Domination: Volume One
Episode One: The Festival
Featuring the Ninth Doctor and Rose Tyler
On a distant world made of ash, a god stared into the Infinity Well and mentally smiled. He could see his future success and knew that nobody would be able to defeat him. After all, how could they?
"I will not be defeated so easily." the god said, with a voice that would chill any man right to the bone, "If my universe will not have me as ruler, then perhaps this universe will."
He smiled inside his head once again.
Somewhere within an infinite vortex of time, a small blue police box whizzed along at an incredible speed. Inside this police box was a large, golden room with coral-like structures scattered around it, many roundels on the walls and a hexagonal central console with a large glass column. Within this glass column, a glass layer rose and fell, signifying that the TARDIS was in flight.
"So, where today then?" Rose Tyler wondered, sitting on a chair near to the console reading a magazine she'd found deep within the TARDIS. Rose was a typical teenager: blond hair, a face used to normal life and dressed in clothes she'd bought with her Henriks employee discount.
"Well, it's a surprise." the Doctor announced, stood by the controls and carefully negotiating with the sentient part of the TARDIS so that they would arrive where they wanted to be. The Doctor was a young-ish man with serious eyes, short black hair and unusual ears. He wore a battered leather jacket, red t-shirt and black trousers, along with a pair of black combat boots.
"A surprise?" Rose asked with a cheeky smile, "Does that mean you don't know or does that mean that wherever we're going's really good?"
"It depends." the Doctor simply said, his northern accent sounding clearly.
"On what?"
"A lot of things."
"Like what?"
"Well, firstly, I'm trying to get to the Eye of Orion. I've attempted to spend some quality time there in the past but on every attempt it's always gone wrong."
"No change there then."
"Oi. Now, secondly, there's some sort of force drawing us towards Earth in the 1970s."
"The 1970s?"
"Yeah. Been there before too and there was all sorts of temporal anomalies back then."
There was a loud thud and then the two travellers realised that they had suddenly landed.
The TARDIS had landed on the planet Trimura, in the city of Agabond. Agabond was a rather pretty place amidst the harsh wastelands of Trimura and that was mainly because Agabond had a large dome covering it, protecting the innocent civilians from whatever lay outside.
"Oh, fantastic!" the Doctor exclaimed, stepping out of the TARDIS with a grin on his face, "This is Trimura, Rose, and if I'm right, then we should be just in time for..."
He tailed off, as they both saw a parade full of colours and different varieties of alien life. They could hear the music coming from the parade as well: it sounded like the carnivals in Brazil, except a lot sweeter.
"What is that? I mean, it's beautiful but what exactly is it?" Rose wondered, her eyes lighting up with joy.
"The Festival of the Eternal Bloom. It happens once every several hundred years and thankfully for you and me the TARDIS got dragged right here, right now."
He ran right into the heart of the parade, beaming. Rose had thought about following him, but stopped when she heard a voice coming from a nearby alleyway.
"Can you help me?" a little girl asked: she was young and had grey, metallic skin. Her hair was also grey, but looked exactly like small ropes.
"I can help, if you want." Rose replied, in her most friendly voice.
The little girl walked off and Rose curiously followed after her.
The Doctor had noticed that Rose had wandered off and sighed to himself. He didn't mind it that much at the moment as he was in the heart of the parade and had noticed something familiar in amongst the civilians: an Osiran Servicer Robot. The familiar Egyptian mummy-shaped robot was marching towards the Doctor, probably because someone had ordered it to. Cunning, he took out his sonic screwdriver, a slim tube of metal which glowed bright blue when he decided to activate it, and zapped it at the triangular control unit on its back. The robot toppled over into a crowd nearby, but luckily they dodged it. However, this caused the parade-goers to run off in fear and start screaming, which in turn caused several police drones to hover nearby and focus in on the Doctor, who was still holding the sonic screwdriver.
"Ah, I can explain this." he said into a camera embedded within a nearby drone, "This isn't what it looks like, I guarantee it."
"You are an unidentified extremist and you shall be taken to see the Mayor." came the robotic reply of the drone, who then zapped the Doctor with electricity, making him topple over onto the floor. Two long arms with robotic claws picked the Doctor's unconscious body up and the drone flew away, towards a large imposing office, with the Doctor still grasping his sonic screwdriver.
Rose, on the other hand, had managed to discover what looked like a homeless shelter full of the metallic people she had seen earlier: a roof made of plastic tarpaulin and supports made from old scraps was what held together this community house as well as their sense of collective responsibility for one another.
"My mum's over here." the little girl said, leading Rose into what looked like a hospital. In one corner, there was a middle-aged woman, also with the metallic skin and the rope-like hair, but there were several black blotches across her face. Rose stared at the horrific appearance of the woman and was horrified.
