Intelligent Design

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"Now, Doctor!" Stral roared angrily as he pointed to the device in front of him. They were in a large room on the Planet Chaos, in the temple of the Grace. The stocky Sontaran had a rheon-carbide rod pointed at Alison's head. "Activate the device."

"And if I refuse you'll what, kill Alison I suppose?" The Doctor asked dismissively.

"I am glad your claimed intelligence is true." Stral replied with a smiling sneer as he jabbed the rod in the back of Allison's dense, black hair. The young woman winced, the dark skin of her cheeks tightening during the impact. He inflected his head towards a device standing on a dais. "In put the code."

"You really think I'll let you just have access to the Chaos Pool?" The Doctor asked, narrowing his sharp blue eyes, piercing along the sharp angular features of his face. He looked back at the portcullis on the floor behind him, behind which was a great pool of omniversal fundamentality. He shook his head, his black hair swooshed and swept over his skull in a perfectly disorganized rabble, with streams of white piercing the darkness like strikes of lightning during a midnight storm. "My intelligence may be confirmed to you but I cannot say that the reciprocal holds true for me, Sontaran. I will not give you access to omniversal power."

"You will, or the girl dies, Time Lord!" Stral snorted, pressing the rheon-carbide even more harshly against Alison's head. "Do not doubt my intent, Doctor, I am Stral the Merciless, Victor of the Mangrat Massacre, Killer of the Swanthshee…" The Sontaran grabbed Alison by the back of her shirt and lifted her slightly so as to put the carbide rod to her throat. "Do you truly think I will hesitate to kill one insignificant girl from Earth?"

"Oi!" Alison growled looking up at the potato-bodied warmonger, as the rod pushed hard against her carotid artery.

"Fine, fine, Stral. You've proven your point." The Doctor gritted his teeth. The Doctor walked towards Stral towards the device on the dais that the Sontaran was standing near. His black cape rustled with his body movements, his hand reaching into the pocket of his black long-tailed coat. The fingers of his free hand splayed over the input interface. "Now, if I remember correctly it's based upon chromatic harmony…good thing I studied under Mozart during his dying days…"

"Now's not the time for bragging, ya swot…" Alison growled softly.

"There's always time for bragging!" The Doctor admonished. "Especially when I do this!"

The cape swept up as the Doctor drew his sonic screwdriver from his pocket. The whirring resonated with the rheon-carbide. The rod flew from Stral's hand clattering loudly as it bounced towards a large metallic portcullis in the center of the room. Stral roared in anger as he tossed Alison to the Doctor and leapt for the rod. The Doctor caught the woman as Stral rose to his feet, pointing the rod at both of them.

"Now what?" Alison asked quietly.

"Honestly, I had hoped you had the rest of the plan." The Doctor replied. She glared at him and he furrowed his brows. "Well, I can't be expected to think of all the plans all the time!"

"You have made a grave tactical error, Doctor. If you think I will not kill the girl, even now!" Stral growled as he brought the rod up. The Doctor lifted his screwdriver. Stral smirked, and slid is interior distal digit over the rod. The whirring of the screwdrive did nothing. "Dissonance amplifier, enabled…"

There was a horrible buzzing noise. The Doctor felt Alison's body stiffen. There was a gawping look on her face as if she was trying to breathe underwater. The sparkle in her eyes dimmed and then he felt her body go lax in his arms.

"Alison!" The Doctor shouted as he looked at her, felt her neck for a pulse and found none.

"There's no surviving a shot at this setting Doctor, not even for a Time Lord." Stral said as he pointed the rod at the Doctor's head.

The Doctor's chin tightened, his teeth locked into one another. He gently put Alison down and slowly turned his head to Stral. A cold, dismissive smirk played across his lips. "You really want the Chaos Pool? Want control of the Grace?"

"If you give it to me I may let you live…" Stral said a smile crooked on his face, misshapened by a scar that cut up from his lip to his eye.

"Oh, no one is surviving today…" The Doctor said as he turned to the dais, to the input device and splayed both hands. "I was here once before, you know, long time ago. I was still wearing vegan hors d'oeuvres on my jacket lapel. It was all different yet, startlingly the same." He glared down at the dais and then sliced a look, sidelong to Stral. "This device will give a person the power over beings that are the closest things to gods in the omniverse. Are you ready for that kind of power, Stral? That kind of responsibility!?"

