Post by Gurgen Hovhanissian on Feb 1, 2017 7:10:33 GMT -5
OOC:
It's a bit longish, I know.
And it's not connected to the current show, or indeed any show.
And it's probably not very good.
But give it a read anyway.
Preciate feedback, just say'n.
IC:
How would you react … when, after a long day at the office, you come home and settle down for a nice whisky, only to discover that some scoundrel has switched it with tea, and weak tea at that. So, now you understand how Gurgen felt. Except that Gurgen job is less about working at the office and more smashing people’s faces in with his boots, oh, and it wasn’t whisky, obviously, but wodka, that was replaced by water.
So, given that Gurgen had a grand total of one emotional response, Gurgen went straight into rage mode. This had to be the work of … someone or other. Yeah, that narrowed it down a bunch.
Gurgen was raging through the corridors, knocking over people and things alike. Since some of the potential culprits were female women, Gurgen figured he’d take a left here, towards the ladies locker room and …
Suddenly, The Armenian Beast found himself charging through an unfamiliar room, far wider than the corridor he had expected. His charge slowed to a jog. Then he just strolled and eventually stopped at a console thingy in the middle of the circular room.
His sadness over the loss of his cherished wodka gave way to wonder. The console thingy had a column coming out of it Gurgen cast his eyes upward to where it disappeared into the ceiling.
“Hello there,” came a greeting.
Beast looked down. A skinny man with a bow tie had inserted himself in between himself and the console.
The skinny man, just as tall as The Beast but less than half the bulk, seized Gurgen by the shoulders. “My, my, you’re a big one aren’t you? Do you have a name?”
Gurgen intently observed the skinny man and replied, “Yes.”
The man waited but no further communication seemed to be imminent. “Well, what is it then?” he prompted.
“What is?” Gurgen asked.
“Your name. Who are you?”
“Ah,” Gurgen said, realization finally nesting inside his skull, “Beast be Armenian Beast.”
The skinny man commented, “A title of sorts I presume,” while he started pulling leavers and pressing buttons on the console.
Gurgen was dimly aware of pretty much everything around him, but the one thing that shone through the dimness with lesser dimness was a sound not entirely dissimilar from an aging Soviet Wolga truck attempting to accelerate away while all its brakes were frozen solid by the Siberian winter.
But he would rather settle a different matter right now, “Little man have name?”
“Why, yes, of course.” He clasped his hands together, then extended the right hand, “Hello, Armenian Beast, I’m the Doctor.”
Beast frowned. He leaned forward, bringing his face within inches of the Doctor. He asked, “Doctor … what?”
The Doctor snapped his fingers. “So close!”
He spun around on his heels, making a full 360. “Anyway, back to you … do you have an actual name? What do people call you? They can’t call you Armenian Beast all the time.”
“Peoples call Beast, Massive Moron, Irradiated Imbecile, Hairy Horror.”
The Doctor patted Beast on the beard. “Well you’re certainly hairy! But I don’t know about this moron business … after all you had the good sense of running straight into my little blue box.”
Gurgen looked about, this place seemed neither blue nor little, nor, for that matter particularly box shaped. “Blue box?” he whispered.
“Here,” The Doctor said, “I’ll show you.” He pulled one lever among many and the aging Wolga sound returned. The entire room shook and then everything went quiet.
The Doctor jogged through the double doors behind Gurgen and shouted back, “Well come on then!”
Gurgen strode after the funny little man. As he stepped through those doors he found himself in a rather odd setting.
He looked about to see, not the concrete blocks, painted in the ugliest shade of green home depot had available of the corridors he was raging through just a minute ago, but rather roughly hewn stones, covered in places by ornate carpets affixed to the walls. Torches hung from the walls.
He turned around to see, indeed, a box, barely large enough to hold his massive bulk, and indeed, it was blue.
He extended his finger and babbled, “Box no fit inside self.”
The Doctor ran up to The Beast. With all the excitement of a room full of preschoolers who happen upon a Lego volcano he says, “It’s bigger on the inside! Ain’t it grand!”
“No,” Gurgen replied, still pointing at the box, “It be tiny.”
The Doctor pinched Gurgen in the cheeks, “And they call you a moron!”
“Beg your pardon,” came a female voice.
The man and the Time lord look aside.
A young lady, a good foot shorter than either of them with hair the color of the last embers in the fireplace long after the last log was cast into the flames stood beside them in a dress of the bluest blue, of a different hue though then The Doctor’s box, that would allow her to perfectly hide in the middle of a clear spring sky, provided of course that she managed to somehow get up in the sky somehow. “Could you hide me? I’d like to get away from them.”
She nodded in the direction of a half a dozen of heavy set men in knee length chainmail running towards them brandishing pointy things.
“Right!” exclaimed The Doctor. He seized the lady’s hand and dragged her into the little box that didn’t fit inside itself. Gurgen, for his part was up for a good brawl … but six men was a bit much and those pointy things seemed very pointy, so he followed them.
“Off we go,” announced The Doctor. He did some complicated things at the console again and the ancient Wolga sounds resumed. … and ceased among expensive sounding noises.
“Ah, yes,” The Doctor said, “That emergency brake earlier may have thrown things just a touch out of alignment.”
There was pounding on the door, accompanied by angry voices.
“I suppose those are the men with the pointy sticks,” The Doctor observed. He took a moment to gather his thoughts and then launched straight into a plan of action.
“Hello,” he said to the lady with the fiery hair, “This here is the Beast and I’m The Doctor.”
“Doctor … who?” she asked.
The Doctor clapped his hands together and exclaimed, “Much better! And you are?”
Still a bit apprehensive about her would be saviors, she hesitantly replied, “Maeve … Princess Maeve … of York.”
The Doctor seized her hand, kissed the back of it and bowing deeply said, “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Maeve of York.”
Without missing a beat he launched straight into, “Do you have any experience with electronics? Oh, right, haven’t been invented yet. What practical skills do you have?”
“Erm … Embroidery?” Maeve tried, off of The Doctor’s non-reaction, she added, “Skinning various sorts of game … some archery, if no one’s looking.”
“Close enough,” The Doctor said. He tore a bundle of cable from the console and handed it to her saying, “See if you can get that sorted.”
He whizzed past The Beast on his way to some other piece of equipment that needed attentions. In passing he nodded towards the door and requested of The Beast, “Could you do something about all that noise? I can’t hear myself think!”
“Beast never hear Beast think!” he called after The Doctor but the latter paid him no heed. Gurgen shrugged. He ambled over to the door where the angry guards were still attempting to break it down.
He did some pounding of his own. This caused the guards to, momentarily, postpone their assault on the poor door. Beast yanked open the door, barked, “Cut that out!” punched one of them in the nose and closed the door again.
While the pounding did resume it had lost some of its luster.
The Doctor popped up next to Princess Maeve, startling her. “Did you make any progress?”
“Well,” Maeve said, almost 125% certain nothing she had done had contributed to their escape, “I sorted them by color.” She held out the bundle to demonstrate.
“What about these?” The Doctor said, indicating two red wires that were separate from all the other reds.
Maeve shrugged, “They feel different.”
“What?” The Doctor asked. He ran his fingers along the two wires and indeed found that they felt coarse.
He followed them to where they disappeared into the console and observed the site carefully, even sniffing it at one point.
“You’re brilliant!” he told Maeve and promptly tore the cables from the console. “They’re probably not important anyway!” he shouted as he hurried over to some levers at the other end of the console.
Some seemingly nonsensical manipulations later the ancient Wolga sounds returned.
Seeing The Doctor smile, Beast figured that their little box that didn’t fit inside itself was once again moving … though he couldn’t actually feel any movement. Using excellent, for him anyway, deductive reasoning, Gurgen surmised that this sound was somehow related to the proper functioning of the box.
Still holding on to his levers, The Doctor mused, “I’ll need to replace them, later. But for the moment the TARDIS is operational again.”
