A Journey Unthought Of

by Hustlin Tom

Chapter 33 REVISED

The control room of the Tardis was silent for quite a long while after the Doctor and Adam went down the hallway that led further into her depths. Ditzy was the first to speak up as she looked to the others, "Come on everypony. We have just a little over thirty-five hours to cobble something together to help seal up the Void hole. Twilight, I'm going to need some help with your magic, Vinyl and Rarity you too."

"Ah'd say Ah've got some mechanical inclination," Applejack replied quietly, "Jus' tell me what yer thinkin' of buildin' with this mess and Ah'll see how Ah can help."

"I'm no good here with this kinda thing," Rainbow said as she flew up into the air and away towards the double doors, "I'm going to help get Lyra back."

Fluttershy gave a quick sigh, "Me too," and then flew off after her.

Pinkie Pie watched as her friends divided up into groups, and her heart was heavy. Her mane and tail lost a little of their spring as she thought over what had been said by the human, and how it was affecting everypony else. Was there a silver lining to all this? What could she do? Everything she would normally try surely wasn't going to work, not with the enormous downer everypony was suffering with; it just wouldn't be appreciated. And what about the bigger picture? What if this time things didn't go so well and the world did end? Her friends, all of Ponyville, her parents and sisters, all gone. Her mane was about to deflate even further as she drew into herself, but a hoof came to rest on her shoulder, and it abruptly stopped as she looked up.

"Hey," Ditzy murmured to her.

"Oh, hey," she replied bleakly.

"Pinkie, we need your help," she said firmly.

"But, there's no party in the world that can fix this," she said despondently as she gestured out with her hoof, "No amount of balloons or cake or funny hats can top this doozy of a downer, and all those things are the only things I'm good at! There's no way to fix this hurt."

Ditzy Doo nodded as she squeezed the earth pony closer, "Pinkie, you are the heart of the Elements. You're stronger in ways others can't imagine. You can push others to see the bright side of things in the deepest dark." Ditzy looked up at the others as they began to pull the components out of the box and organize them, "Well, we're sort of in that dark spot right now. I can't ask you to laugh or even giggle, but we need you to remind us."

"Remind you of what," she asked glumly.

Ditzy turned one eye and then the other to look back to her with a soft smile, "Help remind us to hope. If we lose that then we might as well have not even tried. Even if you can't feel it yourself, give it to them anyway: you might just find you have a little left over for yourself too."

Pinkie looked up at her wordlessly for a few moments before Ditzy had to go back and help begin overseeing the design and construction of the device. The earth pony watched her friends as they worked, and she could tell they were stumbling along on the inside. They did need her. They were depending on her. A spark came back into her eyes, and her mane began to slowly return to its frizzy state. She stood up and trotted over to her friends. "Come on you gals," she said with a certainty she would never have expected, "We're gonna build the best space cork the world has ever seen, and we're gonna do it with style!"

The others looked at her in shock, but she could already tell that they were feeling more positive just by how they carried themselves; their heads were held a little higher, their steps a little surer. Ditzy let out a small sigh of relief, and she muttered to herself, "We're counting on you now Doctor; just find a way to handle Adam."

---

The Tardis halls looked nothing like the control room. There was no coral design here: everything was smooth metal and sliding doors, the shape of each hallway a hexagon just tall enough that we could walk through it without having to duck. "How do you find anything in this place when it all looks the same," I asked, my curiosity overcoming my looming depression.

"The rooms of the Tardis are spatially asynchronous," he said as we turned left into a corridor that was hidden down behind the natural curve of the hall, "If ever you need to be somewhere specific, she'll read your thoughts and rearrange the architecture so that it's exactly where you'll end up."

The idea that the very layout of the ship was changing around us just out of sight was both terrifying and amazing at the same time.

"So is the ship alive," I asked with some worry.

"Oh yeah," he said as his hands went to his pockets, "but don't worry about her being hostile: any friend of mine is a friend of hers."

A strange whining sound reverberated from down the hallway, followed by a abruptly dropped tone.

"What was that," I asked worriedly.

