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Chapter Text

Part One

            Not every day is always a good one when traversing the infinite dimensional corridor. Sure, the worlds are amazing and beautiful; but they can be deadly and dangerous all the same. However, in this case, it wasn’t so much as the world we encountered, but the thing we brought to it.

            It had happened one journey we made to one of the realms that were influenced by the ongoing Cyber War – an interdimensional conflict in which sentient machines battle against each other or a human resistance of some kind. It began with the Cybermen, who tapped into the Infinite DC and began cyber-converting within each of the worlds. And then, one day, they received more than they bargained for when they encountered Skynet, a highly-advanced, self-aware computer system possessing artificial intelligence.

            The encounter also granted Skynet access to the Infinite DC, expanding on their goal for the extermination of mankind while also eradicating the threat of the Cybermen in its path.

            The whole ordeal has gone on for a number of eons across multiple worlds.

            The genesis of it has been a mystery for Neas and myself. We thought it began in the realm where we and the Doctor constructed a cyborg law enforcer named “Robocop,” not very long ago. As we and our companion, Al-Lee Kirsch, investigated over the realms, we found several possibilities of how it started – any of them being the opportune place to end the war.

            The one reality we came to had a corporation by the name of CRS (“Cyber Research Systems”), which carried possession of Skynet from a defunct Cyberdyne Systems – the one constant throughout the multiversal war. CRS was in the closing stages of fully developing Skynet, which left Neas, Al-Lee, and me very little time to stop them.

            Unfortunately, our objective was severely derailed when we were discovered and taken into custody. We were put into a plain, windowless room with a single steel table and chairs. I briefly got into it with the overly aggressive guard who shoved me in. “Watch it, mister, or you’re gonna lose those hands!” I warned him.

            Clearly, I wasn’t in my right frame of mind. The guy was bigger and brawnier than I was when I was in my “Skeeta” incarnation. As “Rania,” I was shorter and skinnier, yet I still carried Skeeta’s fiery temper.

            Poor Neas had to step in between me and the guard. “Don’t mind her,” he told the guard. “She’s just…a little on edge.” He wasn’t too far off the mark; I had been edgy the last few journeys. Once we were left alone, he confronted me. “Alright, Pop. What bug’s been up your butt lately?”

            I hated it when he phrased it that way. “It’s nothing,” I said.

            “We both know that’s not entirely true – not after you almost picked a fight with G.I. Joe back there,” Neas scoffed.

            His unrelenting prodding finally broke through my walls.

            “It’s the anniversary of when your mother and I married on our world,” I revealed. Neas’s mother being, of course, Kristin Curtsinger – an Earth woman I first met in my original incarnation, when I was a fresh-faced young explorer of the multiverse.

            This news just made Neas feel guilty. “Why didn’t you tell me? We could’ve stopped through home, so you two could catch up.”

            “Neas, the last time your mother saw me, I was a bald, heavyset African-American man. Could you imagine how she’d react if she saw me now?” I gestured to my overall figure, most of which was hidden by the white wool sweater I had on at the time. I then added, “Let’s not forget you, too. Last she saw of you, you were just a teenaged girl.”

            That didn’t deter him. “If she’s already familiar with the whole ‘regeneration’ thing, why worry?” he asked.

            “It’s been ten years on our world!” I told him. “A lot more has changed than just us, sweetheart.”

            “Regardless, you’re clearly homesick, Pop.”

            He was right about that. Over a few thousand years and five regenerations, I missed my lovely wife. I can’t tell you just how much I had. She was on my mind virtually every day since Skeeta left our dimension. I was able to cope with it in my “Miya” regeneration. But it got worse when I was “Tiffany.” Let’s just say the time she spent alone in our room, aboard Neas’s TARDIS, was for more than sleeping.

            Thankfully, I had Neas and a sweet little boy named Craig Williams to get me out of my funk, just before I regenerated into “Scarlet.” My hands were full with giant robots, alien parasites, and a lost child of mine who nearly had me killed from a scheme with the Master (or “Missy,” as she was known then).

            In my reminiscing, I noticed Al-Lee nursing her right temple. “Another migraine?” I asked her. She’d been having them for a while.

            “Yeah,” she confirmed. “Feels like it’s getting worse. What’s causing them?”

            Before I could provide my best medical diagnosis, Lieutenant General Robert Brewster arrived to question us. He was a rather stoic man, and rightfully so, being a United States Air Force officer and in charge of Cyber Research Systems. He was all business when he breezed through the door, ordering the stationed guard to leave him alone with us.

            Just as the questioning was about to begin, something crazy happen.

            Al-Lee, out of nowhere, lunged violently at the general. She came up to him from behind and snapped his neck, effectively killing him.

            Neas and I reacted to this with shock and confusion.

            “Al-Lee! What the hell are you doing?!” Neas bellowed before he himself became her next victim. She grabbed him by the neck and actually lifted him off his feet. I should note that Neas is five inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than Al-Lee. Though Al-Lee was built like a bodybuilder, I never imagined her capable of such a feat.

            She pinned Neas to the wall, choking him.

