Good golly, what's this, the last chapter? Why, it is! However, I hope you lot read my author's notes, because I wish to advertise that the twins are not done in the least. I've already got another thing in the works, in which the twins' character arc comes round. Let's consider "Inheritance" a sort of two-part premiere. The next story to come round will take them into deeper and more interesting territory. EDIT 10/7: The second story, which was indeed planned, is postponed, perhaps indefinitely; at the moment, I've very little time for anything. I'm scribbling my stories into a notebook during lectures at the very best, and the twins deserve a little more attention than half-distracted blurbs. So, very sorry, but this will have to do you. :) Cheers!
P.S. For all of you MC-Ten/Rose people out there, I've added a bit for you. :)
P.P.S. I need to give credit to the person who could be understandably designated the co-writer of this piece, Bekah, who is my sounding board, fact checker, beta reader, and inspiration all rolled into one. Pretty much every idea you see here was run by her first, and usually tweaked until a bad idea became a good idea. Although she didn't actually put pen to paper, she might as well have. The twins and their adventures are the product of a sunny day upon a bench, overlooking the quad, and as I'm saying, "What if Meta-crisis Ten and Rose had a kid?" Bekah came back saying, "What if they had twins?" You've gotta love having a friend like that.
There was, not too far from the center of the universe, an enchanting place, that boasted all kinds of entertainment and retreats, one of the most popular of which were the charmante villa des vacances, little foreign retreats complete with their own houses, ponds, and triple moons. You could take a short hopper ride to the Burning Sea and watch the universe's most spectacular sunset, or go shopping at Motogatu Square (in reality, it was more of a wriggly rectangle) which had the most diverse shopping experience this side of the Crab Nebula. But for whatever reason you were visiting the High Winds Resort, the largest and most significant of all of these was the Intergalactic Prehistoric Creatures Preserve.
It was said that the Preserve had drifted outward from the far center of the galaxy some thousands of years ago, built by a civilization no one knew of (or, if they knew, would speak of) and let go for an equally unknown (or unspeakable) reason. However it had come to be, it was now locked very firmly between the triple moons and the golden planet below, a planet which had once had a name, but was now simply "High Winds Resort." If it had a native species with anything resembling intelligence, they had vanished along with its name.
The Preserve was continually adding new species to its roster, but the real gems were the species that had been there since the beginning, or at least, the beginning of remembrance; they had been carefully cloned, and then bred, until there were herds of the creatures, an entire collection. It was the only place in the universe that a body could go to and view, all together, the beginnings of all the planets in all the worlds. That was the Preserve's tagline. "Within convenient distance of the famed High Winds Resort!" the pamphlet read. "Come visit the Intergalactic Prehistoric Creatures Preserve and view, all together, the beginnings of all the planets in all the worlds! Get in touch with your past! This is a vacation you will never forget!"
This pamphlet, aged and crinkled and bearing a corner that looked as if it'd been nibbled on, was now lying outspread on the Doctor's long fingers, fluttering a little in the afternoon breeze. It had been a long time since he'd held this pamphlet, and it was a similar length of time since he'd thought about it; it was an adventure of a previous incarnation, and those things, inevitably, stayed buried until they were needed. Across the back, over a smiling alien face, a message had been written—not in his handwriting, he was pleased to see; there was no sense in breaking the rules when they didn't need to be broken. (Yet.)
It's been brought to my attention that the Time Lords are fond of zoos, the message read. Perhaps you'd like to visit? Love, Amy.
"Fond!" said the Doctor. "We invented them!"
"I believe that's the point," said Jamey. "The Time Lords invented this zoo, didn't they?"
The Doctor pursed his lips and gave a noncommittal wiggle of his head. "I'd say so. Yes. Perhaps. It's been years since I—" He stopped. "Since he went."
"It'd have to be, wouldn't it?" asked Grace, flipping over the pamphlet to show a picture of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. "How could they have a T-Rex unless someone was about who had a TARDIS?"
"I've made contributions, every now and again," the Doctor said with an impish smile. "There's a Gugogondarant in there, very rare, I snatched him off an ice floe in Lower Mezandidi—"
"Focus, dear," said Rose.
"Right," said the Doctor. "I cannot officially confirm nor deny whether this is or isn't a product of Gallifrey, but it did come out of the center of the universe, you know, and the walls are built to contain more than just your average alligator."
