Gooooood morning. ^_^
SIAPNIAN: Three things!
1. New note on my profile. It's about series 2. Basically, I'm asking if you guys have any suggestions for individual episodes—time periods, locations, species, whatever. More nattering there. XD
2. I'M REALLY EXCITED ABOUT THIS ONE okay so I'm about to start up another Big Fanfic Project of a similar structure to this one; it's a rewrite and subsequently a continuation of the Ruby Spears Mega Man cartoon. Basically, I saw other people doing it and it looked like a hell of a lot of fun, I want to see if I can't make The Lion Men make sense, and there are differences in the RS canon that are really intriguing to me. Admittedly, those differences can usually be traced back to "the writers of the cartoon gave negative shits about everything", but they're still differences. –grins-
Anyway, my point is as follows: When I write it, I'm going to write it in such a way that someone with no knowledge of Mega Man whatsoever will be able to follow it just as well as someone who's been there since the beginning. And I love you guys a lot, in case you hadn't noticed, and if any of you are interested in looking at me playing with a different canon I'd really love to see you over there. :) But I'm not gonna nag you or force you or even pout at you; just wanted to let you know in case any of you would be interested!
3. Remember how some of you were like "hey when you start publishing original stuff you should totally tell us and stuff" and I was like asdflkjasd;lfkjs because holy crap that means a lot to me? Weeellllll… I'm getting a bit closer to that goal. And right now I'm mulling over a few different publishing options and if any of you are willing to say which ones would be the most convenient/generally the best for you, I would love it. :)
Wow That Was A Long Author's Note (WTWALAN): GO FORTH AND CONQUER
-BAD WOLF-
Mondas. A natural world in some planes, perfectly habitable, populated by all manner of creatures. A living planet slowly cannibalised into nothing more than a particularly large, particularly round machine.
In others, she had never been anything but a mechanical hive.
Mondas was a single spaceship once, in this Doctor's universe. The flagship of the Cybus fleet. And then that fleet started dwindling.
The Cybermen's programming may have told them to convert as much of humanity as they could as quickly as they could, but their self-preservation overrode it after a point. When that point came—late in the 22nd century through the insight of one Rose Marion Tyler—they packed their remaining ships into a loose coagulation and fled for their cybernetic semi-lives. And as they fled, that coagulation constricted, airlocks connecting into haphazard corridors, computer banks feeding into each other as if they had always been designed as one entity.
Centuries of theft and scavenging and jury-rigging later, she was about the size of a planet—or at least a decently-sized moon—the ship she had once been resting at her core. A Frankensteinian mess of tangled metal, she was enough to give any vessel with even a hint of sentience nightmares.
And she was awakening. She'd heard the whispers, flickers of messages across her passengers' wires. She saw the data.
Mondas was not alive. But she was curious.
-BAD WOLF-
We've… been through a lot together, you people and I. So you'll know what… what it means when…
-BAD WOLF-
The trail ran in circles. Of course it did. Of course it did.
The Doctor kicked a door, fuming, almost hoping that the sound alerted the Cybermen to his presence so at least something would be happening. Rose was in here, who knew where, probably being drained to death, and he couldn't even—
He tugged at his hair, shutting his eyes tight against the frustration, the fear. He had backup plans. He always—well, usually—well, er, sometimes had backup plans, and this was one of those times. In this case, he actually had more than one, although waltzing through the halls waving his arms and screaming "come and get me" at everything with handles on its skull wasn't exactly his favourite option.
So that would just be the second one. Absently, the Doctor reached into his pocket and tugged out a—well, he didn't know what it was, only that it was Rose's and it tasted like fake watermelon and she got really territorial about them whenever she had a cold. It was something to put in his mouth, anyway.
There. That was sorted. He slipped between two of the room-columns, squinting upwards. Nothing too important-looking, but there was a panel about a storey up that he might be able to pry up and look at… It was probably just a door control or something, but it was lighting up and that meant that it was connected to the main power, which meant that he might—might—be able to follow it to places that actually were useful. And come to think of it, the hallway was just narrow enough that he didn't need the magnets to get up there if he was stubborn enough.
