The sewer system consisted of a few very long corridors connecting the various buildings and towers underneath Castle Miramys. Rose was sure that, if he were here, the Doctor would have already started marvelling at the ingenuity of the builders and concluded something new about the nature of this universe.
Rose could only think about the smell; if she had needed any proof that Illantis were humans, this was it.
Using one of the Torchwood-gadgets – a mapping tool, specifically developed for underground missions like these – Rose created a map of the sewers. It took her a good half hour, during which time she kept expecting to find a hint of whatever this great evil was supposed to be. But it was only after she'd mapped out the entire castle that she found the one place she hadn't been to yet: underneath the tower with the Dragon's Bane.
It didn't take her long to find a tunnel leading toward it, but when she did, she stopped and frowned.
The corridor was clogged with barrels.
A dead end, she thought. Scrunching up her mouth, she inspected the barrier more closely, feeling the material and rapping her knuckles against it. They were hollow, from what she could tell. Maybe she could move them?
But she couldn't reach the highest barrels, and when she tried lifting two stacked barrels at once, she realised she wasn't strong enough.
But then she noticed a gap between the rows of barrels and the right-side wall. It could have simple been a storage issue; had the wall been half a metre broader, there would be another stack of barrels.
But Rose knew it had to be more than that.
She put her back against the ice-cold stone wall and began crab-walking into the gap, shining her torch into the darkness.
She grinned when, after a couple of rows, the space opened up.
'Alright, Lara Croft!' she exclaimed to herself.
She was still surrounded by barrels, but her torch now revealed a makeshift corridor snaking through the stacks. The sound of her boots splashing softly reminded her that the thin stream of the sewer was still there, although the stench was gone. Nobody was using a toilet in that tower, she assumed.
The barrel-walled corridor grew larger as the barrels decreased in number, until her torch illuminated the end of the tunnel.
There stood a statue.
It was not another half-naked Illanti, carved from stone, but a machine, with broad shoulder armour, thick legs, and obvious mechanical joints.
A robot.
It stood in front of a massive two-winged wooden door, reminding Rose of the Royal Guards that had barred their way to Miramys' chamber. Carefully, Rose moved closer. It wasn't giving off a particularly evil vibe, after all. She pulled out her phone and took a picture of it, eager to send her find to the Doctor – when the sound of an electronic beeping made her freeze. A sudden mechanical whirring came from the statue. It sounded sharp and loud in the stillness underground, and it sent a shiver of adrenaline up her spine. She cursed as she realised that she must have triggered some sort of mechanism in the robot.
The whirr snapped into a serious of loud clicks that echoed from the walls, and the robot jerked slowly to life. Two bright red lights appeared on a black screen, its equivalent of a face, and the tunnel was cast into an alarming crimson hue.
Rose backed away slowly. The beam of its eyes went straight out into the tunnel – it hadn't seen her. Not yet, at least. She quickly reached for the multi-purpose belt and pulled out an EMP-bean.
'Incursion detected,' the robot shouted with a painfully loud electronic voice that sounded disturbingly close to the metallic voices of both Cybermen and Daleks. It gave her a shiver, but Rose steeled herself. 'State your identification and purpose,' she shouted at the robot.
'Guardian One. My purpose is to follow orders.'
'OK, that's useless. Guardian One, what are your orders?'
'My orders are clear and simple.'
'Great. Er, who gave you your orders?'
'Response denied. I only answer to the King.'
Rose grinned. 'Got ya!'
'Conversation ceases. Orders are now being executed.'
The robot took a step with its massive foot, broadening its stance. Its posture shifted into a crouch, and its thick shoulder plates slowly opened up, revealing a number of muzzles that pointed at Rose. 'Alright, that's enough,' she said, and brandished the EMP-bean – only to drop it in shock when a laser beam shot right past her nose.
'Recalibrating targeting array,' Guardian One said. Rose frantically looked for her weapon on the floor, but it had fallen into the murky sewage water. She shone her torch at it, and whirled her hands through the sludge, but her fingers found nothing.
'Recalibration successful!' Guardian One announced.
Swearing, Rose bolted behind one of the barrels, which got obliterated by a laser beam just a moment later. Splinters and broken staves filled the air as she jumped behind another row of barrels, which promptly suffered the same fate. Rose hastened from cover to cover, ducking below deadly laser beams, scrambling to get away from the murderous robot. When she was halfway through the tunnel, Guardian One changed its strategy. The deadly laser barrage stopped, and instead its heavy metal feet began pounding the stone floor. Rose cursed, and ran.
When she was far enough, she pulled out her mapping device. The route back to the top was clearly indicated. With the Doctor's help, they would get past the robot and look into what he was guarding.
