(Second part of the story! Exploring Ross's near past <happening around the 51st century, three thousand years into our future>)
“Ross. Ross! Rosslinchaequentenoa!” Ross jerked her head off her glowing desk vid-screen to find the face of Professor Ameuress staring down at her. Ah, Rassilon’s rod! I must have dozed off again! She cursed silently to herself as other students pretended not to notice the exchange. “How do you expect to pass your exams if you spend nearly half your time sleeping, hmm? Don’t you want status as a Time Lady?” Ross collected herself and made an attempt to ward off any more threats.
“Yes, of course, I do. Sorry. It’s just I had a late night with this one paper and---” she began but was cut off by Ameuress. Give her the chance to make an example of you and she would strike just as surely as a silverfish with a helpless flutterwing fallen from its perch.
“I’m sorry, does that make it okay to fall asleep in my class? If you need more time for your other classes, I’m sure some can be given you, but if the history of our world, the valuable story of our proud heritage, of those brave pioneers who forged their way through space and time itself and founded our great society, is not of importance to you then, by all means, go back to sleep.” The steamed professor gave her a long hard look and continued. “But if you’re even thinking of establishing a place in Time Lord society, I suggest you take some notes. Or I suppose I could always fail you now?”
For a few seconds Ross just gaped at her. Ross wanted to stand up and yell in Ameuress’s face. What?! Excuse me? Did you just threaten to flunk me because I accidentally fell asleep though a dull speech about how wonderful our oh-so-great founding father Rassilon was? But instead she just said “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. And I never said history was unimportant.”
“Never said you did.” The cranky professor retorted, flipping her black hair back in annoyance. “But you could at least pretend to take some interest.” And with this last remark, she turned and stomped back to the center of the hexagonally vaulted room. All around Ross, fellow students raised their eyebrows in common bewilderment. The professor’s new regeneration must have made her a tad more cranky than normal. Before the punishment for falling asleep in class had been a loud clearing of the throat and a hard, meaningful look, but lately she had vamped up the reprimands.
For another hour Ross forced herself to pay attention to the Triumphs Of Rassilon, explained in painful detail, then bolted from the room as soon as the six tower bells started ringing. Though classes had ended for the day, she was not yet ready to head up to her quarters. First to talk to Professor Kranssen, completely opposite to Ameuress in almost every way and by far her favorite. In less than a week he would be taking twelve lucky students back through time and somewhere in space to demonstrate stellar manipulation, specifically how to create a black hole. Academics aside, it offered the chance to leave Gallifrey far, far behind, at least for a while. She had only seen the poster advertising this unique field trip yesterday, and though it was probably too late, she had to go. She had to get off Gallifrey or, by the great and mighty rod of Rassilon, she was going to lose it!
As Ross raced across one of the many expansive courtyards, she almost plummeted into a group of first years entering through the far gate. Quickly traversing them, she slid through the closing gates and sprinted down a horridly long corridor, up a vast flight of spiral stairs, down another corridor, through two short-range transmat stations, one that to her irritation led even further from her intended destination and the second which thankfully brought her within the general area of Kranssen’s office. She arrived just as he was leaving, speaking a string of seemingly unrelated words to his voice print locking door. Ross Skidded to a halt and sputtered for breath, “Professor *huff* Kranssen, I need to *huff* I need---”
“Need to catch your breath, apparently” he said chuckling. After all that running, her hearts beat violently, both dangerously close to exploding. “Here.” He gestured to an ornately designed bench that had conveniently scuttled over and settled itself next to Kranssen’s door at some point during the day. “Shall we sit while you gather your thoughts and allow your blood pressure to return to normal?” The bench shuffled and tapped an irritated talon on the marbled floor as the two Time Lords settled down on either side of its long wooden seat. Ross reflected on how moody the furniture was around the Academy. Much more so than those of her House. On her first year here, she was given a room with aggravatingly active furniture which would surreptitiously rearrange itself while she slept if only just to confuse her the following morning.
“Felling better?” Kranssen peered inquiringly at her.
Ross smiled back, finally able to speak coherently now that there was no need to gasp for breath. “Yes, thank you. Much better.”
“Sounded to me like you needed something.”
“Yes actually.” Ross felt the urgency to escape bubbling through her veins. “I wanted to talk to you about the stellar manipulation demonstration tour coming up in the next couple of days.” She could no longer keep the hope from her voice. “And I know that you’ve probably already chosen a group of students, but if someone doesn’t come through perhaps you’d consider signing me up?” With this, Ross held her breath and waited for the reply
A ridiculously pathetic expression must have been plastered to her face, for Kranssen just raised an eyebrow and looked inquisitively at her for a good minute before answering. “You know, Ross, you’re not the first one to ask. I’ve got about twenty other students waiting for my answer as well, some of them much older than you and well on their way to becoming stellar technicians.” Ross’s hearts sank as she realized this was the kindest way he could tell her no. After a short pause he continued. “However,” at the sound of his tone, a tiny twinge of hope came fluttering back, “I’ve seen how hard you work in my class and have already considered you as an applicant. You’re a good student, as I know, but it has come to my attention scores in some of your other classes are lacking. One being your history class, if I’m not mistaken?” Ross growled silently to herself in loathing. Ameuress! I should have known you’d tell my favorite professor!
