Infinite DC
Chapter Twenty: The Worst Plan Ever

A contraption common for members of the Time Agency, the vortex manipulator was an extremely precise form of time travel or any other means of travel. In the blink of an eye, LeMarier transported off the Slayer and down to the Earth it orbited, explicitly somewhere out in the wasteland desert.

The blistering heat was something of a welcome, having spent so many hours in the cold vacuum of space that beleaguered the Dalek flagship. In spite of this, she still anticipated leaving the dismally primitive planet and its dimension.

Making use of the vortex manipulator’s properties, she dropped the cloaking shield of the Yautja scout ship she confiscated and parked in the desert midst.

Its three external thrusters faced her way.

The large blade at its underbelly and the exit ramp a few feet from it kept the situated vessel upright.

LeMarier was prepared to ascend up the ramp until…

“Take me with you.”

A scratchy English voice begged to her from behind.

She turned, surprised to see a sweaty and dehydrated young man crumpled to his knees, his platinum blond hair sopping. He wore a type of school uniform that he shed articles of on his long, suicidal journey across the desert. All that was left was a spoiled, untucked white shirt, tattered gray slacks, and sand-filled shoes.

“Who are you?” She grilled the boy.

He tried to answer but only a dry wheeze escaped his chapped lips.

Ultimately, he lost consciousness and went face-first into the sand.

No telling how far or long he trekked the wasteland. To LeMarier, he was as good as dead already; leaving him lying there would be no blemish on whatever scrap of conscience she had.

And yet, the boy possessed a level of persistence deserved to be recompensed.

It could serve some use to her as a companion on her impending expedition.

The maximum capacity of the Tinkerer’s Type-X T.A.R.D.I.S. console room was tested after the triumphant return of the other Gladiators and their friends – including the Doctor and his T.A.R.D.I.S. He kept it materialized outside in the warehouse, near the spherical Type-X itself and the few Type-Z’s wired to it.

All sixteen incarnations of the Gladiator were assembled, each of them getting to know one another – for the first time or all over again.

Even Lauren was granted a chance in meeting another future regeneration – “Alyssa” – and her original face in “Steven Curtsinger.” Although her presence there was welcomed, there was a bit of mourning for her predecessor, “Skeeta Jenkins,” who was originally chosen to join in their last stand.

“I promise that I’ll do everything he would’ve done if he were here,” she guaranteed.

“As far as I’m concerned, we’re all one in the same,” Steven humbly attested.

“But there’s only one you, as far as I’m concerned,” Candace reversed.

Steven looked to the aging blonde that he recognized to be a grown-up form of his infant daughter back home on Gallifrey. Min’s accurate description of her helped, but Steven could see it right off just looking at her. There was much of Kristin in her face and hair; the body, on the other hand, was clearly augmented from Time Lord science.

“Hey, Pop,” she said, smiling.

He embraced her straightaway.

She was rigid to the touch, with all those tight, rippling muscles of hers; particularly, when she returned his embrace, it was like being caught in a vice. Nonetheless, he enjoyed this rare opportunity.

“You, of course, know that neither of you will remember this hug with the timelines out of sync.”

The Doctor.

Steven was warned in advance that his thirteenth incarnation would be coming to his T.A.R.D.I.S. Judging from the abruptness of this regeneration, he would have preferred the one that was all teeth and curls.

“This is a special moment, regardless,” he told him.

“You sure have changed a lot, Doctor,” Candace indicated.

“Really? Wonder what gave it away,” his snarky response was.

Candace giggled. “That attitude’s still the same as the last one, but here it’s an improvement. You aren’t quite so grumpy.”

“That’s ’cause I found Gallifrey.”

She was stricken over this news, nearly stumbling back on her wobbling legs.

The Doctor was quick to say afterward, “Remember, you won’t remember me telling you this, once the timelines are back in sync.”

Candace scoffed. “It’d be hard for me to forget something as astounding as that!”

“Believe me, it is,” he gloomily negated.

His general lack of enthusiasm just made her even more curious.

“Well, can you tell me how you came to replace it?”

