Part 16
I Just Don't Know What Went Wrong
The Master couldn't help but laugh. "You sent your, ahem, little assistant out to the Wastelands to destroy my transceiver?"
"I don't see what's so funny about that," the Doctor replied, incensed.
The Master mimed wiping a tear from his eye. "Where d'you think I sent Dawn Riser to? Such an important piece of hardware left unguarded with you around? Give me some credit at least. You just sent your idiotic little pegaus to face the most powerful unicorn in the land."
"Fifth in history, actually," the Doctor corrected. "And give me some credit. You sending her to guard the remains of your TARDIS already figured into my plans. Derpy was with me when I faced down Graymane the Brutal. She can handle herself around unicorns." The Doctor's eyes narrowed. "And you of all ponies should know by now that I do not make it a habit to travel with useless ponies, no matter what I may say to them myself. I have great faith she'll come out on top."
The Master snorted. "Your reliance on other ponies has long been a weakness, you know."
The Doctor responded with a grin. "We have different opinions on 'weakness', I suppose." He quickly withdrew his sonic screwdriver and aimed it above, causing the priceless chandelier that was hanging above the Master's head to drop. The Master himself managed to dive out of the way and withdrew a metal rod of his own from his coat pocket. Its end glowed red as he aimed it at the Doctor, and the brown Time Charger yelped in pain, dropped his screwdriver, and collapsed to the ground. A bloody welt had formed on the knuckle joint of his foreleg.
The Master grinned as he held up his weapon. It was built to resemble a sonic screwdriver, but was both longer and thicker. "Mine's bigger than yours," he taunted.
"And laser powered, to boot," the Doctor grunted through clenched teeth.
"Really, now. Why would anyone go for sonic? I never could understand your fascination with the old and outdated." The Master fired another shot, and though the Doctor managed to mostly dodge out of the way, his shoulder felt as though it exploded. "Granted, I haven't been able to give it all the features I would have liked," the Master conceded. "But I think you'll find it to be more than deadly enough for my purposes."
~DrW~
Derpy paced nervously in front of the TARDIS console. She wasn't particularly worried about the ship itself, despite the otherwise alarming sounds of some very powerful spells making contact outside. She'd seen the TARDIS withstand much, much worse than a unicorn (fifth most powerful in history she may be) and some changelings. No, she wasn't worried they'd get in at all. She was, however, in a quandary about how she could get out without getting instantly vaporized. "What's she even doing here, anyway?" she asked the softly humming room.
Derpy stopped and cast another glare at the crystal spire. "Oh, don't go blaming me for this. I don't know what went..." Derpy gasped mid-sentence as her eyes widened and her gaze straightened for the briefest of moments. "Say, do you still have that room? The one with the clouds?" Now she chuckled at the irritated response the old girl gave her. "Oh, don't be like that. It only happened the one time. Well, yeah, you only let me in there the one time, but that's not the point. The point is I got an idea."
~DrW~
The Master had the Doctor purely on the defensive. That is to say, the Doctor was forced to continually dodge the laser bolts the Master fired his way. Really, all that was missing was the Master telling him to dance. The beleaguered Time Charger rolled behind the bar as a perfectly round hole was punched through the trailing end of his coat. Taking advantage of the very brief respite to catch his breath, the Doctor grinned when he saw the small metal cylinder that had rolled its way under the table.
Grasping his sonic screwdriver one more time, the Doctor exhaled a long breath to calm his mind. He had only one shot at this and didn't want to screw it up. The moment had passed and the Doctor instantly stood up behind his barricade, pointed his screwdriver at the Master and activated one of its few destructive functions. Both screwdrivers disabled the other, though the Doctor's violently exploded in his hoof, sending him reeling in pain, while the Master's simply made a small 'pop' before a small stream of smoke rose from within.
The Master cast a disappointed look at his now inoperable weapon before tossing it aside. "Not bad, Doctor. Not bad at all. But you're still just delaying the inevitable." The Master peeked over the bar to find the Doctor hunched over, seemingly in pain. "What's the matter? Hurt yourself?" he asked mockingly.
