Disclaimer: I don't own "Doctor Who" or "Twilight", and the essential details of the original concept of this fic came from a video posted on YouTube by heroesdwtw- which has unfortunately now been taken off YouTube- and is used with their permission
Feedback: Much appreciated
AN: Hope you like this; some parts were a bit tricky to work out
AN 2: The classic series monsters here appeared in the Fourth Doctor story "The Stones of Blood", if anyone wants to know more about them
The Future in the Past
After walking through the dark cave for so long I was starting to wonder if the cave was like the TARDIS- surely this mountain couldn't be that thick, although I admitted that we might have been walking downwards at a couple of points in our walk and I just hadn't noticed-, we came to a dimly-illuminated cavern, containing what looked like computers and other electronic equipment.
The design of the technology would have seemed rather basic by the standards of technology that I was familiar with in the future- the computers alone seemed to be ridiculously large to me-, but when I took the current time period into account, I had a feeling that the large screens and control panels around us were probably capable of more than the obvious functions. The sight of a large table in the centre of the room invoked unpleasant images of the creation of Frankenstein's monster in my mind, but I pushed those thoughts aside; it might potentially fit with what we were here to investigate- even if I still couldn't quite imagine 'my' vampires as twisted experiments-, but I had to focus on whatever the Doctor was looking for if we were going to find the answers to the questions I'd unintentionally raised.
"The vampire must be through there," the Doctor said, indicating the opening at the back of the cave before he looked firmly at me. "Just stay quiet, and we should be able to get through this; give me a moment..."
As I watched, he tapped a few controls on the nearest console, and the lights raised in the lab while a door slid shut over the open chamber at the back, moving with a surprising silence despite the somewhat clunky-looking nature of everything else here. As the lights rose, the Doctor's eyes turned away from the console to focus on what looked like a somewhat misshapen pillar in the middle of the room, about a couple of heads taller than the Doctor and slightly wider, positioned close to the table that I'd noticed earlier.
"An Ogri?" the Doctor said, his eyes widening in shock as he looked at the rock.
"Where?" I asked, looking around in confusion before I turned my attention back to him, unable to see the alien that the Doctor had noticed. "Is it behind the rock?"
"It is the rock," the Doctor clarified, looking at the large thing before us with a grim stare.
"Wh- the rock?" I repeated, looking incredulously at the large stone shape in front of us. "The rock is an alien?"
I'd known that the Cullens were technically rock, of course- the sounds James had made when he'd been torn apart wasn't something I'd forget; a twisted combination of tearing flesh and stone being broken, accompanied by the screams-, but I'd somehow assumed that most life-forms would naturally conform to the 'two arms, two legs' image I'd formed of the sentient aliens we'd encountered so far (The Daleks were an obvious exception to the rule, but given that they were the end result of mutations caused by centuries of war I didn't count them as a result of natural evolution); the idea that evolution could produce something shaped so randomly was...
Maybe I was just prejudiced because it didn't look human, but that didn't mean that it wasn't strange.
"Is there something... significant about it?" I asked, looking uncertainly at the Doctor. "I mean, is there a reason why a vampire might want an Ogri?"
"The most obvious thing is the fact that the Ogri rely on various types of proteins to exist," the Doctor explained as he looked back at me, reverting back to his 'lecture mode' even while I noticed that a part of him was focusing on the door and the Ogri as he spoke; evidently he wanted to make sure that nothing discovered us even if he clearly considered this important for me to know. "These proteins were fairly common on Ogros, their home planet, but on Earth the only source of most of them is human blood, with the result that they drain the blood from humans to survive."
"Ah," I said, nodding in understanding; I suppose that a creature like that would be interesting to any vampire. "So... how did they get here?"
"They were brought to Earth by an alien criminal called Cessair of Diplos several centuries ago, where they became part of a stone circle in England that was naturally a popular location for human sacrifice due to the Ogri absorbing the blood that was spilled on them," the Doctor explained. "They generally remained dormant for several centuries until Cessair had reason to wake them up again, with Cessair assuming various aliases to control the land where they existed- she had stolen an artefact that allowed her to sustain her life for centuries-, until... my current companion and I were able to destroy two of the Ogri and helped Cessair's jailers recapture the third in the 1970s."
"So... is this a new one?" I asked, looking curiously at the rock, trying to focus on something in the here and now rather than the dizzying length of time that the Doctor had just nonchalantly mentioned to me. "I mean, could it have come here because of something the vampire did on its own?"
