Disclaimer: I don't own "Doctor Who" or "Twilight", and the essential details of the original concept of this fic came from a video posted on YouTube by heroesdwtw- which has unfortunately now been taken off YouTube- and is used with their permission

Feedback: Much appreciated

AN: This chapter focuses on describing the Doctor's past history with the Selyoids and their agenda on Earth, taken from the novel 'Dying in the Sun' featuring the Second Doctor, Ben and Polly; hope you like it.

Falling Stars

"So," I asked, looking uncertainly at the Doctor as we sat back down in our room, the Doctor looking pensively at our surroundings as though he wanted to make sure nobody was looking at us, "what's the big deal with... Michael Angelus?"

"Michael Angelus is an alias," the Doctor explained, looking grimly at me as he placed the paper on the table between our seats, open and displaying the image that had attracted his attention in the first place. "His real name is Leonard De Sande, and the last time I met him he was a film producer for Star Light Productions and the leader of a quasi-religious group known as the Way of Light."

"Ah," I said, nodding slightly as I processed that before looking at the Doctor again. "And... what made him dangerous?"

"In its simplest terms, he was an agent of the Selyoids," the Doctor explained.

"The Selyoids?" I repeated in confusion; I could tell that the name was spelled slightly differently, but it still sounded similar...

"Well, that wasn't really their original name- De Sande called them that as a bit of a joke-, but they didn't exactly have a name before they came to Earth; from what Polly told me, they just called themselves 'the Children' before everything fell apart..." the Doctor explained. "Some terrible catastrophe on their home planet- this is all based on second-hand information I got from a friend; I don't know what actually happened to them directly- cut them off from the sunlight that they needed to survive on their home planet, and the artists who had dominated the race for so long were forced to turn to the scientists for aid. The resulting experiments led to their entire race reverting from a form based on sentient light to something more like primordial soup that could travel through space on an asteroid, eventually arriving on Earth."

"So... the Selyoids are the last survivors of a dying planet?" I asked, wanting to make sure I'd understood my friend correctly (There was something slightly touching about that, but I avoided mentioning it; the Doctor's grim expression made it clear that he didn't have much sympathy for them).

"Trust me, if all they wanted was to blend in and make a life for themselves, I'd be all for that," the Doctor said, smiling briefly at me in reassurance- evidently he'd sensed and understood my initial sympathy and wanted to reassure me about his motives- before the smile faltered and he continued his explanation. "The problem is that their new liquid state means that they can only exist on Earth by using human bodies as hosts, and while the humans themselves are mostly in control, the subject definitely experiences some changes in attitude once the Selyoids have entered their systems..."

"Does this have anything to do with that... thing that nearly turned your friend against you the last time you were here?" I asked, remembering what the Doctor had said before he'd opened the newspaper.

"Her name was Polly," the Doctor said, nodding briefly in acknowledgement of my query

"She was travelling with me and a young sailor, Ben Jackson- I met them both in 1966, they wandered into the ship to return a lost key while I setting the controls to depart after we stopped this insane supercomputer together, and they ended up sticking around afterwards; they were even there during... well, a difficult time- when we ended up in Los Angeles in 1947 and decided to take a few weeks' holiday. When we were dealing with the Selyoids, she was influenced and manipulated into drinking the Selyoids- their method of gaining hosts-, and when Ben and I next ran into her, she dismissed us both as nothing but hangers-on, trying to get caught up in her glory because we didn't have any of our own, and claiming that there was nothing we could have to say that would interest her unless we were stars ourselves."

"And she wasn't like that normally?" I asked; I was fairly sure I knew the answer, but confirmation couldn't hurt.

"She told me once that she enjoyed travelling with me because it gave her a chance to help people in far more varied ways than she would have been capable of back home," the Doctor said, looking grimly at me. "Does that sound like the kind of person who'd dismiss two people she'd spent months with in favour of a washed-up actress whose career has suddenly taken off again and a former drug dealer who's experienced a significant makeover, both of whom she only met the day before?"

