be free! And I can finally use this!”

From out of another pocket on her dress, she presented a vial of a glowing gold liquid that Neas gazed on in awe.

“Is that what I think it is?” He asked.

LeMarier nodded, grinning from ear-to-ear. “Regen-8! The very formula concocted by ancient Gallifreyan science, enabling a Time Lord with full control of their regenerations, removing death as an achievement! Not since Rassilon rediscovered it has anyone perfected it!”

“And if it’s unperfected, it can have severe side effects,” Neas warily noted. “The overload of regenerative energy can burn you out like a lightbulb!”

“I promise you that won’t happen,” LeMarier reassured. “Just please come with me, Neas! If you don’t, you’ll die in the arena!”

“The arena? What’s the—?”

“Stop asking questions and do as you’re told!”

Her rashness distressed him. He could see now where the upbringing of the Master and the Rani had imprinted itself on her. Sure, this woman was his blood, yet there was too much corruption in her to accept whatever freedom she recommended.

“No,” he defiantly refused.

There was a hint of remorse in her otherwise frustrated countenance.

She pocketed away both the vial and photograph that she snatched back from him.

Cleaning her face with her hands, she distantly professed, “There’s nothing else I can do for you then. I saw a chance for you and myself to be equals, using Regen-8 to degenerate back into my original self. Truth be told, this regeneration of you is absolutely perfect. But you will never be, as long as you continue modeling yourself after your dear Doctor.”

With the snap of her fingers, she summoned two nearby Dalek sentries that Neas only now noticed to have been there through the entire exchange.

“Take him back to the cell,” she commanded. “And neither of you breathe a word of this conversation to Davros.”