What would you do if you arrived in a place you'd never been before, only to find that you'd been living there for years? The Doctor's solution is simple, but, involving as it does him interacting socially with other ponies, is unlikely to work...
Doctor Whooves 1.2 Written as part of my Doctor Whooves series. Can be read on its own, at a pinch. A story of love, and of friendship. A story of growing up, of growing old. Read it. Read it now. If that hasn't captured your interest, here's a message from the Doctor himself:
"Attention, readers! This is the Doctor speaking. I'm in a spot of bother. Having foiled an invasion attempt by the Autons, I was just trying to relax for the first time in about a century when someting else cropped up. It seems that another pony in this town has been going around for years pretending to be me. I am not best pleased at this. Who he is and why he's doing it I don't know... yet. It looks as though it's down to me to solve this little problem myself. Typical. And to think that the Timelords sent me here to keep me out of trouble. Chance would be a fine thing. All I know so far is that he's friends with the local mailmare, so all I have to do is track her down and talk to her. That should be no problem at all. Although oddly, some of the ponies in this town are remarkably difficult to talk to. Miss Sparkle seems to think it's my fault in some way. How she ever became a princess I'll never know."
Note: as before, this story takes place during the season 5 hiatus. The Galgonquans, one of my favourite alien races, are taken from Aliens in the Family, a charming book my Margaret Mahy, later adapted into a TV series for the BBC. I have taken shameless liberties with the background of their species. I'm like that.
“Be careful with that, it's a precision instrument!” The Doctor was sitting in the middle of Ponyville's main street, watching Twilight magically steering a large blue box around a corner into the main street. She was visibly worn out, beads of sweat materialising on her brow as she struggled to maintain the magical aura.
“I'm doing the best I can!” she complained. “What is this thing? It seems to occupy two completely different sets of spacial dimensions!”
“Oh, five at least… careful!” Twilight had just let one corner of the box brush against the ground – not enough to do any damage, but enough to send a panic stricken look shooting across the Doctor's face, and to make him nervously tap his forehooves together. “That's vintage! There isn't another TARDIS like it left in the universe! Do please be careful!”
What was the Doctor doing, here in Ponyville? Well, simply put, the Timelords had unexpectedly decided that the Doctor was senile, which he wasn't best pleased about. They had decreed that he should be forcibly retired to the land of Equestria, where, they thought, he would be kept out of trouble. They had forced him through a regeneration (incidently, he was now in his twenty-second body, and looked far younger than he felt), and sent him and his TARDIS spinning straight towards Ponyville, having 'forgotten' that in his weakened state following the regeneration he would be in no condition to pilot her. He had therefore messily crashlanded in the woods near Fluttershy's house, and been rescued by the owner, who had then secretly nursed him back to health. The Doctor was very cross about being exiled, as he thought there would be nothing to do. On his first day out of the house, he had foiled an invasion attempt by the Nestenes and their Auton drones. This is called 'Sheer Dumb Luck'.
The next day, Twilight had happened to mention that there was a pony who looked and sounded almost exactly like the Doctor, and who went by the same title, who had lived in Ponyville for several years. The Doctor had been pretending to be worried about this ever since. In fact, he was rather excited. Who said exile was boring?
“You know, Doctor," hinted a disgruntled Twilight, "I think this would be a lot easier without an audience.”
“Why, are ponies watching?” The Doctor cast a quick glance either side. “No, I don't think anypony but me is looking at you, old girl.”
“I know," replied the alicorn, wondering how anypony could be so insensitive.
“Eh? But you just said-”
“Look, Doctor, there's Derpy,” Twilight pointed out, relief cascading across her face, “you wanted a word with her, didn't you?”
“Oh, yes, she's the one who… which one is she, then?”
Twilight rolled her eyes. “You see that pony-shaped dent in that lamp-post?”
“Er… yes, there it is.”
“Look beneath it.”
Twilight went back to her levitation, while the Doctor strolled over to a grey pegasus mare - or at least as much of her as was protruding from the street - with a cutie-mark of a cluster of bubbles and an honestly-can't-be-bothered blonde mane.
“Good morning, Miss!” he sang out, cheerfully.
“Oh, good morning," came her muffled voice from the road. "Just a moment...” With practised ease, the mare prised herself out of a Derpy-shaped hole in the cobbles.
“Do I have the pleasure of addressing Miss Derpy Hooves?”
She gave him an odd look, head inclined to one side, and eyes – the Doctor noticed this for the first time – pointing in completely different directions. “I answer to many names,” she said, faux-mysteriously, then giggled. “Yup, that's me. Mailmare extrodinaire. Can I help you, Mr…?”
“Just 'Doctor', will do fine. I think you'd find my name rather difficult to pronounce. Besides, I can't quite remember it at the moment,” he admitted.
“Um… okay...” Derpy was obviously beginning to wonder whom she was talking to, and to wish that she wasn't. She was already glancing from side to side – probably, anyway; it was hard to tell. She peered closely at the stallion in front of her. “You do kind of look like the Doctor, but I don't think you're him. Are you okay there?”
“Ah, yes. Sorry, I should have realised there'd be an element of confusion. Allow me to explain.”
“Right…” Derpy struggled to bring her eyes into focus. It was always tricky after a crash. Before her stood… no, it couldn't be… could it? “You are the Doc!” Derpy brightened up, but then began to look confused again. “Why did you pretend not to recognise me?”
The Doctor was taken aback. “Hold on, just a moment. I don't recognise you. I only arrived here in town some two or three weeks ago, and I've been in hiding for most of that. I only ventured out of Fluttershy's cottage the day before yesterday.”
“But you're...”
“On that day, it was I who foiled the invasion attempt by the Autons that I'm sure you noticed.”
“Were they those dummy-things?”
“Precisely, I-”
“Did they come out of the Everfree Forest?”
“I'll explain later. The point is, yesterday I was enjoying a celebratory picnic with my friends when one of them mentioned a certain pony who looked and sounded awfully like me who lives in this town, and has done so for quite some time. She also mentioned that you would be the one to tell me about him. So here I am.” He beamed and gestured to himself, rather more proudly than Derpy thought necessary.
“So… wait… you're not the Doctor?”
“I can assure you that I am the Doctor, and have been for several thousands of years.”
“Doctor, have you banged your head? Was it in an experiment?”
“What? No! Look, just listen. I am the Doctor, and someone you know apparently looks exactly like me. He could be a future me, or he might just be a double, but I want to make sure… my dear, are you quite alright?”
Derpy was backing away, trying to get as far from this strange madpony as possible. “Look, I don't know who you are, but I have a lot of letters to deliver, and I really ought to get going. See you… maybe.” So saying, she scooped up her postbag, threw it on, and took off – rather more hastily than politeness dictated.
“Well, that wasn't particularly productive.” He wandered back over to Twilight, who had managed to get the TARDIS into the town square.
“Why do you want it here, anyway?” she asked huffily, mopping her brow.
The Doctor was plainly delighted. “I'm glad you asked! It's quite simple, really. The TARDIS feeds partially on chronon particles, and since part of her resides in the fourth dimension, she relies on them to make repairs. She's still in a bit of a state after I crashed her – fluid link broken, Zeiton 7 dwindling, you know – so she needs to repair herself. The town square is one of the weakest spots in the Space-Time Continuum for miles and months away, so it's an ideal spot for her to recharge and fix one or two little faults.”
Twilight looked slightly stunned by the barrage of information, but was obviously interested. “The fourth dimension? As in time?”
“Quite correct. Did I ever tell you what the name stands for?”
“You never even explained what it was.”
“Allow me to elucidate. She is a Type 40 Time-Travel Capsule, capable of traversing the universe in the blink of an eye, given fair weather conditions. My own personal vehicle, and oldest friend.”
“Friend? You mean it's – I mean she's alive?”
“Well, yes, in a manner of speaking. She has a bank of computers.”
Twilight waited expectantly; then realised this was all the explanation she was going to get. “This is fascinating,” she breathed, looking at the box with new eyes.
“A TARDIS: the essence of transport. Time And Relative Dimension In Space. Behold!” As he spoke, he pulled out a key and unlocked the doors, and on his last word, flung them open to reveal… Twilight gasped.
“What do you think?”
“But… it's bigger… I don't… the outside… how?”
“She's dimensionally transcendental.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means… well, to be honest, it just means that she's bigger inside than out. Look, the outside exists in the three dimensions of width, depth and height, but the inside exists in the dimension of time, and a relative dimension of space. That means you can have as much inside as you like, because it doesn't take up any room in the three external dimensions.”
“But wouldn't that mean that there are only two dimensions inside?”
“Time, like space, although a dimension in itself, contains many dimensions of its own,” pronounced the Doctor, as if reading from a textbook.
Twilight pondered this. As a good scientist, she felt that the best method of learning more about this 'TARDIS' would be her favourite: unbridled experimentation. “Can I go inside?”
“Best not.” The Doctor noticed Twilight's drooping ears, and patted her kindly on the head. “Well, I'm sorry, but it won't be safe in there for a good while, yet. Just look.”
He was right. Inside the TARDIS, all that was visible was a poorly lit room, full of once gleaming-white surfaces (now coated in mildew), jutting bits of what looked like coral, vicious-looking spikes of rusting iron girder, and broken computers with parts spilled all over the floor. Twilight couldn't make out any more, but there was certainly the crackling sound of electricity discharging itself into the air.
“Poor girl,” said the Doctor, sadly, “she's far too old for this sort of thing. All the console rooms have been meshed into one thanks to dimensional warping in the crash, and it's left her in a bit of a state. Imagine how you'd feel if your central nervous system tried to hide in your brain!”
“How do you know she's a female?” asked Twilight, not best pleased about being patted on the head.
“She's not female female. She's just a ship. All ships take the feminine.” The Doctor slammed the door shut. “Now then, I need to find that Doctor fellow. Know where he lives?”
“No, sorry.”
“Why ever not? You're the princess, aren't you?”
“Well, yes, but...”
“Never mind. I'll just have to make discrete inquiries.”
Twilight sighed. She had an awful feeling that these inquiries wouldn't be as 'discrete' as the Doctor hoped.
“Doc! Doc? Let me in!” Derpy hammered at the door of her good friend the Doctor with an urgency born of confusion and worry. She had flown over (via one or two lamp-posts and a fence) as soon as she'd finished her deliveries for the day. Now she was panicking, wondering if she should have come sooner.
“Hold on!” came a muffled voice from indoors. The door flew open, and a rush of black smoke caught Derpy full in the face. She coughed and spluttered a little, and was overcome with dizziness; and then strong hooves grasped her shoulders, hauling her inside.
“Ditzy! My dear, how are you?”
Derpy – or Ditzy, depending on which of her parents you believed – looked up, and saw with relief the smiling face of the Doc, full of kindness and – thank Celestia – recognition. “Doc! You're okay!”
“Well, my attempts to turn a cockroach invisible have ended in disaster… again… but yes, I'm perfectly fine! Shouldn't I be?”
The smoke was beginning to clear, now that the door had been opened. Derpy looked around the familiar laboratory, full of the usual half-finished experiments and scientific paraphernalia. Clocks ticked (not all in the right direction), chemicals bubbled, electrodes buzzed angrily.
She thought for a moment, wondering how best to phrase her question. “Well, have you seen me yet today?”
“Not that I recall.”
“Then that wasn't you in the town square this morning?”
“Well, I've been busy in my laboratory all day, so unless my time-travel machine starts working and sends me back to this morning, then… no. Hold on,” he added, scratching his chin, “what wasn't me?”
Derpy swallowed. “There was some strange pony calling himself the Doctor, and he came up to me and said a lot of stuff about… Autons, and things. I thought he was you, but then I figured he wasn't, so I flew off… and he wasn't you, was he?”
“No, no.” The Doctor smiled and ruffled her hair. “I'm here. What convinced you he was me, then?”
“Well," began Derpy, feeling rather foolish, "he looked exactly like you. He sounded kinda similar, too.”
“Great whickering stallions!” The Doctor's voice took on a little more urgency. “Exactly like me? You're sure?”
Derpy nodded.
For a moment, a sadness passed across the Doctor's face. Then he was back to normal, his reassuring smile present once more; yet when he spoke, his voice was tinged with regret. “Well, that was only to be expected, after a while.”
“What do you mean?” Derpy's worry was apparent.
The Doctor sighed, and looked long and hard at her. It was a look full of melancholy, and Derpy's heart went straight out to him, although she had no idea what was the matter. Finally he spoke. “I think it's time I told you where I really come from.”
Derpy still remembered the first time she had met the Doctor. In fact, it was one of her most treasured memories, one of those that you recall whenever you feel a little down-hearted, and aren't sure why. It had been around a week before Twilight Sparkle and Nightmare Moon had concurrently shown up, and the one had ended up defeated by the other.
She had been in the middle of her morning deliveries, and trying to deliver a letter to, as she called her, The Mare at Number 3. The difficult thing about The Mare at Number 3 was that she owned and, more to the point, kept in her front garden, a particularly vicious pit-bull terrier, with enormous teeth and a fondness for pegasus-a-la-raw. Being quite a large dog, it had no problem with self-consciousness, and therefore expressed this fondness at every opportunity, which, unfortunately for Derpy, was every morning at around 7 'O clock, six days a week.
Derpy would be the first to admit that she was not a technically-minded mare. At school, her woodwork grades had been outshone by those of a colt with three legs, and her every metalwork lesson had ended in total disaster, and twice with the speedy evacuation of the school. Her teacher had, to her dismay, once written on her report 'Give her the job and she'll finish the tools'. Despite these limitations, every weekend she would develop some new mechanical means of getting the letters to the letterbox (which was, as Derpy's typical luck would have it, directly next to the door – that is, past the terrier), which she would then spend the week testing.*
This week, her apparatus of choice was a long wooden pole, attached to whose end was a string, to which was further attached the letter. This, she thought, she could stretch out over the garden, manoeuvring the letter into the mailbox without actually going through the gate. The problem of getting the letter off the string once it was in the letterbox hadn't actually crossed her mind yet, and was one she never actually encountered, for as soon as the letter had reached the half-way point, the pit-bull decided that it was now or never if he was going to get his pegasus, scampered forward, and seized the letter in his teeth.
There is a code of honour among mail-ponies that no letter shall go undelivered, and Derpy was well aware that partial digestion by pit-bull was likely to severely hamper her chances of sticking to this code. So she pulled. The dog, understandably enough, pulled back.** In other circumstances, this cheerful tug of war might have lasted a little longer, but, alas, the strain proved rather too much for the string, which, fed up with the whole affair, snapped, throwing Derpy backwards and into the forelegs of, as the strange fellow later introduced himself, the Doctor.
“Oof!” he said, quite understandably, as he caught her rather neatly.
“Eeep!” she said, leaping out of his grasp and onto all-fours… at least, that was what she was hoping to do, except that two of the four slipped out from under her, causing her to topple, nastily.
“I say, are you alright?” The Doctor helped her to her hooves, smiling kindly.
“Er, yeah, I guess...”
“What in the world were you doing?”
A disorinented Derpy attempted to mime using a wooden pole to get a letter past a dog, over a garden and into a letterbox, and said letter being unexpectedly eaten by said dog. Miraculously, the Doctor seemed to grasp the idea.
“Right,” he muttered, narrowing his eyes. Before Derpy could stop him, he had hurled himself over the fence and into the garden, and had begun a wrestling match with the surprised pit-bull. With a yelp, it found itself suspended by its tail over the lawn, a strange brown pony – who smelled, he thought, decidedly off – giving it a hefty whack on the spine. The dog coughed, and the letter flew out of its mouth onto the grass. The Doctor set down the dog, which scampered off into its kennel, slamming the door behind it.
As Derpy pondered the logistics of putting a door on a dog-kennel, the Doctor posted the letter, and returned to her side.
“Oh, thank you!” she gushed.
“It was nothing, my dear.”
Derpy shook her head violently, bringing the Doctor sharply into focus for a few seconds. It was then that she fell madly in love with him.
She didn't realise this at first, of course. One doesn't always. She was, however, acutely aware of a desire to spend more time with the mysterious stallion, and, to her surprise, he seemed to find the idea quite agreeable. Within a few days in each other's company, they were firm friends. The Doctor seemed fascinated by every aspect of Ponyville life, always taking note of interesting behaviours, asking questions about the local traditions.
For her part, she was anxious to find out more about him – and yet he seemed to withdraw himself whenever she asked him about his past, becoming strangely muted, and taking every chance to change the subject. Eventually she learned to accept that he didn't want discuss his origins, and stopped trying. “After all,” she reasoned, “if he doesn't want to talk about it, there must be a reason for it.”