On the other hand... in her mind a plan was already forming for how she could deal with this trigger-happy guard dog herself.
A plan that involved quite a lot of running.
But should she risk it? Could she take this one on by herself?
Well... she doubted the Doctor was in any position to help at the moment, since the entire castle was looking for them. Besides, he could be in trouble himself.
Rose took a deep breath. If he was less Timelord now, then she just had to bring more Lara Croft. And she knew how to do that; she had visited countless universes in search of the Doctor, all while the very fabric of the multiverse had started to disintegrate, and through all the turmoil she had handled herself quite well.
She wasn't a companion anymore. She was Rose Tyler, Defender of Earth – or in this case Pickles, or whatever the Doctor had called this world. A killer robot was child's play for her, wasn't it?
The pounding grew louder, and Rose began to run.
He hadn't lied about his age, the Doctor thought; his face was just as wrinkly as before the shimmer had worn off. His species' appearance bore some semblance to both humans and cactus plants, except the pointy tips of his hair-like extrusions were mostly flaccid and black, curving downward.
The Doctor strode round the room, hands in his pockets, eyes narrowed on the spike-headed green alien. 'So, Qu'alandari, First advisor to Scrooge McDuck. What's your real name, then?'
The alien didn't seem at all impressed by having been found out. 'Blorph'g,' he replied.
The Doctor bristled. 'Well that was rude. I think?'
The man gave a generous smile. 'My name is Blorph'g, and I'm a Vinvocci.'
'Ah,' said the Doctor, nodding slowly as he kept pacing. If Rose had been here, she would now be struggling to keep herself from laughing. 'Right,' he went on, shaking the thought from his mind. 'Blorph'g. Am I pronouncing that correctly?'
'Perfect.'
'I see. Like Arnie, then. Human, me. Well, sort of. Half-human, half-Timelord. Well, Timelord with a human body and lifespan. It's complicated. And a little disturbing, to be honest.' He whirled around, pointing his finger at Blorph'g's nose. 'Where's your space ship?'
The Vinvocci smiled a friendly smile. 'I didn't get here in a space ship, or by any other conventional means, for that matter.'
'Conventional means?' he asked, noting the way Blorph'g had emphasised the words.
Blorph'g raised a cheeky eyebrow. 'I heard some people travel via spiked metal balls.'
'Rhombic triacontahedron. Not that I'd know anything about such a thing. But it sounds like a brilliant way to travel.'
Blorph'g's friendly smile put the Doctor strangely at ease. 'Please, Doctor. I think we can both be honest with each other.'
The Doctor was surprised to be smiling back. He'd found Blorph'g's easy way of talking and sharing suspicious at first. But it also made sense. It had likely been an eternity since he'd been able to simply talk with someone who understood technology that was more complex than hammers and catapults.
Pondering, the Doctor looked about the place, admiring all the gadget-y things that were both out of place and out of time. 'How did you end up here, then?' he continued, while touching a tool that was as alien as it was dead. 'Like the rest of these, I suppose?'
The green man took a deep breath before he began telling his story. 'I was part of a scavenger crew. We found the wreckage of an ancient Varrachian slave trader. Most of the hard parts were still intact, ready for scrapping. It was a good haul. We were looking at quite the party once we could return home.' The Vinvocci sighed. 'I was near one of the pacifier pods when it happened.'
'When what happened?'
The green man's expression withered as he recalled the event. 'It was like a pathway opened up in mid air, without door or frame. I called for the others, when something… grabbed at me, sort of. There was a mighty pull, yanking me off my feet, and then I was tumbling through space, along with the pod. Came out on this world.'
'When was this?' asked the Doctor, brows furrowed deeply.
'Thirty years ago.'
There was sadness in his eyes when he said it, and the Doctor knew that he had lost people that day. And he was still not quite over it.
'I'm sorry.'
The green alien turned and continued telling his story. 'I had to get crafty, fast. Had to learn how to recharge my shimmer. Thankfully I found this primitive combustion engine in one of the homes. The family had put it up there as a shrine.' He pointed at an eight-cylinder engine that sat on one of the work benches, almost completely obscured by a set of buckets. Someone had written the letters 'E.J.' on it with yellow colour, and the Doctor wondered if the TARDIS' translation circuits were playing a trick on him. 'Saved my life, that little tool. I learned how to make fuel from grain, and started making a living as a tinkerer.' He chuckled.
'Then what happened?'
'Felgorn.'
'Right.'
'The pacifier pod was broken, but the machine inside was almost fully intact. The perfect tool against the creature. I just had to substitute a few parts.'
The Doctor looked again at the two blinking red lights on the machine's screen. 'A psionic wave oscillator and a power core.'
Blorph'g gasped. 'You read Varrachian?'
