Author's Notes:
A new start, with a new Doctor. This story should work as an overall 'introduction', so if you're lost, canon-wise, don't fret. Still, to help you find your feet, the Doctor is currently on Earth, recovering and mending his time ship after a fairly explosive battle. Details on this will be revealed during the course of the story. The story is sixteen chapters long, and they'll be uploaded as and when I get the time to HTMLise them. Hopefully it shouldn't take too long. Any and all reviews extremely welcome.
by Flying Goldfish
Part One:
Here there be Dragons
Chapter 1: One time out of ten.
Mike looked ill-favouredly down at the crumpled letter one more time and wondered why he'd come. It had come out of the blue, and had been the first letter he'd had in his letterbox without a little cellophane window in it since Susanne had suddenly broken off contact, without explanation. He'd tried ringing her of course, but the mobile number he had seemed to have stopped working. It wouldn't have been a difficult job for him to find her, at least he liked to tell himself that it wouldn't have been, but at the end of the day, if she'd decided to cut him off without even a word, even a hint that things weren't all right between them, he decided she wasn't worth finding. Still, even after six months he'd felt his heart jog a bit at the sight of a handwritten envelope in amongst the unpaid and unpayable bills. That was part of it, a simple pleasure at reading someone's thoughts on paper, good, tactile paper, not just shorthand notes engraved on electrons to 'michael.de-gris- nez@wanadoo.fr'.
That wasn't to say, of course, that the contents of the letter hadn't intrigued him. He'd been in the business, or at least had had an office with the business's name up on the door for two years now, and so far no one had written him a single impassioned, enigmatic plea for help. That it came from home, and from the local vicar of all people, had probably tipped the balance. He'd packed a suitcase, chosen if not his best things then his most dark, mysterious, and enigmatic things, and returned home, to British soil in name if not in sense. Almost the instant he stepped off the ferry on to the little Channel Island of Herm, it had started to rain. He'd stood on the seafront, a gaunt figure in grey trenchcoat and black jeans, the rain bonding his lank, mouse-coloured hair into long, limp spines, and dripping from the tip of his prominent nose, and tried to visualise just how much of an idiot he looked. He'd waited for nearly forty-five minutes before the Reverend Andwell had appeared, apologising profusely and trying to thank Mike for coming at the same time. At that moment, Mike de Gris-nez had altered some of his assumptions about Reverend Joseph Andwell.
He remembered Joseph from his childhood on the island, a slow moving, quick thinking man, old even then, thin but paunched, his brow heavy, but his face kind. The old man had been a good friend of his family- pillars of the church that they were, Mike remembered with some amusement, and even when it became painfully clear that Mike was more likely to believe in Dangermouse than God, Andwell had always had a kind word for him.
They had never been close though, perhaps spoken two dozen words together in all their lives, so that the vicar should even remember Mike's name, much less how to find him after all this time surprised the young man somewhat. Then he'd read the letter. Andwell was in trouble, it seemed, or at least he had a problem, a problem in which he would appreciate some help. Mike had, reluctantly, agreed. It was probably nothing more than some tedious little irregularity in the parish registers, but with his father dead and his mother now in England- the mainland he'd sworn to himself never to visit, he had little excuse to return home from France for any other reason, and had felt it would be quite nice to see the places he grew up again. On the journey- two hours by TGV to the port, then the hydrofoil across to Guernsey, then finally the ferry here, he'd turned Joseph Andwell's letter over and over again, each time reading more into it. Fear. That was what he'd read there. Andwell was, or thought he was, entangled in something far too big for him. Fear, and a sense of religious awe. Please God he hadn't been brought here to solve some damned miracle!
All that had changed though, in the instant he'd seen the old vicar's face, and that was the moment that he now wished, toiling up the hillside in the pitch-black, expecting any moment to slip and break leg, back, or neck, that he'd turned round and caught the next ferry straight back. The man wasn't scared, the man was stark staring mad.
"It's not far now!" Joseph shouted from up ahead. Mike gritted his teeth together. He knew that. On this benighted island there really wasn't that far you could go, and this rough path, one he remembered from his schooldays, was one with only one end- a small rocky outcrop, perched uncomfortably high atop a sheer cliff. It was not the sort of place one went in the dark, unless one wished to be alone with a date and all the saner places were taken. He eyed Andwell- vicar, client, and annoyance- in the back murderously.
"If this is some bloody weeping statue I'm pushing you over that cliff."
"What?" Andwell called back, his words snatched away by the wind. Mike ignored him. They were nearly there now- he could just make out the tops of the trees on the little islet out beyond the bay over the horizon. He slowed his pace. Ahead, Andwell stopped, just short of the precipitous outcropping, and flung out an arm towards the islet. "There you are, Michael."