"Actually, judging by the timing- Cessair arrived five thousand years before your time, and we're pretty much that far back anyway-, I wouldn't be surprised if it's another of the Ogri that she brought here," the Doctor said, shrugging slightly as he looked at me. "I mean, you can't exactly make an intimidating impression with just three rocks, but even someone like Cessair wouldn't want to attract too much trouble from the vampire lords by complaining about them taking her pet rock; it's possible that she came here with more and the three I encountered... when I dealt with her... were just the only survivors."
"Ah," I said, looking uncertainly at the technology around us before I looked back at the Doctor. "So... why would a vampire want an Ogri?"
"I have an idea or two, but that-" the Doctor began, before he looked up sharply, his eyes widening in horrified realisation. "Something's coming."
"What?" I said, looking in confusion at the Doctor even as he pulled out the sonic screwdriver and aimed it at the nearest console, the lights around us dimming rapidly before he pulled something out of his pocket and tossed it over to me.
"A key on a string?" I said, looking at him in confusion even as I took the hint and hung the object around my neck.
"Little something I made up after a crisis I experienced a few years back; in an emergency, these TARDIS keys can link up to the ship and function as perception filters that deflect any attempt to pay attention to us, so long as we're not dealing with full-blown telepaths or near-insane people," the Doctor explained, smiling briefly at me before he grabbed my arm and held me up against the wall, just as the door opened and a man who could only be a vampire walked into the room- the smart jumpsuit-like attire he was wearing clearly marked him out as not being a native of this time, even if he didn't have abnormally sharp teeth-, dragging a man dressed in tattered animal skins who was almost certainly a native of this era. As we watched, the vampire strapped the human to the table, the victim squirming and yelling untranslatable words and phrases that left me wondering if language had even developed by this point...
Only the obvious tension in the Doctor's stance made it clear that he hated this as much as I did; the only difference was that he was remembering the real reason we were here.
Even if I didn't remember the Doctor's warning about the unpredictability of what might happen if we changed history- who was to say that some of the people that the vampire breed I knew had killed in the past (Or would kill in the future) wouldn't have gone on to do something terrible if they hadn't died when they did?-, a small, selfish part of me didn't want to deprive the Cullens of the chance to get to know each other.
I didn't know what was going to happen here, but I did know that, if the Doctor wasn't going to do anything, I wasn't going to take any action either...
Stepping back with a smile as he finished strapping the victim to the table, the vampire bared his teeth- as much as I'd grown used to the Cullens' type of vampire as being 'normal', it was almost unnerving how easy it was to think of this thing as a vampire- and lunged towards the victim on the table, digging his teeth into the man's wrist as he placed his free hand on the Ogri. For a moment, the vampire's form seemed to be becoming dehydrated and rehydrated as we watched- my best guess was that, based on what the Doctor told me about the Ogri, the Ogri was taking blood from the vampire as fast as the vampire was drinking it from his victim- until he suddenly released his grip on Ogri and victim, stepping back with a satisfied gasp and a broad grin on his face as he licked his bloody lips.
As the Doctor and I watched, he turned to face the stone-like alien and broke off a piece of it, creating a brief pressure in the air that I assumed was the Ogri equivalent of a scream- even if it was just an animal, it had to have some way to communicate, after all-, followed by it
raised one arm and ran a sharp fingernail from the other hand over his wrist, leaving a trace of blood- blacker than any blood I had ever seen- before he placed the cut wrist over the human's lips. For a few moments, the human simply sucked at the wound, apparently unable to do anything else in his current position, before he reeled back with an agonised scream of agony, prompting the vampire to step back and snap some kind of helmet-like device attached to the table on top of the human's head.
"Perfect," the vampire said, grinning as he studied the figure before him, before walking over to study another console, muttering thoughtfully to himself as he worked. "Just a few more days to let the transformation run its course, and then the programming should take effect..."
I'd barely had time to think about what we'd just heard before the Doctor walked up behind the vampire, looked back at me for a moment, and then turned back to place his hand on the vampire's shoulder. The vampire suddenly screamed in pain as it clutched at the Doctor's arm as though trying to tear it away, only for the Doctor to pull a wooden stake out of his coat and ram it into the vampire's chest, leaving it to collapse into dust before it could do anything.
"Focused faith while in direct contact with the vampire; doesn't work if it knows you're there and doesn't give you time to concentrate, but very effective if you have the time to focus," the Doctor explained, smiling briefly at me before he turned his attention back to the man on the table, now writhing and straining against his straps as he experienced a pain I could only barely remember myself, from those brief moments when I had struggled against James's venom before it had been taken out of me by Edward and the others...
"That's normal," I said at last, swallowing as I looked at the body.