“You said,” Maeve accused, “That they weren’t important and now you want to replace them.”
The Doctor smiled at her and simply confirmed, “Yes,” offering no further explanation.
Gurgen came up to The Doctor who was in the middle of an energetic about-face that might have been an improvised dance move. “Wow,” The Doctor exclaimed when he was confronted with the massive Beastly beard, “Still as hairy as ever!”
Gurgen peered down at the skinny man and queried, “TARDIS?”
“Time And Relative Dimensions In Space,” The Doctor explained, reveling in having a new audience for his usual song and dance.
Gurgen frowned. “Lots of words,” he observed.
“And that’s why we stick with TARDIS … Are you entirely sure you’re a moron?”
“Yes,” Gurgen beamed, “very!”
“Meanwhile,” The Doctor said, “I’ve forgotten where I was heading … so, any requests? Anywhere in time and space!”
“Erm … Bath?” Maeve put forward.
“Tigranocerta!” Beast shouted.
The Doctor pointed at Gurgen and shouted, just as loud, “You win!”
He started working the controls and leaned over to Maeve, confiding, “Nothing personal, but Bath … nothing every really happens there … And I know that for a fact.”
Mere minutes later, the three of them sat atop a sandy hill overlooking the city.
“There you go,” The Doctor presented, “Tigranocerta, in the year 70 BCE, when Armenia was at its most powerful.”
Gurgen made large eyes at the massive stone walls surrounding the bustling city. As it was late in the day, a steady stream of carts, horsemen and travelers on foot made their way to the city gates, with only the occasional person going the other way. Smoke from hundreds, if not thousands of cooking fires curled up into the rather chilly early evening air. The clamor of daily life reached them even in their elevated position.
He only momentarily tore his gaze from the city he had heard so many stories about when The Doctor produced a pick-nick basket.
“That’s odd,” remarked The Doctor.
“What is?” queried Maeve, taking tentative nibbles from a corned beef and mustard sandwich.
“Usually when I go somewhere with new friends, something or other pops up that necessitates that we run.”
“Run?” Gurgen echoed, “Run!”
And he matched deed to word. Down the hill he went, all the way to the road, where he turned around and started making race tracks in the dust on the hillside.
“Figure he’s the sort of man who has trouble sitting still for too long,” The Doctor opined, “I know the feeling.”
“So, Doctor,” Maeve started, “You and The Beast … you haven’t known each other for very long, then?”
“Nope,” he replied, “met literally minutes before you ran up to us. Why were you running anyway?”
“Ah, you see,” Maeve said, in between bigger samples of her sandwich, “I was betrothed to this Earl.”
The Doctor rolled his eyes. “Betrothing … such a messy business.”
“I’m glad there’s SOMEONE who agrees with me on that one! But anyway, the Earl is a good deal older than me. But I figured I’d do my part and grit my teeth.”
The Doctor nodded. “Lie back and think of York.”
“What an odd phrase,” Maeve said, “But then I come near his and … dear God, did his breath smell foul! Like something died in there and has lain exposed to the noonday sun. I … I just couldn’t.”
“So, you kicked him in the balls and ran off!”
“No! … I punched him in the nose … and ran off!”
“And now you’re twelve hundred years before your own birth, having sandwiches overlooking the capitol of an ancient empire with a twentieth century Armenian and a Time lord.”
Maeve looked at her half eaten sandwich and remarked, “Is that what these are called? Marvelous invention, Doctor … also … Time lord?”
The Doctor straightened his bowtie and explained, “Yes, I do with time as I please … mostly. Hence, time … lord. Well, since the TARDIS can go anywhere … I suppose I’m also a ‘space lord’ but then again lots of people lord over space. At least some of it … like you betrothed or your dad, I suppose.”
Gurgen had worn himself out and was now trudging up the hill again.
Maeve nodded at The Massive Moron and asked, “What about him, what’s his story?”
“Don’t know, really, but I can tell you that I parked the TARDIS at the facilities of a professional wrestling organization … guidance system was acting up, you see.”
“Wrestling?” Maeve wondered.
“A combat sport,” The Doctor explained.
“Fighting for sport? You mean like at a tournament? So, he’s some sort of … really, really hairy knight?”
“Well, I suppose you could call him that.”
“Welcome back, Sir Beast,” Maeve greeted Gurgen once he had regained their altitude.
Gurgen plonked him backside squarely in between The Doctor and the Princess. His entire left side felt warm, just from being next to a beautiful girl. He tried to avoid looking at her, fearing that he might inadvertently startle her, as he was wont to do with women … and small children … and farmyard animals, officers of the law, grannies, toll booth operators and pretty much anyone who was a) alive and b) conscious.
Maeve declared that the air temperature was ill suited for her dress. Gurgen, almost instinctively, yanked open his fur coat. To his dread, Maeve actually leaned in and snuggled up to him. Sweaty Beast was apparently less disagreeable then would-be husband graveyard breath.
In a peculiar mix of reluctance and eagerness, Gurgen draped the coat over the lady, thereby ending up with his arm around her shoulders. Not only warm was his side now, it felt electrified. Her slightest movement caused him to shiver.
Seeing his predicament, The Doctor took pity upon The Beast and addressed him in an effort to get him to relax, “Say, Beast …”
“Beast!” Beast shouted, as seemingly instructed.
The Doctor patted him on the back, “Good boy!”
Gurgen beamed.
“Did you say, earlier, that you were irradiated?”
“Yes!” Gurgen again shouted, still on edge from the bodily contact with the lovely lady.
“How did that happen, then?”
“Ah!” Now, this was a story he was used to relaying and as he settled into expository mode, he did in fact finally relax some. “Pripyat power station go boom. Daddy-dear rushed over to help and little Gurgen sleep on back seat of ancient Lada.”
“Pripyat … Pripyat … oh, you mean the Chernobyl nuclear disaster? Yeah, nasty business, that.” He pulled an oblong device of some sort form his waistcoat and pointed it at Gurgen.
“Hey, no pokey Beast!” Gurgen objected, shirking away.
“It’s not a pokey devicey thingy,” The Doctor assured him, “It’s just a screwdriver … Well, I suppose you COULD poke someone with a screwdriver … kill them, even … but this is a sonic screwdriver, so, not to worry.”
“Is that a magic wand?!” Maeve exclaimed excitedly, sitting up, much to Gurgen’s regret.
“No, it’s a sonic screwdriver, isn’t anyone listening to me?”
“How does it work,” Maeve insisted on knowing.
The Doctor shrugged. “Just point and think, basically.”
“Like a magic wand …”
“No! Well … no! I mean … well … oh alright, it’s a magic wand, if you insist.”
To stave off any further questions, he quickly told The Beast, “There’s two kinds of news, Beast. There’s good news and there’s … really rather peculiar news. Which would you like first.”
“Beast like wodka first.”
“An excellent choice! But let’s get the news out of the way before we get shitfaced drunk, alright?” Not waiting for an answer, he immediately launched into the good news, “You’ll be glad to know that you’re not, at present, actually irradiated. There’s quite a bit of damage from all the Sieverts you were subjected to … which I can’t really do anything about, I’m afraid.”
“That be ok,” Gurgen said, “Beast be used to having fried brain.”
“Boys,” Maeve interrupted, “It’s really getting quite cold out here. Can we go inside, please?”
The Doctor led them back into the TARDIS, adjusted the internal temperature to 23 centigrade since his Fahrenheit dial had gone missing at some point in the third century BCE and resumed his news bulletin, “Where was I? Oh yes, the peculiar news.”
He pointed the not-a-magic-wand at Gurgen again and stated, “There’s something really rather odd about your beard.”
“Yes,” Gurgen agreed, “Critters live in there!”
To demonstrate, he plucked a centipede from his beard and handed it to The Doctor.
“Hello there little fellow,” The Doctor said to the critter, “You’re really quite disgusting.” And he promptly dropped the creature.