"What happened here?" she asked the girl.
"I can explain." came the wheezing voice of the mother, looking at Rose, "The Mayor is developing a virus, so that the local population becomes like us."
"And? Why are these people the only ones affected? And what's with the black blotches?"
"The virus went wrong. It altered our DNA completely and is still changing parts of our DNA as we speak. The humans decided to imprison us in this chamber and have forgotten about us."
Rose felt outraged by what was going on here. During her time with the Doctor, she'd seen the beauty of Woman Wept, the remarkable alien life that was in Jakoo's Emporium for Thirsty Travellers and yet here she felt like she was back on Earth. At school she'd seen stories about animal-testing and here she was, witnessing animal testing but for humans.
"Why did the Mayor even want to infect you with a virus?" she wondered.
"He predicted a great catastrophe that would begin when a box as blue as the sky landed on our world, and the lonely warrior ventured out, with his friend as sweet as a rose."
In the Mayor's office, the Doctor was arguing. He was arguing about the fact that there were so many Osiran Servicer robots on the planet and he was demanding where Rose had gone to.
"Doctor, I simply do not know where your friend has gone." the Mayor, a fat man that just about managed to sit on his chair, said, "Now would you please explain why you disabled one of my security droids?"
"That is not a security droid." the Doctor protested, pointing at a nearby Servicer, "That is used by a god and, if those are here, he isn't far behind."
"Are you seriously telling me that there is a god who's watching us right now?"
"Yes, I am. I know exactly how he works because I faced him dozens of times before. I know that he always survives me, even if there's a Time War in his way."
"A Time War? What Time War?"
"Doesn't matter."
"Then what does?"
"That you listen to me. If you don't, everyone on this planet is going to die. Perhaps everyone in the universe if he's desperate."
"What makes you think you're so important then? I am the Mayor of Agabond and anything that you say will be meaningless. Servicers, get this man out of my sight."
"I've known people like you and the people who don't listen usually end up dead first. I am a time traveller and I know that the entire future of this planet may not exist for much longer unless you become a reasonable individual and listen to what I'm saying. But if you're so smart, you can save the planet then. Go on, take my sonic screwdriver, take my ship, go and save planets."
The Mayor stared into the Doctor's eyes and the fear in the Mayor's eyes was obvious.
"What do you want me to do?" the Mayor eventually asked, after a few seconds of silence.
The prophecy that Rose had just heard shocked her. How did the strange woman lying in the hospital bed know who she and the Doctor were?
"Are there any more prophecies? Anything about the future perhaps?" Rose asked, hoping for clues about what was to come.'
"No. The future is uncertain." the little girl answered, placing her hand on her mother's hand, "All I can do is wait."
"Rose Tyler, you need to come with me." came a voice from behind her, just before a hand grabbed Rose's wrist and she disappeared in a flash of blue light.
The little girl and her mother stared at where Rose had been a few seconds ago.
The Mayor had explained to the Doctor about why there were so many Servicer robots and about the mysterious virus that had failed in such a spectacular way. He had also taken him to the shelter where the metallic patients lived.
"Doctor!" came the cry of a little girl, "Your friend Rose was here a few moments ago. She was taken."
The Doctor's eyes were filled with terror.
"Rose? Who took her?" he demanded.
"I couldn't see. It was someone with a vortex manipulator."
"I'll follow that up later. Now though, I want these people to be cured." he said to the Mayor, "Or you'll answer to me personally."
"There isn't a known cure. And these people will survive the great catastrophe that is to come."
"I know a race of cyborgs who were engineered to survive a great catastrophe and they wanted universal domination. I won't let another race of beings become like that."
He noticed a tray full of plastic medical bags full of coloured solutions and ran over to them, running his sonic screwdriver over them until he found the right combination.
"Anyone got a bowl?" the Doctor wondered, indicating the bags of solutions.
Within a few moments, the Doctor had emptied each bag into the bowl, mixed the solutions and took a needle from a nearby tray. He inserted a small amount of the antidote into the needle and injected it into the little girl. She screamed in pain for a few moments before her skin turned back into the pale beige of a human.
"Oh, fantastic!" the Doctor cried, glancing at the Mayor with a grin.
The patients had all been injected with the antidote within the hour and the Doctor stood outside the TARDIS with a sad look on his face.
"I'm sorry about your friend." the mother of the child said, placing a hand on his shoulder.
"I don't know where to start with finding her though. That's the problem." the Doctor said, before his sonic screwdriver began to bleep wildly. There was a trace of Rose, he realised and entered the TARDIS, shutting the door.
The TARDIS dematerialised afterwards.
As the TARDIS flew down the Time Vortex, the Doctor studied the co-ordinates on the TARDIS monitor. They were for Earth, sometime during the 1970s.
Fantastic.
TO BE CONTINUED...