Here's where I personally consider the story to actually start. Feedback is appreciated, but a smile is good enough for me. You may notice that this story parodies various shows and the like - if you did, good, it means I'm not messing up yet.

I

When her world lit up again, she was almost blinded. It felt like she had been trapped in the darkness for days, with only two soft sets of breathing and the infinite pain caused by Zer0's elbow to let her know that she was still alive, and hadn't died many hours prior. The searingly bright light forced her to shield her eyes and she sacrificed her pride for her retinas, cowering from the sun like Batman until she was inevitably forced out of the Phone Booth by the Assassin that was on the far (read as furthest from the door and not actually far) side of the little box.

Maya let out a groan of surprise as her legs gave out beneath her, the once solid concrete foundation of the Crimson Raider's base of operations turned to nothing but sand and bits of rock. The night sky was gone, replaced by a stormy looking dusk that was clouded and yet so insurmountably bright to her poor seeing holes. With no strength left in her body and no food in her stomach she toppled like a tower, dropping into the crunchy sand as rain beat lightly on her back.

She wasn't dead. That was her first thought as she came to her senses moments later and spat out the gritty earth that had seen fit to take up residence within her mouth. She could still taste puke and Rak Ale and was getting the feeling that it was a combination that would never quite leave her mouth as she rolled over to find Zer0 examining his precious Phone Booth. Now that she wasn't under threat of immediate death, she could see it was barely holding together, with rusted nails sticking out at the edges and the brass lock being the only thing that looked like it had been repaired in the last thirty years.

"Zer0!" she shouted, rolling again and trying to claw her way back onto her feet. The sand beneath her shoes churned under her flailing legs and made it hard to regain her footing, but she had nothing else in her mind but to charge the insane Assassin as she lunged for his turned back, tattoos blazing with confused energy that had no true direction. "Start making sense before I melt your fucking brain!"

Zer0 must not have been expecting the attack, and he had only begun to turn with his sword half-drawn before she was upon him – a flailing ball of arms and rage that beat against him with unmatched fury and determination and directionless hormones. The human body was a volatile thing, and when forced into a fight-or-flight scenario – which may or may not be what the world's destruction as one knows it is classified as – it boiled down to a choice that the Siren was making posthaste. His back thumped against the door of the Phone Booth and the glass that didn't actually appear on the inside rattled in its frame while a red exclamation mark appeared on his helmet.

"Siren – calm yourself!"

"Calm?! You want me to be calm?!" she screamed as he tried to break free. He was bigger than her, but blue and purple and pink lights swirled around them and pinned him to the wooden door like chains, restraining him and keeping him in place neatly like the kinky handcuffs that could be found under Moxxi's bar. "The world was just about to explode, and now we're- we're-" she stuttered and she hated it as she looked around, noting the wooden dock and seemingly abandoned structure further down the beach. "We're in who the hell knows where! I- I- I can't be calm I'm fucking losing it, Zer0! What the hell is-"

"Siren you must calm yourself! / Calm yourself Siren-"

"No no no! Shut up-" she shouted, her tattoos beginning to burn marks against Zer0's armor. "Everything is missing! We're on a beach in the middle of nowhere and I just watched the world end before being dragged into a fucking Police Box and now we're on a beach in the middle of fucking nowhere!" Her voice was shrill and her eyes were wide with primitive panic as she stared into the unfeeling depths of his visor. "I saw you dead! There was a dead you and he was dead! I think you killed him – you killed you, Zer0, and the world ended and what the fuck?!" He tried to say something, but she released one of his arms and brought a finger up to where she guessed his mouth might have been. It was flowing with deadly energy, and she was on the verge of blowing his head off. "Shut up for a minute, Zer0!" she yelled, "Shut up or I swear to god, I'll-"

For the second time in the past ten minutes, she was shocked into silence as Zer0 slashed swiftly at her face, his leathery palm snapping across her cheek as if he had lots of practice with slapping people that were having mental breakdowns. She stared at his helmet wordlessly in the resulting echo, and after a couple seconds he for no apparent reason brought the hand back around and her head whipped in the other direction with another crack.

