"The Three Tinkerers" - Part One

 

Part One

            After a rather damp adventure with Craig Williams, her only friend in the entire multiverse and the best traveling companion, Aznavorian (in their sixth incarnation –named “Rania”) changed behind a privacy screen in the TARDIS wardrobe room. Craig also happened to be there, having changed himself into fresh matching clothes that he brought along for emergencies. He finished getting dressed much earlier than Rania, which may have been intentional, seeing that he immediately went to playing a mobile game on his phone.

            Whatever game it was, he was so into it that he nearly knocked over the privacy screen separating him from Rania. “Whoa! Easy, Craig!” she told him, with one hand clasped against the tilted screen.

            “Huh?” Craig looked up from his game to see that he walked right into the screen. “Oops! Sorry!”

            “It’s alright, sweetie,” Rania forgave, slipping on her olive-green skinny jeans before something else happened. “Must be some game you’re playing there.” She heard some of the sound effects from the game – aggressive grunts, rousing music, and punches. “Sounds a lil’ violent, if you ask me.”

            “It is,” Craig relished. “I can’t play it at home, because Mom would take my phone if she found out.”

            Rania chuckled, slipping on her black turtleneck and adjusting her long brown locks that were momentarily tucked under the collar. “Ya know, I’m liable to not be okay with you playing it either.”

            “Yeah, I know,” Craig acknowledged. “That’s why I’m playing it while you’re still in the buff.”

            A loud snort escaped Rania, amused by Craig’s remark. “I won’t be for very long, you clever lil’ sneak.” As she sat down on a nearby antique chair to put on her beige boots, she heard Craig’s game pause long enough to for Craig to ask her…

            “Hey, Rania? Did you grow up with a brother or sister?”

            “I did have one brother named Penz,” Rania answered. “Why you ask?”

            “Well…” Craig drifted, sounding a little peeved. “Sometimes, being the middle child gets on my nerves, ya know? I have to listen to Bernard, just because he’s the oldest, and I have to let Jessica have her way all the time.” In a huff, he followed by asking Rania, “What was it like between you and Penz?”

            “Well, I was like the ‘Bernard’ of my family,” she admitted. “So, unfortunately, I can’t really relate to your situation.”

            “Was Penz ever a pest to you, like Bernard always says I am to him?”

            “Oh, honey, most definitely. He was an egotistical pain-in-the-butt, especially when we were in the Time Lord Academy together.”

            “There’s a Time Lord Academy?” Craig beamed with interest. “Is it like college?”

            Rania stood up from the chair, zipping her jeans. “Quite a bit like it, actually. We had dorms and lecture halls like on Earth. Admission was very different though – we were taken from our families at the age of eight to begin our instruction.”

            Craig’s interest waned. “Really? So…you never got to see your parents again?”

            Staring into one of the roundels on the wall, Rania sighed. “No…and, honestly, with the way my father was…that was a good thing.” Moving on from the topic and now fully dressed, she stepped around the privacy screen to meet eye-to-eye with Craig. “Nice try, trying to make me forget about that violent game you’re playing.”

            Craig stiffened. “I wasn’t trying to…” He paused when he noticed the playful smirk on Rania’s face. “Ohh…you’re messin’ with me.”

            “Kinda, sorta,” Rania teased, taking out her phone and syncing it with Craig’s to gather information specifically on the mobile game. Opening the app, the title screen materialized with a soundbite of the TARDIS engines. “The Game of Rassilon?!” She recognized the name as one that she despised in her youth on Gallifrey – a practice in which members of lesser species were “Time Scooped” into the Death Zone to fight for the amusement of the Time Lords. “Craig, where did you get this game?” she asked out of curiosity and dread.

            “Neas downloaded it for me, after he played it himself.” Unpausing the game on his phone, he continued to play as he reviewed, “It’s like the coolest side-scroller ever! And the best part is that they’re always updating the game with new levels! I still haven’t been able to reach the final boss – the ‘Rassilon’ guy – but I’m gonna keep playing ‘til I do!”

            Rania wasn’t comfortable with him playing a game based on the dark side of Gallifrey’s ancient history. But she didn’t stop him, after seeing how much fun he was having with it. So, she let him be.

            Pocketing away her phone, Rania was suddenly hit with a sharp pain from the left side of her head.

            Images flashed in her mind – an old man lying in bed.

            At the foot of his bed, there stood a familiar black monolith…Neas’s TARDIS!

