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r_scribblesRight. So obviously as soon as I decided to try to write an original story last week, I got writer's block & ended up just staring at the 600 words I'd written for days on end. Then I started waffling about who I'd throw together if I were doing a British Avengers or modern League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and sort-of got bitten to write it. This involves me writing for a lot of fandoms & character that I've never tried writing for before and am not as completely immersed in as I usually am when writing fic, so is a little bit harder than usual. Feedback here would be appreciated, especially considering the main protagonist is probably going to be the 11th Doctor and the Doctor Who fandom is this massive thing that I'm only on the very outskirts of.
The League of Jolly Good Eggs
Running as well as he could, knee-deep in an Andatorian swamp, with a dozen of the Andatorian King’s Guards hot on his trail and venomous snakes and swamp eels lurking in the mire; with whole planet set to explode in under 3 hours if he couldn’t get back to the TARDIS in time to go back and do something about it yesterday; The Doctor estimated that his chances of surviving this particular scrape were about a thousand to one. Which was good – he liked those sorts of odds. Those were the sorts of odds against him that really motivated him to come up with something brilliant, out of sheer wilfulness.
There was a low buzzing overhead. More guards, on Battleflies. A shame about the Battleflies. The 8 ft Dragonflies were such beautiful creatures, with their delicate, rainbow coloured wings. They didn’t want to be harnessed and saddled and pulled about with some fat Andatorian sat on their backs, waving a lazer rifle about. All they wanted was to flit about happily, occasionally catching the aphids the size of cats that scuttled around the giant creepers, and making a mess of eating them. He’d have to do something about that, once he’d got out of this spot of bother. The Doctor ducked into the hollow of a rotten tree trunk, and waited for the guards to pass by.
In the still quiet, he heard a slither and a slurp in the swamp water he was standing in. He winced as something slid past his calves. Probably a viper. It was fine. Nothing he couldn’t persuade to swim off somewhere else. He held his breath and waited.
A serpent’s head – black and sleek, with fiery eyes – popped up out of the mire.
‘Ah,’ said the snake in perfect English. ‘There you are.’
The Doctor blinked. And, for a moment, there was little he could think of to say in reply but ‘Aargh! Aargh! Talking snake!’
Which was exactly what he did say. To which, as the snake managed to tilt its head to look down at itself in a manner not usually seen in snakes, he added; ‘Snakes aren’t supposed to talk. I mean, not to say I don’t speak snake. I do – all 17 known variants of it, including Hydra. But they’re very definitely not supposed to speak English!’
‘Oh, for crying out loud,’ said the snake, irritably. ‘I had a feeling this would happen.’
‘I take it you’re not usually a snake,’ replied the Doctor.
‘Not usually,’ said the snake, ‘no. Pandimensional Projection, you see. It’s a pain in the arse. Or would be, if I had one, right now.’
‘Pandimensional Projection’s impossible,’ replied the Doctor. ‘Unless the two dimensions in question are at collision point, and if that were happening here, I’d know about it.’
The snake flickered its tongue with a particularly smug, superior air. ‘Not quite at collision point, no. And it’s not impossible. Just very, very, very difficult. Too difficult for a mortal mind to achieve. As it is, mine’s had to find a familiar form to project into.’
‘An immortal.’ Something about this filled the Doctor with a sudden dread. He was beginning to get the feeling that he was conversing with something very, very powerful, and almost certainly not benign.
‘You’re frightened,’ smirked the snake (The Doctor was certain that snakes shouldn’t be able to smirk, but this one was managing it). ‘That’s good. That’s the correct reaction. Well done. But, here’s the thing. I’m a very frightening person, who’s here to help. I’m sure you can’t imagine what that’s like.’
‘Oh, no,’ The Doctor groaned, his hearts sinking. ‘Oh, no, oh, no, oh… you’re me, aren’t you? You’re a future regeneration. What do I do to become a snake?’
