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Parallel Worlds.
Dalek invasion of Earth.
"Who are you, then?" Rose demanded while the Doctor stood behind her, hoping that Rose was merely reacting like this because she was out of her depth more than just being rude. Usually, he wouldn't say anything about it, reasoning that humans could sort out their own issues. This was not one of those times. Right now, the Doctor wanted answers about what was going on, and since these were the
One of the biggest problems the Doctor had with Jackie and Rose was how the pair of them reacted before getting the full story, and this was a fine example, with another being how Jackie had turned the entire neighbourhood against Mickey when the Doctor had taken Rose with him back in his predecessor's time. In the meantime, he looked over the small group in front of him. A tall dark-haired man wearing casual clothes which looked battered as if he hadn't had the opportunity to change them in a while - in fact, all of them seemed to be in the same position, a petite dark-haired woman with dark eyes which reminded him uncomfortably of Molly before he pushed that aside, a tall black man with a moustache, and a portly man with a beard and moustache with a keen gaze which hinted an exceptional intellect.
"Whoa, there, blondie," the black man tried to say in a cheerful tone which the Doctor noted was American. "We're just as surprised to see you as you are us."
"Yes, indeed, young lady," the portly man said in a gruff voice while his eyes narrowed at Rose in a pointed manner to stop even the slightest hint of an argument, "We watched your…box," the man paused as he studied the exterior of the TARDIS and rubbing his beard in a thoughtful manner as he clearly tried to work out how it was possible in the first place, "appear shortly after our arrival in this world. Perhaps you could tell us how you came to be here, and if you even know what has happened to this Earth?
World? What in the name of Omega does that even mean? The Doctor asked himself, And what's that about 'this Earth?
"We don't know anything; why don't you tell us who you lot are?" Rose asked belligerently.
The young woman of the group snapped back, also with an American accent - it was hard for him to be one hundred percent certain, but the Doctor hadn't really visited America much during his travels. "Hey, hold it," she said, holding out her hands, "
"Rose," the Doctor interrupted, deciding to step in at last after realising he couldn't get any answers to any of his questions while Rose was like this. In any case, he was curious about what they meant by Earths. "That's enough. I'm sorry about that; we've just had a difficult time recently. I'm the Doctor by the way, and this is Rose," the Doctor introduced Rose while smiling at the small group even though he couldn't keep his curiosity to himself. "What's happening here?"
"Y'mean y'don't know?" The black man asked, looking at the Doctor with pointed scepticism.
"I'm afraid not. We arrived here under…unusual circumstances," the Doctor stumbled across the explanation; until he knew more about these people, and what was happening now, he was going to keep all knowledge of the TARDIS's abilities and what they'd recently gone through with the Cybermen a secret. "So what is happening? Do you know?"
The tall dark-haired man sighed. "I think we should tell them, guys," he said, gazing at his friends.
"Quinn-." The young woman began in a warning tone, but the others spoke over her before she could just utter the young man's name; the Doctor idly noted the young man and young woman were close in physical age, but he had never been too sure about human ages given the wide variety of ages a Time Lord could have in any one incarnation.
"Mr Mallory, is that wise?" The portly man demanded.
"Man, it's never a good idea; remember what happened with the Q? Or when you were nearly locked up?" The black man argued.
"Oh come on, think about it, guys; we're out of our depth. We're in London instead of San Francisco, and we're 9 years in the future; we might be jumping between worlds, but the time and space of where we end up have been the same throughout. We have arrived in a San Francisco, not the San Francisco. Until now. Besides, we saw these two arrive in their blue box," Quinn argued back, waving at the TARDIS while showing his clear inability to understand how the ship had arrived in the first place, "they might have technology like the Timer."
"You don't know that for sure-!" The young woman argued back.
"Anyway," the Doctor raised his voice while wondering at the same time casting his eyes about the ruined streets while not even bothering to hide his horror at the sight while he wondered what else had happened to the rest of Earth, but he suspected this scene was not unique. The sight of the Number 22 to Putney brought back conflicted memories for him; Iris Wildthyme had always been weird, even by the Doctor's standards, but he hadn't laid eyes on her for centuries, not since that Dogworld business back in his eighth incarnation, but he hadn't seen her since.
The sight of the red double-decker bus which was the general shape of that ramshackle TARDIS or time machine of hers - the Doctor had never been sure if her ship was even a TARDIS at all - brought back memories for the Doctor.
