REPOST: Altered State-1
Rebecca K. Dowgiert
Oh, what the hey -- I'll re-post the first two chapters of
Altered State, which is currently generating a mild amount of
controversy. (Haven't heard any complaints from the PMEBers,
though...<grin>)
Don't worry! I'm sure we writers will be responsible, and keep
things from spiralling too out of control...
<quiet evil snickering>
*****************************************************
Oh, a note of warning. The following chapter involves a small
amount of innuendo.
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Doctor Who: Altered State
Chapter One - Initial Confusions
by Alden Bates (al...@bates.wn.planet.gen.nz)
"Hello, I'm the Doctor, and this is my friend Grace."
---
Grace woke in darkness. There was an immediate nagging
feeling that there was something wrong. *Great,* she thought,
*First thing in the morning and I'm already getting bad feelings.*
OK, they had left Gallifrey having sorted out the Key to Time.
She had immediately stumbled to bed, making the excuse that
hopping between alien worlds and encountering powerful ancient
entities and insane Time Lords had worn her out. Nothing wrong
there.
She clambered into a sitting position on the side of her bed.
The nagging feeling was still bothering her. Her pajamas were
puddled on the floor beside the bed, and she definitely remembered
putting them on before going to sleep. She shrugged them back on
to protect herself from the TARDIS's chilly atmosphere and
staggered over to her antique dressing table.
After a moment of waving her arm around over the mirror, she
realized that the cord for the table lamp wasn't there. *OK, I can
handle this.* It would take more than a missing cord to phase
Doctor Grace Holloway.
"Lights please," she said wearily.
The room's illumination factor rose, revealing clean white walls
with inset roundels. *This is new* Grace thought, her interest level
rising. The walls ought to have been ersatz wood paneling, with
tacky carved supports pretending to hold up the ceiling. The new
decor wasn't, in itself, odd since the Doctor had shown her the
TARDIS's internal reconfiguration systems, but the gothic look was
still in as far as he was concerned. There was still something
bothering her; she peered into the mirror, looking across the bed.
Something sat up in the bed. It had tousled light-brown hair and
a childlike look of perplexed puzzlement on its face. The sheets
fell away from its bare chest.
"Grace," said the Doctor in the tone of voice people use when
they discover a library book they've misplaced. "I seem to have
been sleeping in your bed."
There was a pregnant pause as both parties tried to grasp the
situation.
"Would I be sorry if I asked what you're wearing under there?"
Grace asked finally.
The Doctor looked at her with an unreadable expression. "Yes,"
he responded calmly.
"Well..." Grace continued in stunned confusion. "Maybe you'd
like to tell me why you're in my bed."
The Doctor's gaze swept around the room. "I don't know. The
last thing I remember doing is setting the co-ordinates for
nineteenth century France and then dozing off in the armchair in
the console room. I certainly don't remember any... oh no, don't
look." His voice rose in alarm as he stared fixedly across the
room.
It was too late, however: Grace had already spotted the pink
bunny rabbit costume draped over the chair on the other side of the
bed.
"I'm going to go and have a shower," Grace said through gritted
teeth. "And then I'm looking forward to your explanation."
The Doctor sighed and reached for his clothing. It was going to
be one of those days.
***
Dressed in his usual costume of a dark waistcoat, deep green jacket
and brown trousers, the Doctor was looking through the TARDIS data
banks. This job was hampered by the fact that the filing system was
chaotic to the point of randomness. He remembered that Mel had
organized it ages ago and it was orderly enough last night when he
recorded his TARDIS log entry, so its current state of a scattered
mess was an utter mystery.
He was therefore having a great deal of trouble finding what he
wanted. He had found out a lot of stuff he really didn't want to
know, such as some hints about his third incarnation's exact
relationship with UNIT UK, and some even nastier hints about his
academy days. All completely untrue of course. As far as he could
remember.
Grace entered the console room. "Have you seen the
TARDIS wardrobe? I thought the stuff in the bedroom was bad..."
She paused to take in the vastly altered chamber.
The console room was significantly smaller than she remembered
it. There were more roundelled walls and a square scanner screen
mounted by the interior door. The wooden console with pull-down
monitors and arching metal beams had gone and instead there was a
large futuristic gray console with a closed off piston which was
bouncing up and down. The ceiling was the height you'd expect in a
normal building.
The Doctor looked up at her with a look of intense worry. She
had put on gray trousers, a purple velvet smoking jacket and a
light pink shirt. "This was the best I could find," she explained
with a faint smile.
"I _don't_ want to know," the Doctor said firmly. "What I've
found in the data banks is quite disturbing enough."
"OK, what's going on?" Grace leaned against the console. "I
know where the TARDIS tool kit is, remember."
The Doctor rubbed the back of his head unconsciously. "Listen to
this, it's dated as our first meeting on Earth in 1999." He pressed
a switch on the console and his own voice emitted from a small
speaker.
"I was nearing the end of my seventh incarnation, when the Time
Lords contacted me. The Master had been put to trial on Skaro.
The Daleks claimed that he had given their poetry a bad review. In
his defense, my brother called me as a character witness. Despite
my expert testimony, he was exterminated and I departed for
Gallifrey with his remains. Little that I know that he wasn't
actually dead; He was just pretending."
The Doctor flicked another switch. "That's as far back as I dare*
go. I have too much respect for my former companions to look any
further." If anything his excursions into the data banks had left
him even more puzzled.
Grace was trying to absorb the information from the data bank.
"I don't remember you telling me this."
"That's because it's not true. This is the entry I recorded last
night, supposedly." The Doctor pressed another button.