"I will change all of time, and space, every Sontaran defeat will become a victory! Stop stalling, Doctor! ACTIVATE THE DEVICE!" Stral chorused as he stepped forward, the rod still pointed at the Doctor's head.

"Alright then, your wish is my command…" The Doctor's hands fell onto the device and played; colors and sounds and tastes filled the room as the Doctor's fingers danced on the keys.

The portcullis hissed loudly. The room filled with an ethereal glow. Stral turned to look at it. The power was rising up out of the Chaos Pool, the Grace was materializing looking for a host to reside in. With Stral distracted, the Doctor slipped his pinky from the intended position to the next. The great power of the Grace flew past Stral. The Sontaran, realizing the trick, turned on the Doctor his rod poised to fire. It however was too late.

Stral disappeared, not just from that location, but to all of history. The Doctor narrowed his eyes and furrowed his brow; the power coursed through his veins. It burned as the Grace simply, allowed the Doctor to be. Stral was a symptom, not the disease and the Doctor knew this disease, knew the apathy of good, the tyranny of evil. He remembered the Invasion of Gallifrey, remembered watching everyone he loved die, forcing him to construct shadows of them trapped in his TARDIS. Even on small scales good would sit by the side and watch an old woman be murdered without note. He looked down at Alison; good would stand powerless as friends are killed in meaningless acts of pettiness. Energy snapped between his teeth as he indulged in panuniversal self-loathing.

The Doctor glared into eternity. "I could re-write it all, destroy it all and reconstitute it. Make it better, make it in my image!

"Is this what she'd want?" A voice asked from behind him.

The Doctor turned his head. The TARDIS had materialized sometime in his wrath. In the doorway stood a shadow of a friend, a shade of metal, poly-organic fabric and circuits, dressed in black, his face old, and his hair black with fringes frosted in white, his lip and chin adorned in a black, peppered with white, semi-organic nano-fiber Van Dykean beard.

"It isn't about what she wants!" The Doctor roared.

"Of course it is…" The android said quietly. "It always is, eventually. Now, are you really going to do it? Be honest, because, I've known you most of your life, and all of my-" He hesitated and sighed in indignation, "-unseemly afterlife. And frankly, for all your bluster you aren't hard enough."

"This is wrong!" The Doctor snarled, or tried to but it seemed to intermix with a lost sob of grief as he glared down at Alison.

"Yes, I suppose young Miss Cheney would have lived quite a bit happier without meeting you at all…" the friend said quietly, as he leaned against the frame of the TARDIS door. "Well, until the Shalka killed her at least, but then again death has its own rewards…" The visage of his friend looked up at the Doctor, "worth respecting."

"Not just Alison this entire universe has devolved into an unmanageable condition…" The Doctor said not pulling his eyes from Alison's body, his mind slowly wandering elsewhere. "Even you were wronged…"

"I can't argue with that." The android said quietly. "But there's nothing one can do about it…"

"Except when you can…" The Doctor said as he turned and snapped his fingers. The power of the Grace flared and the universe disappeared and the Doctor died, erasing his existence and the wounds it had caused.

He jerked back, that is to say, metaphorically speaking. With no physical body, and no positional existence, the act of 'jerking', and the concept of 'back' were entirely alien concepts, and he being a 'he' was simply the sake of convenience for his transuniversal existence's usage of point loci language. He was aware of the man in the cell floor. The dirty, rat-infested jail was filled with the belabored screams of the dispossessed, insane and a few with discordant moral sensibilities. He had used their unrelenting dreams, madness and nightmares to form every computational analysis on the being known as the Doctor in an aim to destroy them, utterly. All the permutations, this latest simulation, all of it had resulted in the Great Intelligence finally finding his victory, his ultimate, final victory. This incurable wretch would be the snowflake to start the blizzard of the Doctor's destruction, the butterfly that would unleash the typhoon. If the Great Intelligence was to defeat the Doctor he had to stoop to the Doctor's level….

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AN: You really think I had forgotten. Yes I made a quippy joke in relation to it in chapter 24…but here it is in its full glory, the final cinch to cinch up. The final dangling chad of incompatible continuity…we did it everyone. We did it….they said it was impossible…and yes we create new continuity errors along the way…but we did it.