The Doctor smiled and put one hand up to a support strut and patted it gently as we passed it by, "She's just agreeing with me. Ah! Here we are." He turned to the right into a small doorway through which a warm light was glowing. I came into the room just after him to find that it was a small kitchenette area with room for two to sit at a small table nearby. "Quite the rush job, but good quality all the same," he muttered.

"You mean this wasn't here before?"

"Pretty sure it wasn't, but then again I eat out more often than not. Used to be that the only food on board were high nutrient pills that could last you a whole day; tasted like overcooked asparagus though. If I had to wager on it the Tardis made this just for us in this moment, right here and now." He reached into a fridge located near the stove area and brought out a dish covered in plastic wrap, then placed it into a twist dial microwave located between it and the stove, "I'm hoping that having a full stomach will help you think better, if not at least make you more positively disposed."

"Oh," I said quietly as my curiosity from before was immediately squelched by my most recent actions.

The microwave dinged, and the Doctor opened the door and reached in, dragging the plate and quickly whipping it over to the nearby table as he hissed from its apparent heat. "Go on," he gestured to me, "Eat up!"

"You don't want anything?"

He rubbed the back of his head and laughed to himself, "Oh I already ate before we, heh, broke you out. Besides, I wanted to talk to you without too many interruptions."

Unsure of what exactly our conversation would be leading towards, I hesitantly took my seat in front of the still covered plate.

"Heads up," I heard the Doctor call out and instinctively I reached up for the blob in my peripheral vision and caught it with both hands. It was a utensil packet I immediately saw, for which I said, "Thanks." He nodded and came over to sit down opposite me.

I removed the plastic cover at last to find a glorious meal before me: green beans, seasoned and crunchy, mashed potatoes, a large whole wheat roll, and a good sized steak. My mouth in an instant became a faucet of desire and saliva, but I hesitated and looked up to my dining mate, "This wasn't anybody out there was it?"

"Absolutely not," he said solemnly, "Pure 21st century non-sentient bovine. Eat up; you need it since you haven't been covering all your protein intake lately."

Feeling a little awkward still but my mind put at ease I ripped my fork and knife out of their packaging and set into the steak, greedily cutting out slice after slice, savoring each delicious bite.

"You want a drink," he asked when he realized he'd forgotten to place a glass before me.

" 'm good," I mumbled as I continued devouring each part of the plate.

"I know you missed a lot of my explanation earlier about myself from your worrying," he said, and then nodded as I looked up in surprise, "Oh yes; it was that obvious. But I'll be brief: I've been around for a while, and humanity has always fascinated me. I've seen things, both good and bad, that you would never believe; heroes and villains alike. For every atrocity that repulses me there's always some new joy that brings me back to your blue little marble. What I want you to understand is that though there are certainly dark, horrific things in both your past and future, there are spots of hope, petals of tragic beauty that echo across time, and even moments of happiness interspersed throughout-"

"Doctor," I said as I lifted up my fork to point at him, "that's really flowery language and all, but you haven't lived my life. I was homeless. I starved, I froze, and I burned. I had no one to turn to. The only reason I didn't die of hypothermia one night was because some think-tank decided I'd make good interstellar garbage.”

“Interdimensional,” the Doctor corrected quietly.

I put my hands up and then jerked them down in frustration, “Point IS humanity isn't good, at all! We're hopeless, living through the life made of our constant mistakes; the smart exploiting the stupid, and the powerful keeping the weak under their thumb. And what do people do: keep their heads down, make token gestures of goodwill, and pretend they can make a difference. Now look at us; you said the two of us just being here is ripping this universe apart!" By this point I was shouting and fumbling from one idea to the next, not really thinking about what I was saying at all. I froze when I realized how loud and crazed I was sounding. The Doctor nodded a little and he put his hands together, placing them near his face as it seemed he thought about my tirade. I lowered my head to look back down at my plate, "Maybe it would've been better for everyone if I had never made it out of the Void."

"No," the Doctor blurted as his clasped hands slammed down on the table, "You cannot think like that. What damage you've done was a consequence of my mistake: you had no say in the matter."