Realising he had been silent for a long time while he reminisced about Iris a bit too much, the Doctor turned back to the conversation. "What do you know about what's happened here, and what do you mean about what you said before about San Francisco? Are you time travellers?"
"Time travel?" Quinn was stunned. "You mean… it's possible?"
"Of course it's possible. This," the Doctor gestured at the TARDIS; he didn't plan on letting them inside unless he was positively sure it was safe to do it. Their arrival seemed too convenient in his mind, "is a time machine."
"C'mon, man," Rembrandt chuckled although there was more uncertainty in his voice rather than derision. "That's a box."
Why was it every time they travelled somewhere and revealed what the TARDIS was people were all too quick to dismiss the outer shell rather than realise alien technology didn't need to obey the limiting laws of other technologies? "Take my word for it, it's a time machine. How did you get here? What were you talking about worlds?"
The young woman sighed when she realised they were at an impasse of information. "A couple of years ago, Quinn invented a device he believed would create antigravity, but instead it opened up to parallel universes."
"It sucked me in, too," Rembrandt interrupted, sending a biting look towards Quinn; clearly the other man had stumbled across the Timer and he hadn't forgiven Quinn even if it was an unintentional and careless accident.
"I have said sorry a hundred times already; how many more times?" Quinn snapped back in exasperation.
The Doctor narrowed his eyes thoughtfully, wondering if he was feeling a touch of deja vu right now.
His mind went back to those far-flung innocent days of his first incarnation when he was travelling with Susan in the TARDIS. When Ian and Barbara both stumbled across the TARDIS while they were trying to learn more about Susan, the Doctor had simply panicked and taken off with the two schoolteachers onboard.
But in these people's case, Rembrandt had merely been pulled along for the ride, but the Doctor had no idea how that had happened.
Rose turned to the Doctor when she clearly realised this bunch were going to argue all the time. "And here you said travel to parallel worlds is impossible? Clearly, it's not if they can do it-."
"True parallel worlds, there is a difference," the Doctor interrupted before she could get some stupid idea of using their machine to head back for Mickey or discover some far-flung perfect world where she could replace a Rose or force herself into a world where Pete and Jackie were happily married. It was not going to happen, not if he had his way. "We are travelling through alternate timelines, Rose," the Doctor went on, noticing the others taking note but then he had not taken his eyes off of them since they first met, "true parallels are harder to create than you realise. Most of the choices made when they're created don't matter much, and some of the changed realities merge back into the true reality anyway."
Quinn and the others had been listening to this the entire time, and what they were hearing was throwing them off. It wasn't every day they discovered that what they thought of as true was not true. But before they could debate this subject and matter further - Quinn and the professor definitely wanted to continue questioning the Doctor about the matter on the Timer and about this thing of travelling into alternate timelines.
"Anyway, Quinn and the rest of you - sorry, I don't know your names?" The Doctor asked, looking at the others in the group with Quinn.
The young woman pointed at herself. "Wade Welles."
"Rembrandt Brown, nice to meet ya folks!" Rembrandt grinned, and the Doctor smiled back.
"Professor Maximillian Arturo," the portly man nodded a greeting.
"As I said, I'm the Doctor and this is Rose Tyler."
The Doctor was about to ask the group more questions about their Timer and was about to ask if he could see it when they heard the sound of strange metallic voices, robot voices, coming closer.
Rose's eyes widened and she grabbed the Doctor's arm. "Doctor-?!"
"I heard, Rose, I heard," the Doctor replied, his expression now becoming one of horror.
"What was that?"
"Shh! I need to hear this!" The Doctor hissed urgently when the robotic voices kept speaking. Slowly Quinn and the others went quiet and listened.
"….rebel humans are in this area. We need to find them, quickly!"
"Doctor, they're coming this way!" Rose stepped back and tugged on the Doctor's arm. She was almost like a little girl trying to coerce her father to play with her, Wade thought with amusement although she wondered if she was the same with Quinn.
The Doctor snapped out of it. "We need to get undercover," he looked around decisively before he nodded at the double-decker bus. "That bus."
"Is that a good idea?" Rose asked.
Why was it humans always had to question everything he decided?
