Chrysalis

[The Master]

London. 2011.

He sat on a park bench, arms outstretched, enjoying the day. He wore a dark suit, with short hair and a broad smile that revealed teeth shockingly white against his dark skin.

He'd gone by a few different names, in his short current tenure on this world. Harold Saxon. Jake. Koschei Mwinyi.

But right now, names didn't matter. He was enjoying life. The cool breeze. The warmth of the metal. The double rhythm of his heartbeats.

He hadn't expected to hear that again, not trapped in a pathetic human husk. But ever since that brief moment, just a few months ago, when all the world had changed and Gallifrey itself had seemed to hang in the evening sky...

Well, ever since then, he'd had his double heartbeat back. And proper blood. And useful senses. And, he suspected, a full cycle of regenerations ahead of him.

Something whirred and beeped near his head. Annoyed, he opened his eyes, then blinked in surprise.

A communication cube.

"Really?" he said to nobody in particular. "Who, out of the few of us that remain, would send me a message?"

He grasped the cube, and spoke a word in a now-extinct language. It began to play.

"This is the Doctor, last living Time Lord of Gallifrey, and if you are hearing this, you owe me a debt. I am amassing an army. For what, you may ask? To attack Demon's Run, and defeat Madame Kovarian and the Clerics. You owe a debt, and I expect it repaid in full. Oh, and if you have a fez, bring it too. Fezzes are cool."

He laughed, a deep and hearty laugh. "Oh, Doctor. You fool. You arrogant fool. You believe that I owe you?"

With a flick of the wrist he deactivated the cube. There were valuable components in it, components he could salvage. Components he could use to build a signal beacon, to call his TARDIS back from the Silver Devastation. Components he could use to escape this dreary mudspeck of a world, and to rise to glory once more.

The familiar rhythms began to rise once more.

thump-thump-thump-THUMP

thump-thump-thump-THUMP

thump-thump-thump-THUMP

The sound of drums.

[The Master]

Cardiff.
Roald Dall Plass.
Three days later.

Modifying the communications cube hadn't been all that hard, even with nothing more than scratch-built equipment to work with. They were designed to carry messages, after all.

And messages were information.

And information was nothing more than another form of energy.

So, modifying the cube to carry a message and a bit of energy wasn't that hard. Not when you got down to it.

No, the only hard part was - or would have been - locating the energy source. Fortunately, he knew where to look. Cardiff. The site of a temporal rift.

And so the Master sat in Roald Dahl Plass, making a few final adjustments to the cube with his MAT. If the passers-by found it unusual to see a handsome black man in a tailored suit sitting in a park bench and talking to a box while shining a flashlight on it, none of them bothered to stop and say anything. It would have been rude, after all.

Satisfied, he tucked the MAT into his breast pocket and regarded the cube. Holding it close to his lips, he whispered to it in a dead language.

"I am whole. I miss you. Come back to me."

Then he tossed the cube into the air. It spun and danced for nearly a minute, absorbing artron energy from the rift. And then it vanished.

The Master sat back in the bench, idly drumming his fingers against the seat, smiling. He could wait. She would come.

She, at least, had never abandoned him.

[The Master]

Area 51.
Camp Francis Rock, Nevada.
2011.

There was just a single researcher on duty that evening, monitoring the Roswell Sphere. It had been nearly four years since it opened itself, and nobody was any closer to figuring out how - or even if - it worked. Three researchers had won Nobel prizes in physics and mathematics, just trying to make sense of it.

Two more had gone mad.

One had just vanished, and had never been seen again.

Whatever it was, it was much bigger inside than it was on the outside. They'd lost a recon team inside it for a week. When the team re-emerged, it was with nearly 50% casualties and incoherent horror stories. After that, the OEI had decided to conduct extremely careful studies. From the outside.

And then a small flying cube appeared inside the room. The researcher glanced up at it, startled, and immediately hit several buttons in quick succession. One was a general alarm. One activated all of the room's sensory equipment. The third activated all of the room's recording equipment.

The cube spun and danced, then darted through the open door of the Roswell Sphere. A blinding radiance blazed from within, suddenly stopping as the door slammed shut.

Several guards, including SFC Hoaloaka of the SPECTERS, burst into the room. "What's going on?" he asked.

The Roswell Sphere began to howl and roar, and slowly faded from visibility.

"I..." said the researcher, helplessly, staring at the cradle that had held the Sphere for 64 years. "I don't know."

