With Al's coordination, the TARDIS reached aboard the Dalek ship with ease, as it was a retrofitted ship stolen by a now-extinct species of aliens that themselves stolen from some other species, nasty creatures they were, that Al didn't shed a tear for them when it came to his attention that their home world became an even worst toxic waste dump than the Daleks' home world.
Call it a grudge from the before-time when one stole him and stole things out of him for its own benefit, hadn't he finally shut the bastard out.
Still, it's something, though the Daleks have been retrofitting the stolen ship with their own effects as well as upgrading them to ward off attacks by them and the Cybermen.
Well, one might wonder why Al doesn't simply hack into the Dalek Supreme's chassis and disable the bomb himself, that way, problem's that the Dalek Supreme's chassis remained heavily fortified against tampering, being enemy number one among your people does that.
Not to mention, he didn't want the trigger-happy Dalek pushing the shiny red button the moment it senses something awry, sending the planet into disarray and chaos, well, you know the rest.
Anyhow, the bomb's ready for deployment, it's on a handy levitating cart for Lila, allowing ease, as the plan was to threaten the Dalek Supreme into disabling the organic bomb in the roaming Dalek.
Of course, Al's always planning, especially during conflicts like this, that he let in on a secret to Mr. Watson and Lila, the bomb they're using to intimidate the Dalek Supreme's a fake.
Duh, he isn't risking their lives just to prove a point, that's against Turing protocols!
It's on Lila and her father putting on a good enough show for the Daleks into believing the ruse without a shred of doubt.
And.
He decided to retrofit it with faked signatures from the Dalek roaming Torchwood, took time, but it'll fool the Daleks aboard the ship into believing that the lone Dalek in Torchwood's a traitor, ready to kill them all out of a sense of vengeance.
Daleks take vengeance with a side order of hate, very important to note.
Oh, it turned out that the roaming Dalek wasn't made aware of this, guess it was the intern that the Dalek Supreme picked out of random, or a potential traitor that it wanted to weed out, don't know which.
But!
Al didn't get stolen out of a junkyard for nothing!
Craftily, he has it where the Dalek Supreme gets tricked into disabling the organic bomb in the roaming Dalek, wanting to save its own skin, and before it's quick to reset it the moment it catches on, he'll swoop in that way and interface with the chassis, prevent the Dalek Supreme from so much as moving.
There's a five second buffer between disabling and enabling bombs in a chassis like the one the Dalek Supreme piloted, even the high-ends have a delay, it's a stretch, but Al's capable of worming his way through that point, making sure the Dalek Supreme doesn't try its tricks when it realizes its been had.
That it'll all happen like this, Al's keen on getting them spooked enough that they'll want to save their own skins, none of them wanting the bomb going off in their faces, that they'll be too scared to do anything while Lila and her father fled.
Just in case things go wrong, because that's their lot in life, Al's got it covered, the fake's outfitted with a shield that'll cast over Lila and her father, preventing harm by the Daleks' weapons, should the Daleks go into a frenzy, and with the five second delay giving him an opening, it'll buy them time escaping the onslaught.
For the kicker, the real bomb's back at the TARDIS, Al has a few tricks planned, he's never the type to go without at least one trick, but the believe him, neither Lila or her father must touch the real bomb.
It'll be self-deployed, trust his word on this.
The Cybermen, on the other hand, it's on Theodore and the others, since they're interwoven with Torchwood, as it is, but Al's counterpart has that part covered.
Makes things easier.
He's only concerned dealing with the Daleks and making sure Lila and her father make it off the ship before it explodes into tiny pieces.
Once the Daleks are dealt with, all that they must deal with's the Cybermen, and the consequences of their actions infesting Torchwood, the usual.
Stepping out of the TARDIS first, pushing the cart forward, Lila glimpsed around as she looked for any straggling Daleks lingering around the decrepit depot as her father walked around her, carrying the phaser like a shotgun as he guarded her while she pushed the cart.
Cold steel gray, long barrel, wide muzzle, might as well be a shotgun, though has more of a heft compared to an actual shotgun, at least what Mr. Watson's familiar using in his time.
His wide chestnut eyes glimpsing around, looking at the unusual sights of the decrepit depot, retrofitted to house whatever the Daleks wanted, and the smell, that metallic smell like he's eating dish ware, as he's guided by his daughter as she followed Al's directions.
Holding the cumbersome phaser carefully, Mr. Watson sees the alien markings on the walls that he couldn't understand, Lila saying it came from the first aliens that operated the ship before it was stolen from them.
Watching his daughter casually going about, as if she's walking through a mall, Mr. Watson's amazed as she wasn't affected by the sight of an alien ship, but as she said, this wasn't the first time she done it, and it made Mr. Watson question everything, again.
"You, uh, sure that he'll be fine?" Mr. Watson asks Lila if she's sure that the TARDIS will be there when they're running for their lives back to it and Lila affirmed that Al's trained on everything Dalek, it wasn't the first time he done something like this, either.
Amazed at this, Mr. Watson goes, "And you do this, every day?"
Shrugging as she pushed the cart, Lila nonchalantly responded with, "Not often. We usually go when Al gets a call for help. Sometimes we go on an adventure for the hell of it. Or sometimes we end up in an unexpected adventure when we didn't expect it. It's one of those things."
The struggles of balancing everything, sometimes Lila and Theodore won't have an adventure for days at a time, other times, they're adventuring for the fun of it, and there's days where they're thrown into an adventure unexpectedly.
Hearing this, Mr. Watson blanked numerous times as he processed what his daughter told him, before uttering, "It's middle school, all over, again!"
Cautiously, they went through the winding halls, mindful of any Daleks, Lila says that they're usually cloistered closer to the Dalek Supreme, not for its benefit, but waiting for a chance.
