Text Key

"Audible speech."

'Directed thought, telepathic speech.'

Rise of the Cybermen / Age Of Steel

Chapter 17 – Parallels

As Mickey and the Doctor moved around the console, moving around different pieces of cooked machinery while Rose sat outside with her phone, I collected my scattered deck of cards. The doubled card had disappeared, along with anything resembling a comfortable atmosphere.

After all, there is nothing quite as fun as waiting for the hammer to fall.

The Doctor might not have said anything yet about what had happened, but there was no way he'd missed what had happened in my head or how my control over the Rider had slipped. Even if nothing had caught fire, I could feel the beginning of a Penance Stare in the second before his head had slammed into mine, and that was a move that always came with a visible warning.

As to what happened in my head…

Well, the comics trade was the most harmless thing. An offer made on reflex. Just like the way I'd tried properly mindlinking with Eight for a second, which would have been disastrous if it had actually gone through.

I couldn't entirely deny that stupid, stupid snap decision was caused by a sense of homesickness that I'd been carrying with me since I entered this universe. Selby and I had been in some form of psychic contact for every single one of my turns of being in control – along with more than a few where I wasn't – before this one and the sudden absence of his presence anywhere in the world had destabilized me. Add in the fact that the Eighth Doctor was very mistakable for the sylvan psychic at first glance and the situation was like many that Selby would have pulled me back from…

Well, the whiplash from that reveal had curbed anything that could have properly been called an emotion beyond that misplaced sense of calm that accompanies anxiety. At the moment, I felt queasy, unsettled, and increasingly restless. Those things were marginally better than 'blinding rage', but it was only a matter of time before those uncomfortable neutrals started bleeding back into irritation and then built back up to another emotional explosion waiting to go off.

I wanted to be gone, to run where I wanted when I wanted, preferably in a direction away from any problems I couldn't figure a way out of. Living with the Doctor ironically didn't come with that option. I might not have protested nearly as much if I'd been stuck with a model that didn't grind my gears just by existing, but having my life go down new routes of bullshit was par for the course.

The one upside of this stupid situation was that if worse came to worse, I was currently in the best possible position for ditching the Doctor; a magic capable universe that allowed me to operate at the top of my game, the absence of a Time Vortex meant that the Time Lord's primary advantage for pursuit was out, and if I timed my disappearance just right, I could fake my own death during the upcoming Cyberman crisis with all the effort it took to not show up at a school reunion.

On the other hand, Ten took the 'deaths' of companions very poorly and while I couldn't say how bad it would go with Rose still by his side, anything that removed her from that dynamic – say, a certain Doomsday that would be not that far away if we were still affixed to some kind of canon timeline – would only intensify his canon spiral into darkness and depression. And there was that creeping suspicion that –

"Delaine, there should be a black Gladstone bag over there full of tools," the Doctor called over, interrupting my train of thought. "Care to bring it over?"

I shoved the nebulous sense of disappointment down as I slowly did what he asked. The fact that I could ignore any orders coming from that voice was godlike, but there was no point to not doing what he asked, especially not with the TARDIS's health at stake. Thankfully, the bag hadn't been thrown too far from where the Doctor had pointed and nothing seemed broken to Zeke's eye.

Second-hand memory told me that the bag was only marginally expanded on the inside, just allowing enough space to shove all the usual suspects. Any duplicates or tools required for more specific work were shoved in other locations… at least, in theory. In reality, the Doctor tended to organize things as well as the average high school student with ADHD. There would be the odd attempt at order, but usually things were left where they lay, ideally in a way that didn't permanently damage the item in question.

More than a few of the 'kind of important' things were probably in an unideal way.

Tossing the bag into the captain's chair, I turned to go back to the task of collecting the playing cards and trying to organize the information I had into something I could navigate.

Of course, this would be the Doctor's cue to demand my attention again.

"Astro rectifier, please," he said, stretching out a hand without turning around.

I felt my nerves tense up, ratcheting the heat in my lungs again for the second time today. No, being in here wasn't helping anything. I slipped the cards under the Doctor's Gladstone bag and started to make my way towards the door.

As I pushed it open, I could just catch the Doctor adding, "And throw in the Ganymede driver and the multi-quantiscope while you're at it. Thermocouplings are tricky things to deal with," before I shut it behind me.

"What, you blow up at the Doctor now?" Rose asked from where she sat on a nearby bench, fiddling with her cellphone.