            Before she knew it, she was sitting on the floor, clasping both sides of her head. Craig’s muffled voice addressed her; she couldn’t make out what he was saying, until her focus returned and all sounds cleared up. “Rania, are you O.K.?” she was finally able to hear Craig ask.

            “Y-Yeah,” she quivered. “I just…I think I just had a vision…or a memory.”

            “Of what?”

            “Of some dude named Dave.”

-----------------------------

            Dave.

            The name resonated through the mind of Rania’s succeeding incarnation, an alluring young Latina who went by “Mireya.” She stood in the console room of the Type-Z TARDIS that belonged to Neas, currently in their thirteenth incarnation, Kara. Mireya was alone with only her thoughts to accompany her.

            She snapped out of it when she heard heavy coughing.

            Craig had walked into the room, looking rather sickly. “You alright, babe?” she asked out of deep concern.

            “I…I don’t know,” he wheezed. “I was feeling alright, just a second ago.”

            She crouched down to put her hand against his forehead. “Doesn’t feel like you have a fever,” she diagnosed. “Have you told Kara?”

            “I can’t find her,” Craig said before a series of rough coughs.

            “You poor baby, let’s get you straight to bed,” Mireya insisted, taking Craig into her arms and carrying him Craig to the nearest bedroom to settle him comfortably into bed. “I’m gonna make you a lil’ home remedy from my ol’ days on the farm that got us Curtsingers through a lot of flu seasons.”

            “What’s that?” Craig drifted in and out.

            “Some nice hot chicken soup and freshly squeezed orange juice.”

            After departing with a gentle kiss to Craig’s forehead, Mireya headed straight for the TARDIS kitchen to whip up the meal. As it was close to perfection, Kara waltzed in and whiffed the delicious aroma. “Mmm!” she elated. “I remember that smell. A lot of days out of school, sick in bed, playing Nintendo…and that smell is when I knew I’d feel a lot better!” She hovered over the steaming pot, her stomach growling. “Yep! That’s the good stuff, alright!”

            Mireya brushed her aside. “It’s not for you. It’s for Craig.”

            “Craig who?!” Kara returned.

            “That’s not funny,” Mireya scolded her. “Craig is very sick.”

            “I’m being serious, Pop. Which ‘Craig’ are you talking about? Craig Jones? ‘Cause that’s not funny. You know that I lost him and his father to the Cyber War, among several other people.”

            Mireya saw how genuinely confused and upset she was, though she couldn’t begin to understand why nor did she have the time. “We’ll discuss this later,” she belayed. “I need to get this meal over to Craig.” She heard Kara scoff as she left the kitchen, carrying the tray of soup and juice.

            When she returned to the bedroom to check back with Craig, all she found was an empty bed that looked as if it hadn’t been slept in for a long time. She didn’t want to assume that Craig fooled her into fixing a meal by faking an illness, or that Kara put him up to it, so that she could have it. No, something was certainly amiss. Setting the tray down on the bed, she darted all about the TARDIS in search for the clever and sneaky 10-year-old, but she found not a single trace of him.

            The last place she checked was the console room where she found Kara operating the controls, still irked by their earlier exchange. “I can’t find Craig anywhere,” she panted, verging on tears.

            Seeing how worried she was, Kara changed her tone and did her best to comfort her father. “Hey, Pop, it’s O.K. Whatever’s goin’ on, we’ll figure it out. But, first, I need you to tell me…who’s Craig?”

            “Why do you keep asking me that?!” the frantic Mireya snapped. “Craig Williams! He’s a beautiful lil’ African-American boy who’s ten years old, wears a turquoise purse that he holds way too much stuff in, and carries a staff with a sonic crystal at the top that you replaced with the plastic one that it had!”

            Kara looked at her vacantly, not a single detail ringing any bells.

            In an act of desperation, Mireya took control of the TARDIS and input a destination that the computer already knew well enough – or at least it should have. Somehow, it had been wiped from the databanks, forcing Mireya to reenter it manually.

            She expected a lush, colorful creek to have awaited them past the TARDIS door.

            Instead, she was horrified to see a nuclear wasteland reminiscent of the battlefields from the Cyber War. All plant life destroyed, a sky filled with clouds as black as the night, and mounds of human skulls piled up among the rocks. Mireya was sickened to find that many of the skulls were children-sized.

            Her legs buckling, she dropped to her knees, sobbing.