The snake hissed a snicker. ‘Arrogant little sod, aren’t you? No, I’m not you. If I were you, I’d probably have stayed on the other side. You’d get on well with that lot…’
The serpent stopped, suddenly. For a split second, its eyes dulled, and its colour faded from jet black to dark green. It started to look just like an ordinary snake. Before the Doctor could say anything, the fire lit up in its eyes again, with a renewed sense of urgency.
‘Shit,’ said the snake. ‘Losing it already. Listen. Here’s the thing. You save the world a lot, right?’
The Doctor shrugged. ‘The world… worlds in general… the universe, a few times. Stopped counting averted apocalypses when they got into the high 60s. Just off to save a world now, as a matter of fact…’
‘Fine. Well done. Only done it the once, myself, but never say never again. The problem’s bigger than that, this time.’
‘Bigger than the apocalypse?’
‘It’s every apocalypse. Every everything there is. It’s the Omniverse. There’s something…’ the snake struggled to keep the fire in its eyes burning. ‘but we saw you… shit.’
‘You most certainly did not,’ the Doctor told the now completely normal and rather bewildered serpent. ‘I always check the toilet for snakes.’
Trouble with the Omniverse. This was, to use an understatement, bad. However, there was still the very urgent matter of the thousand-to-one odds against him making it off Andatoria alive and with Andatoria unexploded. He politely asked the snake, in Basic Swamp Snake Language, to go about its day, and crept out from the hollow in the tree trunk. Until he had chance to think about what he could possibly do to help, the Omniverse was just going to have to wait.
-x-
Three weeks later, and yet 500 years earlier, as was the way with time travel, the Doctor backed hurriedly into the mill – his eyes staring forwards - unfocused, never looking away. He’d only blinked once, when the gaslight had exploded, and now they were through the doorway. Three Weeping Angels – their faces still covered with their stone hands.
Only three of them. He’d faced much worse than that in the past. He calculated that his odds of getting out of this one were about 50/50. He hated 50/50 odds. 1000/1 odds he could handle, but 50/50 was always when people ended up getting killed.
How to get out.
How to get out of this one.
He continued to back up past the machinery when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something.
The angel on the left scratched its nose.
Without taking his eyes off the other two angels, the Doctor frowned.
The angel on the left swallowed a tiny, dainty sneeze.
If the Doctor could have afforded to roll his eyes, he would have done.
‘You’re never a Weeping Angel.’
‘I can be,’ replied the stone angel from behind its hands. ‘1818, first publication of Frankenstein, I didn’t move from under the same tree ‘til I’d finished it. Cried my eyes out.’
‘You’re not one of them.’
‘I don’t know, I haven’t tried, latel… oh, one of the other… oh, I see.’
From the corner of his eye, The Doctor could make out that the angel on the left had moved its hands slightly away from its face.
‘Ah, yes,’ continued the angel, ‘I was told this might happen.’ There was the sound of stone scraping on stone, and the angel’s hands fell completely from its face. ‘Oh,’ added the angel, disapprovingly. ‘These other two aren’t with me.’
‘Don’t look away,’ the Doctor told him. ‘Don’t blink. If I can make them look at each other, somehow…’
‘Medusa mythology? Why didn’t you say so?’ there was another scrape of stone as the angel on the left raised a hand. ‘There we go. We can talk in peace, now.’
The Doctor focussed on the central stone angel. Wedged between its hands and eyes was a small mirror. The same was true of the angel on the right.
‘How…?’
‘Miracle.’
The Doctor finally turned to the angel on the left. With his face uncovered, he looked nothing like a Weeping Angel, save for the fact that he was made of mildew covered granite. There were no fangs, no malice. Just a slightly podgy, sweetly apologetic looking face.
‘This is about the Omniverse again,’ said the Doctor. ‘Isn’t it?’
The stone angel nodded, causing small clouds of dust to billow out from his neck. ‘You were contacted a short while ago by my associate.’
‘The snake.’
‘He isn’t usually a snake, you know. Hasn’t been for a very long time. But this Pandimensional Projection business is terribly odd. We’re both rather new to it, you see.’
‘You seem to be holding out better than he did.’
‘Oh, well, we’ve spent the last three weeks getting your universe and ours aligned as much as possible, which is no picnic, let me tell you. It’s still rather tiring, mind you. Would it inconvenience you terribly if we hurried things along?’