            In trying my best to pry her off him, I noticed that her eyes were red…not bloodshot red but glowing red in the pupils.

            Like a Terminator.

            At the last second, I reached in the back pocket of my brown leggings and retrieved Neas’s trans-temporal sonic. He loaned it to me during our Cyber War investigations, believing it to have been better used by a Tinkerer. I triggered an electrical shock between the device and Al-Lee that dropped her to the floor, rendering her unconscious.

            Free of her chokehold, Neas coughed and wheezed. “What the hell just happened?! What got into her?!”

            “I’m about to find out,” I said as I used the sonic to scan Al-Lee. The readings that came back on the device were unsettling to say the least. “Neas, we need to get back to your TARDIS immediately.”

            “Why?” he asked. “What did you—?”

            “I said now!” I roared; my edginess now drawn more from desperation than depression.

            We left the room (and the body of Lieutenant General Brewster) at just the right time. A sudden attack came over the CRS facility, once Skynet was finally activated, seizing weaponized drones on every human in sight. Lugging Al-Lee along, we tried not to allow ourselves to be sighted in our mad dash back to the Type-Z, which we materialized in one of the storage closets along the top floors. Along the way, we also noticed a T-800 model Terminator stomping through the chaos. We would’ve assumed him to be the culprit had we not seen the two familiar humans accompanying him: John Connor and Katherine Brewster, Robert’s daughter.

            Poor Kate. I can’t imagine how she’ll react, finding her father dead.

            With a small window of time, we boarded Neas’s TARDIS and immediately left, abandoning our failed mission. As soon as we were back in the dimensional corridor, I filled Neas in on what I discovered about Al-Lee: “The sonic detected Terminator components in her biological structure.”

            Neas frowned. “Like, as in implants?”

            “More like her entire endoskeleton,” I elaborated. “Al-Lee is a Terminator.”

            The look on his face when I told him broke both of my hearts. A woman who’d been like a sister to him and a daughter to me was one of the very things we’ve been fighting and protecting the multiverse from this whole time. In light of this unsettling discovery, Neas insisted on Al-Lee being kept into stasis for further observation. There was a pod in the ship’s lab with a magnetic field that kept her CPU inoperative for the time being.

            After we put her in it, I had to ask Neas, “Will you be alright, hon?”

            “I don’t know, Pop.” That answer deeply concerned me as a father.

            Over sixty years passed since then. For a Time Lord, that felt like a few days. Al-Lee was still frozen in the stasis pod. Whatever living tissue Skynet fitted her with had aged very little in that time. It explained so much about her – how she was able to endure physical damage in so many of our journeys, why she barely ate or slept, and how she was capable of immeasurable strength.

            But with these answers only came more questions: Was there ever a real Al-Lee Kirsch? How did this one end up on Gallifrey where they found her? And why does she not remember ever being a Terminator?

            Neas hadn’t spoken much. Our prolonged investigations just hardened him more.

            We needed a break from it all. So, one day, I used the control console to call Craig Williams. His sweet little face popped up on the monitor, smiling. I assumed I’d contacted him through his phone or tablet. “How’s it goin’, sweetie?” I asked.

            “Meh, same old creek stuff,” he said. “What about you guys? Bet ya’ll are having some fun adventures out there in the Infinite DC!”

            I didn’t have the hearts to tell him the truth.

            Craig never had the honor of meeting Al-Lee face-to-face, nor will he ever after what Neas and I found out about her. Instead, I asked Craig, “Hey, honey, how’d you feel about a lil’ trip to the Earth Neas and I come from?”

            His little face beamed at this. “Really?! I never thought I’d get the chance to see what your Earth looks like!”

            “Welp, now you will,” I said with a smile.

            After mulling over it for so long, now was a better time than any for us to return to Georgia and meet up with Kristin again. I didn’t care how she’d react to seeing me or Neas in our latest regenerations. Seeing her again, and with Craig no less, would be enough to lift Neas’s spirits. It took a bit of encouragement to get him to agree to this, as he was the one stalling this time, feeling it necessary to focus on the Cyber War investigation. He only agreed when I convinced him to do it for me.

            Georgia hadn’t changed much since either of us last saw it. For Craig, it was like taking his first step on the moon. He and I were the only ones reveling in the trip, whereas Neas was more dismissive.

            As it turned out, Kristin sold our old family farm. It was now a shopping mall.

            She took the hefty sum of money from the big sale and moved out west to California, which she always talked about doing before Candace (that’d be Neas’s original incarnation) was born. I’ve only visited California in other dimensions, but ours wasn’t too different. It was certainly just as busy, loud, and overcrowded.

            It took a bit of searching but we were able to find the address to Kristin’s new home, a large white mansion in the Hills. I felt a little small when I walked out onto the front terrace, even after stepping out of Neas’s bigger-on-the-inside TARDIS.

            “Ma must’ve snagged one helluva fortune from that sale!” Neas observed.

            “Mind your language,” I scolded him. “We’re about to meet your mother for the first time in ages, and I don’t want your potty mouth being the first thing she hears.” I probably overdid it on the parenting, but I wanted this to be a pleasant reunion for the Curtsinger family.

