See? Told you there'd be adventures soon. I'm a man of my word... mostly. I should note right now that I come from a harder sci-fi background (also being a fledgling scientist myself), so my adventures are more likely to have a sci-fi feel to them.
CHAPTER 6. Mistaken Identity: 11 October 2010
Rory settled quickly into TARDIS life. He'd been delighted to discover that the pool room had a wide-screen TV streaming English football from his timezone, meaning that he managed to catch every single match "live". The Doctor pointed out that he was in a time machine and they could just jump forward a year to catch the results. Rory had just looked at him as if he had completely lost his mind.
Amy, meanwhile, was trying her hardest to act normal - normal for her, anyway - but little things continued to remind him that his fiancée was an alien. Her sleeping patterns, for one, were completely screwed up in his view. She'd lie awake for hours, restless, her Time Lord brain buzzing, before mercifully falling asleep. Less than four hours later – often less than three – she'd be up again, buzzing with energy.
Equally annoying was her habit of playing with her sonic phone at every opportunity. She hadn't yet quite worked out what each button or key combination did yet, but she was determined to find out. The results were unpredictable, to put it mildly. He didn't think he'd ever get over the shock of the microwave exploding, the macaroni bake he'd been warming for lunch smeared all over the opposite wall.
He didn't really mind, though. He'd accepted long ago when he'd fallen for such a mad Scottish girl (her words, although he didn't ever repeat them back to her for fear of physical harm) that there would be a few odd idiosyncrasies that he'd have to deal with. Mostly he was just happy that he was there with her, and that she was happy too.
The Doctor had taken them to various romantic jaunts including 19th century Paris and 15th century Venice – although the latter had included a run-in with a group of what had appeared to be vampires. Closer inspection (by means of Amy's boot) had revealed them to be over-sized alien fish people (of course). After the Doctor had disabled their weather-control machine and given them a very stern telling off, they returned to their holiday.
Now, however, Amy was thoroughly bored of Earth for the time being.
"Please, Doctor. It's great that you're giving Rory and I all these treats, but can we please go to a planet now? Otherwise I'll fly to one myself and god knows we're we'll end up."
The Doctor sighed. He knew she wasn't joking – just last week he'd needed to intervene at the very last second after she'd almost piloted them into an erupting volcano.
"Alright, alright. Any suggestions? Preferences?"
"Make it a good one. And no giant exploding crystals, please."
She stood in the open courtyard, staring at the blue-tinged star. She could feel it searing her eyes, just as all her teachers had told her it would all those years ago, but she didn't care. If this really was the End of Days, and the last time she'd see Zvezda, the light of her world, the source of all the life of her planet, she wanted to savour it, burnt retinas or not.
Not like it'll matter in a few days, anyway.
"Madam Secretary? General Gordost is calling for you,"
She sighed. What was the point of this?
Our fleet is destroyed, our factories ruined, and They are only a few days from this solar system. She shook her head, clearing her mind. It didn't matter now. She had a job to do, and she would do it to the bitter end.
She closed her eyes and headed back into the gradiose marble building. Exuding a purposefulness she didn't feel at all inside, she headed towards the Central Office where she knew the General would be waiting for her.
"Secretary Heviniye. Good to see you," General Gordost straightened from the holograms he'd been inspecting as she walked in. He unleashed a military precision salute upon sighting her which she half-heartedly returned.
"Same to you, General. What's the matter? Aside from being days away from total annihilation, that is."
"The latest scout parties have returned, Secretary."
She groaned inwardly. Not this ridiculous nonsense again.
"And what did they find? Something interesting, I hope." She was trying her utmost to keep her voice level instead of dripping with sarcasm.
The General's lip curled. "Actually, this time, yes." He pushed a few buttons on a console, and a three-dimensional hologram filled the room. Heviniye's eyes widened.
"Well, well." she murmured. "It seems you were right after all, General."
Rory's neck was aching, his eyes having been raised skyward for a good twenty minutes now. Unfathomably tall edifices of glittering glass surrounded him, reflecting the dazzling light of the blue star. The tops of each building were fashioned into the most wonderful, complex architectural shapes that were surely beyond the ability of any human engineer of his time, twisting and curving into all kinds of helical, spiral and other mind bending designs.
"Beautiful, aren't they? The stroyeteli are famed for their architects. And their steak and kidney pies, for that matter. Mm, I could do with one of those now..." the Doctor mused, trailing off into a long-winded ramble about the various culinary delights of the city they'd landed in.
"How do they curve the glass like that and get it to stay upright?" Rory wondered after a few minutes, gazing up at a particularly tall skyscraper whose peak reminded him of an unfolded lotus flower.
"Ah well, you see, they use a special kind of tempered glass that so happens to be incredibly strong but very easy to bend. To make it, they melt ordinary glass and at the specific temperature of three thousand, seven hundred and fourteen degrees, add three apples, and freeze at minus twenty, and hey presto-"
"Rhetorical question, Doctor."
"Right. Sorry."
The protestations in Rory's neck finally won out and he leveled his eyes, flexing his neck to try and dull the insistent ache that had lodged itself there.
"Looks busy," he commented, as throngs of black-attired stroyeteli milled about, just as they would in central New York or London. "Must be the end of their lunch break." He glanced at a stroyeteli who was standing at the edge of the sidewalk, presumably waiting for his equivalent of a bus. He, like all the others, had twelve fingers, six on each hand. Otherwise, however, he was completely indistinguishable from an ordinary human.
"Interesting," the Doctor muttered beside him.
"What's interesting?"