‘Please do,’ said the Doctor.
‘Have people in your universe started talking about The Vision, yet?’
‘Vision?’ The Doctor frowned. ‘What Vision? No.’
‘It hasn’t started leaking through yet, here. It will. Believe me. It started showing up with us just over a month ago. The same image, repeated over and over throughout history. Mass eyewitness accounts from the beginning of civilisation. Humankind is labouring under the belief that the Visions have always been, even though six weeks ago, it had never existed. It’s getting my lot rather cross. Worshipping false gods and whatnot. And they are particularly displeased with me. Seeing as how I’m sort of… in it.’
‘You’re the “Vision”?’
‘Part of it, yes. Apparently. I didn’t appear to anybody - I’d have remembered. Appearing and giving messages just isn’t my side of the operations, really. Actually – this, with you, is the first time I’ve done it properly, and I’m rather worried I’m not doing this terribly well, to be honest. Am I rambling?’
‘A little. Yes.’
‘Ah. Well. See. My point was going to be – you’re in the Vision, too. And you don’t very well remember appearing to all humanity in every dimension throughout all history now, do you?’
The Doctor frowned again, and shook his head.
‘So,’ concluded the angel, ‘the Vision relates to something that’s yet to happen. You have a time machine. Don’t you?’
‘If the TARDIS is just a time machine, then the whizziest HD 3D home computing hub with attached massage chair and psychic drinks dispenser is a pocket calcultor,’ replied the Doctor.
‘Perfect. We’re going to need you, Dear Boy. You and your machine.’ With a creaking and a scraping, the angel reached down to a tablet carved against the bottom of its robe. There was a crack and a “ker-chunck”, and the slab of stone came away in the angel’s hand. ‘Would you kindly give it this?’ The angel held the slab out to the Doctor. ‘My card. It’ll guide you to us.’
The Doctor’s knees buckled slightly under the weight of the stone. ‘You do know cards are supposed to be made of card, right?’
‘I had to improvise.’
The Doctor looked down at the slab. ‘This doesn’t have any co-ordinates on it! Not even a postcode. We might have been able to do something with a postcode, but no. Just a name. How is she supposed to find you with just a name?’
The angel suddenly had a small mirror in its hand. ‘Miracle,’ it said, matter-of-factly. ‘Besides – according to the Vision, she’s already found me. Thanks awfully, Dear Boy. I do hope to see you again soon.’
‘Don’t “Dear Boy” me. I’m over a thousand years old, I’ll have you know.’
The angel chuckled, softly, holding the mirror up to its eyes. ‘A whole millennium. Imagine that.’
Its face changed suddenly. All of the soft, podgy patience left it, and was replaced with a snarling mask, which saw its own reflection, and froze.
‘Miracle,’ echoed the Doctor, softly. He looked down at the name carved into the slab of stone in his hands.
AZIRAPHALE.
-x-
The TARDIS had chosen a nearby church to land in. The Doctor kept a wary eye out for more Weeping Angels as he hurried through the graveyard, lugging the stone slab along with him. Pleased to have made it inside the church with no further incident, he closed the heavy wooden door behind himself and walked through the nave.
Halfway towards the quire, he stopped.
And stared.
The stained glass window was over 200 years old. It hadn't been there when he'd left. He could see himself, rendered in colourful glass. He recognised the man standing to his left only too well, but not the one on his right. On the other side of the window were three women - two old and one young. The old women were dressed as witches. The younger woman was in a jacket and jeans, but still seemed to form a part of their coven. Two more men were in the background, obscured. To the far right and far left of the stained glass picture were two angels... although the one on the left had slicked back hair and fiery eyes and spoke more of the demonic than the angelic to the Doctor. Although, that was possibly perhaps he was under the absolute certainty that the "angel" on the left was the one who had approached him as a swamp serpent on Andatoria.
Disquieting as all of these figures crafted into the glass were, they felt like little added details to the main subject of the picture - a gaping, swirling vortex in the middle of the image - sucking and destroying.
