Part One
Din Djarin’s mission was clear: bring the child to his
people – the Jedi.
Quite some time had passed since the Mandalorian found
the child on Arvala-7, having accepted a contract to retrieve him for Imperial clients.
It was a contract that Djarin never kept, forming a bond with the child and
protecting him from those in the galaxy that wished to collect on the high
bounty for him (and for Djarin as well). As a result, the child became a
Mandalorian foundling and a part of Djarin’s small clan – Clan Mudhorn.
The child sat with him in the cockpit of his gunship, the
Razor Crest, where he often enjoyed
playing with a knob from the controls. They were on a relatively casual flight
across the stars when Djarin noticed some activity just ahead of them. An
unusual nebula materialized. It was small at first, appearing nothing more than
a light mist in space. And then it grew bigger and bigger, until it turned into
a giant swirling vortex.
“What the…?!” Djarin exclaimed as he suddenly felt his
ship being pulled by the vortex, shaking violently. He briefly looked to the
child and told him, “Hang on, kid. I’m gonna get us out of this.” He did his
best to turn the Crest around and fly
away from the vortex, but its gravitational pull was so strong, there was
nothing more Djarin could do to avoid it.
The Crest was sucked right in, sending the gunship into a spiral that
overwhelmed its two passengers.
---------------------
Djarin awoke sometime later,
after falling into unconsciousness at some point during the spiral through the
vortex. He looked out the cockpit window and discovered they were back in
space. However, now they were in orbit of a blue watery planet. Djarin couldn’t
tell which one it was; after so many travels, they all sort of looked the same
to the Mandalorian.
The Crest had
been shut down from the rough ride, but it was nothing Djarin couldn’t handle.
His first priority was to make sure the child was alright. “You O.K., kid?”
When he turned to check on him, he was shocked to see that he wasn’t sitting in
his seat. Djarin shot up from the pilot’s chair, looking around the cockpit to
see if the child hadn’t been thrown into another part of it. It was relatively
small cabin space, so he wouldn’t have been flung too far.
Unfortunately, Djarin couldn’t see any sign of him in the
cockpit.
His next assumption was that the child woke up much
earlier than he did and wandered to another part of the ship. Following on
this, he walked out of the cockpit and into the cargo hold. As he walked in, he
was stopped cold once he noticed something that wasn’t there when they took
off: a blue box marked “police box.”
“Where did you
come from?” he wondered aloud as he descended the ladder and approached the
blue box, his blaster drawn.
One of the box’s doors was opened, inviting the cautious
Mandalorian to walk right into a space that was somehow much bigger than the
box itself. Passing through the doorway, he stepped inside of a bizarre room
that hummed with life, supported by six coral pillars arranged in a hexagonal
pattern that met at the room’s ceiling. The walls were golden with small
hexagonal impressions. Djarin walked up a red-tiled ramp leading from the doors
to a hexagonal platform. On the platform was a second, circular platform. A set
of seats were situated on the other side of the platform.
Sitting in one of the seats was a young blonde, and
sitting on her lap was the child.
Djarin aimed his blaster at the woman’s head and
demanded, “Hand him over.”
The blonde turned her head, her ponytail swinging from
the motion. Her fresh young face, basked with a delightful smile as she played
with the child, had now transfixed into a mortified glower.
“There’s no need for that,” he heard a man’s accented
voice tell him. It spoke from beyond the control console situated at the center
of the platform. It concealed the figure of a man standing over six feet tall
with pale blue eyes, strong cheekbones, and dark brown hair that he wore
close-cropped. He also had rather large ears. He looked to his blond companion
and ordered, “Hand the baby over, Gen.”
“Sure…I would’ve gladly
done it anyway, if I didn’t have a
gun pointed at my head,” the snarky blonde remarked, getting up from her seat
and handing the child back to Djarin. She gave one last gentle smile to the
child before glaring at his Mandalorian guardian.
Holstering his blaster, Djarin gazed over the bizarre
room again. “What kind of ship is this?”
“It’s called a TARDIS – short for ‘Time And Relative Dimension
In Space’,” the man said while approaching Djarin with his hand outstretched
for a handshake. “I’m the Doctor, by the way.” He then gestured to his blond
companion. “This is Neas, but she goes by ‘Gen’ in this version of her.”
“Version?” Djarin hung on the word, looking at Gen.
“You’re a Clawdite?”
“I’m a Time Lord,” Gen retorted, still harboring ill-will
towards Djarin for the blaster. She nodded to the Doctor and added, “And so is
he.”
“I’ve never heard of your kind before,” Djarin admitted.
“You wouldn’t have,” the Doctor told him. “No Time Lords
exist in this reality… and none exist
in ours either.” He spoke with much solemnity on that last detail.
Djarin still couldn’t get past the strange dimensions of
the blue box. “How did you get this ‘ship’ of yours into mine while we were in
transit? You couldn’t have bypassed the docking ramp from outside…could you?”
“The TARDIS can travel anywhere in anyplace at any time,”
Gen explained.
“That, of course, is beside the point of our discussion,”
the Doctor dodged. “The wormhole your ship was caught in…tell us about it.”
“Worm…hole?” Djarin never heard such a term to describe
what he had seen moments ago. “You mean that weird vortex that took us in? All
I know about it is that we were lucky to have still been in one piece after we
passed through it.” He gazed hard on the two Time Lords and inquired, “Why? Do
either of you know more about it?”
After a moment’s pause, Gen told him, “It was a tear in
the fabric of space and time. The Doctor and I have been randomly finding them
throughout different time periods of this dimension…and they get bigger much
further into the future.”
The disbelieving Djarin shook his helmeted head. “What
you’re saying is impossible. No one can travel through time.”
Just as he addressed this fact, the TARDIS lurched in
correspondence with the lurching of the Crest.
It drew the Mandalorian, the child, and the Time Lords out of the blue box,
back into the cargo hold, and into the cockpit. Through the cockpit window,
they saw that the Crest was being
hauled via tractor beam towards a battleship.
Djarin couldn’t believe his own eyes when he analyzed the
make of the battleship. “That’s a Trade Federation ship,” he indicated. “But
one hasn’t been in operation in over thirty years!”
No comments:
Post a Comment