            I rang the doorbell just as I remembered to check my breath. It still had the usual minty scent, which was good. Turning to Neas and Craig, I asked, “How do I look? My makeup’s okay, right?” I straightened my long brown locks for good measure.

            “Your fly’s open,” Neas said.

            My hands instinctively went to my crotch, feeling around for the zipper. I looked like a total idiot when I just felt the smooth texture of my “zipper-less” leggings and nothing else. Neas pranked me good. Nice as it was to know his sense of humor was coming back, he couldn’t have picked a worse time to make me look like a fool.

            The front door of Kristin’s mansion opened, and Kristin herself was standing there at the doorway, looking directly at me with my hands still on my crotch. My face turned red as I quickly cupped my hands behind me. “May I help you young-ins?” Kristin asked, inspecting at the three of us with her gaze.

            A gentle wheeze escaped my mouth as I fought to reply. She was as radiant as the day I last saw her with those lovely blue eyes, her short and bouncy blond hair, and a shiny-white smile framed by glistening, peach-blossomed lips. Though she was seventy years of age, she looked younger with fewer wrinkles than I remember, possibly using a skincare cream to make her look more flawless than she already was by nature. When she answered the door, she wore that gorgeous sun dress I bought her on our twelfth anniversary, still able to fit her petite figure.

            “Who is it, babe?” a man’s voice called out from inside the mansion.

            Kristin half-turned and responded, “A couple of millennials, by the looks of them. They’re here with a lil’ kid, though they haven’t told me what they’re here for.”

            That man inside the mansion came to join Kristin at the door.

            He was a 70-year-old bearded individual with an easygoing disposition that matched with his attire, sporting a zebra-striped blazer, an untucked white dress shirt, and light denim jeans. He also wore a black fedora that hid his long, graying hair, styled into a ponytail.

            I was put off by his presence, but no more so when I saw the way he had his hand around Kristin’s slim waist, as if he were her husband.

            And, as I would soon find out, he was.

            You see, this ponytailed gentleman’s name was Dale, and he was the man Kristin had chosen to marry in my absence from Earth.

Chapter Text

Part Two

            To say I was upset to see my wife with another man would be the understatement of the millennium. No, I was positively pissed. But I kept my cool for Kristin’s sake. After all, she didn’t recognize me or Neas, not particularly after Neas introduced us and Craig as the new neighbors – a married couple and their son. Neas used his “Thomas” alias, while Craig and I kept our usual names. Of course, we couldn’t use “Curtsinger” as surnames, so we went with Craig’s family name (“Williams”).

            We must’ve put on a reasonable first impression, since we were invited in for dinner. I was in a foul mood through most of it. Kristin whipped us up some fried chicken with mashed potatoes, green peas, and her delectable gravy. It was good to know she still had a strong southern palate, even all this way out west.

            Dale was an interesting man, to say the least.

            The topic that took up most of our dinner conversation was him being a veteran actor in film and television, hence how he could afford the mansion that he and Kristin lived in together. His most famous role was that of the title character of the children’s show from the mid-2010s, Captain Knutz.

            “I thought I recognized you!” Neas beamed upon learning this factoid. “I used to watch you as Captain Knutz when I was a kid!”

            Dale’s brow crinkled. “You must be a lot younger than you look.”

            Thankfully, Craig took everyone’s minds off of the awkwardness Neas’s remark spurred when he asked, “What’s Captain Knutz?”

            “One of the absolute best pirate shows, lil’ br—I mean, son,” Neas said (with a very subtle recovery). “Captain Knutz is the main character – a witty, scruffy pirate with a talking parrot sidekick named ‘Krackers’ and a crew of misfits that sail off on adventures, visiting islands with unique characters. One episode, they’re on an island made of chocolate; the next episode, they’re in a place haunted by ghosts!”

            Seeing little Craig’s eyes light up from Neas’s description of the children’s program warmed both of my hearts. It momentarily took my mind off of why I sat there at that table, feeling so angry.

            My parental instincts flared as I saw his face covered with bits of mashed potatoes. I grabbed at the napkin that he neglected to use and started wiping his face, as if I was his real mother, when I heard Kristin suddenly ask me, “Are you feeling alright, darling?” I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant until she pointed to my plate, which I hardly touched. “You haven’t eaten anything.”

            All attention shifted on me in that moment. “I’m fine,” I dismissed, sounding firmer than I intended. I decided quickly to change the subject. “So, Kristin…how did you and Dale meet?”

            This oughta be good.

            Dale was the first to speak up, gingerly taking Kristin’s hand at their corner of the table as he reminisced, “It was the weirdest time. Kristin just moved to Cali, starting a new life after her previous husband passed on.” My left eye twitched a bit. The rest of Dale’s story sounded muffled to my ears, having burnt from hearing the words “passed on.”

            Neas later filled me in on the details that I missed.

            Apparently, Dale and Kristin met at the grocery store one day, accidentally bumping carts and several times again after that. After the sixth bump, Dale gathered the courage to ask Kristin out. From there, the rest is history.

            “Sounds romantic,” Neas complimented, whisked away by the story.

            Me, on the other hand…I was sickened to my stomach, but I wisely chose not to say a word.

