World Of Fire (Jenny's Tale)

[Jenny]

Chapter 1: World of Fire

It appeared to the shuttle pilot of the Infinite Improbability as a vast ribbon of shimmering spectral colors a crossed a dark star filled sky. Visible light particles whirl and danced as atoms of light went through the void of space at 299,792.458 kilometers per second. Bursts of burning gases; helium red and krypton blue mingled and pulsed with hues of copper (II) chloride green and cobalt (II) chloride white. It looked as if someone had sliced a hole in space and this phenomenon was a beautiful, terrifying, and yet festering wound that wanted to suck in anything that got too close to its splendor.

Jenny had never seen anything like it before and she stared at it in wistful wonderment. She had been working on the final tweaks before a test run of herself made DARTS technology. The D.A.R.T.S or Dematerialization and Re-materialization, Transport System, was a masterpiece if Jenny did say so… but only to herself. This was mainly because she had no one to share it or anything with. For the last year Jenny had been traveling the universe in a ship that was little more than a gum wrapper with wings, or at least that was how it felt to Jenny once in a while, stuck in the small ship day in and day out, rarely finding alien civilization and the adventure that she had been so craving when she first took to the stars.

This wasn’t to say that she had seen little, but it seemed little compared to everything she wanted to see and this little surprise in the middle of space was an adventure in the making. Most of her current work consisted of devising a system that would keep her ship from running into a sun, a star, a planet, or anything else encountered on her travels. She felt nervous about testing the DARTS so close to an unknown and unexplainable force but she was also impatient to get on her way and at more then what she considered a crawl.

Strapping herself into the pilot seat of the ships cockpit Jenny smiled brightly and flipped a switch, pressed a few buttons and then gripped the navigational controller like she was in an intergalactic ship racing event. With a final button press and a yell of triumph at the sounds of the engines building up electromagnetic energy, Jenny fully expected to pull away from the anomaly and go in the opposite direction, she was wrong. She didn’t even make it an inch before the ship shook badly enough to rattle her teeth and to make the unpleasant sounds of twisting metal. There was a blinding flash, darkness and then she was no more.

At least as far as anyone would have been able to tell if this had been observed. But to Jenny, it felt as if she hadn’t moved at all. Jenny blinked her eyes several times in the darkness. Her eyes searching, waiting, and hoping that the darkness would not last forever. Crimson light was the first thing that she saw from within the darkness and silence that surrounded her and her ship. The crimson ever slowly faded into a bright scarlet. Then oranges and the colors of fire assaulted her eyes and she blinked rapidly with teary eyed pain as the burning light of not one but two suns assaulted her vision.

The pain vanished as she moved away from the fiery spectacle towards a smaller spectacle. A planet that rested near these two suns shone with fiery brilliance. The readings on her screens told her that this planet was inhabitable and that the fiery glow was just a product of its suns light. Her ship practically screamed as it was assaulted by unknown forces and to Jenny’s horror she realized that the D.A.R.T.S was not completely shut down and she was traveling at a rate of speed that would send her to the planet’s surface as a fire ball of pain and agony on her part.

As much as she tried she couldn’t turn it off from the cockpit. The controls for the drive had become almost useless. Reaching for her harness she released herself and tore out of the cockpit into the engine room. She could see areas of the engine that were red, white, and blue with the intense heat it was omitting. Jenny pulled a safety switch to the drive to no avail. Then when all else seemed lost she grabbed a hold of the power core and yanked it from its place within the drives mechanical mechanisms. She hands got scalded but the ship started to slow, she could feel that much as she stood there. The core fell to the floor with a bang. And the ship made its rapid decent to the planet below.

As hard as she might have tried she was not going to make it back to the cockpit in time. So she reached for the emergency landing gear lever and hoped for the best. A small panel of transparent fibers gave her a glimpse of the world she was about to crash into. She was no longer headed towards it head-on but she knew it was still going to hurt. At first she saw what appeared to be a forest on fire. The leaves burned with the intensity of the suns. Snow capped mountains aglow with the red tempest that beat down on it. Grasses that were an impossible, vibrant red, and great ships that littered the ground as if they had all been blown from the sky and had suffered a similar fate as what she was about to.

