"Dale Against the Universe" - Part Three

 

Part Three

            Dale’s disappeared?! To where?! And why did he leave poor Kristin all alone?!

            My mind jumped to several conclusions upon hearing this, painting Mr. Sydney in quite the negative light. Neas tried to reassure me that there was a reasonable explanation, but I wasn’t hearing it. I was too focused on getting back into the mansion and finding out what happened.

            We arrived to find the whole place ransacked and Kristin practically wrought with dread from the night’s scare. She had already called the police before we showed up, so we sat together in the living room and waited with her. I gave her a glass of water and a Xanax to help calm her nerves. “My husband – my last one, that is – always knew when to give me these,” she said before taking the sedative.

            “Sounds like a wise man.” I tried not to smile too much, giving praise to myself. I probably should have taken a Xanax myself, being as furious as I was at Dale. “I can’t believe he’d just leave you here with the intruder!”

            She looked at me dubiously. “Who? Dale? He didn’t leave me here. I was the one who told him to leave.”

            “Why?” I frowned.

            “Because, for some strange reason, the intruder was after him.”

            This news boggled my mind and also the minds of Neas and Craig. Why would the intruder be after Dale? Were they some overzealous “Captain Knutz” fan? Did Dale owe some shady talent agent money or something?

            Once the police arrived at the scene of the crime, one of the officers asked Kristin for a description of the intruder. She said that the individual looked to be a male biker of six feet in height (perhaps taller) and muscular build, wearing a black helmet that obscured his face. Unfortunately, this description didn’t do much to help the police, as there were several bikers fitting that description in the Los Angeles area.

            Neas and I had our own theory of it being Al-Lee, with the incident lining up seamlessly with her escape from the TARDIS. Of course, Kristin’s description didn’t match Al-Lee’s. Nevertheless, we feared a Terminator like her being out somewhere, roaming in our home dimension.

            “Hon—I mean, Mrs. Sydney,” I addressed Kristin, catching myself from calling her “honey,” a term of endearment from a previous life. “When you told Dale to leave, was there anyplace specifically you told him to go?”

            “Just this low-rent motel about ten miles from here,” she told me. “We agreed to go there, if anything like what happened tonight were to occur. We also have a secret knock that goes like this…” She demonstrated by knocking a specific melody along the coffee table. My ears recognized it to be the basic “Shave and a Haircut” knock.

            Flawed as it might’ve been, it was good to know they had a system in place in case of emergencies. We used to have something like that back in our Georgia farm. In the event of a twister (which were common out in the countryside), we would hide in the cellar – which was, in actuality, the console room of my Type-X TARDIS, made out to resemble a cellar.

            Knowing Kristin would be safe with the authorities, I left the mansion with Neas and Craig to go to this motel where Dale fled to. I used the secret knock Kristin demonstrated to me, and Dale opened up. He was battered and distressed in his tattered silk blue pajamas and the black fedora that he somehow found the time to put on during his escape.

            “Are you alright, Mr. Sydney?” I asked him with a tone that would’ve sounded contemptuous to anyone else.

            Dale gave an uncertain nod. “Did Kristin send you kids? I gotta tell ya…I ain’t exactly feelin’ right at the moment.” He invited us in, locking the door immediately afterwards. “This guy – whoever he was – roughed me up pretty good. It took everything in me just to fend him off. He nearly killed me.”

            I thought he was being a bit overdramatic (even for an actor) but kept it to myself.

            “It was like fighting a machine,” he continued. “The more tired I got, the stronger he did!”

            That detail set off an alarm in Neas. “Like a machine? Like a Terminator?!”

            “Kinda like that, yeah,” Dale affirmed, failing to recognize Neas’s deduction to be more than just a hyperbole. “But we’re talkin’ real life here, man.”

            “So am I, Mr. Sydney,” Neas said. “What you fought was a real Terminator.”

            Dale scoffed at this. “Gimme a break here, kid.”

            “He’s telling you the truth, Dale,” I supported, no longer forcing myself, Craig, or Neas to secrecy with a man’s life on the line. I told him the entire truth – about Neas and I being members of an alien race known as “Time Lords” and having a ship capable of traveling between dimensions, some of which are straight out of the stories of fiction that exist in our world. After the fact, I necessitated to him, “Do not tell Kristin I told you any of this – even though she already knows most of it.”