She let go of him, still gasping for air and never able to get enough as she stumbled away numbly. She could probably kill him, but there wouldn't be a point – the world had just ended and now they were dead. She must have been in hell, because she couldn't swim and Zer0 was here with her. She was dead and now they were both in hell – maybe she could find Sal if she looked hard enough. The sky was darkened and now her eyes were adjusting; above she could see lightning tearing through the clouds as the light on the horizon waited at a safe distance, further than the rolling thunder would ever travel.

The unknown structure in the distance looked to be made out of rusted tin and chains, and she could now also see that there were docks on either side of it – wooden docks made out of real wood, and not piles of scrap salvaged from the junk of Pandora. The air was crisp – not smoggy like it usually was, like she had become used to.

"You fried it, Siren," Zer0 said from behind her, evidently having returned to his Phone Booth. "Phone Booth – not a Police Box. / 'Least we got away."

"Zer0, I'm freaking out," she said softly, her weak legs returning. This was a lot to take in, and now she was wondering if she was having a nightmare or if she had been slipped drugs – it couldn't be real, could it? "I'm gonna go find a rock to bash my head against. If I die in the dream, I'll wake up in real life again. That's how dreams work."

She knew that was pretty much a science in itself. Dying in a dream or nightmare was usually the last thing you remembered about said dream or nightmare, and thus cause dictated that dying must be a trigger to wake oneself from said nightmare. She was like, fifty percent sure that was how it worked, but Zer0 seemed to beg to differ as he ran after her stumbling self, catching her by the arm a bit more gently than before.

When he spun her around, he was as unreadable as ever, but his tense and rigid posture had vanished now, and he took her hand and shoved something warm and pulsing into her grip before closing it again.

Almost immediately, she felt her mind clearing and her strength began to return as he held her in place by the hand, his tight hold keeping her own fingers clasped around whatever he had forced into her her possession. Her breathing steadied and she felt a bit better as a chevron/number three formed heart lit up on the face of his visor, likely as some sort of comforting gesture.

"I did not save you / So that you could kill yourself," he told her as he released her hand once he apparently deemed it fit to do so. When she opened her hand up, she found a tiny cylinder of dark purple sitting in her palm like it was meant to be there, now cool and still and silent. It was drained Eridium – she'd seen it before after Lilith used it, but never indulged in what Zed claimed to be an unhealthy behaviour herself. It was small – she supposed it wouldn't hurt. "We have much to do."

Five minutes later she found herself sitting on one of the smaller rocks that dotted the shore, the smooth stone seating her bottom quite comfortably in comparison to the tight confines of the Phone Booth that was certainly not a Police Box. The light of said Phone Booth, she could now see, was dead and shattered with fragments of glass jutting out of the socket. Zer0 himself was searching through the inside of what seemed to be a different entrance to the box, and though she could not see into it he threw out various items she had never encountered in her time in the darkness.

"He, I, came to me," Zer0 said as he tossed what appeared to be a chunk of a Vault Key over his shoulder and into the sand, where it was joined by a box of hair clips, half of a rusty pipe, the barrel of a Sabre turret and the bloodied blade of a buzz axe. She listened to him attentively, her mind now clear as water while she did her best to ignore the familiar items that were beginning to pile up on the beach. "A number from the future / in a Police Box."

"I thought you said it was a Phone Bo-"

"He had a warning," he continued without pause, ignoring her attempt at interrupting his story as he pulled out a box of lightbulbs. He stepped back and slammed the alternate door shut, dragging the Vault Key piece over and using it as a stepping stool to reach the top of the Phone Booth. "He perfected my research / Leapt through time and space." Zer0 began unscrewing the damaged light bulb with one hand as he brought out a new one with his other. "I killed him, Siren. / Stabbed him in the fucking face. / Got his STD."

Maya flinched like she had been slapped again, her swinging feet grinding to a halt while she watched the Assassin litter without any care for the environment as he tossed the old broken bulb into the sand. "You got his STD," she repeated, staring blankly. "I thought you stabbed him in the- oh god, what did you stab him with exactly, Zer0?"

