Bombaclaad Star

[Ramachulainn]

"STOP HIM!" the superior shouted. "STOP THE MASTER!"

Dioshendwa didn't even wait for the order. His stazer rifle tracked the Master's movements, and he depressed the firing stud. An actinic beam of inconceivable force connected the Guardsman and the Renegade for an instant, lighting the cathedral-sized room like lightning.

The Master crashed to the floor.

"Dios," Ramachulainn said in tones of infinite patience, massaging the bridge of his nose. "Was that much power strictly necessary?"

"Yes," Dioshendwa replied cooly, dismounting the capacitor and inserting a new one. "You saw how he shrugged off multiple stun hits."

"You shot him with enough power to..."

"Sir?" Eyomimir interrupted.

"...burn a whole through... what?" Ramachulainn turned to look at his communications officer. "What is it?"

"Sir," Eyomimir repeated, looking at the instruments he carried. "Are you sure he's dead?"

"What else could he be? Dioshendwa hit him with enough power to..."

"Doesn't matter," Eyomimir interrupted. "Right now, we should be breathing steam and fine ash that was once the Master. Why is there still a corpse?"

The Guardsmen looked uneasily at each other, as his words sank in. He was right. The liquids in the Master's body should have sublimed directly into plasma, along with most of his hard and soft tissues. What didn't, should have been ashen motes.

Dioshendwa raised his rifle. "Well, then. Let's shoot him again."

[Deleted]

"Enough!" the Superior called out. "Place him on the Oubliet of Eternity. We'll finally wipe the Master out from having ever existed in all of Time and Space."

He waited till the Chancellory Guardsmen did as they were told. After checking his first aide, he turned to the others. "He will be fine. He is only unconscious for now."

Avoiding eye contact with the slime covered console he turned to his remaining aide, and nodded to him once the Master was put in place.

"Activate the machine."

A bright purple and blue smoke and light emerged from the platform the Master's body was placed on. The portal to nothingness was opening, and slowly the Master's body had disappeared.

But then it happened. A few warning sirens from the console. Then, sparks began fly from the machine.

"S-Something is wrong!" the remaining aide said as he meddled with the controls, trying to understand the source of the malfunction.

"What's wrong?!" the Superior asked.

"I-I'm not sure! The controls! They're...They're not responding to what I'm saying!"

A dark and hideous laugh was heard throughout the great hall.

"You fools! This was part of my plan all along. And like all predictable insignificant Time Lords...You fell right into my trap. Ahahahahaha, AHAHAHAHAHA, AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAA!"

The Superior's face paled. "What's going on with the machine?!"

"The Master..." the Aide called out. "He's...going into the universe of Anti-Time. I can't close off the Oubliette of Eternity, the Controls refuse to respond to my commands."

The Superior looked to his aide in horror, then looked down in thought. "What could he possibly want the-..."

He turned back to the guardsmen. "When the Master emerges from the universe of Anti-Time, whatever comes out of there, shoot to kill. Maximum fire power if you have to, I don't care. NOTHING from there is to escape this room, is that understood?!"

---

In the Universe of Anti-Time, on the one stable planet in the entire universe, a new package had arrived. It looked like a dead body, one covered in dark ornamental black and red Gallifreyan Robes with Golden Embroidery. It wouldn't move from its spot, the figure remained silent. By most appearances it would appear to be dead. But then again, the Master was always good at faking his own death now wasn't he?

[Deleted]

Feet touching the beautiful stable 'planet' in the anti-matter universe, Zagreus finally touched down and looked around. This was his old home, the one place where she could survive without any trouble, and... well a result of Rassilon's meddling. But now there was a new body. Zagreus narrowed her eyes and then walked over, pulling back her blond hair and kneeling next to the creature.

"Look like the CIA are still keeping up their little shenanigans. Haven't they learned enough?" She spoke up, her tone of voice quite haughty. She then pressed her fingers against the neck of this man, feeling his pulse.

"... Perhaps I have myself a positive body to possess after all. Now..." She turned to focus on this breach in space and time, her lips pulling back into a smirk. "Food."

