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Chapter Text

Part One

            The three T.A.R.D.I.S.es materialized on the Park grounds, right near the same crater that Neas’s created on its first emergency landing.

            “Man, I wonder what day it could be,” Mordecai said upon stepping out of Cici's T.A.R.D.I.S. with his friends and the three Gladiators: Neas, Cici, and Kara. Three incarnations of the same Time Lord – two women and one man – each of them wearing the same hoodie and blue jeans.

            “Hardly anything’s changed since we’ve been away,” Muscle Man noted.

            “That’s ‘cause it’s still New Year’s, after midnight,” Neas said. “Right where we found you guys.”

            “Seriously?!” Rigby exclaimed. “It’s felt like weeks!”

            “Did we forget to mention that our T.A.R.D.I.S. travels through time, too?” Kara haughtily stated.

            While his employees reveled in the fact, Benson uneasily approached Cici.

            “Uh…Cici? About me kissing you back there in the Dalek ship? Look, I’m sorry if it came off as unexpected and unnecessary. It was a stupid move I made in the heat of the moment, and I’m sorry. I understand if you think of me as being repulsively immature and desperate…”

            “Don’t forget ‘thirsty,’” Rigby supplemented.

            Benson angrily gritted his teeth at the raccoon. “Yes, thank you, Rigby.” After a deep calming breath, he continued, “Anyway, I hope that hasn’t changed how you feel about me as a—”

            He froze just as Cici’s warm, soft lips touched the side of his glass dome head.

            “We’ll meet again, Benson,” she sultrily told him.

            “Whoooooooooooooooooooooa, Benson!” Mordecai and Rigby whooped.

            “Way to go, bro!” Muscle Man cheered.

            “Casanova!” Skips extolled.

            “Good show!” Pops applauded.

            Benson blushed, his dome branding the kiss Cici left on it.

            “Well, I…uh…,” he stammered, chuckling. “I gu-guess I’ll see you again, t-too.”

            “You guys are the coolest!” Rigby praised.

            “Yeah, whenever you’re around the Park again, hook us up with another crazy space adventure,” Mordecai invited.

            Kara snorted. “I don’t think you fellas are ready for real space adventures.”

            “More like real space adventures aren’t ready for us,” Rigby countered, following it with another whoop out of him and the rest of the crew as they returned to their domicile in the Park.

            “WHAAAAAAA!!!!!”

            Mordecai was startled awake by the screams of Rigby.

            “Dude!” He groggily yelled. “Are you still having those nightmares about the British taxicab?!”

            “No, man,” Rigby denied. “It’s Benson.”

            Rigby pointed towards the window.

            Mordecai looked out and, oddly enough, their boss and friend was sitting on the ledge right outside their bedroom and gazing up towards the cloudy morning sky.

            “Benson!” Mordecai called.

            His outburst startled Benson, causing him to fall over the edge and hit the ground nine feet below. Mortified from his nasty fall, the concerned Mordecai and Rigby dashed out of the house and rush up to Benson as he limped his way over to the golf cart in a pathetic attempt to escape while he still had a bit of his pride intact. Unfortunately, he didn’t make it anywhere close to the cart when Mordecai and Rigby approached him. “Benson, are you O.K.?” the former asked.

            “Ugh…I’m fine,” Benson groaned. “Just leave me alone.”

            “What’s wrong with you, man?” Rigby prodded. “You’re not waiting for Cici to come back, are ya? Dude, that ship has sailed – or rocketed away…or something. She was an alien from another dimension and the chances of her coming back are a million to one.”

            His cold, harsh method of reasoning earned him a hard punch to the arm by Mordecai. “What Rigby means to say, Benson, is that anything can happen,” Mordecai reassured. “Cici crashed down to our planet in a videotape-shaped spaceship from out of nowhere. A moment like that is bound to happen again, especially in our lives.”

            Benson nodded considerably. “Yeah, I guess you’re right, Mordecai. Maybe some good ol’ work will break me out of this funk. You guys get ready for morning meeting in five minutes.”

            “Well, that was quick,” Rigby griped. “C’mon, Benson. We just had a rough trip through parallel dimensions in time and space.”

            “Alright,” Benson sternly said. “We’ll make it ten minutes or YOU’RE FIRED!!!”

            Rigby was not the only one suffering fatigue after an aggressive, unnatural, and unexpected trip. The rest of the crew – Skips, Muscle Man, Pops, and High-Five Ghost – practically had to pry themselves out of bed. They would have complained just as much as Rigby had they not been reminded by Mordecai about how much Benson missed Cici.

            However, as the morning meeting commenced, everyone but Benson noticed the dark storm clouds developing overhead.

            “Benson, dude, are you not seeing how crazy the weather is right now?!” Rigby indicated. “We can’t work in this!”

            His attention redirected to the raging skies, Benson admitted, “It is a bit of some nasty weather this morning. O.K., well, in that case, we’ll limit all jobs to indoors. Muscle Man, you and Fives…”

            Rigby interrupted his instruction with a loud, aggravated groan. “Just admit it, Benson. This is a sign for us not to work today.”

            “I hafta agree with Rigby on this one, Benson,” Skips said. “We’ve all had a rough night – if some of us wanna call it that.”

            “That’s what I told him,” Rigby exclaimed in aggravation.

            Benson fumed over the complaints, his face turning a dark shade of red. “I can’t believe you guys! Here I am, accommodating you from the weather, and you’re being ungrateful for it?! Or would you all rather enjoy your first day-off at the unemployment line?!”

