[Fonk]

That's great work, sir! Thanks for sharing it with us.

[Fonk]

What an intriguing development! I'm super-keen to find out how this is going to go! ;D

[Fonk]

I do believe that that was excellent! 8)

[Fonk]

I could be up for this, depending on when and where! 😉

[Fonk]

NOTES

1) These characters are not mine. They were created by Sydney Newman, C. E. Webber, Donald Wilson, Russell T. Davies and many others.

2) It's up to you whether you want to imagine that it's the Ninth Doctor or the Tenth Doctor now. I started off writing it with enough ambiguity for it to be either (although, in my mind, it's the Tenth Doctor).

3) Still no title for this. I expect one will come to me a year after the story's finished.

4) While writing this story, I was mostly listening to my MP3 playlist, which contains all sorts of gubbins.

Doctor Who Fan-Fiction Part 4

Rose felt her senses being assaulted a hundred different ways at once upon stepping cautiously out of the building. She detected several scents on the air, as well as a new surface under her feet and millions of new sights, and was just trying to make sense of them all when a loud clang sent her scurrying for cover. She ran full pelt to a clump of trees straight ahead, majestic muscles moving with a surprisingly fluid grace and a speed that broke interplanetary records. Once Rose decided she was safely hidden, she peeked out between the trees to locate the source of the noise. After a few seconds of quick glancing, the Amazon managed to piece together what must have happened. The cave she had just come from had been subject to some sort of avalanche: it had been completely sealed off. Rose frowned. In point of fact, it was almost impossible for her to tell where the cave had been. Had she not known that there had been some sort of opening there, she would surely not have realised that one was meant to exist.

Presently she realised that the clanging must have been as a result of the rockfall. Shrugging to herself – rippling shoulders, humongous pecs and bulging breasts moving in a devastating symphony of raw and carnal enery throughout the simple motion – the musclewoman swiftly turned on her heel. Adopting a semi-crouching stance, the epitome of sleek yet explosive power, Rose moved further into the trees, having elected to follow the scent of a particularly malodorous beast. She was getting hungry.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

The Doctor was thankful that his shoes made no sound as he tiptoed cautiously through the seemingly deserted complex. After a couple of minutes of exploration, poking his head carefully through doors and quietly nipping around corners in the endless, featureless white corridors, the Time Lord had come to the slightly worrying conclusion he was in a sort of reverse hospital. Instead of making people well and healthy again, this place seemed to specialise in taking perfectly fit people and changing them in a variety of horrific ways. There had been one room like a perverted dentist's room, with a massive drill dominating its centre, and a frightening chair – in so much as chairs could be frightening – underneath it. Another room had contained what for all the world looked like a human-sized refrigerator. When the Doctor opened the door, he found a variety of body parts, human and otherwise. Other rooms had held different and worse horrors. The ancient alien had yet to find the room in which Rose had been changed. If she had been around, the Doctor would have rounded off his conclusions on the place by making some sort of joke about it all being "sick", but she was not. Just as he was pondering what he had seen happen to his companion, a thought hit him with all the force of a comet.

"The TARDIS key!" he breathed, unable to contain the sickening thought in his mind. Rose had a copy of the key to the Doctor's fantastic time machine. Reasoning that his friend had probably not kept it in her thin underwear, it must still be amongst the piles of rags that had been her clothes mere moments ago. The Doctor leaned against the nearest wall, closed his eyes and raised his head toward the ceiling. Locating the key had to become a top priority – there was no way to enter the TARDIS without one. In turn, there was no way that the Time Lord could allow the Fertanians to enter it. Given the level of technology he had already seen, the Doctor knew that they were perfectly capable of stripping it of its secrets once they were inside.

Giving them the ability to travel through time would irrevocably change the course of known history. The Doctor's eyes snapped open and an expression of grim determination hardened onto his face. He set off purposefully down the disconcerting corridor.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

A sound. Run. Hide. Cover. Watch. Assess. Calculate. Wait for the moment.

