Love and Monsters
Scootaloo and Ditzy stared at Shining Armor and Trixie for a long moment. Then all of them started talking at once.
“How did you escape?”
“How did you survive?”
“Where are the others?”
“Where’s the Nightmare?”
“Are you alright?”
“Did the others make it out alive?”
“What happened to your legs? Why are your eyes so red?”
This continued for some time before they all settled down enough to start filling one another in on everything that had happened to them since the Nightmare’s defenestration of the Crusaders. By the end of it, Shining Armor looked sickened. “They were turned into monsters and set on their own friends and families,” he muttered. “Celestia. I thought being turned into a battery was bad…”
Trixie chewed at her lower lip, pondering. “You say the tomb couldn’t have been behind you,” she said. “That this is only the second story, yes?”
“Yeah,” Dinky agreed. “Not that space means much in this building.”
“Then we’ve been going the wrong direction all this time?” Shining asked.
Trixie frowned. “It seems so.”
Dinky studied the hidden door to the secret passageway. “So this loops all around the tower,” she said. “With hidden doors at regular intervals, I presume?”
Trixie nodded. “There are six on each level, and a pair of staircases leading up and down at the same point on each level.”
“And the staircases are all the same length.”
Trixie thought about this. “Well, Trixie assumes so. She didn’t actually count the number of steps on each of them or anything.”
“Um. I did,” Shining said. “There were thirty-six every flight.”
Trixie snorted. “Luna. You really are Twilight’s brother, aren’t you?”
Shining frowned. “As the older sibling, I prefer to think of her as being my sister, and we’re definitely our parents’ children.”
“You realize that you’re taking credit for your sister’s ridiculous nerdiness, yes?” Trixie asked. “You’re saying that you’re a bigger nerd than Twilight Sparkle.”
“Uh, I taught her to play Ogres and Oubliettes, so… yes.”
Dinky was deep in thought. “How many flights did you go down?” she asked.
Trixie considered this. “...Seven,” she said at last.
“And all of them were thirty-six stairs each,” Dinky said, looking at Shining.
He nodded, then reconsidered. “Well, probably,” he said conscientiously.
Dinky raised an eyebrow. “I lost count once,” Shining said. “My mind must’ve wandered. But it looked the same as all the other staircases.”
“Oh, you can’t trust based on that,” Scootaloo said. “Everything’s a trick around here. How many flights up was it?”
Shining’s lips moved, silently counting as he thought. “Four. Four flights of stairs ago.”
Scootaloo looked at Dinky. “Let’s check it out.”
Dinky nodded, but then paused and glanced at the others. “Hey. Could one of you take Scootaloo? I’m starting to get kinda worn out.”
Shining nodded, and Dinky levitated Scootaloo over onto his back. Then, lighting her horn, she reopened the secret passage and all four ponies trouped in.
A few minutes later, a pair of statues, their surfaces blackened and marred by lightning strikes, arrived on the scene, snarling. But they were too late. The doors had closed and their quarry had moved on.
Romana watched as the golden cracks in reality inched closer to meeting. Half an hour earlier, one would have to have craned their necks, looking from horizon to horizon to see both ends of the developing rift. Now you only needed to look straight up to see the glowing golden hairline cracks preparing to split open the sky, arching up and over everypony’s heads like a rainbow, if rainbows were golden and fractured and ready to devour the world below. So, not really much like a rainbow if Romana was being honest.
Over the last twenty minutes or so, she had seen many Ponyvillians fleeing with their most prized possessions, desperate to make it out of town before it was sealed off from the world. Many -- but not all. As many as had chosen to leave, more had chosen to stay and defend their town from the onslaught, gathering around Romana to watch the sky rip itself in two. Many held pitchforks or two-by-fours or cast-iron skillets or whatever other improvised weaponry came to hoof. Overhead, the pegasi were rolling in a stormfront with lightning aimed at the center of the rift. Romana saw stranger defenses, too -- for instance, Vinyl Scratch and Octavia had brought some kind of massive amplifier on wheels that Vinyl referred to as her ‘bass cannon’. Romana thought it bore more resemblance to certain medieval siege weapons.
She recognized almost all of the faces around her, and each one wore heavy on her conscience. It was a near certainty that all of them would die tonight, and equally likely that their deaths would be in vain. The Nightmare was a formidable and ruthless foe alone, but with the power of a TARDIS on its side, not to mention the Doctor…
Romana grit her teeth. Well. She’d done the impossible before. “Alright!” she called, struggling to be heard over the rumble of the crowd.
