Thomas Hector Schofield was roughly and inelegantly spun back into existence a short, relative time later, and he didn't manage to steady himself as well as Ace had, in his situation. He staggered, and then his legs gave out and he ended up on the ground – blank and white and stretching forever.
"– and you're worthless!" somebody was saying, somewhere to his right, rather angrily too. "Completely worthless – not a single being wants a piece of you unless you're with those other two, and that's not going to happen unless I can get a hold of the Doctor –"
Hex groaned, noted the headache and lack of any detail whatsoever in his surrounding environment, and muttered something indistinct to himself, before remembering the past few minutes and jerking upright. "You – wait, where am-?"
"– and to be honest, I don't know why I didn't go for him first." Nobody No-One was there, of course, and he was quite literally pacing a groove into the ground – every step he took seemed to warp the ground beneath him just that little bit more. It sounded as if he had been ranting for quite a while, maybe even since before Hex showed up. He turned sharply on his heel, and a crack zig-zagged its way through the ground, shooting out in Hex's direction – he had to scramble back to avoid... well, something. "And he doesn't even like you enough that you can be used as leverage! You're not just worthless, you're useless too!"
"Wait, hang on," Hex said, a bit annoyed by this in spite of everything.
Nobody spun around to face him, scarf flaring out behind him in a non-existent breeze. Hex noticed that the end of it was stained liberally with ink – which definitely hadn't been there before. "Are you saying that you aren't useless, Tommy? What have you contributed to society, lately? Or ever, for that matter?"
"I – I mean, I – " Hex wanted to say something, make a cutting remark that would prove how not-useless he was, which felt kind of ridiculous to be honest, considering who this guy was. Despite that, he kind of wished the Doctor was here to say something witty for him. Prove that he wasn't useless. Although, wasn't that only proving Nobody's point? "– look, what do you even want from me?"
"Nothing you can give," said Nobody, giving him a flippant sort of once-over. Hex felt remarkably like he was being x-rayed, and that the x-ray in question was about to be tossed away carelessly in the next few second, as if his wellbeing didn't matter in the slightest. "Honestly, I wasn't joking when I said you were useless. You – Hex Schofield – you are possibly the most inconsequential being I have ever met! And that's saying something – some of my cousins are adverbs, and it's hard to get more boring than that."
As it turned out, yes, it was possible to get incredibly annoyed towards a being that could probably destroy you in an instant with the right word choice. "Cheers, mate. Thanks a lot."
Nobody waved a dismissive hand through the air. "Oh, don't take it so personally, Tommy. I only meant inconsequential in terms of use to me right now. I'm sure you have a larger role in the general universe that you don't know about just yet. Ooh!" He tapped a finger to his chin. "Maybe your mother was secretly a vampire! Wouldn't that be a plot twist?"
Hex's mouth opened and then shut again, and then he said, "look, if I'm really that boring, why are you still here talking to me?"
Nobody shrugged, and did something impossible – the end result of which was that he was sitting cross-legged several feet off the ground with his neck tilted at a horrifying angle that indicated that his neck had been broken – although he didn't seem affected at all by it. "There's nobody – pun entirely intended! - else to talk to! Your friend's gone all catty on me and there's no reasoning with someone when they're like that, and I figured, since you're here –"
"My friend?" Hex interrupted, eyes widening. He can't have the Doctor, since he's been complaining about the fact that the Doctor's not here, and, well, she was gone when I got to the TARDIS, so – "Ace? Ace is here? Where is she?"
Nobody snorted in what sounded like disgust. "Oh, wow. You know, I might have thought you three coordinated those reactions if I didn't know for a fact that I had taken you completely by surprise. Are you always this concerned about each other?"
"We–"Are we? Or more importantly, maybe, am I? "-what did you do to her?"
"She did it to herself!" Nobody said immediately, almost defensive about it. "Or at least, I'm guessing she did – I certainly didn't tell her to do it!"
This set off a large amount of alarm bells in Hex's head. "What? You – where is she?"
"Around." Nobody flapped a hand nowhere in particular, utterly careless. "I haven't checked on her in a while, but – well, I'm sure she's fine."
Hex wanted to press this, but sensed that he probably wouldn't get very far. He decided to change tactics. "Where are we?"
"We're in my phraseship," said Nobody. "– didn't I mention that earlier? I could have sworn I mentioned that earlier. Ah, well – nevermind. It's called the CORDIS, it lets me do whatever the hell I want, whenever the hell I want, and unless I let you out myself, you're going to be trapped in here forever." He grinned, seemingly pleased with himself. "Any questions?"
"Y – yeah. A bunch, actually." Hex stared into the blank whiteness surrounding him. "Is it like the Doctor's TARDIS, then? But for... er, 'Word Lords', or whatever you lot are?"