Now, she would pop in to see the Doctor at every chance she got, always eager to find out about his latest experiments, even though she didn't always entirely understand them. He had bought a spacious house almost immediately he had arrived in town, and made a modest living as a mechanic and repair-pony. It was he who had developed a new, super-accurate hour-glass that measured time to the tenth of a second, and yet required no magic in its construction. This had made him rather popular with the mayor, who had appointed him Ponyville's official time-turner, a post reserved for only the most knowledgeable and experienced engineers. In essence, his task was to ensure that each and every clock in town was running accurately, never too quickly, never too slowly, telling the time for Ponyville.
In all this time, Derpy had never once confessed her love for him, being sure that it would go unreciprocated.
Bearing all this in mind, the reader will perhaps understand why, upon discovering his true origins, Derpy was a little shocked, to say the least.
“I'm not of your world,” he explained. “I was born in another star-system altogether. I'm an alien.”
“I… what?” Derpy's ears flopped down, she stared at the Doctor wide-eyed, pleading that this was all a joke; but the look in the Doctor's eyes was totally serious.
“I came here on a brief reconnaissance mission. You know, observe behaviour, gather specimens, that sort of thing. My race are always keen to learn.”
“Doc, I don't...”
“Only thing is, I got a bit stuck here. There's a splinter group of the Galgonquans – that's my race – called the Wirdegens. They refuse to just observe, want to use our knowledge to seize power… and they decided to try and take some researchers prisoner.” He paused to let Derpy speak, but she was obviously too shocked: she was simply staring at the Doctor in disbelief. He decided to press on. “Their idea was to hold us hostage in return for secrets from our great library – they don't have access to it, you see. Shortly after arriving in Canterlot, I discovered that a number of Wirdegens had infiltrated the city and were hunting for me. I realised that if I didn't use any Galgonquan technology they wouldn't be able to track me, so I destroyed all my equipment and fled to Ponyville. They don't know what I look like, so they've never found me.”
“But-” Derpy swallowed, trying to regain control of her emotions, “why didn't you just go back to your world?”
“There was a ship in orbit, cloaked from view. If I had used my portable matter-transmitter to return there, the Wirdegens would have found the ship and captured it and me. I've no other way of getting home. My planet has had no word from me for years, so they've probably given me up for dead...”
“Oh, I...” Derpy rushed forward and hugged the Doctor tightly. “You poor thing.”
“Steady there, my dear. I'm quite happy here. But the real Doctor turning up does put a spanner in the works.”
“R- real Doctor?”
“Ah, yes, well, I should have said; this isn't exactly my true form.”
“So… you're not a real pony?”
“No, not really. You see, when we hatch, we vaguely resemble you ponies, but with fewer features, and… purpler. Once we've completed our final test, we ascend to the next form: just pure energy, with sentience and being, and powers you can't imagine...”
“But you look just like a normal pony,” protested Derpy, who wasn't taking in quite as much as the 'Doctor' hoped.
“That's the test. We're sent to Equestria – we like Equestria, it's normally quite safe – and are allowed to choose disguises. I chose the body of the Doctor. We have many records of him, popping up all over this planet, always saving the day, righting wrongs, that sort of thing; but we don't know who he is, or how he's lived so long. 'Doctor' seems to be some sort of cult title, actually, because there are lots of different ponies calling themselves that. They've always been heroes of mine, so when I got the chance I picked my favourite of the Doctors.”
Derpy sat down with a thump. All these revelations had stunned her into silence. The Doctor stood watching her, waiting for a reaction. Eventually, she spoke, slowly and carefully, as though choosing her words even as she said them: “So, you're not the Doctor.”
“No. My real name is Tarrant.”
“And all this time you let me believe that you were him...”
“Well, I was trying to convince myself, to be honest. It took me ages to get the accent right. All you Equestrians sound very similar to the Galgonquan ear.”
“All this time you've been lying to me...”
“Afraid so.”
“All this time I thought I lov… I thought you were my friend, and now you tell me you were lying… and you don't even think to apologise?”
“Oh, whoops!" The idea clearly hadn't even crossed his mind. "I forgot. Look, Derpy, I'm most awfully...”
But it was too late. Tears streaming down her face, the wall-eyed pegasus had dashed out of the door, slamming it behind her.
“And so, Miss, ah, Roseluck, what exactly is your relation to this 'Doc'?” The Doctor was standing, clipboard in hoof, before a pale-yellow earth-mare with a raspberry-red mane, who, to his annoyance, kept on breaking off their conversation to giggle to herself.
“Oh, call me Rose.” She giggled again. The Doctor winced.
“Very well, Miss Rose. If you wish. Now, if you could…?”
“Oh, yeah! He he! Well, I dunno, we just hang around together sometimes if Derpy's not around. I guess you could say I'm his back-up friend, really.”
“So what do you know about him?”
“Oh, not much, really. He just came to Ponyville a few years ago, fits right in. I think he's a mechanic, or something.”
“Nothing else?”
“Sorry.”
“I see. Well, thank you, my friends,” said the Doctor, nodding to Rose and her fellow flower-stall attendants, “you've been almost helpful… I mean, you've all been most helpful.”
All three of them giggled.
“Beetles!” cursed the Doctor under his breath, as he left the three to their flower-arranging. Nopony seemed to know anything about the other Doctor apart from what he'd learned from Roseluck. Only Mayor Mare (Was that really her name?) had known any more, telling him all about some of the gadgets the Doctor had developed: nothing particularly advanced, but certainly impressive given the age in which he lived and the time over which he seemed to have developed them.
“What I need,” announced the Doctor to no one in particular, “is to find Derpy again. If only hadn't scared her off like that. Perhaps I should just learn to be nicer...” He broke off abruptly, noticing that a number of ponies had started following him, and were casting him expectant glances. “What?” he demanded, turning to face them. Then realisation dawned. “Look, I'm not about to burst into song, you know. I'm not in the habit of it. I just like to talk out loud.”
Once the disappointed crowd had dispersed, the Doctor decided to turn his attention to finding Derpy. “Right. From what I've heard, my best bet would be to follow whatever trails of destruction I can find. Then if I can just...”
And at that moment, Derpy, blind with tears, ran straight into him.
*Some smart-alec reader is doubtless thinking at this moment “Well, why didn't she just fly over?” to which the only answer must be “Have you ever seen Derpy flying?” When she tried this, she would almost invariably fly into the wall of the house, plummet to the ground, and then be set upon by the dog. Nasty.
**Living as she did in an entirely vegetarian society that had never felt the need to develop fishing-rods, the irony of this situation was entirely lost on Derpy. It's quite fortunate that this story is going to be read by humans, who have a better chance of appreciating it.
Tarrant was sure he was doing the right thing. All the same, as he faced the door to the cloaking-chamber that would disguise him as a perfectly ordinary Equestrian, an unusual sense of trepidation overcame him, and he felt the pit that had until recently been his stomach deepen even further.
The casual (and Equestrian) observer would have initially made Tarrant out to be a slightly tall Earth-pony. Looking more carefully, one would notice a few distinguishing features. For one thing, he had no mane, nor any visible tail – although one could not be quite sure that there was no tail at all, for most of his body was swathed in elegant robes, in vivid sapphire and subtle emerald shades. The blues and violets and greens danced in exquisite patterns, all loops and whorls, so intricate that one would swear that they were the work of no craftspony, but were magically wrought, or else something so wonderful as a crystallised dream, and, lost in these fanciful thoughts, one probably wouldn't really notice his face.
And then one would, and would panic.
Tarrant's face, if face you could call it, was noticeable only by its apparent absence. Certainly, he had a mouth, eyes, a nose, a muzzle – all the things you expect on a face, and in much the right positions. The trouble was that that was all there was, as though an enthusiastic and imaginative filly had drawn a face with her crayons, happily slapped on the aforementioned ingredients, and then, finding herself drained of both enthusiasm and imagination, had given up and wandered off. In more descriptive, and perhaps more helpful, terms, it was a minimalist face, based on the principle of flatness wherever possible, and emptiness elsewhere.
A pony, faced with such a visage, would run a mile, and fair enough. The fact is, though, that that is what Galgonquans look like, and a pretty picture they think Equestrians, who, they say, have far too complicated faces by half.
He was also blue. This is also quite normal for Galgonquans.
“Tarrant!”
Tarrant's thoughts were interrupted by a sharp female cry. Looking up, he saw an elderly Galgonquan mare, similarly clad, rushing down one of the brightly lit corridors. Glancing over her shoulder, he could see through the windows lining the left hand wall of the corridor, opening onto the void of space. Tarrant gulped. This was his first time space-travelling, and he was still not used to the idea; after all, he had only been in the ship for about two Equestrian days.
“Quan-Mother!” he cried.
“Tarrant, I thought I'd miss you. I was held up by a pressure leak in cabin 4. That fool of a guard wouldn't let me through long after it was obviously safe.”
“Mother, I can look after myself. You have no need to worry.”
“I couldn't let my son go on the final stage of his examination without saying goodbye, you silly boy.” She reached up with her right forehoof, and stroked it across his forehead – the Galgonquan equivalent of kissing.
“Mother, there are ponies watching...”
“Don't be silly.”
“Hem-hem.” Both turned to look at the cloaking-chamber's operator, who was perched on top of its roof. The chamber, you see, was like a lobby between two rooms, and extended into both of them, its ceiling a good few hooves lower than that of the main rooms. The first room, in which Tarrant and his mother were standing, was a sort of waiting room, for those who were being cloaked to wait while the complex machinery was being prepared. The second was the final briefing room, where Tarrant would be reminded of his mission. “Are you quite ready, Quan-Tarrant?”
“Just coming, Quan-Operator,” said a sheepish Tarrant.
“Now remember,” said his mother, still fussing, “be nice to ponies and they'll be nice to you. Always be polite to your friends, politer still to strangers, and the politest of all to your enemies.”
Tarrant had heard it all before. “Yes, mother,” he said, blushing furiously, although he could have spared himself the embarrassment, as the operator had also seen this scene played out dozens of times.
“And watch out for Wirdegens!” she said urgently.
“No need to worry about telling him that, Quanness!*” the operator reassured her. “We'll be sure to warn him ourselves plenty of times before we beam him down. We've just received reports of a Wirdegen presence on the planet, so we're all on red-alert.”
“What?” An expression of shock crossed Tarrant's mother's face. “You're not sending him down with that going on, are you?”
“Oh, don't worry. We should have it under control by the time he arrives.” The operator seemed to be trying to convince himself as much as her. “Right,” he began, changing the subject, “I'll bring up the visualisation of the appearance you chose from the Face-bank.” He punched a few buttons on the control panel in front of him, and brought up an image on his screen. “So, you've gone for… brown Earth-pony?”
“That's right.”
“Sure you don't want a unicorn? Most ponies go for the unicorns. They're a lot more powerful.”
“Yes, quite sure.”
“Huh. To each his own, I guess. Then enter, Quan-Tarrant.”
“Thank you, Quan.”
The door to the chamber slid open with a hiss, and Tarrant stepped forward into the chamber. He turned to face his mother, who smiled at him.
“Good luck, Tarrant.”
“Thank you, Quan-Mother.”
Then the door slid shut, separating them. Though they didn't know it, it was the last they would see of one-another for a very long time.
Inside the chamber, Tarrant was surprised at how empty it was – just a smallish, white, featureless room.
“Please discard your robes,” said a computerised voice, echoing despite the chamber's size, making it difficult to be sure where it was coming from. Obediently, Tarrant removed his clothing, leaving it in a heap in one corner. “Stand quite still,” came the voice once more, “we are preparing to cloak your body.” To his surprise, it didn't hurt, as he had secretly been worried it would. It was little more than a tickling sensation as his body was bombarded with psychic rays that would ensure that, despite the fact that his body would remain unaltered, anypony who looked at him, or sensed him by any other means, would be convinced that he was a perfectly ordinary pony. Next, he was furnished with a complete understanding of the Equestrian language, transferred directly into his brain by means of similar technology.
Emerging from the door in the opposite side of the chamber, Tarrant glanced down at his new form. Everything was perfect, as expected; down to the last hair. The room he was in had tall, sloping, blue walls, like most of the rooms on the ship, and to his left and right, there were trapezoid doors in the centre of the walls. The far wall was taken up by a vast window, which opened out onto space, and the planet below. A matronly figure sitting at a desk, which was made of the same dark-blue semi-metal as the walls, in the middle of the room smiled kindly at him.
“You must be Quan-Tarrant. I'm Quan-Hylda, head of Equestrian Relations. I'm here to make sure you're properly kitted out and prepared for your exam.”
“Pleased to meet you, Quanness.”
“I can see you're a well-mannered young pony,” she beamed at him, her wrinkled – though, not very, for as I have said, the Galgonquan face is renowned for its featureless appearance – face breaking into wreaths of smiles. Tarrant instinctively felt he could trust her, although obviously trustworthiness was to be expected of one with so important a position as Hylda's. “First, though,” she went on, “a few formalities. We need your teacher here to verify your identity. Actually,” she said rather huffily, glancing at the time-disk on her desk, “she should be here by now. Do you have any idea what could be keeping her?”
“Well, she died about six years ago, so she glitches occasionally”
“Ah, I see.” A small red light began to flash above the door in the left wall. “Well, well, that should be her now. Open!” This last was addressed to the door itself, which obediently opened, splitting down the middle into two half-doors which hinged round to either side.
On the other side of the door, a magenta ball of light hovered in mid-air at around head-height. It was about the size of an apple, and was covered in flexing white tendrils, about as long as the ball's diameter. When it spoke, the tips of the tendrils crackled with purple energy. It spoke now.
“Tarrant! Quan-Hylda! I'm sorry I'm late!” The voice was that of an elderly mare, distorted a little, and seemingly a little louder than it ought to have been. “My form lost its structure in the lift, and I missed my floor trying to reacquire stability.”
“Quite alright, Quan-Lidiya. Tarrant has only just arrived,” replied Hylda. “Now then, if you wouldn't mind completing this form?”
“Of course.” The sphere, Tarrant's teacher Lidiya, drifted over to the desk, and used one of her tendrils to pick up a transparent square sheet of plastic, on which various strange symbols – the Galgonquane language – were embossed. With a faint crackle of electricity from Lidiya, new symbols began to emboss themselves into the plastic, glowing faintly at first, then gradually fading. As she filled out the form, she chatted away happily. “I'm sure you'll enjoy it down there, Tarrant. Equestria's a beautiful place.”
“I know, Quanness, but I'm a little nervous. I've never left the planet before, and now...”
“I know, my boy, but you'll soon get used to it. Why, I was far more scared than you are before my first trip, but after a few years I couldn't get enough travel! I was quite the wanderer in my previous incarnations, I can tell you.” This was true. Not only could she tell him, she frequently did. Tarrant was quite eager to avoid hearing the same stories again, so he decided to change the subject.
“Their language is a little limiting, isn't it? How would one express, say, 'boojanji'**?
“I wouldn't try, if I were you,” remarked Hylda, drily. “Now, are you familiar with the contents of this examination scheme?”
“I am to be transmatted to Equestria, where I am to collect as much information as possible about Equestrian culture over the course of one Equestrian week,” recited Tarrant. “I am to interact with the ponies of the city of Canterlot, and to remain undetected as alien to their world.”
“Which shouldn't be too hard,” Lidyia interjected, “since they've no knowledge of alien life-forms.”
“Once I have completed my time there, I am to activate the transmat reversal unit you will give me, thereby returning myself to this orbital craft.”
“Word perfect!” applauded Hylda, delighted. “The only problem is that there have been one or two reports of Wirdegens in Equestria. You'll want to avoid them.”
“Yes, I heard about that.”
“Well, don't worry. They haven't been seen anywhere near Canterlot, so you ought to be alright.”
“Oh… good.” Tarrant was far from convinced…
“Stars and sapphires!” exclaimed the Doctor, picking himself up off the cobbles, “where did you spring from?” He had, lest we forget, recently found the pony he was looking for not through the complex and time-consuming detective work he had been about to embark on, but by coincidentally bumping into her in the street, though a little more literally than either would have wished.
“Oh, I...” Derpy was left sitting in the middle of the street in front of the Doctor, looking dazed. Bringing her eyes into focus, Derpy suddenly realised whom she was talking to. “I... Oh!” She clapped her hooves over her mouth, trying to stop herself from letting out a great sob of despair. It didn't work.
“There, there,” said the Doctor, helping her to her hooves, and resting a gentle hoof on her shoulder, “I'm sorry if you've hurt yourself.”
Derpy shook her head, and sniffed. A fat tear rolled down her cheek, and she sat down again with a thump. “You… you are the real Doctor, aren't you?” she asked, tearfully.