'Among other things. So how are you doing it? No, wait, let me figure it out.' He gazed at the machine, brows furrowed, deep in thought. 'The king's staff!' he suddenly shouted. 'You saw the anamoeta crystal fitted inside it. That's why you approached him in the first place, isn't it?'
His face broke into a sly smirk. 'You are sharp, Doctor.'
'How did you convince him to go along with your idea?'
Blorph'g chuckled. 'Oh, that was the easy part. I simply showed him my real form. He was calm as a brick. A practical mind in a world of superstition. He told his workers and servants to heed my every order, and together we built the Dragon's Bane.'
The Doctor nodded with appreciation. Even he had to admit that the king's quick and flexible thinking had most definitely saved lives. He huffed, his smile widening. 'Brilliant... substituting a psionic wave oscillator with an anamoeta crystal. Clever cactus you are!' He returned to the screen and the two blinking lights. 'And the power core?'
'Seventy of those are installed in the tower underneath us,' Blorph'g said proudly, pointing at the E.J.-labelled combustion engine.
'Seventy?' the Doctor exclaimed. 'You should only need four, maybe five. Your conversion process must be rubbish.'
Blorph'g laughed out loudly at that. 'I'm afraid it is.'
'So, how does it work, then? You recharge the power core with fuel from grain, and the king comes up here with his staff every time the big flappety-flap appears?'
'Precisely.'
'Why not just leave the staff up here with a servant?' The Doctor of course knew the answer, but he still wanted to see Blorph'g's reaction.
It was a defeated sigh. 'The king suffered under the persecution of humans. His race would have been wiped out if Felgorn hadn't appeared. You really can't blame them for thinking the dragon was their divine saviour.'
The Doctor was silent; inside, he was struggling not to react to the righteous anger he was feeling. The king had embraced hatred and revenge, and nothing and no one was stopping him.
'All that is going to change soon, though,' Blorph'g said then, grim-looking.
'What do you mean?'
'Well, I don't read Varrachian, but even I was able to figure out that this machine only allows for a hundred and fifty uses.'
The Doctor's expression turned very serious. 'How many left?'
'Four.'
'Blimey. I came just in time, then didn't I?' He started pressing buttons on the machine, swiftly gathering the nature of the problem.
'Er, Doctor, that's not the right console. If you let me help you, I can show you the menu of the administrative console...'
But the Doctor was moving through the information with lightning speed, his brows furrowing with concern. 'That's quite an upgrade,' he said finally. 'This isn't a pacifier. It's a mind controller. You're not calming Felgorn's spirits, you're actively forcing him away by controlling his every action.'
The Doctor then gave Blorph'g a look he couldn't misunderstand. 'The king doesn't know,' the advisor quickly said.
'And he must never learn it,' the Doctor said sternly. He went back to investigating the issue with the Varrachian pacifier – or rather mind controller – while secretly working out his own scheme.
'It's not the end of the world,' he said after just a few moments. 'All you need is an overseer's clearance to reset the number back to a hundred and fifty.' He moved a long arm behind his head and scratched his nape. 'I could solve this in two seconds with my sonic. Nevermind. Show me your work bench.'
Blorph'g eagerly complied, producing every tool and gadget he could possibly find among the disorganisation of his work place. The Doctor looked at all of it, nodded here and winced there, and finally turned to the green alien to give his assessment.
'Thirty minutes, I'd say. Tops.'
Rose waited for the heavy footsteps to grow louder. Already the red light glowed bright against the sewer walls. Guardian One's voice boomed, 'Orders are being executed.'
She waited for it to turn the corner and see her. 'Oi! Your orders are running away from you!'
The robot began lumbering after her. Rose planted a magnetic signal emitter that would attach itself to Guardian One once it passed over it, and then she dashed.
For the second time that day, Rose made her way through the underground sewer system of Castle Miramys. On her map, she could clearly see the magnetic tracker's position relative to her own. From now on, it was child's play. She ended up making the entire lap, passing underneath every single tower, until she finally got back to the one that interested her. By then she was sweating and panting. She knew that the Doctor probably could have resolved the entire situation in a much more elegant way, but Rose felt she had a point to prove to herself. She arrived in the corridor, passed over the remains of countless wooden barrels, and quickly looked for the EMP-bean she had dropped in the sewage. Ironically, she found it in a matter of seconds.
When Guardian One returned, she hid herself behind a pile of broken wood. This time, she kept her thumb ready over the button.
The robot slowly advanced, shouting its orders. 'Target escaped. Battery levels at Eighty-eight percent. Resuming guard pos-' it froze, then shouted: 'Evidence of foreign presence detected! Orders are being executed!'