            I wasn’t any better later that night in Neas’s TARDIS, which we kept parked right outside Dale’s mansion, albeit cloaked by a high-density perception filter. I checked on the status of that filter, while Neas and Craig sat with their butts sunk deep into yellow and blue beanbags, watching an episode of Captain Knutz on the console room wall screen…and enjoying every second it while eating large tubs of popcorn.

            “Who’s she?” I heard Craig ask him, pointing to the screen. I tried not to pay any mind to the program, having seen more than enough of Dale’s regular face instead of his “Knutz” character. But, curious of Craig’s inquiry, I glanced for a fleeting moment to see one pirate character – a Scandinavian blonde.

            “She’s Knutz’s nemesis, Captain Kelly,” Neas explained. “She’s such a cool villainess! I used to dress up as her every Halloween when I was your age.”

            I thought I’d recognized that “Captain Kelly” character. Neas, of course, being born a girl in his original incarnation had the same privileges as most 21st century girls on Earth. Sometimes, I would forget that, having journeyed with this male incarnation of them for so long.

            “Ain’t nuttin’ but a peanut for Captain Knutz!” That was the catchphrase uttered by Dale’s character before he’d go off and do something heroic on the show. Neas and Craig were like two boys at a sleepover, cheering and hollering whenever Dale/Knutz was onscreen. It made me more than a little jealous – enough to switch off the viewscreen to the shared groans of Neas and Craig.

            “I do believe one of you should be in bed right now,” I specifically singled Craig out with that same stern look I used to give Candace every Friday night. Back then, my eyes were outlined by bushy eyebrows and crow’s feet, adding to the sternness. With Rania’s kind and tender young eyes, it probably wasn’t nearly as effective.

            Nonetheless, Craig knew better than to test my patience. “I was getting a little sleepy,” he admitted, whether he was being truthful or just to appease me, I couldn’t really tell. He got up from the beanbag, setting his popcorn tub down next to it. “Thanks for the show, Neas! I wanna watch more of it some other time.”

            “I’ve loaded up all six seasons to the TARDIS computer,” Neas said. “We’ll be marathoning it for weeks!”

            On that thrilling guarantee, Craig happily headed off to bed, but not before I could leave him with a goodnight kiss to his forehead (much as it annoyed him). As soon as Neas and I had the console room to ourselves, he approached me and said, “So, you wanna talk about what happened at dinner earlier?”

            “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

            And I really didn’t. I wasn’t being cagy in any way.

            “What I’m talking about is what Ma told Dale about you having ‘passed on’,” Neas clarified. My eye twitched again, and Neas definitely noticed it. “We should tell her the truth, Pop.”

            “No!” I objected.

            “Why not?”

            “Because by morning, it won’t even matter! We’ll be back in Craig’s world and all of this will be behind us! And that’ll be the end of it! Understood?” My harsh tone must’ve gotten through to him. He didn’t say another word about it for the rest of the night.

            While we were all sleeping in our separate rooms that night, I was awakened by a loud crash in the room nearest mine – which was the lab. I was so exhausted that I slept in my sweater, leggings, and boots, so I didn’t have to waste any time getting dressed to check on the noise.

            When I got there, I was met with an unsettling sight: the stasis pod where Al-Lee’s body was kept had been busted open…and Al-Lee’s body was gone. There was a trail of bloody footprints from where the glass shards were scattered, leading out of the lab. I tracked them all the way back to the console room and discovered that they led straight out through the exiting doors.

            “What happened?” I was relieved to have heard Neas’s voice when he and Craig showed up in the room, both safe and unharmed. Just like me, they were already dressed.

            “Al-Lee’s escaped,” I alerted.

            “Al-Lee? The Terminator girl?” Craig inquired. We briefed him on the situation with her before we visited Kristin and Dale. “She’s gotten out of the TARDIS?! That cannot be good!”

            “It’s certainly not, lil’ bro,” Neas concurred with a burdensome sigh.

            As we deliberated on Al-Lee’s whereabouts, Neas suddenly received a call on his smartphone. He briefly glanced at the caller I.D. and then shot me a guilty look. After some hesitation, he addressed the caller, “Hello, Mrs. Sydney.”

            Mrs. Sydney being Kristin – the surname she adopted from her marriage to Dale.

            I wanted to scold Neas right there and then for giving out his phone number – exclusive only to people in our circle (such as U.N.I.T., the Doctor, Torchwood America, the Protectorate, or any of our close friends, like Craig) – to his mother of all people. I figured he must have provided it to her, sometime between dinner and when we left, or whenever I wasn’t paying attention.

            The only thing that kept a restraint over my frustration was my concern for my former wife. “What did she say?” I asked after the call ended.

            Neas looked at me unnervingly. “They had an intruder…Dale’s disappeared.”

Chapter Text

Part Three

            Dale’s disappeared?! To where?! And why did he leave poor Kristin all alone?!

            My mind jumped to several conclusions upon hearing this, painting Mr. Sydney in quite the negative light. Neas tried to reassure me that there was a reasonable explanation, but I wasn’t hearing it. I was too focused on getting back into the mansion and finding out what happened.