Good thing, too. The daft objects always seemed to give out at the wrong moments. …kind of like most of the things he kept in his backup pockets, actually.
The Time Lord ignored that train of thought. Propping his back against one side of the aisle, he braced one foot against the opposite wall, the other in line with his back, and started shimmying his way slowly upwards.
The traction on the Doctor's shoes wasn't as good as he'd hoped. He grimaced, grunting from effort as he shuffled a few tedious inches. Instinctively, he opened his mouth to complain before he remembered that there was nobody to complain to; that little reminder spurred him on and he spent the remainder of the climb valiantly ignoring his discomfort.
Mostly. He wasn't a brute-strength kind of Time Lord and heaving himself up a smooth vertical surface using traction and willpower was not the kind of thing he was used to.
His wrists hurt.
With a sigh of mingled relief and pain, the Doctor finally wedged himself next to the panel. Fishing the magnets out of his pocket again, he attached them near his ankles; they weren't much, only about the size of his hand, but their D-ring handles were just sturdy enough to balance the balls of his feet on if he was careful. Wasn't much of a help overall, but it'd at least keep a hand free.
Pulling his glasses out of his pocket and flipping them on, he contemplatively touched his tongue to the roof of his half-open mouth as he studied the little outcropping of metal.
Humans. Hundreds of years of invention and reinvention and they still used completely ordinary screws to stick things onto other things. The Doctor shook his head affectionately before rummaging through his pocket again.
He didn't have a normal screwdriver—of course he wouldn't; why would he when he had the sonic?—but he did have a lot of oddly-shaped whatsits. He just needed to find a whatsit of the right shape.
Two-greh coin, 63rd century Titus. Little wobbly X-shaped end. Tentatively, the Time Lord pressed it against into the head of the screw, relaxing a little as it clicked obligingly into place.
The Doctor heaved a slow sigh as he twisted the coin-cum-screwdriver, resigning himself to a lot of tedium and probably a few blisters by the end of it.
-BAD WOLF-
…you'll… you'll never hear me say this again, but—but I'm—
-BAD WOLF-
Liam'd spent pretty much the whole time in that little capsule praying the Cybermen would forget about him.
He hadn't wanted it to be like this.
All right, he wasn't going to lie to himself this time; when Rose got shoved into the locker next to him, he was a little bit… a little bit glad. If there was someone else there, maybe they'd find her more interesting than him, and maybe…
Well, he hated himself now.
She hadn't even screamed. Hadn't made any noise at all, really. She'd kind of gasped when the whirring started and then her breath had gone really hitchy and uneven for a while, but now it was just slow and shallow. Liam would have thought she was just sleeping if not for those scary parts where she stopped breathing altogether.
She wasn't… dying, was she?
Liam angrily kicked the wall as hard as he could to distract himself from the little prickles under his eyelids. He wasn't crying. He didn't cry.
There had to be something he could do, but he'd tried everything he could on the door itself, and if whatever'd made those horrible gouges hadn't been able to get out then a squishy 14-year-old human definitely couldn't…
He kicked the wall again. The noise was deafeningly loud, temporarily drowning out his pessimism as it echoed in the tiny metal drawer he was stuck i—
Drawer.
Liam didn't know much yet but he'd helped his ma fix the shuttle since he was old enough to hold a torch steady. He knew spare parts when he saw them and this entire ship was spare parts. The spare parts were just… really, really big.
The only things that would have human-sized drawers were morgues, cryo chambers, and medbays. No one'd used cryo since FTL became the norm—and it required packing gel anyway to keep the sleeping passenger from knocking around in flight—so he could probably cross that one off the list… Definitely cross it off, once he remembered the hairline cracks around the door. If there was one thing you didn't want to get into your cryo chamber, it was—
—well, it was everything, actually.
There weren't too many morgues in space. The only vessels that really expected enough corpses to warrant one were warships, and those almost invariably chucked their fallen out of the nearest airlock—respectfully—rather than waste energy building a room to store dead people in.
Cool air washed across Liam's face and he flushed, feeling a bit silly. Of course it wasn't a morgue. He hadn't suffocated yet and those cracks weren't big enough to do much. Air was being pumped in for him, so whoever built the chambers wanted their contents alive, so… medbay?
