Minisode 1 - The TARDIS’s New Desktop
The Professor stood at the console of the new TARDIS console room, letting himself take in all of the new sights and sounds that echoed around him, letting him feel and experience everything new that the TARDIS had cobbled together just for him. They had just left Lily’s home, and Lily had quickly left for the corridors to see her old room, back where she had left it all those years ago, and to see what she needed to do in order to update it to fit her current needs, which had left the Professor to explore the new console room in full while Lily was distracted.
The Professor always had a fascination, almost a love, towards the older style of console rooms, where the console room, while feeling like a sort of meeting place for the pilot and other passengers, it felt like a sort of common area for everyone involved, with things that could decorate the walls and built and hidden all around the room, a sort of old mansion, with hidden compartments, and such. The Coral design filled him with such indescribable angle for his unnecessary everything felt about how it grew and presented itself, and while the more toybox-ish or gear-shaped console rooms were big enough to show off the TARDIS’s majesty and overall grandeur and overwhelming presence, it did feel like someone was compensating for something whenever the console rooms were far larger than what was required.
So here he was, in the console room of his TARDIS, a classic eight walled design. Behind him, the door to the TARDIS was in perfect shine, with a gigantic window peering out of the mirror on the other side, a one way mirror, in order to protect the occupants inside and finally, for the first time, allow the Professor to see outside of the TARDIS without having to turn on the scanner. Following along to the right, the wall was covered with big, ancient white roundels, showing off with it, and stretching around the room behind all of the furniture which was placed around the room, were beautiful darkened wood walls, which kept the light at just the perfect temperature as to not blind anyone as they stepped into the console room, especially given how pale and gray the floors were, a much more simple and cold design when compared to the walls making up the console room all around him.
Against the wall right of the door out of the TARDIS, was an elegant red velvet chair, a chair that has seen more than a half dozen Professor incarnations and still somehow survived multiple internal TARDIS regenerations, including more than once when the Professor regenerated inside the console room, with it being a witness to the event. Next to the beautiful chair, was an end table with an hourglass frame, a small lamp sitting on top of it, almost ironic for it to be inside the console room of a Timelord’s TARDIS.
Next to the chair, continuing on the right, is a floor to ceiling bookcase, full of books and trinkets from all across the multiverse, telling stories and locations from all sorts of places, all organized and set up to make it look as colorful as possible, except for the bottom shelf, in which besides books, and some small trinkets, and the cherry candy collection jar, in the center, sat a little chest, which if it were to be scanned, would read as if it wouldn’t exist, as if the space itself were empty.
This, is the current resting place of the Professor’s journal, the collection of all of the Professor’s notes, theories, and stories of the people and places he has been to on his travels, bloated with so much paper inserted into it that it eventually became a hassle just to carry it on his person in the last incarnation, and so he keeps it protected and locked within his TARDIS until it is necessary to use. However, he kept that single bit of information secret. As he had learned, it is better to have people think you have a trump card on your person, then know you have the trump card in hiding, especially given the ways some villains like to play mind games onto others.
Next to the bookshelf, continuing on the right, were three pieces of furniture all clinging to one wall like some kind of “three’s a crowd” joke and trying to find someplace to fit themselves. An old Grandfather clock that ran at odd intervals and ticked at random times, as it slowly tried to fix itself. A Jukebox that ran itself off of cassettes, and a storage area in the middle for some of the most used tapes, unless the TARDIS needed to use a particular song and the tape just “magically” found its way inside the jukebox and began to play, and a very old piece of TARDIS tech that the Professor found useful in the last couple of regenerations, the Astral map projector, or in some situations, a Time-Space visualizer, in which he was able to see where they were in the multiversal void, after a large amount of tinkering and reworking that was needed in order for it to work.
Close by to these three pieces of tech was the single fully visible roundel on the wall, slightly popped open, revealing a node with an empty hole where something once used to be. This, like a hunter showing off its prize mounted on the wall, was where the chameleon circuit once was plugged in, which would have allowed the TARDIS to change its shape to anything that was required in order to blend into the local environment. Rather, it would have, if it had not snapped the chip in two and sent the remains into a black hole, never to be seen or heard from again, leaving the TARDIS free reign to rework the outer shell as she saw fit through backchannels and other such methods, which is how the exterior was able to stay in it’s wardrobe like state.