He looked.
"There I am, what?" The islet- it was too insignificant to have been given a proper name, and he didn't chose to remember any of the silly childish names they'd given it as children- was there, as normal. It didn't have hordes of angels gathered overhead, or a ghostly stable, light flickering in its open- he stopped. There was a light on the island actually, a dim red light, flickering slightly. "Someone's lit a campfire over there." Reverend Andwell shook his head. The man was beaming like an idiot. Mike found himself dearly wishing to punch the old vicar clean over the cliff edge.
"Why couldn't we see this in the morning?"
"They're naturally nocturnal- and shy, for obvious reasons."
A flicker of sanity. Andwell had always been a bit of a naturalist- in fact, come to think of it, that had probably been why Mike's name had occurred to him. It had, after all, been Mike, amongst others, who had managed to import four rather ill- tempered snakes into the church hall one summer in his youth. Still, there was no reason why this couldn't have waited another night, until he'd rested from his journey.
"Look, Joseph, if you've discovered some new variety of something or other, don't you think a scientist would be better to... I mean, they don't all take things away and cut them up." Andwell shook his head.
"They'd cut these up soon enough... and worse. They're not a new variety. They are... they are just new... and wonderful." Mike looked at him. The wind was rising, a dull beating motion.
"Listen, I'm flattered that you thought of me in this, but if you're worried about scientists mistreating whatever it is you've discovered then it's a solicitor you want, not a private eye... and please, none of this mystery business, just tell me what it is you've got here."
The older man turned back out towards the sea and stared out across the skyline.
"They will come soon... I can't describe it, Michael, so beautiful, so awesome in their majesty." Andwell's face was fixed with a look of manic ecstasy. Mike felt a stab of guilt. He'd forgotten just how old the vicar was by now. He shouldn't be out in this weather, and if his mind was beginning to go then he needed compassion, needed to be led gently back to the house and talked out of his folly, not impatient glares. After all, Andwell was paying him to waste his time. Somehow that just made it worse.
"Let's go back, Joseph. We can come again on a better night." There was something flapping somewhere- perhaps a loose tarpaulin of even some badly stowed sail- beating hard in time with the wind. He tried to work out where the sound was coming from, all the while affording the vicar his kindest, most compassionate face. He was unprepared for the vehemence of the old man's reply.
"Don't treat me like some senile old idiot, Michael. I know precisely what I saw, and I know you won't believe a word of it unless you see it too, so you just stand there until I say so!" Andwell bristled at him, then turned back into the storm, his head cocked at the flapping sound. Mike followed his line of vision, and felt an icicle stroke his heart. There was something up there. An indistinct shape, moving below the clouds. An aeroplane? An aeroplane with great wings that flapped in the storm, an aeroplane with light in its eyes and fire in its mouth.
Michael de Gris-nez often quoted a particular maxim in his dealings with clients:
"Expectation varies inversely with accuracy." Anyone who thinks he or she has witnessed a shoplifter at work probably has, anyone who thinks he's seen a Martian Warship landing has probably seen a passing helicopter. Put another way, the fantastic is fantastic only because it doesn't happen very often. Reality is extremely mundane, nine times out of ten.
Andwell motioned for them to both take a few paces back and he did so. Of course, it needs room to land, his brain noted mechanically. The beast settled carefully on the rocky outcropping, its wings folding into slack-webbed arms like a bat, the claws gripping the boulders of the cliff almost nervously. It was a little over twice the size of a horse, and a dull colour that might have been brown or red, or even a dark green. The body was plump, and covered with something midway between scale and feather, the wings leathery and hard. Its long neck folded sinuously upon itself and the reptile head lowered to the vicar's outstretched hand. Gently, the old man caressed the creature's jaw.
"They are the lost wonder of our world," Andwell breathed, his eyes never leaving the beast. "The greatest of God's creatures."
Mike swallowed. The animal's head jerked up a few feet, and nervous intelligent eyes fixed on his own.
"It's all right," the vicar whispered to the dragon. "This is Michael... he's much wiser in the ways of this world than I am. He'll find a way to make things work for you, I promise."
Mike looked the creature in the eye.
"Well, what do you know," one corner of his mind remarked quietly to the rest of it. "One time out of ten?"
Gwen Mifhaise scanned the crowd for her brother. No, he hadn't arrived yet. Well, either that or he'd arrived and got so bored waiting that he'd just wandered off again. No, that wasn't too likely. Once Philip had a plan, he stuck to it, even if reason, common sense and occasionally the law were against him. It wasn't that his plans in themselves were ever anything short of comprehensive and ingenious, it was just that he utterly refused to take any account whatsoever of changing circumstances.
