The Master's Game (Doctor Who)

A traveler's heart

The Master showed her the hollow planet Hiek Mejar. Almost a third of its surface had been blown away and the hole reached down right to its core at some points. And all the way down cities were built into the walls and a rather exotic, mostly aerial wildlife had evolved. Some animals looked like giant flying stingrays, covered in fur, others like dinosaurs, but with strange glowing tentacles. They didn't travel all the way down. Just to a black market inside the petrified shell of a gigantic egg, where the Master got a tiny chip from a shabby looking inhabitant with six furry arms and a face like a mantis. He also let Roka steal some valuable trinkets from other merchants, which they later just flung into the abyss one by one. Just for the fun of it.

Another time they spent nearly three weeks on a planet called Ghiburo, where the Master charmed himself into the political ranks of a small country, just to get the codes to a bunker filled with collected alien tech. Roka didn't ask why, when he revealed his rather complex plan to her. She knew only two things: Never would she be able come up with something elaborate like that, and it was a lot of fun to dissect his plans to find small gaps and possible exploitable holes in them. In the end she saved them two whole months. She also managed to twist some lethal parts of those plans in a way that made killing a few people a lot more ineffective than keeping them alive. Earning herself many mean looks and annoyed grunts that she only commented with wicket grins. The Master might have been a genius and all, but he thought way too complicated and chaotic oftentimes.

After that they visited the obsidian desert of Kh'ra. A planet that used to be covered in sand, but the sun had gotten so hot that it had melted it all into black glass, forming alien pillars and shapes all around. Without the TARDIS they would have just burned in the heat. The underground was honeycombed with tunnels that's walls were engraved with alien and ancient symbols and pictures. Roka ran her fingers over it, fascinated by the thought that something had lived here once. A small pile of red shimmering crystals was what the Master took with him, before he threw a side-glance at Roka and went exploring the tunnels with her for some hours, telling her of the civilization that once used to live in them.

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Right now though she sat in the research room again, watching the Master build a small device. He had wanted a second set of data from the Sirhanotchi chamber, only to find something peculiar.

"Uhm... it's gone." He looked perplex at the scan that showed none of the floating matter from the first. "Your glitch... fixed itself."

Roka sat on the chair next to him and after a short moment of shock she sighed. "No, it didn't. Ever since I entered the TARDIS there are sometimes... like windows in time where the glitch seems to have no effect. Usually lasts for a day, sometimes two. But then it gets back to 'normal'."

"Hm... could be related to your frozen time stream." He compared the new scan with the first one.

"Those were also the times I went out with the Doctor," she reminisced and couldn't keep herself from comparing those memories.

They weren't chasing after adventures as the Doctor always did. They also weren't constantly hanging around earth. In fact, not for a single second. And when the Doctor always looked out for crowds of people, the Master actually avoided them for the most part. It was very different to travel with him, but she didn't regret it. Right now she saw a side of him that was totally unexpected to her. All Roka knew so far about him had been the Doctor's stories, and slowly she started to realize that those formed a very incomplete picture. All those places they visited and all the stories the Master told her about them... at one, or probably many, points in his life he must have discovered them all. It also got obvious that he had spent more than just a few hours at some of those. Sometimes even years, what proved once more that he had a lot more patience than the Doctor.