Doctor Who

The Girl and The Ood

Prologue

The wind made a crisp whistling sound as it blew through the battered buildings. The skyscrapers that once stood proudly against the rusted sky now seemed to shy away at the very passing by of the clouds. Up on a hill, just beyond the disastrous cityscape, a warehouse building stood battered, yet sturdy in the musty air. Sigma 002, an Ood, stood silently in the opening of the building, waiting. The wire stitched to his skin since birth waved idly in the wind, and the orb at the end rested tenderly in his hand like an egg; its plastic shell reflecting the barely flickering sunlight through the clouds, giving it a milky hue.

From inside the warehouse came a small girl around the age of five-years. Her face was smudged and her clothes dusty and worn from rummaging around the city for supplies and food. Her hair was a pale blonde and her eyes an aqua blue, the kind of blue one can see in the sky on the perfect summer's day on Earth; a color that reflected both longing and wisdom beyond her years. She stumbled her way up from the rubble to stand next to the solemn alien and gripped his hand that was resting at his side with her bony fingers.

"Sig, has she come back yet?" Her voice was soft and coarse, but sounded sweet like a lune's song.

"No, Ms. Sirina, not yet," Sig replied, the orb lighting up with each syllable he spoke. He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. "I'm sure she'll be back as soon as she is able. You know how Ms. Amelia is, she won't stop looking until she has made sure each one of you is taken care of."

Sirina nodded, let out a long sigh through her nose, and rested her forehead against Sig's wrist. "I hope she's okay."

Suddenly, there came a noise like a thunder-clap that roared and reverberated throughout the diminished buildings of the city; already broken windows shattered into fragments of fragments in their frames, and small buildings threatening to fall crumbled beneath themselves.

"What the hell?" Sig muttered, his voice sounding like someone speaking through a walkie-talkie. The two watched as brownish grey cloud billowed out from the distance and blanketed the ruins below.

Down in the dust below, a girl had just tumbled her way out of the collapsing remains of a building, coughing, and dusting the bits of rubble from her hair. She was about twenty years of age with short, pixie-like brown hair, with bangs that swooped over to the right, just under her eyebrows. A blue handkerchief covered her mouth, and she wore a long-sleeved leather jacket that cut off just below he rib cage, with a white shirt underneath. A gun holster was hooked around her hip and thigh and made a soft hissing noise as the brown leather rubbed against her black skinny jeans. She carried two large military backpacks, one on her back, and the other hanging on her chest.

"Well, that was a wee bit too close for comfort," she grumbled to her self.

Suddenly something clamped down on her ankle, pulled her down, and started dragging her back toward the billowing darkness. A crab-like claw gnawed at her feet, and an unearthly voice came screaming from the shadows of the rubble.

"You just don't know when to quit, do ya?" She huffed as she pulled out her gun. she took aim, and shot at the joints. With a bloodcurdling screech, the monstrous claw let go, and whipped itself back in the broken bricks and tumbling walls. With that the girl got up, and began to run towards home.

As she made her way through the deserted streets, she tried her best not to look at her surroundings. Since the epidemic hit two years ago, the bodies seemed to pile up just as much as the buildings began to make mountains upon themselves. Some were already bones; others were in the middle of decay. Those who couldn't make it out of the buildings when disaster struck roasted slowly in their graves and became mummified, almost in a picturesque way. The girl looked slightly off to the side out of curiosity, for who could ever be in the presence of Death itself and not be curious to see its workings in progress? She took in a sharp breath as she caught a glimpse of a mummified corpse staring back at her from an opening in a collapsed building. The sunlight hit the shriveled skin just right to where only half of the grotesque face shown in the shadows, laughing at her from across the way as if to say, "You're next, you're next, you're next!"

She let the air out slowly through her nose and continued on her way.

Not too much later, she looked up and smiled to see Sig and Sirina waiting loyally for her in the opening of the warehouse.

"I've hit the mother load this time!" She huffed as met her companions at the top.

"Are you alright, Ms. Amelia?" Sig asked, hovering behind her worriedly. "What was all the commotion down there about?"

"Agh, nothin' much, just my being reckless," she replied pulling off the backpacks and setting them on an old table. "Oi, kiddos! Come and get it!

Suddenly, there was a noise like stampede that filled the air, and out from shadows came children of various ages and races. Some came from holes in the walls, and some came from the rusted ceiling rafters, using old boxes as stairs. They all crowed around her, eager and desperate. They called out her name in pleading cries and started grabbing on to her jacket and pants with their scrawny fingers.

"Hold on, hold on!" Amelia said through a laugh. "Seriously, there's enough for everyone, I made double dog sure of it. Get in line so everyone gets their fair share."

As the kids lined up for the rations, Sig touched Amelia's shoulder with this free hand. They began to speak to each other telepathically:

"When you said you were 'being reckless', what exactly do you mean, Miss Amelia?" He said skeptically.

Amelia sighed. "I… ran into some unwanted company."