Next on the wall tour comes to the wall where the gigantic scanner was, where almost half the wall is a set in sliding wall where a classic scanner is set into the wall, opened to show the sparking stars of some universe they are currently inside, while along the scanner, on either side, were these ornate, carved flourishes, painted in gold like the gold trim the mirror outside is surrounded by, giving it just enough light that makes it look like it is lighting up the scanner, like some kind of inset frame for the old inset scanner.
Following next on the wall tour, was the door leading into the corridors, surrounded all around by something more important to the Professor, far more important to him, are the pictures of him and his companions over the years surrounding it. Pictures of his family, of his life, all for him to look at and smile and remember, at least more of the good times than of the bad, a connection to his memories, a physical manifestation of them, if he never needed to reflect upon his life or needed to think. He always found that even though they aren’t with him at this moment, they still always offered him good advice in the hardest of struggles. They were his family, after all. At least, he thought of them as such.
Next on the tour of the walls which contained the console room, on the right of the door leading into the corridors and the collection of photos, was that of a wall full of little odds and ends, like buttons, switches, and everything else that could make up an old fashioned fault locator, another ancient TARDIS device made redundant with time and upgrades, but has found new life as extra and additional controls for the TARDIS when it comes to troubleshooting, repair work of any kind, big or small, or even something as simple as needing extra power from other systems. In general terms, the controls on this wall were that of an engineering station, a monitoring station for the TARDIS to check over its systems and make sure that everything is running smoothly.
Nearing the end of the wall tour, we have the wall dominated by one central object, an internal desk, with shelving and cabinets for use in a wide variety of means, all cobbled together to make it look as presentable as possible, with little added in things for convenience, like more storage for cassette tapes for the jukebox, a typewriter for quick notes or forged papers to blend into certain universes they land in, and even a few tools and a toolbox for more repair work, which when you are traveling in a TARDIS, a lot of times, you end up having to do repairs on the fly during an escape, a chase, or any number of other situations.
Finally, comes the centerpiece of the entire console room. For a console room cannot be called as such without a console within, the control system of the TARDIS itself, and one of the most important areas of the TARDIS being as a whole. If the Eye could be considered a TARDIS’s heart, then the console could be considered a sort of temporal lobe, the part of the brain which reads and interprets information for the rest of the sentient being.
A lot like the room as a whole, The Professor had a certain heartful fondness for when it came to the classic designs of the consoles for which he used to pilot the TARDIS. Specifically, the coral designed console always looked like the mushroom throne of the Caterpillar from Wonderland, with the console bit being the throne and the rotor playing the role of the Caterpillar looming over everything with the crystals rising and falling within playing the part of its arrogant, unamused expression.
So, as a final centerpiece of the room, the console was that of a much older model, around the model of the 5th Doctor’s first TARDIS console design, even right down to matching to the walls by being made out of a more wooden base and exterior, with a cap on top of the hexagonal like time rotor, to protect it as it fell down, to stop it from any damage coming into the console room, but also to stop the Professor from putting anything on top of it and treating the time rotor like some kind of impromptu shelf for clutter.
As the Professor stood at the console, taking in all of his surroundings and taking in slow breaths, finally, for the first time since he was in this incarnation, given how he had to escape from an invading Ergon searching to destroy him, and then having to help out one of his oldest friends with a Rani who had long since given up any subtlety and somehow developed an even worse moral code when it came to beings she saw as lesser than herself, finally he could take in a breath or two and relax.
He had a friend with him once again, one of his oldest friends, to give her a few stories to tell around a campfire and give her a retirement tour to put her mind at ease and to give her a proper thank you since the people she worked with treated her like dirt and threw her away like trash for no concernable reason besides not following protocol as he could see.
He had, in all intents and purposes, a brand new TARDIS, freshened up and remodeled down to the very look of the exterior, all ready and able to travel the multiverse and search for new stories to see and new people to help, and hope beyond hope that no one else decides to try and blast a hole the size of a watermelon through the front door trying to find a way to get at the pilot and passengers within.
Finally, he had a new face, courtesy of the Ergon and its hunt to try and destroy him by order of his master, as he was sure of, since he was able to continue to exist, which told him one terrifying prospect about the current state of affairs.
Somewhere, out there in the void, who knows where…
Omega still lurked.
Omega survived the war, and was able to escape both Gallifrey’s dual destructions, but the final days of the war, and who knows what else in order to survive onward, and now, he has begun to search and destroy what he deems are threats to his “legacy”, whatever it could be after the truths about his crimes and the crimes of the other 2 founders of Gallifrey became common knowledge.
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