I took a second to smooth down the stress tic I could feel forming on my forehead. No killing the companion. "I'm trying to avoid it."

"I don't get why you got so angry earlier, but it wasn't like I said anything."

"My mother's dead. I would consider that 'something'." Apart from the few universes where she wasn't, but that wasn't relevant to the conversation or my feelings about the subject. I'd grown up in the shadow of her absence in my first life and what taste I'd gotten of her in the life that followed just made the absence worse.

Rose looked stricken and for half a moment, I didn't feel an iota of dislike for her. She was just a nineteen year old girl who just realized how badly she'd messed up. "I – I didn't –"

I waved her off. It was easier to deal with the issue on my own terms, when it wasn't the sucker punch at the hind end of a chain of increasing annoyance. "No, I get it. You wouldn't have known. It's not exactly tattooed across my forehead." Though it was written in scars across other parts of my body, I didn't exactly make a point of showing those off either.

"How'd it happen?"

That was almost always the second question. 'How'd it happen?' When my scars were the start of the discussion, it was almost always the first. Either way, it all came back to the same story.

"Suicide." My right hand lifted itself to my temple almost of its own accord, but the sound of a gunshot was almost entirely me. There was no satisfaction in making her flinch and none in telling the story either. After so many times telling it, it was little more than reflex. "I got to watch. I was four years-old."

That was true, but it was only one fraction of it. I'd learned to keep those cards close to my chest until the situation required they be revealed.

The stricken look was back, this time cranked up to eleven. "I'm – I'm so sorry," she stammered. "I didn't know. I swear, I –"

"Most people don't. Point to you though, most people follow that up with 'so that explains why you're crazy'." A humorless laugh escaped through my teeth. No, that part had never been fun, even when the words had been thrown out as a joke.

Rose wasn't smiling. No, she'd settled with the proper response to finding out that someone had a horrible backstory; stunned silence and more than a little guilt for careless comments made.

I turned to watch the river flow by, the sunlight dancing over the dirty water like fire. I wondered what kind of expression she'd be wearing when she heard the rest, before discarding the idea. No point in fussing about it until it came up.

'You should clean it,' one of my alters said, casting a disapproving eye over the brown-grey water.

'As you wish, Sparkles,' I replied with a roll of my eyes before I opened up one of his specific powers and began to pull the corruption towards me. To an outside observer, there would be hardly a visual difference; maybe the water would look a little less muddy for a moment, but it would be dismissed as a trick of the light. More dedicated scientific observation might pick it up more clearly, but by the time they moved to check out any possible source, I'd be gone, along with the crystals of concentrated filth I'd removed from the Thames.

It would only be a literal drop in the ocean, but it would make this world marginally cleaner… probably just in time for someone else to drop some garbage in some other body of water.

After a few minutes of solitude, Rose came over to join me at the railing. "What was your mum's name?" she asked after a minute of watching me flick the crystals out into the water.

"Delora." From the Latin 'dolor', meaning sorrows or grief. A bad fit for a cheerful woman that became all too appropriate in the end.

"You were named after her?"

I flicked another pollution crystal into the water, listening to the hard 'splosh' as it broke the surface and sank. It might manage to dissolve in a couple million years, but even that frame of time felt unlikely. "No. Someone who was nice to her in high school. Better than picking a name out of a big book of dead people you happen to be related to, I think."

"What was she like?"

I shrugged before flicking another crystal in. If I squeezed them between my thumb and forefinger in just the right way, I could make a decent distance without using anything else. "Fun. Kind. A bit wild. I've got a dozen or more stories from people about how she'd skip school and cross a couple state lines just because she could. They tried to keep her from graduating with the rest of her class for that. Didn't stop her from getting through nursing school. She loved horses, but she had to give them up after a while. Too expensive. They say I look a bit like her, but taller and… well." I gestured vaguely at the rest of me.

Rose gave me a sidelong look. "Weird?"

I wasn't even mad, because it was true. "Sounds 'bout right."

Splosh.

Another minute or two of silence passed, it's only punctuation the sound of Rose idling with her phone, the water lapping at the sides of the walls around the river, and the irregular splash of the crystals I was feeding back into the water I'd pulled their source material from.

The quiet beeping of buttons being pushed suddenly stopped.

"Oh," Rose said.

I looked over at her phone. "What?"

"I don't exist in this universe."

"Ah." Another moment passed and I stretched out my hand. "Let me have a try."