So, this was the Vision. It had come to his dimension, as well. he didn't know yet how often it had been seen, and by how many, but he estimated that it was many. Existence wasn't the sort of thing to bow out quietly. It had shown its end to as many people as it had been able, and demanded that they share it.
He was looking at the end of all things. The destruction of the Omniverse.
The League of Jolly Good Eggs
Running as well as he could, knee-deep in an Andatorian swamp, with a dozen of the Andatorian King’s Guards hot on his trail and venomous snakes and swamp eels lurking in the mire; with whole planet set to explode in under 3 hours if he couldn’t get back to the TARDIS in time to go back and do something about it yesterday; The Doctor estimated that his chances of surviving this particular scrape were about a thousand to one. Which was good – he liked those sorts of odds. Those were the sorts of odds against him that really motivated him to come up with something brilliant, out of sheer wilfulness.
There was a low buzzing overhead. More guards, on Battleflies. A shame about the Battleflies. The 8 ft Dragonflies were such beautiful creatures, with their delicate, rainbow coloured wings. They didn’t want to be harnessed and saddled and pulled about with some fat Andatorian sat on their backs, waving a lazer rifle about. All they wanted was to flit about happily, occasionally catching the aphids the size of cats that scuttled around the giant creepers, and making a mess of eating them. He’d have to do something about that, once he’d got out of this spot of bother. The Doctor ducked into the hollow of a rotten tree trunk, and waited for the guards to pass by.
In the still quiet, he heard a slither and a slurp in the swamp water he was standing in. He winced as something slid past his calves. Probably a viper. It was fine. Nothing he couldn’t persuade to swim off somewhere else. He held his breath and waited.
A serpent’s head – black and sleek, with fiery eyes – popped up out of the mire.
‘Ah,’ said the snake in perfect English. ‘There you are.’
The Doctor blinked. And, for a moment, there was little he could think of to say in reply but ‘Aargh! Aargh! Talking snake!’
Which was exactly what he did say. To which, as the snake managed to tilt its head to look down at itself in a manner not usually seen in snakes, he added; ‘Snakes aren’t supposed to talk. I mean, not to say I don’t speak snake. I do – all 17 known variants of it, including Hydra. But they’re very definitely not supposed to speak English!’
‘Oh, for crying out loud,’ said the snake, irritably. ‘I had a feeling this would happen.’
‘I take it you’re not usually a snake,’ replied the Doctor.
‘Not usually,’ said the snake, ‘no. Pandimensional Projection, you see. It’s a pain in the arse. Or would be, if I had one, right now.’
‘Pandimensional Projection’s impossible,’ replied the Doctor. ‘Unless the two dimensions in question are at collision point, and if that were happening here, I’d know about it.’
The snake flickered its tongue with a particularly smug, superior air. ‘Not quite at collision point, no. And it’s not impossible. Just very, very, very difficult. Too difficult for a mortal mind to achieve. As it is, mine’s had to find a familiar form to project into.’
‘An immortal.’ Something about this filled the Doctor with a sudden dread. He was beginning to get the feeling that he was conversing with something very, very powerful, and almost certainly not benign.
‘You’re frightened,’ smirked the snake (The Doctor was certain that snakes shouldn’t be able to smirk, but this one was managing it). ‘That’s good. That’s the correct reaction. Well done. But, here’s the thing. I’m a very frightening person, who’s here to help. I’m sure you can’t imagine what that’s like.’
‘Oh, no,’ The Doctor groaned, his hearts sinking. ‘Oh, no, oh, no, oh… you’re me, aren’t you? You’re a future regeneration. What do I do to become a snake?’
The snake hissed a snicker. ‘Arrogant little sod, aren’t you? No, I’m not you. If I were you, I’d probably have stayed on the other side. You’d get on well with that lot…’
The serpent stopped, suddenly. For a split second, its eyes dulled, and its colour faded from jet black to dark green. It started to look just like an ordinary snake. Before the Doctor could say anything, the fire lit up in its eyes again, with a renewed sense of urgency.
‘Shit,’ said the snake. ‘Losing it already. Listen. Here’s the thing. You save the world a lot, right?’