He started waving about his screwdriver again. “No,” he said, “something quite a bit stranger than that.”
A few seconds later, he seemed to be satisfied with his manipulations of the follicular jungle. “It would seem,” he said as he started to insert his fingers into the beard, “that there was something of a … portal …”
His hand disappeared into the beard.
“hidden in your beard. Well, the potential of a portal anyway.”
He was now up to the elbow engaged in the tangled mess of hair. “Don’t know why, don’t know how … yet. But there you go.”
His entire arm and shoulder had at this point disappeared into the beard. He quickly pulled out, saying “Tadaaaa!”
Maeve came over to investigate the beard. “A portal, you say?”
She brought her face right up to the beard, trying to work up the courage to test it herself.
Out of nowhere, a giant maw full of teeth lunged at her. She fell backward. The maw slammed shut, capturing nothing but a few strands of hair.
The Doctor rushed over to help her to her feet. “It’s an acrocanthosaurus … run!!!”
The giant lizard worked its way through the beard, leaving The Beast to look on in stunned silence.
“Well, it’s a baby, really. Actually quite cute, if it weren’t intent on eating us.”
“Less talk,” Maeve screamed at him, “more running!”
Seeing this prehistoric killing machine go after his newfound friends, Beast did the braves, and dumbest thing he could think of. He seized the acrocanthosaurus cub by the tail. Its claws slipped on the metal floor and it slammed into the ground. Beast enjoyed his victory for about one second and a half. The acrocanthosaurus was now not only aware of The Beast it also decided that he looked tastier. In a reflex, Gurgen used the one aerial move he had mastered in his decade and a half in the wrestling world and delivered a standing dropkick straight to the side of the monster’s head.
The hungry carnivore decided Beast was more trouble than he was worth and resumed his chase of the other two bipedal snacks. They had used the distraction to disappear into the bowls of the TARDIS but Maeve had not had the foresight to avoid putting any perfume this morning. Though in fairness, expecting a twelfth century princess to anticipate getting chased by a dinosaur through the insides of a time machine is a bit unfair. Still, the faint smell of roses wasn’t hard to track for a creature with a nasal cavity the size of Wembley stadium. So the acrocanthosaurus chased the princess and The Beast chased the acrocanthosaurus.
Despite his extensive experience with the art of running headlong, Gurgen had a hard time keeping up with the creature. Maeve found it harder yet. Her dress was well suited for a wide range of activities, sadly, all of them required her to move very little. Soon enough, she tripped on the hem.
“Doctor!” she pleaded, arm extended towards the Time Lord.
The Doctor whipped out his screwdriver and aimed it at her. The portion of her dress below the knee detached itself. She scrambled to her feet and flung the detached fabric at the charging monster. The time it took the acrocanthosaurus to get rid of the cloth was enough for Maeve to gain some distance.
But soon enough, the peculiar parade resumed. The Beast, still chasing the dinosaur, reemerged in the central control room of the TARDIS. He couldn’t recall taking any turns, near as he could tell, they had only gone straight. Still, Gurgen was used to not comprehending things like … including, magnets, the English language and Velcro. So, relative dimensions? He just filed it away and kept on running.
Soon enough, all four of them again arrived in the control room, never having taken any turns.
Since he still hadn’t gained on the dinosaur, Gurgen figured chasing them was futile. He hatched a harebrained scheme. The central console looked like it might support his weight so he started to climb.
The Doctor was beginning to wonder how they’d deal with this situation. His hearts were almost bursting from his chest at this point. How the princess was keeping up, he didn’t know. He had to admit that she had heart, if only one of them. They ran into the control room again.
The Doctor glanced up and spotted the Beast, perched high above.
With a nod of his head, Gurgen managed to invite The Doctor to pass right underneath him.
Once they had passed the Beast, The Doctor whipped around and waved the screwdriver at the acrocanthosaurus. Sparks erupted all around, momentarily disorienting the creature.
At this point, Gurgen shouted, “Crazy Horse!” and he launched himself, beard first, down upon the unsuspecting dinosaur.
The beast looked up at The Beast and promptly disappeared, back into the beard. Gurgen slammed into the steel plate floor. Keeping still because every single movement hurt Gurgen whimpered, “ow.”
The Doctor ran to him. “It’s ‘Geronimo!’, by the way,” he instructed while checking Gurgen over with his screwdriver.
Beast clambered to a sitting position. Shaking his head, he explained, “Beast keep mixing them up.”
“Erm, boys, not to put too fine a point on it, but I think it’s coming back.”
The boys paused and listened intently. Sure enough the acrocanthosaurus’ hungry screams emanated from the beard.
“Close it! Close it!” Beast shouted.
“I’m trying! I’m trying!” The Doctor shouted back. He frantically waved about his screwdriver, trying this setting and that.
The dinosaur sounded like it was mere feet away.
“Now would be a good time!” Maeve insisted.
“Hang on, almost there,” The Doctor tried another setting and the cries stopped.
“Thank God!” Maeve sighed, both hands clutched to her chest, “You sealed it.”
The Doctor helped The Beast to his feet. “Not exactly,” he said. He stood across from The Beast staring at the beard. He breathed rapidly for a moment or two. Then he sucked in a large breath and plunged into the beard.
Maeve and Gurgen stared at the Doctors body sticking out of the beard, the head and upper body, gone from view. They stared at each other, then back at The Doctor, then back at one another.
Maeve tentatively moved forward, intent on extracting The Doctor when he popped out on his own.
“Ok, we’re good … no carnivores of any kind to be seen.”
Off of the odd looks his companions gave him, he explained, “Couldn’t close it anymore … There’s something about our dear Beast’s body that gave him the energy to keep the portal closed. But now that I opened it, I don’t have the energy needed to close it again.”
“… so …” Maeve wondered, “what about the acrocanthosaurus?”
“I shifted the portal by a couple of million years and … basically … hoped for the best. Here’s to optimism, right?”
“Right … now that that’s taken care of,” Maeve said, “more trivial concerns.”
“Oh?” The Doctor wondered. As both men turned to her. Maeve did her best to cover her legs.
“Could you look somewhere else? I’m not used to showing this much leg in the company of men.”
“What? Oh, certainly!” The Doctor spun around. He noticed The Beast hadn’t followed suit.
He seized Gurgen by the shoulder. “Turn around, Beast, give the lady some privacy.”
Reluctantly, Beast tore his gaze away from those fine looking legs.
“I don’t suppose you have any dresses in this castle of a vessel?” Maeve asked.
The Doctor waved at a doorway behind him. “Through there, second door on the left … that’s the wardrobe … not sure there’s any dresses in there. Oh, and mind the crocodile.”
Maeve gasped, “There’s a crocodile?!”
“No, but there could have been,” The Doctor said. After a moment’s hesitation, he added, “In light of recent events that was probably not the best remark to make.”
But already, he heard Maeve’s feet head in the indicated direction.
He turned to The Beast and whipped out his screwdriver again, scanning and checking it every few seconds. “Now, about this beard of you …”
Eyes growing large with apprehension, Beast beheld his chin growth. For the first time ever, he wanted it to be further away … kind of hard when it’s attached to your face. “Beast cut it off?” he wondered aloud.
“No, no, I mean yes, it’s your beard, you do with it as you want. But wouldn’t you like to know why? Why it is as it is? Who made it like that?”
Scanning some more, he added, “The portal, that’s in and of itself not that special. But encoding both the portal and the energy to keep it hidden in your beard … that’s Time lord genetic engineering.”
“Time lord sciency stuff?” Gurgen wondered, “Doctor mean to say there be more of Time lords?”
His screwdriver seemed to suddenly lose its allure. The Doctor briefly studied the tips of his shoes.
“There used to be,” He finally admitted, “I’m the only one left.”
In an instant, Gurgen stepped forward and grabbed The Doctor in a massive hug that oddly resembled quite a few submission holds in wrestling.
Using what little air he could yet force into his alien longs, The Doctor breathed, “And we’re hugging … quite tightly … ow, ow, pain.”