            His sudden, erratic behavior took his staff by surprise.

            “Benson, calm yourself,” Pops pleaded. “This is quite unprofessional of you.”

            “Yeah, bro,” Muscle Man acknowledged. “What’s up with you today?”

            “He’s still bent out of shape about his alien girlfriend,” Rigby openly broadcasted.

            “RIGBY!!!” Benson roared.

            “It’s no secret how much you like Cici, Benson,” High-Five Ghost stated. “We all saw the kiss she gave you.”

            Having lost all control of the meeting, Benson furiously demanded, “LEAVE! ALL OF YOU! GET OUT OF HERE! MEETING’S OVER!!!”

            They did as he requested, without question.

            Alone, Benson threw an explosive tantrum from Pops’ house all the way to the park’s water fountain. The only thing to stop it was a sudden bolt of lightning that struck down right upon the water fountain in front of him.

            The shockwave knocked him back and out of consciousness.

            Some minutes later, he awakened to an extraordinary sight.

            Standing right where the water fountain once stood was the Type-Z T.A.R.D.I.S.

            Benson was overwhelmed but not as much as when the Type-Z’s doors opened with smoke billowing out, along with a lone figure.

            The smoke cleared to reveal a dazed, stumbling Cici.

            She looked exactly as she had the night before, with her long straight black hair and dressed in her black hoodie, purple shirt, blue jeans, and black boots – the same clothes as her previous incarnation: the tall, masculine African American man named “Neas.”

            Beaming with joy, Benson cried, “Cici! You’ve come back!”

            She hardly responded to his presence, merely looking around the quaint park setting in sheer admiration, her hands on her hips.

            Looking straight at her, Benson realized how she was literally more radiant, her flawless olive skin glowing gold. At first, he thought it to have been a side-effect to the lightning; of course, with her alien physiology, it could have been anything.

            “C-Cici?” He stammered. “Are you…alright?”

            Her crystal blue eyes finally glanced his way, ostensibly recognizing him.

            Then, without caution, she collapsed to the ground, much to Benson’s distress.

            The coffee shop was the one spot where Mordecai and Rigby felt liberated from Benson and work altogether (except for the one time he had Peeps surveillance cameras strapped to their bodies).

            They invited the rest of the crew along for breakfast and planned to spend New Year’s Day – their official day-off – hanging out together.

            It was an added bonus that they came to the shop during Margaret and Eileen’s morning shift, as it allowed them to recall their recent space-time adventure with the ladies, ending it on Benson’s explosion earlier that day.

            “You should’ve seen him,” Rigby said. “He completely flew off at us, even Pops!”

            “Sadly, it’s the truth,” Pops confirmed.

            “As wrong as he was, Rigby, his feelings were justified,” Eileen addressed. “Love makes people do crazy things.”

            “Or, in Benson’s case, turns them into a nutjob,” Rigby argued.

            The shop entrance dinged, indicating the arrival of another customer.

            Muscle Man’s eyes unnervingly bulged, looking towards the person. “Uh…speaking of nutjobs…”

            The others traced his gaze, seeing a big, burly man standing near the entrance, wearing sunglasses and biker gear while carrying a fully-loaded handgun.

            “What the…?!” A mortified Mordecai uttered.

            “Where is Sarah Connor?” The man asked in a very robotic tone of voice with an Austrian accent.

Chapter Text

Part Two

            Sarah Connor lived an ordinary, boring life in 1984 before one man – Kyle Reese – traveled back through time to protect her from a killer cyborg called “The Terminator.” Reese let her in on the legacy she would start with the birth of her future child, John Connor, who would lead in the human resistance against the machines among a nuclear holocaust.

            Through the murderous rampage of the Terminator, Sarah received a glimpse of the world Reese hailed from.

            Then appeared one woman who came from neither the future nor the past.

            In fact, as Sarah would discover, she was not even a part of either their realities.

            Her name was Neas, but she went by “Reilly,” and she traveled in an oddly-shaped, dimensionally-disproportionate capsule she referred as a Type-Z T.A.R.D.I.S.

            Reilly knew of the war against the machines Kyle fought in, worsened by the emergence of another breed of machines that, like Reilly, came from a different dimension and threatened the ultimate outcome of the war itself.

            For that purpose, she had to remove both Sarah and Kyle from their “personal timeline,” as she called it.

            Sarah returned to a life of normalcy, or something close to it.

            In this new dimension she was brought to, she was once more working as a waitress in a coffee shop alongside – and this was the oddity of the reality she had to adjust in – an anthropomorphic robin and mole.

            She grew to appreciate this new world, until today.

            The screams and gunfire that erupted outside the kitchen alarmed her.

            Last she heard such horrifying sounds, the Terminator had shot up a police station.

            No. He couldn’t have found us here. Could he?

            In her panic, she heard the rear entrance door fly open to the barging of Kyle Reese, who guarded her in the dimension, per Reilly’s request.

            “He found us,” he warned her, a loaded shotgun gripped in his left hand.

            “How’s that possible?” A dumbfounded Sarah questioned. “We ditched him in another dimension!”

            Reese quizzically shook his head. “I don’t know how he made the trip. All I know is that we’ve got to find Reilly.” He nodded towards the backdoor. “C’mon. While we still have a chance.”

            “No,” Sarah defied. “Not without Margaret and Eileen.”

            “They’re not the mission priority!” Kyle snarled.

            “They’re priority to me, Kyle,” Sarah countered.

            He saw there was no convincing her otherwise; she was determined to protect the lives of innocents that mattered nothing to him.

