Colourless [warning: Pastflavin]

[continuum_of_drs]

The Key To Time was completely colourless when assembled, and that was a concept that always afterwards struck the Doctor as a bit ... anticlimactic. To think something so ... easily understood could control the very balance of reality. Shouldn't it have been some sort of hideously complex device, or something with an eye-hurting structure that defied conventional physics and Euclidean geometry?

Its lack of colour was the only thing that made sense about it, really--its lack of a definite hue meant that any kind of energy could pass through it, be magnified and replicated and expanded and directed by it. A versatile instrument in the hands of beings as ancient as the Guardians of Time, certainly.

Still, it looked so disappointingly...mortal. He'd seen Great Old Ones with with more properly mind-hurting technology--Fenric was infamous for it--and the Guardians were so far beyond the Great Old Ones as to leave them looking hopelessly primitive.

It didn't look as though this disparity was going to be reconciled any time soon. The best he could hope for, then, was a kind of mental tucking away of the entire concept into a file relegated for the kinds of things the universe always threw at one with what appeared to be the sole aim of confounding one. Filing away and a hope that he'd done the right thing in assembling it in the first place, White Guardian or no White Guardian. After all, the Universe needed shades of grey, didn't it? Grey or ... colourlessness.

Maybe that was why the Key looked the way it did.