"The Three Tinkerers" - Part Six

 

Part Six

            The next day in Herkleton, another Type-X TARDIS materialized within the Creek. Its occupants – Steven and Kristin Curtsinger – disembarked to the colorful atmosphere. “Whoa!” Kristin yelped, feeling as if she had walked right into a painting. She looked at her body and clothes, all of which had transformed into animated form. “Yo, check me out! I’m a dang cartoon!”

            “That’s the spatial quality,” Steven explained. By his submissive tone, it was clear that he had experienced this rare occurrence before, presumably multiple times.

            “The what-now?” Kristin barely caught on, distracted by her new cartoon form.

            “It’s the shift in dimensions – kind of like how most TARDISes change their shape to blend in with its surroundings upon landing,” Steven expounded. “You see, the nuage energy that makes up the Infinite DC can—”

            “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Kristin tuned out his technobabble.

            Steven rolled his eyes, abandoning his lecture. “Forget it. Let’s just go.”

            “Go where?” Kristin asked. “Dude, what is goin’ on with you? You bring us to Jellystone Park for some weird reason that even you don’t know, and now you act like you still know where you’re going!”

            “I don’t,” Steven tranquilly stated. “I seem to be following purely on instinct.”

            “Purely on instinct?” Kristin parroted condescendingly.

            “If I could put it into better terms, it feels like someone or something put it all inside my head.”

            Kristin sighed, a headache coming on. “It all sounds like another weird Time Lord thing to me. But, because you’re my husband and I love you, I’ll follow you to the ends of the Earth…er, Earths.”

            Steven gave her an appreciate smile. “Thank you, my love.”

            Clinging to his right arm, Kristin kept in pace with him as they walked down a specific path in the Creek. During the trek, Kristin was momentarily distracted by an inflatable pirate ship that sailed down a nearby river. A bunch of kids were on it, bouncing around and playing the role of swashbucklers. “Aww,” Kristin gushed at the scene. “That looks like a lotta fun!”

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            Skeeta had stared at the monitor for so long that his eyes teared up. He continued to fume over HAL and the theft of his TARDIS by the psychopathic A.I. He was thankful for his Time Lord biology, which allowed him to stay awake and alert for as long as necessary. Meanwhile, his two female counterparts occupied themselves with activities that were remedial from their perspectives – Mireya took a hot bath, and Rania did some yoga, barefoot on a mat.

            While Mireya’s leisure pursuit kept her out of Skeeta’s preferable range of focus, Rania opted to establish hers in the console room, right near the consoles where Skeeta monitored for nuage activity. He wouldn’t have minded, if it weren’t for her incessant moans of satisfaction with every stretch. They were very distracting to Skeeta’s focus.

            “Ohhh, man!” She euphorically emanated. “Ohh, yeah! That’s what I needed!”

            Skeeta’s patience had finally wore thin. “Is all that really necessary?!”

            Rania could see the veins protruding from his Milk Dud of a scalp. “My bad,” she smirked at him, locked in the middle of a stretch. “I’m used to doing this alone…though technically I am all by myself.” Noticing how Skeeta rubbed his eyes for the hundredth time, she suggested, “Maybe you should do some yoga. It’ll help with your stress levels.”

            “I am not stressed!” Skeeta retorted.

            Rania scoffed. “Could’ve fooled me, dude. Ever since HAL stole your TARDIS, you’ve been like a ticking bomb.”

            Skeeta took deep breaths, calming his nerves. “I’m sorry,” he told her.

            “It’s all good,” Rania accepted. “In all fairness, Mireya and I have more than enough reason to be tense ourselves, with poor lil’ Craig’s timeline threatened.”

            “He really means a lot to us, doesn’t he?” Skeeta inquired.

            “He’s a part of our family…like a third child,” Rania said. “And he’s the only real friend we’ve got in this crazy multiverse.”

            Skeeta nodded approvingly, smiling. “We’ll save him. You have my word.”

            “I know,” Rania winked and smiled back. “It’s my word, too.”

            Suddenly, the console beeped three times in a row.

            Rania unlocked herself from her yoga position and joined Skeeta at the monitor; three blips of nuage signatures came over the screen. “One of these has to be my TARDIS,” Skeeta indicated. “I have no idea what the other two are.”

            Rania then held one button on the console that patched her through the intercom. Speaking through a hidden microphone, she called, “Mireya! Get it out of the tub now! HAL’s arrived!”

            “You could be a little nicer, ya know,” Mireya responded over the comm.

            “Yeah, I could be,” Rania quipped, ending the conversation there. She proceeded afterwards to reach into her left pocket and retrieve a small black tool – her personal sonic screwdriver. With an air of fortitude, she said, “Let’s go save our lil’ Craigy!”

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            It was by nightfall when Rania and Mireya traced one of the three signatures to a clearing in the Creek that had an abandoned merry-go-round. But the merry-go-round wasn’t all that they found there. They also spotted a familiar black rectangular solid of eight feet high.

            “Is that…?” Mireya began, curiously squinting at the solid. “The Type-Z?!”

            Rania, by contrast, reacted to it cautiously. “It looks like it, but I have very good reason to believe that it’s not.”

            “You sound like you’ve seen it recently,” Mireya noted her predecessor’s wary tone of voice.

            “When Craig and I visited the late Miocene before coming aboard Discovery, we found a monolith just like that one among a tribe of hominins,” Rania reviewed. “I placed my hand on its structure, and I received a bunch of visions, just like we did when we encountered the Star Child.”

            “So, the two are connected?” Mireya presumed.