Then there was impact and then there was nothing.

[The N.P.C.]

Chapter 2: Breaking and Entering

The High Council of the Time Lords was in session. The world of Gallifrey was in its final days. Rassilon plotted and schemed. He refused to let the Time Lords and more specifically himself die without a fight; even when that fight seemed utterly hopeless. They had been locked in a bumble of time; time that did not change and did not continue. It was an existence without true hope, without true meaning. It was a faith that was as good as death. But there were no chances at a beyond. To discover that last mystery of the cosmos was there life after death.

The Physician had seen all sorts of patients in his life time. Dead and alive, alien and Gallifreyan, but his newest one had come as a shock when he had received the word that he would probably be needed. Just hours before a small craft entered the planet’s atmosphere. Before these everlasting few days this would not have been much cause for a commotion. But considering currant circumstances, this craft was an impossibility, a most improbable and miraculous event. It was not possible.

Like many who had swarmed from the cities protective walls, the Physician had been stunned. But more importantly he was concerned about the survival of the small ships pilot and crew. When he arrived at the crash site he pushed his way through the milling crowd. Even the Lord President of the Time Lords was present. Probably deciding how to best use this to his advantage, the Physician thought critically as he descended upon a small unit of Time Lords that were about to gain access to the ships interior and seek out any survivors.

He waited with baited breath and a glimmer of hope that whoever was in the ship was still alive and would not die this day. Access was gained through the use of a sonic pick. It practically tore the ships access panel from the ships body. The Physician rushed forward to get his first glimpse of life outside of his time locked world. Most of the boarding party went towards the front of this ship to seek out the pilot; after all the ship would have had to have had one. But it didn’t take long for the word to get back to the Physician that no bodies were present in the cockpit.

The physician made his was towards the back of the ship since he was the closest to that area. The ship had seen better days and even in its prime it wouldn’t have been considered a technological wonder to a race such as the Time Lords. But when the Physician made his way to the engine room and entered all that changed.

The girl was a tiny thing, no more than 4’9”. She looked to be little more than a teenage girl of little more than 16 or 17. She looked quit human in fact. But these details meant nothing compared to the condition she was in. While almost everything in this part of the ship was reason to pause and marvel at its brilliance of technological advancements the condition of the lone girl was the more pressing of concerns. She was half under what could have only have been some sort of beam from the structure of the top of the ship. It held her pinned and the Physician was sure that the poor girl had been crushed to death.

He rushed forward and felt for her pulse, the normally rhythmic beating was uneven and slow but it was still evident. A sigh of relief came from the man’s lips as she yelled for some assistance with removing the girl from the fallen rubble. “SURVIVER! Need some help shifting debris,” he yelled in a loud and business like voice. “Hurry, she looks critical,” he continued to say as he tried to diagnose other potential threats to her life. She was bleeding from several wounds and cranial damage and a concussion was probably more than likely. She lay limp like a broken doll upon the floor. Her hands appeared to be burnt and blistered, though he couldn’t diagnose what could have caused it. Broken bones were a definite and many painful months of healing in order if she survived at all.

Two Time Lords appeared on either side of him, Lord Cisillian and a Time Lord called simply the Watcher. Between the trios they quickly and with care lifted the beam that lay across the prone and unconscious form. An apparatus was called for and the girl was lifted into safety. The apparatus was a wondrous medical device used primarily for alien species. It was a technology that lost most of its usefulness since the times when regeneration became possible.

The machine automatically used its sensors to determine and stabilized the girl’s vitals with chemicals and stimulators. She was then taken back to the city proper and received at the medical facility. But as the Physician once again passed underneath the eyes of Lord Rassilon he couldn’t help but to shiver at the look of cold calculation on his face.