championoftime | (no subject)

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[Log for Vasilia Aliena]

The Doctor was busily working in the TARDIS, ignoring the furry shape slinking along the floor behind him and trying to pull away a pair of pliers with all its might, when the strange urge overcame him that was hitting so many others simultaneously.

At first, dread hit with it. The last time he felt this way, the Time Lord flu struck him. It was the beginning of the couple of the worst two weeks in memory (yes, he hated it more than the death tolls for the simple fact that he hadn't known what was going on), but still he straightened himself out and staggered to the TARDIS door.

He left the Mongoose to slink around the console room, and headed out in the halls. He went in the direction that made him feel less like retching all over the floor, stopping occasionally to hold on his hat and catch his breath. He was nigh on exhausted when he reached Vasilia's door, knocking earnestly as he pulled out his fobwatch.

"What is this nonsense?" he muttered to himself.

[Private to Dallas | Text]

It seems that I'm going to be indisposed for the next few days. But if you need anything, I'll still find a way to be there.

How are you feeling now about what happened with David? [He saw that unfortunate start of a conversation in David's journal.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"The infirmary is acceptable," Vasilia said, lifting her chin. "Doctor Jones has proven able to ward me from infection even among the ill. But! Do not change your plans for me. I have no desire to be in your debt."

Sniff.

He gave her a faintly surprised look. "Oh, that's quite kind of you! But I don't make plans, I simply take them by surprise. You can carry on." He gave her a quick, approving look right before he went back to typing in his journal. And... sadly about to follow her, because he knew what would happen if he didn't.

Hmmph. He was too obliging. He must have a hidden motive. Or be soft. There was something charming about him and she resented it; he seemed kind. She hadn't asked anyone to be kind to her.

"What field of medicine are you in?" she asked over her shoulder; for all that the tone befitted a judicial debriefing, it was more her bad-natured attempt at making conversation.

He knit up his brow and dropped his journal too easily into a fathomless pocket.

"I studied xenobiology for about 80 years at the Academy, but most of my classes were in thermodynamics. I'm a physician here because not all of the Barge's residents are human and I have certain psychic expertise that can be lent to mental healing." In direct contradiction to her request for information to be clinically analysed, through no real effort or intention, he delivered the statement conversationally.

She paused quite suddenly, turning. "-then you aren't an Earther!"

The name had seemed so characteristic; many characters in trimensional dramatizations of Earth were named 'Smith', and the given name 'John' she was given to understand was extremely common.

"Who, me?" Yes you, you dolt! "Oh I've been to Earth a time or two, but I'm actually a Time Lord. A Gallifreyan. But don't use me as the standard by which to measure my race. I've been very boisterously and adamantly declared a renegade."

That "R" got an extra special roll, and a raise of brows with a quick, childish smile as punctuation. But then, right back to casual and away from that bout of boyishness that argued with his visible age.

"Earthers won't have me either, to my disappointment. It seems that they abhor my fashion sense."

"I-- am not particularly adherent to fashion trends. Your clothing covers you and in doing so is sufficient," she said stiffly, because she had no eye for fashion and this had been a subject of humor more than once; she would be sleeveless at home only because she enjoyed the freedom of movement. But here, she prioritized not being touched much higher.

She gave him a long wary look. "Count Dracula told me that your people knew a great deal about metaphysics. He advised me to address my questions to the one with the large scarf and teeth. Do you know him?"

"Thank you! I thought so." Only the Doctor would take that bizarre conglomeration of words and consider them a compliment. But he looked faintly surprised at what she'd been told.

"He's me, actually. Me, but a few centuries earlier. When we die, my kind change personalities and appearance, but retain our core self and our memories."

He waves dismissively. "Chicken, egg, the chick has to happen somewhere en route, don't you think?"

"Regeneration. The Lord President Rassilon mentioned it. I did not wish to further discuss it-- with him."

Because he was a pompous bore.

He knew a lot more about regeneration than he let on to Rassilon. The truth was, that he didn't want to help Narvin get his regenerations back. He didn't want to open up the gateway that the other Gallifreyans hadn't evolved into, and while he hoped someday those vicious forerunners of his people (that he swore was still reflected in the hate behind their eyes) would be able to possess the ability, they were very much not ready for it.

"I can tell you a bit. I'm afraid I'm not all that well informed."

Lies, lies, and more lies. But they're friendly lies? The sort meant to invite and comfort and not coldly deceive. On to the truths. "We've only thirteen of them. Any more is a risk to our physical and mental health. This is my seventh. They're more difficult to control if you die traumatic deaths."

"What is their purpose?" Vasilia pressed. "Why a completely different face? Voice? Even taste in clothing?" As much was clear from the difference between the seventh and the one with the scarf. "Is it painful, death? Do you choose when? Why thirteen?"

