And out stepped the Doctor, and his companion, Ace. The year was backward. The year hadn't happened yet. This year never was.
The Doctor surveyed the landscape. It was barren, and dark, and lifeless. Long, tall, grey grass filled the land before his rather expansive eyes. In the shadows, he saw creatures on the edge of his sight. Most would have thought they were hallucinations. He knew better.
Ace fidgeted with her backpack. The biting cold was getting to the fingerless gloves she had on. Getting through the fabric, lapping up her heat like a rabid dog tearing into flesh. Ace looked to the Doctor. She knew better than to rush him. Her Doctor, the one with the umbrella, could be rushed. But not this one.
And he was taking his sweet time. Finally, he turned and said "You must be getting cold. You human bodies are so fragile."
"And you're not cold," she said dryly.
The Doctor chose to withhold that the chills going down his spine had nothing to do with the cold. When the Master had taken over the Earth, Martha had used as a metaphor for other people she was recruiting, that the megalomaniac had diverted the time stream. No. The Master had pushed and prodded the stream, letting the rivers of time break through and overflow anything in its way. Creating holes in the Web Of Time. No one thinks about what "Web Of Time" truly means. A web is meant to catch things.
And now that the web was broken, things were coming out.
Ace looked at the Doctor again. She finally said "Are we going to get a move on?"
The Doctor nodded. He turned around and closed the ripped-up, caved up door of his wife, and took a walk down the road.
"Stay close," he said, wrapping his long scarf around him. The creatures he had seen in the shadows were getting closer. Ace couldn't see them, but he could tell her subconscious mind could feel their presence. She fished in her bag for her Nitro-9.
"Just in case, yeah?" said Ace.
The Doctor grinned, "Well, it does do well to stay prepared."
"Because your jelly babies sure don't do much against the Master's minions," said Ace teasingly.
They both knew by now that there were much worse than Toclafane, or even the Master, out there.
However, even when there was a possibility of being torn to shreds by horrific monsters from beyond even the Doctor's comprehension, insults to jelly babies couldn't be taken lightly. The Doctor glared (half-lovingly) at her smirking face, and said "Jelly babies have helped me broker peace between many species. Why, I once stopped a whole fight between Alexander the Great and the great Zygon leader of the city Zygonia by just letting them have two unique flavor of jellybeans each in their respective territories. Indeed, you can only find those 4 flavors in those respective places and times in the universe"
"Zygons from Zygonia?" said Ace, laughing, and continued "Now you must be joking."
The Doctor could see the creatures now, as they drew nearer. The nearest 3-D equivalent was a large five-tusked jaguar. Every step made the sound of a nasty, bleeding scar being ripped open again and again in time. Their footsteps were puzzling slow. Why?
"Are we being followed?" said Ace, looking around swiftly. Her face showed no fear, but the Doctor knew she was afraid. Every biological self-preservation instinct must be telling her to run. Worse, she had seen the damage that the creatures beyond the web of time could bring. The blood of his seventh incarnation, still caked on her coat, proved that.
Damn you, Koschei. Why did you have to take your lust for power and vengeance so far?
Ace saw the Doctor looking on her stained coat, and winced at the memory she must be trying to suppress.
The Doctor looked at the road, and saw a large spindly three headed creature. It had no eyes, and but it seemed to be tracking the two with its entire body. And then he realized that the tusked jaguars were slow because they were the hunting dogs. This monster was the true hunter. Then it disappeared from his view. From all his senses.
That wasn't a good sign.
Ace saw the worry on his face. "We need to move quicker, yeah?"she asked.
"Yes, we should go now!" said the Doctor.
The Doctor and Ace ran down he road. The road zig-zagged. From far away, you could swear it made a left, but when you got close, it was a right. Or two feet could become ten feet. Or no feet, and you realized you made no progress.
"Still not as bad as a shopping market line," muttered Ace.
"No, but both are made to make you stop," said the Doctor. "The shopping market wants you to buy those little products on the side. They never have enough Snickers. No matter which galaxy you go to."
He stole a glance at the side of the road. He could see the creatures (which he now dubbed Elephantuguars) , keeping up with them.
"Must ask them about their exercise program," he said.
"Look, it's there," shouted Ace.
And the gate was there. It was an arch made out of the living insides of a TARDIS. Constantly reforming at almost a thousand types of colors a second, it seemed to change shape and size every time you blinked. The outside had the mechanical gears and gizmos of the last form the component TARDIS had taken up. You could never truly look at the inside of the gate. No, not like you would go mad if you looked at it. The inside of the gate was almost the very concept of time itself. Looking inside would be like looking at the color blue—impossible.
The Doctor was at the gate. Not catching his breath, he observed the gate while winded Ace looked at him observantly.
