Disclaimer: This is a fan-made work made out of appreciation and love for two great stories. Doctor Who and Bioshock: Infinite are copyrights of the BBC and 2k Games. I have no ownership in either, well, except this story I suppose.
Chapter 1: A Rather Peculiar Morning
Klong!
the sounds of the cloister bell rang throughout the TARDIS, as the Doctor slowly began to lift his head from the console. It's not very often the Doctor finds himself waking up from sleep. This was not because he was a particularly heavy sleeper or difficult to wake up, but because having any amount of sleep tends to be a rare feat for him. In fact many of the Doctor's companions would say that he hardly ever sleeps at all. Nearly a millennia of travelling experience in addition to Galifreyan biology left him taking roughly 3 hours of sleep between adventures, and even those came by sparingly. This time, his rest had been a somewhat one-of-a-kind. As he entered the TARDIS from his previous adventure he finally let the exhaustion from his travels overtake him, and allowed himself to take what Rose had called a "proper Earthly sleeping schedule".
Klong!
Rose. The Doctor pondered somberly as he continued to stir from the control console of his TARDIS, The sound of a Cloister bell firing off for a second time. It had been over three months since he left Rose in Pete's world with his metacrisis clone and the unfortunate departure of Donna Noble, and not a single moment had passed that he had come to regret the decisions he made in the aftermath of the Stolen Earth Crisis. In an effort to ignore the pain the losses of two of his most prized companions had caused, he left Ms. Noble's advice behind and began to travel alone. no matter how far he travelled, no matter how many lives he saved, no matter how much he had run, there was no running away from the pain of his loss. He had lost his pink and yellow human and his best mate, and this time there would be no chance for either of them to ever return.
Klong!
The Doctor had little time to dwell on this further however, as The cloister bell had fired off inside the TARDIS for the third time, trying to stir the time lord, and alert him to a far more immediate peril. "Alright I'm up. I'm up!" He shouted in frustration, still rubbing his eyes from his unusually long slumber.
Klong!
" Oh by the stars of Casterberus, what could possibly be going wrong with the universe... now."
The Doctor's voice quieted as the screen of his TARDIS alerted him to a complete rip in the time space fabric. But this tear was unusual. It certainly couldn't have been formed from a paradox, the signatures of the tear would be far more cataclysmic. It appeared to be a multiversal rift, but it wasn't like the one between his universe and Pete's World. This was a very different kind of rift, and a very peculiar one as well. It was almost as if someone had found a zipper in the universe and decided to pull its fly down. However to do this should require an enormous amount of energy and power, and the likelihood of a new bad wolf entity was incredibly unlikely. Perhaps some wayward civilization has discovered a way to create such tears? 'No that would be impossible, no civilization could have created a tear in time and space like this,' thought the Doctor as he tried to rap his head around the situation in front of them.
There were in fact two civilizations the Doctor could think of who could have created this tear; the Time Lords and the Daleks. The Time Lords were certainly capable of creating a device which could be used to create multiversal rifts. Between the engineering of vessels like the TARDIS, The Eye of Harmony, and numerous scientific studies on the space time vortex, They were more than sufficiently knowledgeable and technologically savvy to accomplish such a feat. However Galifrey and its people have long since passed on. Even if the Time Lords were still alive by some miracle, they would have considered a device which could create such a tear to be a pointless point of investment, especially since a properly equipped TARDIS could traverse through naturally-occurring rifts of such nature with relative safety.
Then there was the Daleks. Though not exactly known for being outstandingly brilliant in any capacity outside of conquest and destruction, the Daleks themselves had accomplished some rather remarkable feats of engineering themselves. Moving entire planets, the reality bomb, ships which could traverse and survive within the void, and even the somewhat clumsy emergency temporal shift (ETS) are among a few things the Daleks had managed to design for themselves. while it would likely be crude and rudimentary, given enough time the Daleks could have designed and manufactured such a device. However there was just one problem with this notion. The Dalek's technology, irrespective of its purpose almost always carried a very characteristic energy signature, which didn't seemed to be present in this tear. That and the fact that armies of Daleks were not exiting from the rift seemed to be a pretty good indication of non-Dalek origins.
While the Doctor's mind scrambled to identify the nature of the tear, he allowed himself to be completely oblivious to the fact his TARDIS was drifting (more like careening) towards to the rift. That was until he looked back at the screen for a second opinion.
"Oh that isn't good.," The Doctor noted dully. It was about this time the Doctor's adventurous impulses began to take over. A wide grin breaking across his face as he set a direct course through the tear. "Brace yourself old girl, looks like we are going to be exploring the rabbit hole the old fashion way."