"They keep us alive. It's not always a different face. My brother has managed to match his last few with some concentration. And some are chosen. Mine usually happen under traumatic conditions so there's no time to concentrate."

He's been just hovering thus far, and he looks for some surface that he can sit on that might be able to support his weight. If nothing else so he can get over this abysmal supervisory feeling.

"Thirteen simply because the regenerative materials start to degrade. Do remember, each of these regenerations ends up a personality living in the back of our mind. Each regeneration is imprinted on our time ship. So if we call upon more than thirteen, that's more personalities lurking. We have very vast intellects, but very delicately structured minds. It's a bit much emotional weight to bear for synapses meant for logistics."

"Does the personality change as well? The aptitudes-?" She was asking a flurry of questions and she realized it only after the fact-- "there are chairs in the lab, please come with me." Her simulations had been forgotten.

"Hm? Oh! Yes. Lab." He turned in place while he was saying this, giving up his chair search and reaching up to hold his hat on, as if it may be whisked away by the motion of room departure. Dramatics and all that. He knew most of the people in the lab, so if any were there today, he doubted they would be all that opposed to his presence.

Vasilia led him through the halls, striding as confidently as anyone a head taller, and pulled out two chairs almost without thinking as soon as they were in the lab and near the computer she usually used.

"Death. What is it like," she said, the walk having given her time to focus her mind.

The Doctor toddled along behind her. Toddle toddle toddle. All the way up to the lab where he found a chair suitably capable of spinning, because if you were going to sit somewhere any amount of time a logical mind must be in possession of a chair that's ~fun~.

"Death?" While he started to turn from side to side. "Frightening. Painful. One mind blinks out. The next takes hold. You grapple against it, but your functions start to slip from your grasp like grains of salt that refuse to hold between your fingers."

Vasilia went pale as he spoke: a little more so as she digested his words. She had expected a more whimsical answer, perhaps, and yet though that would have annoyed her, the frankness was somehow worse.

"Ah," she said quietly. Out of her tangle of questions, now so much less intriguing and more potentially horrific, one rose. "Is that the death experience for humans, as well? And--if there have been Time Lord inmates--did they die before arrival? I am told we all did. I do not remember dying."

"They were at least in a situation where imminent death was extremely possible. Some have gone and returned home and then back here, progressed further to their next point of possible death." He squirmed to a more comfortable position in his spinny chair.

"Omega did, before he came, as did Rassilon. My brother as well, I presume. The death experience for humans is quite similar." He remembered from the breach. From having Narvin fill him full of bullets, and then being left with a sense of utter shock.

"Except the next mind doesn't take hold. It just stops."

Vasilia linked her hands limply in her lap. "If that is death, then why continue? Why suffer a dozen new instances knowing that the last is coming? Why struggle, why postpone?"

Why pride oneself on fifty decades when at the end was that ending--what use a legacy?

She had stumbled into the same morass that another woman had--it would have comforted her very little to know that Gladia Solaria too had realized this, had found herself seeing her years as only a long, meaningless diversion as she awaited the unknown.

"Some of us do choose to die. It's called a tombing. We simply decide to stop because there's nothing else to do? But why stop coming up with things to do?"

He makes a vague motion in the air, and dangles his arm over the arm of the chair. "What's the point in living if you don't spend it living? I live my life to the fullest. All the centuries of it."

"What can be done, then-- what task or diversion--that will matter, when three generations or ten are gone after you, and you are only a matter of record?" she asked-- as unnaturally subdued as if she had fallen ill again, after all.

"Sometimes I look forward to it, and sometimes I dread it. So long as I make a mark as me on the universe before I go."

Oh, and how he'd made a mark. In more than one way he shouldn't and was glad to have. "By that reasoning, what's the point in living in the first place?"

"Precisely," she said, simply, dully.

He raised a brow and leaned his head back slightly. Well, that was particularly odd.

"Haven't you done anything that brings you lasting enjoyment? Something that you can go back to time and time again?"

Vasilia turned in her chair, starting her terminal with a few listless taps; it booted to a prompt-- she was more comfortable with a command line than with the nannying graphic interfaces-- and a few strokes started her simulation program.

"I have," she said, watching the initial random population -- represented as a hundred-by-hundred grid of colored squares, of various brightness and hue to represent their default strategy and status-- start to shift and interact. "I have been a roboticist for twenty six decades, and I studied it for two decades before I was qualified for the title. It has brought me a great deal of joy. But; I had never considered an end to that work." She finally looked back at him, her interjection of pre-emptive argument perfunctory and without bite- "I am aware that it was a short sighted view. You hardly need to tell me."

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A wild mortality appears

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