"Perhaps they might contain the thing in the Void?" suggested Jamey, with a twinkle in his eyes, only for the Doctor to say, "Are you nuts?"
The twins looked at him in blank astonishment.
"That thing has been in the Void for a million-million years, and you think clever walls will contain it?" demanded the Doctor of his children. "This thing chews through reality and you think, hmm, let's stick it amongst a billion vacationers?"
"Well," said Grace, stung, but the Doctor was already talking, and didn't hear her.
"Now if we could only just vacuum up its Void-stuff, I don't see why not," he was saying, very fast and very loud. "Seems like it might work, eh? What's lending it the juice to rip holes in reality? Why's it only begun to do it now?—because it's only recently built up enough Void-stuff to manage it, I bet. Or Void non-stuff. Given that the Void doesn't exist. Hum. But how to steal it away? How to steal it away—"
"The float-y black things you mean," said Rose. "You remember?"
"Of course I remember, that's precisely what I mean," said the Doctor. "We need a giant Void-stuff duster, that's what we really need, but the question's how to build one. And make it work. If the thing is in the Void, then we'll only be sucking up Void, or trying to, it's too—non-huge—" The Doctor gave a chuckle at this joke of his, which no one else seemed to think was funny, and so without ado he plunged back into the middle of it. "We've got to get this Conqueror out of the Void first, that's what the crux of the matter seems to be, but we're liable to let him loose among the stars and ruin everything unless we're ready."
"Let him loose inside the zoo," said Grace, "and then suck up his Void-stuff."
"We wouldn't have to transport a beast the size of a planet, that's for sure," agreed Jamey.
"Can't do any of it unless we have—"
"—an impossible thing," interrupted Uncle Tony, who was standing with his arms folded and listening to them all intently. "You're talking about making a machine—a real, tangible machine—that's made to collect a kind of particle that by its very definition can't exist. It's like saying that's you're holding antimatter in your hands. You couldn't be, because matter and antimatter can't touch. It's the same principle."
"Is it?" asked the Doctor, his eyebrows leaping upward.
"Of course it is," said Uncle Tony.
"Is it the same sort impossibility," mused the Doctor aloud, "as a box that's bigger on the inside? Or time travel in reverse?"
Uncle Tony's lips pressed together in a thin line. He felt he was being laughed at, and he didn't like it. "No," he said. "All those have been theorized about. All of those—"
"Have been thought of, you mean," said Jamey. "You mean to say that because Earth hasn't thought of it, it can't exist."
There grew across Uncle Tony's cheeks a fierce stain of red. "I mean to say that to the best of my knowledge, a thing that does exist and a thing that doesn't cannot cross paths. That then presents a problem when you want to use something that does exist to collect something that doesn't."
"I won't lie," said Joran. "You've lost me. I'm floating in the third hemisphere of Lockadill. Lost forever. Are you talking about creating a self-contained black hole? It's either that or you're talking about taking a feather duster to a giant beast from the Void that calls itself the Conqueror."
The Doctor's head swiveled round to look at Joran, the twins copying him precisely not a half-second later, and three pairs of intense brown eyes bored into Joran's skull. He looked back with some amount of trepidation, but to his credit he didn't look quite as terrified as he used to—Joran thought it was likely that he had reached a certain level of immunity by now, and could no longer be bothered to fear them as he had.
"Oh," said the Doctor. "Oh, that's brilliant! Absolutely brilliant! Joran, I could kiss you!"
"Please don't," said Joran, who had been wrong in believing himself immune; what he felt now was very much like fear indeed.
"You're not seriously contemplating such a thing," Uncle Tony said incredulously. "A black hole? Really?"
"Only a small one," the Doctor said in a tiny voice. He lifted up his fingers and moved them together until only a sliver of light showed between them. "Really tiny. Almost insignificant. Practically powerless."
"Then what would be the point?" asked Uncle Tony.
"Bebenzar," said Grace.
Joran gave a discontented grumble that came up from deep inside his chest. "You lost me again."
"Magnetic air, my good man," said Jamey. "Same principle, different mechanism. An itty bitty black hole—a practically powerless hole—"
"Black holes suck in everything," said Joran, realization hitting him like a physical blow. "Including stuff that doesn't technically exist."