Beast released The Doctor from his grasp. “Beast be sorry,” he apologized, “Beast get bit carried away. Doctor see, Beast know what it be like … being alone. Peoples no like to be around Beasts.”
“Well,” The Doctor tried to explain, straightening his jacket, “I wouldn’t say that I’ve been alone.”
But Gurgen was not deterred, this discovery of a fellow lone spirit needed to be commiserated, with alcohol, of course. From the depths his coat, which, for all the items he was able to store in it, seemed to be bigger on the inside as well, he produced a flask.
He took a big swig from it and handed the flask to The Doctor, declaring, “Us lonely men need to stick together. Here’s to being alone together.”
The Doctor chuckled a bit. “Well, I’ll drink to that!”
He followed the Beast’s suit and took a similar swig … which resided in his mouth for about one half second before being expelled in a brilliant mist across the TARDIS’ central console.
With sparks flying from the console, The Doctor demanded, “What the hell is this?!”
Gurgen smiled. He knew very little about nigh on any topic it was possible to have a conversation about, but he knew booze. “Absinth!” he beamed, “the good stuff … 92% … from Czech republic.”
“You drink this?!”
“Yes,” The Beast cheerfully said.
“For fun?!”
“Yes,” The Beast cheerfully said.
“You’re insane!!!”
“Yes,” The Beast cheerfully said.
Regaining his composure some, The Doctor said, “Remind me to never save the Czech Republic.”
“Hey!” Beast objected, waving his arms about in grand gestures, “That be where the good absinth be from. Doctor do save Czech republic!”
“It was a joke,” Maeve explained, seizing Gurgen’s flailing arm, “The Doctor will save the … whatever country that is.”
She folded her face into an expert pout and told the Doctor, “No dresses.”
She had apparently come across some puffy pants that were popular in the sixteenth century and had combined it with an eighteenth century Austrian cavaliers jacket with a long sleeve Pink Floyd t-shirt underneath.
“Wonderful!” The Doctor observed, “And not an inch of leg in sight!”
He stormed off to some storage compartment while he told the princess, “And now you can cover it up again!”
“How so?” she called after him.
The Doctor rushed back to the anachronistic pair in the center of his space-time box. He tossed a bright orange suit at Maeve and an extra-extra-large version of the same at Gurgen. “We,” he explained, as he was already stepping into his own suit, “are going to the Chernobyl power plant, right in the middle of the meltdown … hence the radiation suits.”
Maeve repeated with a total lack of comprehension, “Chernobyl … meltdown … radiation … what does any of that even mean?”
Gurgen placed his massive paw on Maeve’s shoulder. “Chernobyl be power plant … it make electricity for lights and stuff … When plant melt down, it make lots of radiation. Radiation make Maeve sick or dead. That be why us wear suit.”
“Couldn’t have put It any better myself, Beast,” The Doctor said. “Someone zip me up,” he added, making vain attempts to reach the zipper himself.
Beast indicated the zipper and told Maeve, “Maeve take that and move it up.”
She executed the instructions expertly but never the less asked, “Why don’t you do it?”
Beast’s eyes glazed over, he looked out across the TARDIS’ control room, casting his gaze back in time. “Beast do that once, when girl ask. Beast pull bit hard … girl be mad at Beast then.”
He rubbed his cheek. “Very mad.”
“Oh, Beasty,” Maeve consoled him, adding a little side hug for good measure, “I’m sure she’ll forgive you in time.”
Still looking at that unseen point across space and time, Gurgen mused, “Girl tell Beast to hurry up and die.”
“There are more girls in the universe, Beasty,” The Doctor interjected as he shoved big bowl shaped items into their arms, “many … many more girls … but anyway, some of them will like you. Now see if you can get into those.”
Maeve and Beast did as instructed, leaving The Doctor to cajole his craft to the indicated place and time.
“Beast gone blind!” Gurgen shouted. Arms outstretched, he started running. The Doctor tripped him and when he was splayed across the floor, he twisted the helmet around.
“It be miracle!” Gurgen exclaimed.
At the elation of having regained his ability to see, Gurgen almost missed the ancient Wolga truck sounds.
The Doctor donned his own helmet and grabbed his team by various arms to lead them out of the TARDIS.
They found themselves in a concrete basement. The walls hadn’t been cleaned in a decade. Several patches of encrusted calcium showed where water seeped through the walls continuously. The whole scene was illuminated by a series of light bulbs, dimmed by age and grimed that had long since settled on them too. In fact, the brightest source of light was a flashing alarm hanging above a sign that warned, in Cyrillics of radiation. In the far corner, the ceiling had cracked and some unknown substance was oozing through from above.
“Don’t worry,” The Doctor told Maeve who had come to stand next to him, “We’re safe in these suits.”
He pulled a worried face and said, “Hang on.”
He waved about his screwdriver and checked the reading. “Yes, we’re safe,” he confirmed.
Maeve grabbed him by the shoulder. “Doctor! It’s the Beast! The radiation has gotten into his suit!”
The Doctor spun around to see Gurgen twist, turn and gyrate in an unpredictable pattern.
“Demons! The radiation has awoken demons inside of him!” Maeve insisted.
“Hang on.” The doctor calmly walked over to The Beast, ignoring Maeve’s insistence to hurry. It was a few seconds before Gurgen held still long enough for him to press some buttons at the base of his helmet. Gurgen instantly ceased his erratic movement, querying The Doctor, “What Doctor do that for?”
“His intercom was set to music,” he explained.
Maeve breathed a sigh of relief.
“Now what us do?” Beast wanted to know.
But before The Doctor could formulate a plan. A rather grating female voice interrupted them.
“So there you are … what took you so long?”
The Doctor closed his eyes and whispered, “No, no, no, why did it HAVE to be you.”
He threw his arms wide and spun around. “Missy! How have you been? Miserable I hope. And you’ve brought some friends I see.”
Unlike themselves, Missy didn’t wear a radiation suit. She wore her habitual nineteenth century governess outfit. On either side of her stood a cyberman, two more stood perfectly still behind her.
The Doctor whipped out his screwdriver and tested the environment again. “Oh,” he said, “how silly of me.”
He turned to his friends. “You can take off the suits, there’s barely any radiation. I seem to have misread the comma.”
Gurgen, glad to be rid of the confining garment, peeled of the bright orange contraption. Maeve settled for removing the helmet.
“Seize them,” Missy told the cybermen.
“Beast crush tin men?” Gurgen asked The Doctor.
“You can’t,” was The Doctor’s reply.
But when the lead cyberman grabbed Maeve, Gurgen charged anyway. He dealt the cyberman a crushing blow, squarely in the middle of its face … and promptly sank to his knees, clutching his paw.
The cyberman seemed entirely unaffected.
Undeterred, Gurgen, from his crouched position sought to topple the metallic mammoth. He slammed into it with all his might. While this did shake the cyberman a bit, it quickly grabbed Gurgen by the scruff of the neck and tossed him to another member of his little detachment.
Gurgen struggled against the iron grip of this second cyberman until The Doctor strolled over and told him, “It’s ok, Gurgen. You did well. Now save your strength.”
Next The Doctor went to Maeve to tell her not to worry and that he’d get this sorted straight away.
The two remaining cybermen dragged him away from the princess and dumped him at the feet of their mistress.
“Thank you so much for bringing Gurgen back to me,” Missy said.
The Doctor frowned and echoed, “Back?”
She ambled over to Gurgen and patted him on the head, “My own little, living, TARDIS.”
She withdrew her hand. Smelling it, she added, “Might be in need of a bath … in bleach … but at least he’s functional.”
“You did this,” The Doctor surmised, “You altered his DNA … made the portal grown inside his beard. And, from your point of view, you did so five minutes ago.”
She checked her pocket watch. “Seventeen, actually. I was getting a bit bored, truth be told.”