Rose passed over the phone, trading it for a couple crystals to throw into the river, and I punched in my name and the surname I'd abandoned millennia ago. Credit to the Doctor, his 'superphone' upgrade made Rose's bedazzled Nokia fly faster than most era-appropriate smartphones.

Splack.

As the information filled the screen, my eyebrows slowly rose up in an attempt to meet my hairline. "I'm a missing person case and my father is being investigated for my murder." I cleared out the screen before handing the phone back. It wouldn't do for anyone to find out that the 'me' in question was only thirteen years old.

Splash.

"Oh. Sorry."

"Ha. Don't be. He deserves the trouble." If I had the time, I'd probably go over there just to point and laugh at him from now until his conviction… and maybe for a while after that, unless he actually did it. Then I'd probably just kill him. It'd be a more rounded justice than most people got.

Rose's fingers played over the pink rhinestones of her phone's casing nervously. "It's just… the universe where my da's alive and successful is the one where I never was born. What if those things are connected?"

I knew personally that exact thought wasn't exactly a friendly one to have bouncing around your skull. The idea that your very existence came at the cost of someone's life… no, that was the sort of thing that grew roots if you let it sit there.

"Well, considering that this universe has touch screen advertisements and zeppelins, I wouldn't put money on it. I mean, most deaths are the result of random happenstance that could happen to anyone provided they're standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. Forget to look both ways before crossing the street, pick up some bad sushi, get picked up by a serial killer while hitchhiking... maybe get brained by a toilet seat from a disintegrating space station," I said, leaning back from the railing. Playing the part of a sage voice talking to a troubled young person was easier than me trying to talk to Rose Tyler. Of course, the moment I stopped playing in the abstract, I'd start remembering all the things that were annoying about her. "So this universe just happens to be one where he fell on the other side of the odds. It's got nothing to do with whether or not you exist."

Rose didn't look like she entirely believed me. "Toilet seat from a space station?"

That's what got her attention? "Okay that one was a total crib off of Dead Like Me," I admitted. "But I was making a point. Any given universe runs on laws, work arounds, and the roll of the dice. It's like Dungeons and Dragons but with less fun and more critical failures. Learn to roll with it." I turned to look at the street. No business that I could see, but they probably weren't far off. "Anyway, you want something to eat?"

"What?"

I jerked my thumb down the road. "I'm running off to find the nearest Chinese place and I'm offering to pick something up for you. Sort of a 'sorry for almost putting my fist through your face' present. So what do you want?"

"Aren't you still upset with me over the whole bringing up your dead mum thing? And didn't the Doctor give you the whole 'don't wander off' speech?" she asked as she started to follow me anyway.

I shrugged. "It's old news, I'm hungry, you're upset, and if we pick up something for those two, we can probably avoid getting yelled at. Everybody wins."

Rose's face twisted up in amusement. "Fine, but I think I should be the one to lead. It's still my city, even if it is a different universe."

I held up my hands in mock surrender as I fell into step behind her. At least this part of the day didn't entirely suck.

It had taken the Doctor ten minutes and ten years of his life shoved into an arton crystal to realize that he was short one companion and then another three to realize that the actual number missing was two. This was almost enough time to actually register the thoughts 'oh no, they've gotten into trouble' and 'they're trying to kill each other somewhere where I can't get between them' before that entire train of thought was sideswiped by the arrival of the two young women in question returning to the park, Rose with a tray of covered drinks and Delaine carrying an array of plastic bags.

"I hear you've got a wanton wantin' for wontons, Mickey Smith," Delaine called over, lifting up a bag containing a large styrofoam container and a couple of oyster pail boxes.

"What?"

"It's a – forget it, just take your fucking wonton soup." She thrust the bag towards Mickey, muttering under her breath, "This is why I should never try to be funny on purpose."

"That's why you left? To get food?" the Doctor asked incredulously as Delaine started rummaging through the bags for the next meal. "Whose idea was this?"

Delaine waggled the fingers on her free hand before shoving it down into one of her remaining bags. "Mine. I seduced Rose with the promise of free food, fortune cookies, and MSG."

"What was the last one again?" the blonde asked.

"Very tasty – ah!" Delaine lifted up a box. "Chicken and soy sauce chow mein…"

"That's mine," Rose said as she reached over, trading one of the covered paper cups for the box.