"Such as?"

"The Sythrenene. Again. Who else?"

"The Sythrenene…. Did they hurt you, Miss Amelia?" Sig's fingers tightened on her collarbone.

"I got a little roughed up, but I'm fine, Sig. Really. Hold on a second…" She stepped forward and clapped her hands loudly to get the children's attention. "Alrighty, kid-o's time for bed. I'll be in there in a minute to tuck you in!"

As the children scampered off with their spoils of the day, Amelia walked over to Sig and whispered in his ear. "I need to talk to you in private."

They walked to the corner of the giant room where a large hole had been poorly covered up with planks of rotted wood. Amelia lifted up one of the planks and let Sig walk in first.

The room was a decent size with a makeshift bed in one corner, and a large wooden crate for a desk in the other; an old office chair that had lost the back pad sat close by. The desk was covered with numerous computer monitors, one on top of the other, that had the whole city under surveillance. They made a soft beeping noise as they switched from different venues of the city. A tall black lamp stood next to the desk, its light shade missing and its paint slowly peeling off.

"What is it that you wanted to talk about, Miss Amelia?" Sig turned to see that Amelia was still standing by the door, leaning on the wall with her head down. "Miss Amelia?"

She looked up at him, a sheepish smile curving her lips, her brow creased in embarrassment. "Sig, you know how I said I roughed up a 'little bit'?" She made quotations with her fingers.

"Yes?" Sig took a concerned step forward.

"Well…. I got roughed up a lot!" She heaved in a breath, and started to slide to the ground. "Please! Please help me to the bed! Hurry!"

Sig pinned the orb to his shirt and rushed to her side, slipping his arm around her waist and hooking her arm around his neck to support her. She let out an exasperated cry of pain as she flopped on to the bed with a thud.

"M-Miss Amelia, what happened?" Sig asked as he lifted her head and settled a pillow beneath it.

"I-I was downtown," Amelia replied, closing her eyes to keep her mind off of the pain. "I found an old convenience store that had more than enough food for us all. But as I was filling the bags, a Sythrenene came out of nowhere." Amelia took in a sharp breath as a shot of pain zapped through her body like a Taser shock. She grabbed Sig's sleeve and let out a soft cry. "I knocked down a couple of the pillars in the building to block its escape, and I got out before the building collapsed. But the tricky little monster managed to slip through and grab my leg. It got it pretty good, too. Oh, God…"

Suddenly she felt a slight tingling down in her toes, and her leg began to throb in massive pulses. She screamed in agony, her back arching from the shock.

"Miss Amelia!" Sig cried. Amelia's knuckles turned white as she clamped on to his sleeve.

"I'll…I'll have to regenerate it, Sig." She looked up to him, her eyes wide with fear. She let go of his sleeve and clasped on to his hand.

"You don't have to… fully regenerate, do you? Please tell me you don't, Miss Amelia." Sig squeezed her hand tightly.

"O-Only one way to find out…" Amelia gasped. She closed her eyes and started to concentrate…

She tried to imagine the pain that traversed through body was flowing down to her leg, centralizing the pain to the wounds and keeping it neutralized. She took in a couple of deep breaths then held it in. Sig watched as she laid perfectly still, her fingers clenched tightly around his gloved hand as though she was trying to draw strength from his grasp. Suddenly, with a gasp Amelia's eyes shot open, brown and glistening like two gold coins. A light shone from her mouth as though her soul was trying to rip out from the very center or her being. She swallowed it down with a hard gulp and winced; a fraction of a second later the same light began to gleam from her wounds.

"Agh, there it goes… there is goes, Sig…I did it. I did it," Amelia gasped. She lay back on to the pillow looked up to the cracked ceiling. She gave Sig's hand a squeeze before she spoke. "I have to honest with you, Siggy…. I don't know how much longer we can survive. I don't know how much longer we can wait. He's just taking so long."

Sig was quiet. "Maybe," he began softly. "Maybe he didn't make it, Miss Amelia. Maybe something…"

"No, he couldn't have," she interrupted, shaking her head in denial. "He's too damn stubborn. And… and he promised. He promised he's come back. He has to."

Just outside the doorway a boy about twelve years old stood and listened in on the conversation. His head was shaved on one side, and he allowed his hair on the other side to grow normally. He wore a white Victorian-like shirt with black leather pants and boots. It was obvious that he cared about his looks, and tried to keep himself as tidy as possible provided the dusty domain. As he listened to the conversation he shook his head skeptically. "Some savior this man turned out to be," he muttered to himself. " 'He's going to save us all,' she says. 'He never abandons his loved ones,' she says."

He walked to the opening of the warehouse and looked up. The clouds had parted ever so slightly to let the stars above peek down at the city below. It was a rare sight to see anything of the sky except dust, but the boy saw them as nothing special, nothing to gawk about.

" 'The Oncoming Storm' my foot! Some mad man in a big blue box you are!"