Not waiting for further comments from The Doctor she continued, “It all got a bit tedious, you know, traveling with this.” She showed him her wristband. “Especially lugging the help around …” She tapped a cyberman on the head.
“But now, thanks to you, old friend, I once again have a fully functional TARDIS. The beard folds into itself, you see.”
She made a grand gesture. “Now I can go anywhere, any time, with all the cybermen I want.”
She walked right up to The Doctor. “Or would you like to stop me?”
“Is that even a question?” The Doctor replied.
“It’s easy enough,” she declared. She pulled out some sort of device and caused an image to pop up in midair.
“Little Gurgen,” Gurgen whispered.
In the image a little boy appeared, six or seven years old, protected from the elements and the radiation by nothing more than his East German Sandmannchen pajamas. He wandered through the corridors of the power plant, in search of his daddy-dear. Military men rushed past him, on this or that urgent mission. They had no time to check on the lost little boy.
“Suppose I showed you a little boy,” Missy began, “and I told you that he’d grow up to become the tool your greatest enemy uses to conquer the Universe … could you then kill that boy.”
“Never,” was all The Doctor replied.
She looked at the image. “From right here, I can see a dozen different ways to make him stone dead in under five seconds. How about it? Just whip out your trusty old screwdriver and deny me his services.”
For some reason, all this talk of that magic wand of The Doctor, made Maeve notice that the right hand pocket of her suit felt a touch heavier than it should. She slid her hand inside, taking care not to alert the man in full plate armor holding her.
She got right up in his face. “Kill him, and prove that you’re no better than me, or let him live and hand me the Universe on a platter.”
The Doctor lowered his head. A smile grew across his lips. “You’ve really got me beat this time, Missy. I mean, it’s a genius plan.”
“Why thank you!” Missy chirped.
“The rewriting of his DNA … using a nuclear meltdown as cover … hiding a portal inside a beard … And most of all that power you stored in his body to hide the portal until it was fully functional.”
“All that power …” he repeated, intently looking a Maeve, then at Gurgen.
Maeve clutched the screwdriver in her pocket. How had he said this thing worked? She whipped it out.
“Just point …” she said. She leveled the device at her hairy knight.
“… and think,” The Doctor added.
Gurgen was not known for his powers of comprehension. He was the one person on the planet, possibly the Universe, who failed to understand Velcro. But causing mayhem and beating up people and tin men alike, that he understood.
He shook off the cyberman’s arm and punched again. While it still hurt plenty, the results were quite different. He buried his fist straight into the cyberman’s head. He charged one of the cybermen holding The Doctor even before Missy could react. That fact that she needed him alive made her hesitate.
“Knock him out!” she eventually said. But Gurgen had already dropkicked the cyberman to the floor. Back in the day when he first started out in the world of wrestling, he had simply stomped towards his opponent, suffered whatever the opponent could throw at him and smashed in his face until his paws hurt. But he had since learned to avoid his opponent’s punches, to duck and weave. The cybermen, not known for their speed of movement failed to gain purchase on the elusive Beast.
He grabbed one of them by the arm, tore it clean off its socket and bashed a second’s head in. Next, he grabbed the headless body by the ankles. Using it as a great big club, he bashed the penultimate cyberman into expensive looking junk.
Down to her last cyberman, Missy ordered him, “Oh just kill the bastard.”
The cyberman aimed his blaster. Beast frantically tried to find something to use as a weapon.
“Just stand up straight!” The Doctor shouted.
The Beast complied, trusting that other people had a better idea than him as to what needed doing. Hell, most plantlife had a better idea of what needed doing than him, including the proper way to operate Velcro.
The cyberman fired. The bolt hit Gurgen straight in the … beard. And disappeared, not causing any harm.
Maeve seized the heaviest object she could a) find and b) lift, which turned out to be a fire extinguisher and hurled it at Gurgen.
The Beast grabbed the extinguisher by the nozzle and, in a beautiful arc swung it at the cyberman. One second later, another decapitated body joined its friends in blessed obsolescence.
Missy aimed some sort of device at Gurgen but just as she fired, The Doctor banged his hip into hers, causing her to miss.
Gurgen stampeded over. He grabbed Missy by the wrist and twisted it until she let go of her weapon. A crunchy sound spoke of the demise of her teleportation wristband.
“Doesn’t it become quite tiresome to always be foiled,” The Doctor inquired as he popped his head right next to hers.
“Yeah, yeah, a minor setback,” Missy told him, “but …”
She grabbed The Doctor’s head and planted her lips firmly on his.
The Doctor just stood there, hunched over, arms stretched out wide, flailing wildly.
Gurgen looked at Maeve questioningly. Maeve just shrugged. She was used to people forcing themselves upon others, though in her experience, it was usually the men doing the forcing. These future times sure were different.
“but,” Missy continued, “foiled, I may be, but not quite beaten.”
She shoved The Doctor, still reeling from the kiss. With a beautiful vault one would assume impossible given her choice of dress, she leapt into the beard and promptly disappeared.
“After her!” Maeve decreed.
Gurgen thrust his paw in the air. “Yeah!” he hollered.
The Doctor restrained Maeve, however. “How about, ‘no’,” he impressed upon them.
He physically dragged them towards the TARDIS. “Not quite sure HOW Missy kept the radiation at bay, some sort of force field, I suppose, she’s big on force fields, you know. But anyway, now that she’s gone … well, better not to linger, you know.”
Maeve was still not entirely sure what radiation was. It seemed to be some sort of bad humor in the air. Indeed, she agreed, best not linger.
Gurgen paused at the door. He stared at the section of wall where the image of his younger self had appeared. His deductive faculties not improved by Maeve’s ministrations with the screwdriver, Gurgen tried to figure out if he could do something. Save little Gurgen from getting hit by too much radiation. Get him out before his brain got too fried. He, himself had already been hit by so much radiation, a little more probably couldn’t hurt, he supposed.
The Doctor placed his hand on the Beastly shoulder. “It’s no use, Beast. Whatever happened to you, back then, it already happened. There’s no changing it now.”
Gurgen looked The Doctor in the eye. The Doctor read a tremendous sadness in those eyes. Not that The Beast had suffered so much, not compared to him anyway, but for one of his limited comprehension, the weight placed upon him by a world that didn’t understand him and often didn’t care to try and understand him, it must be crushing him. The mileage on his soul outpaced the age of his body by a long stretch.
Beast for his part was wont to miss the blindingly obvious. He was the sort of person who’d run head first into a brick wall, pained fluorescent pink, that he had seen from a mile out and still be surprised that he hit something. But he did recognize something familiar in The Doctor, an old soul in a young body.
“Come along now, Beast, it’ll all be alright in the end.”
Gurgen nodded. He allowed The Doctor to guide him inside. Maeve shut the door behind them.
“I lied, by the way,” The Doctor admitted, “it won’t be alright. At least, I can’t guarantee it.”
Beast replied, “Beast know, but Beast thank Doctor for saying so anyway.”
In a flash, he pulled the flask from his coat again. “Us drink to it?”
“A very definite ‘not in this lifetime and probably none of the future ones’ to that.”
Beast shrugged. “More for Beast.”
The TARDIS made its usual ancient Soviet Wolga truck sounds again. Beast relaxed a bit, knowing that they were away from the evil reactor that fried his brain.
“Tigranocerta again?” Maeve queried.
They looked down upon a ghost town. The walls had been demolished in places, the stones having been reused to build other structures. Other than a lone boy tending a flock of sheep there was no traffic of any sort. No smoke from cooking fires curled up into the evening air. The magnificent capitol of the mighty Armenian empire lay in ruins, never to rise again.
“Yes,” The Doctor answered, “50 BC this time.”
It was Gurgen’s turn to remark, “King Tigran been fool. No know how to fight battles. No trust general to do it for him.”
The Doctor nodded his agreement. “Pretty accurate reading of history by my count.”
