CHAPTER 23

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As the spider possessed Sabalom Glitz continued to try to hit everyone in the room with energy blasts from his hands, Michelle held out her hand towards him; and he was instantly moved into the mirror verse. Michelle smiled as she could hear Alina and the Shadow Cheetahs all having to contend with Glitz's arrival. Alina started to curse her all over again at the presence of this newest arrival to her home.

"I thought that you wanted to reform me, Michelle. How is being attacked by some new psycho every time that I turn around supposed to do that?" Alina screamed.

"I had no choice. He was attacking us. Oh, and since when do you call me Michelle? I thought that I was just Sister of Mine, and that was all I ever would be," Michelle said back to her sarcastically.

"Just shut up and get him out of here. It's bad enough that I'm being hunted day and night or what passes for them here by the Shadow Cheetahs. I don't need to worry about evading this lunatic too," Alina protested.

"I can't until the spider on his back possessing him is gone. He's too dangerous to bring back until then," Michelle said.

"What spider? I don't see a spider," Alina said.

"It's invisible until it drops off, but it's there. You have to sever the mental connection between it and Glitz first to free him," Michelle explained.

"I'll work on it," Alina said.

"Did you just ask her to free Glitz?" Donna, who could only hear Michelle's side of the conversation, asked.

"Yes. I think that she's going to try to in order to keep from winding up his next victim. As soon as she does, I'll bring him back. I don't trust her not to try to turn him as soon as he's free," Michelle said.

"Good idea. I don't trust her either. Good work, Mirror Girl. That's one spider down and possibly half a town's worth to go," Donna said.

"K'anpo, are you alright?" Mel asked as she checked the old Time Lord's vital signs.

K'anpo slowly woke up and said, "Yes, Mel. I have a really bad headache though so please lower your voice a few octaves. I hate being knocked out! The aftereffects of it just seem to get worse with age."

"Tell me about it," Ileana said with sympathy.

K'anpo looked at her with interest; and then said, "You're a vampire, right? A friendly one though. Amazing! You're the first nice vampire I've ever run across."

"I'm friendly too," Katherine said with an annoyed tone although she had a smile on her face as she said it.

"Oh, yes. I can see that you're a vampire too. It's very nice to meet both of you then. I always love to make new friends," K'anpo said as he kissed both of their hands.

Abraham loudly cleared his throat, and K'anpo realized that one of the women must be in a relationship with him.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean anything by it. I'm just surprised to find friendly vampires. I've never seen them before. I love that I can still find something new even at my age. The universe is still full of wonder if you know where to look," K'anpo said with a warm smile on his face.

Abraham just nodded and smiled back at him. Ileana just sighed. She had been faithfully married to the man for over a hundred years, and he was still jealous if any other man paid the slightest attention to her. As if she was going to cheat on him now after all of this time! She had to admit to herself though that it secretly pleased her that she could still get that reaction out of him.

K'anpo then noticed Victoria for the first time and said, "I can see that you have the werewolf's curse on you. I can help you to control that if you'll allow me. I have a lot of experience with meditation and using it to control the body and the emotions."

"I would like that. I want to be able to control the animal inside of me. I want to use its power to help the others. Do you really think that you could help me do that?" Victoria asked hopefully.

"Oh, yes. I think that after a while of training with me that you'll quickly have complete control. You will be able to control your transformations and also be able to keep the animal side of you in check. How old are you anyway? You look young, but I can tell that you are about the same age as Ileana," K'anpo asked.

"What?" Donna asked in surprise.

Everyone stared at Victoria in disbelief as she said, "I was around 20 years old in 1879 when a werewolf attacked me. I haven't aged since then, but the transformations are new. I didn't start changing until recently. I hate it. I want to be normal again. Well, as normal as an immortal girl can be I suppose."

"Why didn't you tell us this?" Donna asked with some anger in her tone.

"I didn't want to be thought of as any more of a freak than I already am by everyone," Victoria said as she looked sadly down at the ground.

"You're not a freak, Vicky. None of us thinks that," Donna said firmly.

"Thank you," Victoria said in a low voice with her eyes still down on the ground.

"I'll help you, Victoria Collins. You will have your life back as it was before," K'anpo promised.

"Thank you. Thank you so much," Victoria said with much more enthusiasm this time.

Then she did a double take as she realized something. "How did you know my name?" she asked K'anpo.

"I'm a Time Lord. I can read your timeline, and I'm a telepath. I don't usually get information from people's minds without permission, but I couldn't help but pick up on it. It's on the top of your thoughts because you're feeling guilty about lying about your own name," K'anpo said.

"Oh, Vicky! I'm sure you've had lots of fake names if you've been around as long as you have. It's okay. I don't care about that," Donna said sympathetically.

"Now that we've gotten all of that out of the way I think that we should see about hunting down the spiders. Does anyone have any ideas on how we could find them?" Dorothy asked impatiently.

"They will be very hard to find unless we can build something that will make them show themselves whether they want to or not by breaking their link with their hosts," K'anpo said.

"You mean a psychic disruption device like the setting that I made for my screwdriver, but one on a bigger scale that will cover the entire village?" Donna asked.

"Yes, something like that. I can help you to modulate the effect so that it will cover this entire area, and we can stop the spiders in one massive attack," K'anpo offered.

"That sounds good to me. I'll take you to my TARDIS. It's right next door," Donna said as she led K'anpo out of Kara's house.

