Tristan Parkes: Day of the Dementors

03 January 2103

Tristan Parkes slid out from underneath the control console of his homemade TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space) and got to his feet. Finally, after fifteen years of work, the TARDIS was complete. Tristan had his ancestors' research into time-travel and dimensional physics, along with early twenty-second century technology and some magic to thank for the completetion of the TARDIS.

Like the rest of his family, Tristan was among the most brilliant wizards in the world. The whole Parkes family had a certain affinity for anything technological and a high degree of raw magical power. The Parkes family brilliance carried with it a streak of inventiveness, although exactly how the inventiveness was applied varied depending on the member. Tristan's Aunt Kathryn focussed her talents on inventing weapons, some technological, some magical, some incorporating elements of both. She had always had a bit of an aggressive side to her and had invented some pretty potent weapons while at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the 2050s. Tristan, on the other hand, took after his father, Albert Parkes, with an intense fascination with time-travel. Tristan wasn't the first member of his family to attempt to build a time-machine. His great-grandfather had tried a number of times, with varying degrees of success, and his father had successfully built one into a car in 2058, during his sixth year at Hogwarts. The main problem with Albert's time-machine was that it required a high speed and a massive dose of power in order to operate. Tristan didn't want the problems associated with a high speed, even though the power requirements were unavoidable, so he got around that by taking the approach used in the longest-running science-fiction series to date: a TARDIS.

Like the TARDIS in the old television series, Doctor Who (which was still broadcast, even 140 years after it first aired), Tristan's TARDIS relied on the principle of a pocket universe to create the interior of the TARDIS and the exterior atoms were pulled out of normal space-time when it dematerialised and were pushed back into normal space-time in their original configuration upon rematerialization. Doing so, with approximately two tonnes of matter that made up the exterior of the TARDIS was an immensely complex task, and it required an eight-processor, state-of-the-art, twenty-second century computer in order to assemble and disassemble the TARDIS exterior.

Unlike the TARDIS of Doctor Who, Tristan's TARDIS featured a cloaking device that actually worked. While it didn't do anything to the molecular structure of the TARDIS exterior, what it did do was project a hologram all around the TARDIS that made the TARDIS look like a similar-sized object from its surroundings. The actual hologram was not solid, as it was composed of millions of tiny particles that emitted light and floated in space around the TARDIS itself. When the holographic projectors were turned off, the particles went back inside their respective projectors, revealing the true exterior appearance of the TARDIS. The actual appearance of the TARDIS, when the holographic projectors were turned off, was a simple black box, approximately one-point-five metres square, and two-point-six metres high, with doors on one side as the only distinguishing feature.

Tristan had started work on the TARDIS back when he was only seventeen, and entering his last year of school. Not that having to go to a boarding school ever stopped Tristan from working on his inventions. Tristan would simply teleport home to work on his larger projects whenever he had some free time. While Tristan's almost-obsessive inventive streak made him a bit odd in the eyes of the other students, Tristan was probably the sneakiest troublemaker to attend twenty-first century Hogwarts. When it came to causing trouble at school, Tristan was a master of making it look like someone else was responsible for the chaos. This was partly due to his mastery of technology which, even in the 2080s, some wizards still didn't understand its full potential.

Tristan looked around the control room and admired his fifteen years of work. The TARDIS certainly had a homemade feel to it, with all the visible welds in the metal and the way the controls had obviously been installed by hand. The centre of the control room was occupied by a column filled with spiralling red, green and blue light, and had four control panels around it. On the sides of the room were various instruments for scanning the exterior area around the TARDIS and for performing diagnostics on the TARDIS systems.

One curious aspect of Tristan's personality was an unusual calmness. This was partly because of his natural personality and extremely rational mind, and partly from having unusually acute senses. There was little point in trying to sneak up on Tristan to give him a fright because he'd always sense you coming long before you ever reached him. While he could at times seem rather emotionally dead, he was still as human as anyone else, and more human than some other people.

Tristan took a deep breath and entered a location in Australia one hundred years in the past as the destination time and place. Tristan figured that the technology of the early 21st century shouldn't be too hard to adapt to his needs if the TARDIS systems should break down on the trip. Nervously, Tristan pressed the button to activate the TARDIS and the central column, particulary the red, glowed much brighter. The pulsating red light was accompanied by a sort of grinding sound until it finally stopped several seconds later and the spiralling light went back to its idle state.

It seemed that the TARDIS had indeed worked, and that all of Tristan's anxiety over the first test had been unneccessary. Still, it was to be expected, considering that the TARDIS was only Tristan's first prototype, and there were numerous things that could have gone wrong on the trip.

Wanting to be absolutely certain, Tristan went and checked the location and time displays to verify that he had indeed landed where and when he wanted to. According to the instruments, everything had worked perfectly, but a couple of power-relays had been burnt out in the trip, due to a minor malfunction. Knowing that this was one piece of technology he couldn't easily adapt from the early 21st century, Tristan was glad that he had pattern-replicators installed for making new parts and that they were on their own separate circuit. That too had suffered some minor damage, but Tristan decided that he was more interested in the past than making repairs at the moment.

After scanning the exterior for a suitable object with which to disguise the TARDIS, Tristan selected a nearby large boulder, and within seconds the TARDIS was surrounded by a hologram of the rock. Tristan then left the TARDIS, locking it with his remote control, and set out to explore the past.