The Frozen Hunter (OPEN)

"No, no no no no!"

Rhydian Martis, frustrated, shook the weird wrench-looking device he called a 'Multi-Spanner' in his hand vigorously. One minute, the sonic probe/Vortex Manipulator had a 100% lock on a time disturbance that rippled through the Earth's most disrupting place; London. That place seemed to be a magnet for all sorts of time disturbances, Rhydian thought before trying to track down the source. The next minute, the time disturbance disappeared completely off the grid. At least, in this timezone anyway.

Rushing into a nearby restaurant and dashing into the lavatories (he needed a safe place to disappear without being noticed), Rhydian enclosed himself in a cubicle, the bathroom empty of people but the faint yet audible sounds of cutlery being used outside the door. Frantically, he tried to get a lock on the signal once more, fiddling with switches on his Multi-Spanner and combining the use of professional tinkering and smacking the back-side of the Spanner on his open palm, it started to beep wildly, indicating a source had been locked onto.

"Ahah! Gotcha!" He said, wildly yet determined and pressed the button to transport him to the disturbance. In an instant, a terrifyingly electrical instant, he was gone, leaving only a lightning-like aura inside the cubicle.

Rhydian emerged in a crowded street corner, where, due to his short, fourteen-year-old stature, nobody in their fancy suits and dresses and leather jackets walking through seemed to notice. Ugh, Rhydian thought. More bloody crowds. Obviously he didn't have much of a liking towards the sort.

He was only snapped out of his grumbling thoughts by the sounds of beeping from his Multi-Spanner, still in his hand and slightly warm from the use of the Vortex Manipulator. He twirled around (as best as he could in a crowd of people) and after a 360 degree turn, he found where the source was coming from. At least he was in the right time-zone, but since his Multi-Spanner couldn't get a definitive lock, it took him somewhere around the whereabouts of the time anomaly.

Rhydian dashed off in the general direction of the source, using his Spanner as a guide. It was imperative he would find the source of this and either neutralize it or stabilize it, since London already had enough cracks in time already. He visited Coal Hill School in 2016 once, met a chap called Charlie. He was a Rhodian, he was. Nice species, until they were wiped out. Apparently he and his team had been told to protect the Earth by orders from the Doctor. Typical Doctor, always leaving the humans to everything.

Shaking his thoughts and concentrating on the task at hand, Rhydian burst off into yet another crowd of people on a city street, the old worn buildings around him only fuzzy, his eyes focused on his Spanner. Yells of 'Hey!' and 'watch where you're goin'!" were cast about him as he pushed through the busy people, not caring less. Finally, he got so close to it that he didn't notice it past right to the left of him; an average girl in a... bathrobe?

Rhydian looked confused. The source was supposed to be right here. His eyebrows furrowed, very confused, until he slowly turned to his left, in realisation, that a girl in a bloody bathrobe was making his Multi-Spanner go wild with readings, all affirmative of 'This is the time anomaly!'

"Hang on..." Rhydian said slowly, squinting at the blonde. "Hmmm..." He said, mumbling something about time disturbances, shutting the alarms off the Multi-Spanner and using the aformentioned object to scan her from head to toe, oblivious of his social conduct, something he despised.

Rhydian eyed the girl strangely as she entered a store labelled Henrik's (he knew those chain stores around the place; London, mostly. He never payed attention to all those boring shopping mall fill-ups), not only because she was strutting around a busy street in nothing but her bathrobe (why?) and that she was giving off some... intricate readings.

Rhydian's eyes squinted slightly at the results his scans from his Multi-Spanner had given him on the out-of-place woman. He detected the time disturbances alright, they were all there and in flying colours, however there was also something else.

Dimensional residue.

Was that correct? Rhydian wondered as he put the scan results closer to his eyes and cocked his head in the process, shaking the Multi-Spanner in the process but to no avail. These readings weren't wrong. His device was always reliable, but there were times he wished it wasn't. He, once again, was brought to the attention of the girl leaving the store with some new clothes, proper clothes. Phew, at least he didn't have to worry about his image, however young he was, stalking a girl in a bathrobe on the streets of London.

This was new, and Rhydian couldn't get his mind off it. If this was dimensional residue radiating off of this girl, then it was certainly in large quantities. Rhydian recited from his knowledge: Dimensional residue only appears on a person or object when it has travelled through the barrier of one universe, passed through the void and entered another. Considering this and the amount of residue on this girl, she had been doing this for a long time.