            We arrived to find the whole place ransacked and Kristin practically wrought with dread from the night’s scare. She had already called the police before we showed up, so we sat together in the living room and waited with her. I gave her a glass of water and a Xanax to help calm her nerves. “My husband – my last one, that is – always knew when to give me these,” she said before taking the sedative.

            “Sounds like a wise man.” I tried not to smile too much, giving praise to myself. I probably should have taken a Xanax myself, being as pissed as I was at Dale. “I can’t believe he’d just leave you here with the intruder!”

            She looked at me dubiously. “Who? Dale? He didn’t leave me here. I was the one who told him to leave.”

            “Why?” I frowned.

            “Because, for some strange reason, the intruder was after him.”

            This news boggled my mind and also the minds of Neas and Craig. Why would the intruder be after Dale? Were they some overzealous “Captain Knutz” fan? Did Dale owe some shady talent agent money or something?

            Once the police arrived at the scene of the crime, one of the officers asked Kristin for a description of the intruder. She said that the individual looked to be a male biker of six feet in height (perhaps taller) and muscular build, wearing a black helmet that obscured his face. Unfortunately, this description didn’t do much to help the police, as there were several bikers fitting that description in the Los Angeles area.

            Neas and I had our own theory of it being Al-Lee, with the incident lining up seamlessly with her escape from the TARDIS. Of course, Kristin’s description didn’t match Al-Lee’s. Nevertheless, we feared a Terminator like her being out somewhere, roaming in our home dimension.

            “Hon—I mean, Mrs. Sydney,” I addressed Kristin, catching myself from calling her “honey,” a term of endearment from a previous life. “When you told Dale to leave, was there anyplace specifically you told him to go?”

            “Just this low-rent motel about ten miles from here,” she told me. “We agreed to go there, if anything like what happened tonight were to occur. We also have a secret knock that goes like this…” She demonstrated by knocking a specific melody along the coffee table. My ears recognized it to be the basic “Shave and a Haircut” knock.

            Flawed as it might’ve been, it was good to know they had a system in place in case of emergencies. We used to have something like that back in our Georgia farm. In the event of a twister (which were common out in the countryside), we would hide in the cellar – which was, in actuality, the console room of my Type-X TARDIS, made out to resemble a cellar.

            Knowing Kristin would be safe with the authorities, I left the mansion with Neas and Craig to go to this motel where Dale fled to. I used the secret knock Kristin demonstrated to me, and Dale opened up. He was battered and distressed in his tattered silk blue pajamas and the black fedora that he somehow found the time to put on during his escape.

            “Are you alright, Mr. Sydney?” I asked him with a tone that would’ve sounded contemptuous to anyone else.

            Dale gave an uncertain nod. “Did Kristin send you kids? I gotta tell ya…I ain’t exactly feelin’ right at the moment.” He invited us in, locking the door immediately afterwards. “This guy – whoever he was – roughed me up pretty good. It took everything in me just to fend him off. He damn-near killed me.”

            I thought he was being a bit overdramatic (even for an actor) but kept it to myself.

            “It was like fighting a machine,” he continued. “The more tired I got, the stronger he did!”

            That detail set off an alarm in Neas. “Like a machine? Like a Terminator?!”

            “Kinda like that, yeah,” Dale affirmed, failing to recognize Neas’s deduction to be more than just a hyperbole. “But we’re talkin’ real life here, man.”

            “So am I, Mr. Sydney,” Neas said. “What you fought was a real Terminator.”

            Dale scoffed at this. “Gimme a break here, kid.”

            “He’s telling you the truth, Dale,” I supported, no longer forcing myself, Craig, or Neas to secrecy with a man’s life on the line. I told him the entire truth – about Neas and I being members of an alien race known as “Time Lords” and having a ship capable of traveling between dimensions, some of which are straight out of the stories of fiction that exist in our world. After the fact, I necessitated to him, “Do not tell Kristin I told you any of this – even though she already knows most of it.”

            “She does?!” Dale flared. “How in the hell does she know?!”

            “Because the man she was married to before you was a Time Lord,” I said. “And I was once that man.”

            Dale looked at me much differently than before.

            I wasn’t just some young woman he shared a dinner with, earlier that evening.

            I was now someone totally alien to him.

            Still, he tried to deny any of what I explained to him. “Nah, nah, nah! You kids are sick! You’re outta yer minds! Playing mind games with an old man like me who just had an attempt on his life! You ought to be ashamed!”

            Seeing that I was getting nowhere with him, I made the one decision that I told myself I would never make, unless it was absolutely necessary. I turned to Neas and ordered, “Show him Craig’s true form.”

            “My what?!” I heard Craig bellow, totally confused. I felt so guilty that I couldn’t even look him in the eye.

            Neas couldn’t believe I requested such a thing, but he knew why it had to be done.

            He took his sonic screwdriver out from the inside of his hoodie, and he aimed it towards Craig. “I’m so sorry, lil’ bro,” he said before activating the Gallifreyan tool.