"Why was he wasting time with all of that talking to my teammates when he could have been doing that from the get go?" Dorothy asked Mel with a groan after they had left.

"Knowing him, he probably plucked the idea from Donna's mind as she was thinking about using her sonic screwdriver on Glitz. I'm sure that she was just about to before your friend Michelle interfered. Once he learned that Donna's method was effective, he started thinking up a way to have the effect cover the entire village. He needed time to do that though so that's why he was chatting to your other friends. He was using that time to think about how that he would accomplish it. He doesn't like to propose an idea unless he's already thought it all out ahead of time and is a hundred percent sure that it will work first," Mel said.

"In other words, he's the complete opposite of the Professor with his fly by the seat of your pants last minute solutions made up as he goes along," Dorothy said with a chuckle.

"Exactly. Also, I think that he's going to take on Victoria as a project. He's got that look in his eyes that he gets when he's determined to do something. That's one reason he was spending so much time with her. She's sparked his interest. There must be much more to her than he told all of us," Mel guessed.

"You sure know how to pick them, Doughnut. In that way, he seems to be the same as the Professor. He doesn't ever tell anybody else what he's doing either," Dorothy said.

"Like the Doctor, he'll let us know eventually. I just wonder why he has such an interest in Victoria for. There must be something unique about her. Something special," Mel said.

"Or something dangerous," Dorothy said.

"I don't think that that girl would hurt anyone. At least not by my first impression of her," Mel said.

"You think too positively, Doughnut. I don't know Victoria that well, but I'm sure that she wouldn't purposely hurt anyone either. The problem is that there's an alien in her body, and it might have other ideas that she doesn't know about. If your K'anpo is anything like the Professor, I'm sure that he's thinking that too. There's something strange about how Victoria has lived so long. It sounds like something is using her as its host, and it has taken that long to grow inside of her. It's kept her alive all of this time for a reason, and we need to find out that reason before it's too late," Dorothy said ominously.

The two friends had their conversation interrupted as half a dozen people suddenly teleported into the house and started attacking them with beams from their hands.

"Michelle, do what you do best. Dorothy, use your power to protect her while she concentrates," Ileana shouted out as she suddenly took command in Donna's absence.

Michelle concentrated while Dorothy protected her in a force field. She sent them all into the mirror verse in less than a minute.

"Good job. No doubt that more spiders are coming though. They know that we're here now, and they're going to try to take us out as quickly as possible. I'm sure that an entire army of them will be here soon. Once they appear, Michelle will have to do the same thing while Dorothy protects her again. Katherine, Victoria, Abraham, and I will have to distract the spiders and keep them away from Dorothy as much as possible so that she can devote her full concentration on protecting Michelle. Elisabeta, you'll have to take Mel, Amanda, Anna, and Kara to one of the bedrooms and lock yourselves in. If the spiders teleport in there, call out to us; and one of us will come in there and help you. Although knowing you, you'll probably put up a pretty good fight by yourself without having to get any help from anyone; and I'm sure that Mel has a few surprises of her own if she's traveled with Time Lords this long," Ileana said with a smile.

"Someone's certainly risen to the challenge," Dorothy said to Mel with a wink.

"I think that she's probably learned a few things in her long life. She seems to be a natural when it comes to taking control and thinking on her feet," Mel said.

"Yeah, she does. I think for once I'm just going to shut up and follow orders, Doughnut. How about you?" Dorothy asked.

"Oh, I agree wholeheartedly," Mel said.

Everyone did as Ileana had instructed them as they prepared for the spiders to arrive. They didn't have long to wait either. Dozens of spider possessed people suddenly arrived inside of the living room, and they all started attacking at once. Dorothy looked outside and could see dozens more on the front lawn running towards the front door.

She steeled up her resolve and promised herself that she wasn't going to let a bunch of overgrown bugs take her or her new friends out. She was going to send them running all the way back to Metabelis Three.

Meanwhile, Donna and K'anpo were inside of Donna's TARDIS trying to quickly put together the psychic disrupter device when they could feel the entire ship shaking around them. Donna quickly turned on the monitor and saw that the spiders were hijacking the ship with them still inside of it.

"Oi! Who told you that you could take my ship, you overgrown bed bugs?" Donna shouted out to them.

"They must have some idea of what we're up to. We'll have to work even quicker to stop them now before they find a way to get in here to us," K'anpo said.

"We'll have to think of what to do even quicker than that, Wise Man. Look at where we're headed," Donna said.

The monitor showed that the spider possessed people were dragging Donna's TARDIS to the edge of a steep cliff that led to a drop of what must have been hundreds of feet. They were going to throw it off of it with the two Time Lords still inside of it! There was no doubt that the TARDIS would survive such a fall, but Donna wasn't so sure about the two of them.

Donna raced to the console to dematerialize before it was too late only to find that it wasn't working. Something was wrong. She couldn't get the TARDIS to do anything!

"No! You stupid piece of junk! You would pick now to break down, wouldn't you? You'd better get us out of here right now, or I'm going to take you back to Gallifrey and have you melted down and turned into doorstops!" Donna threatened her TARDIS.

The TARDIS did nothing though. It never even made a sound as Donna kept trying to start it up. It was completely dead.

Next: The Bad Wolves fight for their lives against hundreds of spider possessed people while Donna and K'anpo must find some way to keep from being thrown to their deaths!