The first thing anyone notices about the Doctor is how they seem to be somehow larger than life, mannerisms over-the-top, with a sort of manic energy that makes it impossible not to notice them.
It takes a while, if it ever does, for it to set in that this is intentional.
Ushas sits with her chin on her knees in a field of madevinia aridosa, and pulls one out. It comes up roots and all, and she stares at its eye as its light flickers and fades. Plants, she's found, are universally disappointing, along with everything else in Cadon District. She can't wait to leave: initiation to the Academy of Prydon is in just under two months-seventy-one days, precisely-and she'll finally be in the Capitol, and the most prestigious Academy on Gallifrey, with its brilliant instructors and even more brilliant laboratories. She'll make something of herself like nobody from Cadon ever has.
"Ushas!" calls a voice. It's close enough that she would be able to see the speaker if it weren't raining so heavily, but as it is they're orange-brown-red and fade into the rain and the grass and the sky, which is as much a shrine to Lord Rassilon's might as anything else, even if the only ones who will see it are Cadonin and Outsiders.
"Nyarlathoteprothetadar," she says irritably, "you're late."
"Sorry," says Nyarla, holding up the hem of their soaked robes. "I was distracted."
"By what? The Cadonflood?"
Nyarla's frills fan out as they scowl. "The vortisauryi were keeping me occupied. May we go now? I'm wet." They raise the hem of their robes higher as proof, dropping them to fall back to what Ushas realises with horror are bare legs and feet with a painful-seeming splat they don't react to.
"I'm wet," Ushas points out. "Everything's wet. It's raining."
"Oh, is it? I suppose that's nice."
Nyarla is… well, Ushas' Kithriarch calls them "odd", with a simultaneous projection which suggests something rather more harmful than simple oddity. Something more like instability-deformity-abnormity. The rumour is that Nyarla was put together wrong in the Loom; it's nothing against them, they're relatively harmless, but it's difficult to establish a telepathic link with them and they don't seem as present in the timeline as others, and Ushas overheard Nyarla's Kithriarch tell hers once that he questioned Nyarla's loyalty to Lord Rassilon, which is a very serious accusation. Ushas' Kithriarch said that that was absolutely ridiculous, and that Nyarla being disloyal was just as likely as their having a tardis.
(If Ushas had surreptitiously checked for one the next day, she'll never admit to it.)
The story goes that before there was anything, there were the Outer Gods, the creators and rulers of the Universe Which Was Before, destroyed in the same breath the Universe Which Is was formed. At the centre of the Universe, the shadows grasping onto the fringes of the Past coalesced into something more, something too reminiscent of its dead predecessor for the comfort of what might have survived to care.
Many survived. None cared.
The Shadows ushered in the Dark Time of this new Universe, yet without rules and inhospitable to most forms of life, and made it so that it was. They forged a civilisation in the æther, and watched as new things came into being, according to the rules which they had devised, the cornerstone of all things, and all things followed in their tripartite image; Time accompanied by her sisters Death and Pain, echoed in the shape of the Selves of all things.
Ey dies, and then ey wakes up. "Oh," ey says. "Look at that."
"Are you okay?" asks a little human girl in a nightie, standing bare-foot on the grass. Her dæmon, a tabby kitten sitting at her feet, takes the shape of a butterfly and alights on her shoulder, shifting again to a ferret and taking on the same concerned expression she wears.
"I just had a fall," ey assures her, and pulls-pushes emself up.
Anji looks between the two men, the one in the leather jacket with the little white cat for a dæmon whose name is Fitz Kreiner and whose name sign is apparently an A smacking twice against his left forearm near the elbow-baby sign for "cracker", possibly a pun about Ritz or an acknowledgement of how emphatically White British he is-and the one who Fitz only calls "doctor" and is head-over-heels in love with, with the long curly hair and the amnesia. She can't see his dæmon; it's probably some kind of insect.
"Doctor" must be a name sign, Anji figures, because when the doctor asks DOCTOR WHO? with the standard U handshape, Fitz replies ONLY DOCTOR, SAME AS ALWAYS, with the initialised form of the sign. AND THIS IS A-N-J-I K-A-P-O-O-R, he continues. SHE NEED OUR HELP.