"I still ruined Lyra and Bon Bon's lives," I shot back, "Vinyl's too. I got caught because of my stupidity and now they will always be chased by that scientist pony and his goons, or at least however long that is."

The Doctor slapped the table with an open palm and sternly looked at me, "Adam, just for a moment I need you to think outside of yourself and stop trying to win the argument about how terrible you are!"

The surprise sound and the seriousness of his look silenced me, which he most definitely took advantage of, "Have I ever lived a life like yours? I must admit, no, I haven't. I've made mistakes just as well as you have though, and if we wanted to put it to contest i can most assuredly say my nine-hundred or so years of experience in idiocy vastly dwarves yours. I can tell you for a fact that there's no satisfaction in focusing on self over others. You think there's no such thing as a good man? Fine, neither of us are; because good men are not so by nature, but by action and choice. I've seen people do good things, even when it would hurt them in the end, and it wasn't token or hollow. If you cannot consider humanity to be good then don't: consider them instead to be redeemable."

He put his arms out and his palms to the sky unseen above to which he momentarily glanced, and then looked back to me, "Look at us in this moment: we have a day and a half left to save the universe. That is more than enough time to prove to everyone here, pony or humanoid, that humanity still has something to offer this world!" He gestured to me with his open left palm and a closed right fist, "Stop focusing on what injustices have been done to you," here his left palm closed, while the right opened, "and instead see what potential you have to right other's."

I sat and looked at him, unsure of where I truly sat in my thoughts. If you could be redeemed, could your good actions ever truly outweigh your bad ones? Perhaps if you were trying to keep score you were thinking about it all wrong in the first place. The Doctor did have a point for sure: the clock was ticking, but there was still time to make things right. Maybe it was time to refocus priorities.

Unsure if he had reached me or not, the Doctor slapped his palms against his slacks and glanced off to the side before he focused on me again with his large eyes and frown. "There was a man around the time of your Revolutionary War named Edmund Burke. He had some pretty good nuggets of wisdom consistently through his life but a favorite of mine was this, 'The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.'" He then pointed to me, "If we can't be naturally good men, we can be good men made, and if you're like me doing nothing is not an option." He withdrew his finger and stared right into my eyes, "What will you do?"

I put my utensils down looked back at him intently until finally I asked, "How do we fix this?"

"Everything that's come through the breach, including us, has a specific radiation signature; it's difficult to trace at long distances, but it is definitely present in us. The only way to plug the hole is to eject the radiation back into the Void: the Tardis should be able to then easily seal it." He leaned back in his chair nonchalantly, "All well and good, but I think there is another problem that needs to be taken care of right now." He shrugged in jest and waved a hand towards the doorway, "Something a little more personally relevant? Perhaps a...missing roommate?"

Oh good lord.

"Lyra-" I blurted, and I burst to my feet, my chair falling back onto the floor.

"Theeere it is-" he said with a small smile, but it was only to himself as I had already bolted for the door.

I ran back the way I came, or at least I think I was. The hallways all looked the same. Then I remembered what the Doctor had said about the Tardis, and I began to mutter under my breath as I rushed straight ahead, "Lead me to Lyra. Just lead me to Lyra.” A turn to the left was fast approaching and it seemed to feel like the right choice. I took it. The hall bent around to form a circular incline until it came to a diagonal fork. There was a blinking light above the passage leading off to the right. I took it as my sign. Immediately after running down it there was a single sharp turn to the right, and suddenly I was back in the control room, all bronze and curvaceous coral. The other ponies were there, or at least six of them were: Bon Bon, Rainbow and Fluttershy were gone. Without bothering to stop and talk I ran around the console, down the gantry, and out the double doors of the Tardis. I heard Ditzy call out after me but I didn't respond. I ran out into the green, the mud, and the darkness. My eyes quickly adjusted, but night was nearing, and the obstructive canopy above was not helping provide any light. It didn't matter. She was out here somewhere. I didn't care if she was afraid of me or if she'd never forgive me. At this point, I just wanted Lyra safe, no matter the cost.

Comments

[Luckyfanisaac]

wanted to put it to contest I can most assuredly say my nine-hundred or so years of experience in idiocy vastly dwarves yours.