"That's a really simplistic way of looking at it," said Nobody, "but if you really want to be that boring, then yeah." He smirked. "Want to know how it works?"
"N - " As much as Hex hated to admit it, he did - know your enemy and all that. And if Nobody was freely volunteering information, then... "Yeah, actually. How does it work?"
"I could tell you, but I'd have to kill you," he said, and Hex blinked. Immediately, Nobody had vanished from where he was and appeared inches away from him, so they were nose-to-nose. "No, seriously, I can't tell you that, you puny little human brain would ex-plode." He grinned, his tongue poking out slightly, and flicked Hex's nose neatly - making him yelp. "Brain matter is so messy to clean up. I think we want to avoid that." Another blink, and then Nobody was back where he had been before moving - crosslegged, mid-air. "But the Cliffnotes version, well, I could probably do that without too much spontaneous brain combustion. Whaddya say?"
"I - sure?" Hex said, unsure.
"Molto bene!" Nobody cried, apparently delighted. He spun around twice, legs splayed out, as if he were sitting on a swivel chair rather than on thin air, and when he faced Hex properly again, he was wearing an old-fashioned mortarboard at a jaunty angle, and had a sort of rod in his hand. "Sit down, sit down!" he invited cheerfully.
Hex shot him a look of immense trepidation. "I... think I'll stand, thanks?"
Nobody's cheerful expression remained, but his eyes hardened. "Hey, did I ever mention the time when somebody said offhandedly 'no-one can turn a human being inside-out!' when I happened to be in the vicinity?"
Hex hurriedly took a seat on the ground. There were some threats that you just did not question.
"Excellent," said Nobody, and then thrust the stick into the air - it caught onto a loop of string that Hex could have swore blind wasn't there before. Nobody tugged downwards sharply, and a blackboard fell down from nowhere at all, filling the space right next to where Nobody was sitting at it. Written on it in neat white handwriting was the phrase 'WORD LORDS FOR MORONS'.
"Oh, that is just charming, that is," Hex muttered.
"Much as a TARDIS allows a Time Lord to travel throughout space and time," Nobody began, adopting a rather patronizing, teacherly tone, "my CORDIS allows me to manipulate words and reality through the use of language. For example - well, let's go back to 'no-one can turn a human being inside out', since I thought that one was pretty good. If you say something worth making true with any part of my name in it, and I or my CORDIS are around to listen - I was there personally in that case, by the way - bam!" He slammed his hand down in the air, creating a loud bang for emphasis. "Instant reality! Doesn't matter how improbable the phrase is, or how it would logically work, the CORDIS can make it happen!"
Hex's eyes narrowed very briefly - he had realized something important here, but didn't exactly want to voice it aloud just yet.
"The CORDIS, by the way," Nobody added, leaning back, "it supplies me with everything I need to get stuff done. Especially when I'm inside it, but it works outside too. Things like - oh, just things. A gun." The same laser blaster he had been using before appeared in his hand, and he twirled it once. "An actual gun." It was quickly replaced by an old-fashioned revolver. "A violin, a TV remote, an assault rifle," all of these things appeared in his grasp in quick succession, "a... hot tub." This time, nothing showed up, which was probably for the best. "You know! Useful things."
Hex had the beginnings of a plan in his head, but he needed more time. Appeal to the guy's vanity. He has a huge ego, right? "So... uh. That's really cool. CORDIS, huh? What's that stand for?" He tried to work it out in his head. "Car... Or... Random Dimension In Space...?"
Nobody rolled his eyes - rolled his entire head around, in fact, like he was trying to convey his immense disappointment in this acronym in the most visual way possible. "Nooo, no no no no no - what does that even mean?" He slammed his hand twice against the blackboard, and in a puff of white dust, the words 'WORD LORDS FOR MORONS' were gone and there was a piece of chalk in his hand. "What do they even teach you kids these days? Ridiculous. No, 'CORDIS' stands for 'Conveyance Of Repeated Dialogue In Spacetime'." He wrote the acronyms out as he said it, and underlined the words twice pointedly, glaring at Hex. "You got precisely one of those words right, and it was the two-letter noun. I'm not some Time Lord whose ship only stretches the one, boring dimension. My ship is happily, properly multi-dimensional, all forty-five of them."
"Forty-five?" Hex tried to work out how a ship working in forty-five dimensions would even function, and failed miserably. "But-"
"Uh-uh-uh, don't do that - brain combustion, remember?" Nobody said sharply, and Hex was beginning to suspect that these warnings maybe weren't just a metaphor, with how much his head was starting to hurt. He tapped his rod against the blackboard, against the underlined words. "Back to the point. The CORDIS - snappy little term, coined by my grandson, or something - it disguises itself in a way much more clever than the Doctor's burnt-out chameleon circuit, which, by the way, doesn't even work. I mean, a police box? Really?" He shook his head, and then pointed towards the two words of the acronym. "Anyway, 'Repeated Dialogue'. CORDISes - CORDII, maybe? - they're powered by regular words and phrases throughout the multiverse- so they tend to disguise themselves as a word or phrase in their surroundings. That's how I slipped into the base, by the way."