            And that was exactly what made Sarah Connor a legend.

            John really takes up after her, he pleasingly reflected.

            They acted quickly. While Sarah went to Margaret and Eileen, who were ducked beneath one of the tables, Reese covered for her by unloading his shotgun on the Terminator. The blasts were powerful enough to send the cyborg hurling back, smashing through the shop window.

            “Sarah, what’s going on?!” A hysterical Margaret cried.

            “Just come with us, if you want to live,” Kyle barked.

            “I WANNA LIVE! I WANNA LIVE!” Rigby maniacally screamed.

            They rushed out of the shop and into Muscle Man’s car, with Kyle at the wheel.

            As he sped out of the parking lot, a loud thud reverberated from the rear, and they sighted the Terminator – his chest gruesomely busted open to reveal a metal skeleton – atop the trunk.

            It punched through the rear windshield, grabbing Pops.

            “Oh, dear!” He shrieked.

            Skips attempted to swat the Terminator away with some lefts and rights, yet they only caused more pain to his hands than the cyborg’s face.

            “It’s like he’s made of iron,” the yeti bafflingly noted.

            “Here, try this,” Sarah offered Kyle’s shotgun, which Mordecai willingly accepted. He took aim at the Terminator’s face, firing one shot at close range that successfully broke him away from the vehicle, sending him tumbling across the highway.

            Rigby breathed a sigh of relief. “Man, what was up with that guy?”

            “He’s not a man,” Reese told him. “He’s a machine sent through time and space.”

            “Well, what we gotta do to stop him, bro?” Muscle Man inquired.

            “Wait, you instantly believe what he’s saying?” an astounded Sarah asked.

            “We’ve dealt with weirder stuff than this,” Mordecai rationalized.

            Kyle scoffed. “Doubt it. None of you have ever dealt with a killing machine like a Terminator. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop ever…until you are dead!”

            His intense account chilled everyone to the bone – even Sarah, who heard the entire terrifying story long beforehand.

            “Sarah, who is this guy?” Eileen queried, gesturing towards Kyle.

            “We don’t come from your world,” Sarah explained. “We were transported here by an alien time-travel machine called a T.A.R.D.I.S.”

            The Park crew reacted strongly to her description.

            “No way, bro!” Muscle Man gasped.

            “You’ve met Neas?!” Rigby said.

            Kyle nearly swerved off the road, clearly alarmed. “How do you know her?”

            “We’ve recently had an ‘experience’ with her and her multiple regenerations,” Mordecai replied.

            Sarah questioningly frowned. “Regenerations?”

            “Mordecai…Rigby…are you there?”

            The walkie-talkie at Skips’ hip sparked to the urgent sound of Benson’s voice.

            “What’s up, Benson?” Skips answered. “You calmed down any?”

            “Never mind about that,” Benson said. “Cici’s back! She just appeared in the T.A.R.D.I.S.”

            They all gazed on each other in mixed reactions.

            “Who’s Cici?” A baffled Kyle asked.

            “I want that grass cut no more than three inches! Make sure there’s not a scrap of candy wrap lying anywhere! Scrape every bit of that gum off the benches! I want this place looking spotless, even if we’re here past sundown!”

            Gene ran a tight ship as park manager of East Pines.

            His militaristic crew knew how to take orders, unlike the slackers Benson had on his own grounds.

            Momentarily, Gene had his focus distracted by a lone figure that hobbled past the front gates. He could hardly believe his eyes at the battered state the man was in. However, the real off-putting thing in his broken façade was the one half of his face that was nothing more than an exposed steel skull.

            Man! That’s one heck of a prosthetic, Gene thought.

            He curiously observed the ravaged stranger up to the point that he approached an “employee’s only” shed and broke the padlock with his bare hands.

            “HEY!” An infuriated Gene roared. “That’s park property!”

            His crew was quick to respond to the man’s vandalizing.

            Not a single one of them could subdue him; rather it was the other way around.

            Horrified by how little effort was taken from the man in putting his men into submission, Gene decidedly took matters into his own hands.

            He walked straight up to the man, gripping his right shoulder to force him into facing his way. The man hardly budged; for Gene, trying to move him was like trying to move a tank (he was certainly as big as one).

            But the man did turn on his own accord, mainly to punch into Gene’s vending machine body, ripping out one of the “snacks” contained in him.

            Gene collapsed while the man proceeded into the shed.

            The Terminator faced one corner of the shed with space that seemed unoccupied.

            Through its head-up display, it spotted its point of interest: a highly-advanced service elevator, camouflaged by technology not of the current century – or reality – it inhabited.

            It brought the Terminator down below to a hidden cybernetic base beneath East Pines – a base run by Cybermen.

            Enemies to Skynet in the Future War, the Cybermen were the deciding factor.

            Armed with technology far more superior than Skynet’s, they destroyed humanity and overpowered the machines.

            This specific Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 Series 800 Terminator was their personal enforcer, reprogrammed to no longer function under Skynet’s initial command but to Cyberman-based encoding.

            On the Terminator’s arrival, one Cyberman addressed, “Was your mission successful?”

            “No, Sarah Connor remains active,” the Terminator returned.

            “You will be upgraded for your next attempt. Sarah Connor must be deleted.”

Chapter Text

Part Three

            As adorably petite as Cici was, Benson had the damnedest time carrying her unconscious body back into her T.A.R.D.I.S. It was the only place he could afford to nurse her back to health in whatever way possible, particularly with all the alien equipment to be found in her alien ship.