Battleship medbay, he thought. Emergency stasis was only for people who somehow came under the category of "not at the top of the medical team's priority list" as well as "dying". Most ships didn't have them at all; the ones that did usually just had one or two. Liam'd passed dozens. The only ships that would prepare for enough casualties to overwhelm a medbay that badly were ships expecting to be shot at.
Liam chewed on his tongue, screwing his eyes shut. He'd never worked on emergency stasis stuff before. Didn't even really know how it worked, just knew that there were a lot of scanners and stuff involved, and that it was totally all right with knocking a patient out if they struggled too much.
Liam awkwardly straightened out his kicking leg. No more sudden movements, then.
It was basically built to keep people alive. So if something broke and it got more dangerous to be inside than out, there was probably a failsafe, right?
The boy rolled on his side, eyes closed as he reached out, running his hands down the walls. They were uniformly banged up beyond recognition, scratched and dented and generally horrible, but his searching fingertip grazed against a smooth edge that was pried up just a little…
Biting his lip hard, he squeezed his pinky finger into the gap and started feeling around. Wires, wires, wires—come on, there had to be a Braille label somewhere… If he could find something connected to the ventilation system, if he could shut it off without hurting anything else, the chamber would hopefully open the door rather than let him suffocate. Hopefully.
Liam shook his head a little bit, straining. A jagged fold gouged his palm and he bit back a whimper and he reached and reached and reached—
It was just an instant, probably. But Liam could remember, in excruciating detail, the moment he felt the woolly texture of frayed metal—that half-heartbeat just before the thunderbolt struck and everything was light and noise and blood on his tongue and pain oh God pain—
The chamber shut itself off.
Liam tore his hand away from the gap the moment he could move at all, the skin of his fingers alternating between complete numbness and feeling like he'd stuck his arm in a fireplace. There was warmwetsticky dripping down his wrist and oh hell had he bitten part of his cheek off but he was alive, breathless and shaky and in way too much pain but he was alive.
Liam scrambled clumsily backwards, fully intending to get as far away from the frayed wire as the chamber would allow.
His shoulder hit the door.
The door gave way.
-BAD WOLF-
…I'm frightened.
-BAD WOLF-
A landing bay unfolded itself, the arms of a loving mother welcoming her child back home. Mondas waited as the ship glided in, as the docking magnets engaged and the vessel thunked neatly back into her body.
Connections fizzled into life. There was a life sustaining that ship that she didn't understand, that she had never even begun to imagine in her most daringly optimistic calculations.
She had to move quickly. The life was mortal. Strong, and deep, and alien, but mortal nonetheless, only available as long as its vessel deemed it so.
Mondas reached out, focussing the deepest connections of her power core on the little chamber that held so much. She lashed herself to it, settling, preparing. Her child had been skimming energy off of the top, just enough to keep itself flying; now that it had her, it didn't need a battery anymore.
Mondas drank deep. The life fought back. Strong, at first. But as Mondas scooped away all the power that it had, sucking the energy inside its body's very cells and tucking it away in her storage core, it started to flicker.
Mondas paid attention to the signals from the medical pod. If she were not careful, she would overwhelm the body before she drained it altogether. Such waste was appalling even in the smallest batteries. In this one, it was unthinkable.
Heart shallow, arrhythmic, but still going. Breathing was difficult, exhaustion taking hold and squeezing hard. The data said the life was human—strange, but there was no trap here…
The consciousness lapsed, higher functions falling silent and still, a corpse with a heartbeat.
Systems disengaged for years upon years flared into life again. They had made do with little things, with surviving, scraping together what they could. Before this battery, the most optimistic projection was that they would be ready again in approximately 680 years. But now… now, it was time for war again. The final conversion. Eradication of the beta species, triumph of the new.
The corpse fluttered one last breath as Mondas harvested all it had left to give, a spoon scraping around a bowl for the last dregs it held.
Rose Tyler's heart struggled, shivered, and stopped.
-BAD WOLF-
R-Rose?
…Rose?
…rose? pl
rose please
please don't
-BAD WOLF-
It did not start itself again.
-BAD WOLF-
…m-mum?