"Bingo," said the Doctor. "And I've some experience in trapping Void things. Mix them altogether, and what do you get?"
"A plan that might actually work," Rose said, with a big grin. Her eyes, a lighter shade of brown than her husband's, had in them an eager gleam that came to them but rarely nowadays. "If we're an impossible kind of lucky, that is."
"Ready?" asked the Doctor.
"Ready," said Rose. Her eyes crinkled upward, bearing little hairline wrinkles that hadn't been there seventeen years ago. The Doctor loved them more than he ought to and looked forward to seeing how they deepened.
The Doctor took her hand, just like old times, and whispered in her ear, "Allons-y!"
The Manager of Affairs, who oversaw the inner mechanisms of the High Winds Resort, took his tea at three o'clock, and not a minute later. His house overlooked the Low Basin inlet, and it was there, down by the quay, that the Manager of Affairs took his daily tea. The weather at the High Winds Resort was always fair, and so there was never any reason to disturb this habit of his. He especially liked, after he'd read the daily reports, to gaze upward at the spectacular sights the horizon afforded: the triple moons, for one, but most especially the behemoth that was the Intergalactic Prehistoric Creature Preserve. The Preserve was always there, beyond the clouds, like a misshapen fourth moon, and the way the sun's light blew across the shining hull was truly a magnificent thing to behold—especially at three o'clock.
Usually, at three o'clock, there was a stream of glittering beads going from the Preserve to the planet, and at three-oh-five, those beads would reverse direction, and take passengers from the planet up to the Preserve. They were immense ferry ships, built to carry thousands upon thousands of people, and were what the Manager lovingly referred to as his "fleet." Today, however, the ferry ships weren't moving at all: they were frozen in a massive clump betwixt the planet and the Preserve, crowding together in the most horrific traffic jam the Manager had ever seen.
He snapped his fingers, but he was so astonished by the sight in the sky that his fingers slipped, and he had to try again before it would work. His glasses were dropped into his waiting hand by someone, a servant whose name he had never bothered to learn nor ever would, and he strapped them onto his face with such force that they landed crooked. He barely noticed. With furious fingers he activated the telescopic settings, and a second later, the traffic jam in the sky leapt into sharp relief.
"Lord of Fiery Skies and Damned Seas!" he swore, and the servants standing beside his chair gave a start and crossed themselves hurriedly. The Manager took no notice. He was too busy looking at an entire fleet of ships, frozen between the High Winds Resort planet and the Intergalactic Prehistoric Creature Preserve, for absolutely no reason at all. There was no debris, no pirates, no solar flares; he supposed there might be some sort of malfunction, but on so massive a scale, it was unthinkable!
It was entirely by accident that his head twitched far enough that the Preserve itself came into view; otherwise, he might have made his inquiries after the ships and beaten in heads but otherwise gone along as ignorant as the ferry ship pilots. Luck—or fate—or both—moved his eyes far enough to the left that they caught on an ominous glow in one of the Preserve's empty paddocks, one of the immense sections of the zoo that were left open in case some immense creature happened to come their way. The glow went three ways, in the shape of a triangle, and when he zoomed his glasses in as far as they were capable of going, he saw not far from one of the corners a little blue blip that he thought might be a—
"No," said the Manager, aloud. "That's not really a tanning block, is it?"
"Sir?" asked a servant.
"It is a tanning block," the Manager whispered, absolutely scandalized. There was, on the surface of the Preserve, a tanning block, the sort outfitted for humanoid peoples, in which they could change their skin color at will. These were the sort of things kept by beaches, or in hotels; certainly not on the Preserve! "Who put that there? Who authorized that?"
He pulled loose his glasses, and gave the nearest servant a blood-chilling glare. "Fetch me my phone, son. I have to make a call."
"Hurry, hurry!" Grace said to Jamey, running along behind him with a mass of wiring wrapped around and around her arms. As they ran, Jamey uncoiled the wiring from her arms and laid it out around the already fizzling energy field, adding a secondary barrier. It was just insurance, a last minute thing they'd convinced their father that they needed, but one the twins thought absolutely essential. If this thing—the Conqueror—was even half so powerful as they thought, he might overwhelm the first barrier. In fact, the twins even thought it likely.