"You disguise your ship... as a phrase?" Hex said slowly.
"Sure do. Wanna guess which one?" Nobody wiggled his eyebrows dramatically. "Come on, it's not that difficult."
"Uh, um," Hex tried to think, and surprisingly, it didn't take him that long to work it out. "Oh. The joke that the guard was telling back outside the room."
"Bingo!" Nobody cheered. "You get a gold star! – or, well, you don't, not really. Unless you want one?" In his other hand, a large metal star-shaped object appeared. He tossed it from hand to hand.
"I'm good, thanks," Hex said. Nobody shrugged, in a suit yourself sort of way, and then threw the star in his direction anyway. Hex ducked and it sailed cleanly over his head, and when it hit the ground behind him it exploded, rather loudly and messily.
"Whoops!" Nobody said cheerfully and completely unapologetically. "Sorry about that. Anyway. That is, more or less, my CORDIS! Any questions from the class?"
Hex took a deep breath in. His plan was more-or-less properly formed now, although he would have really rather preferred to work on it a bit more and maybe get the help of someone else – but that wasn't an option right now, and he had no idea if he'd have a chance to execute it later on. So. "Yeah, I kind of do. Uh – that thing with your name. It works with pretty much, you know, anything, right?"
"Pretty much, you know, anything, yeah," Nobody said, affecting a mocking version of Hex's accent.
"Right. So if I said something like, 'nobody can do a perfect backflip'...?"
Nobody rolled his eyes, but leapt down from his perch next to the blackboard and obliged – throwing himself up into the air and flipping over backward with the ease and grace of an Olympic gymnast. He stuck the landing perfectly, throwing his hands up into the air as if expecting applause - and Hex had to admit that it was one of the most impressive gymnastic feats he had seen in his life. "That's more like a party trick than anything else, Hexxy. If you're going to tell me that I'm able to do stuff, at least make it interesting."
Another breath. Don't panic. This is exactly the sort of thing that the Doctor pulls all the time, and it always works for him, right? "All right, then." He thought for a second about the phrasing of what he was going to say, and then decided that he had thought it over enough, and stood up, so he was facing the Word Lord directly.
"Nobody," he said, "is going to let Ace and I safely out of his CORDIS, without doing anything at all to harm us, not now and not ever. No-One will leave the Doctor and – and the rest of the universe, too – alone, and," something suddenly occurred to him, a flash of inspiration, "he's going to either stay in the CORDIS for the rest of time, or go back to whatever dimension he came from – whichever one of the two he wants. And Nobody won't try to find a way to get out of these conditions."
There was a moment of absolute, utterly deafening silence, in which Hex and Nobody stared at each other. An odd sort of expression crossed Nobody's face, something that Hex couldn't interpret.
Did it work? Did I actually just do that? Hex wondered, anxiety mounting second by second. What if he hadn't been specific enough - had left some kind of loophole in his wording? Oh god, Nobody would destroy him.
But then Nobody smiled, a small, unreadable smile, and took a step back. The blackboard faded from existence, as did the mortarboard on his head. "Well," he said. "This sure is an interesting turn of events."
"Nobody is going to let Ace and I out now!" Hex added suddenly, aware that he hadn't exactly put a timestamp on his previous statements. "Right this instant, with no tricks, or traps, or – or whatever!"
Nobody began to open his mouth, but Hex – now a lot more confident than before – said, rather quickly, "and Nobody's not going to say anything at all to me!"
Nobody's mouth snapped shut, and he adopted an almost comical expression of frustration.
"Now," said Hex, utterly delighted at how well this was working out for once, but trying very hard not to show it, "the way out – please."
Again, the frustrated, disgruntled look, and Nobody was glaring daggers at Hex, and also mouthing something silently that was impossible to interpret. But he waved a hand through the air, and immediately a doorway appeared – standing in the middle of the blank white room, attached to nothing and closed firmly. He gestured to it with an exaggerated, furious curtsy in Hex's direction.
"That leads... out?" Hex asked, and Nobody nodded. He frowned. "Where, exactly?"
Nobody shrugged, and pointed at his throat, mouthing something that Hex assumed was along the lines of 'I can't talk, idiot'.
"Oh – uh, right. Nobody can speak if... if it's relevant?"
"Thank you," said the Word Lord with a dramatic sigh. "In response to your question, I took the liberty of landing us just outside the Doctor's TARDIS. But if there's anywhere in particular you'd like to be, Master Hex –" he adopted a trilling Scottish accent for the last two words that was uncomfortably familiar.