"Ah," I said, lost for anything else to say in response to the Doctor's words.

He'd told me stories about some of the things he'd done with his old companions in the past, but looking at him now, still clearly hurt at something that had to have happened to him centuries ago, from someone who would clearly never have done something like that on her own...

In a weird way, it was nice to know that he could still think that way about someone he couldn't have seen for several decades at least; after Edward had dismissed what we'd shared as nothing but a fleeting distraction, the idea that the Doctor could remember me the same way he remembered Ben and Polly in the future was... nice.

"So... aside from the mood alteration, what did the Selyoids actually do to people?" I asked, turning our conversation back to the original topic.

"Well," the Doctor explained, returning to his explanation, "when ingested by a human in their liquid state, the Selyoids alter various subtle details about the humans they're 'possessing', enhancing their bodies to the peak of that human's physical potential. They don't actually change the subject's appearance, but they give them an enhanced sense of charisma and neaten up some potential 'flaws', such as making Polly's hair more radiant than it usually was and giving another man an increased sense and appearance of self-confidence; I'd cite more examples, but I never met anyone else who was exposed to the Selyoids before they ingested them- and it's obviously hard to know what they left behind after they removed-, so I can't say what was changed."

"Ah," I said, my mind briefly flashing to Edward's description of the effects that vampires could have on their prey; the idea that I was dealing with another race that could 'dazzle' me was disturbing. "Anything else?"

"Well, on a personal scale, the Selyoids could also provide their hosts with a degree of enhanced healing- they could slow it if they had to; I was present when an actor who was host to some Selyoids was shot in a restaurant, and apart from an initial golden glow the Selyoids slowed his healing to the point where he needed some hospital attention-, and they were able to influence others through some kind of hypnotic charisma; that actor I mentioned tried to make Polly shoot me-"

"She shot you?" I found myself repeating before I could stop myself.

I may not know Polly, but after hearing the Doctor's reasons for rejecting Christina, and after some of the stories he'd told me about his old companions, the thought of any of them actually shooting him...

"Actually, it didn't quite work out; Polly's natural self and her loyalty to me meant that she shot the actor at the last minute, which made his original wounds so serious that the Selyoids couldn't handle them," the Doctor clarified, a brief smile on his face before his expression became grimmer and he continued speaking. "Anyway, that ties in to the other reason that the Selyoids are so dangerous; when treated in the right manner, the chemicals they produce could have a very hypnotic effect on the human mind, to the point that De Sande was able to add the chemicals to a film that he made to advertise the Selyoids' 'message' to the general public, making the film's effects appear far more convincing than they should be for the time as well as making those watching the film have a far more emotionally intense reaction to the storyline than they would have done under normal circumstances."

"They brainwashed people?" I asked, a sharp spike of fear passing through me at the thought; the idea of Edward reading my mind had been disturbing enough, but the idea that these people could control it...

"De Sande claimed that it was to a limited degree and the Selyoids wouldn't make the humans do anything they didn't want to do originally, but considering that Polly tried to kill me because one of the Selyoid hosts told her to, I think we can both agree that he was at least exaggerating," the Doctor said, waiting for me to nod in agreement before he continued. "Besides, regardless of how allegedly limited the Selyoids' influence was, we still had peoples' emotions being manipulated and reshaped against their will by foreign external influences; I think we can both agree that, whatever De Sande claimed he was doing, that was not acceptable?"

I could only nod in firm resolution at that assessment; I might not know what the Selyoids thought they were accomplishing, but after the Doctor's speech about the value of free will, I was in complete agreement with my friend that anything that violated our freedom wasn't acceptable.

If I'd just resented Edward taking away my choices by leaving me, I was never going to accept another race out to control my own for their benefit.

"So, if the Selyoids were all just basically acting as... enhancers... when they were in human bodies," I said, finding myself briefly stuck for a better term to describe the Selyoids' described effect on humans, "how did they communicate with humans?"