Reluctantly, he recounted the story of his discovery, starting all the way back to the moment after he and Candace parted ways during the Time War.

Meanwhile, in his mingling with his other selves, Neas discovered one missing.

Kimbyr.

He only caught sight of her leaving the console room through one of the corridors while having an in-depth conversation with Rhyanna on how he still wore yoga shorts in memory of her (a sentiment that empathically touched her).

Politely excusing himself, he followed Kimbyr further into their father’s T.A.R.D.I.S. He almost lost track of her, winding through multiple hallways – there were honestly more in the Type-X than there were in the Type-Z!

It was the sound of her sobbing that guided him the rest of the way; it echoed across the halls, yet Neas pinpointed the precise source with his acute hearing.

Kimbyr was huddled against the wall in an area that noticeably bore a resemblance to a Zero Room. If it was just that, then she found the perfect place to let out her emotions. Neas never used the one back in his T.A.R.D.I.S. that often, even on days when his stress was at an all-time high. Rhyanna, however, spent a couple of centuries meditating in there, sometimes with the air-conditioning off to create the ultimate sense of stillness. Once in a while, she also would retreat there to weep.

He knew the conditions of this refuge to stem from most recent events.

She was unmistakably shaking, her legs hugged close to her chest.

As much as it pained him to see her signature cheerful disposition traumatized by her experience in the arena, he knew in his hearts that she needed this.

“Hope you didn’t come all this way to say, ‘I told you so’.”

In his train of thought, he failed to realize that she spotted him standing there at the doorway.

Putting on a phony smile, he feigned in idiocy: “I don’t know what you—”

“C’mon, dude,” she derided. “I’m your future, not your past. I know what you’ve thought of me from the minute you met me.”

Neas sighed.

The greatest curse of being a Time Lord was never being able to keep secrets, even from yourself.

“I did for a moment,” he confessed. “But then I saw you sitting there, makeup all runny and stuff, and figured you didn’t deserve it. We both already know what you’re feeling anyway.”

Kimbyr agreeably nodded with his reasoning.

“That thing got me real scared, man,” she said. “When it had me by the throat and held me that close to its ugly mug…” She swallowed hard, fighting back another rupture of tears. “I thought for sure that was it…that you all were going to watch me die right there…no more future for the Gladiator.”

“But he didn’t kill you,” Neas engrossedly reviewed. “They obviously recruited that thing to annihilate us all, but it didn’t the second it went after you. And what it said when he had you by the throat – ‘Remember’ – what could that mean?”

“Yeah,” Kimbyr inquisitively considered. “He said it like we’ve met before.”

“Maybe you have, just not yet,” Neas deduced. “It happens quite often, with us bouncing around time and space.”

Kimbyr shook her head in doubt, cleaning her face.

“I dunno,” she asserted. “All I know is that I’d prefer not to run into that thing or anything like it again for as long as I live.”

“Everything okay in here?”

The prying Candace startled her two young future successors, appearing in unannounced.

“Yeah, everything’s fine,” Neas fibbed.

He caught Kimbyr smiling at him, thankful for keeping her secret.

Frankly, it might as well have been a secret for all their lives; any of them could one day reencounter the dreadlocked alien brute before the perpetual “reunion” in Immortan Joe’s arena.

“So you’re my replacements: Shaq and Angelina Jolie,” Candace teased.

Kimbyr exasperatedly rolled her eyes. “First, it was Megan Fox, and now Angelina? Really?!”

“And Shaq’s like seven feet,” an offended Neas cited. “I’m only six-foot-five!”

Candace laughed with esteemed amusement. “I’m sorry. I’m just getting used to this whole idea of regeneration and one day being you two.” She centered on Neas and added, “You especially, big man. You’re a triple bonus – young, black, and male.”

Neas jokingly flaunted. “What can I say – we’ve got good taste.”

The three Gladiators cackled hysterically; it was just the levity they needed under these stressful circumstances.

Once she was able to settle herself, Candace refocused on her purpose for coming: “Pop needs us back in the console room. He says that we’ve got a solid plan that’ll stop Davros and his Dalek armada.”