            With his lack of upper body strength, he impressed himself enough to make it past the threshold, Cici dangling from his arms, when he was met by a tall, muscular man in black leather aiming an AK-47 right in his face.

            “Put her down,” he stoically commanded with a noticeable Austrian accent.

            Benson did so immediately; however, in his fright, he practically dropped Cici, her body thudding on the sleek, steel floor.

            “What the hell are you doing?!”

            The voice of a young adolescent rang over the console room.

            Frozen at the rifle still directed at his dome, Benson did not get a good look at the boy until he rushed into view, yelling to the gun-toting, leather-clad Austrian.

            “Put the gun down now!”

            The man conceded rather easily, voluntarily lowering the AK-47.

            Crisis averted, the boy took a breath before addressing Benson: “Sorry for my Uncle Bob’s behavior. He gets that way around strangers.” He then focused on Cici, who was sprawled across the floor. “He did it!”

            “Did what?” Benson questioned the boy’s amazement. “And she’s not a ‘he’!”

            “Well, he used to be, before he regenerated,” the boy stated. “His name’s Neas. My uncle and I traveled between dimensions with him in this crazy spaceship of his.”

            His explanation ultimately clued Benson in on the circumstance of Cici’s arrival.

            Her glowing skin…The fact she was wearing Neas’s clothes (which, of course, were her usual clothing as well)…

            From all that he went through with her and her past and future incarnations, he should have suspected her ability to change appearance down to a molecular level – the process Time Lords referred as “regeneration.”

            Unfortunately, with this insight came a more disappointing realization for Benson.

            “She doesn’t remember who I am,” he solemnly said.

            “Why would she?” The boy inquired. “Who are you to her?”

            “I had a recent adventure with a future version of her, as well as other versions,” Benson replied. “Then again, I did meet her last life before this one.” He radiated with satisfaction on that aspect, which he concluded as a likelihood of Cici remembering him. “But something I don’t get is how you guys became involved with him…I mean, her.”

            The boy contemplated for a minute, as if reconsidering Benson upon learning how engrossed he had been in Neas’s lives.

            “O.K., here’s the thing,” he began. “My name’s John Connor. I’m the son of Sarah Connor and the future leader in an oncoming war against an army of machines that include ‘Terminators’ – killer cybernetic organisms that are metal on the inside and flesh and blood on the outside. This man, my ‘Uncle Bob,’ is one of them. Only he’s one of the good ones, thanks to some reprogramming my future self did on him.”

            Overwhelmed at everything the boy named John had told him, Benson looked on his “Uncle Bob” with newfound curiosity. It was hard to buy the fact he was a cyborg, seeing the beads of sweat across his forehead. And yet, his taut disposition just seemed to convince the park manager.

            “Man, I can never catch a break on bizarre days,” he uttered. “And it’s only the first day of the New Year!” Returning to the main topic at hand, he admitted to John, “Still lost on how you guys got tangled up with Neas.”

            “It all started with some new players in the game that messed up the future more than it already was,” John said. “They’re called Cybermen, and they wiped out all of the human resistance and most of Skynet, assimilating it like the Borg. Neas found out about the disruption in the flow of our timeline, having helped my mom and father already before by taking them into hiding. He had to get me to safety before the Cybermen sent an upgraded T-1000 Terminator to delete me. We barely got out with our lives, but Neas got badly hurt, which is how he ended up regenerating.”

            Benson quivered. “Where is that T-1000 Terminator now?”

            “We ditched him in another dimension,” John confirmed. “No way he’ll come after us again.”

            The loud screech of a vehicle halting outside the T.A.R.D.I.S. prompted Benson to recollect on a prior endeavor: “Oh, man! I forgot I called the guys back to the park! They’re gonna flip when I tell them about—!”

            Glancing back to where he dropped Cici, Benson was puzzled to discover that she was no longer there.

            “Where did she go?!” He bellowed. “I was standing here the whole time, and I didn’t see her get up once!”

            “It is possible she regained cognizance during our interaction,” the Terminator surmised. “We must reacquire her, if we are to conduct further assessment on our current mission.”

            “You guys get to it,” Benson said. “I’ll meet up with my friends.”

            He stepped right out of the module just when his employees approached.

            They brought along a visibly shaken Margaret and Eileen, as well as two strangers Benson failed to recognize.

            Muscle Man’s car was in even worse shape than ever with the rear windshield shattered; and Skips was holding a shotgun, the barrel still smoking after being recently fired.

            “What the heck happened to you guys?!” The park manager queried.

            “Some crazy cyborg dude from another dimension attacked us at the coffee shop,” Rigby frantically recounted. “We barely made it out with our lives, man.”

            Benson’s body stiffened at the prospect of another Terminator (one programmed to terminate its targets) on the loose. “Y-You don’t say,” he nervously murmured. “Where is it now?”

            “No idea,” Eileen answered. “We were just fortunate to get it off our backs, thanks to Sarah’s friend here.”

            Noting the way in which Eileen gestured to the human waitress standing beside her and Margaret and referred to her as “Sarah,” an unsettled Benson pointed to her and said, “You’re Sarah? As in ‘Sarah Connor’?”

            The group reacted with astonishment at his knowledge of the woman he had never once encountered until that very moment.

            “Yeah, that’s exactly right,” Mordecai said. “How do you know her, Benson?”

            “Because I just met her son, John Connor,” Benson remarked, indicating the Type-Z T.A.R.D.I.S. behind him.

            “WHAT?!” They shouted to Benson’s news.