Gurgen looked upon the remains below. Thing were created, and then they grew, grew into great things, and then they died. It was the natural order of things and he didn’t feel sad about it, well not a whole lot anyway.
“So,” The Doctor tore him from his musings, “I’ve managed to tie the portal in to your mind. You make it go where you want now.”
“That be dumb,” Gurgen opined.
“How so?”
“Gurgen no have mind so portal no go anywhere.”
The Doctor chuckled, “Well, at least it won’t hurt anyone then.”
Gurgen mulled this over in his empty head. “True,” he finally said.
The Doctor clapped his hands together, “Shall we be off? Great adventures to be had!”
Maeve jumped a little. “Are we going to Bath now?” Before either man could answer, she added, “Actually, I’ve gone off Bath now … never mind.”
“Beast go back to wrestling now.”
“Why?!” The Doctor shouted, “You’re the strongest Beast on the entire planet, there’s no challenge in wrestling.”
“It be only thing Beast know. And Beast make pretend Beast no be super strong. Beast keep fans happy.”
“You’d be surprised at what you know. But ok, I’ll take you back.” He turned to Maeve, “How about you? Mystery … foreign lands … entirely different planets even!!!”
Maeve looked upon the hairy warrior besides her. He wasn’t terribly bright, true. And he could do with some personal hygiene, very true. But at least he was honest, was very unlikely to hurt her, and was strong enough to keep her safe … at least until she figured out his world.
She leaned in to the Irradiated Imbecile and clutched his massive arm with her own thin arms. “I’ll stay with him, I think.”
“Just my luck,” The Doctor lamented, “I just happen to pick up the two people who do not want to visit every corner of the Universe, twice over.”
“Doctor will live,” The Beast said with just a hint of a grin on his face.
“Don’t even think of offering me absinth!” The Doctor warned, also sporting a hint of a grin.
When he’d said his goodbyes, The Doctor set his TARDIS to pretty much anywhere. Something occurred to him. He threw the TARDIS into reverse. The TARDIS bucked and groaned but complied in the end.
He popped out, in the backstage area of Gurgen’s wrestling fed, mere feet away from Maeve.
“Just one more thing, Princess …”
She interrupted him, “DOCTOR! Where have you been?!”
“I was gone for a while, right?”
Maeve cocked her head. “Five months, I recon … it was just minutes for you I guess.”
“Quite,” The Doctor replied, “I see you’ve gotten over your aversion to showing some leg.”
As a response, Maeve made a pirouette, sending the edges of her plaid skirt whirling in the air.
“And marvelous legs they are,” The Doctor commented, nodding appreciatively.
“Quite liberating, actually,” Maeve observed.
“Right, what I was meaning to ask before we got sidetracked by shapely legs … would it be ok if I popped by for the OCCASIONAL dashing adventure?”
She grabbed him by the shoulders, spun him around and put him in a headlock. “You’d better!”
The Doctor tapped out, saying, “Learned some move from The Armenian Beast, I see.”
When she released her victim, he added, “Speaking of his hairiness … where is he?”
“Oh, he on in five, he’s just getting Dewi ready … that away.”
Maeve pointed The Doctor in the right direction and would have accompanied him, but a pair of young girls sporting backstage passes, caught her, insisting on selfies.
The Doctor went in the indicated direction quietly wondering who Dewi was. When he turned the corner, a huge maw filled with dagger sized teeth knocked him to the ground. Even before he hit the ground, he had his screwdriver out, not entirely sure if there was anything he could use the thing for against the acrocanthosaurus.
But before he could valiantly conquer both his own despair and the looming monster, Maeve caught up to him. “Oh, you’ve met Dewi … he’s quite harmless, you know.”
“Dewi?” The Doctor wondered.
From atop the dinosaur, seated in a saddle, The Armenian Beast called out to, “Doctor! Doctor be back! Absinth?”
Restoring his attire and his dignity, The Doctor leapt to his feet. “You’ve figured out the beard! … and how to tame dinosaurs, apparently.”
Gurgen patted Dewi on the flank, “Dewi be great big kitten.”
“Just be glad you’re not the ball of yarn,” Maeve confided, “Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have a match to attend to.”
Out there, in the arena, March ör Die by Motörhead burst from the speakers.
“Doctor no be stranger!” The Beast shouted as he headed through the heavy black curtains that separated the backstage area from the sea of madness known as wrestling fans.
The Doctor rushed back to the TARDIS, did his usual twisting of knobs and pulling of levers and found himself in the back row. He pulled out a pair of opera glasses which he picked up while on a definitely-not-a-date with Empress Sissi to the Vienna opera in 1855.
There they were, The Beast and The Princess. She led the acrocanthosaurus back to the backstage area while Gurgen got busy not ripping his opponent apart … which, given his strength, as insane as he was, he totally could. He was pulling his punches, The Doctor could tell … The fans couldn’t or they didn’t seem to mind.
“Don’t be a stranger?” The Doctor murmured to himself, “Oh Gurgen, I am so very, very much stranger than even you can imagine.”
It's a bit longish, I know.
And it's not connected to the current show, or indeed any show.
And it's probably not very good.
But give it a read anyway.
Preciate feedback, just say'n.
IC:
How would you react … when, after a long day at the office, you come home and settle down for a nice whisky, only to discover that some scoundrel has switched it with tea, and weak tea at that. So, now you understand how Gurgen felt. Except that Gurgen job is less about working at the office and more smashing people’s faces in with his boots, oh, and it wasn’t whisky, obviously, but wodka, that was replaced by water.
So, given that Gurgen had a grand total of one emotional response, Gurgen went straight into rage mode. This had to be the work of … someone or other. Yeah, that narrowed it down a bunch.
Gurgen was raging through the corridors, knocking over people and things alike. Since some of the potential culprits were female women, Gurgen figured he’d take a left here, towards the ladies locker room and …
Suddenly, The Armenian Beast found himself charging through an unfamiliar room, far wider than the corridor he had expected. His charge slowed to a jog. Then he just strolled and eventually stopped at a console thingy in the middle of the circular room.
His sadness over the loss of his cherished wodka gave way to wonder. The console thingy had a column coming out of it Gurgen cast his eyes upward to where it disappeared into the ceiling.
“Hello there,” came a greeting.
Beast looked down. A skinny man with a bow tie had inserted himself in between himself and the console.
The skinny man, just as tall as The Beast but less than half the bulk, seized Gurgen by the shoulders. “My, my, you’re a big one aren’t you? Do you have a name?”
Gurgen intently observed the skinny man and replied, “Yes.”
The man waited but no further communication seemed to be imminent. “Well, what is it then?” he prompted.
“What is?” Gurgen asked.
“Your name. Who are you?”
“Ah,” Gurgen said, realization finally nesting inside his skull, “Beast be Armenian Beast.”
The skinny man commented, “A title of sorts I presume,” while he started pulling leavers and pressing buttons on the console.
Gurgen was dimly aware of pretty much everything around him, but the one thing that shone through the dimness with lesser dimness was a sound not entirely dissimilar from an aging Soviet Wolga truck attempting to accelerate away while all its brakes were frozen solid by the Siberian winter.
But he would rather settle a different matter right now, “Little man have name?”
“Why, yes, of course.” He clasped his hands together, then extended the right hand, “Hello, Armenian Beast, I’m the Doctor.”
Beast frowned. He leaned forward, bringing his face within inches of the Doctor. He asked, “Doctor … what?”
The Doctor snapped his fingers. “So close!”
He spun around on his heels, making a full 360. “Anyway, back to you … do you have an actual name? What do people call you? They can’t call you Armenian Beast all the time.”
“Peoples call Beast, Massive Moron, Irradiated Imbecile, Hairy Horror.”
The Doctor patted Beast on the beard. “Well you’re certainly hairy! But I don’t know about this moron business … after all you had the good sense of running straight into my little blue box.”
Gurgen looked about, this place seemed neither blue nor little, nor, for that matter particularly box shaped. “Blue box?” he whispered.