            “She does?!” Dale flared. “How does she know?!”

            “Because the man she was married to before you was a Time Lord,” I said. “And I was once that man.”

            Dale looked at me much differently than before.

            I wasn’t just some young woman he shared a dinner with, earlier that evening.

            I was now someone totally alien to him.

            Still, he tried to deny any of what I explained to him. “Nah, nah, nah! You kids are sick! You’re outta yer minds! Playing mind games with an old man like me who just had an attempt on his life! You ought to be ashamed!”

            Seeing that I was getting nowhere with him, I made the one decision that I told myself I would never make, unless it was absolutely necessary. I turned to Neas and ordered, “Show him Craig’s true form.”

            “My what?!” I heard Craig bellow, totally confused. I felt so guilty that I couldn’t even look him in the eye.

            Neas couldn’t believe I requested such a thing, but he knew why it had to be done.

            He took his sonic screwdriver out from the inside of his hoodie, and he aimed it towards Craig. “I’m so sorry, lil’ bro,” he said before activating the Gallifreyan tool.

            Now, you all are probably just as confused as poor little Craig was, so allow me to explain: Craig’s “two-dimensional” appearance has been shielded by a perception filter powered by the nuage energy that makes up the Infinite DC. As such, he appears like a real three-dimensional boy to those outside of his world, while everyone else appears just as two-dimensional (or cartoonish) as he does.

            When that filter is depowered by a device like Neas’s sonic, it removes the veil, allowing Craig to see the real world and vice versa.

            The result was the reason why I never wanted Craig to be subjected to it.

            He was horrified to see Neas, Dale, and myself in our three-dimensional forms – our skin, hair, and clothes popping out at him and overwhelming his senses. If I could describe the sensation he was experiencing in plain terms, it would probably be like watching a 4D movie on “overload” settings.

            “No! NO! MAKE IT GO AWAY!!!” he cried, shutting his eyes from it all as he cowered into the nearest corner.

            I immediately went to him, enveloping him in my arms to calm him. “Shhh. Shhh. It’s alright, honey. It’s alright. We’ll turn it back on for you, I promise.” My hearts broke, seeing him so frightened. I hated myself for making him go through this, so much that it brought tears to my eyes.

            “What the…?!” I heard Dale from the other end of the room.

            He was just as horrified to see Craig’s two-dimensional form, standing out among the three-dimensional setting. I gave Neas the go-ahead to turn the filter back on for Craig but to leave it on for Dale. He needed to see it all and know how serious we were about this situation.

            “This is some crazy Roger Rabbit stuff right here!” he yelped, not once taking his eyes off of Craig. “That kid’s head…it’s so…”

            “DON’T YOU DARE!” I shouted at him, still cradling Craig in my arms. “He looks no more alien to you than you do to him!”

            “Coming from the girl who used to be my wife’s husband!” Dale retorted.

            “Look, Dale,” I said as calmly as I could, doing everything in my power not to unleash on this man. “This is the world we come from. Yes, it’s weird, but it’s also wonderful. So, I suggest you get used to it, because you’re going to need our protection from the Terminator that’s been hunting you for reasons that we haven’t yet been able to discern right now!”

            Shortly after my rant, there was a regular knock on the door.

            It set us all on edge – more than we already were.

            Neas cautiously went to it and looked through the peephole. “It’s Al-Lee,” he whispered back to me.

            Unfortunately, she must’ve heard him from the other side, because she said thereafter, “I know you’re in there, Neas…and I also know what I am. I promise that I’m not here to terminate you.”

            “How’re we supposed to believe that?” Neas asked her. “You could just be programmed to say that!”

            Suddenly, the door flew off its hinges, throwing Neas back.

            Al-Lee stomped right in, just as Neas swiftly produced a plasma rifle from his hoodie (he’s got some deep pockets) and fired a shot at Al-Lee’s face. It damaged some of the flesh along the left side, exposing part of her metal endoskeleton. Angered by the attack, Al-Lee tore the rifle out of Neas’s hands and held him at gunpoint.

            But she didn’t fire.

            Again, she proclaimed, “I’m not here to kill you! I just want to talk.”

            “About what?” I asked her.

            “I have information on the Terminator that tried to kill Dale Sydney.”