[Ramachulainn]

He turned back to the guardsmen. "When the Master emerges from the universe of Anti-Time, whatever comes out of there, shoot to kill. Maximum fire power if you have to, I don't care. NOTHING from there is to escape this room, is that understood?!"

"Yes," Ramachulainn answered, voice grim. "You heard the man. Dioshendwa? What do you want?"

The more militant Time Lord looked startled. "Want?"

"Yes," Ramachulainn answered. "You're clearly the most comfortable with excessive firepower. What would you like to use to kill the Master?"

A slow smile spread across Dioshendwa's face. "Black threads," he said. "Issue black threads as personal arms, along with probability shredders. If we were up against standard opponents, I'd suggest mounting a Time Eater in here as well. I don't know what impact that would have on something of Anti-Time, though."

"Right," Ramachulainn said. "Superior. We'll need a consultant from the Orrey. If the Master has escaped into Anti-Time, we'll need to assume that he's going to try and bring something back. And we'll probably need to kill, capture, or destroy that as well."

He turned back to his squad. "Dios. YOu and Shendawaya draw the black threads and the shredders. My authority, and I'll clear it with the Castellan if necessary."

He looked at the others. "Eyomimir, I want you to contact the Orrey and get us an expert. Then you go fetch him, and escort him back here. Kastramaleli, Tarquetavala? You stay here. Kill anything that looks like the Master, anything that says its name is 'Zagreus', or anything that the Superior here doesn't like the looks of."

"And what are you going to do, Captain?" asked Tarquetavala.

"Go see the Castellan," he answered. "And request authority to have this entire building removed from the surface of Gallifrey and time locked."

[Deleted]

The Superior hid a small grunt.

"Time Lock will not work here, and we may not have enough time to establish a Lock on this building, even if you could! For all we know he may jump back out as soon as you leave. No. I'm afraid until the Master returns, we must seal this room off from the rest of the building."

Without waiting for a response from the rest of the guards, he pressed a button on a small remote he pulled from his robes, as the doors behind them sealed and locked themselves.

"Even if we fail to kill him, we can at least keep him trapped in here until the rest of the CIA can find a more proper way to deal with this."

[Deleted]

Zagreus couldn't wait. She had power here anyway, she could possess this body, and with that Perfection had plunged her lips right against The Master's body, blue regeneration-like energy flowing form one to another. Both bodies then collapsed, Perfection's stone cold dead as the other body was just laying there. Suddenly with a gasp, The Master's body was moving.

"Always feels like a rush..." Zagreus muttered to himself, and then sifted through the memories. Okay so he was, for some reason a mindless entity with little memory. There were some echoes, but whatever it was, the entity had body jumped awhile ago. Ho hum.

Zagreus stood up and faced the portal to the normal universe. Whatever it was that was going to be on the other side, it was probably going to be a bunch of angry Time Lords. So it was there he picked up Perfection's body and then threw it through the portal.

The Time Lords would find a young female body fall right through first.

[Ramachulainn]

So the Time Lock was out. With the CIA sealing the room, the Chronosticator was out as well. As were the heavier weapons. Surprisingly, Dioshendwa took the news pretty well. Instead of ranting or snarling, he simply began servicing his stazer rifle with a tool kit he extracted from his belt.

"Even if we fail to kill him, we can at least keep him trapped in here until the rest of the CIA can find a more proper way to deal with this."

Captain Ramachulainn eyed the Superior. "Perhaps, but if we can't kill him with a single stazer rifle, I'm not certain that five more will make a difference. We should at least have obtained the..."

By now, Dioshendwa's rifle was in several glittering pieces on a low table.

"...rest of the weapons." He spun on his subordinate. "What are you doing?"

"Boosting the draw rate from the Eye," Dioshendwa replied, words indistinct around the neutron ram he held in his teeth. "Should fully recharge in about three seconds, if I do this right."

"And if you don't?"

A shrug. "I pull the trigger, and the squad's scraping cooked meat off the walls. If I'm lucky, there'll be enough left for me to Regenerate." The quarkhammer in his hand droned like a throat-singer. "If I have time, I'll boost the throughput as well."