"And some Peking duck for Sonic the Hedgehog," Delaine said, pinching her drink in the crook of her elbow as she shoved one of the two remaining styrofoam boxes and one of the oyster pails into the Doctor's hands. "Mickey, you've got like half the sticky rice; make sure Rose gets a box."

"…Sonic the Hedgehog?" he asked.

"Spiky hair, red sneakers, inflated ego, always going fast, never shutting up?"

The Time Lord glanced down at his shoes just to be sure the color was correct. "Was it necessary to wander off in a foreign universe of which we know almost nothing for the sake of takeaway?"

Delaine shrugged. "Technically, I could have cooked all of this myself but then the whole point of eating out of disposable containers with crappy chopsticks would be lost," she said as she took a long sip of her drink. "Plus, great as my many great and storied powers may be, I can't pull an Irn-Bru out of thin air."

"...somehow, I'm not surprised by this development," the Doctor muttered as he opened up his box and started to poke at his Peking duck. "I thought you'd run off," he said as he skewered one particularly good looking piece.

The girl glanced over to the bench where Rose and Mickey were sitting, the two trading the odd pinch of each other's food as they talked about something or other. "Much as I'd love to, I keep finding myself in the role of responsible adult."

"Entirely overrated," the Doctor agreed as he lifted a mouthful of meat towards his mouth, only pausing a few inches before he could complete the action. "Hold on… do you think that you're supposed to be my responsible adult?"

Delaine spared him a dry look before returning to her meal, deftly dunking a piece of chicken in the thick lemon sauce that came with it. "You may have generally good intentions, but that doesn't change the fact that you're an idiot."

"Does that make you an idiot for sticking with me?"

"Shut up and eat your damn food."

Despite the clear annoyance coloring her tone, there was no flicker of the gold eyes the Doctor had seen earlier, nor the sense of an imminent explosion. There was just a young woman whose personality sometimes seemed too old for her body eating Chinese takeaway with all the grace of the average stray cat.

"Is there some sort of technique to eating that fast without making a mess?" he asked after a moment of watching her.

"Yeah, it's called 'Fifteen Minute Lunch Breaks' with a few hints from the school of 'Nobody Steals From My Plate'. One of the techniques for the last is palm impalement."

The Doctor slowly withdrew the chopsticks he'd been inching towards her box with the intent of getting a sample and went back to picking at his own food. "So what brought about this change of heart?"

Delaine picked up another piece of chicken, chewing it for a bit longer than strictly necessary before responding, "About what?"

"Rose Tyler."

She shrugged. "She found out something upsetting about this universe and, all appearances aside, I am capable of being nice."

"I never said you weren't," he replied. "What did she find out that was so upsetting?"

"I really think you should ask her."

The Doctor looked over to where Rose was sitting with Mickey, the two chattering about something or other as they traded bits of food. There wasn't an obvious sign of distress coming from the nineteen year old girl, but her usual brightness seemed a few shades dimmer than its usual sunshine glow. He closed the lid to his takeaway, sitting it down at Delaine's side before going over to the next bench over.

"Rose?"

She looked up. "Yeah?"

"Delaine said you found out something upsetting."

Rose's face fell for a second. "I checked the internet here," she confessed. "I never existed and Delaine's apparently been murdered."

Oh no.

Delaine quickly swallowed the piece of chicken she'd been chewing on. "Missing. It's only a murder once they find a body or signs of foul play. Ideally both."

"You're taking it well," the Doctor noted.

She shrugged as she reached for her drink. "Well, the guy under suspicion is the guy who was the most likely one to have done it, so I guess that's the best the local me or I can hope for. Even if he didn't, I like the idea of him getting screwed over."

"Ex-boyfriend?" Mickey asked around a mouthful of wontons.

Delaine snorted into her straw. "Please. Like I would pick anything less than the best."

In the back of the Doctor's mind, his Sixth took a moment to preen.

"Anyway," Rose said loudly, drawing everyone's attention back to her. "My da's a success and I was never born. I want to see if they're happier that way."

What. "Rose, that's a terrible –" the Doctor started to say.

Rose cut him off. "You said we were stuck here. I don't see what else we've got to do, besides have a look around."

"We're not stuck," he replied, pulling the dully glowing arton crystal out of his breast pocket. "Once this is done charging, we'll have enough power to get back across the void to your real home with your real mother."

"And how long is that going to take?" Mickey asked.

The Doctor resisted the urge to grimace.

"…about twenty-four hours," he admitted.

That confession was probably the mistake that set all of the trouble in motion.