"Pardon?" the Doctor asked, looking back at me.
"The pain he's in," I said, looking apologetically at the Doctor; my friend wouldn't like hearing that the pain someone was experiencing had to happen, but it wasn't like there was anything else we could do right now. "Vampire venom- the venom that the Cullens use- is... well, it's painful; the transformation takes three days, but once it's over, the vampire's apparently fully mutated."
"No way to stop it?" the Doctor asked.
"Edward managed to suck the venom out of me when I was bitten once, but... well, there's no way to stop the pain if that's what you mean..." I said, looking awkwardly at the Time Lord. "I'm... I'm sorry..."
"Nothing we could do about that," the Doctor said, sighing as he walked over to examine the helmet attached to the man on the table, following the connecting cables to the nearest console before looking over at me with a smile. "Well, on the bright side, we don't have to worry about the essential details of this situation; this helmet appears to be connected to a psychological reprogramming device."
"A what?" I asked.
"Essentially, a brainwashing machine," the Doctor explained, hurrying over to examine another console (I wasn't sure if I should be impressed or uncomfortable at the ease with which the Doctor was able to ignore the man screaming in pain behind us, but I knew the Doctor well enough by now to know that he would have a reason for doing so), pulling up various bits of text on the screen. "From what I can tell, the vampire we stopped earlier was trying to combine the vampire virus- not that he'd call it that, of course- with Ogri DNA in the hope of triggering a mutation in the virus; by letting the Ogri drain blood from him while he fed, he apparently hoped that he would trigger a mutation in the blood the Ogri absorbed..."
"That's why he... broke it?" I asked, indicating where the vampire had broken a chunk of rock off the Ogri earlier.
"Exactly; get to the blood before the Ogri was able to fully absorb it, and he hoped that the result would trigger a mutation that he could use for himself," the Doctor explained, nodding grimly at me before he walked over to the console connected to the helmet. "Of course, that's where this comes in; from what you've told me of your vampires, there's no reason for the conventional vampires to realistically expect them to take orders from the 'original' vampires, given their sheer power level, so this thing must be designed to help them 'program' the vampires to take their orders."
"Really?" I said, looking at the machine with a renewed sense of unease. The thought of Edward being able to access my mind before he'd told me that he couldn't had been uncomfortable enough, and I'd only just come to accept the TARDIS's ability to affect my mind just enough for me to understand foreign languages; if that thing could actually make vampires do something...
"Hold on; they're going to put every vampire that's turned in something like this?" I asked looking in confusion at the Doctor as another thought occurred to me. "I mean, maybe they can do that at first-"
"They only need to do it once; from what I can tell, this device is so thorough that it would actually encode the instructions given directly into the vampires' genetic memory," the Doctor explained, shaking his head as he grimly studied the machinery for a moment before he looked over at me. "Now then, what were the 'rules' of the vampire society the Cullens belonged to?"
"Uh... keep the secret, mainly," I replied after a moment's thought to ensure that I was remembering the tale correctly. "Vampires aren't to attract attention by killing in large numbers in specific areas, vampires don't tell humans what they are if the humans are going to be left human- the Cullens had a few debates about whether they were going to turn me or not because of that-, things like that..."
"In other words, they're to stay underground and not attract attention to themselves or exert authority over the general human population; understood," the Doctor said, rapidly tapping away at the controls in front of him for a few more minutes, the helmet around the head of the still-turning vampire glowing in response to its actions, until he stepped back and nodded. "All right then; that should do it."
"You've programmed it?" I said, looking at the still-thrashing form on the table in surprise. "Already?"
"They wanted to be able to instruct the new vampires as quickly as possible; they didn't have your foreknowledge of how long the transformation would take and didn't want to waste time finding out about that the hard way," the Doctor explained, before he pulled out the sonic screwdriver, tweaked the setting, and aimed it at the various computers around us. "Just let me attend to this, and we can be on our way..."
As we turned and hurried out of the room, the computers behind us began to spark, small explosions erupting from the consoles as the screens cracked and the images displayed on them disappeared, and I could only hope that whatever dark experiments had taken place here would never go further than what they'd done already.
As I heard the screams starting again behind us as the first of the Cullen's breed of vampires progressed through the transformation with ever-increasing agony, I could only hope that he wouldn't kill too many people before he started creating the vampire society that I knew had to exist.
We'd preserved the future, and all we'd had to do was create a race of vampires who would kill so many people between now and my now...
God, time travel could put you in morally complicated situations.
AN 3: Well, hope everyone enjoyed that explanation; just one more chapter to tie up the Doctor and Bella's reactions, and then we're on to the next story