Infinite DC
Chapter Ten: Changes

Pale white smoke seeped from the gun barrel.

If Neas had only a second to react, he would have stopped what happened.

He was Jake’s initial target, until the thug changed his mind at the last second and switched over to Skeeta.

Hysteria set fast over the area.

Mikey and his friends wailed in frenzy.

Clarence clung to Mandy, burying his face into the cloth of her coat.

Shel wept over Skeeta, whose body sprawled on the floor, the gunshot wound to his abdomen bleeding out.

Neas did his best to treat it, but his rage towards Jake distracted him.

“You had no reason to shoot him!” He growled.

Jake complacently chortled, taking sinister satisfaction in his handiwork.

His moment of self-righteousness was short-lived, as soon as he felt the demeaning slap of his mother’s hand across the back of his head.

“You numbskull!” She reprimanded. “What’d you do that for?! It’ll be just another body we’ve gotta dump!”

“We got to make an example, Ma,” Jake said. “That we’re not playin’ games.”

“Well, next time, let me be the one to make it,” Agatha grumbled.

She looked to Sanders, who was just as distraught about the bleeding man on the floor as Neas and Shel were.

“Now where were we?” She taunted. “Oh, that’s right – the treasure you promised us in exchange for our services.”

Neas glared back and forth between the Fratellis and Sanders. “What treasure?” He only then realized the truth in the matter for himself: “Don’t tell me you promised One-Eyed Willy’s treasure to them!”

Agatha greedily beamed. “That she did.”

“NO!”

Bravely, Mikey parted himself from his friends, speaking in defiance.

“That treasure rightfully belongs to us and Willy,” he professed.

“My sons and I knew about it long before you rug rats did,” Agatha debated.

Neas moved from the gravely wounded Skeeta, confronting Sanders. “What were you thinking in telling them about that treasure?!”

“I was thinking how useful they’d be to my plan!” Sanders countered.

Neas groaned. “Again with this so-called ‘plan’? What exactly is this ‘plan’?”

“SHUT UP!” Agatha snarled. “I don’t have the time or the patience for whatever personal problems you two got!” Her aim on Sanders grew firmer. “Take us to that treasure, or we’ll pump lead into everybody here, startin’ with you!”

“This is the police!”

The authoritative voice addressed the criminal family from outside, though it carried the distinct gruffness of an immortal yeti Neas and Shel recently encountered.

“We’ve got ya surrounded! Come on out with your hands up!”

“It’s the cops!” Francis squealed.

“We can take ’em!” Jake asserted.

“What’re you Butch and Sundance all of the sudden?!” Agatha ridiculed. “Why fight when we’ve got the perfect getaway vehicle?” She then turned to Sanders and snidely added, “With the perfect getaway driver.”

Sanders softly moaned, detesting this shift of power. “As you wish.”

She started to lead the Fratellis to the back.

Jake’s gaze suddenly fixed on Shel, who continued to weep for Skeeta.

An idea struck his noggin.

He snatched her by the hair, causing her to scream in anguish and terror.

Alarmed from this rash act of villainy, Neas and Mandy advanced on Jake but were stopped cold when he trained his gun on them.

“Take another step…” He pressed it against Shel’s left temple. “And this kid’s brains get blown to bits!”

Whether or not they chose to accept it, Shel was just as much of an unwilling hostage in the Fratellis’ escape as Sanders was an unwilling accomplice. Not even Agatha could dispute such a move, being the smartest one her son made in the last hour.

Neas, Mandy, and the children helplessly witnessed in the criminal family’s getaway with their two Time Lady captives. Not long after they descended back downstairs, the sound of Sanders’s T.A.R.D.I.S. dematerializing reverberated through the floorboards.

Shortly after the dimensional departure, the main entrance to the old restaurant busted open.

Mordecai, Brand, and Skips were the first to rush in before the other friendly faces of the bespectacled blonde Stephanie “Stef” Steinbrenner, the lovely redhead Andrea “Andy” Carmichael, and the rest of the Park crew.

“Brand!” Mikey joyfully cried, hugging his big brother.

“What’s going on, Mikey?” Brand questioned. “What happened in here?”

“Yeah, we heard a gunshot,” Mordecai said. “Anybody hurt?”

Skeeta let out a vicious groan, bringing all their attention on him.

Benson grimaced, looking on the bloodied stranger. “Who’s this guy?”

“An old friend of mine,” Neas said, kneeling beside Skeeta.

“Somebody that we’ll meet one day, I take it,” a curious Mandy reputed. “He’s losing a lot of blood. Unless we get him medical attention, he’s gonna—”

“That won’t be necessary.” Neas denied. “He’ll be regenerating soon.”

Mandy numbly blinked twice. “I’m sorry. Did you just say he’ll be ‘regenerating’? That would mean he’s…”

“A Time Lord, yeah.” Neas concluded.

Skeeta’s hemorrhaging body jerked up long enough to clutch one bloodied hand onto Neas’s shoulder, while reaching into his jacket with the other. It took him a great deal of strength to retrieve the old photograph from his pocket, handing it to Neas.

“Don’t…let me…forget,” he weakly huffed.