“Well, I suppose I am, rather… I say, you look in a bit of a state. Why don't you come with me?”
“I… guess. I think I need to talk to you.”
“So do I,” said the Doctor, thoughtfully. “Come on!”
He led her to a nearby café, and they sat together at an outside table. The waiter came straight over to them – today hadn't been good for business, and he was hoping to pick up a few tips before the café closed for the evening. He put on his best 'impoverished waiter' smile. “Good afternoon monsieur, madame, what can I get you?”
“Bring me your finest wines!” proclaimed the Doctor, casting a hoof dramatically aloft.
The waiter gave him a dry look. “Sir, this a café, not a restaurant. We do not stock alcohol.”
The Doctor looked around, bemused. “Oh. Coffee-shop, eh? No alcohol. Hmm.” He put a foreleg round the waiter's shoulders and leaned towards him conspiratorially. “Listen, are you sure you don't have any brandy, or somesuch? This young lady has had rather a shock… I think.”
“You 'think'?” The waiter raised an eyebrow, and glanced at Derpy. She had stopped crying, but was looking very sorry for herself. She was staring straight down at the table – or doing her best to, at any rate – and hiccuping occasionally.
“Well, I haven't been able to ask, yet. She's still suffering from the after-effects of the shock… or not, as the case may be. I'm hoping that if I give her some of the stuff that cheers and inebriates she'll calm down enough to tell me what happened, so that I can figure out whether she actually needs any.”
“I see.” He didn't. “Well, I will see what I can do.”
“Thanks awfully.”
The waiter turned and headed towards the indoor part of the café.
The Doctor considered trying to talk to Derpy, but decided against it. Inwardly, he congratulated himself on how sensitive this new incarnation was turning out to be. A regeneration had been just what he needed, although he was still not happy that he had been forced through it. A very underhoof trick by the Timelords. Lost in such thoughts, he didn't notice that the waiter had returned, bearing a nauseous-looking bottle of dark rum.
“Cook keeps this in case of medicinal emergencies,” he explained.
“Why,” asked the Doctor, eyeing the oozing contents of the bottle suspiciously, “in case she has to cause one?” The waiter didn't laugh.
“We will not be allowed to charge you for it,” he said, almost apologetically.
“I suspect I'll survive the gnawing feeling of guilt. Pass it over.” Obediently, the waiter hoofed*** him the bottle. After a brief wrestle, the Doctor managed to uncork it – “Let's hope the contents are more keen to leave the bottle than the cork!” he joked, to no avail – and looked around in vain for a glass. “You haven't really thought this through, have you?” he said, glaring at the waiter.
“My apologies, monsieur. I will see if...”
But before he could finish, Derpy grabbed the bottle from the Doctor's hoof, sniffed it, and, before the very eyes of the two astonished stallions, swigged the whole contents in a few seconds.
“Well...” said the Doctor, amused, “now I've seen everything.”
“Thanks, Doc,” said Derpy, apparently completely recovered from her bout of misery, and none the worse for wear for her one-mare drinking contest.
“Well,” said the waiter, obviously very annoyed, “you have only yourselves to blame if we have a medical emergency in the next few days and we have no rum.”
“Having seen that… that stuff,” remarked the Doctor, “I'd say the patient would have us to thank. I'm amazed we aren't having a” – the Doctor did a rather realistic imitation of the waiter's snooty Fancy accent – “'medical emergency' right now.” The waiter stood frozen to the spot, open-mouthed with shock and rage. He was not used to customers talking to him like this. “Now, I suggest you get on with your job and bring us two menus. Chop-chop!”
The waiter was about to throw this ruffian out, when he noticed that the Doctor had slipped something into his hoof whilst talking. He glanced down. It was unmistakably a diamond. He looked back up at the Doctor, who winked.
“Menus?”
“Of course, sir. At once, sir. Thank you, sir.” The waiter dashed back into the café as fast as his legs would carry him. Fortunately, this was very fast.
The Doctor turned to his guest, smiling. “Now then, my dear, whatever's the matter?”
“I… um… look, I guess I owe you an apology.”
“Not at all.”
“But I… I thought you were some sort of imposter.”
“I would have assumed the same. Actually, I've mistaken myself for an imposter before now.”
“Well, I should still… Doc, I was wrong. As soon as I told… the other Doctor about you, he told me that… that he's a fake. That all this time, he lied to me...” Derpy looked ready to relapse into tears. She looked hopefully up at the Doctor. “Have you got any more of that stuff?”
“Miss Hooves, notwithstanding your liver's apparent durability, it would be remiss of me in the extreme to let you have any more alcohol even if I could, or wanted to, which I can't, and don't, because no, I haven't.”
“I… I forgot the question.”
“Come to think, so have I.” The Doctor began to chuckle. Nervously, Derpy joined in. Soon they were both laughing away like old friends. They laughed so hard that they didn't notice the waiter return, who was getting rather sick of not being noticed returning. He had, as instructed, brought two menus. The Doctor glanced down his, eyebrows raised. “Hmm.” He took out a monocle, which he placed in his left eye, and began to read. “Right then, let's see what we've got. Daisy sandwiches, lettuce cutlets, water burgers… hay fries. Ah, yes. I had fries once. Like chips, only not as good. Got any crumpets?”
“I'm afraid not, sir.”
“Thought not. Ah well. How about chocolate cake?”
“That we do have.”
“Splendid. What'll it be, Miss Hooves?”
“Muffins,” she said, without hesitating.
“Good-o. Waiter?”
“Sir?”
“Muffins and… er..." He had obviously forgotten what he was talking about. "The other one.”
“Chocolate cake, sir?”
“Precisely. Off you go.”
Off he went.
“My stars,” muttered the Doctor to himself, "I seem to have developed quite the sweet-tooth. My tooth's sweeter than a… a… sweet thing. Oh dear.”
“Apple?” suggested Derpy, helpfully.
“Oh, no, no apple similes. I don't want to end up sounding like… like… orange… wears a hat.”
“Applejack?”
“That's the bunny. Ah! Bunny! They're sweet. Thanks.”
“Uh… you're welcome.”
“Now, you were saying?”
“Oh, er… Yeah, my friend, the Doc… he's not the Doc.”
“I think we've definitely established that.”
“I wanted to say sorry. I thought… I dunno what I thought, but I shouldn't have been so rude.”
“I owe you the apology. I should never… I forget what I did, but I'm sure I shouldn't have done it.”
“You forget a lot of things, don't you?”
The Doctor sighed. “Maybe they're right. Maybe I am senile.”
“I… I'm sorry?”
“Oh, nothing. Look, I know this might not be the best time, but did he happen to mention who he was?”
“Well, he said… he said he was an alien.”
“Fair enough. He's not the only one.”
“What do you mean?”
The Doctor leant forward across the table, resting his head on his forehooves. He allowed his eyes to bore into Derpy's. She flinched away, but then found herself drawn into them somehow… Peering closer, she found herself staring not into the Doctor's eyes, but into two enormous black pits, their bottoms too far away to see, infinitely dark and cavernous. She wondered how she hadn't noticed them before. But no matter, for now she was falling, falling into those pits, their walls lined with what felt like thousands of years of knowledge and experience, happy times and sad, memories that could be treasured for all eternity and others best forgotten. She had long since forgotten who she was, where she was, all she was aware of was falling, all that truly existed were these chasms…
“Do you require butter with your muffins, miss?”
Derpy screamed and jerked her head away from the Doctor's gaze, her eyes flying off in opposite directions. Then she realised the waiter was staring at her. “Oh! Uh, yes please.”
The waiter set a butter dish down on the table next to her plate of freshly baked muffins. “And your cake, sir.”
“Thanks awfully.”
The waiter departed tutting to himself about manners, and the Doctor promptly buried his muzzle in the generous slice of chocolate cake the waiter had placed before him. For her part, Derpy bent herself over her plate, closed her eyes tight shut, and inhaled deeply. The muffins were still warm, and the steam wafting from them carried the scent to the eager pegasus. This little anchor in reality had been just what she needed after... that. She still wasn't sure she could trust this stallion. Opening her eyes again, she noticed the butter that the waiter had left. She hadn't really wanted any, and had simply been taken by surprise by the waiter's request, but now it was here it seemed a shame to waste it.
In this short space of time, the Doctor had all but demolished his cake, and had set to painstakingly licking every trace of chocolate from his hooves. He was halfway through the tedious but rewarding task when he realised that Derpy had started to watch him. In his embarrassment, he quickly hid his hooves under the table and resumed the conversation. “He, er… didn't happen to say which planet he was from, did he?”
“Well...” Her mouth full of muffin, Derpy's words were practically unintelligible. “He faid fomefing abou' being on a refearfch miffion, bu' I don' really remember anything else.” It was her turn to look embarrassed. She swallowed her mouthful of crumbs. “I was pretty upset,” she said quietly.
“I understand.”
“So, I get that you're the Doc, but what do you do? Are you a mechanic, like my Doc?”
“Well, I… I suppose that I'm just a doctor. I wouldn't like to be more specific. I am the Doctor, and the Doctor means me.” He leaned back in his chair and smiled.
“Like, a medical Doctor?”
“Oh, no, no. I only wish I were. My back's been playing up again lately...”
“Then what are you a doctor of?”
“Of everything.”
Derpy gave him a quizzical look. “You weren't kidding about not being specific, were you?”
The Doctor laughed. “I'm not easy to describe. I'm a traveller, I suppose; an adventurer, that's certain; a gentlecolt, though I say it who shouldn't; and I'm somepony who likes to extend a helping hoof.”
“You travel, then?”
“I would say so, yes.”
“Where have you been?”
“Ha! Where haven't I been!”
“Yak-yakistan?”
“I haven't been there.”
“Then where?”
“I mentioned I was an alien, didn't I?”
“Well, you more just sort of implied it and did a stare-y thing with your eyes.”
“Oh, sorry. Well, I am. My dear, I've travelled the length, breadth, width and depth of space. I've travelled to the nine corners of the universe, seen things you wouldn't believe. Golden birds wheeling in a silver sky, their cries echoing over crystal mountains and emerald lakes. Glassy islands set in purple seas. Ponies made of words or thoughts, and creatures older than time itself. I've met Starswirl the Bearded, taken tea with King Sombra – before one or two unfortunate events that rather altered his way of life – and got into a fight with Princess Celestia's nanny. I've rescued whole planets from certain destruction, and seen suns burn as they die. And as they live, come to that. Suns have a bit of a habit of burning.”
Derpy was captivated, staring at the Doctor, eyes like saucers, begging him to go on. “Wow!” she breathed. “It sounds amazing!”
“Oh, it is,” smiled the Doctor. He stood up and walked out into the middle of the street, smiling at Derpy. “Believe me, I know. You see –
“I am the very model of a modern space-time renegade;
I've left countless evil power-grabbing monsters feeling quite dismayed;
I've climbed the mountains of Gi-braa, explored the caves of Fromium;
Discovered sixteen uses of the element polonium.”
The Doctor's apparently spontaneous melody was beginning to attract quite a crowd.
“I've got into more sword fights than a pony likes to talk about,
“The ponies of this town will surely think my presence Heaven-sent!”
“Oh yes, as ponies of this town, we think his presence Heaven-sent,
As ponies of this town, we're quite convinced that he is Heaven-sent,
As townsponies of Ponyville we've little doubt the Doc is Heaven-sent!”
(Diddle-iddle-iddle-iddle-iddle-iddle-ee)
“I've travelled back in time to help your ancestors along a bit,
And now I've got a moment it's a joy to make a song of it;
And thanks to many other talents which I haven't yet displayed:
I am the very pattern of a Gallifreyan renegade.”
“Those many other talents which he sadly hasn't yet displayed
Prove him the very pattern of a Gallifreyan renegade.”
(Om pom pom pom pom pom pom)
Now the Doctor slowed down his song to a more reverent pace.
“Now… From time to time I must admit, I doubt my very sanity,
And I've been known to demonstrate a frightening inanity.
On more than one occasion I have yielded to vanity,
And even valued violence over manners and urbanity.”
He cleared his throat, rather embarrassed. “And so, my dears –”
“This Doctor, though originating from a distant planet, he
would never let your world fall into chaos and insanity;
I hereby promise that so long as I retain organity...”
“Right… I've painted myself into a bit of a corner, here, haven't I?”
“Ratify!” shouted one of the ponies watching.
“Now, that's not quite right, is it?” the Doctor responded.
“Auntie!” shouted another.
“Better...”
“Strawberry!”
“You're not even trying.”
“Humanity!” suggested a teal unicorn mare near the front of the crowd.
“You just made that word up,” muttered the Doctor. “No, I have a better idea...” And drawing himself up onto his haunches, he very loudly and quickly sang:
“No evil creature will disturb this peaceful planet's sanctity!”
“A tricky one to rhyme as well, we didn't think of 'sanctity',
And even though it seems that mare made up the word 'humanity',
While he is here no monstrous thing would dare disturb Equestria's sanctity!”
(Diddle-diddle-diddle-diddle-diddle-diddle-dee)
“The mention of my name makes brave Sontarans and cruel Quarks afraid,
Slitheen and Weeping Alicorns are lucky to escape unscathed;
And bear in mind the talents that won't rhyme, and so go undisplayed:
I am the very model of a space-time-travelling renegade!”
“Those many talents that won't rhyme are tragically still undisplayed…
But he is the very model of a space-time-travelling renegade!”
(Om – pom – pom!)
(POM)
“Thank you, fillies and gentlecolts!” shouted the Doctor to the dispersing crowd. “I'm here all century. Please tell your friends not to call me 'Doc'!”
Derpy was almost speechless. “Doctor… that was...”
“Incredible?”
She nodded dumbly.
“Yes, well, not too bad. More or less had to make it up as I went along. Not too sure about one or two of the rhymes.”
“There's just one thing I don't understand, Doctor.”
“Oh? What's that?”
“What is a 'partial tart'?”
“Well, nothing really. I just couldn't think of anything else to rhyme with 'martial arts'.”
“Oh.”
As Derpy polished off her muffins, the Doctor continued to question her, and quickly found out about her first meeting with the other Doctor, about the many years they had spent as friends, and about the blow that his arrival had struck their relationship.
“My word,” he said, once Derpy had finished. “So he actually does know who I am? I was rather hoping it was some coincidence...” He got up from the table as if to go – Derpy had long since finished her muffins – saying as he did so “Well, it looks as though I'll have to have a talk with him. I need to find out who he is and what he wants. I don't think he's a threat any more, so that's a relief at any rate.”
Derpy giggled. “You talk funny.”
“You don't seem to understand adverbs, but I wasn't going to mention it.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind...”
“Doc?”
The Doctor winced. “Don't call me that, please.”
“Sorry, Doctor?”
“Yes?”
“I think he said his name was Tarrant.”
“Oh, well… there are a lot of species that use that as a name. Odd, really...”
“And he's a… Gal-something.”
“Ah, now that does narrow it down a tad.”
“And I don' t think he really looks like a pony. After he told me, when I looked at him, I could sort of see what he really looked like.”
“What, then?”
“Sort of purpley-blue. With no face.”
“Of course! He's a…” The Doctor's face fell. “It's on the tip of my tongue, but I can't for the life of me remember what they're called.”
“I feel like something was messing with my mind, telling me that he was a pony, when really he wasn't.”
The Doctor looked at Derpy with new respect. “It takes a lot to tune out psychic interference rays. You're actually pretty intelligent, aren't you?”
“What's that supposed to mean?” challenged Derpy, rather hurt.
“Well, for somepony who spends most of her life causing traffic accidents...”
“Oh, yeah. Fair enough.”
Together, the two ponies made their way towards the dwelling of the imposter Doctor. To her astonishment, Derpy realised that she was beginning to look up to this Doctor just as she had her old one. To his dismay, the Doctor realised that one slice of cake hadn't really been enough.
*'Quan' being roughly equivalent to 'Sir' or 'Mr' in Galgonquan society, as well as a polite prefix to a name or title, it is worth remembering that when addressing a female Galgonquan, properly called a 'Galgonquinne', it is correct to use the term 'Quanness', or one risks offending her. The fact that the feminine suffix is the same in Galgonquane – the many-layered language of that splendid race – as it is in Equestrian is pure coincidence.
** I'm afraid this can't be expressed in our language.
*** Well, ponies can't 'hand' each other things. That would be silly.
“This is the place, then?” asked the Doctor, nodding towards the oaken door of his counterpart's home.
“Definitely,” nodded his new friend, letting her tangled blond mane flop in front of her eyes. Brushing it out of the way, she approached the door and planted four short, sharp knocks in the centre. There came no reply. “Hmm. Sounds like he's out.”