            Out of curiosity, Rania scanned the monolith with her sonic. The Gallifreyan tool nearly exploded out of her hand with the overload of information it received. “Good grief! The nuage levels are off the charts!”

            As the two Tinkerers approached the monolith for closer examination, they stopped just as two other figures emerged from behind it. They were both fresh-faced individuals in their twenties – a boy and a girl. The boy was a tall blonde of slim build, adorned in an assortment of clothes from different eras, specifically the Gilded Age of American history. The girl was a short, fair-skinned brunette – a perfect Audrey Hepburn clone – with thick, defined eyebrows; her attire was more modern than her male companion’s, consisting of a brown leather jacket, a white undershirt, tight blue jeans, and a pair of black Converse.

            Rania and Mireya knew them both very well.

            The boy was their original incarnation, very early in his first journeys across the Infinite DC. He went by the Earth name of “Steven.”

            The girl was a young Kristin Curtsinger, their human wife.

            Rania and Mireya were awestruck to see the latter present in Craig’s world, neither of them remembering ever bringing her there. “What the…?!” Mireya muttered. “Why’s Kristin here?!?!”

            “Better question: why’s he here?!” Rania gestured to Steven.

            “Yo!” Kristin suddenly called out to them, once she took notice of their presence in the clearing. Steven, on the other hand, was more focused on the monolith. “How ya’ll doin’ this evening?”

            Rania and Mireya weren’t prepared for this interaction. Obviously, Kristin had no idea who either of them was – not that she would’ve known, even in her future. The Tinkerers kept their lives far from the one their wife lived on Earth; outside of Steven and Skeeta, she never met any of their other incarnations.

            “We’re fine,” Rania managed to respond.

            “And so are you,” Mireya murmured, eyeing young Kristin’s figure.

            “Don’t even start,” Rania reprimanded her.

            “Why not? She is our wife.”

            “Yeah, but she doesn’t know that.”

            “Whoa. Heads up. She’s coming this way.”

            Sure enough, Kristin walked straight up to them, leaving her young husband behind to examine the monolith. “I know this all looks weird – two people out in the woods, late at night, investigating a strange monument,” she told them.

            “No, it’s not weird at all,” Rania told her. “We’re here for the same reason.”

            Kristin frowned. “Really? Ya’ll must’ve known it’s been here then.”

            “Not exactly,” Mireya stated.

            Before Kristin could probe the two ladies on their interests in the monolith, another party emerged from the enclosing vegetation. It was Little Craig, dressed much differently than when Rania and Mireya saw him the other day. He looked very close to his older self, carrying a staff (sans diamond ornament) and his trusty purse of holding.

            “Ugh, why’re all you grownups here?” he groaned upon finding them. He then noticed Rania and Mireya, recognizing them. “Hey, you’re the nice ladies I met yesterday at the stream. You guys go on walks at night, too?”

            “Yep,” Rania replied. “Gotta get our steps in.” She jokingly marched in place.

            Shifting his focus on Kristin and Steven, Little Craig asked, “And who’re these guys? What’re they doing here?”

            “Doin’ a lil’ investigating,” Kristin nodded to Steven and the monolith. She seemed to have also recognized Craig. “Didn’t I see you earlier this afternoon? You were playing with your friends on that cool inflatable pirate ship.”

            Little Craig scowled. “They aren’t my friends,” he sternly proclaimed. “My real friends are back home – my old home. And I’m going after that Wishmaker to get them all back!”

            “What ‘Wishmaker’ are you lookin’ for, hon?” Kristin supportively inquired.

            Little Craig reached into his purse of holding, pulling a composition notebook out of it and opening to a specific page that he showed to Kristin. “This one,” he indicated the details on the page, which contained a child’s drawings of a girl named Hannah and her quest for the Wishmaker, a paper fortune teller.

            Kristin giggled in amusement. “Oh, man! I remember making one of these when I was your age. I used to make wishes on them, too.”

            “Did they ever come true?” Little Craig asked with hopeful eyes.

            “Of course not,” Steven interjected, having overheard the discussion whilst studying the monolith. “Wishes are a fictitious construct of the mind, spurred by the machinations of the…” He stopped when he turned and looked to the group, noticing how Kristin, Rania, and Mireya were all giving him admonishing glares. Realizing that he overstepped, he retracted his initial statements and told Little Craig, “Sorry, little one. Forget what I said.”

            Steven’s interruption attracted Little Craig’s curiosity on him and the monolith. “What’s that thing?” he asked of the latter, approaching Steven. “I didn’t see it on the other half of the map.”

            “I’m not quite sure,” Steven answered, his eyes lit with wonder. “I’ve got this strange sense of déjà vu, just looking at it.”

            “What’s déjà…?”

            Craig’s question was cut short when Steven placed his right hand on the monolith’s black marbled structure. All of the sudden, an explosion of light burst between him and the alien object, blinding Rania, Mireya, Kristin, and Little Craig. When it dispersed, they discovered that Steven and the monolith had both disappeared.

            “Wh-Where did they go?!” Little Craig exclaimed in wide-eyed bewilderment.

            “That’s exactly what I was gonna ask!” Kristin corresponded, running to the spot where her husband and the monolith once stood. There wasn’t a trace of either left. Her flummoxed hazel-brown eyes searched to the heavens, and she frenetically screamed, “Steven Curtsinger! Don’t you leave me behind! You get your butt back here now!”

            Following her outburst, the enclosing vegetation shifted again.

            At first, they believed it to be Steven, reemerging from wherever he vanished off to. But it was another man – a black man, clad in black leather and sunglasses, despite it being nighttime.

            “Oh, no!” Rania gasped on the realization that this sunglasses-wearing man in leather was the HAL-controlled Terminator.