It was easy for Mickey to remember the way to his grandmother's house, because for all the Doctor's talk of how this other universe was supposed to be so different from theirs, the layout of London hadn't changed a whit.

Oh, there were enough hints lying around to give away that this wasn't his native stomping grounds; armed soldiers standing at certain blocked streets, different business and advertisements – electronic and old fashioned paper posters –, and the zeppelins, of course, but other than that it was still London, England, Earth.

He spared a glance at the silver buds that some people were wearing in their ears. Something about them told the boy they weren't some fancy sort of wireless headphones, even before he saw someone press one before starting a conversation with empty air.

Then he connected the dots; those were like the communicators like they had in the comics and spy movies, except these 'EarPods' seemed to work more like cellphones than miniature ham radios you could just click to turn on.

Of course, that didn't mean other people didn't have regular cellphones; just walking through the crowd, Mickey was seeing a combination of everything he'd seen at home along with a few other, weirder things that bridged the gap between the handheld and the ear-mounted communications devices… that nobody seemed to acknowledge as anything more than a representation of how much money the owner had to throw around. Sort of like how rich people insisted on buying a new Benz every year, despite having a perfectly good car of the same brand in their garage.

Least some things stayed the same…

As Mickey rounded a corner that would bring him a few blocks from his grandmother's house, he noticed something reflected in window of a shop across the street. Or, more accurately, someone.

It wasn't the best view, but it was enough to give Mickey an idea of who was following him. A shortish white man with dark hair, wearing a hat and carrying a brolly on one of the rare unclouded days in London. Nobody Mickey knew in this universe or the last fit that description, which meant that there was no reason for this person to be following him.

Well, no good reason, anyway.

The young man picked up his pace, though taking care not to go too fast. The police always assumed the person who ran first was the one who did something wrong, and when it was a young black male from the council estates running away from a middle-aged white man who wasn't tall enough to reach the top shelf at Tesco's, they tended to pick sides even faster.

Was there another Mickey Smith in this world? It wasn't that hard to believe considering that there was another Pete Tyler running around. That a Mickey Smith who'd never encountered the Doctor would be a person worth tailing was a different problem.

Did someone notice the TARDIS landing? It wasn't something that seemed like a regular issue for the Doctor, but a big blue box appearing out of nowhere would be something that people would notice.

Noticing another shop with particularly reflective windows, Mickey crossed the street to it, maneuvering himself close enough so he could watch the reflection as he pretended to look at his phone.

The man with the umbrella had changed his course again, moving to cross the street as he had… but with a fresh wariness, like he suspected the young man had caught onto his pursuit.

Mickey started moving again, slower this time as he picked the long way 'round to his gran's house. Even if she wasn't really his grandmother, he didn't want to bring someone who might be dangerous to her doorstep.

Unfortunately, his plans for losing the stranger fell apart before they'd even properly begun, because as soon as he ducked into a blind alley, Mickey Smith found himself frozen in place. Oh, he could feel his insides still working around; his lungs bringing the oxygen in and taking the carbon dioxide out while his heart tried to figure out if beating fast enough would get it out of its owner's ribcage, but it was like a set of invisible vices had locked around his arms, legs, and mouth, locking him in place without any ability to call for help.

"You put on a fairly good chase, Mickey Smith," a very soft, very Scottish voice said from behind him, the sound of hard shoe soles accompanied by the occasional click of a metal umbrella tip hitting hard stone as its owner was came closer. "Good selection of tricks, too. If I didn't have a few of my own, you just might have lost me."

His pursuer finally stepped in front of Mickey, allowing the boy his first good look at the man.

Like Mickey's few passing glances had told him, the man was small; somewhere around the heights of Rose and Delaine while somehow having the right proportions to look smaller than that. Had to be about… forty, maybe halfway to fifty at the most, even if his outfit had probably gone out of style a few decades before anyone that age would have been born.

And beneath a pair of thick black eyebrows, were the most piercing set of blue eyes Mickey had ever seen. Like chips cut out of an iceberg's heart, freezing him in a way the invisible bindings around his body didn't.

The effect suddenly disappeared as the man smiled, an expression that seemed a fairly even blend of bland politeness and actual cheerfulness. "Pleasure to finally meet you," he said, sticking out a hand.

Mickey stared at it. There wasn't much other option at the moment.

The man lowered the offered hand. "Oh right. Unable to move."