Rose activated the EMP-bean. It emitted a loud whistle, pitching higher for a tense moment, until a shockwave of crackling light erupted from the device, spreading out through the tunnel. It enveloped the robot which immediately began to shudder, its surface covered in visible static, crackling and bristling as its systems overloaded. It struggled to move, its electronic voice shouting as if in pain – and then it simply slumped into itself.
It was not dead yet.
'Countermeasures successful,' its voice grated, suddenly deep and very, very slow. 'Battery drainage successful. Processors protected. Recharge required. Recharge required. Recharge required.' It went on to repeat this over and over. Rose looked at it with both pride and apprehension. She'd defeated it, but the EMP had failed to fry its circuits and take it out completely. Rose assumed it had been built to withstand such an attack. It likely was some kind of war machine.
She quickly took a picture of the disabled robot, and the mess it had made of the barrels. Then she turned to look at her prize: the door Guardian One had been protecting. It was a massive gate – wooden, with metal reinforcements. Rose looked for a lock, but there was none. She pushed against the gate, which, to her surprise, simply swung open. Obviously, she thought. Don't need a lock, if you have a guardian killer robot to keep people out.
What she found behind the door rooted her to the spot.
'That would be the jackpot.'
In front of her stood something that – like her new pal Guardian One – definitely didn't belong here. But while the shooty robot had been practical and crude, with a clear purpose, this thing was worlds more alien... Even Rose could tell it had come from some place entirely different in this universe.
It looked like a miniature star, hovering inside a semi-spherical receptacle that looked a lot like a trophy cup growing out from a socket. The receptacle's round top was a framework made up of elegant curves and arches through which the tiny sun glared, its light making the material into black silhouettes and shapes. The framework slowly revolved inside its socket, a movement so quiet Rose got the impression she was watching a movie on mute.
It was as if she was looking at a star inside some artist's elegant masterpiece; or an eye, watching through a lens. Because as it kept turning, the framework revealed a wide, circular opening to one side, so it appeared as if it was peering around the room. It gave her a shiver as it passed by, making her feel captured.
Rose walked carefully, approaching the star step by step. After Guardian One, she figured that even the tiniest misstep could start a robot uprising. There was no interface, or at least nothing she recognised as one. The surface of the socket was covered in straight lines, glowing in an eerie turquoise light, and running parallel or diagonal to each other like on a computer chip, branching at precise angles.
She pulled out the tricorder – like all her Torchwood equipment it was thankfully both water- and EMP-proof. However, she couldn't make sense of the readings she was getting. Screwing up her mouth, she got out the camera and started taking pictures. This time she sent them to the Doctor right away.
The thing cast a ghostly glow onto the simple masonry of the floor and walls surrounding it. The room itself had to be smaller than the tower's girth, but it looked very big to Rose. Probably because it was completely empty apart from the fascinating thing in its centre.
As she rounded it, she found a two-tiered, wooden scaffolding close to the wall. The simple structure clashed hard with the room's brain-from-another-dimension-vibe. Ontop of the scaffolding waited the next surprise: five common car engines were all connected to a monster of a car battery propped up in the middle, nestled into a tangle of hoses and wires. A cable flared up from it and disappeared into the ceiling, to funnel electricity to some apparatus.
Five exhaust pipes led to another opening in the ceiling, reminding Rose of the big metal tube that was spitting fumes into the air. She remembered the Doctor commenting on the smell; like someone had left their car running. 'Can't wait for him to make sense of all this,' she said with a smile, and shot a couple more pictures, sending them to the Doctor. Behind the scaffolding, she spied another huge door, and behind that she found more barrels. A distinct smell of gasoline wafted at her when as she approached them. She tried to lift one, but they were heavy with a sloshing liquid. Gasoline for these engines? What was going on?
A glance at the time, and she decided that she'd done her job uncovering all these mysteries. She'd let the Doctor figure out the rest. With a last look around the room and its weird contents, she closed the door behind her and walked past the quietly lamenting Guardian One. She stepped over broken barrels, hoping this mess wouldn't make problems for them in the future. She doubted it would go unnoticed.
She found the stairs and quickly checked for a message from the Doctor. 'Time to feed the crows,' he had texted her. Rose took a deep breath and ascended. Carefully she snuck out of the door to the sewers, only to find that the big community bathroom was now empty. She considered the opportunity. Her boots and cargo pants were stained from the sewage water, and a nasty stench clung to her, betraying her trespassing to everyone with eyes and a nose.
She guessed that the angels were probably going to tie the mess in the sewers to her. But she didn't need to make it easy for them.
She found a brush and some soap to clean her boots and pants, wishing she could linger in a full bath for an hour or so. She found multiple plates with oils that smelled refreshingly of lime. She applied them to her clothing, sniffed herself, nodded, and looked for the door.