Leap.

Strike. Strike! STRIKE!

A wayward and frantic claw wrenched into Rose's gargantuan right calf. She screamed in pain and bubbling anger. Four red streaks lined the veiny muscle. Thick scarlet liquid oozed from the wounds, staining the ground beneath her. The rage inside Rose exploded into life.

Turn.

Strike. Again. And again. And again. Rip. Tear. Crush. Bite. Any advantage. See the life leaving the creature. Satisfaction.

Pause.

Breathe. Breathe.

Pause.

Need fire.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Quietly the Doctor rounded another corner. He was holding the sonic screwdriver aloft and staring at it intently. The Time Lord was by now quite convinced that there was no-one else around in the whole complex. The thought bothered him, but he had had to place at the back of his mind; besides, caution was always prudent in Fertanian territory. The stories were horrible. The screwdriver was emitting a series of beeps which grew louder and closer together when the alien got closer to Rose's TARDIS key, a little like a Geiger counter. The search was proving very frustrating for the ancient alien: every time he had a fix on where he thought the key must be, it moved out of his reach to a seemingly entirely new location. After hundreds of years of adventuring, the Doctor's instincts were shouting the word "trap" at him as loudly as they possibly could, but his natural curiosity had gotten the better of him and he had decided to follow this trail to the end. He had passed through corridor after nondescript corridor, chasing the beeping that died and moved away every time.

The Doctor concentrated his efforts. The screwdriver's beeping was the loudest and most insistent it had been since he began the search, which had lead him to a door in an unusually grimy section of the compound. Taking a deep breath, the Time Lord pushed open the door. There, standing in front of him – and though he could not explain it, wearing the expression of a confused puppy – was the TARDIS.

"What?" the Doctor exclaimed. And then someone stepped out of the shadows.

"Looking for this?" she asked, dangling something that reflected the light and looked very much like the TARDIS key the Time Lord had given Rose. It was Sophia. The Doctor's deeper instincts had been right all along. Instantly his face set in a grim expression.

"It must be important to you," she said, dangling it enticingly just out of the Time Lord's reach. "Very, very important." The Doctor swallowed.

"Why do you say that?" he asked. Sophia smiled. Evidently this man's intellect was not quite as good as she had previously believed.

"Why, it's very simple, smarty-pants," she crowed, closing her fist around the key, concealing it from sight. "You abandoned the search for your… friend to find it." The Doctor was momentarily taken aback with the truth of the situation. "We had this box towed here by some of our grunts as soon as you left it. I suppose this key opens it?" she inquired softly, opening her hand to display it on her palm. Deciding this was no time to play games, the Doctor gave the simplest response.

"Yes."

"Then let's see what's in here that's so special." With that, the Queen turned to the TARDIS and slipped the key into the lock. Without even looking through the door, she stepped inside. The Doctor followed. Once on the inside, Sophia looked around in awe for a few moments. She ran, showing all the excitement of a young boy surrounded by Christmas presents, to the central console. Experimentally she pressed a few buttons and flicked a few levers. The Doctor took careful note of what she had done, so that he could put it back to rights later on. With a madly gleeful expression, the Time Lord's unwanted house guest turned back to face him.

"It's bigger on the inside!"

"You'd be surprised how often I get that," the Doctor retorted glibly.

"What did I just do?" she asked.

"You moved the internal dampeners out of alignment, fiddled with the thermostat and set the toaster to 'extra-crispy'." Sophia gave him a withering look. "Well, if it's not got black bits, it's not toast, if you ask me," the Doctor sniffed.

"What does it do?"

"The toaster? Waffles, toast – of course, can't have a toaster that doesn't do toast – baguettes, bagels, croissants… ooh, and I tried to adapt it recently so it'll let us do paninis. I've not tried it yet, though. Would you like one?" The Doctor made a move for the central console, but Sophia stepped into his path.