“Any idea where, old girl?”
“Um… well, probably to look for me, actually.” She opened her eyes wide. “Oh! I just ran out! He must have been so worried.”
“Well, it seems we'll have to await his return,” said the Doctor, looking rather put out.
“Not really,” giggled Derpy, “he never remembers to lock his door.”
Sure enough, they had no trouble gaining entry, and, once inside, Derpy closed the door behind them. The Doctor looked around in amazement.
“My word,” he said to himself, “some of these inventions are far ahead of their time – even by Galgonquan standards.” A look of triumph crossed his face. “Galgonquan! I knew I'd remember eventually. He's a Galgonquan, has to be.”
Derpy crossed to a table, on which were piled several glowing, multicoloured, ethereal orbs. “These are the Doc's flameless fireworks. He only just figured out how to get them to work.”
The Doctor, however, was more interested in some of the diagrams pinned to the walls. “Goodness me! Temporal redistribution! This sort of thing gives me a headache.”
“This is his high-speed bottle opener,” continued Derpy, “but the mayor banned it 'cause it nearly opened Carrot Top at the Invention Convention.”
“An evolutionary accelerator!” exclaimed the Doctor. “I've never seen anything like it… Mind you, it wouldn't work.”
“How do you know, if you've never seen anything like it?”
“I can understand the principle,” retorted the Doctor, haughtily. “Now then, let's see… ah, just as I thought. He's been trying to develop a long-range communications device – probably to contact that orbital craft you mentioned. I believe the Galgonquans have had a craft permanently in orbit for the best part of a century now, and it's still undetected.” He smiled to himself at the thought. “Wonderful ponies, the Galgonquans.”
“But it must be awful for him, stranded here. What if he can't get back, and never sees his family again?” Derpy was beginning to look sad again. The Doctor hurried over to comfort her.
“There, there. That's very unlikely. He's got all the time in the world. Galgonquans can live for anything up to eight-hundred years without any difficulty.”
“Oh my goodness...”
“You don't seem very pleased.”
“Oh, I am, it's just… I always hoped…” She trailed off, and began crying again, softly this time. The Doctor leaned forward and drew her into an awkward hug.
“I understand.” He didn't.
“Derpy? Derpy!” Tarrant was tired of running. He had been running all over Ponyville, desperately searching for his best – his only – friend. It was getting dark now, and starting to rain, too. His hooves were splashed with mud. Most sensible ponies had gone inside, and the only answer to his cries was the soft pitter-patter of raindrops on the wet soil.
Tarrant knew he was an important pony. In fact, as time-turner, his authority was only exceeded by the mayor's. In effect, he was Ponyville's number two pony. And yet, for all his importance, no one really cared about him. Certainly, other ponies might talk to him, even laugh and joke with him, but when it came down to it, there was nopony who really cared whether he lived or died. Nopony except Derpy. He didn't want to lose her friendship.
Despite this, he also knew that catching pneumonia wouldn't do him any favours, either. Reluctantly, his hooves and his heart heavy, he turned for home, fighting his way through the fierce, driving rain.
By the time he had arrived back at his house, he was wet through. His fur was dripping, his teeth chattering, and his best green tie was hanging limp and sodden from his neck. Approaching the door, he could have sworn he could hear voices coming from inside. Drat! He must have forgotten to lock the door again. Burglars were all he needed to round off today. Gritting his teeth, he flung open the door – only to see Derpy, his only friend on the planet, and the Doctor, his lifelong hero, examining his inventions. His response was much as you might expect. “Great whickering stallions!” he cried, stumbling into his house, out of the rain.
“Doc!” shrieked Derpy, rushing across the room towards him. He was clearly exhausted, and it was taking him all the energy he had just to stay upright. Derpy took his hoof, leading him through the laboratory into the sitting room, where she set about lighting a fire. The real Doctor followed them through.
When the Doctor finally spoke, the fire was lit and Tarrant was on his sofa, finally getting some rest.
“So,” he began, “you're the one who's been going around impersonating me, are you?” He looked at Tarrant very sternly, but his expression quickly softened when he realised he was being grumpy again. “That's a nice tie,” he offered, by way of apology.
“Yes, I… wait, what do you mean, 'one of the Doctors'? I'm the Doctor. The definite article, almost.”
“But… there are more of you?”
“Such as who?”
“Well, there's the strange one with the scarf, the one with short hair and big ears, the little tramp, the-”
“Yes, I think I get the idea,” huffed the Doctor, “but I think you could describe me a little more flatteringly.”
“You? Singular?”
“I'm no Equestrian. I am a Timelord of the planet Gallifrey. I cross the void beyond the mind, the empty space that circles Time, a presence… Anyway, all those ponies are me.”
“My goodness… But how?”
“Cellular regeneration. When I die, my body rebuilds itself in a new form.”
“Can all Timelords do that?”
“Most certainly. It's not so very different from your race's many stages of existence – though I see you're still in your first.”
“That's incredible...”
“Let's not digress,” said the Doctor, assuming a businesslike tone. “As I see it, your problem is one of transport. You need a device that will move you from here to the Galgonquan orbital craft.”
“You know my species?”
“Not personally, no, but I have… I said, let's not digress!” the Doctor snapped. “Now, I don't have any such technology, and you've been unable to create it, which leaves us in a bit of a fix.”
“Oh, it's not that I can't build a transmat unit. I was top of my class in engineering.”
Derpy, who had been sitting quietly all the while, here rolled her eyes. “It's alright for some,” she muttered.
“The problem,” Tarrant continued, unaware of this, “is that I have to create a kind of teleporter completely unlike the ones my species uses.”
“Eh? Oh, I see,” interrupted the Doctor, “you don't want the Wirdegens to be able to track you.” He thought for a moment. “There's probably enough equipment here for me to rig up a home-made short-range matter-transmitter, but… well… I daren't.” He looked irritably down at Tarrant, who was simply gaping at him. “I say, are you listening?”
“Oh… sorry, it's not every day one comes face to face with one's hero.”
The Doctor was visibly mollified by this flattery. “Hum, well… see that you pay attention, that's all. As I was saying, I don't think I should make you one myself, because I don't trust myself to get it right. One screw out of place and I could transmit you straight into the planet's core, or into deep space.”
“But surely… you're the Doctor, aren't you? According to our records, you can do anything.”
“Ah, yes, your records. I've been meaning to ask about those. You say, Miss Hooves tells me, that you picked your favourite of all of the faces of mine that you'd seen, correct?”
“That's right.”
“But how could you have seen this one? Since I regenerated, I've never left this time-zone.”
“You did say you were a Timelord… I assumed that meant you could travel in time.”
“Oh, I can… well, could. I've been exiled here, and I'm not allowed to travel in time, nor yet to leave this planet.”
“Well, there are definitely records of a pony called the Doctor, who looks like you, popping up in Equestria's past.”
“My word… That means that… that this exile won't last forever! That I'll be free again!”
“Congratulations,” Tarrant offered, a little uncertain.
“Thank you, sir, thank you!” exclaimed the Doctor, seizing Tarrant's forehoof and warmly pumping it up and down several times.
“Funny,” Tarrant continued, “none of the records mentioned that you talked like this.”
The Doctor's smile vanished abruptly. “Like what?”
“Well, like a character from a comic opera.”
“Comic opera? Comic opera?”
“He does have a point,” added Derpy, who was warming her hooves by the fire.
“Thanks ever so for you opinion,” responded the Doctor, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “now do please shut up.”
“So, Doctor,” said Tarrant, wisely changing the subject, “do you have any ideas?”
“Well, presumably you know of a great deal of Galgonquan technology, but you daren't build or use any of it for fear that the Wirdegens will detect it and come and get you with their big knives.”
“That's about the gist of it.”
“I do have an idea.”
“What is it?”
“Well, isn't it obvious?”
Tarrant and Derpy shook their heads.
“Oh. Well then, I have another idea. Clearly you want to avoid building all of that technology that you would be very good at using, but which would attract the Wirdegens' attention. My plan is simple: build it.”
Derpy gave him a funny look – that is, a look that was funny even by her own high standards. “You're aware of how that came out, right?”
“Think, Derpy, think. Those Wirdegens might well have gone by now, anyway. If they are, then fine, we can just send him back up to his ship. If not, then they must be fairly well kitted-out to detect certain technological patterns. I'd be extremely surprised if they didn't have matter-transmitters of their own. All we have to do is lure them here and – ahem – clobber them.”
A few minutes and a cup of hot cocoa later, Tarrant and the Doctor had set to work in Tarrant's own private laboratory, in an attempt to replicate some easily recognisable Galgonquan technology. They had chosen the famous Galgonquan anti-gravity chopsticks – perhaps not the most glamorous of inventions, but certainly one that it wouldn't take them too long to build. Sadly, they had forgotten that they would need an external power-generator, which they were now in the process of cobbling together.
“This is actually really clever,” said Tarrant, hammering a nail into a plank of wood, and not really looking at what he was doing, so that he ended up nailing his tie to the table. “I'm surprised I didn't think of it.”
“Self-praise is no praise at all,” reminded the Doctor, “but don't think too harshly of yourself. You just couldn't see the wood for the trees. A little lateral thinking was required here.”
“All the same, in all these years…”
“All these years you've been tirelessly working on ways to create a brand-new type of transmat, Quan-Tarrant. What you've done is incredible. Don't you forget it. There's no substitute for hard work.”
“To be honest, Doctor, I wasn't just trying to create a way of getting home.”
“Oh no?”
“I really did want to help the ponies here, too.”
The Doctor smiled to himself. “I rather thought as much. But let me guess: no matter how hard you tried to fit in, the more out of place you felt?”
“Well… yes, to be honest.”
“And the closer you tried to get to ponies, the more distant you felt from them.”
“Yes, that's exactly right. How in the world did you know?”
“Trust me, I'm used to being an alien abroad.” The Doctor winked at Tarrant. “I'm afraid you'd never fit in here. You need to be at home, with your own ponies.”
“I suppose… but I am awfully fond of this place. Who'll look after them when I'm gone?”
“Now steady on, old boy, I don't think they're entirely dependent on you.”
“No, I suppose not. I've got rather protective of them, I'm afraid.”
“Well, that's not altogether surprising. Do you know, I think that after all these years trying to be like me, you've actually started to become me?”
“Really?” Tarrant seemed almost proud at the suggestion.
“Really. I've influenced a lot of ponies in my time. Plenty of them wanted to be like me, fighting evil, that sort of thing. Perhaps they try and be me, and in doing so actually become me, in a way. I sometimes wonder whether there actually are other Doctors out there, like you said, all helping in their own way.”
“This is all very interesting Doctor, but we really ought to try and get this finished. Have you seen Derpy?”
“Not since we sent her into the storeroom to get some more screws.”
“Right… She's knocked herself unconscious in there before now, you know.”
“On what?”
“I didn't like to ask. I'd better go and look for her.” Tarrant tried to move away from the workbench. “Oh.” He looked forlornly down at his once-best green tie, which, by means of a nail, was now serving to ensure that he wouldn't be going anywhere much in a hurry. “Pinkie gave me that as a 'Welcome to Ponyville' present,” he said glumly.
“Perhaps I'd better go.”
“Perhaps you'd better.”
While Tarrant searched for a hammer to get the nail out, the Doctor headed into the small storeroom at the back of the house. It was a rather pokey little affair, little more than a cupboard, and barely had room to accommodate the shelves overflowing with screws, screwdrivers, pliers, bulldog clips, electrical leads, washers, springs… and the like, which its purpose was to contain.
To his surprise, upon entering he heard the sound of sobbing – and there was Derpy, curled up in the room's far corner, weeping quietly into her forehooves. At the sound of the door opening, she looked up, frightened and embarrassed.
“Doc… I was just… uh-”
“My dear, are you feeling alright?” said the Doctor, softly.
“Yeah, fine,” lied Derpy, shakily trying to stand up.
“Don't talk such rot. What's the matter?”
“I dunno...” Derpy slumped against the wall again.
The Doctor sat down beside her, and put a hoof round her shoulders.
“Look, I may be a bit alien, and – I admit it – perhaps a little senile, but even I can tell something's wrong. Come on. You can trust me,” said the stallion she'd only met earlier that morning. “Alright,” he said to himself, considering this fact, “fair point, but still.”
“Huh?”
“Just, um, talking to myself… again.”
Derpy gave one of her pleasant, tinkling little laughs. “You're funny.”
“Thanks… I suppose. Well, you seem to have cheered up a bit. Fancy coming back through?”
“Does he have to go?”
“I beg your pardon?” This had come completely out of the blue, as far as the Doctor was concerned, and he wasn't entirely clear on what she was talking about. *
“The Doc… Tarrant...” She shuddered, still unused to the name, “does he really have to leave?”
The Doctor looked down into her wide eyes. Tears were welling up in the corners, and Derpy was beginning to quiver again. The last thing the Doctor wanted was for her to start crying again – quite apart from anything else, he still didn't feel well-adjusted enough to deal with it – but he knew what he had to say, all the same.
“No.” What? That wasn't what I meant to say! Stupid Doctor!Now is the time to put my hoof down.
“Really?”
This is it. “Of course not.” Drat! “We'll talk to him. Perhaps he would rather stay.” The Doctor was inwardly kicking himself. “He's made his home here, and he seems quite happy to me. I say we let him stay.” Doctor, you, sir, are a coward.
“Thanks, Doctor,” smiled Derpy. “You're the best.” She leant towards him, closing her eyes and resting her head on his shoulder, drawing him into a hug.
Wordlessly, the Doctor returned the hug. But he didn't smile.
*Well, alright, not even remotely clear. He was a scientist, not some sort of… social scientist.