His grip on Neas’s shoulder fell limp, along with the rest of his body, submitting to unconsciousness.

Cogitating over what might as well be a “dying” request, Neas glimpsed at the old photograph given to him.

“Oh, god,” he gulped.

“What?” Mandy asked, noticing the unsettled tone in his voice. “What is that he gave you?”

He handed it over to her, without taking his eyes off the unconscious Skeeta.

Mandy gave it one look before she herself gasped.

In the old polaroid was a family she and Neas knew all too well sitting on the porch of a familiar Georgia farmhouse. The father’s name was Steven, the gorgeous mother to his left was Kristin, and the fresh-faced teen daughter in front of them was Candace – the original.

“Why would he have this?” Mandy queried with heavy suspicion.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Neas studied the dying man. “He’s our father.”

“But that’s impossible!” Mandy negated. “In all the years we lived with them, neither of them said anything about him being a flippin’ Time Lord!”

Finally able to pry his eyes from Skeeta, he fixated a fiery gaze on Mandy. “They kept our Gallifreyan heritage a secret from us ’til the day we met the Doctor. Who can say they kept anything else from us?”

Captivated by their exchange just as the others around them were, Rigby was promptly ensnared by a faint golden glow emitting from where Skeeta lied.

“Guys, look!”

Reverting attention back on Skeeta, they saw his body engulfed in the golden hue.

Neas and Mandy knew this extraordinary phenomenon as the process of regeneration, and their cohorts were witnessing it up close and personal for the first time in their lives.

Through the golden regenerative energy producing from him, they could detect certain features altering, such as his distinctive bald scalp. The dark complexion of it lightened and smoothened, making way for long, flowing blond hair. His husky physique changed beneath his blood-soaked Tuskegee uniform into a slimmer, smaller, and more feminine body type that could hardly fill in the clothes.

Neas even noted how the gunshot wound to the torso healed entirely, the bullet itself popping out during the process.

In seconds, the bald, middle-aged African American man had transformed into a young Caucasian woman. Her eyelids gradually lifted, baring the sparkling blue pair gifted from this new regeneration.

She sat up, examining her surroundings and then settling on the flabbergasted faces looking on her.

“Hello,” she said in her timid, English-accented voice, which was a stark contrast to the vigorous baritone of her predecessor. She was especially taken aback from it, her fingers lightly touching her peach-blossomed lips. “Oh, dear. Is that what my voice sounds like now? It’s so…delicate.”

She spotted the old polaroid in Mandy’s hand, instinctively snatching it from her.

“Happy to have kept it safe for ya,” Mandy teased.

The young Englishwoman investigated the photograph, smiling as she mentally recalled her memory of it.

“I remember,” she said.

“That’s why you kept it,” Neas deduced. “You needed it to remember who you once were.”

The blonde acknowledged this with a nod upon gathering herself to her feet.

She wobbled on her new legs, urging Neas to be her crutch.

Her eyes met with his, sparking more memories.

“You’re…my child,” she whispered.

Neas nodded, smiling. “I am.”

She looked past him, eyeing Mandy. “You’re my child, too.” Her head shook in confusion. “How does that work? No, no. I remember. I remember. Regeneration…right? I’ve regener—”

Reflectively, she clutched her bosom, rendering herself speechless in her discovery of the noticeable shapely breasts she now possessed. This led to an emergency examination of two other body parts, grabbing her crotch with one hand and throat with the other – a gesture that drew odd glances from her audience.

Finding a nonexistence of male genitalia and an Adam’s apple, she exclaimed in dread, “I’ve regenerated into a girl – a British girl!”

Neas tried not to laugh. “You’ll get used to it. Believe me. I’m living my first regeneration as a man.”

“Bro, this is so awkward.” Muscle Man perceived.

“This is regeneration.” Neas opposed. “It’s random.”

“So…this is what it was like between you and—”

In thinking of Shel, Benson was brusquely alerted to her absence.

“Where’s Shel?!” He frantically questioned.

“She was taken by the Fratellis.” Mandy informed.

Benson glowered. “Who?!”

“They’re the bad guys, Mister Gumball Machine Man…Person.” Clarence clarified. “One of them hurt that nice man who was Mandy’s dad before he turned into a beautiful princess.”

“Well, we’ve got to go rescue her from them!” Benson proposed.

“How?” Neas said. “We have no way of knowing where or when Sanders might’ve taken them to replace Willy’s treasure.”

“I know of a way,” proclaimed Skeeta’s successor. “After all, I was the one who designed the Type-Z T.A.R.D.I.S. they’re traveling in this moment.”

Neas and Mandy shared a dissatisfied stare. Another “family secret” that had been kept from them.

“All I need is another version of it from another time to pinpoint the destination through the dimensional corridor.”

Her idea sounded solid to Neas. “You can work with mine. It’s just a few clicks from here, Ske—” He paused, realizing for the first time since welcoming in this new regeneration of his father that she did not have a proper name to it. “What do we call you now?”

The young English blonde thoroughly deliberated, smiling once she came to a satisfying selection.

“Lauren. Call me…Lauren Louise.”