"Your pretence of stupidity is masterly, Doctor. One would almost think that you were a child. Do not move towards the controls. Just tell me what it does."

"It can only teleport," he said. "I use it to roam around the universe. I'm a bit of hobo, really, just moving from place to place." The bluff worked. Sophia's face fell as she turned away from the Time Lord. She moved away to the console and leaned against it, studying the vast array of controls.

"I had hoped…" she began, and faltered. The Doctor used the moment to move closer to her.

"What had you hoped?" he whispered kindly. To his utter amazement and not a little fear, a tear was making its way down her cheek.

"I had hoped that it might be a time machine of some kind," she said, righting herself. "There are some mistakes in Earth's past that I wish to rectify." The Doctor turned his head slightly and studied the Queen thoughtfully.

"Mistakes?" Sophia's face turned to ice.

"We did not kill men when we had the chance," she hissed, wiping the tear from her cold face. Something clicked inside the Doctor's mind. "The technology has existed for us to be able to continue the human race without men since the twenty-first century," she continued crisply, all emotion now in check. "Why we did not choose to get rid of the vermin when we had the chance is a constant source of fascination to me."

The Doctor looked at her with a curious mixture of sympathy and revulsion.

"To hate your own kind," he began. "It must take a special kind of mind to be able to do that." The anger visibly rose to Sophia's face.

"Men are not my kind," she spat. "You are not my kind." The Doctor simply smiled indulgently.

"You don't know the half of it," he said, keeping his expression carefully mild in the face of her venom. Sophia drew herself up to her full height and glowered at him.

"It is of no importance," she stated. "You have outlived your usefulness. Prepare to die." She slid the remote control device from her trouser pocket and before the Time Lord could move, the Fertanian Queen shot him with it. Long, arcing lines of comic-book electricity shot from the small object, zipping and sizzling up and down the Doctor's body. He didn't even scream; the alien simply hit the floor of the TARDIS with a soft thud.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

The creature that had once been Rose Tyler sat in a beautiful clearing. It was idyllic: sunlight glittered through the trees, birds chorused. Once in a while one of the forest's larger denizens padded by. Had you been there, you would have been able to feel the sheer amount of nature going on. Particularly if you had seen the creature that had called itself "Rose". She was, all by herself, an exceedingly large amount of nature. The bronzed muscles of her awe-inspiring body were, at the moment, relaxed. Even so, they jutted at all sorts of inhuman, impossible angles from her wide, tall frame. She was clad in the hide of one of the less fortunate of the forest's wolf-creatures: it had been fashioned into a sort of fur bikini. There was a clump of bones next to the tree stump on which the unbelievable woman was sitting. As she chewed all the meat from the last of her kill's legs, another few bones joined the pile.

The Neanderthal stood up, stretching. Instantly her muscles sprang to life, breaking out in stark relief from her arms and chest. She winced when she put weight on her injured leg. Looking down, the woman saw the scars that her kill had inflicted and swore to herself that she would never get hurt again. She looked around, picked up the thick branch she had decided would make a good weapon, and moved off through the trees.

— To Be Continued —

[Fonk]

Suddenly I remeber an old saying: "God gave us a brain and a penis, but only enough blood to run one at a time."  <passes out>

I believe that was Robin Williams! 😀

Great story, sir. I enjoyed every moment! Thanks for posting it up.

[Fonk]

Wow… breath taking. Please continue!

That's high praise indeed, thanks very much! I swear that the fourth part is in the pipeline; it's just a matter of working out the fine details. :-[

[Fonk]

It does, however, look very cool.

I hope the Wii version is just as good. 😉

[Fonk]

It's also very, very good indeed. 😮

[Fonk]

A giggle, eh? Not a sound that tells of doom… 😉

Well, whatever it is, I look forward to it! Thanks for posting.

[Author]

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