“Um, Doctor? Are you still in there?” The Doctor was standing in Fluttershy's bathroom, staring into the mirror with a look of horror and dejection. “All I had to do was say 'no,' but I can't even manage that.” As he sorrowfully gazed at his reflection, the words of one of his best friends and oldest adversaries drifted into his head, and, to the Doctor's mind, it was as though his image in the mirror shifted, taking on new form. The colour of his mane deepened, and his chocolate-brown fur became a vivid blood-red. A horn emerged from his forehead, a pointed black beard sprouted on his chin. The Doctor knew the face well – it was an incarnation of his old enemy the Master. The Master let out a low chuckle. “You're getting old, Doctor – your will is weak! It's time you regenerated.” “Doctor? C-can you hear me?” Fluttershy sounded very worried. “I did. Ten days ago.” Still oblivious to Fluttershy, the Doctor continued to address his imagined foe. “Maybe I really am senile. I've lived far too long.” “May I remind you, my dear Doctor,” said the dream-Master, “that you are not the only one to have received a second regeneration cycle. I have cheated death countless times,” – he chuckled – “despite your best efforts.” “Have I really made a mistake? Why… why can't he just stay here? Would that be such a problem?” The Master narrowed his eyes. “You know perfectly well that he would never be happy. Galgonquans love to travel, but they are never truly at peace until they are with their families.” “He seems happy.” “Do I ever seem happy to you?” The Doctor considered this. “Well, yes, you often seem happy. Mostly when you're gloating over something.” “And am I happy?” “I… no. I know perfectly well you're not.” “Well, then.” “Why are you giving me advice? It's not like you.” “The question, dear Doctor, is why you have dreamt me up to give you advice.” “I- I don't know. Perhaps the Master always thinks of me at these times.” “I don't know, Doctor, but I do know this: Tarrant must be returned home, no matter how it might hurt that filly.” “But how-” Fluttershy's voice interrupted from outside the door, more urgent now. “Doctor, I don't want to be rude, but you've been in there for nearly half an hour, now, and I...” – the Doctor could almost hear her blushing – “I kind of… need to… um, 'go'.” The Doctor looked towards the door, and sighed. “Coming, Miss Fluttershy.” Looking back towards the mirror, he found that the Master had gone. “Ah well.” He opened the door. “Doctor, are you okay? I heard you talking… I- I'm sorry for listening.” “It's alright, old girl. I'm just tired of it all. Don't worry. I'll be off your hooves soon, remember?” “Have you found somewhere to live?” “Well, for now it looks as though I'll be staying with my fan-club.” This was true. As soon as he had found out that the Doctor was looking for a place to stay, Tarrant had immediately offered the use of his house, and the Doctor had gratefully accepted. “Okay,” said Fluttershy, a little uncertain, “well, tea's in half an hour -” “As if I'd forget!” “- and don't forget that Discord's coming over.” “Oh, that'll be fun.” “That's what I'm worried about...” The Doctor and Discord had met before. Although friends at first, the Doctor had turned against the Lord of Chaos when the latter had seized control. Sadly, he had then been abducted by the Time Lords for a 'mission of the utmost importance', which was Time Lord code meaning 'getting a renegade to do the dirty work', and his plan to defeat Discord had fallen through. By the time he'd got back, the royal sisters had dealt with the problem. More recently, they had met once or twice when Fluttershy invited her friend over for tea. Although initially mistrustful, the two had quickly rekindled a long-dormant friendship, largely based on pranks. Fluttershy had never seen the Doctor act so foalishly, although she was quite accustomed to such behaviour from Discord. This is why she had mixed feelings about having them reunite. She found it hard not to like the Doctor, for his bizarre mixed personality, which was stern elderly stallion one minute, excitable colt the next, was oddly endearing; and yet she still found him a little difficult to deal with at times. Coming out of the bathroom, she heard the sound of singing from the kitchen. As she walked down the stairs, she confirmed her suspicions that it was the Doctor's voice. She poked her head round the kitchen door. It was just as she feared. The Doctor had taken it upon himself to perform a few household chores, and had started with the kitchen, and, more specifically, with the washing up. “I don't want to set the world on fire… oh, hello, my dear!” “Um… hi, Doctor.” “Just getting on with a spot of washing-up. Can't hurt.” Fluttershy would have begged to differ, if differing had been something she wasn't terrified to do.. For somepony who claimed to have a superb grasp of physics, the Doctor's common sense was sometimes a little lacking. Case in point: he had washed a couple-of-dozen small bowls already, and had placed them all in a single stack on the draining board. It was already beginning to teeter worryingly, and the Doctor seemed totally unaware of the fact. “I was warpin' me way through the 'eavens...” trilled the Doctor in an atrocious Flancastrian accent, adding yet another bowl to the pile. Fluttershy wanted to cry out, but quickly stuck her hoof in her mouth to stop herself from doing so. After all, if she did the Doctor might be cross with her… or perhaps some other ponies would hear and stare at her… Fluttershy cringed. “You don't look quite yourself, old girl. Penny for your thoughts?” “I was just… thinking.” “Good. That indicates you're a sentient life-form,” said the Doctor, drily. “Oh, sorry.” Fluttershy retreated behind her curtain of hair. The Doctor waited expectantly, forehooves immersed in soapy water. Finally he gave in. “About what?” “It… it doesn't matter,” insisted the pegasus, pointedly eyeing the ever taller pile of her kitchenware and willing the Doctor to follow her gaze – but he kept staring at her. “Animal, vegetable or mineral?” “Pardon?” “You know, twenty questions. I'm really rather good at this.” He allowed himself a smug little smile. Fluttershy was worried about the bowls, but then… she did love games. “Okay,” she said, with a sweet little smile, “mineral.” “Is it a made thing?” “Oh, definitely.” “Is it for work or for pleasure?” “Yes,” tittered Fluttershy. “Yes or no answers only!” she reminded him. “Blast. Wasted question. Is it useful?” “Uh-huh.” “Right then...” the Doctor narrowed his eyes. “Do you keep it inside the house?” “Yes.” There was a long pause. “Is it brightly coloured?” “No.” The bowls were plain white. “Do you use it on your own?” “Sometimes.” Fluttershy was doing her best to keep a straight face and give nothing away, but it wasn't easy. “Can it move by itself?” “No.” “Is it hard?” “Yes.” “Does it cost money?” Now this is where Fluttershy had the upper hoof. Although one might normally expect to pay for bowls, these particular ones were given to her by a craftspony as a thank you for looking after his cat while he was on holiday. “No,” she said, perfectly truthfully. “Drat it! How many have I got left?” “Exactly ten.” “Not too bad. Do you use it in the bathroom?” “No.” “The bedroom?” “No.” “Living room?” “Not normally,” she teased. “Hang it all! What other rooms are there?” Fluttershy cleared her throat. “What?” She glanced around her, then looked back at the Doctor. “Oh… kitchen?” “Yes… eventually.” She tittered again. This was why she liked having the Doctor around. Sometimes it was like being a little filly again. “Thanks for that. Is it furniture?” “No.” The Doctor was beginning to worry. He was so absorbed by the game that he had been washing the same bowl for nearly five minutes. “Is it portable?” “Yes.” “Is it smaller than… a duck?” Fluttershy laughed. “A duck? Yes, it is.” “Do you eat with it?” “Kind of.” “Do you eat off it?” “...Yes,” she said reluctantly. “Aha!” “Only one left,” she reminded him. “Right. It must be a plate.” Fluttershy gave an adorable little yip of delight, and jumped into the air, wings fluttering. She'd won! “Fluttershy, don't be a bad winner.” Fluttershy blushed. “Sorry, it's just… I don't normally win things.” “Well, what was it?” asked the Doctor, impatiently. “A bowl.” She frowned. “Um… sorry if it was too hard, or anything.” “No, no, fair enough,” the Doctor grumbled. “Wait a moment… the bowls! They'll fall over! My goodness, Miss Fluttershy, why didn't you warn me? It's a good thing one of us has some sense.” So saying, he leaned forward and picked of the top half of the stack, evidently hoping to split the large pile into two smaller ones. He had forgotten, however, that his forehooves were still coated with soap-suds. Inevitably, the bowls slipped from his grasp, and as he lurched forward to try and catch them, he managed to knock over the other pile, too. Fluttershy gave a small shriek as broken crockery scattered across the floor. The Doctor surveyed the carnage from the sink, into which he had leapt to protect himself from the falling bowls. It was a decision that had had to be made, but he felt that on reflection he wished he'd stayed outside the sink… dry… and risked a few minor bruises. “Whoops!” he said. Fluttershy looked sadly at the remains of her best bowls. She looked very sorry for herself, the Doctor thought, and it seemed that something else was required. “Sorry...” he ventured. “That's okay, I'm sure Discord will patch them up later.” “All the same...” “But next time… I don't want to be strict, but… do you think you could ask before you do the washing-up?” “I was only trying to...” “I kind of did all the washing-up an hour ago.” “Ah. So those were all… um…” The Doctor searched for the right word. “Clean?” he offered finally.” “Yeah...” “It's just, you mostly use them for salad, and I thought 'well, maybe they look clean, but...'” “Doctor, why don't you go for a walk?” “No, no. I'll stay and help clear up,” he said, beaming. Fluttershy wasn't beaming. She looked horrified. “I insist,” she said, firmly. The Doctor was not about to argue with Fluttershy using her Firm Voice. “Right-o!” he said quickly, dashing for the door. He had left the house before Fluttershy could blink.
The Doctor trotted cheerfully out into Ponyville, stopping occasionally to admire the scenery. Now and then, a pony would pass by and give him a smile and a cheery wave, for it was now common knowledge that it was he who had saved the town from the Autons not three days ago. He waved back, but never stopped to chat. Chatting, he had found, was not really his forte. Gradually, he made his way to the town square, which was where he had left the TARDIS to recharge herself. He gazed sadly at the battered old 'phone box, whose disguise would remain useless for another fifty years or so, whose paint was peeling off, and whose light was flickering rather weakly, indicating that at least something was going on in there. He pulled out a key and fitted it into the lock. The door swung open, and the Doctor stepped inside. It seemed the recharge had done the old girl some good. She seemed to have figured out which console room was which, at any rate, although she was a little uncertain of which one to use. The one that the Doctor was now standing in was darkened, lit only by an old-fashioned gas-lit street lamp to one side of the door. It was a largish room, with stone walls and floor – indeed, the floor was cobbled – and a stone hexagonal console in the middle. The doors out of the chamber had been made to resemble front doors, the walls, houses and shops, and instead of a roof, the moon shone down on the Doctor from a starry night sky. It was quite beautiful. “Ah, yes,” whispered the Doctor to himself, “I remember this.” He approached the central console. “I was having such a lovely night, and I said to myself, 'Why can't tonight last forever?' and I decided that it should.” He absently flicked a few switches. “I redesigned the control room to match my memories.” Once he had finished reminiscing, the Doctor remembered why he had come. He needed to set the TARDIS into 'dormant' mode. He wouldn't be able to go in, but the repairs would be carried out much faster – and they needed to be, as a quick look at the fault locator told him that this was about the only room it was safe to enter. It was a long and complicated process, and by the time he had finished, the TARDIS had got confused again and shifted the console room into another form entirely. “I don't remember this,” muttered the Doctor, looking around at the thickly wooded glade he was suddenly in. To his annoyance, the console was now an oversized mushroom, with buttons and levers protruding from it grotesquely. On top of that, the grass of the forest floor was covered in dew, and now his hooves were soaking. On the bright side, there was the pleasant sound of birdsong, and although the tall conifers stopped him from seeing much to either side, there was a patch of beautiful morning sky visible above him. “Must be one of the previous owner's,” he concluded. “Oh, for crying out loud! Where's the door?” He experimentally poked a button. Between two trees, an odd-looking jet-black hole appeared in mid air. “Melodramatic,” he tutted, stepping through it. Finding himself outside, he closed and locked the door behind him. Giving his ship one last wistful glance, he turned around – only to find himself muzzle to muzzle with the grinning face of Pinkie Pie. “Hey, Doc! What'cha doin'?” The surprised Doctor gave a funny sort of yelp, and instinctively leapt backwards, straight into the side of the TARDIS, which gave a dissatisfied 'vworp'. Apparently not noticing his predicament, Pinkie continued to bounce cheerfully on the spot. “For your information, Miss Pie,” said the Doctor, picking himself up, “I was engaged in an extremely complex and difficult operation involving multiple dimensional shut-downs.” “Why were you hanging around the famous Blue Box of Ponyville?” She put on a spooky voice: “Legend has it that it was placed here hundreds of years ago by an evil necromancer who-” “Miss Pie, I put it here yesterday.” “Oh,” said Pinkie, not in the least put-out, “Silly ol' me!” “This is my TARDIS, and I've just...” The Doctor decided to forgo technical language, “I've just told her to have a nap. Hopefully I haven't woken her up by launching myself against her.” Pinkie peered at him. “You look grumpy about something. Are you okay? Are you sick?” Before the Doctor could stop her, Pinkie had used her hooves to prise his mouth open and peek inside. “Say 'Ah!'” she ordered. “Ah.” “Hmm. Doesn't seem to be anything wrong there.” “I'm relieved to hear it.” “You're welcome! So, what's up, Doc?” “If you must know, I'm on the horns of a dilemma.” “A dilemma? Why don't you come with me and tell Auntie Pinkie all about it?” she suggested. “Auntie Pink-” began the Doctor incredulously, but then his expression softened. “Oh, very well.” It couldn't hurt. Probably. “Come on then, slow-coach!” Pinkie began to bounce away. “Tra-la-la-la-la!” Grumbling, the Doctor followed her, already wondering whether this was such a good idea after all.
Pinkie Pie didn't stop bouncing until they reached Sugar Cube Corner. The Doctor, against his better judgement, had been following her all the way. Absently, he had allowed his gaze also to follow her, though only in the vertical direction, as she bounced up – down – up – down, and, as such, by the time he arrived he had a very sore neck. He had also been thinking over the logic of using Pinkie as some sort of agony aunt, and had decided that it was a service he could well do without, thank you very much. After all, in all the conversations they'd had during the few days they'd known each other, the pink pony had got the wrong end of enough sticks to build the wrong end of a large bonfire.
Sadly, any and every attempt to tell Pinkie so had been overridden after the Doctor had managed about two words of complaint with such chipper remarks as “Oh, look, balloons! I love balloons! Be right back!” and “Did I ever tell you about the time I got my cutie mark?” which was immediately followed by a detailed account of how Equestria was made. Cutie marks hadn't come into it at all.
Thus, the Doctor who arrived was a severely deflated one, grumbling about false advertising in storytelling, clutching a hoofful of balloons that Pinkie had somehow persuaded him to carry, and gloomily massaging his neck.
“Hey,” said Pinkie as she bounced through the door, “I bet you just love cupcakes! I sure do! How about some cupcakes?”
“No thanks. I've had far too much sugar these last few days. Chocolate with lime frosting, please.”
“Coming right up!” In a blur of pink, a small table in the back room was laid with tea-things, and a large teapot full of steaming Assam was set beside a tower of cupcakes.
“How did you make the tea so quickly?”
“Silly,” replied Pinkie, playfully jabbing the Doctor with a forehoof, “I can't give away my secret!”
“Fair enough. Hold on, don't you work here?
“Sure do!”
“But you don't seem to be… working.”
“It's my day off!” she said with a hint of pride. “It says so in my contract. Every third Tuesday after Saturday. Milk?”
“Wait… every third… never mind. No thanks.”
“One lump or two?”
“I said no milk, thanks.”
Taken aback, Pinkie glanced up at the Doctor – then noticed the slight smirk at the corner of his mouth. She burst into a fit of hysterical laughter, much to the Doctor's consternation.
“It wasn't that funny,” he assured her.
Pinkie's laughter abruptly ceased. “Oh, okay,” she said, simply. She began helping herself to sugar out of the sugar bowl, adding spoonful after spoonful to her cup. “Now, what seems to be the problem?”
“Well, for a start, this isn't Tuesday.”
Pinkie waved a nonchalant hoof in the air. “Details, details. I'm here to solve your obviously agonizing friendship problem which even now is eating away at your very soul like a canker in a hedge.” She beamed at him. “Am I right so far?”
“Miss Pie, I don't mean to be rude, but don't you think you ought to leave some space in that tea-cup for tea?”
Pinkie glanced down at her cup, already overflowing with sugar. “Oopsie!” she sang, raising the cup to her lips and draining the contents at a gulp.
“And I thought I had a sugar problem,” remarked the Doctor, then wondered why his voice sounded so muffled. It was because, without realising it, he had crammed two large cupcakes into his mouth. “Ah. Might still be a grain of truth in that, actually...”
“Now then, Doctor,” began Pinkie Pie, as she finished pouring the tea, “I've had enough of your evasion. I want answers and I want them now!” By the time she had finished this sentence, she actually sounded quite threatening – an effect that was only intensified by the fact that she'd incredibly quickly pulled down the blinds, grabbed a desk lamp and shone it in his face, and – seemingly from nowhere – taken out a wide-brimmed hat and rammed it as far over her eyes as it would go.
“Very well,” began the Doctor, understandably a little worried, “It seems I have no-”
“Wait a minute. Is it just me or is it dark in here?”
“I don't think it's you.”
“Okie-dokie-lokie!” So saying, she let the blinds retract to their original position and took off the hat. To the Doctor's annoyance, she left it to him to move the desk lamp back.
“Now, listen. You remember when Princess Sparkle told me about that other Doctor?”
“Uh huh, the Brown Doc.”
“Don't call him that. Well, I went looking for him, and I found out...”
Actually, you lot have already heard all that. Let's cut to something more interesting.
“I'm so glad you stayed, Doc.” Derpy lolled back on the park bench, and put a foreleg around Tarrant's shoulders.
“I really do think you should call me 'Tarrant' Derpy, it's only confusing, otherwise,” suggested Tarrant, who was sitting next to her on the bench, a little distractedly.
“Oh… okay.” Derpy looked a little hurt, and Tarrant knew perfectly well why. Derpy quite obviously just wanted things to go back to the way they were before, before she knew his true identity, before the real Doctor had intruded in their lives. Certain subtleties in her behaviour had informed him of this – like the fact that she refused to use his name, and kept going back to their old haunts with him, and kept going on and on and on about how easy it is to forget and how nothing should interfere in a friendship, and had even – Tarrant cringed at the memory – written a poem entitled 'One Doctor Is Enough for Me,' which, tragically enough, was too awful to bear printing. Derpy identified herself as 'a mare of letters,' but only because she didn't know what the term actually meant. She thought it was just a fancy name for a mailmare.
All the same, Tarrant felt guilty. “Please, call me what you want,” he said after a while. “I'm more used to 'Doc' anyway.”
“N- no. You're right, I guess.”
“Thank you.”
“Doc- I mean, Tarrant?”
“Mm-hmm?”
“Why don't you tell me a little about yourself? I mean, if we're going to be honest with each other...”
“Is that really what you want?” He knew perfectly well it wasn't, but it was so like Derpy to make this effort. She was a selfless little pony, thought Tarrant.
“Yeah, sure!” smiled Derpy, but it was a bogus smile. One can always tell a real smile, if one knows how. Certainly, the mouth looks the same, curved up at either end, and all that, but that's not a smile, not really. If somepony – Derpy, for example – should ever smile at you, just look in the corner of her eye. There should be a single bright spark in there, dancing with joy and love and freedom. That's the smile. If you can't see one, you're not being smiled at. Try harder.