"The world was like this when I started," he'd been known to remark, "and if it's not where it's supposed to be when I'm finished then that's its problem, not mine."
The weather was fairly clement today at least, she noted, trying to step over or around Gloucester Green's pigeon population and find her way along the corrugated iron and plastic shelter to Bay 15, where Philip's coach was due to arrive. Just as she'd found a clear route an old lady wielding a tartan shopping trolley bag emerged from a bookshop in the adjacent shopping centre and stopped still, her back to Gwen, with no apparent intention of moving in any direction. The young woman grit her teeth, pressing herself against the brick wall to squeeze past the herd of tourists and visitors- a herd which seemed to be displaying very slow Brownian Motion- and continued on her way, casting a quick glance at her watch. Tutorial with Dr Smith in half an hour. That would easily leave enough time to get Philip back up to college, install him in her room with instructions not to touch anything, and get her things ready for the tutorial, providing the bus wasn't late. She reached the bay. There he was, a tall man with short hair of a vivid ginger whose only style could be said to be 'untidy haystack', looking about himself with an air that was two parts confusion to one part studied contempt. She yelled his name and he turned, his face bearing a nascent goatee and a scar like a four-toed catscratch across the forehead.
"Gwen." He gave her a rather taut, edgy smile. When they were younger, people had often mistaken them for twins- Philip was the elder by three years- but the sudden spurt of growth he'd put on in his teens, not to mention what Gwen desperately assured herself were radically different temperaments, had put a stop to that long ago. Now here she was, in her second year at Oxford, being taught metaphysics and epistemology by a man whose office timetable covered a couple of centuries and kept a charred looking telephone box in his study, and Philip was out in the wide world, having had some degree of success with his first novel, and apparently some way into writing his second. Actually, it would be fair to say that Philip and Dr Smith had quite a bit in common, not least their pained reactions to her rather bleak sense of humour.
"Well then, how goes my sister's life in her ivory tower?" Philip gathered up his bags- a grey rucksack and a carrier bag that had probably once contained food but now seemed full of empty wrappers and drink cartons, and looked at her. She cast a pointed glance, which he either failed to decode or simply ignored, to the nearby litter bin, and replied.
"I'm doing pretty well, I think. I mean, the drink and the drugs and the constant partying get you down after a while, but I've done a bit of work... once this term, I'm sure." Philip nodded, turning his attention to the bus station.
"This would be a marvellous place to start a fascist dictatorship." She ignored that. Philip liked to make outrageous off-the-cuff remarks every so often. Since they were usually barely outrageous enough to offend a long-sequestered nun, and frequently needed much rehearsal to make them sound truly off-the-cuff, they tended to more suggest that he was carrying on some second conversation that no one else had bothered to listen to. Gwen and her brother didn't 'communicate'- they just said whatever seemed appropriate in the vague hope that they would occasionally corelate with one another.
"Listen," she waited until she could be fairly sure that he was. "I've got a tutorial in about twenty-five minutes, so we're going to have to get on now." She turned and aimed a shoulder through the crowd, keeping her head turned sideways to check that he was following in her wake. "So I'll just park you in my room for now, if that's OK, and show you round the city later?"
Philip nodded, which seemed to satisfy her, and they continued on their way. Oxford looked like his kind of place, from what he'd seen from the coach, and for a moment a bit of an old resentment flared up, to be swiftly quelled. He was beyond silly little details like that now, wasn't he? The place was somewhere to be, nothing more, and it fulfilled its function in that regard admirably.
"Who's the tutorial with?" He repeated the question, and she responded,
"Doctor Smith." Philip nodded. Smith was his sister's favourite tutor, from what her letters home made out- an almost made-to-measure eccentric who knew how to teach and wasn't hopelessly out of touch with his students' priorities. Apparently some of the Finalists in the year above Gwen had found him a bit too lax, rarely having much inclination to keep anyone to deadlines, and more interested, one had said, with playing the part of an Oxford Don than actually being one, but Gwen had bonded well with him. Philip was rather looking forward to meeting the good Doctor, for several reasons. Just one other thing he had to know...
They walked at forced march past Worcester College, Gwen leading him a dance across the road past aggravated motorists. Once they were on the pavement again he drew level with her. "Did you hear on the news this morning?" Philip asked, making idle conversation. She shook her head before he had a chance to go on.
"Saving money- I didn't buy a Radio Times this week, so I've no idea when anything's on." He nodded.
"Oh well, it was on when I was travelling down- apparently they've found some sort of colony of monitor lizards out in the Scilly Isles... or the Channel Islands. One or the other." Gwen raised her eyebrows slightly.
"Monitor as in dragon?" She scratched her head. "I wouldn't have thought they'd be able to survive in that climate."