He tapped Mickey with the tip of his umbrella and the invisible vices that had locked him in place disappeared, almost letting the boy fall the rest of the way to the ground before he got his balance back.

"What the hell was that?"

"Magic," the man said mysteriously before dropping back into the faintly excited authoritative buzz that Mickey was beginning to suspect was his normal way of speaking. "Or maybe applied telekinesis, a specialized tractor beam, or any other number of options operating at various levels of fantasticalness. It's your choice whether or not you want to do in the wizard, but everyone knows that a good magician never reveals all his tricks."

"…'fantasticalness' is a word?" Mickey asked before mentally kicking himself for his first question being about word choice of all things.

The man didn't look overly bothered by it. In fact, he managed to look even more amused. "Yes. And, being that I was a thesaurus in a former life, I would know."

"How's that work out?" Mickey fought the urge to kick himself in real life. The dumb questions just kept coming, didn't they?

"Rainbows. Also being shot by energy beams and hitting your head on the edge of a table for various, all admittedly somewhat unclear, reasons. Not particularly fun. But I believe introductions are in order."

The man tipped his hat and, tucking his umbrella under his other arm in an effortlessly smooth motion, gave a small bow at the waist. "Ezekiel Septimus Sterling. Zeke to my friends, but I will answer to 'Professor' if you must insist on formality."

Of all my alters, it was probably Zeke I trusted the most. Strange, considering that I'd never trusted the Seventh Doctor during my time as a simple viewer of Doctor Who in my first life, but we were both long past both respective points. He'd relaxed and improved his people skills, while I'd… gone the other direction, I guess, though there wasn't much to lose in the second department. But I did trust him to see things that I would miss or overcomplicate with my fucked thought process and reel me in when Selby was unable to do so. One could almost call the relationship 'symbiotic' and, in using a summon charge to send him after Mickey, I was now experiencing that sensation usually called 'buyer's remorse'.

"I still can't believe she'd run off like that," the Doctor was saying for maybe the fifth time since we'd started following the blonde's trail through the streets of the alternate London. The conversation was old, boring, and beginning to make murder look appealing, but thankfully it didn't require a verbal response, leaving me to have a good look around this alternate London.

While the majority of things were the same as in the last Earth, there was a distinct blend of technology that had never quite existed in the 'default' setting of 2007. Flip phones, smartphones, and Bluetooth ear sets were sharing the same street as Earpods, half the posters hanging featured moving pictures and another quarter were LED screens going through more complicated motions, and the shadow of zeppelins flying above occasionally blotting out the sunlight over us. There was a newspaper stand selling glossy prints with moving pictures, the titles largely ignored by a public that seemed half-glued to their more convenient electronics.

Somethings stayed the same I suppose, though how the Earpods were better than Bluetooth without grabbing and disassembling one, I couldn't say, though I could make a guess about what it was capable of from what I could remember of the episode.

Mind control. Memory hacking. How would that translate into 'consumer friendly product'? Mentally executable commands, straight electronic to brain interface?

Maybe it was packaged with a contact lens that was an improvement on smartglasses, allowing for a visual component for users to work with. That would fit with the relative advancement of technology and the Cybermen just over this world's horizon.

I glanced back the other way, only to find that the Doctor was looking at me with a faintly expectant expression. Ah, I was supposed to give a response.

I raised an eyebrow at him. "My turn to talk? Good. Let's start off with the fact that I don't believe you, because I seem to recall a certain time travelling alien making some comment about a certain blonde almost causing a paradox 'the last time she met her father'… oh, maybe an hour or so ago?"

The Time Lord had enough decency to look sheepish for a moment, bringing my focus back to him. "Well, yeah, but she was still pretty new to the whole time travel business back then…"

My other eyebrow rose to meet the other. "Are you saying that nearly breaking the universe is an acceptable part of the learning curve?"

"No! It's just… Rose's father is very important to her. I should have guessed she would do this after seeing that advertisement anyway."

And with both my eyebrows already in the upright position, the only way left to look more sarcastic was to roll my eyes. "And that's why you should have used Reversed Scotty Time."

"What?"

"You've heard of Scotty Time, right?"

"Yes, it's the thing where you give someone an inflated number when they ask you how long you need to do something, so that way you look suitably impressive when you do it in a quarter of the time. Do it all the time," the Doctor recited in a bored 'move on with it' sort of tone. "I don't see how–"

"Reverse the polarity," I interrupted, resisting the urge to do a proper Third Doctor imitation only by a hair. There was still probably a touch of the voice around the edges, carrying the accent through clearly enough to make the Time Lord react with surprise.