A hush fell over the crowd in a wave, rippling out from Romana. She breathed in deep and let it out slowly. “I’m going to activate the field now,” she said. “If anypony wants to leave, now is your final chance.”
Nopony said anything. Romana nodded and connected two wires together. The world flickered for a moment, and then all of central Ponyville and a good chunk of the surrounding landscape was encased in a shimmering violet bubble.
After a moment, Starlight stopped casting her time-slowing spell. The golden cracks started expanding at an exponential rate, the tearing of time and space now audible to the ponies below, a sound like ripping fabric and tearing metal all rolled into one.
Everypony watched as the two halves of the rift reached toward one another… and met.
It was rather anticlimactic, actually. There was no earth-shattering kaboom, no brilliant flash of light, not even a puff of smoke. There was just a rift, glowing golden against the swirling violet backdrop. As the crowd below watched, it split and began to widen.
The Doctor huffed and mopped the sweat from his brow as he patted the last shovelful of dirt down on Owis’ grave. It was late in the evening now, and beginning to grow cooler. That didn’t worry him much. Gallifreyan nights were much too warm to worry about anything like exposure. He stood for a long moment over the shallow grave he had dug for his replacement, trying to think of a few final words to say. He could find none. He had scarcely known Owis, really -- known of him, yes, but he had barely spent half an hour with the man before he had been killed.
The Doctor looked up at the sky, and at last found the words he was looking for. He turned his gaze back to Owis’ grave and said, “Omega’s teeth, but this was a miserable old house.” He glanced up at the imposing edifice of Lungbarrow and continued softly, “At least we’re both out of it now, eh? How’d that poem go? Move on, move under, said the undertaker.”
He chuckled a little, his voice a little dry and hoarse, but it soon dwindled to nothing. He stared at Owis’ grave. He could put it off no longer. Grudgingly, he turned to face the craggy face of Mount Lung. It was the highest peak on Gallifrey, and perhaps the most beautiful. It was, however, also the most confusing. It was known by many other names -- Mount Cadon, Mount Plutarch, Mount Rycadia -- and it was said that to call the mountain by a different name would be to climb a different mountain entirely.
The Doctor had had ample enough experience with the mountain to know that this was not metaphorical. He had climbed them all in his time -- and, occasionally out of his time. Today, though, he needed to climb Mount Lung and Mount Lung only. He trudged over to the base of the mountain and began picking his way up along the rocky path.
Behind him, the House of Lungbarrow was swallowed by thick mists that hadn’t existed while the Doctor had been in his yard. This was entirely normal, and the Doctor didn’t even glance back. Even if he had, he would never have been able to see the transmat blink back on, nor the grisly crew who appeared inside of it, walking in a single-file line out into the grim old house.
If he had seen them, had known how close his pursuers were, he wouldn’t have stopped, or hidden, or even sped up. That would have defeated the purpose of the exercise. He was a child again, on the darkest day of his life so far, and he was climbing Mount Lung to visit the hermit.
Dinky stopped at the base of a pair of parallel flights of stairs. One went up. The other, the one that she had just stepped off of, went down. “This is the one where you lost count?” she asked, glancing back to look at Shining Armor.
He tilted his head, staring at the stairs. “Uh… yeah? I’m pretty sure it was, anyway.”
“Right.” Dinky said. “I’m going up one floor. The rest of you, stay here.”
“Oh… kay,” Trixie said, frowning.
Dinky trotted up the stairs. As the others watched, her hooves started to blur on the steps, as though they were moving faster than the rest of Dinky’s body. Then she was gone.
Shining Armor’s eyebrows shot up. “Interesting,” he said.
“Dinky?” Scootaloo called. “Dinky, where are you?”
“I might ask you the same question,” Dinky’s voice said from directly overhead. “I lost count of the stairs, too. It seems that something is distorting space to keep us from reaching the floor in between where we’re standing.”
“So… we’re on the right track, then,” Trixie said. “We just have to figure out how to bypass the distortion.”
“Easier said than done,” Shining said. “This could be a complex system of interconnected spells designed to disorient and mislead any magic we use on it -- disentangling it all could take hours.”
“Or we could walk up while Dinky walks down and stop when we meet in the middle,” Scootaloo said.
“I-- er --” Shining Armor scratched the back of his head. “Okay, that might work, but -- well, there’s a good chance -- the spell matrix just might not let us reach that floor at all.”
“Worth a shot, though,” Trixie said. “Dinky! Trixie is walking up now. Prepare to start walking down!”