"I am hurrying," Jamey puffed, taking another glance at the horizon. The Preserve was guarded by a host of unmanned ships, but thus far, they hadn't seen any, but only because Joran had jammed the navigational systems of the ferry ships, and there was no one left on the Preserve. If there was no one left on the Preserve, there was no one left to see the mischief of the Smiths (plus two), and they were too far from the edges of this particular compound for the security cameras to be of any use. But that wasn't going to last for long, and they knew it. They had to do this now.
Finally they made their last pass, and made the necessary connections; Grace gave the signal to her mother, who was leaning out of the TARDIS, and her mother gave the signal to the Doctor. The second barrier lit up, the same color as the first—cherry limeade, Grace thought—and blazed so bright that she could feel it against her skin.
"Get ready!" Rose yelled.
"What do you mean, you haven't got a clue?" the Manager of Affairs roared into his phone, or at least, what passed for one at the High Winds Resort; it looked like a long rubber Lego block. "There's something going on inside the Preserve, man, and whatever it is, I'd bet my pension that it's what's keeping the fleet from moving. Think of all the money that's not being spent! Think of the money, man!"
"I am, sir," the voice on the other end said. It was the voice of the Head of Security, and it was not a voice much inclined, at the moment, to be pleasant. "I'm thinking that if we go in there, guns blazing, and find ourselves outmatched, it's going to cost a small fortune to fix. That's assuming we aren't all dead."
The Head of Security (whose friends called him Marty) had tried to explain this to the Manager already—twice—but had not yet tried using such clear monetary terms, but the instant he did, the Manager cottoned on. "Very true," he murmured into the phone. "Very true. Absolutely inconceivable risk. Send in a single scout ship to see what's what."
"Very good, sir," said Marty, Head of Security. "Will do, sir."
"And hurry!" the Manager added, at a shout, and threw his phone at a nearby servant so hard that it pinged neatly off the crown of his head. It made him feel a little better, but whatever value it might have had was worth very little in the face of his stone-cold tea, sitting on a table down by the quay. He felt he might cry. He really did hate cold tea.
Sure enough, just as they began flipping switches and turning dials, a ship appeared on the horizon, small and quick; the red stripes on its sides marked it as a scout. This would be Joran's job. He climbed up on top of the TARDIS, armed with a fearsome-looking cannon, which had to lean against one hip in order to heft, and aimed it towards the oncoming ship. A building whine sounded in the air, and into the mechanically refreshed air of the Intergalactic Prehistoric Creature Preserve he bellowed, "The name's Lieutenant Joran, officer of the Second Earth Dynasty Marine Corps, Attack Class, and I am here to categorically ruin your day!"
With the twins below, shading their eyes in order to better see Joran, Joran slammed his fist down on the cannon's trigger; from out of its mechanical maw came a beam of light, long and thin but blazing with energy that crackled and made Joran's hair stand on end. It struck scout ship dead center and shorted out all of its systems, right down the list, and out of the sky it dropped. Joran whooped.
"Nice shot," called Jamey, impressed, and Joran gave him a snappy salute. The cannon had been Joran's idea, but the Doctor had had some rules about the use of deadly force, and so Joran had done the best he could—and the best he could was a broad-spectrum electronic dampening field. He'd used them before, to great effect, but nothing could quite compare to an EDF cannon with the power of the TARDIS behind it.
"Thank you," Joran said, once he'd jumped down off the top of the TARDIS. He left the cannon on top just in case the noodle-heads on the planet below decided to send another scout.
"All clear!" Grace was saying, her head disappearing inside the TARDIS's doors. A low hum built in the air, stirring up a small breeze, and in the center of the bright-colored barriers appeared a hole. It was small at first, barely more than a crack in the dirt, but soon expanded until it was nearly the entire length and breadth of the triangular barriers.
Jamey sauntered up to the edge of the barriers and leaned casually over. "Hullo," he said, as if talking down a well. "Anyone home? Monsieur Conqueror?"
The darkness grumbled.
"Perhaps I've caught you at a bad time," Jamey said. "I just wanted to warn you that we're going to close up this hole. It's only recently opened, we were lucky to see it. However, this time we've come prepared. Once we shut this one, all the others will be shut, as well." He paused. "Permanently."
You lie, the Conqueror's voice growled from the depths.
"Do you think?" asked Jamey. He began moseying along the edges of the barrier, hands in his pockets, blond hair swooshed into a truly spectacular upward direction. "I think I recall besting you with a screwdriver. A screwdriver. I've upgraded my toys somewhat since then."