            Now, you all are probably just as confused as poor little Craig was, so allow me to explain: Craig’s “two-dimensional” appearance has been shielded by a perception filter powered by the nuage energy that makes up the Infinite DC. As such, he appears like a real three-dimensional boy to those outside of his world, while everyone else appears just as two-dimensional (or cartoonish) as he does.

            When that filter is depowered by a device like Neas’s sonic, it removes the veil, allowing Craig to see the real world and vice versa.

            The result was the reason why I never wanted Craig to be subjected to it.

            He was horrified to see Neas, Dale, and myself in our three-dimensional forms – our skin, hair, and clothes popping out at him and overwhelming his senses. If I could describe the sensation he was experiencing in plain terms, it would probably be like watching a 4D movie on “overload” settings.

            “No! NO! MAKE IT GO AWAY!!!” he cried, shutting his eyes from it all as he cowered into the nearest corner.

            I immediately went to him, enveloping him in my arms to calm him. “Shhh. Shhh. It’s alright, honey. It’s alright. We’ll turn it back on for you, I promise.” My hearts broke, seeing him so frightened. I hated myself for making him go through this, so much that it brought tears to my eyes.

            “Jesus Christ!” I heard Dale from the other end of the room.

            He was just as horrified to see Craig’s two-dimensional form, standing out among the three-dimensional setting. I gave Neas the go-ahead to turn the filter back on for Craig but to leave it on for Dale. He needed to see it all and know how serious we were about this situation.

            “This is some crazy Roger Rabbit shit right here!” he yelped, not once taking his eyes off of Craig. “That kid’s head…it’s so…”

            “DON’T YOU DARE!” I shouted at him, still cradling Craig in my arms. “He looks no more alien to you than you do to him!”

            “Coming from the girl who used to be my wife’s husband!” Dale retorted.

            “Look, Dale,” I said as calmly as I could, doing everything in my power not to unleash on this man. “This is the world we come from. Yes, it’s weird, but it’s also wonderful. So, I suggest you get used to it, because you’re going to need our protection from the Terminator’s that been hunting you for reasons that we haven’t yet been able to discern right now!”

            Shortly after my rant, there was a regular knock on the door.

            It set us all on edge – more than we already were.

            Neas cautiously went to it and looked through the peephole. “It’s Al-Lee,” he whispered back to me.

            Unfortunately, she must’ve heard him from the other side, because she said thereafter, “I know you’re in there, Neas…and I also know what I am. I promise that I’m not here to terminate you.”

            “How’re we supposed to believe that?” Neas asked her. “You could just be programmed to say that!”

            Suddenly, the door flew off its hinges, throwing Neas back.

            Al-Lee stomped right in, just as Neas swiftly produced a plasma rifle from his hoodie (he’s got some deep pockets) and fired a shot at Al-Lee’s face. It damaged some of the flesh along the left side, exposing part of her metal endoskeleton. Angered by the attack, Al-Lee tore the rifle out of Neas’s hands and held him at gunpoint.

            But she didn’t fire.

            Again, she proclaimed, “I’m not here to kill you! I just want to talk.”

            “About what?” I asked her.

            “I have information on the Terminator that tried to kill Dale Sydney.”

Chapter Text

Part Four

            It was rather tense in Dale’s hotel room with Al-Lee sitting there among us. As she recapped the story of how she escaped from the stasis pod, I kept glancing over at Neas to see how he was taking all of this. Let’s just say that whatever trust he had in Al-Lee was dashed after discovering she was a Terminator. He gripped his plasma rifle as it rested on his lap, covertly aimed at her.

            She told us of how she awoke in the stasis pod, confused as to why she was there in the first place. After she broke out of it, at the risk of stepping on glass shards (cutting the soles of her feet), she discovered the lab notes that I kept of her “situation,” detailing her Terminator biology and programming, which included her mission to terminate Neas.

            The guilt on her face as she reflected on discovering the truth of herself seemed genuine and even made me feel quite a bit of pity for her. Neas, on the other hand, refused to believe it, probably thinking it was part of her programming.

            “I didn’t want to hurt any of you, so I left,” Al-Lee told us. “I wandered the streets of this city, until I received a transmission from Skynet: ‘Aznavorian the Tinkerer’s location has been detected in the present dimension’. Except the visual that was transmitted to me was of this guy.” She pointed directly towards Dale.

            I balked at this palpable error. “Dale?! Seriously?!”

            “What’s wrong with that?” Dale asked me, seeming a little offended.

            “I think I’d remember ever being…well…you,” I tried to rationalize for him in a respectable way.

            “Maybe ‘Dale Sydney’ has been a human disguise all along?” Neas took this info with more serious consideration. “Do you carry any fob watches around, Dale?”

            “What’s a fob watch?” Dale asked, unintentionally debunking Neas’s theory.

            “Well, regardless, this mistake has put Dale’s life on the line,” I said. “There’s a Terminator that wants to kill him, as long as it believes Dale is the Tinkerer.”

            “From the way you’re talking, Pop, it sounds like you’ve got a plan.”

            Neas knew me so well. I did actually have a plan.

            Whether or not it was a good plan depended on our success.