“Alright!”
This time, as Trixie walked, Shining Armor and Scootaloo could see the same distortion on her hooves as they had seen with Dinky, but the effects seemed less obvious. Trixie’s legs stretched like taffy, but they didn’t blur, and Trixie successfully reached the top of the stairs to meet Dinky. There was a sharp snapping sound like a rubber band breaking, and everypony winced as their ears started ringing.
“What was that?” Scootaloo asked, shaking her head vigorously.
“Trixie thinks we broke something,” Trixie said. “Whether it was the spell or some kind of tripwire or both, she cannot say.”
Shining hurried up the steps to join them at the top. “Well, it certainly seems that the spell matrix was blown,” he agreed. “But your point about possibly tripping some kind of alarm is well-founded. We should get away from here before the Nightmare or the Valeyard or whatever creature they’ve summoned as a guard dog comes to investigate.”
Trixie nodded and opened the hidden door. “Come on. Everypony out.”
They all hurried down the hall, leaving the door to click shut behind them. None of them noticed that the bust of Pandak turned its head as they walked away, its eyes glowing red.
The Interface paced the sepulchre, alone. The Valeyard had departed to search for the interloping Crusaders, leaving the Nightmare alone with the TARDIS and the rift, seething. The mathematics simply didn’t work. It had calculated the power drain from the TARDIS. The box should have had far more energy left within, the Eye of Harmony refuelling itself over time for it to harvest again and again. Instead, the whole thing was teetering on the precipice of total collapse.
In a sudden surge of anger, it punched the blue box. A chunk of the exterior fell to the floor, revealing that the plasmic shell was rotting away. Inside, the silver cylinder that comprised the TARDIS’s true form -- or at least as close to its true form as anyone could ever see -- was clearly tarnished. “What have you done?” the Nightmare hissed, steam rising from its jaw. “What have you hidden from me?”
There was a flicker of psychic energy from the TARDIS -- involuntary, which made the Interface’s ears prick up. “Well well,” it said. “You have been a naughty box, haven’t you? Where have you put your power?”
For a long moment, all it got in response was golden light and static echoing through its mind. Then…
“Hi.”
The voice was familiar, but it echoed and distorted through the Nightmare’s head. “My name’s Dinky. Well, not really, but that’s what everyone calls me.”
The Nightmare froze. No. It couldn’t be.
“Please. I need help,” Dinky’s distant voice said.
IT WILL HAVE COME AT A PRICE, a voice in her head warned. WERE YOU WILLING TO BE PAYING IT?
The TARDIS seemed to laugh at the Nightmare. It saw the golden energy connect console and filly, filling the young Dinky Doo with a fraction of the TARDIS’s energy, Gallifreyan equations and words writing themselves in the air in shining golden circles and lines.
Without even realizing it, Dinky absorbed the power that the Nightmare had set its sights on. “No!” it hissed. “No!”
The memory broke up, and the Nightmare fell heavily to the ground, mind reeling. After a few moments, it collected itself. This was fine. It now knew where the extraneous energy had gone. All that needed to be done now was to extract it, all the more easily done when the vessel was unsuspecting and defenseless. Soon, the power of a TARDIS would be the power of the Nightmare, and all time and space would suffer at its command.
It was quiet and still up near the top of the mountain. The Doctor sat in silent meditation, simply staring at a patch of earth in front of him, one where a scraggly, weedy-looking flower sat. He was smiling very slightly. He didn’t stop when he heard the crunch of gravel coming up the path behind him. He didn’t look around, either. “Hallo,” he said. “Would you like to come and sit awhile?”
“What, with you?” It was distinctly Donna’s voice, but if he listened closely, he could hear the buzzing undercurrent, nearly hidden behind the halo of humming golden energy that encircled her head. “I don’t bloody think so.”
“Don’t worry, it won’t take long. I want to tell you a story. Though, since you’re all only projections of my worst fears and self-loathing, and therefore products of my mind, I suspect you already know it. Donna certainly does. Jo would as well, if she were here, but I’m content enough with how Jo left my life.”
“Go on, then.” Charley’s voice this time, with enough of that same old teasing mock-weariness, those plummy tones, that perfect Charley-ness, to strike at the Doctor’s heart. “Tell us your tale, old man.”
The Doctor glanced up toward the sky. Both suns were setting now, and it had darkened to a deep shade of burnt umber. “When I was a child, growing up in this nasty old house, I bloody well hated everything,” he said bluntly.