"Have a look at them, Rory. Something's not quite right here."
"What d'you mean?"
"See how they walk. They're just walking normally, slowly, without purpose. Surely if this were the end of their lunch break, some of them would be late? And would be rushing to get back to work and not get yelled at by their boss?"
Rory looked closer. He noticed that everyone seemed to be looking down, their eyes devoid of any energy or life. There was something that seemed oddly like resignation in them, as if they knew that what they doing was completely worthless. "Maybe the work here is just really, really dull."
"Maybe."
The pair continued on down the street for another few minutes, the Doctor occasionally pointing a particularly unusual building and going on some technical ramble about its construction that caused Rory's eyes to glaze over. He had just finished expounding about a type of polished concrete that used ripe cherries in its manufacture when he suddenly stopped in his tracks.
"Rory, where'd Amy go?"
"Oh, she went to get her sonic phone. She's obsessed with that thing," Rory replied absent-mindedly.
"Over half an hour ago."
"She's not great at finding stuff, Doctor," he reminded the Time Lord, but the Doctor remained perturbed.
"How far do you think we've walked from the TARDIS?"
Rory paused to contemplate. "Half an hour wandering in the middle of a busy city... I'd say about half a mile?"
"Half a mile..."
Rory sighed. "Doctor, what is it? What's the problem? Can't you use your telepathic stuff to find her?"
The Doctor shook his head. "She's a good telepath, but she hasn't developed that side of it properly yet. I can only sense her psychically if I'm within a mile of her. And right now, I can't."
All colour drained from Rory's face. "Oh, no."
Amy walked stiffly into the imposing marble building, flanked by two twelve-fingered men she guessed were guards of some kind. She'd managed to retrieve her sonic phone from under the kitchen table, rushed out of the TARDIS and found herself in the middle of an armed party (though they hadn't been aiming their guns at her). She'd resisted them briefly, but had relented upon being reminded that, first, they had guns and she didn't, and second, it'd really make their day if she could please, please, please come quietly.
If they were trying to kill me, they wouldn't have said "please" three times, she'd reasoned. Most nasty aliens don't bother with one, let alone two.
"This way, madam." The guard on her left raised his arm, pointing her up an ornate stone staircase.
"Thank you," she replied tersely. They were impeccably polite and surprisingly generous - every time she'd complained about sore feet, they'd stopped to rest until she felt better. They were also kinda cute, twelve fingers notwithstanding, but Amy kept in mind that they were still her captors.
They led her into a darkened room, large holographic projections on either side.
"General. Madam Secretary. She's here."
A gruff-looking man in full decorated military uniform, and a sharp-looking woman with light brown hair tied up in a neat bun turned and faced her.
"Ah. Welcome. I am Secretary Heviniye, Head of the Stroyet Grand Council." The woman spoke in clipped, high tones. "This is General Gordost, Chief of the Stroyet Defence Force."
The man nodded politely.
Big on politeness, this lot, Amy thought wryly. "Pleased to meet you," she said, extending a handshake to both. She decided that it'd be smartest not to tell them anything about herself unless she really had to for obvious reasons. The last thing she wanted was a case of mistaken identity.
"Same to you. You're not exactly what I was expecting, if I may say so," the woman remarked, returning the handshake.
Amy had no idea how to reply to that, so she chose to ignore it and completely change the subject. "The building to the right of the lobby is really cool, to be honest. The one that looks like a flower on top."
Heviniye smiled. "Ah, the United Stroyet Glass headquarters. Chief manufacturers of Stroyet Glass, our greatest export. You know, to make it, we take ordinary window glass, melt it at precisely one thousand degrees of temperature, add three perfectly ordinary apples and then freeze it at zero. Creates glass which is wonderfully easy to work with but incredibly hard to break."
Amy's eyes had completely glazed over. "I... see."
Heviniye blushed, noticing her expression. "Sorry. I forgot myself... stroyeteli are naturally proud architects, and we tend to detail the process behind our greatest achievements at the drop of a hat."
"Don't worry about it," Amy reassured her, suppressing a wry smirk at the thought that she knew someone else with a very similar problem.
"Thanks. Now, to business." Heviniye clapped her hands together and assumed a business-like posture. "They will be here in four days, and when they arrive, our sun – and by extension this world – will be destroyed. But not if you help us."
Amy's face whitened. "Sorry?"
"Was I not descriptive enough? Sorry. I'll try again. In four days, a fleet of ships commanded by Them will arrive in this solar system. Their purpose is to destroy our world by destroying our star. We have no more weapons, no more starships, and no means by which to produce either. We are doomed – but with you, we have hope."
Amy could barely speak. "M-me?"
"Yes, you." Heviniye replied, an ever so slight note of impatience entering her voice. "You're supposed to be the last of the Time Lords – Time Ladies, sorry – and the Oncoming Storm. The one who's protected countless worlds from destruction and saved the whole universe on multiple occasions. Come on, Doctor. We need one of your brilliant ideas."
The two heartbeats within Amy quickened to an almost dangerous pace, her eyes wide as dinner plates.
Mistaken identity, indeed.
You'll notice that the names have a distinctly Russian bent to them (feel free, by the way, to point and laugh at my rather dodgy attempts at transliteration). This mostly came about because Heviniye was originally called "Strelya", and it struck me that this had a rather Russian feel to it, so I ran with that. You'll also note that I haven't capitalised "stroyeteli" - that too is deliberate. Fans of Mass Effect will know the justification, it's more or less grammatical and has to do with the correct use of proper nouns. However, anything that is capitalised in canon will remain capitalised to avoid confusion.