4. In the fire.
Chloe finds herself in clear view of the current Watchful Dalek in the strong room. There's nowhere to hide near where she is. She moves to activate her return journey on her wristwatch, but the reaction time of the Watchful Dalek is quicker, and Chloe falls to the floor, mortally wounded. This is the disaster that Gallifrey would have cautioned against. Chloe feels the floor rush up and hit her, her uncushioned fall adds the indignity of a bruise on her head... Why am I still thinking? she asks herself. The pain of the Dalek shot hitting her was severe enough, surely. She had seen many people die at the shot of a Dalek and this one is no different. She forgets about her regenerative capability.
Chloe's vision becomes blurred and yellow as her regeneration starts to kick in. It isn't a complete regeneration - changing every cell in her body, more of a partial or restorative regeneration.
The Watchful Dalek drags her body away, out of the strong room. Chloe finds she must play dead and try to avoid some of the worse bumps along the way.
Then Chloe hears a scream. She recognises that voice anywhere. What's Alyssa doing here?
The Dalek dragging her stops and turns. Should she shout a warning and gain another Dalek shot to have to regenerate from?
Chloe staggers to her feet behind the Watchful Dalek. She has no strategy and no idea how to properly defeat the Dalek.
"What are you doing here?" the Watchful Dalek asks Alyssa tersely. "How did you get in?"
An Intruder Alert alarm is already sounding, but the Dalek wastes no time raising yet another one.
Chloe recalls a recent idea someone had for disabling a Dalek and notices a fire blanket on the wall. She grabs it and throws it over the Dalek and pulls a cord tight, preventing the Dalek from firing at Alyssa. She runs towards Alyssa and stops in her tracks.
Now it's Chloe's turn to scream.
Alyssa steps cautiously towards Chloe, but Chloe backs off.
"What's wrong?" Alyssa asks.
Chloe points at Alyssa; at her forehead.
"You're a Dalek mutant!" .
"No, I'm not!" Alyssa pulls the fake Dalek eye off her forehead and pockets it. . "It's not real. I had to fool a lot of Dalek mutants to get here!"
This takes a while to sink in for Chloe. Meanwhile she backs off while Alyssa walks slowly towards her.
Reaching a wall at her back, Chloe reaches cautiously to touch Alyssa's forehead.
"It's okay," Alyssa chuckles. They haven't touched me. The Doctor gave me that thing, so we'd merge in with them and not be noticed!"
A Dalek arrives to answer a call for help emanating from the now tied up Watchful Dalek to find two human girls. It rapidly fires. It has orders to sort out the situation quickly. Both girls fall to the floor.
As Chloe falls to the floor she thinks Not again!
Alyssa feels the searing pain of the Dalek shot but assumes she will just pick herself up again - she has done before!
"I will become the Watchful Dalek." The Dalek passes by the tied-up Dalek and proceeds on into the strong room to become the new Watchful Dalek, closing the door, removing remaining hope for Chloe to just dash in there and look around.
A few minutes later, both girls have completed their restorative regeneration. They get up. Chloe staggers to the strong room door.
"I've got to get in here," she says.
"Why don't you just use that wristwatch of yours?" Alyssa asks. "It sounds like it's just the job."
Alyssa has been opposed to using Chloe's wristwatch transport for herself, but she can see that her sister might use it here usefully.
Chloe groans but recognises that she now knows a little bit about the layout of the strongroom - she saw it briefly!
"Yes, you're right. I'll use it. This may not be a safe place to wait, just here. You'd better find somewhere else to be."
Choe fully expects Alyssa to avoid using her transport and looks around for somewhere for her to hide.
"I'll be fine," Alyssa prompts. "Those Dalek weapons hurt but they don't kill you!" .
When should Chloe tell her sister she has regeneration without which the Dalek weapons would certainly terminate her life. Now seems far too fraught and dangerous.
Then Alyssa makes a bold assertion of an idea she has. "Why don't we both go in and I'll draw fire while you do whatever you're needing to do?"
For Chloe, this seems incredibly brave. A large sacrifice - to feel that searing pain again, voluntarily, for her sister!
Chloe looks at Alyssa wide-eyed. "Wow! Thank you!" She hugs Alyssa. "That's really special!" A grateful tear rolls silently down her cheek.
Chloe can hear another Dalek rolling towards them somewhere around a corner or two. There's no time to lose.
A shame these special moments are often short.
Chloe thinks of a place behind where the Watchful Dalek had been, standing at a keyboard. She activates her wristwatch transport with Alyssa...
A moment later they're both standing just behind the new Watchful Dalek. The slightest noise would bring defeat again.
Chloe looks more carefully around the room, noting the layout of the equipment and guessing what each object is used for. In particular, she's looking for memory chip storage, or any other sort of backup, but what would a Dalek backup device look like?
Distantly, they can hear alarms still sounding, and they wonder how the Doctor is doing, briefly. Their own predicament draws their attention back again.
Chloe contemplates her best move.
Alyssa looks at her sister. She's never trusted her wristwatch transport, yet here she is in some disputed degree of danger, dependent on it to get out of the place.
She recalls the Doctor's instructions to the mutant Daleks - to touch as many Daleks as possible. She starts to reach out to touch the new Watchful Dalek while Chloe's looking the other way... .
As Alyssa's hand makes contact with the Dalek, her hand feels as if it's burning, as if she just placed her hand on something very hot! She tries to pull it away, but it won't.
Chloe hears her sister's breathing change from quiet and steady to sudden and gasping. She turns to see her sister struggling to pull her hand away from the Dalek.