Anji Kapoor has seen a lot, especially in the last few days. She's watched an alien with two hearts and purple blood bleed out on the street, and she thinks she's about ready for anything at this point, if still carefully suspicious. But then the doctor takes her hand in both of his to shake it, and simultaneously says in the same textbook-careful Signed Exact English, YOU MUST FORGIVE ME PLEASE.
She drops his hand like a dead fish, or a gun, or as if it were someone's dæmon, or whatever might be worse than even that. NO, she says. YOU-she shakes her head and dominant hand both frantically, an ignore-that which isn't necessarily ASL but clearly comprehensible all the same-YOU HAVE HANDS HOW-MANY? She's not exaggerating the horror on her face even slightly.
I THINK NOW I HAVE TWO, the doctor replies. WHY DO YOU ASK?
ASK-you WHY? she says incredulously, and repeats it again for good measure, ASK-you WHY? Agastya isn't the most expressive of dæmons, and his limbs don't exactly lend themselves well to sign, but he offers an incredulous head-tilt.
The doctor gives her an uneasy grin. YES?
Arkytior-no, Susan, her name is Susan now-is not cut out for an education on Sol 3. It's very counter-intuitive, she thinks, and startlingly primitive. They think there are only three dimensions! Three!
She thought that this would be easy. Boring, sure, but easy, because these are pigcayi, they don't have mind-sense, they talk by making shapes with their faces. They couldn't have been perceptive enough to comprehend someone's tardis being different, them being different, especially not with a perception filter in use, she'd thought.
She was, she's finding, very, very wrong.
Nyarla stands in front of the Untempered Schism. This is tradition, an initiation that only Chronarchs undertake, the first step in the journey to becoming va, one of the few who has power over the Web itself. There are only three Cadonin here; most Chronarchs in Cadon District choose to remain such. As it is, it's them, and Ushas, and a boy called Kos who they've seen before on the bank of the river.
Nyarla stands in front of the Untempered Schism and they laugh. This is abnormal, a reaction that causes the overseeing Time Lords to worry, broadcasting in their shock. Ushas projects instability-abnormity-deformity with something that is more fear than amusement and more pride than fear. Nyarla is consumed by the Schism and does not make a rude gesture at her.
Nyarla stands in front of the Untempered Schism and they see the Brightness of the Universe Which Was Before, they see all that once was of them and of the Outer Gods, and they understand, and they do not feel fear, they do not think they have ever felt fear before; they see their Past and their Future in a way that is more abstract yet more precise than they thought it was possible to experience; they meet Death in the Schism and so, so, much more, azméo pogarei, iä iä R'lyeh wgah'nagl; they see into themself, they see all that there is to know, and they laugh.
"What is your dæmon, Susan?" She looks at the glass case which houses Susan's tardis as she says it, hugging the creature Susan has been informed is a cat to her chest.
(It is not a cat, cats are not the sort of things you can hug to your chest, Susan knows this. Her parent, a noted purveyor of sparkly, deadly things, once tried to touch a cat, and even avoiding the poisonous ridges on its spine they almost died. Her mother and father both laughed at them.)
"Larn is a squid," she says, and prays, because she has a tardis, people with tardises are allowed to pray, that she goes away, and very especially that she doesn't come any closer.
"Oh?" says the girl, whose name Susan cannot remember, and whom she despises. "I've never met anyone with a squid dæmon before, he's such a pretty colour!"
"Well now you have," Susan says, and then, because her parent told her to try, "Everyone says she is very unique," and it's not technically a lie.
"I've been thinking, and I don't believe I want to be called Nyarla anymore," says the Chronarch formerly known as Nyarla.
"Why not?" Ushas asks, at the same time that Kos says, "Well, what do you want to be called, then?"
"Theta," says Theta resolutely. "Nyarla is... weird."
"You're weird," says Ushas affectionately. "Wanting to be called something in the middle of your name, how ridiculous! How will people know who we're talking about if you're not called Nyarla anymore?"
"Nyarla isn't my name either."
"Right, Nyarlathoteprothetadar."
"Oh, spack off, you!"
Fitz isn't sure he's attracted to men, let alone strange genderless, dæmonless aliens.
"I object to that!" the Doctor says, and shit, he didn't mean to say that aloud, but xe's smiling so xe must not be too offended. "I have a dæmon, don't I? What do you think the Tardis is?"
"The Tardis is your dæmon? How can you move away from her? You aren't a witch, are you?"