"Grace and I have left Gallifrey after the fiasco with the Key to
Time. The supreme High Council exercised their powers and banished
the Black Guardian to the nether reaches of the Universe, of course.
Grace seems quite annoyed with the whole affair, and I intend to go
to her room tonight with a bottle of Antarian wine and the bunny
outfit to cheer her up. Tomorrow we can continue my search for
Ulysses."
There was a short squawk, and a loud Australian voice
emitted from the console. "You can materialize the TARDIS on the
freighter and save him," it pleaded.
The Doctor frantically punched buttons as the familiar voice of
his fifth incarnation rang out: "Oh, all right then. Anything to
shut you up..."
The Doctor gave the console a hefty thump and gave Grace an
embarrassed look.
Grace shook her head with something that went beyond disbelief
and into the firm territory of incredulous denial. "It didn't
happen like that."
"Exactly," the Doctor nodded. "The entire databank seems to be
inaccurate."
Grace stood motionless for a moment. Frown lines stood out on
her forehead. "A parallel universe?" She remembered the rather
far-fetched story she'd read in school about a world where America
had been taken over by Germany in the Second World War. After
traveling with the Doctor, that story seemed almost plausible.
"Either that or someone hijacked the TARDIS, reconfigured the
interior, rewrote the data banks and stuck me in bed with you.
Beyond having a good laugh at us, I can't think of any motive for
doing that." The Doctor replied briskly. "Besides that, it would
take tremendous power and an extremely sick mind."
"OK, so it's a parallel Universe," Grace said. "Someone still
must've put us here for some reason."
"To get me out of the way probably," the Doctor sunk in thought.
"while they enact some plan or scheme. Using the TARDIS to get
back is out of the question; I've only ever managed something like
it once and that was completely uncontrolled. I think the best plan
is to track down this Ulysses character, since he seems to be a
large part of my alternate self's life."
"OK, so who's Ulysses?" Grace prompted.
"My father, apparently."
***
The TARDIS materialised on a pile of rubble in the centre of a large
number of piles of rubble. It was very obviously a ruined city of
some kind, with torn metal structures jutting from crude piles of
rock. There was a vague fog in the air, wreathing the outcrops and
eddying through metal archways.
The Doctor emerged first and surveyed the terrain. It seemed
vaguely familiar; he had been here before of course, so that would
explain it.
"Skaro!" the Doctor announced as Grace joined him. "Home
planet of the Daleks. this's where the co-ordinates were preset to.
Dreadful place isn't it?"
Grace sniffed at the stench which filled the air and heartily
agreed. There was the faint whiff of something decomposing.
"Now, we're looking for either Ulysses himself or some sort of
clue as to where he might've gone. He's a sort of renegade Time
Lord like me, so he could be in any place or time."
"Any idea what sort of clues?"
The Doctor began clambering down the side of the rubble. "An
object, a map, perhaps an inscription. The last clue was a three
thousand year old sketch of a Dalek on a pharaoh's tomb."
Grace was making a better go of it in her sneakers, but there was
still a lot of noise from rocks clattering down in front of them.
"And you've been looking for him since you left Gallifrey?"
"My alternate self has, yes. Since his first incarnation
apparently."
"So basically we're looking for a guy who an alternate version of
you has been searching for all his lives, and you expect to find him
just like that. No problem, I didn't have any plans for this
afternoon."
"Really, Grace." the Doctor smiled happily at her as they
reached the ground. "If I were you, I'd be far more worried about
what's happened to the versions of us who we replaced."
"Loose in our universe?" Grace thought aloud. "Oh dear."
"Yes. I hope they don't run into anyone I know. It could be
most embarrassing."
***
They hadn't gone far when they came across a shard of metal
protruding from the ground like a splintered tooth. The Doctor
bent down to examine the faded markings on its side.
"Dalek writing," he said, scanning the text. "No, Dalek
_poetry_. And the Daleks aren't going to win any literary awards
for it."
Grace remembered that Daleks she'd seen on Deremar and during
their last quest on Earth in 1963. They hardly seemed the sort of
beings who wrote poetry, unless it was about blowing things up.
The Doctor grasped her by the arm and pulled her down. "Shh,
look," he whispered, pointing.
The Dalek skimming along ten metres away at the bottom of the
slope didn't look much like the ones she had seen before. It was
larger, with a multipronged claw instead of a sucker. As it turned
to survey the territory she noted that it had a double eye-stalk,
giving it a bug-eyed look. The multitude of hemispheres around its
base flashed in a rhythmic pattern like some sort of hypnotic light
display.
Grace slumped down, her back to the metal sheet. "This is
hopeless. Do you seriously expect us to search the entire
planet?"
The Doctor didn't answer her question. Instead he was looking at
the Dalek on the hovering platform that had positioned itself
roughly three metres away and was staring back at him, gun pointed
firmly in the direction of his head.
"Keep very still," he said quietly. "It's either going to shoot
us, or read poetry."
To Be Continued.
Well, this is going to be interesting. We could do with another
companion though. How about the alternate Jadi Morok, male
stripper and philanthropist who does bounty hunting in his spare
time? Maybe not...
Alden Bates.
___ _ _ ___ | Alden Bates | al...@bates.wn.planet.gen.nz9
.' _ `| |_| | _ \ | The daftest things in the Universe, Number 165899
_ _ _ < | A Sontaran with a toupee.
--
"Grace," said the Doctor in the tone of voice people use when
they discover a library book they've misplaced. "I seem to have
been sleeping in your bed."
From: IA#3 - Altered State