"Yes! From the bus, we can have a higher vantage point!" The Doctor ignored Rose and just tugged her towards the bus, and since they didn't have any better ideas, the other followed. As he jumped onto the bus, seeing at once it wasn't Iris's time machine, the Doctor could not hope but think of the irony. For a long time, he had gone out of his way to avoid this type of bus considering how irritating Iris was, but right now he had instantly seen the thing as their salvation. By the time they got to the upper deck of the bus, the aliens appeared. Wade gasped at the sight of the aliens when they appeared.
There were 6 of them, all of them were shaped like pepper pots with some kind of flexible camera lens on top while to the side were separate arms; on the left of the machines were a collection of sucker-like tips attached to a long segmented arm while to the right there was a long thin tube. Wade was willing to bet the thing was a gun, of some kind.
The weirdest thing about the machines was they moved on some kind of ball, but it kept them upright and fully upright. Engineering wasn't Wade's strong point, but she wondered if it was some kind of gyroscope.
"Are those things…Daleks, Doctor?" Rose asked sounding uncertain.
Wade and the others didn't know what Rose was talking about, but the Doctor did. He nodded grimly in confirmation, although there was a moment of uncertainty in his own voice as well.
"They are," the Doctor replied as he nodded.
"But they can't be!"
"This is a different reality, Rose. Not everything we know is the same," the Doctor snapped back in a harsh whisper and Quinn and the others knew under different circumstances the Doctor would be talking in a louder and stronger voice, but with these…Daleks…were so close, the Doctor didn't dare do anything to alert them to their presence.
"What are Daleks?" Quinn demanded.
"They're killers born to hate. Inside those casings is a living bubbling lump of hate, genetically conditioned to believe itself superior and everything else is inferior. Its been placed inside an armoured travel machine to give it incredible power, and it forms an instant bond. In our timeline, the Daleks were once the greatest threat in the universe, but my people fought them in the end in a war across time and space," the Doctor said so fiercely nobody was willing to earn his ire.
"So, er, these Daleks are different from the ones you know?" Rembrandt asked, sparing a quick look with the others. The singer didn't know what surprised him the most, the fact they were in the future on a devastated Earth, or they were in the company of aliens.
"Very," the Doctor took a moment to calm himself down. Getting angry wasn't going to help them right now. "I can only make a few guesses about how these Daleks work, but the design can't be that different. Right now I want to know what they're doing, and I want to see if there's any way we can make contact with the resistance in this world."
"How do we find out what they're doing?"
The Doctor took a moment to think. "Their data-cores. It's like a memory chip. They contain all the information about the Daleks. If we can get to one, we can download it and we can learn what the Daleks are doing on Earth and then we can stop them."
"You've fought these things before, can't we reason with them?"
"No, they're beyond reason. They only want to conquer and destroy everything in the universe which is nothing like them. Now I just need to work out a way of getting to a data core. We don't have any weapons or any way of breaking into their casings," the Doctor replied while he tried to think of a way of dealing with these Daleks.
Suddenly the Doctor had an idea. It was mad and it might not work since he didn't know how advanced these Daleks were compared to the Daleks he was used to dealing with. Slipping his sonic screwdriver out of his pocket, the Doctor pointed it at the Daleks.
Rose saw what he was doing. "What are you doing?" She whispered in horror.
The Doctor ignored her and triggered the screwdriver. To his relief and his surprise, the Daleks levitated and swung around, and glided away in mid-air.
That trick with the sonic screwdriver would not have worked with the advanced alien technology the Daleks of his timeline had put into their shells and he was surprised these Daleks didn't seem as advanced yet.
Had he and Rose appeared in a timeline where the Daleks were only just beginning, and they had not yet encountered really advanced races yet?
When he did think that, the Doctor also wondered if this was this timeline's equivalent of their invasion of Earth? It was interesting in itself, and he wondered to himself where his counterpart was. The Doctor shrugged in dismissal and he decided not to worry out it. He had enough things to worry about back in his own reality. He couldn't worry about everything in the multiverse.
Right now all he wanted to do was come up with a plan to deal with the Daleks. Parallel universes and alternate timelines were hard to deal with at the best of times since they took something, some decision or action, and twisted it out of all recognition, and anything with the Daleks was something the Doctor would have preferred not to handle.
All they needed to do at this point was to find and deal with a Dalek.
That wasn't going to be good.
Author's note - The Dalek's new design is inspired by the Hayakawa Dalek drawn by Michiaki Sato. There are illustrations of them up on Deviant Art.