Ramachulainn considered that, flicking a mental command to his own rifle to set for maximum power and minimum aperture. "If you get the chance," he decided, "do the others as well."

A body hurtled through the portal. Smoothly, the five Time Lords that hadn't disassembled their weapons spun and fired. Air was blasted into plasma and vacuum, the temperature of the room increased several degrees, and five actinic flashes a million times more destructive than mere lightning ravaged the intruding figure.

[Deleted]

If what Zagreus senses is true, that leaves one question on the minds of our readers.

Where has the real Master gotten to?

Was he still in the room with the rest of the trapped Time Lords?

Had he escaped?

Or was he never there at all, and simply cast a great hypnotic spell on the Guards and Agents of the CIA into thinking he was alive?

Would it matter? The Master was safely hidden away from the senses and the sights of the Time Lords there. He watched as his latest plan came to fruition. Things seemed to be going as he had predicted. To the Nth Degree.

Zagreus waits at the end of the world, For Zagreus is the end of the world, he thought to himself as his serpent-like eyes watched all that was there. But MY time is the end of time, And MY moment shall be time's undoing.

[Deleted]

As soon as the mess was clear, what remained of poor Lady Perfection would be practically nothing. However there was still a good amount of anti-time within the young woman's body through the transfer process, and the backlash acted like a bomb, as her anti-time blood spilled out and burst towards, letting out a loud crackle and searing migraines for those with time senses within a good few lightyears. There happened to even be small rips right through time, shining light from the Void.

Yeah, that's how destructive just the shell of a body would be. Imagine if Zagreus was actually shot and ripped apart. It may have been a good thing that the anti-time being was wanting to more or less stay alive. He pulled himself through the eye this time, in The Master's body.

""Would you like to know what happens when one gets too close to a crack in time?" His lips pulled back into a sneer.

[Ramachulainn]

((OOC: I'll clean this up once I post for real. I'm a little confused, right now. Is the Master now in the room, with Zagreus speaking through him? I want to make sure that I get the right level of panic for my character...))

[Deleted]

(OOC: To clarify, Zagreus has the Master's last clone body. But the Master himself didn't actually go to the Anti-Time Universe with his clone body when the Oubliette was activated. IE- Master snuck out of his body into his Morphant Deathworm form...Through the pukeslime he shot out at that one guy.)

[Ramachulainn]

He isn't dead, Ramachulainn realized, startled. "One of you geniuses," he said, "tell me how he isn't dead. Really, I want to know."

The shadow of the corpse they'd annihilated was burnt into the wall just to the right of the portal. And the Master stood there, big as life and twice as arrogant, sneering.

"Seriously, I want to know," Ramachulainn continued, checking the recharge time on his stazer. They'd expended the full capacitor charge on those shots, and the display simply confirmed what he already knew. 57 seconds and counting. "How does someone survive that?"

"Would you like to know what happens when one gets too close to a crack in time?" The Master sneered.

"Not really," Dioshendwa said, standing up and locking the final piece of his stazer in place with an audible click. The crystalline rifle began to emit a buzzing hum. "Now do us all a favor, and die."

He threw the rifle to his shoulder and depressed the firing stud. The room blazed white as the rifle - driven by an unfettered connection to the Eye of Harmony - emitted a ravening lance of incandescent fury, beside which a lightning bolt would be barely a candle.

[Deleted]

The Eye of Harmony was pure power, something that, while it would completely rip apart any creature, it would feed Zagreus pretty quickly. He took his time, to let the answer of the other Time Lords ring in his mind. Clearly they did not care, but at the same time, ruffling through some of the few memories that this… Master had, he was a criminal to them. Much like how he was.

"Seriously, I want to know... How does someone survive that?"

"By being a creature of anti-time and thus do not follow the laws of this universe." He humbly answered his question, ripping a crack in time behind him. "Be a smart little man and don't use 'time' as your weapon."

"Not really," The other Time Lord spoke up, uttering a rather typical McClain-esque line. "Now do us all a favor, and die."

"I warned you…" He yawned, peeling himself into the crack in time, thus traveling to a different part of the universe as the tears in space-time furled and unfurled. Anything could happen on either side...