"With my sword, Siren," he said, causing her to cringe while the Vault Key piece broke in two under his foot. She couldn't tell if it was real or fake, but the sight of such a beautiful relic being destroyed made her do a double cringe. It was almost as bad as what the madman in front of her was saying. "Took his Space Time Distorter. / I shared it with you."

"Oh god stop talking."

"It's our STD / it belongs to both of us. / Sharing is caring."

"Space Time Distorter," she suddenly realized, her warm cheeks cooling in an instant as she realized what he was actually trying to tell her. She supposed it was harder to deliver messages when you were limited to seventeen syllables – like a more convoluted Twitter post or something. She sat up straight, staring at him as he kicked the Vault Key chunk away. "That's the Police Box's name?"

"It is a Phone Booth," Zer0 told her simply, causing her to sigh. He gracelessly dumped the remaining light bulbs from his box back into the STD and closed it up again, leaning against it. She wasn't sure if he was just messing with her now or if he was dead serious, but she didn't think she was comfortable with the fact that she had been inside of an STD. "And yes – Space Time Distorter. / Live under a rock?"

"You're telling me we…" Maya frowned, biting her lip as she was wont to do in stressful situations. She was by no means a dumb person – maybe a bit naive due to being raised in isolation, but certainly a smart woman all around – and now with the necessary information provided the pieces were all falling into place right before her very eyes. The world had been ending and now it wasn't, and now they were somewhere else entirely due to a Phone Booth delivered by a different Zer0 from the future itself. "You're telling me we, what, traveled through time and space?"

"No I'm not, Siren / I'm saying we're in hell now / We died, went to hell." His words oozed with sarcasm that made her look down at her feet – he sounded like he was disappointed or something similar, and it was somewhat discouraging. "Psyche. There is no hell. / We traveled through space and time, / Eridian Tech."

"That's cool," she said with nothing else to really say about such a declaration. She couldn't really call bullshit after what she had just seen – and reality was relative even if she was dreaming. It was complicated, but she knew that if she was dreaming then it was probably just as real as Pandora, which in turn is the nightmare of literally everyone off of Pandora and at least half of the people that lived on Pandora. "So you needed me to power it and now we're… somewhere. Right?"

"Smart girl. Yes, that's right," Zer0 said, causing her to smile a bit. He was much easier to talk to when he wasn't being a sarcastic prick, she noticed as she circled the STD and opened the side they had come out of. With light and a clearer mind, she could now see that the inside was filled with exposed wires and computers – and no, she agreed, it was not bigger on the inside after all. He climbed inside and began fiddling with one of the still smouldering cords, and she found herself wondering how he knew what he was doing if it wasn't his STD. "You're too powerful, Siren / Fried our STD."

"Please stop calling it our STD," she requested tiredly. "It's upsetting."

"Life is upsetting / But we all shoulder burdens. / Deal with it, Siren," he said as one of the circuit boards that the cable he was trying to extinguish made a crackling sound, and he was sprayed with a shower of brilliant yellow sparks. "We need some new parts," he said as he tried to extinguish himself now, patting at his smouldering leather armor. "My STI is damaged. / It's no good, Siren."

"We need a new STI? Are you fucking serious?" she asked, feeling even more disconcerted than ever before. She hadn't felt this disturbed since Krieg had worn that one Bandit's spine like a necklace – with the brain still attached to the Axis like a pendant. That had been quite the morning – she still remembered the screaming. "I don't think I'm qualified-"

"No no no no no," Zer0 cut her off quickly and concisely, waving his hands at her as a new patch of flames erupted on his back. Even as he tried to beat them out he continued to explain: "A new Space Time Interface. / Please try to keep up."

"Sorry." She wasn't sorry, but she was realizing now that everything would go faster and she could probably get home all the quicker if she just went along with what he was saying. Half of what he was talking about didn't make much sense to her – STIs and STDs and how they were different from STIs and STDs – but if she pretended she knew what he was saying he probably wouldn't stop to try and explain the semantics of it. She didn't care, so it worked out as it saved them both time, it saved him breath, and it saved her hassle and headache. "Where do we get one then, Zer0? What do we do to save the world when we get one?"

"It's very simple."

She didn't believe him.