            Sarah’s friend – the one Eileen gave credit for their initial survival from the other Terminator – snatched the shotgun out of Skips’ grasp. He cocked it while he firmly ordered to Benson, “Show me where John is right now.”

            Leaving the T.A.R.D.I.S. console room with the Terminator, John anticipated the extreme challenge that would come with searching for Cici in the infinite interior of the Gallifreyan ship.

            “Let’s split up,” he insisted. “We’ll cover more ground that way.”

            “Negative,” his protector disapproved. “There is much of the ship that remains foreign to us. Its disproportions give high probability to misplaced directional sense and a decline in mental stability.”

            “Hey, it’s no sweat,” John confidently assured. “You’ll know if I get lost when you get lost, and then you can use your sonar or whatever to come and find me.”

            The Terminator remained unconvinced but was nonetheless programmed to follow John’s orders.

            They split apart, covering different sections of the T.A.R.D.I.S.

            After some time, John did lose his sense of direction and became desperate to retrace his steps. He eventually resorted to calling out to his protector, but the Terminator was certain to have been on the other side of the ship – however far that might have been.

            “John?”

            He jumped at the voice that spoke directly behind him, spinning around to see Cici. “Geez, don’t scare me like that,” he hissed. “C’mon. Let’s get back to the console room before we both go stir crazy tryin’ to find it.” He commenced in heading down a route that he merely guesstimated to be the correct one, his back to Cici.

            Of course, if John had not faced away from Cici, he would see how the Time Lady’s form suddenly shifted into liquid metal, morphing into a male police officer – the default form associated with the T-1000 Terminator.

            This upgraded model branded an electrified blade molded from its left arm.

            Its intention was obvious as it leveled towards the back of John Connor.

Chapter Text

Part Four

            “John! Look out!”

            He turned the second that he heard Cici’s voice again; it sounded slightly different than a second ago.

            And he discovered why right away.

            There, in front of him, was the T-1000; its arm blade extracted to cut him in half.

            It was just about to do so before one of them began to disintegrate.

            Confusion settling on the liquid metal Terminator’s face, it suddenly disintegrated as well. In a matter of seconds, all of the T-1000’s form was rendered to that of a soppy puddle on the floor.

            “Holy shit!” John exclaimed, just as he noticed Cici – the real Cici and not a T-1000 impersonator – standing across the corridor with a Super Soaker water gun in hand.

            She was dressed a bit differently. She wasn’t wearing the hoodie of her preceding regeneration, or his blue jeans. She was adorned in a skintight pair of black jeans with a different pair of boots to match. She also had on a necktie that was more colorful than the ones her predecessor often wore – apparently, this new regeneration still had his affinity for them.

            “You O.K.?” she asked John.

            “Yeah,” John acknowledged. “What did you hit him with?”

            Cici tossed the emptied Super Soaker aside. “Acid. Didn’t have any molten steel lying around, so I improvised.” Her demeanor then became stricter, approaching the future leader of the Resistance. “But, more importantly, what’re you doing wandering around the T.A.R.D.I.S.?”

            “We were looking for you,” John said. “Thought we’d split up to cover more ground that way.”

            “John, this is the T.A.R.D.I.S.,” Cici scoffed. “You’ll be ‘covering ground’ for centuries in here.” She reached into her back jeans pocket, retrieving her trans-temporal sonic screwdriver. “Lemme just hone in on the Terminator’s position, and I’ll have us back in the console room in no time.”

            The Gallifreyan tool whirred to life, sparkling blue on its tip.

            Cici and John followed in the direction that it led them, right to the Terminator.

            “I advised against this futile task,” the cyborg informed Cici.

            “I really hate it when he says ‘I told you so’ in his dorky way,” John grumbled.

            “As long as I’ve got you both back by my side, none of that matters,” she told them. “Now let’s get back to the—”

            BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

            Four shotgun blasts rang through the corridor, each one directed at the chest of John’s protector. Powerful enough to knock the big, leather-clad cyborg down.

            It didn’t take long for the shaken Cici and John to see the shots came from Kyle Reese, accompanied by Sarah Connor and a group of strangers neither of them could recognize.

            Kyle rushed over to the fallen Terminator while it was still incapacitated; his shotgun aimed directly at its head.

            “NO, DAD!” John cried, pushing Kyle away from his protector.

            Reese was so keyed up that he almost hadn’t recognized what John called him.

            “What did you say?”

            Sarah heard it also, but she was more deterred from the fact that the young boy – the one who stood between Kyle and the Terminator – was her future son…and, apparently, Kyle’s.

            Everyone gathered in the console room much later.

            Kyle involuntarily removed the shotgun shells he fired into John’s Terminator out of the flesh of its chest, while John explained the situation to him and his mother of the past. “So, long story short, my future self reprogrammed a Terminator and sent it back through time to protect me rather than kill me. Pretty cool, huh?”

            Kyle glowered. “You were always having the technicians experiment on Terminator technology. I never figured out why until now. You knew they would try again, when you were the kid you are now, so you put it on our side. It’s a brilliant idea, John, but it’s hard to trust a machine built to terminate.”

            “Hey, it’s not like I did this yesterday,” John refuted.

            “Kyle Reese, you are an inadequate protector to Sarah Connor,” the Terminator evaluated. “You lack the sufficient programming to maintain consistent vigilance and stamina.”

            Kyle furiously ripped one shell out of a wound, damaging the flesh further.

            “Was I meant to feel that?” The Terminator asked him.

            “No,” Kyle confessed. “You feel nothing.”

            John sighed at the tense interaction between the two soldiers, turning to Sarah and wittingly muttering, “They’re gettin’ along rather well, aren’t they?”