Tarrant looked. There was no spark. “Very well,” he said, resignedly, not wanting to hurt her feelings. “Ask away.”
“How old are you?”
“Eighty-four.”
“R- really?”
“Certainly.”
“You- you don't look it...”
“Well, I don't appear to you as I really am, but I flatter myself I'm quite spritely, for my age. It'll be time for me to discard this form in a decade or two.”
“Oh, right.” Derpy thought for a second. “Wait, what?”
“Well, we Galgonquans are rather like… like your caterpillar and butterfly. As we age, we assume new forms, until we die and ascend to a plane of pure energy. Actually, I don't think butterflies do that, do they?”
Derpy shook her head, wordlessly.
“Still, you see my point.”
She nodded.
“My dear, are you feeling quite well? You look a little pale.”
“Did you speak like this before?”
“I beg your pardon?”
Derpy took a deep breath. Obviously, this had been bugging her for a while. “You talk just like the Doctor, and you said you were trying to be like him. You actually are really like him. Did you always talk like you do now, or is that just part of the act?”
“Well… yes, to be honest, at first I faked it. But if one does something of this sort for long enough, it… well… it becomes a part of who you are.” Derpy looked sad, he realised. He reached out a hoof and put it round her shoulders, but for some reason this seemed only to make her sadder still.
“Tarrant?”
“Yes?”
“I'm not sure how to tell you this, but… since the first day I met you, I've… I've loved you with all of my heart, Doc.” He opened his mouth, but Derpy quickly overrode him. “And I don't just mean as a friend. I know it's silly and I know I shouldn't, but I can't help it. I...” She trailed off, sniffing. “I'm sorry.”
Tarrant was stunned. Despite his closeness to the pegasus, his sensitivity towards equine emotions had never been particularly well-tuned. Although an ordinary Equestrian might well have noticed Derpy's feelings for him, this was a complete shock to Tarrant. Derpy looked ready to cry, and he knew from past experience that he ought to say something, but he was at a loss as to what. It took him a few moments to find the right words.
“I'm married.” It occurred to him almost immediately after he spoke that these were not the right words.
Now it was Derpy's turn to fall silent. Tarrant stared directly ahead of himself, eyes wide with terror, his leg still around Derpy's shoulders. He didn't dare move a muscle. After about a minute, she looked up at him, eyes glistening with un-shed tears. “You never said,” she said, a little resentfully.
“It would have raised some rather awkward questions,” he pointed out.
“But still...”
“Yeah. Sorry about that.”
“Who is she?”
“Never met her.”
“Oh…” It dawned on Derpy what the Doctor had just said. “What?”
“I was betrothed at birth. It's how it's always done. When I reach the end of my first incarnation, I'll be mature enough to marry her properly.”
“I see...” Derpy was too dazed by the news to be properly upset. “So… if you don't go back, what will she do?”
“I'd imagine she'd just be… very very lonely. Oh, gosh.”
Derpy pushed on. “Do you have parents?”
“Yes...”
“What will they think?”
“Well, as I said, they all think I'm dead... oh, gosh.” Tarrant was beginning to look increasingly worried.
“Doc?”
“Mm?”
“I don't think you should have stayed.”
The Doctor should be about done by now. Let's pop back over to Sugarcube Corner.
“...so now he and Derpy are probably going around, as happy as anything, and I have to tell them it won't work and that I've got to send him back to his home planet. I'm not having a good day.”
Pinkie Pie was sitting forward in her seat, with her forelegs resting on the table and her head resting in her hooves; her eyes, wide as sympathetic saucers, had been fixed on the Doctor for the past ten minutes. “Hmm,” she thought aloud, in unusually measured tones, “Tell me if I'm being too hasty, but – having given it some thought – I think the wisest course of action would be to tell them you've got to send Tarrant back.”
“Miss Pie, I...” The Doctor broke off, realising he was almost shouting, and resumed more calmly; “What was the whole point of the story I just told you?” he asked, exasperated despite himself.
“Ooh, er… that you needed to tell Derpy and Tarrant that you had to send him back!” Pinkie completely ignored – or misinterpreted – the Doctor's unamused glare. “What can I say?” she went on, grinning proudly, “I'm a good listener.”
“Evidently.” The Doctor sighed. He had been quite right (as usual): trying to get any sort of advice from a sweet but apparently brainless pony had been a terrible idea. 'Although,' he thought, 'wasn't this Pinkie's idea? Well, there you are, then. Case in point.'
“But,” continued Pinkie, obliviously, “I guess the best way would be to make them think it was their idea.”
The Doctor, who had just begun to stare out of the window at nothing in particular and wonder when this would all be over, suddenly turned his gaze to Pinkie once more. “I beg your pardon?”
“Well, you know. Sometimes Gummy gets into one of his grumpy-grump-grump-pants moods, and won't agree to do anything, and that's sooooo boring! If I want to do some baking but Gummy's in one of his moods, I just leave a recipe book lying open on a cake recipe for him to find, and then he reads it and suggests we bake it, and I'm all like, 'What a good idea, Gummy!' and he's like,” – she squished her mouth so that it protruded slightly, making her look nothing like an alligator, but the Doctor could see where she was coming from – “'I know, and aren't you proud I thought of it?' and I'm like 'Yes, it was all your idea, I'm so proud!' and he-”
“Yes, I think I've picked up the ebb and flow of the conversation… Hold on, you mean Gummy can talk?”
“Well… no, not really. I have to do those bits for him. Didn't you see my alligator face?”
The Doctor, who, thanks to the complex telepathic translation-matrix in the TARDIS, could in fact understand every word Gummy said, couldn't really see him being very keen on baking – indeed, the scaly fellow had once described it within the Doctor's earshot as “a pitiful and ultimately futile attempt to impose equine notions of order onto innocent flour.” He decided to keep this fact from the excitable party pony, who had now launched into a long and detailed list of all the faces she could pull.
Shoving the last cupcake into his protesting mouth, the Doctor stood up. “Look, all this is very interesting, but I think I'd better be going.”
Pinkie abruptly stopped listing faces. “Oh! Okie-dokie! See ya, Doc!” She then went straight back to her list, apparently not at all put out at her entire audience being about to leave.
“Very well. Thank you for the advice. Good day, my dear.”
Once outside, the Doctor found himself rather relieved. Even for a pony with his sweet-tooth, being out in the fresh air after so long stuck in the sickly, super-sweet, sugar-soaked atmosphere of Sugarcube corner was nothing short of bliss. The Doctor inhaled deeply. It was a chilly afternoon, but the crispness of the air appealed to him. The pale orange tint in the horizon, caused by encroaching evening, took him back to his young days; climbing the mountain near his house to talk to his friend, the hermit.
What had happened to that hermit? Then the Doctor remembered, he had – like so many other Timelords deemed 'past it' – been retired; co-incidentally enough, to the same planet as the Doctor; sent to live in an isolated temple on the Eastern fringes. Come to think of it, he seemed to remember the old fellow cropping up as a side-character in a Daring Do book.
Sometimes the Doctor thought that his best friends were his memories.
Pushing such gloomy thoughts from his mind, the Doctor set off to find Derpy and Tarrant. They had to be around somewhere, after all. Best place to start was obviously Tarrant's house. He would have tried Derpy's, too, but he had no idea where she lived. At any rate, his grasp of Ponyville's geography was still a little sketchy, and-
Oh look, there was Quills and Sofas. He had been in there just the day before, looking to buy a new partridge-feather quill. Using a partridge-feather quill was an idiosyncrasy peculiar to the Doctor, and to nopony else, but he was still rather dismayed to find they were not stocked, and downright annoyed when the not-to-be-deterred salesmare added insult to injury by attempting to sell him a 'Sofa of Reasonable Comfort'.
And so proceeded the Doctor's errant mind to wander from one matter of no consequence to another, and his hooves, no longer under any direct instruction, began to wander freely, this way and that, but predominantly the wrong way altogether. Surprisingly, this proved a happy mistake, for it was merely by good fortune – and perhaps the timely intervention of the fates – that the good Doctor happened to wander into the park, and so to pass the very bench upon which Tarrant and Derpy were seated, deep in conversation.
As he passed them, they called out to him, dragging his mind away from thoughts of squirrels and depositing it firmly in the moment. “Oh, good afternoon,” he mumbled, a little dazed. “I could have sworn I was looking for somepony… now, who was it?” He screwed his face into an expression of deep concentration. “No, it's gone,” he said finally. “Oh well. Can't have been very important then, could it? Actually, I wanted a word with you two, anyway… about… oh dear…”
The Doctor, it should be clear, was now in one of the dreadful absent-minded moods to which he had been prey lately, especially while reminiscing. He had thus completely forgotten what it was he had wanted to talk to Tarrant about.
“Doctor,” interrupted Tarrant, “We've come to a decision.”
“Oh… well done!” The Doctor said this not out of irony, but merely out of uncertainty as to how to respond to the situation. He was still trying to remember what it was he had wanted to talk to them about.
“I have decided to return home.”
Derpy nodded solemnly.
“Oh yes,” said the Doctor, brightening up. “That was it.” He steeled himself for what he had to do. “Tarrant,” he said, bravely, “you must return home.” Then he paused. “Hold on a minute, wasn't that what you just said?”
“Yes, Doctor. I'm merely neglecting my duty by staying here.”
“Oh, good show! Knew you'd see sense!”
“I beg your pardon? It was you who first suggested to me that I stay.”
“Nonsense. It was Derpy's idea.”
Derpy turned crimson, and hung her head.
“Well,” admitted Tarrant, “that does make a little more sense.”
“I- I've changed my mind,” insisted Derpy. “He can't stay.” She gulped back a sob. “It wouldn't work out.”
“Right, then,” the Doctor replied, turning round to face the exit to the park, “we've got some work to do.” He paused, looking annoyed at something.
“What's the matter?” asked Tarrant.
“Oh, nothing much. I've just endured half-an-hour of the most inane conversation possible for absolutely nothing.”
“There!” exclaimed the Doctor triumphantly, driving the final nail home with a hefty thwack from his hammer.
“Where?” asked Derpy, innocently, just coming into the workroom with a tray of cocoa balanced on her back.
The Doctor and Tarrant, still clutching their tools, looked at each other, uncertain.
“Nowhere, really,” explained the Doctor, hesitantly, “just 'there'.”
“Glad to get that clear,” muttered Tarrant, earning an unamused glare from the Doctor, and a giggle from Derpy, who was setting the tray down on the vacant workbench.
“This is no time for frivolity,” he insisted, a little more grumpily than was really necessary. “All three components of my plan are complete.” He glanced over at the three objects that the two stallions' labours had yielded.
“There's just one thing I don't understand, Doctor,” she ventured.
“Oh? What's that?”
“What is it?”
“Well, fair enough. I've only explained three times,” he sighed. “I should've guessed this would happen sooner or later.” He pointed a hoof towards his and Tarrant's first creation, a pair of slender metal rods, about three or four hooves long, each of which tapered towards a point, and was topped with a bluey-purple sphere. “Completely authentic Galgonquan anti-gravity chopsticks,” he boasted, “and I know they're authentic because Tarrant helped make them, and he tells me he is a fully qualified lyrchch… that's Galgonquan for 'chef',” he added, seeing Derpy's confused expression.
Tarrant nodded proudly. “It's actually just standard training, these days,” he admitted, “but I got a triple plus! And won a prize.”
“What was it?” inquired Derpy, a little excited.
“Half-an-ounce of Jethrik.”
“Fancy that,” the Doctor interrupted, “now, if you wouldn't mind? You were the one who wanted the explanation after all...” He raised an eyebrow at Derpy, who hung her head.
“Thank you. Now, these chopsticks will act as bait. Once activated, by means of the external power supply we've built,” – he gestured to the second object, a mess of circuitry contained in a small wooden box – “any watching Wirdegen will sense the use of Galgonquan technology and immediately investigate; probably by teleporting straight here.”
“When he gets here,” continued Tarrant, “he'll see us and try to capture us – but we'll capture him. You'll notice that we've covered the floor of the room with an invisible graphite-based lubricant. Upon arrival, the Wirdegen will make straight for us and slip on the floor, giving us time to dash into the next room – being careful to avoid the invisible tripwire – and to wait in there.” Tarrant led them into the kitchen – being careful to avoid the invisible tripwire – and went on with his explanation. “Triggering this tripwire will pull the support out from this shelf,” – he gestured to what had once been a kitchen shelf, but had since been unattached from the wall and set up on two wooden supports, one of which had one end of the tripwire tied round it – “which will then collapse, allowing this Extremely Large Sack of Flour” – he pointed at an Extremely Large Sack of Flour, which was on top of the shelf – “to fall onto the floor, thus pulling down on the rope I've attached to its neck,” – he indicated with a hoof a long, thick rope, one end of which was tied round the neck of the sack, from whence it led up towards the ceiling, and vanished into an Intricate Pulley System on the ceiling – “which will in turn cause the Intricate Pulley System that we've attached to the ceiling to be galvanised into action, pulling the net” – he pointed towards a large net, which was spread across the floor in front of the kitchen door, and whose four corners were attached to ropes emerging from the Intricate Pulley System – “up and around whoever tripped the wire.”
“Then,” finished the Doctor, leading them back into the workroom – being careful to avoid the invisible tripwire – “we simply knock the bounder on the head, and drop him in the cage.” He affectionately patted the wooden cage with iron bars that he and Tarrant had just finished working on. “The Galgonquan authorities can deal with him later.”
“Um...” Derpy had rather hoped she would understand the explanation a little better now that all the equipment was ready. She hadn't. There were, however, one or two things nagging at her. “What if more than one Wirdegen comes?”
Neither the Doctor nor Tarrant was quite prepared for this question. They looked at each other awkwardly, each willing the other to say something convincing.
“And what if he doesn't trip the tripwire, or the rope snaps, or he moves before the net catches him?”
“...” said Tarrant, helpfully.
“We'll cross those bridges when we come to them,” assured the Doctor, a little impatiently. “Now then, are we ready?”
“It certainly looks like it,” said Tarrant.
“Then plug the chopsticks into the power-generator.”
“Right.”
“Switch on!”
In a Canterlot basement, a rather bored Wirdegen was grumpily stirring his oolag juice, and wishing he was somewhere else entirely. His name was Squeerz – an unpleasant name for an unpleasant fellow, as most, if not all, Wirdegens are. It takes an unpleasant type to resist the benevolent rule of the Galgonquans, after all.
He had been on routine surveillance duty of an area with a two-hundred mile radius for the last two years, and he was sick to death of it. His job – such that it was – was to monitor the area for any traces of Galgonquan technology, and then to swoop down on the users and capture them, with intent to use them as hostages. The problem was that the Galgonquans had long since cottoned on to this little scheme, and had, quite simply, ceased sending operatives of any sort to Equestria. The fact that the unfortunate Squeerz was still under orders to maintain the Wirdegen occupation of this area was a testament to the unbelievable stubbornness of Wirdegen High Command – for so the rag-tag group of drop-outs insisted on referring to their 'central council'.
Despite his unwavering loyalty to his masters, Squeerz was incredibly bored. There had, as mentioned, been no activity in months and months and months. All the while, he had had to live in the body of an ordinary pony, doing ordinary pony things: shopping, cooking, cleaning; even talking to the ponies he despised so much – for Wirdegens hate Equestrians deeply.
And so it was that, when he was rudely awakened from his daydream by the thin, pervasive beeping of the alarm, he was remarkably happy about it. Dashing over to the huge detector array that took up most of his basement wall, he eagerly punched a few buttons on a control panel that had lain unused for longer than he cared to remember. A few presses allowed him to home in on the filthy Galgonquan scum that was using the technology his machines had detected. 'More fool them,' he thought to himself, programming the co-ordinates into his transmat system.
“So… what happens now?” asked Derpy, not unreasonably.
“We wait,” explained the Doctor.
“Oh… good.” She didn't sound very enthusiastic.
“Cheer up, I can tell you one of my stories.”
“Your stories?”
“About my exciting life!”
“Oh… good.” She sounded even less enthusiastic.
“Did I ever tell you about the time I was trapped on a planet that was going to explode in two days?”
“Well, we only met each other this morning...”
“Oh, yes, so we did.” The Doctor looked a little confused.
“I'd like to hear the story,” Tarrant interjected.
“Good-o! Now this all happened centuries ago, a couple of millennia in your future. I was...”
“Wait, what?” asked Derpy, who, while not very good at maths, could see a definite logical flaw in that sentence.
“I said...” But Derpy never got to hear the Doctor's explanation, for just at that moment, a harsh, angry buzzing filled the air, and the three turned to its apparent source. The air next to the work-bench had begun to shimmer, to solidify, to shift and take shape, so that before they knew it, a decidedly odd-looking pony was standing before them. And he was very odd-looking.