"No, that's good," he said, and began to reach for the handle of the door – before freezing. "Hang about, where's Ace?"
"Other side of the door, of course," Nobody said, crossing his arms. "Are you going to go meet her, or are you going to stay here and gloat?"
Hex grinned, properly now. "Nah, that's beneath me. Although, I'm thinking – by now, I'd say I actually deserve that gold star you were offering before, right? No?" He quickly spun to face the door, twisting the handle and opening it. "Actually, nevermind. I'm gonna go now, bye – "
And he ducked through, slamming it behind him, heart racing and still beaming – he did it, he'd just beat a murderous, reality-warping, multi-dimensional alien with logic, and he just knew that the Doctor would be outright thrilled when he heard about this.
"McShane, you'll never guess what I just did!" he yelled to Ace, who was no doubt somewhere nearby. "We're getting out of here! We're –"
And then he stopped, and looked around properly, and realized two things. One, he wasn't outside of the TARDIS, like Nobody had promised. In fact, he wasn't anywhere at all. If the last room he was in had been completely white in every way, this room was utterly black, absorbing all light. It felt like he was floating, untethered, in a vast, empty void. And the door he had come through was gone, like it had never been there in the first place.
The second thing, of course, was that Ace was not there with him.
"Ace?" he called, and then, accusingly, "Nobody, I can't see a way out – what are you playing at?"
There was utter silence, for a moment, and then the distant sound of somebody laughing reached his ears. But laughter might not have been the best word to use, since it sounded more like the sound that somebody would have made while being dragged backwards through broken glass. Hex looked around frantically for the source of the laughter, but there was none – and worse, it seemed almost like the darkness around him was compressing inwards on him, like it was coming for him with great grasping claws, preparing to choke the life out of him.
And then everything flickered, went grey then static, and then to what could only be described as the flicker of the color bars on an old-fashioned television, and Hex's eyes were both open and closed and once, and he might have even yelled out –
But then he was back where he started, sprawled on the ground in the white space, and Nobody was hanging upside-down from where the ceiling should have been, laughing madly – great, heaving cackles, like he had just experienced the funniest moment of his life. "Oh Tommy," he howled, scarf tangling around his shoulders and hair horribly disheveled in ways that defied the laws of physics, "you didn't think it was going to be that easy, did you?"
Hex struggled onto all fours, tried to say something, but really, what was there to say? He ended up choking on air, staring at Nobody in fear and disbelief, and – and –
Nobody was still laughing, black tears of delight streaming down his face, shoulders shaking in mirth. "Oh, oh my. If it was that simple to defeat a Word Lord, we'd all have gone extinct long ago. Let's finish our lesson, shall we?" With a click of his fingers, the chalkboard was back and the mortarboard was improbably back on his head, despite the fact that he was still upside-down. Written on the board: 'WORD LORDS: A CLASS FOR MORONS WHO THOUGHT THEY COULD ESCAPE'. "I don't have to do anything I don't want to! Let me put this into perspective – Time Lords, right? They have the possibility of travelling through time and space, because of their TARDISes, but they don't need to. In fact, quite a lot of them choose not to – and as much as I'd usually hate to admit it, there are some striking parallels at play here. A Word Lord's CORDIS only grants them the possibility of using language for their own means." He grinned, razor-sharp, and wiped away some of his tears of mirth. "For example. 'Nobody is going to let Ace and Hex out of the CORDIS' – well, saying that definitely makes it something that could happen, but why for the sake of All's Hand would I want to do that?"
Hex swallowed. "So – you were just..."
"I was just messing with you, yeah," Nobody agreed gleefully, "and gods, you should have seen the look on your face when you realized-!" Another fit of laughter seemed to overtake him, and he fell over sideways, cackling madly. "You actually thought you had won? Just like that? You?"
Of course it didn't work, Hex was thinking, furious at himself, of course, nothing can ever just be that easy. Why the hell did I ever think a plan of mine would ever succeed? Stupid, stupid, stupid –
"I've changed my mind, though," Nobody said seriously, the laughter falling away from him like an article of clothing being discarded to the ground. He sat up. "You're not as useless as I thought you were – that was legitimately the funniest thing that's happened to me in centuries." He stifled another chuckle, although with some considerable effort. "Ha – maybe I will keep you. Or sell you to some circus, somewhere... I mean, I'm more likely to get a good price there as opposed to the Daleks..."
He stood up after a few seconds of contemplation, smirking.
"Well," he said, "I've got to be off. Not that this hasn't been entertaining, but I do have other things to get on with. Y'know the drill."
And before Hex could even speak (not that he would have known what to say), Nobody was gone – vanished into nothingness.
And after a few more seconds, so was he.