            Sarah snickered at his witticism.

            It was the first time he ever saw her laugh or even smile, even if she was just a younger counterpart to the hard-edged woman he knew from his own time.

            Meanwhile, at the control console, Cici multitasked between observing the happy exchange John and his past mother shared and working the T.A.R.D.I.S. controls. Not before long was she approached by Benson, the gumball machine man who – according to what John told her – helped bring her back inside her ship while she was unconscious.

            “Your tie…it looks…beautiful,” he stiffly told her.

            Cici smiled. “Thank you. That’s very sweet of you to say.”

            Benson fidgeted, straining to get what he wanted so desperately to ask out.

            “Do you…r-remember me?”

            Her eyes moved away from the controls, staying attentive on Benson’s nerve-wracked face. It was clear that he knew her from somewhere, either by reputation or some future event that she had yet to experience. She didn’t have it in her hearts to tell him the truth.

            “Of course, I do,” she beamingly fibbed.

            For a brief moment, Benson was totally relieved; sadly, the gumball machine man was as sharp as a tack – he could see right through that put-on smile of hers. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

            Cici’s face fell with disappointment. “No, sorry, sweetie…I don’t.”

            At the corner of her eye, she could see Benson’s friends walk in on their conversation.

            “You don’t even remember that crazy adventure we went on together with your other lives?” A disconcerted Mordecai questioned. “Your previous regeneration or whatever was there with us.”

            Cici grimaced in heavy thought.

            “I remember…stopping Davros and the Daleks from destroying the multiverse. Other than that, it’s a total blur.”

            “I think I know what’s the problem,” Skips said. “When Time Lords cross over within their own timeline, they aren’t able to remember any events they took part in with their other selves. It’s like her timeline corrects itself, once she and her other incarnations return to their proper places in time.”

            Cici raised a curious eyebrow at the yeti. “You know quite a bit about us.”

            “Meh,” Skips shrugged. “I dabble.”

            She returned on Benson, whose head hung low.

            Her hearts sank to see him so distraught. “Oh, honey. I’m so sorry. I really wish I could remember you, because you seem like such a sweet guy.”

            The compliment was enough to lift his spirits, but not mend his broken heart.

            His somber mood was abruptly disrupted with a phone call he received through his private cell.

            It came from the East Pines Park – Gene and his crew had been assaulted.

            The one striking detail in the message was the description of the suspect of the crime: a man with a face that was one-half metal.

            It sounded exactly like the other Terminator sent to their dimension.

            As such, Cici operated her Type-Z T.A.R.D.I.S. to take them precisely to the park grounds at the moment the badly wounded, barely conscious Gene was carted away on a stretcher; his front half shattered with snacks still spilling out.

            “This place is weird,” uttered John, who refrained from snickering at the sight of a vending machine on a stretcher.

            “He was here,” his protector said, swiveling his head to scan the area.

            Cici did some scanning of her own with her sonic.

            “Are you picking up his signature?” She asked the cyborg.

            The Terminator’s head continued to rotate in sync with Cici’s sonic screwdriver, until it centered on a single location.

            “There,” he pointed to a tool shed just a few clicks from them.

            Inspecting the inside, they found a simple, average shed filled with tools.

            Only when the Terminator’s heads-up display detected the alien tech camouflaged there did they learn the other Terminator’s interest in the park grounds.

            Cici manipulated the force field mechanism that hid what appeared to have been a technologically advanced service elevator. “I recognize this cybernetic design,” she spoke of the contraption.

            “Who built it?” Benson asked.

            Cici roguishly smirked. “Only one way to find out.”

            She bypassed the elevator’s security protocols, permitting them entry.

            They went several feet down below the Earth’s surface, seemingly forever, until they touched down to their destination.

            The doors slid open, and they were welcomed to an unwelcoming spectacle…

            Several Cybermen barring their path; their wrist blasters primed and aimed at the intruding team.

            “Of course,” Cici sneered in frustration.

            “You really shouldn’t have come here.”

            A voice familiar to only Cici spoke from beyond the group of armed Cybermen. They parted to allow a tall, muscular woman with long black hair to step forward and stand face-to-face with Cici and her companions.

            Cici gasped the second she saw her face. “Oh, my god…Al-Lee…You’re alive!”

Chapter Text

Part Five

            There was a time when Neas traveled with a woman who came from Gallifrey but was human – or so they thought at the time. Her name was Al-Lee Kirsch, and she was initially believed to have been a descendant of the human known as Leela, a warrior of a savage tribe of regressed humans and a dear friend of the Doctor’s.

            That all turned out to have been a lie.

            Al-Lee was an advanced form of Terminator made to look, feel, and act human but programmed to kill the Gladiator of Gallifrey and any known associates. She was sent across reality, ending up on the Drylands of Gallifrey where the harsh climate ultimately interfered with her programming. This, in turn, gave her a technological form of amnesia.

            Neas found out about this the hard way, when Al-Lee’s initial programming resurfaced and nearly killed the Gladiator in their eleventh incarnation. He was forced to jettison Al-Lee from his TARDIS, leaving her fate to the dimensional corridor itself.

            Since then, Neas had not seen her…until now.

            Cici was so stunned to see her that she hadn’t heard the few rounds popped off from the AK-47 gripped by John’s Terminator, removing a few Cybermen.

            But then one particularly upgraded Cyberman unleashed a powerful energy wave out from its fingertips, shocking the good Terminator into an abrupt shutdown. Cici distinguished this Cyberman from the rest by the red glowing Terminator-like eyes emitting within its steel dome. “Cyber-converted a Terminator, huh?” She verbally noted. “Overkill much?”