“Here,” The Doctor said, “I’ll show you.” He pulled one lever among many and the aging Wolga sound returned. The entire room shook and then everything went quiet.
The Doctor jogged through the double doors behind Gurgen and shouted back, “Well come on then!”
Gurgen strode after the funny little man. As he stepped through those doors he found himself in a rather odd setting.
He looked about to see, not the concrete blocks, painted in the ugliest shade of green home depot had available of the corridors he was raging through just a minute ago, but rather roughly hewn stones, covered in places by ornate carpets affixed to the walls. Torches hung from the walls.
He turned around to see, indeed, a box, barely large enough to hold his massive bulk, and indeed, it was blue.
He extended his finger and babbled, “Box no fit inside self.”
The Doctor ran up to The Beast. With all the excitement of a room full of preschoolers who happen upon a Lego volcano he says, “It’s bigger on the inside! Ain’t it grand!”
“No,” Gurgen replied, still pointing at the box, “It be tiny.”
The Doctor pinched Gurgen in the cheeks, “And they call you a moron!”
“Beg your pardon,” came a female voice.
The man and the Time lord look aside.
A young lady, a good foot shorter than either of them with hair the color of the last embers in the fireplace long after the last log was cast into the flames stood beside them in a dress of the bluest blue, of a different hue though then The Doctor’s box, that would allow her to perfectly hide in the middle of a clear spring sky, provided of course that she managed to somehow get up in the sky somehow. “Could you hide me? I’d like to get away from them.”
She nodded in the direction of a half a dozen of heavy set men in knee length chainmail running towards them brandishing pointy things.
“Right!” exclaimed The Doctor. He seized the lady’s hand and dragged her into the little box that didn’t fit inside itself. Gurgen, for his part was up for a good brawl … but six men was a bit much and those pointy things seemed very pointy, so he followed them.
“Off we go,” announced The Doctor. He did some complicated things at the console again and the ancient Wolga sounds resumed. … and ceased among expensive sounding noises.
“Ah, yes,” The Doctor said, “That emergency brake earlier may have thrown things just a touch out of alignment.”
There was pounding on the door, accompanied by angry voices.
“I suppose those are the men with the pointy sticks,” The Doctor observed. He took a moment to gather his thoughts and then launched straight into a plan of action.
“Hello,” he said to the lady with the fiery hair, “This here is the Beast and I’m The Doctor.”
“Doctor … who?” she asked.
The Doctor clapped his hands together and exclaimed, “Much better! And you are?”
Still a bit apprehensive about her would be saviors, she hesitantly replied, “Maeve … Princess Maeve … of York.”
The Doctor seized her hand, kissed the back of it and bowing deeply said, “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Maeve of York.”
Without missing a beat he launched straight into, “Do you have any experience with electronics? Oh, right, haven’t been invented yet. What practical skills do you have?”
“Erm … Embroidery?” Maeve tried, off of The Doctor’s non-reaction, she added, “Skinning various sorts of game … some archery, if no one’s looking.”
“Close enough,” The Doctor said. He tore a bundle of cable from the console and handed it to her saying, “See if you can get that sorted.”
He whizzed past The Beast on his way to some other piece of equipment that needed attentions. In passing he nodded towards the door and requested of The Beast, “Could you do something about all that noise? I can’t hear myself think!”
“Beast never hear Beast think!” he called after The Doctor but the latter paid him no heed. Gurgen shrugged. He ambled over to the door where the angry guards were still attempting to break it down.
He did some pounding of his own. This caused the guards to, momentarily, postpone their assault on the poor door. Beast yanked open the door, barked, “Cut that out!” punched one of them in the nose and closed the door again.
While the pounding did resume it had lost some of its luster.
The Doctor popped up next to Princess Maeve, startling her. “Did you make any progress?”
“Well,” Maeve said, almost 125% certain nothing she had done had contributed to their escape, “I sorted them by color.” She held out the bundle to demonstrate.
“What about these?” The Doctor said, indicating two red wires that were separate from all the other reds.
Maeve shrugged, “They feel different.”
“What?” The Doctor asked. He ran his fingers along the two wires and indeed found that they felt coarse.
He followed them to where they disappeared into the console and observed the site carefully, even sniffing it at one point.
“You’re brilliant!” he told Maeve and promptly tore the cables from the console. “They’re probably not important anyway!” he shouted as he hurried over to some levers at the other end of the console.
Some seemingly nonsensical manipulations later the ancient Wolga sounds returned.
Seeing The Doctor smile, Beast figured that their little box that didn’t fit inside itself was once again moving … though he couldn’t actually feel any movement. Using excellent, for him anyway, deductive reasoning, Gurgen surmised that this sound was somehow related to the proper functioning of the box.
Still holding on to his levers, The Doctor mused, “I’ll need to replace them, later. But for the moment the TARDIS is operational again.”
“You said,” Maeve accused, “That they weren’t important and now you want to replace them.”
The Doctor smiled at her and simply confirmed, “Yes,” offering no further explanation.
Gurgen came up to The Doctor who was in the middle of an energetic about-face that might have been an improvised dance move. “Wow,” The Doctor exclaimed when he was confronted with the massive Beastly beard, “Still as hairy as ever!”
Gurgen peered down at the skinny man and queried, “TARDIS?”
“Time And Relative Dimensions In Space,” The Doctor explained, reveling in having a new audience for his usual song and dance.
Gurgen frowned. “Lots of words,” he observed.
“And that’s why we stick with TARDIS … Are you entirely sure you’re a moron?”
“Yes,” Gurgen beamed, “very!”
“Meanwhile,” The Doctor said, “I’ve forgotten where I was heading … so, any requests? Anywhere in time and space!”
“Erm … Bath?” Maeve put forward.
“Tigranocerta!” Beast shouted.
The Doctor pointed at Gurgen and shouted, just as loud, “You win!”
He started working the controls and leaned over to Maeve, confiding, “Nothing personal, but Bath … nothing every really happens there … And I know that for a fact.”
Mere minutes later, the three of them sat atop a sandy hill overlooking the city.
“There you go,” The Doctor presented, “Tigranocerta, in the year 70 BCE, when Armenia was at its most powerful.”
Gurgen made large eyes at the massive stone walls surrounding the bustling city. As it was late in the day, a steady stream of carts, horsemen and travelers on foot made their way to the city gates, with only the occasional person going the other way. Smoke from hundreds, if not thousands of cooking fires curled up into the rather chilly early evening air. The clamor of daily life reached them even in their elevated position.
He only momentarily tore his gaze from the city he had heard so many stories about when The Doctor produced a pick-nick basket.
“That’s odd,” remarked The Doctor.
“What is?” queried Maeve, taking tentative nibbles from a corned beef and mustard sandwich.
“Usually when I go somewhere with new friends, something or other pops up that necessitates that we run.”
“Run?” Gurgen echoed, “Run!”
And he matched deed to word. Down the hill he went, all the way to the road, where he turned around and started making race tracks in the dust on the hillside.
“Figure he’s the sort of man who has trouble sitting still for too long,” The Doctor opined, “I know the feeling.”
“So, Doctor,” Maeve started, “You and The Beast … you haven’t known each other for very long, then?”
“Nope,” he replied, “met literally minutes before you ran up to us. Why were you running anyway?”
“Ah, you see,” Maeve said, in between bigger samples of her sandwich, “I was betrothed to this Earl.”
The Doctor rolled his eyes. “Betrothing … such a messy business.”
“I’m glad there’s SOMEONE who agrees with me on that one! But anyway, the Earl is a good deal older than me. But I figured I’d do my part and grit my teeth.”
The Doctor nodded. “Lie back and think of York.”
“What an odd phrase,” Maeve said, “But then I come near his and … dear God, did his breath smell foul! Like something died in there and has lain exposed to the noonday sun. I … I just couldn’t.”
“So, you kicked him in the balls and ran off!”
“No! … I punched him in the nose … and ran off!”