But it didn't make any sense at all, Rhydian thought. Each time one travels across dimensions and universes they leave a hole in the said universes that one travelled to and fro. Depending on the method of travel, sometimes it can leave big holes, holes that he didn't have the faintest idea how to fix. If this girl had this much of this stuff dripping off of her then the amount of damage that could have been dealt to this and countless other worlds...

Rhydian ran towards the girl, who was already starting to blend into the background of people, she just simply was absorbed into the crowds like a drop of water does into a pond. Rhydian, eventually weaving and ducking past numerous other businessmen, temps, whatever, he finally reached the back of the blonde and promptly tapped her on the shoulder, hoping she'd notice.

"How many times?" Rhydian half-stuttered from the running, but seriousness evident in his voice, "How many times have you travelled between dimensions? Oh, better question, how the bloody hell did you do it?" His Australian accent was also kicking through in exhasperation.

Rhydian was utterly speechless when his arm was swiftly whipped from its previous position and his body flung against a wall of a nearby building on the street. He wasn't exactly prepared for combat, and his lack of strength wasn't helping either. He processed the questions that he was given and out of instinct was offended by her honestly not-so-outrageous accusations given the circumstances.

"Who the hell am I?" Rhydian repeated, bemused and a little ticked off, "I'm the person that's tracking down a ginormous space-time disturbance and right now you're the one emitting those distortions." Rhydian brought the Multi-Spanner inches from the girl's face. "See that? That right there is a reading far beyond whatever I've seen, you've been hopping across dimensions and frankly that's so brilliantly irresponsible that I could have you taken in by Order 45c of the Shadow Proclamation and- Oi, I'm the one answering the questions, you give me answers and I'll give you mine!"

Rhydian sighed, his panting subsiding. Obviously frantically blurting out information like a hyperactive barking dog wasn't going to help, and it looked kind of weird when a woman probably close to double his age was pinning him against a wall.

"Could you just let me do-" Rhydian was about to ask her to quietly lower him off the wall when a figure of speech from the girl's interrogation caught his mind in a flurry of putting two and two together. Time disturbances coming from her, and...

'You with those bloody statue things that got me here?' The girl's voice echoed through his mind.

"Hang on, did you say Statues?" Rhydian, realising the danger of the situation, widened his eyes and in a bout of strength forced himself free by sliding underneath the blonde and ducking to her right.

"Statues? Statues that sent you back in time, correct?" Rhydian asked in a rhetorical manner because he already knew the answer. "Oh no, this is not good. Not good at all...!" He brought the Multi-Spanner to his face again and fiddled relentlessly with the switches and controls, trying to make sense of the situation. It all made sense now, this girl was sent back in time from a touch from a Weeping Angel. He had read about Weeping Angels in his father's information bank. They were described as intensely hostile and were to be destroyed on sight. If that was even possible. Suddenly flipping around to face Rose again, he started.

"The statues, did they look like angels? Grey, stone angels with wings, right? And they'd move, faster than you could blink, and always stood still when you looked at them?" Rhydian fired questions at the girl, hoping she'd answer this time. He pointed his Multi-Spanner at her again and took a more thorough scan. "Oh, they would've had a field day with you. According to my scans, you've got a hell of a lot of time residue, a tell-tale sign of time travel. You've time travelled as well as jumped dimensions, haven't you? Oh, you're just a bloody one-in-all value pack, you are!"

"Completely legal and safe? I doubt that, given the amount of dimensional residue you've been carting around for God knows how long. You realise that stuff is left around the place and allows for other people to track you? Not to mention the creatures that actually feed off that nasty gunk, too? They could just use your residue as an endless food supply, and breeding ground, and-" Rhydian sighed again, even more exhasperated than before. His hormone-raged mind was getting overwhelmed, and he didn't want to go on rambling again.

Rhydian ignored the comment on his 'scary' factor, only acknowledging it with a single scoff as he took his Multi-Spanner again and took an area-wide scan including both time and space, and according to them the area had been chock-a-block full of all sorts of time disturbances, recent and from the past. Not surprising, this city along with the entirety of Earth as it seemed with aliens, was a hot-spot for Weeping Angels and the like. He remembered when the Reapers came to Jupiter a few weeks back (in his perspective) in 2876, and to defeat them he had to call in a specialist from another universe that developed an exterminator for them, like bacteria cleanser to... well, bacteria. But that wasn't the point.