            Al-Lee smirked. “You were always one for a paradox, Neas.”

            “I go by ‘Cici’ now,” she coldly established.

            “Yes, I’ve noticed the new regeneration,” Al-Lee said. “I gotta say – this form is substandard compared to your previous one.” She approached Cici, towering over her with superior height and girth. Her red-glowing cyborg eyes glared down on her. “It’d be pretty easy to kill you now, wouldn’t it?”

            Cici swallowed hard. “You were my friend…I trusted you!”

            “You trusted the human shell you see in front of you,” Al-Lee countered. “But I’ve always been a Terminator underneath…and my mission has yet to be completed!” With lightning-quick speed, she suddenly grasped Cici by the throat and lifted her a whole foot off the floor.

            “LET HER GO!” Benson protested along with Mordecai and Rigby. They attempted to come to Cici’s rescue, only to be held back by the Cybermen that took aim with their wrist blasters.

            Cici was fading fast, unable to breathe under Al-Lee’s unforgiving grip. Her life was suddenly spared when the Cyber-Terminator griped the flexed arm Al-Lee choked Cici with and ordered in an automated voice, “Do not terminate her just yet. The Cyber-Controller wishes to speak with her first.”

            For a moment, Al-Lee resisted complying to the order.

            She was forced to do so once her programming took control, releasing Cici.

            “You O.K.?” Benson went to her aid.

            “Place them in holding until the Controller is ready for them,” Al-Lee commanded. “And make sure you confiscate her tool – it’s just as deadly as a plasma rifle to us.”

            The Cybermen moved to confiscate Cici’s sonic screwdriver and the weapons of her companions. The Cyber-Terminator took away the inert body of John’s Terminator, possibly for reprogramming or – worse yet – upgrading. The steel army escorted them into a chrome-plated holding cell, which had already been occupied by a sole human when they were placed inside. “What the H?!” Rigby bellowed once he and the others took one look at their cellmate.

            It was another Al-Lee.

            This one looked a lot more buff than the one they met at the entrance. Her hair was dyed blue, and she wore blue jeans and a red-and-pink striped sweater that hugged against her muscular frame. She greeted her new cellmates with a gentle smile and said, “You’re probably wondering what the hell’s happening right now.”

            “Yeah, no shit!” Cici exclaimed. “Are you another Terminator?”

            “Actually, I’m another you,” the prisoner told her. “The 21st Gladiator.”

            “What?!” Cici yelled, joined by Benson, Mordecai, and Rigby. “No way!”

            “She’s telling the truth,” a voice spoke from behind the 21st Gladiator. “I didn’t believe it myself when she came to me, but she has everything the other ‘Neases’ have: a sonic screwdriver, a TARDIS, and two hearts!”

            Cici recognized that voice – one she hadn’t heard in quite some time.

            “Craig?!” she identified the speaker, looking past her future regeneration to see her little brother, keeper of the Stump, protector of the Creek, and the most important boy in the multiverse there in the holding cell.

            Cici rushed at him, almost tackling him with the biggest hug she ever gave him – the first hug this incarnation of her ever gave him or anyone.

            Craig struggled to breathe under Cici’s mighty embrace. “Alissa warned me this would be the first time this version of you would meet me,” he rasped. “She didn’t warn me you were so strong though!”

            Cici let him go, allowing him to breathe again. “Who’s Alissa?”

            “That’s me,” the blue-haired prisoner raised her hand. “It’s what I call this regeneration.”

            Facing her, Cici couldn’t get past how identical she was to Al-Lee. “Why do you look so much like her?”

            “She actually looks like me,” Alissa reversed.

            “We’re still fighting in the Cyber War,” Craig told Cici. “This is my second time getting captured by those chrome domes, and it’s starting to really get on my nerves. I’m just lucky to be sharing a cell with another one of you.”

            Alissa knelt to give him a hug and a kiss. “Likewise, lil’ bro.”

            “So…Skynet modeled Al-Lee after us?!” Cici reflected, the very thought making her queasy.

            “We were always one for a paradox,” Alissa said, not realizing they were the very words spoken by her Terminator counterpart.

            “That is messed up, bro!” Muscle Man commented.

            It was then Al-Lee and the Cybermen returned to their cell. “You’ll now answer to the Cyber-Controller,” Al-Lee announced.

            Craig quivered in her sight. “She doesn’t get any easier to look at.”

            “It’s O.K., hon,” Alissa comforted him. “Just keep your eyes on me, if it helps.”

            The group was removed from the cell and taken to a laboratory deep within the stronghold. There, they were greeted by a Cyberman not so different from the rest, with the exception of a transparent “window” through which its brain could be seen. “You are the Gladiators of Gallifrey,” it addressed Cici and Alissa.

            “That’s right,” Cici said. “And you can kiss both of our asses.”

            Alissa playfully nudged her. “I was gonna say that.”

            “Sure, you were,” Cici winked.

            “You will cease this chatter,” the Cyber-Controller demanded. “Before you are deleted, you will see how the Cyber Legion will achieve victory of the Cyber War.” It proceeded to unveil some machinery situated to one side of the room.

            Two large steel rods side-to-side from each other, an electrical current sparking between them to generate a tear in the fabric of space-time. Cici, Alissa, and their companions could see the infinite dimensional corridor swirling just beyond the portal. “You’ve created a rift opener,” Alissa gasped.