There was a monstrous roar, and upward out of the hole came first the nose, then the eyes, then the jaw, and soon the entire head of the Conqueror; it was black like death and brought with it a kind of coldness that was felt only in the soul. Its eyes rolled back and forth as it tried to shimmy its shoulders through, and while it worked, the Doctor turned on his modified triangulation device. It no longer simply traced energy, but captured it. And with the miniature black hole in the very center, there was nothing it could not trap.
The Conqueror bellowed a bellow that shook the entire Preserve, and struggled to free his shoulders; he got one elbow free, and then another, and was working at his claws when the device kicked in. All the Void stuff the Conqueror had soaked up, all the emptiness it had drank in to fill up its empty belly, went streaming into the teensy-weensy black hole. The black of its hide became less and less dismal, and the glow of his eyes less and less vivid, and even the size of him shrank, until they were looking at a very great but very pissed off lizard, some hundred feet tall.
"It's working!" cried Uncle Tony, delighted, which of course ruined everything.
The Manager of Affairs, down on the planet, was not the brightest of light bulbs, and very much driven by a gut full of pride; his dead scout ship enraged him to the point of mania, and after throwing an entire tin of biscuits at the face of his cook, he ran down to his office and ordered an attack. Technically speaking the High Winds Resort was a (peaceful) business establishment, but it was a planetary business, and then some, and therefore necessitated defensive systems. One such system was a collection of missiles, housed beneath the Burning Sea.
And so, just as Uncle Tony was expressing his unfortunate sentiments, the Manager of Affairs was screaming into a com-device to "goddamn fire!" From the middle of the Burning Seas shot one missile, two missiles, three; and they went streaking up out of the atmosphere and went barreling straight for the Preserve.
Now, had the Manager been thinking clearly, he would have ordered the scout ships to be arrayed in military formation, and sent up to attack as such. They were armed and could certainly handle it, and would, besides, render minimal damage to the High Winds Resort's primary source of income. The missiles, however, were of a different class altogether. One missile might have made quite a sizeable and expensive dent, and two would blow a hole; three, though, might very well explode into the internal structure, which no one in any galaxy knew how to operate, much less repair.
The Smiths, plus two, stared open-mouthed at the sky while the Conqueror struggled inside his neon-red energy barriers, and watched the three missiles coming toward them. "Bad luck," said Jamey, and took up his sister's hand.
"That's rather unfriendly," the Doctor said mildly, and went back inside his TARDIS. The missiles, as they watched, turned round, and then began to trace a lazy shape in the space between the planet and the Preserve: "HA-HA-GOT-YOUR-TOYS!"
Down in his office, the Manager let out a scream of wrath and hatred and despair, though if he had understood exactly what was happening, he probably would have shaken the Doctor's hand. A specimen like the Conqueror would be a priceless addition to their collection.
A little bell went off inside the TARDIS, a helpful ding-ding-ding. The Doctor shouted at them, "He's done!" and then blew up the missiles, which were now a safe distance from the planet, the triple moons, the ferry ships and, most importantly, the Preserve. They all bolted for the TARDIS. This part of their plan had to be synchronized very carefully between how fast the TARDIS could depart and how fast the Conqueror could move, neither of which had been tested, and so just as the engines engaged the power to the barriers was cut, and the Conqueror was let loose.
Up they spun, out of the Conqueror's reach, and they watched the thing that had been frightening jump and swat at them like a spastic Godzilla-would-be. The trouble was that the Conqueror looked nothing at all like Godzilla—more like an angler fish with claws—but it had lizard-skin, and that was enough.
"You should phone whoever was trying to missile us, dear," said Rose, even as Joran shouted in utter agony, "You took off with my cannon up top!"
They all looked at him.
"It's gone!" he wailed. "D'you know how long it took me to build it?"
"Yes," said Grace. "I helped you."
"There, there," said Uncle Tony. "We'll find you a nice pub once we've got back."
Joran, eyes wide, took a flying leap at Uncle Tony, who yelped and went dashing into the back.
"I really should," said the Doctor, ignoring the lot of them. "And maybe afterwards we'll have a day at the zoo. What do you think?"
"I think a day at the zoo sounds lovely, dear," said Rose.