"Zagreus is the Time Lords' shame,
The beast that they've been keeping..."

[Deleted]

The Superior covered his eyes as the flash from Dioshendwa's rifle filled the room. Only to be baffled as the weapon did nothing to "the Master". And now there was a rip in time, right there, to allow anyone from...wherever "the Master" was going to come waltzing into the heart of the CIA headquarters on Gallifrey. Worst possible security leak ever.

How had the Master gained these abilities so soon? he wondered. Sure, the passage of events in the Anti-Time Universe was different than their own, it could very well be asynchronous if anything. But none of the neverpeople were reported to have become this powerful. How-

And there it was. Right as "The Master" was leaving.

"Zagreus is the Time Lords' shame,
The beast that they've been keeping..."

Zagreus...Had the Master gained control of even that monster? It would make sense. It was the only thing currently making sense right now.

"Ramachulainn, there is no point in staying here, we must retreat," he said as he pulled out his remote and unlocked the door. "If your men can, have half of them go after the Master. Only observe the Master's actions wherever...wherever that crack may lead to. You and the other half must follow me to my office!"

"You!" he called to the other aide. "Get him-" he said pointing to the aide who was injured by the Master's earlier attack, "and bring him back to my office!"

Of course, however, the superior was the first to go running for the door. He had to report this to his own superiors. He may be reprimanded for this, but he could still recover from this.

Ever since the Doctor's encounter with the Neverpeople, the death of Coordinator Vansell, and the very incident involving Rassilon and Zagreus, the CIA's own R&D department have begun reconsidering the anti-time theory, and developed a few prototype weapons in the event the threat of Anti-Time ever came on Gallifrey's boarders again. Only downside...none of these prototypes have been tested yet.

The remaining aide reached down and picked up his unconscious co-worker. The Master's slime was still all over him, and the poor fella hadn't moved since the Master attacked him.

His body felt extremely cold at first. The aide almost thought his partner was dead. He checked his heartbeat. No pulse. Wait...there it was. It was very small though. His partner needed immediate medical treatment once they returned to their superior's office. He threw his partner over his shoulder, got up, and ran for the door, just as his boss was currently doing.

[Ramachulainn]

"Zagreus is the Time Lords' shame," the Master chanted, "the beast that they've been keeping..."

With that, Ramachulainn was forced to flinch as the Renegade tore a gaping hole through space-time and stepped through. "Rod and Eye!" he roared. "How did he survive that?"

Shendawaya had already lept into action. Both an Acolyte of the Aesculum and a Guardsman, he had earned the right to wear the green-bordered uniform of a Guard-Surgeon. And, right now, he was applying nerve blocks to Dioshendwa's wrists. The militant Guardsman's stazer had melted, coating his hands with superheated liquid quartz. "I... I don't know," Dioshendwa said through gritted teeth. "I could've cracked a TARDIS with that shot..."

"Ramachulainn, there is no point in staying here, we must retreat," the Superior called, edging towards the door. "If your men can, have half of them go after the Master. Only observe the Master's actions wherever...wherever that crack may lead to. You and the other half must follow me to my office!"

Ramachulainn the man wanted to tell the CIA operative to go look up a mallowmourn tree and see if he could find someone who'd take his orders there. But Captain Ramachulainn of the Chancellary Guard recognized the necessity of the man's request.

"Eyomimir," he said, gritting his teeth, "take Tarquetavala and Shendawaya, and follow the Master. Keep a constant feed to my disk, both through the rift and as an independent channel."

"Right, Captain."

"But, Dios..." Shendawaya started to protest.

"Will need extensive repair," Ramachulainn said, eying the hideous state of his second's hands. "There's nothing more you can do for him, without getting him to the Aesculum."

The three Guardsmen saluted, then approached the tear. After examining it for nearly a minute with the various sensors he carried, Eyomimir nodded. Trying not to look apprehensive, they followed after.

Ramachulainn followed the Superior, keeping a careful eye on the wounded Dios. As soon as they were clear of the shielded Oubliette Access Room, the activated his comms disk with a telepathic command. "Ramachulainn," he said, simply. "Medical transport required at CIA HQ."