            “You can develop your own breaches to parallel worlds within any moment in time!” Cici added.

            “Correct,” the Cyber-Controller verified. “We will achieve conquest of the multiverse by bringing modified Terminators from the war to countless worlds, assimilating countless species. You and your companions will be our first subjects.”

            “Like hell we will,” Cici said before she let out a loud whistle.

            Her confiscated sonic screwdriver switched on, in some way preset to correspond with her whistling. It gave off a signal across the Cyberman stronghold that overloaded its mainframes. Every Cyberman in the base fell to their knees in agony and went dead. Only Al-Lee and the Cyber-Terminator remained functional – the latter elsewhere in the stronghold, on the verge of stripping the reprogrammed Series 800 Model 101 for cyber conversion.

            However, the signal emanating from Cici’s sonic screwdriver in turn reactivated the Terminator. Its first act was preventing the cyber conversion, dismantling the Cyber-Terminator by ripping its head off and crushing it in its hands.

            Back in the laboratory, the rift opener became unstable, due to the overloaded mainframes. Alissa attempted to shut it down at the controls, but they were unresponsive. “I can’t stop it,” she cried.

            “Well, how can it be stopped?!” a panicked Mordecai inquired.

            “There is no way!” Al-Lee screeched. “Your fates have been sealed!”

            Suddenly, the wall nearest Al-Lee exploded. John’s Terminator charged through and grappled her. The two Terminators tussled around the rift opener, dealing massive cosmetic damage to each other, exposing their cybernetic endoskeletons. It came to a grueling conclusion when the Terminator hurled Al-Lee into the rift opener.

            The ensuing effect created a vortex with a vacuum tough enough to suck in every inert Cyberman within the lab, including the Controller. Thankfully, Cici, Alissa, and their friends acted fast, gripping on tight to anything that was bolted to the floor. Unfortunately for the Terminator, he was too close to the vortex to avoid it. Able to stand firm inside the vacuum for so long, his clothes and what remained of his living tissue dissolved right before the eyes of his allies, including John.

            “NO!” The boy cried, watching helplessly as his Terminator was dismantled from the vacuum and then ultimately drawn into the vortex.

            At the Terminator’s own sacrifice did the vortex finally close.

            “He saved us,” Kyle said. “But how?”

            “It was the one flaw in the Cyber Legion’s rift opener,” Cici told him. “Non-organic beings can’t go through – only living flesh. The same technology Skynet used to send Terminators through time.”

            “And there was enough of Al-Lee’s endoskeleton exposed to overload the machine,” Alissa included.

            In their moment of exposition, Craig spotted John crying into the bosom of his young mother while Kyle comfortingly placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder, mourning the loss of a protector, friend, and surrogate father.

            Craig then felt a strong but gentle hand come down on his shoulder, looking up to see Alissa smiling. “C’mon, lil’ bro,” she invited. “My TARDIS is still around here somewhere. I should get you back to the version of me you really belong to.”

            Giving an affirmed nod, Craig then looked to Cici and said, “It was good to see you again, big sis.”

            Cici tickled his chin. “I’ve gotta feeling we’ll meet each other again, lil’ bro.”

            Hours later, at the Park, Benson and the rest of the crew made arrangements for Kyle, Sarah, and John to stay at Pops’ house. The conditions were only temporary. Cici needed time to search for an adequate dimension for the three survivors to safely call home.

            Benson paid her a visit inside her T.A.R.D.I.S., which she had stationed right outside Pops’ house. He found her working tranquilly at the controls, all to herself. Her isolation urged him to question the whereabouts of a certain Mogwai he knew she always cherished. “Where’s Gizmo?”

            Cici jolted at the sound of his voice, not expecting anyone else to have been there. Nevertheless, she was delighted to see that he bothered to visit her. “He’s around somewhere,” she told him. “Poor lil’ fella can’t help wandering ‘round the T.A.R.D.I.S. every now and then. Gotta look for him on the first opportunity I have.”

            “I can help you find him,” Benson passionately volunteered. “I can help you with anything, Cici. I want to go with you.”

            Cici sighed at his proposal. “I know you care a lot about me, Benson. But I can’t bring myself to put you in any more danger than you can handle. If the Cyber War is still happening all around me, I can’t—”

            “I can handle plenty of danger,” Benson professed.

            She gave an amused chuckle, walking up close to him. “You’re a very brave, sweet man,” she told Benson, caressing the side of his face; there was a delicate squeak to the motion between her palm and his glass dome.

            Their faces inched closer to each other, verging on a kiss.

            “Hey, Benson!”

            Cici drew back her head, giggling.

            Benson gritted his teeth, noticeably annoyed from the interruption caused by Mordecai and Rigby. The two barged their way into the console room. “There you are,” Mordecai told his boss. “Hey, you know where we keep the extra bath towels?”

            “You mean to tell me you don’t know where your own towels are?!” an infuriated Benson bellowed. “YOU LIVE THERE!!!”

            “That doesn’t mean we know where every little thing is,” Rigby debated. “Geez, Benson. Like you’ve never had a brain fart in your li—” He ineptly leaned against the T.A.R.D.I.S. controls, specifically a lever that sent the Type-Z into an immediate launch back into the infinite dimensional corridor.

            “RIGBY!!” Benson thundered.

            “Hey, you can’t fire me, if we’re not in our dimension, Benson!” Rigby rebutted.

            “I think that’s the least of our concerns,” Mordecai fearfully discerned.

            Cici and her three new (or old) companions held on for dear life, spiraling down the infinite D.C. and beginning another journey into the unknown.