realityshifted

[night has long since settled over Gallifrey and yet he doesn't retire. instead, he leaves his rooms and makes his way to gardens in his section of the residential quarters. there, amongst several other Gallifreyan flora planted there, are several silver-leafed cadenwood trees, their leaves glittering and reflecting a warm burnt orange and red, offset by the few lights still left on in nearby quarters. by his watch, he has an hour before the first sun starts to rise up over the Mountain of Solace. he settles himself against the base of the tree, deciding not to have a seat on one of the nearby sofas. no doubt he'll be joined by others wishing to watch the sunrise, but most Time Lords wait for the second sun to rise. he, selfishly, prefers to watch both.

while he waits, his thoughts return to the Plane and he mulls over his previous explorations and encounters there. too many things--too many new things--for this stuffy Time Lord.

and then there's that forest. what would his beloved cadenwood trees look like there without the magnificence of Kasterboran suns? no doubt they'd still overshadow the ones there in their silvery brilliance, but would some of their magic be lost?

to test this, he enters the Plane, bringing the one tree with him. unfortunately, he isn't anywhere near the forest, though he can see it in the distance--but still... he glances up at the silver leaves now twinkling in the light of the millions upon millions of stars in that place and grins. smugly, of course.]

Better than that forest any day! Just as I thought it would be.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Only in morbidity can you find the truth! Or was it mathematics? Or the Matrix, but we all know the Matrix can lie.

[makes a face] Only when it's tampered with.

Which is easily done. Some record of universal history, isn't it?

If somebody didn't tamper with it in the first place, there'd be no problem.

If we didn't rely on it as our chart for the Web of Time, we wouldn't be so vulnerable when it was tampered with.

And what would you suggest we use? The Matrix is a safe, sound system barring a couple incidents in Gallifrey's history.

I'd suggest that, for one, the Time Lords crawl out of the Rassilonian Era and into a new one by upgrading our technology. I'd also suggest that we stop treating the Matrix as the definitive description of the universe. It isn't. It would do the Time Lords some good to trust their intuition, not their inertia.

And into an era where we'd be back meddling far more in the affairs of every living creature in the universe? Might as well toss us back into the Dark Ages. [though, upgrading the technology wasn't a bad idea, though he'll never admit that.]

Bit of trivia about humanity: the reason they called their Dark Ages 'the Dark Ages' was mainly because they wanted to distance themselves from it. And they did that because they wanted to glorify and enlightened, classical tradition that they were essentially inventing on the spot.

How quaint. But need I remind you that we also did something similar in adopting our current ways? We obliterated thousands of species and caused so much bloodshed in our attempts to control Time. We are nothing like that now because of the policies we've adopted.

And so the incompetency of our predecessors dooms us to complacency and pointlessness.

I'm sure Lord Omega would love to hear you call him an incompetent.

You might be terrified of Gallifrey's legends, but I don't bow for any of them, from Rassilon to Morbius to Pandora and her wars.

[frowns] No, how could you when you weren't even here for those wars?

[in hindsight, he didn't wish to think of how everything might've turned out if the Master was alive during that time.]

You know I've been in wars before. They're trivialities.

I meant the ones involving Pandora. When it wasn't her and the civil war, there was those ridiculous Free Time agents and chaos they wrecked on our planet! Do you call that a triviality?

By Time Lord perspective, it should be. Every little disturbance ought be a tiny little blip in the over-all stable history of our venerable species, isn't that so? Anything that disturbs the peace is to be buried, exiled, or wiped out of time.

[pointedly] You weren't there. You and the Doctor were spared that horror.

[stops that train of thought and straightens up.] Any other time that would be the case.

[coldly]

Gallifrey doesn't spare her renegades from horrors. We have suffered more than any pompous, stuffed-up, self-congratulating idiot on that planet could even dare to conceive and still, we endure, grow stronger, get better. There's a very good reason Pandora could have her civil war. The planet of what used to be the greatest, most advanced species in the universe was too weak to stop her.

Omega might disdain me for being a renegade, but isn't that what he always was? He and Rassilon. The ordinary Time Lord isn't much better than Pythia's lot.

Then--! [doesn't speak for a moment, instead biting his tongue and keeping any scathing remarks to himself. curiosity is winning over at this point. anything is better than speaking more of Pandora, especially since he doesn't wish to die for scolding the Master.]

...What happened when you left?