“Why are we here Doctor?” Derpy asked, her face once beaming with joy as usual now showing serious signs of concern.
The air of the console room felt tense, the Doctor just staring down at a readout on the console’s monitor. Several different Ancient High-Gallopfreyan symbols scrolled across the screen, shifting and rotating in rapid succession. He didn’t want to worry her, especially not now. If either of them broke for even a second, then everything would be in jeopardy. He looked up at her with a usual smile while quickly pushing away the monitor. Derpy made an adorable scrunchy face, always hating when he hid something from her. Usually it was for her own good, but it didn’t strengthen her trust when he did it.
“Oh it’s nothing, just a slight blip in the vortex.” The Doctor bluffed.
Derpy moved around the console, seeing her friend flip through several pages of a thick leather bound book. It seemed old, almost ancient, yet the pages still held strong despite being yellowed with age. She couldn’t see what he was reading despite staring directly at the pages, as if the words themselves refused to remain in focus.
“Doctor, c’mon. You said we were going to a crystal palace over a sea of glass, and suddenly you ran off to the library. It’s not like you to stop mid-sentence like that. I’m worried about you.”
She tried to get a closer look at the book he was holding, seeing the words “900 Year Diary” embroidered in gold on the cover. She knew that he was hiding something, just from the look in his eyes. It didn’t seem like the Doctor was fully paying attention, only truly noticing her after she finished talking. Of course he was listening, though he didn’t want to answer his question. Instead he tried to divert her attention by starting to ramble as usual, but his intentions were obvious.
“Oh, this? It’s just an old journal of mine, mostly boring old Time Pony stuff. I thought I forgot about something, so I thought I’d just check up on a thing or two, waltz down memory lane and stuff.”
Derpy raised an eyebrow at him, only causing him to stumble and becoming more frantic. He began to trail off the longer she stared at him, his expression melting as he looked down at the console again. He didn’t want to admit that he was the least bit frightened, but nearly all of the console’s warning messages were flaring red. He then looked back up at her, clearing his throat.
“I…I’ve found something, or rather someone I didn’t expect. It’s sort of a distress signal, but the word distress doesn’t really describe it.”
Derpy tilted her head to the side a little, feeling as if the Doctor were speaking in riddles.
“You kinda lost me.”
“Usually the message is ‘Help Me’ or ‘S.O.S’, but instead it’s just… deranged. Whoever’s sending the message directly to us… they’re screaming in pain.”
“Then we have to go and help them!”
Derpy’s heart was in the right place, but he recognized that voice. It was somepony he hadn’t talked to in a long time. Someone he thought had been dead for centuries.
“It’s someone very dangerous. I won’t lie to you, this could be more dangerous than anything we’ve faced before.”
“Did that ever stop us before?” Derpy smirked, knowing that she had a point.
The two of them had faced countless monsters before, from Daleks to Cyberponies, to wars of the past to threats of the future. She always knew that there was danger around every corner with the Doctor, but she always had the Doctor to defend her. Not only that but she knew that she could fend for herself on some occasions, she was always proud of that.
“Can’t argue with that. Let’s answer the Siren’s call, shall we?”
When pushing down the re-materialization lever the console sparked and the entire room shifted, left and right. Derpy crashed into one of the tan seats while the Doctor hung onto the console for dear life. The TARDIS knew what he was trying to do and was fighting it anyway. The usual wheezing and groaning quickened in pace, working harder and harder.
“I can’t land, the TARDIS is being stubborn!”
“Maybe there’s a very good reason after all!”
“Going back on your decision?”
With one last heavy jolt, both the Doctor and Derpy were flung onto the floor. The whole room started to go dim, a loud ringing like a low gong constantly booming again and again. The timeship whirred a few times, sounding more like a cough, before finally stopping. No activity, no sound, just silence. The Doctor got up first, coughing as smoke lightly bellowed from a few of the various controls. Looking up at the central column, the Doctor saw a sort of inky black sludge rise and stick to the inside of the glass. The TARDIS cried out in pain, letting out an ear piercing shriek. It was impossible, nothing ever got inside of the TARDIS like this.
Picking up the still partially conscious Derpy he rushed outside, nearly collapsing into the rocky and rough soil. The TARDIS was almost completely coated in the black inky sludge. On closer inspection, the sludge sparkled slightly and even hurt to look at for long periods of time. It was blacker than the darkest black and didn’t fully exist for a single second. The TARDIS began taking off again, the Hostile Action Displacement System switching on as the conditions became too severe for the TARDIS to continue existing. Immediately grabbing his sonic screwdriver, he rapidly dialled it to one of its thousands of settings. He used it just as the TARDIS began to vanish, activating a certain protocol within the ship's systems.
He knew that the TARDIS was going to a safe place now, but there was still the issue of them being stranded. Derpy picked herself up and dizzily looked around at the barren landscape before her. Thousands upon thousands of flowers that might’ve once been pink were now completely dead and withered away. Encircling them all were broken and faded white pickets coated in the same sludge as the TARDIS, along with an equal number of gravestones. Right at the center was a battered pink gazebo, poised in the middle of the web of inky nothingness.
“Sometimes I need to make house calls… I’ve been putting this one off for too long.” The Doctor said somberly, trying to avoid the gaze of the entity made of sludge not due to the strain, but out of shame.
The sludge was alive, even more than alive, it was sentient. A large glob of it surfaced above the gazebo, twisting and churning, shaping itself into a pony. For a second it looked no different from either one of them, the detail so intricate and unique that it would be, should be, impossible to replicate. The pony-shaped being smiled at them kindly, before warping into pure malice. Its limbs creaked and stretched in horrifically unnatural ways, still looking down at them while rapidly shifting between expressions of innocence and pure evil.
“Ah, Doctor, I knew you’d come back eventually. Did the Time Ponies finally clean up their mess?”
The entity’s voice didn’t even sound consistent. Four different voices were screaming all at once, but one spoke above the rest. Calm, collected, but still very rough and abrasive. The Doctor secretly winced at the mention of his race, knowing that she’d been abandoned by them for who knew how long. She may have been kept here for a reason, but she was still a sentient being.
“No… I have. I should’ve immediately come back for you… I shouldn’t have abandoned you here.”
Derpy finally regained her senses, looking up at the beast. Some sort of deep internal instinct screamed for her to run far far away. It hurt her head, even her normal bubbly nature couldn’t break through. The creature reached out and snatched her up with a loose tendril, pulling her up to her eyes like a specimen in a jar. In a moment she saw everything, every action she’d done and every action she could do. It read her personal timeline like a short article.
Derpy fought and struggled to the best of her abilities, but the entity already knew every accountability. It tossed her to the side like a rag doll, causing her to tumble into a dead bush. The Doctor tried to rush to her aid, but several other ink tendrils shot out at near light speed, blocking his bath.
“Now, now Doctor, you said something about a ‘house call’? I think you should see one patient at a time. After all, it’s at least partially your fault that I’m here.”
“I tried! I condemned every horrendous act my people did during the war, and I still don’t stand for it.”
“Your people… YOUR PEOPLE!?”
The entity was seething with rage out of nowhere. Its form twisted and contorted, reflecting its emotional state. Eventually it restabilized, taking in a deep breath as one icy line stabbed through The Doctor’s hearts.
“Don’t you mean, our people?”