When the Doctor looked up, he was grinning. "Y'know, funny thing about dimensionally displaced pockets. You put things in them during your travels and forget they're there. Like these for instance." He held up his hooves, and in each one was a brightly colored glass ball, one red the other blue. "I picked these up during one of the many, many hostile invasions I've stopped on Hearth's Warming Eve. I'm beginning to think there's some kind of cosmic importance to the date. Anyway, cute little things, aren't they? Why not give them a look?" He rolled the glass decorations under the the bar, and the Master tried to scramble away for a brief moment before the bar was ripped apart by an explosion which knocked him several hooves away.
The Doctor stepped out from behind the smoking rubble--though not without a slight limp--and calmly brushed some soot off his coat sleeve. "Are you quite done?" he asked.
His response was a hoof to his face.
Stunned, the Doctor took several more blows before gaining the sense of mind to start dodging. After weaving between a couple more punches, he spun around with a speed and grace that belied his rather scrawny size and planted both hind hooves into the Master's face, sending him reeling. "Really now," the Doctor admonished. "This is just getting embarrassing. Sad, even. Two of the greatest minds in the universe, and we're brawling it out like... like drunkards in a pub."
The Master stumbled to his hooves, spit out a tooth and shot the Doctor a wide-eyed grin. "Fine by me!" he shouted as he lunged at his foe once again.
~DrW~
Dawn Riser growled in frustration as she blasted the blue barn in front of her with another destructive spell. The bolt of magic energy bounced off, blasting another hole in the cavern wall. Her frustration rose another notch as her horn began to glow in preparation for another spell. She blinked in surprise when the doors swung open. She then got knocked on her flank as a rush of water vapor burst forth from the now open TARDIS.
Derpy trotted along the top of the cloud almost cheerfully. She could see she was in a rather large dome shaped cavern, the ceiling far overhead and rough tunnel entrances bored into the walls like certain cheeses. Over along the far wall was a mess of pipes and wires that climbed the wall and entered several of the tunnels. That would be where the messed up TARDIS is then, she thought.
She did start when a hot bolt of magic burst through the cloud several hooves away and burned a new hole in the ceiling. Time to get to work. Derpy started hopping randomly on the cloud as several more bolts were fired through it. "You should probably cast a force field spell or something down there," she called down to the mind-controlled pony beneath her. "And you too," she added to the group of changelings that had flown through the cloud to confront her. "Because I have no idea what I'm doing."
Down on the ground, stuck in a fog the consistency of pea soup Dawn Riser ignored the pegasus's warning and continued firing blindly at the little irritation even as the fog began to darken ominously and her mane began to stand on end. It was only when an arc of electricity passed before her eyes that a small shred of lucidity took over and had her put up the shield spell. Less than a second later the world turned white.
~DrW~
Derpy stumbled through the wrecked cavern, occasionally coughing up a gout of smoke. "Woah," she mumbled to herself. "That was a good one!" She looked around and saw a couple of changelings smoking and twitching on the ground. Along the far wall, a fire had erupted within the cylindrical capsule that had once been a TARDIS, the haphazard machinery surrounding it fried to slag, and lying in the middle of the room was an unmoving blue unicorn. "Hey!" Derpy yelled out as she ran to the other pony's side. "Are you okay?"
Dawn Riser coughed a couple of times as she slowly got to her hooves. "I... believe I am, thank you," she responded in a tone that Derpy thought was mildly snooty. As Dawn Riser was moving her various joints experimentally, she cast an appraising eye at the pegasus before her. "And who might you be?"
"Name's Derpy," she replied with a proud flutter of her wings. "I'm the Doctor's companion."
A look of understanding dawned on Riser's face and she nodded. "So you travel with the Doctor. That certainly accounts for your... unorthodox method of combat. I do suppose I should thank you for destroying that monstrosity and freeing me from his control."
A sudden, almost deafening buzzing noise stopped the conversation dead in its tracks as swarms of changelings began surging out of the various tunnels and into the dome. "You can thank me inside the TARDIS," Derpy said in a rather sped up, high pitched voice. "Run!"