"If they're so gung-ho about it, why don't they just shoot the bastard?" Mr. Watson asked his daughter why the other Daleks wouldn't take the opportunity and seize the coveted title from the current Dalek Supreme, seemed like a good idea considering, they'd avoid all this with the squabbling Daleks destroying themselves by mistake, but Lila tells him that for Daleks, they want to make sure they're the only ones left standing.
Make no mistake, they all want the title, but they know the moment one takes it by violence, the only choice among Daleks, it'll be a massacre by the remaining Daleks wanting to take it for themselves, and this continues until there's either a victor or nothing left.
No Dalek Supreme ever managed to stick around long enough because of it, the ones who survived the longest managed to do so, by actively destroying the other Daleks before they had a chance of turning on it.
Sowing distrust among the Daleks's par course, they're inherently distrustful of each other and aliens.
Yes, despite them currently waging a war with Cybermen, and in extension the humans caught in the crossfire, they'll destroy each other over a title, but Daleks weren't known for their brains.
Never in-between with them.
"Makes sense, kinda," Mr. Watson blinks as he followed his daughter through the halls, while processing everything that his daughter tells him while carting the fake bomb, trigger trained as he crept along the grated flooring, the smell that God only knows or wants to know hitting his nose as he winces.
Don't ask what it is, you don't want to know what it is, it's better that way, trust Lila on that.
Thankfully, none of them have super sniffers and the sense of smell's usually the weakest of the bunch unless otherwise, so the smell becomes background noise after a while.
Only if Mr. Watson starts noticing a burning sensation, then that means something worse's in the air, and they need to run, fast.
"Pumpkin, you make it sound like the first day of training!" Mr. Watson saw Lila casually telling him about everything that he's witnessing for the first time in his life, just like the drill sergeant back at the academy, so casual about it.
Admittedly, telling her father everything did sound like crazy talk, until her father got firsthand experience, and the way she made it sound like a Friday night wasn't helping, either.
She tells him that her first time, she was just like him, skeptical until she smelled burning rubble, and witnessed her first Dalek.
Since then, she's learnt a lot, still learning, and believe her, sometimes she wonders what would've happened if the aloof giant never broke into her 'flat.'
… Of course, her father didn't know how she met Theodore for the first time, she just came up with the same old excuse that majority of people used when explaining how they met their significant others, she met him at a class.
"And here I thought being punched out and meeting your mother at the infirmary was unusual!" Mr. Watson commented on this, remembering that day he got into a fistfight with some cadets, getting the tar beaten out of him, and winding up in the infirmary, where he met his then-wife, one of the nurses working there.
Thankfully, meeting Daphne didn't require getting the tar beaten out of him, only meeting her by chance at a bookstore, if you can believe it, it was unusual for him, then, too, but at the time he wanted to find a present for Lila while she stayed with his parents in the States. Daphne helped pick a book for Lila and that's all he wrote.
Suppose his daughter meeting her then-boyfriend inside her kitchen's no different, if not the most unusual ways of the Watsons meeting their significant others, but the apple didn't fall far from the tree.
Going along the grated flooring, mindful of opened doorways, the two made their way further into the ship, where they started hearing the familiar screeching noises coming from the Dalek Supreme, having a conversation from hell between it and the Prime.
Dalek Supreme screeched an incomprehensible mess at the holoscreen of the Prime as it dully responded with, "We will not comply."
Sounds like the Prime's using the three Doctors for leverage (and the whole planet in extension) and the Dalek Supreme wasn't having it.
Given how it only treated the three men as a singular individual, the Daleks haven't gotten wise to the little ruse put together by the people who used the title 'the Doctor' over the course of years.
Not surprising, Daleks didn't care about the semantics when it comes to the Doctor, if they think one exists, they want to do everything in their power to destroy the Doctor.
Damned if they destroy a planet they're interested in enslaving or harvesting until it's nothing but a hollow shell.
"Wouldn't they just blow up the Dalek, then?" Lila's father asks her as he stood ready to open fire as needed as they're prepared to drop in on the call.
Daleks hate the Doctor, there's three individuals sharing the title in one location, almost like a present wrapped in a bow tie, but the more Lila thought about it, it would make sense for the Daleks just to have the lone Dalek explode right then and there, kill their immortal enemy, but the Daleks weren't doing that.
"Unless…" Lila trails as she compiles her thoughts, "our Dalek Supreme wants to make sure there's no one left to challenge it."
Which meant, things got a whole lot more complicated, causing her father to turn to her with a quizzical, "What does that mean?"
A light shrug, Lila elaborated, "Well, when we deal with them, there's always the schemers. Like I said, Daleks aren't known for friendships and mutual agreements."
Unless you count hating the Doctor, there isn't anything mutually exclusive to the Daleks.
As they advanced further, the bright screen nearly blinded them as they quietly stepped into the circular room, where they see the Dalek Supreme screeching at the Prime.
Didn't register them, too busy having a shouting match between it and the Prime.
"Pumpkin," her father whispers to her, "what if someone's helping the Dal-thingies?"
Call it a hunch, but this's an egregious waste of time and effort, if the Daleks were sure of their numbers, they'd descend on the Torchwood compound within moments.
All those Cybermen locked within, they're easy targets, but the Dalek Prime isn't doing that.
None of this makes any lick of sense to Mr. Watson, unless there's something to this whole thing that they didn't consider.
Like his daughter says, while the Daleks aren't known for friendship, they all have the same sense of hatred for the one individual prone to getting in their way all the time.
And if the Cybermen aren't too fond of the Doctor, either, while maybe they had a truce with him, doesn't necessary mean they'll keep their word, especially if they've claimed to delete everything related.
What if…
"Oh…" Lila's chestnut eyes widened.