“That’s the worst plan ever!” The Doctor roared among the congregation of Gladiators, Tinkerers, and their small assembly of companions.

“Well, I think it’s a great plan,” Nina encouragingly disagreed. “It’s a bit of the old plan mixed with the new one.”

“So…we’re basically using the dimensional rift that Davros is going to open to bring his fleet of Daleks into this dimension by calling forth our own armada, consisted of our regenerations and their allies, through the infinite D.C.?” Neas evaluated.

“Affirmative,” Steven acknowledged. “All it takes is a little manipulation in the rift’s intensity.”

The Doctor’s arms flew up in vexation. “A little, he says!”

His unmistakable frustration did not go unnoticed by those in the room.

“It sounds too impossible,” a skeptical Maureen expressed. “There couldn’t be any more of us out there than what we’ve got cramped up in here, could there?”

Alyssa cleverly grinned. “Funny you should say that.”

She faced the Type-X control console, fixating on a keyboard bordering on a Commodore 64 model that she inputted a three-key command. Above the console there projected three holographic feeds videoed in real time. Each one was of a different woman, ranging from as young as seventeen to as old as forty-three. Behind them were different T.A.R.D.I.S. console rooms of Type-Z design.

Three more regenerations of the Gladiator; none those in the Type-X knew.

Alyssa pointed to the seventeen-year-old, a fresh-faced Caucasian blonde with twinkling blue eyes. “Her name’s Si, and she’s your nineteenth regeneration.”

Awe transformed Shel’s face. “She looks younger than me!”

“And I’m also half a century older than you,” Si glittered.

“This one’s name is Geraldine, your seventeenth regeneration,” Nina indicated the center feed, which was telegraphed from inside the console room of a pale, flawless woman in her thirties wearing a rounded black sunhat that her floppy dark hair peeked out of.

“Hello,” she waved in a sweet-natured way.

Neas’s ears interestedly twitched at her voice. “Is that a German accent?”

“And, lastly, there’s Rickert,” Steven nodded to the forty-three-year-old Italian American woman on the far right feed, sporting a bob cut and tanned skin; her broad, defined shoulders detectable. “Your eighteenth regeneration.”

“She looks hungry enough to take on fifteen million Daleks,” Candace surveyed.

“Bet your booty I am,” Rickert resiliently testified. “So when are we doing this? How long we got to be cooped up in the corridor?”

Mars’s face lit up. “Wait. They’re all barreling through the corridor right now?!”

“Just the three of them?” Margie rose.

Steven shook his head. “No. They’re just three of thousands we’ve managed to contact through the beacon. Imagine how much more we can reach once after we’ve intensified it.”

“You do realize in doing that you’re dooming this whole planet more than Davros and his army will,” the Doctor quarreled. “Oh, but that’s just second nature for the almighty Tinkerer, isn’t it? You’ll doom a planet, no matter what dimension that it inhabits.”

“No, Doctor, I won’t,” Steven calmly undermined. “Because a strike team will be sent into the Dalek flagship to save my wife and our other friends up there, get back the T.A.R.D.I.S.es Davros is using to power his generator, and destroy Dalek Vec and that generator altogether. Our team will get the job done before the rift ever has a chance at imploding this reality.”

The Doctor admiringly huffed. “Well, a strategy that mad certainly requires a madman to take charge of it, wouldn’t you suppose?”

“That depends,” said a simpering Min. “Are you volunteering for the job?”

“Never thought you’d ask,” the Doctor snootily supported.

Steven brightened. “That just leaves ground forces to defend the outpost. You’ll have to give us Tinkerers enough time to stabilize the rift with Lindy, Rhyanna, Isabel, and Cara’s T.A.R.D.I.S.es and let our own opposing armada through.” He took a pause, reaping incentive in his next address, “As complex as this plan is, I’ve got one hundred percent faith in it succeeding with so many magnificent minds and bodies working together.”

“Yeah, yeah,” the Doctor bemoaned. “Stop with the butt-kissing and let’s just get to work, shall we?”