The Doctor grinned and gushed "An absolutely marvelous piece of engineering! It's encoded with corrupted Gallifreyan codes. It's got several layers of security, and that's just the first 3 Dimensions,"
The trees began to wither. The air was getting colder. The shadows began to move closer.
"So how do we get inside?" asked Ace.
"No idea," said the Doctor, still grinning.
"Would Nitro-9 work?" asked Ace.
"If only," said the Doctor.
The trees began to crack, and begin to glitch into irregular shapes. Like the very timeline of the tree was being corrupted, and changed into something else.
"Well, then come up with some ideas, Professor!" said Ace, who was surprised at her own outburst. Her eyes began to widen, and her body began to shiver despite all her bravado and self-control.
The Doctor turned to give her a somber look. She knew that look from her Doctor. It meant he was about to give heart-wrenching news.
"The only way to unlock is the gate is to give it genetic biodata from a Gallifreyan. I would have to...bleed myself out to give enough material. I would surely die."
Ace's breath caught in her throat. She placed her hand on her forehead and said "Well...you'll live again, right?"
"Yes, well it's not so simple!" the Doctor snapped. It suddenly occurred to him that the shadows had stopped moving.
Ace hadn't noticed, and said "I understand death is painful for you, but only one of has one life! "
"But..." the Doctor trailed off.
And then the Doctor realized why he had been allowed to come here. They had wanted him here all along.
Facing the shadows, and the monstrosities within, he said "But if I regenerate here, the perversions that exist within this plane will mix with my biodata. They will search into my darkest thoughts, and pull them out. They will turn me into a version of myself mixed with all of their evil. And they know I might risk that to save you."
"Don't'" said Ace immediately. "Let them rot in hell. I'd rather die than screw up the world further."
"There is a chance, if you lock me in here with them, that you could escape safely," said the Doctor, "I'll be stuck here for all eternity. It'll be all up to the Martha lady you met."
The Doctor wasn't even sure if Martha could save them if he was locked in here. But, of course, he wouldn't tell Ace yet.
"According to the proper timeline, we shouldn't even have met," said the Doctor now turning to look at her. She was looking at her jacket. He continued, "But I've enjoyed-"
"Save your speech for later," said Ace. She took off her backpack, and took her jacket into her hands.
The Doctor was confused.
Ace looked at the Doctor, nd said "How do you unlock this gate?"
"By applying the genetic data to the surface," said the Doctor.
The shadows were beginning to bristle. The glitchy tree begin to crack open a hole.
"Doctor?" asked Ace.
"Yes, Ace?" said the Doctor.
The tree's hole opened up, and it became a mouth. The bark began to bend, and was clearly becoming less stiff. The tree was transforming into something else.
"RUN!" shouted Ace, and she threw the jacket onto the gate.
The resulting sound was much like the sound of the TARDIS materializing, instead so much louder. Ace felt in her bones, in her mind, in her very sense of being aseveryeventhappenedatonce-
"ACE! COME ON!" said the Doctor. He threw his pack of Jelly Babies at the creature that was no longer a tree, and it reflexively stopped to analyze, break apart, and reconstitute the timeline of the Jelly Babies. That was all the time needed for the Doctor and Ace to pass through the Gate into the World Beyond.
Ace woke up on a dusty place. The soil was purple, and the sky was very dark blue. She realized that her jacket was gone, as well as some very important equipment
"I left my Nitro 9!" said Ace.
"And I left my poor Jelly Babies," said the Doctor. He was sulking, with his backed turned to her.
"I take back what I said earlier about your candies," said Ace."They're lifesavers!
"No, they're jelly babies, but thank you. It's a small consolation," he said. Then he looked at her, and said "So my DNA from my future self's blood was luckily in place to help us get through the gate."
"Knowing you, well, as I will know you, that almost certainly wasn't a coincidence—you probably planned that the whole time," said Ace. She frowned, and said "No offence, but sometimes I could hug and strangle umbrella-using you at he same time." The Doctor (scarfed one) only laughed.
"So this is the World Beyond?" said Ace, looking around the abandoned buildings.
"Doesn't look like much?" said the Doctor, back to grinning again. He pompously stated "That may be due to your 3-dimensional limited eyes."
"And to you 20/20/20 vision?" said Ace.
The Doctor pondered the space, and, with a shrug, said "Looks okay."
"Time for us to get to work?" said Ace.
"Everything relies on Martha's success. We just have to survive what the Master's done to time until then," said the Doctor.
"I'm good at survival," said Ace with a grin as the eldritch location literally rose before them. She heaved a baseball bat from the pile of objects on the floor.
"Then let's get to work. Let's do something marvelous."