[The Master]

Cardiff.
Roald Dall Plass.
Two minutes later.

There was a howling, roaring sound from a nearby pillar, and a gust of wind kicked up by displaced air. And then, there was silence.

The Master stood up, hearts beating rapidly in his chest, and approached the pillar. As he did, a door opened wide.

He stepped through and stopped, overcome by emotion. "I'm home," he said. "We've passed through fire and war and death, and I've returned home."

He smiled as he ran a gentle hand over the console. "Did you miss me?"

Behind him, the door swung shut.

[The Master]

Skegness.
The British Isles.
Earth.
8 July 2007. Nearly midnight, local time.

The Master had killed the engine of his motorcycle a half mile back, and was now walking it through the pleasant warmth of the evening. He had abandoned his normal attire for jeans, and steel-toed work boots, and a Manchester United shirt. In the distance, he could hear voices.

"Hey, Jake!"

"Jesus Chr- I ain't lookin'! Cut me some effin' slack!"

"No, check this out!"

To be honest, he was curious about what had transpired. He had arrived on the scene well after the show was over and, while he was good at (everything) forensics, it just didn't have the same je ne sais quoi as first hand experience.

He made it to the top of the low rise, just in time to see Jake punch a young Caucasian - Ah, the Master thought, that's where the body came from - right in the nose. He thought he could hear the crack as the bone broke, and blood gushed from the man's face. He responded by throwing a kick at Jake, who just dodged and tackled him.

The Master leaned against his motorcycle, watching the fight. This sort of thing was, in his opinion, much more interesting than professional gladiatorial games. Two men, with no formal training, intent on reducing each other to cold meat. It really gave you an appreciation for mortal combat.

Not to mention an appreciation for a lifetime spent studying venyu sankido. That way, if you ever found yourself in that sort of situation, it wouldn't be that sort of situation.

The Caucasian - Noah, the Master recalled - seemed to be gaining the upper hand. He was straddling Jake now, trying to either strangle him or break his neck. It wasn't clear which.

"Now why," he asked himself, "aren't I Noah?"

The answer came in the form of a fist-sized lump of rock. Jake cracked Noah across the face with it, then rolled on top of his former friend and furiously beat the recognizably out Noah's face, cursing him the whole time. Then he tipped over and half-crawled, half-dragged himself to something that glittered silver in the moonlight.

The Master smiled.

Silvery-grey something - light, for lack of a better word, although its glow cast no illumination on the beach - erupted from the silvery object in Jake's hand. Tendrils lashed into his eyes, his nose, his ears. More flooded down his throat, and through the pores of his face. And then, as suddenly as it began, it ended.

Jake slumped to the sand, lifeless. The Master rolled his motorcycle behind a rock, pulled a bag of chips and a bottle of beer out of a saddlebag, and settled in to wait.

---

An hour later...

He'd watched from concealment as he had woken up, assessed his new situation and the cooling body nearby, and taken action. He wasn't surprised he hadn't noticed himself - he'd just come back from the dead, and found himself in an injured and inebriated body. Really, it had been a wonder he had managed as well as he had.

Noah's pockets and shirt were filled with rocks, and the corpse was dumped into the deepest part of the water he could find. And then he limped off, to figure out where the apartment his new body rented was to be found, and to sleep off the worst of the alcohol and the beating.

Once he was well out of sight, the Master rolled his bike down the beach. Propping it on the kickstand, he waded out into the water and dragged the corpse back ashore.

It had not gotten any lovelier, and it was obvious a few crabs had gotten at it while he had slept. The Master stared at it for a moment.

"I suppose I owe you a word of thanks, for having found my ring?"

Then he produced a small tube from his jacket. He pointed it at the body. With a disappointing lack of dramatics, the body seemed to disappear.

He put the tube away again, then stooped down and picked up a small, doll-like figure. "Thanks, then," he said to it.

And with a mighty throw, the miniaturized corpse of Noah sailed out beyond the breakers.

[Sarah Jane]

((OOC- Just so you know, I have this bookmarked. I'm keeping my eye on you. I have been for a while.))

[The Master]

(OOC - Actually, do you want to make that an IC post of sorts? Sarah Jane, trying to track down what the Master is up to and why he's working for UNIT?

Nothing too elaborate. Just a post once in a while, with Sarah digging up CCTV images or UNIT files or spy satellite footage.)