You see, Wirdegens, as mentioned, are essentially rebellious drop-outs from Galgonquan society. Because of this, they have no legal access to Galgonquan technology, simply stealing what they can, when they can; and, as such, the only cloaking-chamber technology they can use is extremely limited. They tend to come out looking very strange indeed. Squeerz, for instance, had a mane which was somehow striped not vertically, as ponies' manes generally are, but horizontally. To make matters worse, it was coloured in the most vivid shades of purple and yellow imaginable, to not altogether pleasant effect. As to his fur, it was a nauseous lime-green, with… blotches. Brown blotches. Add to this the fact that one of his eyes was blue, the other, red, and you ought to have a complete picture of just how hideous a creature he was. To top it all, he was swathed in technology: a tight, black jumpsuit sported a side pouch akin to a holster, from which protruded the unmistakable barrel of some sort of futuristic gun; his left eye was covered by a round, metal device with a single red light in its centre, which was a 'vision augmenter', which automatically provided him with information on whatever he looked at; and wires appeared to protrude from his head and to lead off to what looked like a computer, which was strapped to his back – in fact a database containing a variety of information that could not possibly be stored in the mind of an ordinary pony.
Thoughts of aesthetics were not, however, paramount in the minds of the would-be Wirdegen-catchers at that particular moment. Acting with one accord, they hurled themselves, one after the other, through the door to the kitchen – being careful to avoid the invisible tripwire – and awaited the inevitable consequences.
True to form, and with a very vicious snarl, Squeerz leapt through the doorway. Leapt quite literally, in fact, bounding through the opening and over the tripwire, proving the inevitable consequences to be entirely evitable.
“Come back here, you scum!” barked Squeerz, glaring round the kitchen, to find Derpy hovering in a corner out of reach, looking absolutely terrified. No matter. His vision augmenter informed him that she was no Galgonquan, and therefore of no consequence. He disregarded her. He did a quick scan of the kitchen using the augmenter. Aha! The Galgonquan was hiding in a cupboard, along with… no, it couldn't be. His database informed him that this was one of a legendary species known as Time Lords, with whose help unimaginable knowledge could be gained. Squeerz licked his lips. “Come out, you cowards!” he sneered. “I know you're in there.”
There was a muffled bump from inside, and a short chattering of voices, too quiet to make out. Squeerz looked on, unimpressed.
Finally, a voice came from inside. “No we aren't.”
“You silly fool. Now he knows we are,” said a second, very similar, voice.
“Well, he does now.”
“You've never been on an adventure before, have you?”
“Not really...”
“I thought as much. You're panicking. Losing your common sense. Amateurs...”
Squeerz cleared his throat.
“Alright,” said the second voice, “we'll come quietly.”
“You speak for yourself.”
“Hush! Do as I say.”
There was a brief period of whispering, and the door opened, to reveal two rather squashed and almost identical brown earth ponies, who rather sheepishly stepped out onto the tiled floor.
“So,” crowed Squeerz, “you thought you could outwit me, Commander Squeerz of the Third Wirdegen Battle Fleet?”
“Commander?” asked the pony on the right – who had been the second to speak, and who was, according to his scanner, the Time Lord – more than a trace of disdain in his already haughty voice. “I wonder how easy a title that was to earn. From what I remember of the Wirdegens, you give out titles as a reward for successfully combating a cold.”
“Or for robbing a defenceless shopkeeper,” the other, the Galgonquan, chimed in.
Squeerz was visibly riled by their comments, and menacingly advanced on them. “Why, you...”
“Now!” the Time Lord shouted, and the pair bolted, dashing around the large kitchen in opposite directions, both headed for the door in the far wall.
Squeerz, overcoming his initial confusion, spun round to face the door. “Stay exactly where you are!” he spat, reaching back to draw his weapon from his holster.
Both the Time Lord and the Galgonquan turned to look at him, just as they reached the door and tried to get through it – completely failing to avoid the invisible tripwire – and got hopelessly stuck. Squeerz looked on, amused, as the Extremely Large Sack of Flour toppled obediently off the shelf, pulling down on the rope. The ponies, meanwhile, pushed and pulled in an attempt to free themselves, and finally both managed to collapse backwards into the kitchen, just as the Intricate Pulley System whirred into action, pulling the net up and around the two dazed ponies, leaving them dangling about twenty hooves* above the kitchen floor.
A smirk playing across his lips, Squeerz crossed the room, obviously with intent to gloat. “Well,” he began, standing below the slowly rotating bundle of net, Time Lord and Galgonquan, “I had a feeling this would be easy, but I had no idea you were going to trap yourselves for me.” His voice was like a horseshoe being scraped down a blackboard. His captives winced, collectively.
“You won't get away with this, you bounder,” remarked the Time Pony, shaking a protruding hoof at the Wirdegen.
“No,” added the Galgonquan, “when I get my hooves on you you'll wish you'd never been born!”
“Oh dear,” mocked Squeerz, “I'd better give in now before you turn the tables on me. I hope you remember your 'with one bound he was free' training.” Already tiring of his prisoners, he drew his gun, aiming it directly up at them. “Better hurry, though. One blast of this and you'll be nicely incapacitated, so that I can take you back to my basemen… I mean, to my base with me. I should warn you that you may lose control of your limbs… permanently.” He grinned, wickedly, and took aim.
Derpy was almost paralysed with fear. Indeed, it was only the most basic muscle memory that was causing her wings to flap, ensuring she stayed airborne and well out of reach. Sure, Ponyville wasn't exactly the safest place in the world to live, so she wasn't entirely unaccustomed to dicing with danger, but this was the first time she'd been properly at the epicentre of a disaster.
She felt so helpless. She was acutely aware that she hadn't been much use up to now: the Doctor and Tarrant seemed to have done all the real work, and she felt awful. She hadn't even dared help with the construction of their various gizmos – not with her track record for woodwork. Now, she was too scared to lift a hoof to save the Doctor and Tarrant, her closest friends in the whole world, and was stuck hovering in the corner, watching as that filthy Wirdegen creature taunted them.
“I had no idea you were going to trap yourselves for me,” the loathsome thing crowed. She didn't even dare speak up for them, didn't dare sneak up behind their captor – though it would have been easy enough.
She struggled to bring the three ponies into focus. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't quite get her eyes to converge on them. Terrific. Now her friends were about to be brutally maimed, and all she had was the soundtrack. 'There goes my last chance of helping,' she thought to herself, glumly. 'All I can focus on is some stupid rope.' Wait just a minute… the rope! Every time she tried to focus on the ponies, she ended up with a crystal clear image of the rope by which the net bundle containing her friends was suspended from the ceiling. The rope had only been chosen with the weight of one pony in mind, and now, supporting two, it was visibly beginning to fray. In fact, it was quite clearly going to snap in a minute or two, depositing the net's contents on whatever was directly below – exactly where Squeerz was standing.
Unfortunately, she realised, her last traces of hope vanishing, he was already raising his weapon towards them. She could quite clearly see it glinting, and hear his waspish comments. There was no way that rope was going to snap in time. Not on its own, at any rate…
And so it was that Derpy was a great deal more useful than she had ever supposed. Planting her hooves against the wall behind her to gain a little extra force, she hurled herself across the room, straight at the rope. Squeerz, hoof on the trigger, turned at the sudden movement, and followed Derpy's progress with his gaze. Too late, he saw her take a well-aimed gnash at the thin rope with her immaculately brushed teeth. He stood for a fraction of a second, wondering why the angry bundle of earth pony above his head was getting bigger. Then it hit him. Squeerz waved a feeble hoof from under the kicking mass of Doctor and Tarrant, and then succumbed to the swirling blackness of unconsciousness.
All was blackness – endless, whirling blackness. The kind of blackness one only experiences in dreams, and then subsequently wishes one hadn't. It is frequently said that black is just the product of an absence of light. Not in this case. There was plenty of light, which only lit up the blackness, making it even more visibly black. 'Hold on,' thought Squeerz, the gears in his brain – both metaphorical and literal – working at full tilt, 'that last bit didn't make much sense.' He could almost hear himself thinking over the whirr of machinery on which Wirdegens are so dependent. 'So,' he pondered, 'I'm probably asleep.' With one last momentous effort, he put the final piece in his metaphysical jigsaw. 'I'd better wake up, then,' he thought to himself, and did. He immediately wished he hadn't.
When one wakes up, there are a number of things one expects and hopes to see. For many, the ideal morning greeting would something luxurious; let us say, for the sake of argument, a butler standing over one with a glass of freshly squeezed mango juice, enquiring whether one requires breakfast in bed. Let us call that Scenario A. Then there is the slightly more mundane, but nevertheless welcome feeling of cosy familiarity – one's beloved calling from downstairs that breakfast is ready, and that it is pancakes, for example. We shall call this one Scenario B, as everypony likes pancakes. On the other hoof, one might find oneself presented with the not-particularly-unusual-but-disappointing-anyway setting of, say, one's irritating little sister bouncing up and down on one's bed, gleefully declaring that you have missed breakfast, and that it was pancakes. This, as no one who has been paying attention will be surprised to learn, will be called Scenario C. Finally, one might find oneself confronted with something downright unpleasant. To pick an example purely at random, one might realise that one was trapped in a rather uncomfortable cage, and that three ponies whom one had only recently met, but whom one loathed with the burning intensity of a million white-hot suns, and who really shouldn't have won the recent battle which was only now drifting back into one's conscious memory, standing over one with an air of superiority, trying to decide what to do with one. We will call this Scenario Squeerz. If one were to find oneself in Scenario Squeerz, the first thing one would probably try and do would be to try and figure out how one could stop being in it. This, therefore, a snarl on his lips and an ache in his head, was exactly what Squeerz tried to do.
“What I don't understand,” Tarrant was remarking, a little peeved-sounding, “is why he didn't slip over when he tried to chase us.” “Yeah,” added Derpy, “I thought you said you'd coated the floor in an invisible graph-based… uh...” “Invisible graphite-based lubricant,” finished Tarrant. They both gazed at the Doctor, daring him to reply. “Ah,” the Doctor began, sheepishly, “well, what with it being invisible, and all, I suppose it is possible that I thought I'd coated the floor in it, when I, in fact, hadn't.” “There wasn't a great deal of point in my walking everywhere extra-carefully for the last half-hour, then, was there?” suggested Tarrant. “Well, um… Oh, look, I think he's coming round!” Glad of the distraction, the Doctor eagerly gesticulated towards the prone form of their prisoner. He was groaning a little, though he had yet to open his eyes. “Great whickering stallions! You're right!” “You say that a lot. Is that your catchphrase?” “Of course not. I don't have a catchphrase.” “Um, Doc?” Derpy interjected, awkwardly, “You kind of do.” “I do not!” Tarrant protested, but the looks on the faces of his comrades told him he had already lost the battle. “Stars and sapphires,” chuckled the Doctor, “the look on your face!” But then a look of horror crossed his. “Oh, cripes. I've got a catchphrase.” “Several,” Derpy informed him, matter-of-factly. “I very much doubt that.” “If you say so, Doc. By the way, what was that silver tube-thing you were using in the lab, earlier?” “I'm glad you asked! It's quite simple really. I call it my Sonic Screwdriver. It uses sound to manipulate objects.” “How can you use sound to move things?” asked Derpy, innocently. “I'll explain later,” assured the Doctor. His expression changed, as he saw that the other two had lapsed into fits of giggles. “What?” “Oh, nothing,” Derpy managed to insist between bouts of laughter, “just admiring your catchphrases.” “Oh, shut up.” This ungracious response simply made the two laugh all the harder, so the disgruntled Doctor turned his attention back to the Wirdegen in the cage. He was just in time to see his eyes open, blearily take in the situation, shut again in the vain hope that this was still a dream, open to see whether it was, find it wasn't, and then widen into a look of abject horror. “Look,” said the Doctor, eagerly, “Jamie's awake!” “Who?” asked Derpy. “The prisoner. I took it upon myself to name him.” “'Jamie'? That's a weird name.” “It's Bridlish. They still use the old naming traditions.” “Where in Gkkrr's name am I?” This last, which, fortunately, the TARDIS had the decency not to translate, was a rude interruption from Squeerz, who, I am sorry to say, was not famed for the civility of his tongue, nor for his patience. “My laboratory,” explained Tarrant,” and I'll thank you to watch your language while we're in it. I have a swear-box, you know.” And he gestured towards a wooden box that stood on a table in the corner. In its top was a narrow slot for bits. “You do not interest me with your petty habits,” barked Squeerz, “you will free me immediately! I am an officer, and I am not accustomed to being treated in this-” “You know,” the Doctor murmured, so softly that Squeerz fell silent without even thinking, “I very much doubt whether you'd make it past the rank of private in the Equestrian army.” “Silence, Time Lord scum! Your internal affairs are of no consequence. In the Wirdegen fleet we honour true virtues: bravery, cunning, strength-” Somehow, the Doctor undercut him once more – for his voice now was so gentle, so pregnant with thought and wisdom, that even one so base as Squeerz felt obliged to listen: “Oh, so they do here… but they tend to lend a certain importance to others: honour, kindness, truthfulness and loyalty, for example. Now, I am not given to acts of violence, but I strongly recommend that you cooperate with us. I do not take kindly to having my time wasted. My time is precious, sir, and though you are a prisoner here, I do not think it wise that you refuse our hospitality.” Tarrant was staring at him, wide-eyed; this was the foalhood hero he'd imagined, the Doctor he'd read so much about. It was a relief to see him behaving so sharply, when he'd been beginning to think that the Doctor's apparent senility had stripped all trace of the legendary time-travelling hero from him. Now, his doubts had been all but destroyed. Oddly enough, the Doctor, too, was taken-aback – and not just because he'd shattered his own expectations. For a few years, now, he'd felt as though a cloud, a fog, had descended upon his mind, one so dense as to hamper and hinder even his most basic thoughts. He'd taken it for senility, though he'd been too proud to admit it. Sometimes it was stronger or weaker: one moment, sending his mind drifting hither and thither like a leaf caught in the wind, preventing him from having any true conscious recognition of what was going on; the next, allowing him to carry out the sort of complex calculations that would leave even the greatest Equestrian mathematicians scratching their heads and chewing their pencils, but still not letting him really concentrate and unleash the full power of his brain on the problem, and, worse, causing him to make embarrassing mistakes. Its influence had been particularly weak just recently, when he had battled the Autons and the Nestene Intelligence, and the deeper into the adventure he had got, the thinner it had seemed. He had theorised that his regeneration had helped, in some small measure, at least, to free his poor mind from its bonds. Now, for the first time in what seemed like forever, the cloud seemed to have lifted – he felt like his old selves again. Here he was, waxing lyrical, as though he were no more than 200… no, older than that, he felt a great deal wiser… call it 450. That would do nicely. And there was something important! This realisation came like a bolt out of the blue – he couldn't remember what, but there was something important that he had forgotten, a long, long time ago. He remembered so very nearly, a memory that had lain dormant at the back of his mind since this infernal cloud had first appeared… in fact, was it a memory of before, only just before, it had appeared for the first time? Suddenly, he was gripped by a strange sense of urgency – it had been something frightfully urgent, something he'd needed to tell the Time Lords about; and then this cloud had blotted it out! His mind was freer than it had been in all that time, but the fog simply refused to lift from this one simple memory, clutching at it with its tendrils of cloud as though its very existence depended on it – and perhaps it did, as, after all, the rest of his mind was completely clear… at least, it felt clear. As a test, the Doctor calculated pi to a couple of hundred decimal places, then expressed it as a vulgar fraction, and converted it into base 7. No problem. He sighed with relief. Instinctively, he knew that if he could only remember this one thing, he would be free of the cloud forever. With all his might, he concentrated on his single goal – to uncover the final patch of his brain that was off-limits to him. He strained, he pushed, and then… “Doctor?” said Derpy, sounding a little worried, “Are you okay?” His concentration snapped. As if on cue, the cloud sank back into its rightful place, hugging his mind like an old friend, lying heavy on his thoughts, just as thick as ever. “I… I…” the Doctor stammered, helplessly. There had been something he was trying to remember, but he couldn't for the lives of him remember what it was, or what it was about, or even why he was trying to remember it. “I seem to have lost the thread of my remarks,” he finished, listlessly, aware of some great loss of purpose, but unsure what it was. For reasons quite unknown to him, he felt like bursting into tears. Tarrant sighed. “I'll do it.” He pulled out a small cylindrical device, which he had developed some months ago, and pointed it squarely between Squeerz's eyes. “Now,” he said, sounding not a little bored with the whole affair, “do you know what this is?” “No,” lied Squeerz. Accordingly, a small red light lit up on the device. “Well, this seems to be working,” said Tarrant, satisfied. “Ooohhh!” said Derpy, visibly excited, “I remember that! It's the truth detector!” “Got it in one!” applauded Tarrant. “Boy, we had some fun with this!” “I remember!” said Derpy. “I don't remember,” said the Doctor, glumly. “Well, you weren't there, old boy,” Tarrant reminded him. “No. You don't understand. I don't remember anything. Not any more.” “Are you okay, Doc?” asked Derpy. “I thought I was,” he replied, “but now I'm not so sure...” Meanwhile, Tarrant was questioning the prisoner. “Are there any other Wirdegens monitoring this area?” “Not telling,” said Squeerz, smugly. The truth detector lit up green. “Blast!” said Tarrant. He hadn't thought of this. Improvising wildly, he grabbed the nearest thing available, and pointed it at Squeerz. “Believe me,” he snarled, “it would be better if you answered my questions.” “Or what?” sneered the Wirdegen. “Do you think I don't know an anti-gravity chopstick when I see one?” Tarrant looked down at the thing in his hoof. He couldn't think of a comeback, so he just said “Blast!” again, and left it at that. “What's the matter,” asked the Doctor, sounding a little less crestfallen, “Jamie not cooperating?” “You could say that,” huffed Tarrant. “Well, I wouldn't worry about that,” he smiled, “I'm on fairly good terms with the local alicorn, and I'm sure she'd be only too pleased to cast a quick obedience spell on this… creature. Clever things, those obedience spells. They do have a tiny habit of erasing the identity, but never mind.” “You wouldn't dare.” Squeerz insisted. “You ponies are a bunch of worthless do-gooders. You'd never use those spells on me.” The Doctor grinned, evilly; a wide, menacing grin, such as a shark might give its prey when it invited it home for a quick bite. “Try me.” At the sight of the Doctor's grin, Squeerz shrank back into his cage, his ears flattened and eyes wide. This was a grin he was all too familiar with; a grin he had often seen his fellow Wirdegens give just before they did something very unpleasant to somepony else. It was a grin to be reckoned with. “Alright,” he whispered, terrified. “Um… thanks, Doctor,” said Tarrant a little uneasy. The Doctor's gaze didn't waver from Squeerz. “You're quite welcome,” he said, very calmly. “I'm sure Jamie will answer your questions, won't you, Jamie?” “My name isn't Jamie-” began Squeerz, but the Doctor silenced him with a look. “Isn't it?” he asked, in mock-surprise. “Er… yes, yes it is,” said Squeerz, rather hastily, his eyes still fixed on the Doctor, who, he was beginning to think, was actually pretty terrifying when you got to know him. “Splendid,” began Tarrant, almost as uneasy as Squeerz, “now, are there any other Wirdegens monitoring this spot?” “None. The nearest ones are hundreds of miles away.” The truth detector flashed green. “I want a list of their names and addresses,” Tarrant ordered. “Derpy, could you write these down for me?” Derpy, who had been eyeing the Doctor warily, complied, jotting down the details that Squeerz recited. When he'd finished, Tarrant turned off the truth detector, and announced “Well, I think that's everything.” “Yes,” agreed the Doctor, finally taking his eyes off the prisoner, “it looks as though we'll be sending you home shortly – and you with him,” he added sternly, looking at the still-frozen Squeerz. “Y- yes,” Squeerz stammered, not daring to move. “Oh, don't cower in the corner like that,” the Doctor chuckled, remarkably warmly, considering the demeanour he'd only just forsaken, “we're not going to hurt you.” “But… you said…” “I didn't mean it. I'm far to nice to do anything of the sort.” “I- I-” Squeerz began to stammer again, this time with rage. “You told me that honesty was a virtue!” “And so it is. Did I lie at any point?” Squeerz thought for a moment – then shook his head. “No,” he muttered, furiously. “And didn't you yourself tell me that cunning was a virtue?” Squeerz gritted his teeth in frustration. “Yes,” he growled at the floor. “Very good. In today's lesson, you learn to think about what you say, not just what other ponies say.” The Doctor fell silent as Derpy rushed over and hugged him violently. “Doctor! I'm so happy,” she squeaked. “I say, steady on! Don't tell me I fooled you, as well.” “Uh-huh,” admitted Derpy, muffled by the Doctor's fur, against which she had pressed her head.” “Well, it looks like you've learned something, too. I am a very nice pony.”