“Doctor! Language,” Charley said, mock-scandalized.
He shrugged. “If I can’t be brutally honest with myself --”
“You seldom are,” Adric noted.
“Well, I’m working on it. Anyway, one day, I thought I might try and run away from home. I wasn’t sure quite where I’d go, so I went up this mountain to talk with the hermit.” He waved vaguely at the cave. “We had a hermit. I think he might’ve been a status symbol. Can’t think of any other reason why old Quences would keep him around, not with Satthralope chewing his ear off about it every other week.”
“Who?” Peri asked. “Those names sound ridiculous, and that's coming from someone named Perpugilliam.”
“They suited their bearers rather well, then. Anyway, I went up the mountain and found the hermit. I only meant to ask him how I could become a hermit, but I ended up telling him all my troubles and fears, how I hated it in the miserable old House of Lungbarrow and loathed Gallifrey generally. I spilled my darkest secrets to him, and when I was done, he smiled at me. Pointed to this rubbish-looking little flower on the ground, hardly any more than a weed, and asked me if I thought it was beautiful. And the longer I looked at it, the more I thought it was -- it’s a lovely shade of off-white, perfectly symmetrical, and so strong to be growing up here, in this harsh soil and chilly climate. The more I looked around, the more beauty I could see -- the smooth and bumpy surface of a rock, the glowing orange of an evening sky, the stars that shone so brightly on this isolated estate.”
“But you know what happened next,” Donna said coldly. “You grew up and you shattered this planet into atoms. No more hermit, no more flower, no more Time Lords.”
“And yet here it is,” the Doctor said. “Even here in my worst nightmare made solid, there’s still that little flower.”
“We’ll see about that,” Adric said, shoving the Doctor roughly out of the way and stamping the flower into the ground, scuffing it around until it was little more than a tangle of roots sticking out of the ground. “There. Story’s over.”
“Hm,” the Doctor said noncommittally. “Is it? I still remember that little flower, and I can remember its beauty as well as the pain of you destroying it. Perhaps there’s a lesson in that.”
“Enough talk,” Celestia growled. “Take him!”
The Doctor glanced up looked around the closing circle of shambling things, sizing them up one by one until his attention was snagged by a particular face. It was a withered, scruffy-looking thestral in a ripped jacket, carrying a broken guitar on his back. He wore the shattered remnants of a skull on his head, taken from a creature that had never existed. Even in this warped form, the Doctor recognized him immediately. He gave the creature an almost feral grin. “Hello, Fitz,” he said. “What d’you reckon? One last kiss before I fall?”
Fitz lunged forward. The Doctor didn’t flinch. Therefore, he was privileged to see what happened next.
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Insults don't work if the target isn't actually insulted.
Goodness, but everything's getting wonderfully wound up. The tension is almost to the snapping point, and we're nearly at the end of Part 3 (which will, amusingly enough, be Chapter 42.) Looking forward to seeing what happens when the Doctor stops running, among other things.
...No.
Okay, that's not entirely fair. Love and Monsters is... well, it isn't good, not by a long shot. But it tried something new, and the Doctor-lite format would go on to produce Blink, so that's an equal transaction in my mind. And the villain was literally designed by a nine year old, so I can't be too harsh there.
Ah, K'anpo the Hermit. Finally, some Gallifreyan lore I know! Granted, I only know what the show did with him, but still, it's nice to finally recognize something from more than just my ill-advised wiki crawling.
10444528
Juno was mad, knew he'd been had
So he shot at the sun with a gun
Shot at the sun with a gun
Shot at his wily one only friend
Ah, Romana. You have grown so much since your first meeting with the Doctor. Welcome to making the impossible, possible.
Interesting that it is in dealing with matters of both life and death that the Doctor begins to truly regain himself. Interesting, and very fitting. And now, to seek the hermit... Yes. I remember when the Third Doctor spoke of that mountain, and its rejuvenating properties. And now, the Doctor climbs again. Whether the hermit is “there” or not, perspective will finally be regained.
Yes! Suck on that, you heartless, nameless, godless, motherless, shapeless, formless Thing!!!*
And you renewed one of my favorite Doctor Who scenes in the process. How absolutely perfect.
*Not to be held against all the nice elder Things floating about, of course. That would be rude.
10630742
Oh, naturally. I'm sure that Lovecraft's pantheon would happily join in the denunciation of the Valeyard most vociferously, with the possible exception of Cynothoglys, She Whose Hand Embalms, because she's just kind of a giant mummified arm.
...she could still flip him off, though.