I wrote this story in August, back when Peter Capaldi was announced as the new Doctor. Now that he has made his (official) debut on television, I'm reposting it so more people can see it. I find it remarkable how I got his voice down, especially after seeing him as the Doctor. He was only on the screen for a minute or so, of course, and suffering post-regenerative amnesia, but from what I've seen so far, I can see him as a Doctor very much like what I've written here. Maybe you will too.
Pillars of smoke rose into the darkening sky, blotting out the light of twin suns and sprinkling a thin blanket of ash onto the ensuing carnage below. The once bright and bountiful city at the top of the canyon lay in burning ruins. Explosions still rattled through the tattered remains of buildings, even though there was almost nothing left inside. For those who had once lived here, a living hell had descended onto civilization.
Suffice it to say, this was not a good day for the Viradians.
They were once a prosperous race, their society spanning half the galaxy. For five thousand years, Viradian gems had been traded freely among species as a symbol of peace. But about six months ago, the Daleks had arrived, and things pretty much went downhill after that.
Since then, the Viradian Empire was decimated, their colonies and outposts destroyed, their population killed or enslaved. A small band of rebel fighters remained, hiding among the ruins of the cities and in the nearby wilderness. But it was only a matter of time before the Daleks found them as well. Until then, the Viradians would survive, and try to reclaim whatever they could of their once glorious society.
And today, they had gotten a bit of help.
"REPORT!" the Dalek commander barked at the two soldiers in front of him. They were in the control room for the Viradian weapons base, a small place covered in panels and security screens. One of the Daleks glided up to the commander.
"REBEL VIRADIANS HAVE BEEN DETECTED NEAR POWER STATION NUMBER TWELVE," it said. "THEY ARE PROCEEDING TOWARDS THE BUILDING."
"FIND THEM AND EXTERMINATE THEM!" the Dalek commander shouted, and turned to exit. But someone was blocking the doorway. Someone who definitely should not have been there.
"You're just going to kill them, then? That's the problem with a Dalek. You're just so...unimaginative. In any case, I wouldn't try firing at them so close to the power station. Could be nasty if you hit it."
The man in the doorway was wearing a chocolate brown waistcoat, underneath a dark oilskin trench coat patched with leather and cloth. His trousers were fitted with a mess of baggy pockets, and he was wearing a pair of boots covered with snakeskin motif. And most peculiarly, he held a walking stick which appeared to be topped with a question mark.
All three Daleks jolted into attention. "IDENTIFY YOURSELF!" the Dalek commander shouted.
"Oh, come on now! That path web of yours has reinstated itself by now. Dalek technology, always one step ahead of most people. Well…I'm not most people." The man paused for a moment. "But then again...new face, new man. New updates needed in the machinery."
"IDENTIFY YOURSELF OR YOU WILL BE EXTERMINATED!" the Dalek commander continued to shout. He was in a rather bad mood today to begin with.
The man stepped up close to the commander. "A lot of people have died today," he said. "And countless more since you started this invasion. All of them innocent. Because of you."
"THAT IS IRRELEVANT," the Dalek commander replied.
"To you, maybe," the man said, waving his walking stick like a circus baton. "But to the rest of us, life is worth something. It's something to be cherished. But you? You think it's something for you to just destroy, again and again and again. And that's why I'm going to have to stop you."
"YOU WILL BE EXTERMINATED!" the Dalek commander shouted, and all three Dalek guns in the room swiveled to aim at the man.
"Yeah, I don't think so," the man sighed, and pointed his walking stick at a panel at the back of the room. The question mark top flipped up, and a buzzing red light emerged from the stick. There was a spark, and the panel collapsed.
"Hope you don't mind about that," the man said. "Just the security systems for the power station going down. You're not going to need them anymore anyway."
"EXTERMIN – "
"Shut up for a moment, will you?" the man said. "I haven't even told you who I am yet. Considering you were so insistent about it before…" He walked up very close to the Dalek commander, and peered into its eyestalk. "I'm the Doctor."
All three Daleks instantly recoiled, gliding back a few feet.
"Tell your masters," the Doctor said. "There's a storm coming."
If the Dalek Emperor had a mouth, it would have been smiling. The drive to exterminate the rebel Viradians was coming along nicely. Already, several of them had been caught and exterminated. Just now he had received word that a large group of rebels was on the move. It was sure that they would be found and painfully exterminated, just like all the others. And the Dalek Emperor liked nothing more than the pain and suffering of Dalek victims.
All around its jet black casing, several guards patrolled the surrounding area. The Emperor's flagship was safely floating high above Viradios in space, where they could watch everything moving perfectly. Soon enough, the Viradians would be totally eradicated, and the Daleks would move on to the next civilization, to start the whole thing over again. They had gotten plenty of practice, and they were very, very good at it.
But something was different today. There was an odd signal trying to come through on the Emperor's private channel, something usually reserved for dire emergencies.
"OPEN CHANNEL GAMMA-ZED THREE," he boomed to nobody in particular, and immediately a hologram activated in front of him. The signal was coming from the Viradian weapons base, which had long since been under Dalek control. Instead, there was a slightly shabby man wearing unusual clothes at the controls. He waved. "Hello."
There was a brief silence from both ends, as the two analyzed each other from both ends of the signal.
"DOC-TOR," the Dalek Emperor boomed.