The Dalek shrieks in anger and begins to turn to face them. Alyssa's hand comes free of the Dalek. Chloe makes a grab for her sister, thinks of home and activates her wristwatch transport.
The Dalek fires, catching Alyssa as they depart...
Catching Alyssa, Chloe lays her down carefully on the settee in their lounge to recover.
Devyon pops in. "Been busy? Cuppa?" He has no idea what they've just been through! .
"No, Dad," Chloe says as calmly as she can muster. Her mind is a whirl of possible ideas, any of which might be alright, or might be disastrous.
Chloe now knows the equipment layout in the Dalek strong room. She also knows that the Doctor will know the right equipment to use to destroy the strong room and its contents. And she knows just the time when they might return to with such equipment.
All this can wait. They have time machines.
The thing that's most bothering her at the moment is rescuing the Doctor. How can she get to him?
The mystery of why Alyssa was on Skaro also bothers her. She watches the steady rise and fall of Alyssa's chest for a few minutes, glad she's still alive. The yellow glow of her regeneration has come and gone; she must be fully regenerated now. Just resting. Looking for the wounds from the Dalek shots yields nothing. There's now no sign of any damage. She's relieved. She looks at her own wounds, where she was shot by the Daleks. The entry points had hurt badly at the time, but no damage remains after regeneration, only memories.
She reaches for her communications device the Doctor had given her. How could she use this to reach the Doctor? She daren't use it in case he's mid battle.
Alyssa stirs.
"What were you doing on Skaro?" Chloe asks gently as Alyssa opens her eyes and looks at her. Chloe wants the full story.
"What were you doing on Skaro?" Alyssa asks, puzzled, too. The Doctor hadn't told her that Chloe would be on Skaro, too. It all seemed highly improbable.
"I'm on a mission to destroy the Dalek project information that led to them having the power to end the Universe. How about you?"
"Wow!" Alyssa marvels briefly. "What a mission!"
Chloe shrugs. "It's a bit tricky, but I've only made a small progression. But why were you there?"
"I was asleep in the Doctor's Tardis and when I woke I went to the Control room where the Doctor told me about Skaro. His Tardis had taken him there to an island. We had to join a group of mutant Daleks, so we wore those mock Dalek eyepieces. Sorry, I alarmed you! We travelled in a boat to the mainland and the Doctor told everyone that to win against the Daleks we had to touch as many of them as we could. That's what I did just before you brought us back here."
"That was brave, Alyssa. That Dalek was furious, wasn't it?"
"I wonder what the touch does to them?"
"They meld with your DNA, so that Dalek will emerge as an impure Dalek. The pure Daleks will shun it and banish it or terminate it."
"No wonder it was furious! Transformed from being their treasured pure Dalek to being an abhorred impurity in a moment! It lost its prized purity."
"Purity is always to be prized and kept safe, anywhere," Chloe says.
"Will I mutate?" Alyssa asks in a moment of horror as she recognises that if the Dalek might mutate, then will she?
"No! I can totally assure you of that. The Doctor told me all about the Dalek mutations. It's one of their weaknesses. But only an already mutated Dalek can affect you."
Chloe has a burning question now.
"Alyssa, I need to know where the Doctor is."
"He's on Skaro, but after he briefed the mutant Daleks I lost him. Then I saw you!"
"I need to talk to him."
"Could you track him with your Tardis?"
"Good idea. Are you coming?"
"Yes!"
Chloe holds Alyssa's hand, thinks of her Tardis and activates her wristwatch transport... It seems Alyssa has totally changed her mind about using it!
Chloe dashes to her Tardis Console and presses the Voice Control button. It doesn't seem appropriate to exclude Alyssa from knowing how to operate her Tardis now - she's grown up a lot recently!
"Tardis, can you show me where the Doctor is?"
A little more thought just then and she might have chosen to intercept the Doctor just after the mutant Dalek briefing!
Once she's seen what's happened, she can't change it. It becomes another "fixed point" in history!
An image of the Doctor appears on the monitor screen.
"What is your plan?"
A Dalek is interrogating the Doctor. He's detained in a Dalek detention area in something a bit like ancient stocks - his hands are shackled.
The Doctor smiles and replies, "I'm certainly not going to tell you!"
"We killed two of your associates!"
The Daleks show images of Chloe and Alyssa lying on the floor where they fell.
The colour drains from the Doctor's face. He's horrified.
"Both of them?"
Chloe notes where the room is and where the Dalek is looking.
"Shall we appear behind the Dalek briefly?" she asks Alyssa playfully.
"What good will it do?"
"It'll encourage the Doctor."
Alyssa reaches out her hand for Chloe to hold in an affirmative response.
Chloe activates her wristwatch transport...
The Doctor's very relieved to see Chloe and Alyssa, but in an instant the Dalek knows they're there. It only has to look at the Doctor's face!
Chloe quickly thinks of home and activates her transport again.
"Your friends seem to be able to come and go as they please?!"
"Hologram, probably," the Doctor claims quickly.
"We found our Tardis repelling equipment switched off. We switched it on. They can't come and get you now!"
Chloe and Alyssa watch on the Tardis monitor screen to see the Doctor further questioned about his plan.
"We can't go there in a Tardis and enclose him, but we can use my wristwatch transport," Chloe says. "But when we go, we must be able to free the Doctor to bring him back."
"How can we do that?"
"I don't know yet. There'll be at least one Dalek watching him at all times now!"
"They've won, then," Alyssa groans.
Chloe still has lots of possibilities in her mind, but which one would be more likely to yield success?
What can they do?