            Using a direct line to Skynet that was only achievable (and safe) through a burner phone, we arranged a meeting at the Los Angeles power plant. My plan was for Dale to pretend to be me while I was his “assistant” (a term that the Doctor once used to describe his companions). Meanwhile, Neas would wait along a distant ridge with Al-Lee and Craig, waiting for the moment to destroy the Terminator with the sniper function of his plasma rifle.

            “What if this doesn’t work?” Dale asked me as we waited. “It’s my ass that’s on the line here, not yours.”

            Much as I didn’t want to admit it, he was right.

            I was taking a huge gamble on the life of a man who did nothing other than take care of the woman I love, while I was off journeying across the multiverse with different faces and genders. “It’ll be alright, Dale,” I reassured him. “Just know that Neas is an expert marksman. All I have to do is give the signal, and this Terminator will be terminated.”

            It was almost dawn by the time that the Terminator arrived.

            But he didn’t come alone.

            As it turned out, this Terminator was being operated like a toy robot by a young boy who looked to be Craig’s age. He was dressed in pretend royal garbs, complete with a headband that had a daisy insignia (for a crown) and a heavy blue jacket with white ruffles as his robe.

            I actually knew this boy. Indeed, he came from Craig’s world. I remember meeting him one day, when Craig wanted me (in my “Noraline” incarnation at the time) to scare him. I was rather muscular as Noraline and a giant to any of the kids at the creek – save for the Elders (who were basically teenagers). And while I once succeeded in scaring this same little boy in front of me now, I doubt I could again as the meeker Rania, especially with a Terminator in our presence.

            “Xavier?” I said his name aloud. I heard Craig repeat it in the earpiece that I had tucked in my right ear. Of course, Craig was a lot more surprised than I was, asking questions that I relayed over to Xavier himself. “What’re you doing here, sweetie?”

            “I’m not here to talk to you, whoever you are!” Xavier proclaimed. “I’m here to talk to that guy!” He pointed to Dale. “The wrinkly old dude with the ponytail!”

            “HEY!” Dale objected to the description. I held back from laughing at his reaction. “You little brat! What kind of joke is this?!”

            “It’s not a joke!” Xavier bellowed. “I’m here ‘cause of the Twilight Phantom!”

            I suddenly began to take this situation seriously again – more so than before – when I heard that name come out of Xavier’s mouth. “Why would the Twilight Phantom use a sweet lil’ boy like you for such a twisted purpose?”

            “Sweet?!” Both Dale and Craig (in my earpiece) cried out in objection.

            “This little monster made an attempt on my life with that thing!” Dale indicated the stationary Terminator standing between us and Xavier.

            “He’s just a child being manipulated by a real monster!” I argued. Of course, Dale scoffed at my vindication of Xavier’s actions (right as they were). I simply ignored him and did what Neas claimed I did best: being a parent. “Xavier, honey?” I softly addressed him. “You don’t have to do anything the Phantom tells you to do.”

            I saw a little hesitation come over him. “I…I…Yes, I do!” He declared. “The Phantom promised I would become king – a real king! King of the Multiverse!”

            “The Phantom just wants that for themselves, sweetheart,” I tried to convince him. I then offered my hand out to him and said, “Just come with us. You don’t have to be a servant to that monster anymore.”

            I seemed to have gotten through to him. His face fell in realization of what I was saying. The poor lil’ fella looked so sad, knowing the truth. It just made me hate the Twilight Phantom – an entity that Neas and I have dealt with for quite some time now, saving the entire Infinite D.C. from countless threats that they’ve caused – even more.

            All seemed to have gone well until I heard some commotion come over my earpiece. I heard Neas grunting and Craig crying out for him to “Look out!”

            “Neas? Craig?” I responded to the noise. “What’s going on?!”

            “Craig?!” Xavier negatively reacted. “He’s here?! Then that means the Gladiator is here, too! You tricked me! This was all just a trap, wasn’t it?!”

            I tried to reconvince him that it wasn’t, but it was too late.

            In his rage, Xavier operated his Terminator to charge for Dale, brushing past me – his actual target. This worked to my advantage. With Xavier and his Terminator ignoring me, I was able to jump onto the Terminator from behind and rip off its helmet, exposing its metal skull. Surprisingly, there was no flesh coating – rubber or living tissue – meaning this was not an infiltration unit. That was obvious with it being controlled remotely by Xavier.

            With a knife that I had concealed within my sleeve, I pried open the CPU port on the Terminator’s skull and tore the chip itself out. This effectively shut down the machine before it could’ve terminated Dale.

            “NO!” Xavier screamed. Frightened, he escaped through an interdimensional portal, activated by his remote control, before I could’ve tried to reason with him again.

            That commotion I heard over my earpiece had stopped, which concerned me. “Neas! Craig!” I called with my eyes looking towards that distant ridge they were on. “What happened? Are you alright? What about Al-Lee? Is she okay?”

            “Neas and I are okay…but Al-Lee…she’s been terminated.” There was great relief and sadness in Craig’s voice.

            I got a little more information when Dale and I regrouped with the boys.

            We assumed Al-Lee’s Terminator programming had gone dormant, which was only temporary. It resurfaced in the midst of our mission, forcing Neas to destroy her with the plasma rifle. He aimed for her head, destroying it and her CPU chip entirely.