"Not a witch, no. Although I was Merlin once! I mean, she's a dæmon, obviously she's a dæmon, that's what her name means, she's just not mine like Fortune is yours. I've never met my dæmon. I don't remember if I ever had one, actually. If I do, I'm sure I'll run into them eventually."
Theta does not question many things that Innocet has done. It is not, and they hate that it is not, within their abilities to question much of anything a Time Lord does.
They do question her choice in their name.
"Are you the police?" the little human girl asks.
"I shouldn't think so, no," ey says, and coughs up eir ashes.
"Oh," she says. "Are you a repair man, then? I have a crack in my wall."
"Is it a very big crack?" ey asks.
"It's huge," she says seriously. "And scary. I think it ate up my Aunt Sharon's dæmon."
"Oh, well now, that won't do at all! Come on, let's go have a look."
"Oh, what are you two doing now?" she says.
Theta and Kos (or, to listen to Theta, Koschei) look at each other. They look at their feet. They look at Ushas. They shrug in perfect synchronicity.
"Is that-?" is that a loom? are you building a loom? what is wrong with you?
"You can talk," says Kos. "We disabled the Matrix uplink."
"Of course," Theta adds, "if Borusa should try to get in and not be able to open the door we run into a few problems. But so long as we keep to the background we ought to be fine."
"You couldn't keep to the background if your life depended on it," Ushas mutters, but she's already peering at the wreckage of the former Matrix terminal, now repurposed as a half-finished Loom. "Does this bypass the APC Net entirely? It must, you're not connected to the Matrix, but how...? Oh, biological parentage. That's clever."
"Without undue modesty, yes, isn't it?"
"You haven't got a single modest strand of biodata, Thete."
"Susan Foreman? You don't know what to make of her?"
"No, not at all. She knows more than I'll ever know, but her homework has been so terrible lately..."
"I don't trust that girl's dæmon," Telemachus says. He doesn't know why humans can't just get to the point sometimes. "I've never seen a squid that looked like that."
"She never talks to any of the other dæmons either," says Winnifred. "It's as if she sees herself as better than all the rest of us. I don't like it."
The weasel shakes his head once in agitation. "You're a dog," he says, "it's different for you. Some of us don't go smelling the backsides of everyone we meet. She may just be standoffish, or shy. I would be, if I looked as strange as she did. And it's not as though she can have a private conversation away from her human with that glass case she's in."
"Fair. And she does look odd, what little of her I've been able to see."
The story goes that the end of the Dark Time was brought about by a group of Shadows who no longer wished to be Shadows, as much as the Dark Time could end, as much as ending was a concept available to such a prototypical era. The new regime this group created they called Neotechnological, and it was as accurate a name as any.
There are blades so sharp they can sever the parts of the Self, and the Shadows used them to remove their Pain, and in the process, remove everything that made them people as well. Under the rule of their newly-crowned Lord President, the Shadows severed themselves and became as thin and insubstantial as their namesake; wanting to be Shadows no longer they became simply shadows, and the Lord President saw it and he proclaimed it to be good.
Anji can't understand how anyone could mistake the Doctor for human. Xe isn't, not even close. Xe might even be the furthest from human it's possible to get. Xe doesn't look right, doesn't feel right, doesn't sound right; every time she looks away she forgets exactly what xe looks like, and when she turns back xe seems somehow, in some small but irrevocable way, different.
"Oh, Rassilon, it's got a tardis. How's it got a tardis?"
"How should I know?"
"You're the one who made the thing!"
"You helped! And you think I've Loomed anyone before? Maybe this is normal!"
"That is not normal, Theta!"
"I demand to see whoever's in charge of this ship!"
"Who are you?" a boy asks. He's wearing a dreadful outfit, like medical scrubs.
"Tegan Jovanka, and I refuse to answer any more questions until you tell me exactly who you are!" This is ridiculous. She doesn't have time for this. She's going to be late.
"I'm Adric," says the boy, and his unsettled dæmon alights on his shoulder as a songbird. "This is the Doctor."
"Who is-?" the Doctor begins to say.
"Oh my god. Oh, my god. Where is your dæmon?"
The story goes that before there was anything, there were the Outer Gods. Their Messenger lived in the Shadows, and would continue to do so when the Universe fell and another took its place, and another, and another, until the day that the stars were aligned, and the question was asked, and thus the Fall of the Universe Which Is would begin.
"Doctor who?"
"Good question!"
The thing about stories, you see, is that they can't write themselves.