Berry Punch blinked. And then, as if to make sure that she was still looking at the Doctor, Derpy Hooves and… the Doctor again, and hadn't mercifully woken up in bed, she blinked again. “I… I'm sorry, what was that you said?” The Doctor sighed. “Very well. I'll explain again. Tarrant here, known to you as the Doctor, is an alien who came to Equestria for a week and got stranded for fifteen years.” “Those aren't quite the numbers,” interjected Tarrant – but to no effect. “He will shortly be returning to his home planet,” continued the Doctor, ploughing straight over Tarrant's remarks, “along with the alien criminal we've captured and are holding in Tarrant's basement. I, meanwhile, am another alien, a Time Lord known as the Doctor – the real one, this time – and I've been exiled to your charming little town and left to rot. After Tarrant has left, I shall probably, with the mayor's blessings, assume his current position as Ponyville's official Time Turner. Finally, this is Derpy, whom you already know, and who is neither alien nor imposter, which should come as a great relief to you.” “I… I don't…” Berry Punch didn't seem to have taken much of the Doctor's speech in. “Ah, well,” the Time Lord began, “Third time lucky, I suppose. Tarrant here, known to you as-” “Doctor,” whispered Derpy, “don't you think it would be easier to just send everypony a letter? We can't do this with everypony in Ponyville.” “Oh no. I get dreadful writer's cramp. Besides, we must have talked to at least half the ponies in town by now.” Tarrant checked the list. “Six,” he corrected. “Six?” “Six.” “Oh.”
“I still say writing letters would be quicker,” Derpy suggested, quietly. “Nonsense! We're here, now, anyway.” The three were standing outside Sugarcube Corner. The shop had only just opened, and wasn't terribly busy – the occasional pony wandered in seeking breakfast, but for the most part, things were fairly quiet. The morning sun danced across the faux-icing that covered the bakery's roof, giving the impression of a fresh snowfall. “Well then,” began the Doctor, “um, best hoof forward, and all that.” He stepped smartly up to the door, and pushed it open. “Hello?” “Come right in,” said a cheery voice from inside, “we're open!” The three trotted inside and up to the counter, behind which stood the proprietress, Mrs Cake. “Good morning!” she said, in her very best 'the-customer-is-always-right' voice, “Welcome to Sugarcube Corner! Is there anything in particular you're looking for?” Tarrant took the lead. “My dear Mrs Cake, although I'm sure your pastries are well up to their usual standard, I'm afraid that this morning we are not in search of gastronomic satisfaction…” “Actually,” the Doctor interrupted, “I am a tad peckish.” “I can't take you anywhere,” growled Tarrant. “We've just eaten, remember?” “Yes,” admitted the Doctor, staring wistfully at the various victuals that comprised the shop's wares, “but that was hours ago, old thing.” “Don't you 'old thing' me. It was 45 minutes ago.” “Nearer 47,” Derpy interjected, helpfully. Mrs Cake watched the exchange with a bemused expression that would not have looked out of place on a railway official who'd been asked to carry a small suitcase. “Excuse me,” she said finally, when she could watch no more, “do you want food or not?” “No,” said Tarrant, firmly. “Yes,” said the Doctor, eagerly, and at precisely the same moment. The two glared at each other, each bearing a 'just you watch it' scowl at the other's identical face. “Maybe if just the Doctor had some food?” Derpy suggested. “Oh… very well,” chorused the pair. “That's alright, then,” said Mrs Cake. “Now… which of you is the Doctor?” “Until recently I was,” Tarrant began. “And now I am,” the Doctor finished. “Wait… what?” Mrs Cake was starting to look downright upset. “I'll explain later. Just give me half-a-dozen of those rather nice-looking jam tarts.” “Certainly!” The shopkeeper visibly brightened up, and hurried over to fetch them. “That'll be three bits.” “Ah.” The Doctor sheepishly patted where his pockets would have been, had he been wearing any clothes, then cast a hopeful glance in Tarrant's direction. “Oh, very well…” Tarrant pulled out a hoofful of coins and began counting them out. “Can I have some of your raspberry muffins, please?” piped up Derpy. “Of course, dear.” “Et tu, Derpy?” said Tarrant, looking a trifle wounded. “Sorry, but all this food makes me feel kinda hungry,” confessed the pegasus. Tarrant rather grumpily took the gentlecolt's prerogative and paid for Derpy's treat as well. “Now then,” announced the Doctor through a mouthful of pastry, “delicious though your baking is, we were really here to see your apprentice, Miss Pie.” No sooner were the words out of his mouth than an excited ball of pink came flying into the room and wrapped its forelegs around the Doctor, whose cheeks turned pink to match. “Erm, steady on, old girl,” he mumbled. “Not just now, please.” “Doctor!” squeaked Pinkie, in a voice that seemed to indicate that she had just won the lottery, discovered she could fly, and ascended to a state of omniscience – which, come to think of it, the Doctor pondered, he wasn't entirely sure she hadn't already. Finally, Pinkie let the Time Lord go, then redirected her affection at Tarrant. “Fake Doctor!” she screamed, flinging her hooves around the equally surprised Galgonquan. “Morning, Pinkie,” said Tarrant, a little embarrassed. Derpy alone was ready for Pinkie's display of unconditional adoration. Forelegs wide and welcoming, she cheerfully returned Pinkie's fondness in kind. “Hey, Pinkie,” she said cheerfully. “Hi there, Derpy,” buzzed the party pony. “How nice of you all to come visit me! Now that there are four of us, we can play Ponopoly, or pin the tail on the pony, or- or-” “Hang on a moment, we need to talk to you,” the Doctor interrupted, desperate to prevent Pinkie going off on one of her tangents. “No problem!” beamed Pinkie. “Mrs Cake, is it okay if I take them into the living room?” “That's fine, Pinkie, but remember to finish those crumpets,” smiled Cup Cake. “I will!” She turned and lead them through the doorway behind the counter into the house-proper. In the living room, Pinkie abruptly sat down in the middle of the floor, and fixed her bright-blue eyes on the Doctor. “I'm all ears, Doc!” she assured. “That makes a nice change from all mouth,” the Doctor decided not to say. Instead, he said “Remember how I told you yesterday about the spot of bother I was in?” “Yeppers!” Pinkie said proudly. “I never forget a good story!” “Well, things have turned out pretty favourably, as far as that goes. I just need the ponies round here to be clear on who I am. And where I come from. And who Tarrant is. And so on.” “If I know the ponies round here,” continued Tarrant, “they'll just take it in their strides without a thought. The only problem is telling them.” It was Derpy's turn to speak. “We thought, that since you know pretty much everypony in town, you could organise some sort of get-together.” Pinkie's ears pricked up. “You mean a party?” “Exactly!” grinned Derpy. “I was rather hoping for a whist drive, actually,” murmured the Doctor, but they ignored him.
The teleporter wasn't exactly a slick affair. After all, it had been constructed in rather a hurry, and had only been built to make one trip. It was basically a circular metal disc with gently sloping sides, onto which those wishing to be teleported would step. It was set in the middle of the floor of Tarrant's workshop, and emitting a steady (and slightly impatient) hum. On it was standing Tarrant himself; along with two heavy suitcases, packed with those possessions with which he couldn't bear to be parted; and a still-caged Squeerz, who did not look particularly enraptured at the idea of being turned over to the Galgonquan authorities. “You'll regret this!” he was screeching at the top of his voice. “This isn't over, Doctor!” “On the contrary,” the Doctor informed him, coolly, “I would be very surprised, not to mention rather disappointed, if we ever met again.” “Shut up, Jamie,” said Tarrant, giving the cage a little kick. Squeerz fell into a sullen silence. “I must say,” continued the Galgonquan, “it's nice to be going home… even if I shall miss everypony.” “Well, at least you got to say goodbye,” sniffed Derpy, who was at that moment between bouts of crying, “though I'm not sure they completely understood your story.” The three of them were still recovering from the massive going-away party Pinkie Pie had delighted in throwing. Even Squeerz had been invited – though it had taken three bowls of fruit punch to get him to join in the singing from inside his cage. “Still,” remarked Tarrant, “it's nice that everypony's finally clear on who I am.” “Yep,” added Derpy, “I don't think anypony'll get you two mixed up any more.” “Especially as I won't be here,” he pointed out. It was perhaps not the best thing to say, given Derpy's rather weakened emotional state. When they'd finished comforting Derpy, who hated goodbyes at the best of times, the Doctor broached a subject he'd been meaning to bring up for a while. “Now then, I've been meaning to bring this up for a while.” Told you so. “Fluttershy thinks that since I've recovered, it's time I moved out of her house to make space for the animals… obviously she put it rather more tactfully than that... but that raises the question of where I'm going to go.” Mercifully, Tarrant caught on immediately. “Oh, my dear fellow, of course you can have the house!” “You're sure?” “Well, I'm not going to need it. Feel free.” “Oh, thanks awfully. And you won't forget to denounce the other Wirdegens on this planet to the other Galgonquans, will you?” “As if I'd do such a thing.” Derpy giggled. “You two really do sound identical.” “We do not!” chorused the two – then burst out laughing. “Alright,” the Doctor admitted, “maybe we do sound a bit similar, but just remember: I'm the original – he's just copying me. Which reminds me,” he added, addressing Tarrant now, “thank you. Thanks to you telling me there are records of me in this incarnation in the past, I know that one day I shall be free of this exile.” “You're quite welcome. Thank you. I never thought I'd ever actually meet you.” “Well it just goes to show, sometimes wishing extremely hard does work.” “Goodbye, Doctor.” “Goodbye, Tarrant. Bye, Jamie!” Squeerz glared at him. “Shut up.” “Charming.” The Doctor crossed to the small control panel attached to the teleporter, and double-checked the coordinates. “Seems to be in order.” He pressed a few switches. “Energised.” “Goodbye, Derpy.” “G- goodbye, Doc.” Derpy stared up at him, eyes wide, choked with tears. “You know I can't take you with me.” “Uh-huh.” “And I can't stay.” “I know.” “Sorry.” “S'okay.” “You'll be happier here. The Doctor's here to look after you – the real Doctor, this time. And it's not forever. One day, I shall come back; yes, I shall come back. Until then, there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties. Just go forward in all your beliefs, and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine. Goodbye, my dear… goodbye.” The Doctor pulled a lever, and with a faint shimmering of air, Tarrant, his suitcases, and Squeerz began to vanish. Tarrant smiled at Derpy who did her best to smile back. He saluted the Doctor, who returned the gesture as Tarrant faded away into nothing. There was silence for a few moments. Then the Doctor spoke. “He stole that entire goodbye speech from me. Humbug!”
Worlds away, in a distant corner of Time and Space, a glamorous looking mare sat busily working at her bench, which was covered in test-tubes, diagrams, and unfinished calculations. The lab in which she was sitting was similarly full of star-charts, computers and lots and lots of waste paper. She was an unobtrusive pale green in colour, with a short, curly, brown mane and blue eyes that seemed to leak irritation. Her cutie mark was an astrological clock, and she wore a short red tunic. Angrily, she screwed up another page of worthless errors and hurled it at a wall, adding it to the ever-growing mound. Just at that moment, she was distracted from the source of her ire by a steady beeping from a small metal box – a sub-ether communications unit – set on the workbench, accompanied by a blinking red light. Grateful for the distraction, she leant over and pressed a switch, then spoke into a small microphone attached to the box. “I'm listening,” she said, simply. “Ah, good,” rasped a voice from the speaker. It was so distorted that all that could clearly be gathered was that it was male. “Have you given any more thought to my little proposal?” “I have.” “And your decision? Remember, you would be a very valuable asset to the team.” “I'm sure I would. Tell me, is it true what you say about the Doctor? Has he really been exiled once again?” “He has. I know, I know, it seems too good to be true. But believe me, he won't be leaving Equestria for quite some time.” “And do you really have what you say you have?” “I have them all. All they lack are ponies to wield them.” The mare breathed a sigh of amazement. “Then… I will join you.” “Good, good! I'm sure you won't be disappointed.” “But none of your ridiculous and overcomplicated plans. Working together hasn't always gone well for us in the past.” “Oh, believe me, my dear, I've been planning this for quite some time. This time, we will reign triumphant – and that meddling fool, the Doctor, won't be able to lift a hoof to stop us.”