"Well, you're certainly sharper than these three were," the Doctor said. "May I ask how you figured it out? Was it the coat? Or maybe the hair? It's gotten a bit wiry since the last time we came upon each other. Haven't had that in a while –"
"CEASE YOUR MINDLESS DRABBLE."
"...sorry. But yeah, that's me."
"WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO ACHIEVE WHEN WE HAVE ALREADY WON THIS BATTLE?"
"To stop you, of course. You know that there are still a few Viradians out there. They'll be fighting until the bitter end. And do you know what? They have something that not one single Dalek in the entire universe has. Hope. And that hope drives them to fight against you. They won't stop."
"WE CONTROL THEIR TECHNOLOGY. THEIR CITIES ARE BURNT. THEY ARE POWERLESS AGAINST US."
"Well, I suppose so. Unless…they have Dalek technology, am I right?"
The Emperor paused. "IT IS OF NO CONSEQUENCE," it said.
"Is it, now?" the Doctor asked, and folded his arms. "Tell me."
"EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF DALEK WEAPONRY ON THE PLANETS AND COLONIES OF THE VIRADIAN EMPIRE IS UNDER MAXIMUM SECURITY. THEY WILL REMAIN SO UNTIL EVERY LAST REBEL IS DEAD AND WE HAVE TOTAL CONTROL OVER THE EMPIRE."
The Doctor clapped his hands together. "And this is where it gets interesting. I'll tell you the whole story, shall I? The Viradians are smart, and they know help when they see it. I popped by out of chance, saw what had happened to them, and gave them exactly the help they needed. You see this?"
He moved to the side, revealing the interior of the weapons base. "I took the liberty of shutting off the security systems to the power station while I was in here. And, as I'm sure you know, the Viradians are heading there right now. They have access to the whole building."
"AND WHAT GOOD IS POWER WITHOUT A VESSEL FOR IT TO BE USED IN?" the Emperor boomed.
"Precisely," the Doctor grinned. "And since I'm in the weapons base control room…I can give them exactly that." He flipped a switch. "There we are. They can get their hands on anything in the storage now. As for what happens next, well, you can do the math."
Immediately, there were alarms in the flagship about incoming missiles. "DOC-TOR!" the Emperor shouted over the cacophony. "WE WILL FIND YOU AND EXTERMINATE YOU!"
"We'll see about that," the Doctor said. "You could have left the Viradians alone, but no. You had your shot, and you blew it. The thing about you Daleks…is that you never learn."
The hologram flicked off. Explosions hit the hull of the ship, and it started to disintegrate. It would never fly again.
"Doctor!"
The Doctor turned around, and saw that Fria, one of the Viradians he had befriended during this little incident, was running towards him. The ruins of the city had stopped smoking, and the remaining Viradians were setting out to rebuild now that the Daleks had been vanquished. The sky had begun to light up again, and the twin suns beamed down across the landscape.
"Where the blazes are you going?" Fria said, once she had caught up with him. "It's going to be quite a job putting everything back together. It's the whole Empire we're reconstructing. We could use your help."
"Well, I'll see what I can do," the Doctor said. "I might call up the Beruchi. Fantastic builders, they are. They've got twice the arms to do twice the work of one man. But I'm afraid I can't stay. The Daleks are still out there, after all. No doubt they're on one of their little conquest sprees. I'll do what I can about it." They had started walking again, up a hill where the TARDIS, blue as ever, sat patiently.
"And after that?" Fria asked.
"Business as usual," the Doctor said. "Go off, see the sights, eat the food, fight the monsters. The same life it's ever been."
"Normal life must seem so boring to you," Fria admitted.
"That depends on your definition of 'normal,'" the Doctor said. They had reached the TARDIS now. From where they stood, they could see down into the massive canyon that lay below the city and across the plains for miles on end.
"If I may ask," Fria began, "…why do you do it? Live the life that you live, I mean. All the wandering like a lost tourist. Instead of sitting down somewhere nice and taking a couple days off.
The Doctor paused as he contemplated the question, looking out over the landscape. "On Gallifrey," he began, "there used to be a huge mountain range near where I lived. When I was younger, during the wintertime, I used to go out and wait near the foot of the mountains. Sometimes you'd be lucky enough to see a flurry of sulphurized snow floating down onto the grass. Whenever that happened you would see the flocks of Iridescent Runners emerge from the mountains. Oh, they loved it. I watched them frolicking about in the grass, just enjoying the world…
"Do you realize how lucky we are? Here on Viradios, we only have a planet to stand on because certain space rocks coalesced near a binary star system. We only have life because certain chemicals interacted with each other about five billion years ago. The Viradians are only here thanks to a series of terribly complicated evolutions and extinctions that allowed your species to survive. The odds are stacked against us all, and yet we're standing here right now, looking out over the world, having this conversation. It's remarkable."
The Doctor opened the doors of the TARDIS. "And because we're so lucky to be here, I think that we should enjoy it. There is an infinite array of wonders out in the universe and beyond, and despite the fact that they may have barely existed at all, we hardly ever appreciate them. So at least someone needs to do it. And besides…if we are lucky enough to exist, just for one time, we should take advantage of that fact. Go out and enjoy ourselves. Make the most of it. And then, at the end of our lives, we find that it was so very worth it."
He reached beyond the TARDIS doors and grabbed a very worn, very floppy fedora, and placed it on his head. The Doctor gave one last look at Fria and said, "And it's so very beautiful out there."
The Doctor closed the doors, and with a grinding of engines the TARDIS faded away to the next adventure.