            After casting the remains of both Terminators from this harrowing ordeal into the sun, we returned to Earth. Dale decided to recuperate with some burgers and fries at his favorite L.A. diner. He treated me and Craig to some as well; Neas, however, opted to remain in his TARDIS, still unsettled about Al-Lee.

            “Is your kid gonna be alright?” Dale was considerate enough to ask.

            “I don’t know,” I shrugged. “Al-Lee was his best friend…apart from this lil’ dude.” I playfully rubbed Craig’s head to emphasize my point.

            Although Craig enjoyed the gesture, he couldn’t help but to wonder, “What about Xavier? He’s working with the Twilight Phantom – Neas’s greatest nemesis!” He was a little overdramatic in his cataloguing but was nonetheless accurate. “I don’t think I can go back to the creek, knowing that.”

            “It’ll be alright, hon,” I told him. “Neas and I will stay in your dimension for as long as we have to. Remember, my TARDIS is already there, so you’ve got double the protection.” This seemed to have suppressed his fears, as he went right back to enjoying his burger afterwards.

            “You really are a good dad,” I heard Dale tell me. “Or, uh, a good mom or…ya know what I mean.”

            “I do.” I chuckled at his confusion. “And you’re a good man, Dale Sydney. Good enough for Kristin.”

            “Are you sure you don’t wanna tell her?” He must’ve sensed my grief to ask that, though I didn’t do much of a good job at hiding it. “You said it yourself that she already knows about how you change. I’m sure she—”

            “No,” I somberly declined. “She deserves a happy, normal life. And you can give her that, Dale.” He nodded appreciatively on my approval.

            Suddenly, his phone rang. Kristin had called him through Face-Time.

            “She still does Face-Time calls,” I giggled along with Dale, who knew himself how it was a habit of Kristin’s.

            Dale answered the call. While I couldn’t see Kristin’s face, I could hear her bothered voice over the phone. “Honey, are you alright? Are you still at the hotel?”

            “Nah, I’m at a diner, having a burger for breakfast,” Dale cooly answered.

            “WHAT?!” Kristin shrieked. “You should be hiding! That maniac is—”

            “Taken care of, thanks to Rania and Thomas,” Dale interjected. “You don’t have to worry anymore. I’ll be coming back home soon.”

            “Oh,” Kristin accepted, albeit flabbergasted.

            “Hey, by the way, babe,” Dale continued, “what more can ya tell me about Steven?”

            He surprised me with this question, smiling and winking at me as he asked it.

            “Steven?” Kristin said, sounding just as surprised. “Well, I don’t wanna make you jealous, hon…but Steven was magnificent. He had this special warmth that made you feel safe, even in a tense situation. He was always kind – more so around children – yet was fierce when he needed to be. He wouldn’t dare let anyone he cared about be hurt in any way, nor would he ever give up on them. I wish I could tell you more, but there are some memories that I’d rather keep private – moments that I still dream about to this day.”

            My face was drenched in tears by the end of her beautiful illustration of me.

            It even managed to choke Dale up a bit. “Thanks, babe,” he told Kristin. “I know wherever he is right now, he’s honored to have known such an amazing woman like yourself.”

            “Aww! You’re too sweet!” Kristin said. “Now get your butt back here, so I can kick it for eating a burger while keeping me worried sick about you!” Dale and I laughed at her threat, after he ended the phone call.

            “Thanks, Dale,” I said once our laughter subsided. “I needed to hear that.”

            “I know ya did. And I promise that I’ll never tell her that you’re still out there…in the multiverse.”

            After bidding Dale farewell, Craig and I returned to Neas and the TARDIS. Neas was still standing with his head down over the control console, which was exactly how Craig and I left him. I asked if he was alright, and he responded with a cold and faint “I’m fine, Pop.” He didn’t even look at me or Craig, which only made the both of us more disquieted.

            No eye contact or further words were exchanged as Neas piloted us back through the Infinite D.C., returning us to Craig’s world. The TARDIS materialized in a spot within the creek that was very familiar to me. It was not that far from Poison Ivy Grove, which was normally avoided by any kid in the creek, due to the area being completely covered by poison ivy.

            Then I remembered: this area was where my Type-X TARDIS had been parked since my “Noraline” regeneration. I specifically chose Poison Ivy Grove for its hazardous conditions, since it kept those from discovering my ship.

            I walked out of Neas’s Type-Z TARDIS with Craig, thinking that Neas was right behind us.

            Unfortunately, I was mistaken.

            The moment we were out, the door closed and the Type-Z dematerialized out of the dimension, much to our shock.

            “Where’s he going?!” Craig asked me. “Is he coming back?!”

            I didn’t want to tell Craig, but I’d suspected Neas would do something like this from how reserved he’d become since the demise of Al-Lee. The Cyber War had taken enough from him, but Al-Lee was the final straw.

            Now, the Gladiator of Gallifrey has exiled himself from everyone he loves…

            …his lil’ brother, Craig of the Creek…

            …and his own father, Aznavorian the Tinkerer.