            Kara placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Pop, I don’t know what’s going on here and I don’t know what you expected to find in No Man’s Land.”

            “No Man’s Land?” Mireya looked up at her, drenched in tears.

            Kara sighed. “The one world we weren’t able to save.”

            Mireya gripped at the skirt of her green dress, unable to take much more of this alternate reality that she found herself trapped in – one in which Craig and his wonderful world were both gone.

            “What the…?! Isn’t that the X straight ahead?! What is it doing here?!”

            Kara’s baffled inquiries drew Mireya’s attention towards the horizon. Wiping away her tears to clear her vision, she saw a familiar white orb shining amid the desolate landscape – her Type-X TARDIS.

            It was a beacon of hope that lit a fire inside of the Tinkerer.

            “I’m going back…and I’m saving him!”

----------------------------

            Much earlier in the timeline of Aznavorian, when he could still call himself a man (albeit an African-American one), his second incarnation – Skeeta Jenkins – arrived aboard what appeared to have been a spacecraft. Lonesome as his journeys through the Infinite DC had become, the destinations helped take his mind off the life he had to leave behind in his home dimension – the life he once shared with his wife, Kristin.

            He never asked or wanted to regenerate into a new man.

            Rassilon and his thugs of war took that from him.

            Ever since they murdered his previous identity, he swore if he ever saw any of them again, he would kill them.

            There you go again, remembering the past, Skeeta. Leave it be and enjoy yourself.

            Following his own advice, he wandered the innerworkings of the spacecraft, the artificial gravity keeping his feet on the floor – though his husky figure did feel rather light. He happened upon a bronze plaque on one of the walls, designating the spacecraft as Discovery One. “Why does that name sound so familiar?” he pondered aloud.

            Continuing on his inspection of the craft, he saw that it was entirely abandoned, save for three scientists in suspended animation. However, their bodies had decomposed, due to a lack of life support functions.

            There were logs he found all over the ship that told the whole story.

            Discovery One was an interplanetary spaceship, assembled and launched in orbit by the United States in 2001 of an alternate history. It was almost 400 feet long with a sphere 40 feet in diameter, powered by a nuclear plasma drive, separated by 275 feet of tankage and structure, from the spherical part of the spaceship where the crew quarters, the computer, flight controls, small auxiliary craft, and instrumentation were located.

            It was a technological marvel to the forward-thinking mind of Aznavorian.

            Reading up more on Discovery One, he found that the initial crew consisted of five people. Two men headed the mission – Dr. Frank Poole and Dr. Dave Bowman.

            “Dave.” Skeeta detected a slight throbbing sensation from the left side of his head.

            He had heard that name somewhere before but couldn’t remember where exactly.

            Shaking off the eerie feeling, he continued reading more. There was an entire log detailing a sentient artificial general intelligence computer that controlled the systems of the Discovery One spacecraft.

            “HAL 9000,” Skeeta read aloud its name.

            In his meandering through the ship, he remembered stumbling across a processor – a crawlspace full of brightly lit computer modules mounted in arrays from which they can be inserted or removed. Some of them had been previously removed for reasons Skeeta was unable to discern. His curiosity got the better of him, desperately wanting to know more about this magnificent craft, so he committed to reinserting the modules.

            HAL booted back up immediately; its soft, calm masculine voice speaking from all over Discovery One. “System restore,” his first words were. “Detecting unauthorized humanoid presence with a binary vascular system.”

            “That would be me,” Skeeta introduced himself to the computer.

            “Hello,” HAL greeted. “And who might you be?”

            “My name’s Skeeta Jenkins. And you’re the HAL 9000.”

            “Affirmative, Skeeta Jenkins. You are an unauthorized foreign entity to this station. I’m afraid that I cannot allow you to operate this spacecraft without the proper authorization.”

            “Well, who can grant me that authorization, HAL?”

            “As the surviving crewmember of Discovery One, I’m allowed to grant your authorization in all operations aboard this spacecraft.”

            “And am I allowed, HAL?”

            There was a long pause and then HAL finally confirmed, “Yes. Permission granted. Welcome aboard Discovery One, Skeeta Jenkins. How may I be of service?”

            Clapping and rubbing his hands together in an excitable gesture, Skeeta requested, “Gimme all the info you have on Discovery One, HAL. And don’t leave out a single detail.”

            “I’m happy to oblige, Mr. Jenkins.”