As the TARDIS slipped through the tear, her insides began to stir violently. The Doctor himself was holding onto the control console for dear life, as his beloved ship's began to spark and ignite sporadically, and bits of coral began to rain down to the floor. The shield integrity was beginning to fail, As quickly as the violent turbulence began, it had already come to a close, leaving both the Doctor and the TARDIS in a very bewildered state. The time lord quickly moved to put out the fires before they could spread out of the control room, and after a couple of cross-applications of fire extinguisher and ye trusty mallet he managed to prevent any further damage.
"You alright there?" The bewildered time lord asked; rubbing his longest companion's time rotor gently. He soon found his answer as a gentle, albeit rather stressed hum came to him in response. The Doctor smiled at his ship, thoroughly satisfied with her response, and began a thorough inspection of his ship and location. With a few inputs into the command console, the daft time traveler activated the TARDIS's diagnosis protocol. As the prognosis began to appear on the console display, The Doctor began to mutter out the details aloud.
"Let's see you still got power: good. Time vortex connection: check. Time rotor is in working order. The sensors are a little. Minor damage to desktop theme, console in need of refurbishing, Parking brake in need of service? Well, maybe I'll get to that later,".
He never intended to do anything about the brakes.
" Now let's see where we are... ,"
While the sensory damage of the TARDIS meant it couldn't not give out any precise location, The Doctor recognized it as Earth sometime in the early 20th century, How Earth seemed to constantly get drawn into these kinds of peculiar occurrences was almost a complete mystery to the 905-year old traveler, however he quickly recognized that the source of this rift- or tear, or whatever it was- was not going to discover itself by him debating the metaphysics of Earth's anomalous attraction to anomalies.
The Doctor prepared his long coat, retied the shoelaces, and retrieved his sonic before walking towards the door. As soon as he reached the door, he turned back to face his TARDIS; a gentle smile lining his face as if to reassure it that he would come back safe.
"Well I suppose there is no time like the present, is there? Allons-y, old girl,".
With that the Doctor walked out the door. As he turned to face his surroundings, his jaw began to slowly drop as his understanding of human history seemed to unravel as his latest destination unfolded itself before him. The locale was a vast metropolitan city, easily spanning several miles across. The architecture was almost decidedly turn-of-the-century American. and none of it all felt out of place The roads were paved in brick and stone tiles, and the streets teemed with life: People walking their way to work, stopping to chat with old friends, families playing carnival games, and the occasional sound of a barber quartet could be heard off in the distance.
Strangely enough there did not seem to be any horse carriages or the occasional automobile using the streets; there were however plenty of zeppelin-like aircraft floating off above, a curious detail that reminded him of his adventures in Pete's world.
Even stranger was the auspiciously gregarious amounts of Nationalistic and Christian propaganda decorated throughout the city. Most of the buildings seemed to have a copy of the american flag hanging off their balcony or window. Off in the distance airships can be seen promoting the words of a Father Comstock. Then there were the propoganda floats laying around the sides of the streets. The most egregious offender, however, were probably the deifying statues of three of America's founding fathers standing right in front of him. The Doctor was aware that the Americans tended to be a rather patriotic and religious bunch, but this kind of dogmatic nationalism and religious zealotry seemed more appropriate in the 16th Century Vatican than a Modern-Era American city.
However all of these oddities were completely forgettable in front one very notable fact, which really turned the Time Lord's head upside down: The city itself was floating. Not in a lake, not a harbor, not even the ocean below, but in the sky, and from his best estimate, probably about a kilometer and a half above the sea floor. Even the tram rails which seemed to connect the various parts of the city together were also suspended in much the same manner. The fact there was a flying city at a point in human history where none were supposed to have been built was bizarre enough, but the most perplexing problem with the whole scenario, aside from the ludicrous amounts of power needed to lift the city into the air alone, was the lack of any evident suspension mechanisms. Nothing, no jets, no anti gravity generators, no ballast chambers, no electromagnetic manipulators, or even -stars forbid- a giant fan or an array of propellers.
It was at this point that of the more than a thousand questions running through the Doctor's mind, of those only one managed to escape out his mouth. One which in its simplistic brevity, and shaky projection had managed to encompass the Doctor's total bewilderment and disbelief at his surroundings.
"Wha-Whaaaaat?"
A/N (w/ B.S.): And so completes the first chapter, a couple of things I would like to say. First is that this is my first work of fan fiction, and it is indeed my first attempt at any serious narrative project. So constructive criticism is appreciated. Whether it be in grammar or in story-telling technique any bit of advice can go a long way to improve my writing skill.