"What?"

I exhaled through my teeth. Alright. "Do it backwards," I explained slowly. "Lie. Deceive. Twist the facts. Say 'oh, it'll only be a minute' when it'll really take an hour. Treat it like your date when you're fixing your hair. That would have least kept them in the TARDIS, rather neatly letting us avoid this goose chase entirely."

The Doctor's hand went up to his head at the 'hair' comment, only to drop down to his hip as he assumed a faintly disapproving pose. "Lying? Delaine, I'm shocked that you'd think I'd stoop to such levels. Absolutely shocked."

Now that was a whopper, if slightly more sarcasm laden than the typical fib. "You subjected me to white torture because I said something you didn't like."

"Accidentally. Honestly, I only put you in the Zero Room so you wouldn't run away. The place is supposed to have a relaxing effect on people, but I guess it's in your personality to be contrary." The Doctor shuffled his shoulders under his coat before adopting a mulish expression. "Besides, that 'something' was very dangerous information. Had to figure out how you got it."

The eyebrow was back up again. "Did you?"

The Time Lord looked to the side and gave an awkward fake cough.

Idiot. I turned my focus back to the task of picking Rose Tyler out from the crowd. Couldn't be that many five foot five blondes running around in bright fucking orange… aha!

Rose was sitting on a bench not that far along, looking at her phone with a forlorn look. Great.

The Doctor seemed to pick up on my annoyance, casting what he probably thought was a reassuring look my way. "Don't worry about it," he told me before he went over to the blonde and fell into a hushed conversation that carried on for a few minutes.

I looked up at the sky, wishing for a merciful deity to throw a convenient lightning bolt my way. Unfortunately, I'd never found myself over popular with gods.

"Uuugh okay, I give up," the Doctor groaned loudly, drawing my attention back to the pair. "Give me the phone, I'll find the address."

Uuuuuuuuugh.

Author's Notes

Okay, sorry for taking so long to come up with this chapter. I just got over a month long depression funk, had a family emergency pop up, legal stuff, and rewrote several sections of this multiple times because the results didn't quite work. The last section was a particular bitch until I made like the Doctor and just gave up. Could have been better, but I just couldn't find out how.

Also there were some other things that I will explain… right now.

As some people may have guessed by this point; a lot of stuff has changed since I started writing this fic. Stuff in my personal notes has shifted around, stuff that I've mentioned in this story shifted the line it was following, character dynamics (would you believe that Delaine was supposed to be one of the more average main characters of Chains Adventurous at first?). Which is why I'm backtracking to previous / early chapters and rewriting certain bits to make everything more internally consistent, ex: moving the magic testing from the end of Tooth And Claw to the beginning of The Christmas Invasion, because me establishing Delaine's affinity for and ability to sense magic (established kind of on accident in the last chapter) makes her not realizing that she's in an anti-magic universe until she tries to use a spell a total plot-hole.

This won't be a total rewrite, because I would like to move forward on this story rather than starting over again, but early chapters especially will be seeing some pretty big changes as I take advantage of improved characterization and understanding of the general mood of the story. The first six chapters have gotten this treatment and been reposted on this fic specifically, so you might want to check that out. The fact that I was able to do that over the course of… like two days should tell you how intense these fixes are (generally not very). Really, the first chapter got the lions share and then the rest was just spit and polish. I'll work on the rest when I get the motivation/time.

I've removed the character Eitri who originally gave the exposition on the Sycorax to Harriet Jones, not only because my notes for another fic precluded his existing (making Delaine the Asgardian for the MCU fic, thus reducing some character juggling and making the storylines smoother), but also because I couldn't justify him existing when Zeke would know all that stuff firsthand (he was a slightly later development, as you may have guessed by the creation of the plot hole).

Also I got tired of writing Eitri's name. A side effect of constructing something cool but unwieldy, like overcomplicated anime swords, costumes, and hairstyles.

Arashi – Hopefully this chapter answered your questions about the telepathic contact and if it isn't clear; the headbutt was used as a telephatic interface in an Eleventh Doctor episode, but also it would work as a distraction to get her guard down.

As to why Delaine might not have questioned Eight's presence… well, apart from what she explained in her internal monologue, she knows the show (and associated properties) and would be well apprised of the fact that the Eighth Doctor is mostly harmless.