"Well, according to Polly, at least the Selyoids in her were able to share some memories and impressions of their lives before coming to Earth, but they didn't actually speak to her; from what I gathered De Sande initially assumed that they were just there to enhance humanity before he found a way to communicate with them more directly," the Doctor explained. "A few Selyoids were able to fully interact with the rest of the world, but they could only do that by possessing corpses acquired from the police morgue- they only took John Does, but that's still putting them in a tenuous ethical position in my book-, and that limited their ability to perceive the world around them; an attempted experiment to give them an independent form of their own turned the Selyoid into a raving beast that essentially dispersed when it was exposed to bright light."

"They were trying to create their own bodies?" I asked, wanting to make sure I understood what the Doctor was telling me; travelling with him might be incredible, but I was rapidly learning that it was important to make sure that you understood everything you were being told. "That's why they were... brainwashing people?"

"In the short term, they were relying on using humans as Selyoid hosts to allow them to experience life in some form, while long-term plans involved using De Sande's films and other related organisations to spread 'awareness' of the Selyoids and encourage people to devote more resources to restoring them to their original form," the Doctor explained. "If De Sande had his way, the human race would have become slaves to the Selyoids, conflict and hardship essentially erased in exchange for working to 'help' the Selyoids regain their true forms while abandoning the individual strife that helps humanity grow."

"So... we'd stop fighting each other because we'd be so busy working for the Selyoids?" I said, looking sceptically at the Doctor. "And De Sande thought we'd like that?"

"With the Selyoids influencing humanity, yes," the Doctor said grimly. "Getting rid of want and poverty by making everyone stars might seem like a laudable goal, but there's no way for them to do that the way De Sande was planning without encouraging awareness of the 'strength' of the Selyoids, and even then not everyone would be able to receive a Selyoid."

"They'd run out of Selyoid samples eventually?" I asked grimly, reminded suddenly of a vampire comic that I'd found in a bookshop a while back; one particularly vivid paragraph had a vampire trying to convince his friend to kill him before he began a murder spree that would render vampires extinct only when they'd completely succeeded...

The results of the situation the Doctor described might not be as bloody as the scenario described in the comic- for one thing, the Selyoids weren't actually killing anyone, but just possessing them-, but the essential idea remained the same; regardless of species, once you ran out of certain key resources, your plans were pretty much screwed.

"That, and the fact that De Sande's entire plan was based on the flawed premise that everyone who didn't receive a Selyoid would just blindly worship them from afar because of the films; even if they didn't run out of Selyoid chemicals before they achieved their goal, some people would react to that stimulus with violence to try and take what they want," the Doctor said; I thought about objecting to his criticism of humanity, but quickly realised that there wasn't any point as I couldn't actually deny that the Doctor was right that some people would react in the way he described when faced with something they wanted.

"There's no accounting for human nature, huh?" I said with a slight smile.

"Quite," the Doctor said, smiling slightly at me. "Still, if it's a choice between free will and world peace, I take free will any day; where's the point in being happy if the individual doesn't have the right to be what they want to be?"

It was something I'd never consciously thought much about before- I'd objected to the idea of a dictatorship as much as anyone of my generation would, but it had still seemed like an intellectual debate more than a serious topic-, but looking at the Doctor right now, I felt his belief in that statement more than I'd ever felt anything before.

Peace might be an important thing to aim for, but the Doctor was right; if we couldn't have peace without freedom, we'd lost the point of the whole reason this country had been founded in the first place.

"OK, so that's what they were doing last time you saw them... so why were you so shocked to see De Sande now?" I asked, focusing on the original reason for this conversation?"

"The last time I saw De Sande," the Doctor explained, "he'd ingested a mass amount of Selyoids into his body with the goal of giving the Selyoid in him the strength to overwhelm his own personality and become the new Selyoid director-"

"He'd what?" I said, my eyes widening in shock at the idea.