The Doctor shrugged. ‘The world… worlds in general… the universe, a few times. Stopped counting averted apocalypses when they got into the high 60s. Just off to save a world now, as a matter of fact…’
‘Fine. Well done. Only done it the once, myself, but never say never again. The problem’s bigger than that, this time.’
‘Bigger than the apocalypse?’
‘It’s every apocalypse. Every everything there is. It’s the Omniverse. There’s something…’ the snake struggled to keep the fire in its eyes burning. ‘but we saw you… shit.’
‘You most certainly did not,’ the Doctor told the now completely normal and rather bewildered serpent. ‘I always check the toilet for snakes.’
Trouble with the Omniverse. This was, to use an understatement, bad. However, there was still the very urgent matter of the thousand-to-one odds against him making it off Andatoria alive and with Andatoria unexploded. He politely asked the snake, in Basic Swamp Snake Language, to go about its day, and crept out from the hollow in the tree trunk. Until he had chance to think about what he could possibly do to help, the Omniverse was just going to have to wait.
-x-
Three weeks later, and yet 500 years earlier, as was the way with time travel, the Doctor backed hurriedly into the mill – his eyes staring forwards - unfocused, never looking away. He’d only blinked once, when the gaslight had exploded, and now they were through the doorway. Three Weeping Angels – their faces still covered with their stone hands.
Only three of them. He’d faced much worse than that in the past. He calculated that his odds of getting out of this one were about 50/50. He hated 50/50 odds. 1000/1 odds he could handle, but 50/50 was always when people ended up getting killed.
How to get out.
How to get out of this one.
He continued to back up past the machinery when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something.
The angel on the left scratched its nose.
Without taking his eyes off the other two angels, the Doctor frowned.
The angel on the left swallowed a tiny, dainty sneeze.
If the Doctor could have afforded to roll his eyes, he would have done.
‘You’re never a Weeping Angel.’
‘I can be,’ replied the stone angel from behind its hands. ‘1818, first publication of Frankenstein, I didn’t move from under the same tree ‘til I’d finished it. Cried my eyes out.’
‘You’re not one of them.’
‘I don’t know, I haven’t tried, latel… oh, one of the other… oh, I see.’
From the corner of his eye, The Doctor could make out that the angel on the left had moved its hands slightly away from its face.
‘Ah, yes,’ continued the angel, ‘I was told this might happen.’ There was the sound of stone scraping on stone, and the angel’s hands fell completely from its face. ‘Oh,’ added the angel, disapprovingly. ‘These other two aren’t with me.’
‘Don’t look away,’ the Doctor told him. ‘Don’t blink. If I can make them look at each other, somehow…’
‘Medusa mythology? Why didn’t you say so?’ there was another scrape of stone as the angel on the left raised a hand. ‘There we go. We can talk in peace, now.’
The Doctor focussed on the central stone angel. Wedged between its hands and eyes was a small mirror. The same was true of the angel on the right.
‘How…?’
‘Miracle.’
The Doctor finally turned to the angel on the left. With his face uncovered, he looked nothing like a Weeping Angel, save for the fact that he was made of mildew covered granite. There were no fangs, no malice. Just a slightly podgy, sweetly apologetic looking face.
‘This is about the Omniverse again,’ said the Doctor. ‘Isn’t it?’
The stone angel nodded, causing small clouds of dust to billow out from his neck. ‘You were contacted a short while ago by my associate.’
‘The snake.’
‘He isn’t usually a snake, you know. Hasn’t been for a very long time. But this Pandimensional Projection business is terribly odd. We’re both rather new to it, you see.’
‘You seem to be holding out better than he did.’
‘Oh, well, we’ve spent the last three weeks getting your universe and ours aligned as much as possible, which is no picnic, let me tell you. It’s still rather tiring, mind you. Would it inconvenience you terribly if we hurried things along?’
‘Please do,’ said the Doctor.
‘Have people in your universe started talking about The Vision, yet?’
‘Vision?’ The Doctor frowned. ‘What Vision? No.’