Ross smoothed down her crimson robes in an attempt to maintain composure. “… It’s not my strongest subject, no.” tearing her concentration from a particularly fascinating anomaly that was a lose string, she beseeched him once again as a final attempt. “I may not have the best marks, but Professor Ameuress hates me, and I don’t see the point in knowing every single detail of about a million years of Gallifrey’s history when there’s so much more out there to see. There are zillions of planets out there teaming with life and breathtaking beauty no one’s even discovered yet. Nebulas and supernovas and events throughout time that I’ve only read about but have dreamed of witnessing since I was young. Wormholes and black holes and fascinating creatures of every shape and size. I want to see it. All of it. I want to travel the stars, back and forward through time. I just don’t want to be stuck to Gallifrey forever.” Belatedly, Ross stopped herself from going on, as she certainly could have. She’d just poured out her oldest and fondest desire to a man she had only known for five years, and only then as a student-teacher relationship. A flash of empathy and regret passed momentarily through the old professor’s eyes.
“I felt the same at your age” he said quietly, but as soon as the moment passed he cleared his throat and stood, back to business. “I’ll think about it, of course. But I suggest you start improving your history score if you’re really serious about this stellar manipulation trip. If I were you, I’d talk to Professor Ameuress about extra work. Never know, it might pay off.” Turning to leave, he gave a wink and a nod and strode off to attend other business, his red robes swishing around his feet. Ross remained sitting, watching him grow smaller and smaller and finally turn a corner, out of sight. Karn, the larger of the two suns in the binary star system, was setting over the distant jagged peek of Mt. Lung, filling the corridor with a deep orange glow, casting long blue shadows along the marble floor. She couldn’t believe it. He had already considered her?! Though Ross hated the prospect of spending even more time filling her head with facts and figures about Rassilon, Omega and a zillion other horridly boring things involved in the planet’s history, her mind was already made up. A renewed determination pushed her to her feet and propelled her in a beeline to the office of the dreaded Professor Ameuress, that is if zipping through a few transmats, turning left and right down long and short corridors, climbing two flights of stairs and descending another could be called a ‘beeline.’
At the end of an extensively long hallway, lined on either side with vaulted floor-to-ceiling windows, the door, behind which Professor Ameuress inevitably brooded over students’ research papers, stood ajar. The determination, which had heroically spurred her on up to this point, quickly fell away, leaving Ross to tiptoe the last few yards, as if a very full minefield lay just beneath the shining stone floor. The distance between herself and the opposing door disappeared much too quickly for her liking, and soon the door handle was within her grasp. Taking a moment’s reminder of why this insane happenstance would be worth it in the end, she sucked in great lung’s full of air, seized the handle with both hands and pulled the wretched thing open. Before Ross had a chance to open her mouth, Professor Ameuress, buried behind a massive volume, her black hair now tied back into a braid, held up a finger for silence, forcing Ross to stand awkwardly in the doorway for another three minutes before peering bespectacled over the top of the paper and leather relic and simply saying, “Yes?”
Luckily, those three minutes gave Ross just enough time to gather her thoughts on what exactly she was going say. “Professor Ameuress, I know we’re not on the best of terms at the moment, but I’d like to rectify my, erm… laziness and lack of interest by doing…” oh, boy, this is it, “extra work. And I would seriously be more than grateful if, because of my hard work, you’d raise my mark in the class.” For the second time that day, she found herself holding her breath, waiting for a reply that would seal her fate.
“Extra work? I suppose as we do live in a civilized, highly advanced, democratic society, forged by millennia of hard working Gallifreyans, I can’t really deny you that request, can I?” Slipping off her glasses and swiveling around in her chrome chair, Ameuress put years of telekinetic practice to good use. From a high shelf in the back of the room, a small blue cube gracefully floated down into the Professor’s waiting palm. Facing back to front, she held out the crystalline cube to Ross, who took it, a slight feeling of dread building in her stomach. It was a datacube of compressed information, or in this case extra work, especially designed to rob unlucky students and politicians alike of every last ounce of sleep. How this was a remedy for falling asleep in classes was a mystery to her. Nonetheless if it meant earning a better grade in history to therefore earn a seat on the stellar manipulation time ship, she would eat enough Cacava plant to keep herself awake for a decade. “That should keep you busy. No time travel. No assistance from cousins. Trust me, I’ll know about it. My desk, Drasday morning.” And without another word, Ameuress obscured her face once again behind the cracking leather spine of the ancient history volume.
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