"Well, they've got biologists and biochemists clogging up all the ports trying to get down there, the news said- I'm surprised you haven't heard about it up here." He looked at her carefully. Gwen shook her head, and a dragon passed overhead, gouts of flame tearing into the streets and houses and people. Guinevere screamed, more from pain than fear as the wave of heat rolled over her, and let fly an arrow at the beast's stomach. The arrow went wide, the creature curled round in the air and plunged towards her and she was alone in a darkened room. Something itched on the back of her hand. She scratched at it, and felt something small squirm beneath her finger. She brought her hand up to the light. A tiny silverfish curled defensively in her hand. Irritated, she flicked it to the floor, then checked the palm of her other hand to make sure she hadn't simply transferred it. No, it had gone. Then more came, three crawling over from the other side of her hand, one between each finger. Shuddering, she struck them away, but more streamed from her cuff. She coughed, and eight of the tiny gleaming crustaceans flew from her mouth. There was a tickling in her nostrils, a horrible creeping feeling at the corners of her eyes and Gwen shivered.
"Something wrong?" Philip had a hand on her shoulder and was peering at her dubiously. "You look like you just remembered you left the gas on." She shook her head abruptly.
"Sorry, nothing. I just got this horrible daydream for a minute. Don't talk about dragons, will you? Had enough of that in "Harry Potter". Come on, I'm going to be late."
Had Doctor John Smith, Fellow of St Oscar's College, Oxford, been aware of how anxious Gwen was to avoid being late to his tutorial, he might conceivably have taken more determined measures to alert her, and the rest of the group, of his rather sudden change of plans than a simple note pinned to his door reading:
Dear Yr 2 students,
popped out to slay (save?) dragons-
tute postponed till next week,
Yours,
(An illegible scribbled signature)
Doctor Smith had, in all fairness, only changed his plans a
bare two hours before Gwen Mifhaise had set out to the coach
station to meet her brother, and given that in that time he had
succeeded in driving from central Oxford to Poole, he could not
really be said to be making poor use of his time. Now though, he
could see something ahead which was almost certainly bound to
delay and frustrate him: a uniform. He sighed, dredging up
memories of his exile on Earth all those years ago. He'd dealt
with the police cars that had objected to his rather incredible
speed by the simple expedient of going faster- by the time his
battered old canary yellow vintage car had broken the speed of
sound, he'd managed to evade any car on the ground and thoroughly
bewilder any effort to track him by helicopter. If they were any
use at all, they'd track him down eventually, but by that time he
would, ideally, have the protection of UNIT. He didn't much care
for being part of an organisation, but using officialdom against
itself- that had a certain appeal. Still, to use UNIT one first
had to contact UNIT, and that meant tiresome explanations. He
eyed the approaching soldier resignedly.
"I'm sorry sir, this is a restricted area... authorised personnel only." The soldier had had a hard day. There always were some unauthorised members of the press trying to sneak through- not that this man's car could exactly be accused of sneaking. He looked at the paintwork with some revulsion. The driver, a youngish, stocky looking man with untidy dark hair and a short beard, regarded him with a scowl, and then smiled in an untrustworthy sort of way.
"This is where I catch the ferry for the Channel Islands, isn't it?" The soldier nodded.
"There's a perfectly good Seacat terminal just down the road, sir. This is a military installation." The man in the car nodded.
"Yes, I am aware of that as it happens. Visit the dragon tours, is it? I thought I might be of some help."
"We have all the help we need, sir, thank you very-" The man in the car cut him off with an imperious wave of the hand.
"Nonsense. You've got a collection of half-witted scientists who can't tell their DNA from their sandwiches and a gang of military buffoons who'll shoot at anything that moves... and probably miss that as well." The soldier felt his patience beginning to wear a bit thin.
"Sir, you know I can't let you in."
"Of course you can. It's incredibly simple. You lift this barrier, then stand to one side. I'll do the rest."
"All right then sir, you know I'm not going to let you in!" The man in the car wagged a finger.
"Temper temper. As a matter of fact I don't know anything of the sort. I know that you will obey me." A pause. He scowled, then muttered something to himself.
"What was that, sir?" The soldier's temper was well and truly frayed now. The man glanced back up at him.
"I was just wondering why that trick never works properly for me. Anyway, I suggest that you give this..." he handed over a piece of notepaper, with a few words and numbers scribbled on it, "... to your Port Commanding Officer and tell him or her, if they have any further doubts, to telephone Sir Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart and ask him if that Arcturan hydro-reactor I gave him for the lawnmower is still working." The man sat back in the car with a smug grin on his face. "You know," he remarked to the soldier with some surprise, "I think I might actually be going to enjoy doing this sort of thing again."
To be continued...