At least when dealing with his friends. And discounting the universe's tendency to take a baseball bat to his happiness.

With regards to Delaine's power levels… At full power in a universe compatible with her full (and I mean, like everyone of her alters chipping in with their powers) nature, she (or any other alter should they be so inclined when in control) could very easily destroy an Earth-sized planet in the span of… ten to fifteen minutes. And this is a 'reduce to rubble' type thing. But this would require using every piece of power they have and could possibly end up killing them between the strain and drain following it.

On a personal level… Delaine's a lot less of a threat, but still distinctly dangerous, especially compared to some other alters. I'm 'designing' my characters to have certain power preferences, which are usually ones that they pick up during jumps they are in control, some of which I'm also specifying to work best or exclusively for the alters in question, either because they are hard to control or semi-separate entities who are picky about which alter they interact with. This doesn't mean that any given alter is more or less dangerous than another, barring personalities and the 'summon' thing, which strictly limits them to the powers/weapons they received during their control periods, but they do tend to 'specialize'.

Delaine's 'specializations' – in case you haven't seen the character sheet on the AO3 version of this series where there are more than a few explanations for everything that's going on – are half-magic and almost entirely combat/violence based, with her most powerful ability being entirely magic-based, which means that she is incredibly unsuited to the Doctor's Universe both in a physical and storytelling sense. Pretty much all she has to work with out of her own power set is Aura (pretty much basic Chi powers that are good for detecting things and punching up close and at range), a three-tiered alt-form from the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon jump, and her mechanical/technical abilities (both in repair and driving). Unfortunately, because she's trying to pass as 'normal' for the time being, this actually leaves her with the last and least impressive of her powers, paired with whatever 'mundane' skills she has.

As to seeing more of her 'badass' powers… that's what I have planned.

Delaine's reference to 'the Rider' should be pretty clear to anyone who's checked the bio I posted on the AO3 version of the series (which I am going to keep plugging until the end of time because it's going to save me on a lot of drama on explaining what she or any other alter can and can't do as it becomes more complete), but to those who don't visit that site, one of her earlier jumps was Ghost Rider.

To further clarify for those who don't read comics and can't sit through a Nic Cage movie, the Ghost Rider is… well, the usual recipe is to have make a deal with the devil and have a spirit of vengeance shoved into your body. Then you become a flaming skeleton at night/in the presence of evil/whenever the plot demands it, universally with some kind of cool ride at your disposal and almost always wearing leather. Powers include; hellfire (which burns a victim based on how awful a person they are), the ability to channel said hellfire through objects such as machinery, weapons, and the occasional animal mount, and the Penance Stare, which takes every single bit of pain the person it's being used on ever inflicted on anyone in their lives and turns it back on them instantly. This usually results in catatonia or death (barring certain exceptions).

To get a better glimpse at the version I'm using, try seeing if you can find any of the fight scenes from Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance on Youtube. I apologize in advance for the weird camera work and editing choices they employed.

With regards to Rose's bedazzled Nokia (probably a 3120, given her original year of origin and likely price range); I remembered and saw it pointed out that she originally had a different phone that the Doctor upgraded, but I couldn't find a good shot of it in The End Of The World and I couldn't be bothered to rewatch half of Series One on the off chance there was a clear shot of it, so I just gave her something I thought would suit her; a pink, mostly invincible, era and budget-appropriate phone that is extra glittery thanks to her own actions. After all, she is a teenage girl and if I had been allowed to customize anything I owned, I would have done a lot of stuff too (not in pink though).

Yaaaaay, Zeke has finally shown up in the flesh!

I redesigned the Earpods into less of a directly-wired to brain Bluetooth thing to something similar to those Necomimi Cat Ears… except more powerful and precise in their ability to read (and in turn, manipulate) brainwaves. It felt like a realistic leap in technology from smartphones to hands-free capabilities and it also would make sense that the ability to manipulate aspects of the brain could be used both to relay information and take control of motor impulses. I imagine the Cybermen themselves feature a more invasive brain-computer interface that allows for more precise translation of impulse to action.

I also wrote them as being a more class exclusive status item, like how really rich people used to be the only people with smart phones and everyone else had to settle for sidekicks and Nokias… which also builds into why there would be Cybermen walking around collecting people later, which wouldn't be a problem if everyone had Earpods like how it was implied in the original two parter.

Anyway, it might be another long wait until the next chapter (or not), but I hope you all enjoyed this one!