‘It hasn’t started leaking through yet, here. It will. Believe me. It started showing up with us just over a month ago. The same image, repeated over and over throughout history. Mass eyewitness accounts from the beginning of civilisation. Humankind is labouring under the belief that the Visions have always been, even though six weeks ago, it had never existed. It’s getting my lot rather cross. Worshipping false gods and whatnot. And they are particularly displeased with me. Seeing as how I’m sort of… in it.’
‘You’re the “Vision”?’
‘Part of it, yes. Apparently. I didn’t appear to anybody - I’d have remembered. Appearing and giving messages just isn’t my side of the operations, really. Actually – this, with you, is the first time I’ve done it properly, and I’m rather worried I’m not doing this terribly well, to be honest. Am I rambling?’
‘A little. Yes.’
‘Ah. Well. See. My point was going to be – you’re in the Vision, too. And you don’t very well remember appearing to all humanity in every dimension throughout all history now, do you?’
The Doctor frowned again, and shook his head.
‘So,’ concluded the angel, ‘the Vision relates to something that’s yet to happen. You have a time machine. Don’t you?’
‘If the TARDIS is just a time machine, then the whizziest HD 3D home computing hub with attached massage chair and psychic drinks dispenser is a pocket calcultor,’ replied the Doctor.
‘Perfect. We’re going to need you, Dear Boy. You and your machine.’ With a creaking and a scraping, the angel reached down to a tablet carved against the bottom of its robe. There was a crack and a “ker-chunck”, and the slab of stone came away in the angel’s hand. ‘Would you kindly give it this?’ The angel held the slab out to the Doctor. ‘My card. It’ll guide you to us.’
The Doctor’s knees buckled slightly under the weight of the stone. ‘You do know cards are supposed to be made of card, right?’
‘I had to improvise.’
The Doctor looked down at the slab. ‘This doesn’t have any co-ordinates on it! Not even a postcode. We might have been able to do something with a postcode, but no. Just a name. How is she supposed to find you with just a name?’
The angel suddenly had a small mirror in its hand. ‘Miracle,’ it said, matter-of-factly. ‘Besides – according to the Vision, she’s already found me. Thanks awfully, Dear Boy. I do hope to see you again soon.’
‘Don’t “Dear Boy” me. I’m over a thousand years old, I’ll have you know.’
The angel chuckled, softly, holding the mirror up to its eyes. ‘A whole millennium. Imagine that.’
Its face changed suddenly. All of the soft, podgy patience left it, and was replaced with a snarling mask, which saw its own reflection, and froze.
‘Miracle,’ echoed the Doctor, softly. He looked down at the name carved into the slab of stone in his hands.
AZIRAPHALE.
-x-
The TARDIS had chosen a nearby church to land in. The Doctor kept a wary eye out for more Weeping Angels as he hurried through the graveyard, lugging the stone slab along with him. Pleased to have made it inside the church with no further incident, he closed the heavy wooden door behind himself and walked through the nave.
Halfway towards the quire, he stopped.
And stared.
The stained glass window was over 200 years old. It hadn't been there when he'd left. He could see himself, rendered in colourful glass. He recognised the man standing to his left only too well, but not the one on his right. On the other side of the window were three women - two old and one young. The old women were dressed as witches. The younger woman was in a jacket and jeans, but still seemed to form a part of their coven. Two more men were in the background, obscured. To the far right and far left of the stained glass picture were two angels... although the one on the left had slicked back hair and fiery eyes and spoke more of the demonic than the angelic to the Doctor. Although, that was possibly perhaps he was under the absolute certainty that the "angel" on the left was the one who had approached him as a swamp serpent on Andatoria.
Disquieting as all of these figures crafted into the glass were, they felt like little added details to the main subject of the picture - a gaping, swirling vortex in the middle of the image - sucking and destroying.
So, this was the Vision. It had come to his dimension, as well. he didn't know yet how often it had been seen, and by how many, but he estimated that it was many. Existence wasn't the sort of thing to bow out quietly. It had shown its end to as many people as it had been able, and demanded that they share it.
He was looking at the end of all things. The destruction of the Omniverse.