I might have wanted Edward to turn me, but I would have still been essentially me once the newborn hostility and thirst had passed; the idea that someone would actually want to sacrifice their very self on purpose...

"The original director had been absorbed by a detective that Ben and I had been working with while investigating their presence in the city- he was increasingly obsessed with the Selyoids and it drove him to destroy the director's original body to really bond with them-, and had decided to stay in him because it liked him," the Doctor explained. "De Sande hoped that he could use the others' Selyoids to enhance the strength of his own and allow it to overwhelm his personality so that it could take control, but when he was trying to escape in an airplane to give the Selyoids time to overwhelm him, I was able to disorientate the pilot and cause the plane he was using to crash."

"He was in a plane crash?" I said, eyes widening slightly as I looked at the photograph with renewed understanding; something like that would be devastating to even a vampire, never mind anything human. "No wonder you were shocked to see him..."

"But I really shouldn't have been," the Doctor said grimly, staring in frustration at the wall for a moment, lost in the memory of his last encounter. "I'd seen what the Selyoids were capable of, and De Sande himself had commented that the amount of Selyoids within him would patch up any injuries he sustained at the time almost instantaneously; he would have lost some of the Selyoids within him due to the mass he lost in the initial explosion, but considering that he absorbed a whole parkful of Selyoid hosts, that would just delay him until his absorbed Selyoids could regenerate him back to a level where he could operate."

"And he just decided to start over where he left of?" I said, looking at the Doctor in surprise, going over some of the stories I'd heard Charlie tell about his colleagues to think about the problems some criminals faced trying to hide. "Wouldn't people recognise him?"

"Why should they?" the Doctor replied with a shrug. "It's been a good few years since De Sande was active, directors at this point aren't always the most public of individuals when it comes to the film-making business, and there were never that many photographs of him when he was active; your generation may be used to accessing images via the Internet, but it's not like pictures are consistently reliable these days."

"You recognised him-" I pointed out.

"I have a far keener memory than the average human- plus, I've had to edit my mind to discard of some of the clutter over the years; when you live as long as I have in this life, you tend to see little point in remembering the specifics of some of the times you've spent in dungeons, as an example, thus making it easier for me to recall more important details like the face of the man who nearly brainwashed the world-, although I will admit that part of it was simple luck; again, you have to keep in mind that people tend to stick with specific newspapers, so it's probable that De Sande chose to let this paper publish his picture because he doubted anyone who knew him would see it," the Doctor explained.

With that said, he turned to study the paper thoughtfully for a few moments, before he stood up with a resolute expression. "Well, now that we've cleared up what we're dealing with here, it's time to go and deal with the situation at hand."

"Confronting De Sande directly?" I asked.

"Yes and no," the Doctor replied. "I doubt that De Sande's just going to let us in to examine his offices if we just rely on the psychic paper... but fortunately, I have a few other ideas."

"You do?" I asked, looking at my friend with a hopeful smile. "What's the plan?"

"Simple enough," the Doctor replied. "According to this, Fallen Star Productions focuses on giving failing actors a new lease on life, but I'd rather not confront any of his listed actors directly until we know where he's keeping the Selyoids; I left the Selyoids alone for too long last time, and I'd rather just cut them off at the source now."

"So... how do we do this?" I asked.

"Well, the company doesn't have a specific address listed- according to this article, all mail is to be sent to a PO box, and filmings are apparently arranged with other studios; something about them wanting to encourage awareness of other locations rather than tearing up the old for the new-, but I do know someone who has a few interesting contacts with the local film industry," the Doctor said, smiling at me as he stood up. "If we're going to find out what De Sande's up to as soon as possible, we're going to need local knowledge about this 'Fallen Star Productions' company, and even if my contact doesn't know it immediately, I'm sure he'll know someone who can find it for us."

AN 2: Well, hope you liked that 'briefing' on our current enemies; coming up, the Doctor will meet an old friend from his previous confrontations with the Selyoids, as they find out more about what De Sande's been up to since his 'death'...