"Oh, and don't call me 'Little boy'." Rhydian scowled at the name; he never liked being looked down upon, like some sort of child. Well, he was a child and he recognised it but both his intellect and experience was far from a child-like state. The whole of time and space does that to a kid. When the blonde asked him a question along the lines of 'How come you're doing this? You're too young." (One he had recieved countless times before), he stopped completely in his tracks, narrowing his eyes at the footpath ahead of him and pocketed his Multi-Spanner, then swivelled on his heel to face the girl staring at her with cold eyes.

"I do it not because of the thrill. Not because of the danger. Not even to save the universe. It's to fill a role, a role which was never fully completed. My father was a Time Agent in the late 51st Century, and he abandoned his magnificently dangerous and exotic life for an ordinary woman in the 21st who just so happened to become my mum. My dad, he..." Rhdyian stopped again, tears threatening to spike from the corners of his eyes, but he managed to keep it under control albeit a little spillage, "My dad died in that life, fighting for my mum. For her town, for her country, for the world. For that world, not his. He never graduated as a retired Time Agent, no. I found his Vortex Manipulator, that spanner you saw me using. It was the only real thing apart from a few items that he had left on Earth, dormant, just waiting for someone like me to come around and use it. I've got a whole life ahead of me, and I realised that his journey was never completed. It is my liberty to finish what he started."

Rhydian this time, took a deep breath and let it all out, feeling somewhat relieved that all this emotion, along with some stress, was off his chest. Sticking his hand out into a shake, Rhydian started again, "My name's Rhydian. Rhydian Martis. I'm not doing what I'm necessarily supposed to do, I'm not doing what I necessarily want to do, but I'm doing what I can do. And that's filling the void that my father left. Which, I guess, includes saving the universe time and again, filling the void the Time Lords left when they were destroyed."

Rhydian smiled calmly, glad that the minor feud was over, and kindly took the piece of paper with Rose's number on it and put it in his inner jacket pocket. "Thanks. Nice to meet you, Rose Tyler. I do have a cellphone, yeah. Didja say Vortex Manipulator? Funny, cuz that's exactly what this is." Rhydian raised and rattled the Multi Spanner in his hand. "I call it a Multi-Spanner, 'cause it also has a miniature sonic probe attached to it, which gets rather handy." Rhydian remembered reading something, an opinion on an article that was stored on his info-pad on the vortex manipulator.

"I do recall reading something about the Vortex Manipulators." Rhydian said after a short while, "I can't remember exactly... ah, yes! 'Cheap and nasty time travel', I think it was. It was a sort of opinions column on the legality of the things. Oh well, whoever that person was, he must have a better alternative." Rhydian rolled his eyes. He pocketed his Multi-Spanner, but didn't quite set off yet.

Rhydian didn't know what was up with this girl, but for some reason she had an aura of goodness about her, like there was no trace of evil of any sort. Not only being very head-strong, she seemed like the gold-hearted hero in every fairy tale. Maybe it was the time or dimension residue, Rhydian didn't know, but he was sure of this feeling, like he could trust her (although he took into account that she didn't very easily).

"I understand about not trusting people, too." Rhydian finally said, "-Ish. I'm naturally a very sceptical person, and jumping around the universe doesn't help that. But I had learnt not to be too skeptical nor naive at the same time."

"Thanks. Thank you, really, I don't usually get that sorts of comments directed towards me. When I'm off on other planets and such I just seem to..." Rhydian was cut off by a shrill beeping noise coming from his Multi-Spanner in his jacket pocket. He gently took it out and examined the readings.

"...Blend in the crowd..." Rhydian finished his previous sentence a little too late but tapered it off nonetheless and turned to Rose. "So, Rose. Do you want to find out how these Weeping Angels got here? Because I'm feeling up to it. Leave them where they are any longer and they're most likely going to cause more time disrepancies that I would be able to count. Or are you busy? If you are, that's fine." Rhydian offered her the chance to 'work together' or some sorts to combat a threat, something he did rarely. For all he knew Rose could be some sort of disguise made by some outlier force sent to kill him, or something along those lines.

But like Rhydian said, he never was too skeptical.

Nor too naïve.