“And now you’re twelve hundred years before your own birth, having sandwiches overlooking the capitol of an ancient empire with a twentieth century Armenian and a Time lord.”
Maeve looked at her half eaten sandwich and remarked, “Is that what these are called? Marvelous invention, Doctor … also … Time lord?”
The Doctor straightened his bowtie and explained, “Yes, I do with time as I please … mostly. Hence, time … lord. Well, since the TARDIS can go anywhere … I suppose I’m also a ‘space lord’ but then again lots of people lord over space. At least some of it … like you betrothed or your dad, I suppose.”
Gurgen had worn himself out and was now trudging up the hill again.
Maeve nodded at The Massive Moron and asked, “What about him, what’s his story?”
“Don’t know, really, but I can tell you that I parked the TARDIS at the facilities of a professional wrestling organization … guidance system was acting up, you see.”
“Wrestling?” Maeve wondered.
“A combat sport,” The Doctor explained.
“Fighting for sport? You mean like at a tournament? So, he’s some sort of … really, really hairy knight?”
“Well, I suppose you could call him that.”
“Welcome back, Sir Beast,” Maeve greeted Gurgen once he had regained their altitude.
Gurgen plonked him backside squarely in between The Doctor and the Princess. His entire left side felt warm, just from being next to a beautiful girl. He tried to avoid looking at her, fearing that he might inadvertently startle her, as he was wont to do with women … and small children … and farmyard animals, officers of the law, grannies, toll booth operators and pretty much anyone who was a) alive and b) conscious.
Maeve declared that the air temperature was ill suited for her dress. Gurgen, almost instinctively, yanked open his fur coat. To his dread, Maeve actually leaned in and snuggled up to him. Sweaty Beast was apparently less disagreeable then would-be husband graveyard breath.
In a peculiar mix of reluctance and eagerness, Gurgen draped the coat over the lady, thereby ending up with his arm around her shoulders. Not only warm was his side now, it felt electrified. Her slightest movement caused him to shiver.
Seeing his predicament, The Doctor took pity upon The Beast and addressed him in an effort to get him to relax, “Say, Beast …”
“Beast!” Beast shouted, as seemingly instructed.
The Doctor patted him on the back, “Good boy!”
Gurgen beamed.
“Did you say, earlier, that you were irradiated?”
“Yes!” Gurgen again shouted, still on edge from the bodily contact with the lovely lady.
“How did that happen, then?”
“Ah!” Now, this was a story he was used to relaying and as he settled into expository mode, he did in fact finally relax some. “Pripyat power station go boom. Daddy-dear rushed over to help and little Gurgen sleep on back seat of ancient Lada.”
“Pripyat … Pripyat … oh, you mean the Chernobyl nuclear disaster? Yeah, nasty business, that.” He pulled an oblong device of some sort form his waistcoat and pointed it at Gurgen.
“Hey, no pokey Beast!” Gurgen objected, shirking away.
“It’s not a pokey devicey thingy,” The Doctor assured him, “It’s just a screwdriver … Well, I suppose you COULD poke someone with a screwdriver … kill them, even … but this is a sonic screwdriver, so, not to worry.”
“Is that a magic wand?!” Maeve exclaimed excitedly, sitting up, much to Gurgen’s regret.
“No, it’s a sonic screwdriver, isn’t anyone listening to me?”
“How does it work,” Maeve insisted on knowing.
The Doctor shrugged. “Just point and think, basically.”
“Like a magic wand …”
“No! Well … no! I mean … well … oh alright, it’s a magic wand, if you insist.”
To stave off any further questions, he quickly told The Beast, “There’s two kinds of news, Beast. There’s good news and there’s … really rather peculiar news. Which would you like first.”
“Beast like wodka first.”
“An excellent choice! But let’s get the news out of the way before we get shitfaced drunk, alright?” Not waiting for an answer, he immediately launched into the good news, “You’ll be glad to know that you’re not, at present, actually irradiated. There’s quite a bit of damage from all the Sieverts you were subjected to … which I can’t really do anything about, I’m afraid.”
“That be ok,” Gurgen said, “Beast be used to having fried brain.”
“Boys,” Maeve interrupted, “It’s really getting quite cold out here. Can we go inside, please?”
The Doctor led them back into the TARDIS, adjusted the internal temperature to 23 centigrade since his Fahrenheit dial had gone missing at some point in the third century BCE and resumed his news bulletin, “Where was I? Oh yes, the peculiar news.”
He pointed the not-a-magic-wand at Gurgen again and stated, “There’s something really rather odd about your beard.”
“Yes,” Gurgen agreed, “Critters live in there!”
To demonstrate, he plucked a centipede from his beard and handed it to The Doctor.
“Hello there little fellow,” The Doctor said to the critter, “You’re really quite disgusting.” And he promptly dropped the creature.
He started waving about his screwdriver again. “No,” he said, “something quite a bit stranger than that.”
A few seconds later, he seemed to be satisfied with his manipulations of the follicular jungle. “It would seem,” he said as he started to insert his fingers into the beard, “that there was something of a … portal …”
His hand disappeared into the beard.
“hidden in your beard. Well, the potential of a portal anyway.”
He was now up to the elbow engaged in the tangled mess of hair. “Don’t know why, don’t know how … yet. But there you go.”
His entire arm and shoulder had at this point disappeared into the beard. He quickly pulled out, saying “Tadaaaa!”
Maeve came over to investigate the beard. “A portal, you say?”
She brought her face right up to the beard, trying to work up the courage to test it herself.
Out of nowhere, a giant maw full of teeth lunged at her. She fell backward. The maw slammed shut, capturing nothing but a few strands of hair.
The Doctor rushed over to help her to her feet. “It’s an acrocanthosaurus … run!!!”
The giant lizard worked its way through the beard, leaving The Beast to look on in stunned silence.
“Well, it’s a baby, really. Actually quite cute, if it weren’t intent on eating us.”
“Less talk,” Maeve screamed at him, “more running!”
Seeing this prehistoric killing machine go after his newfound friends, Beast did the braves, and dumbest thing he could think of. He seized the acrocanthosaurus cub by the tail. Its claws slipped on the metal floor and it slammed into the ground. Beast enjoyed his victory for about one second and a half. The acrocanthosaurus was now not only aware of The Beast it also decided that he looked tastier. In a reflex, Gurgen used the one aerial move he had mastered in his decade and a half in the wrestling world and delivered a standing dropkick straight to the side of the monster’s head.
The hungry carnivore decided Beast was more trouble than he was worth and resumed his chase of the other two bipedal snacks. They had used the distraction to disappear into the bowls of the TARDIS but Maeve had not had the foresight to avoid putting any perfume this morning. Though in fairness, expecting a twelfth century princess to anticipate getting chased by a dinosaur through the insides of a time machine is a bit unfair. Still, the faint smell of roses wasn’t hard to track for a creature with a nasal cavity the size of Wembley stadium. So the acrocanthosaurus chased the princess and The Beast chased the acrocanthosaurus.
Despite his extensive experience with the art of running headlong, Gurgen had a hard time keeping up with the creature. Maeve found it harder yet. Her dress was well suited for a wide range of activities, sadly, all of them required her to move very little. Soon enough, she tripped on the hem.
“Doctor!” she pleaded, arm extended towards the Time Lord.
The Doctor whipped out his screwdriver and aimed it at her. The portion of her dress below the knee detached itself. She scrambled to her feet and flung the detached fabric at the charging monster. The time it took the acrocanthosaurus to get rid of the cloth was enough for Maeve to gain some distance.
But soon enough, the peculiar parade resumed. The Beast, still chasing the dinosaur, reemerged in the central control room of the TARDIS. He couldn’t recall taking any turns, near as he could tell, they had only gone straight. Still, Gurgen was used to not comprehending things like … including, magnets, the English language and Velcro. So, relative dimensions? He just filed it away and kept on running.
Soon enough, all four of them again arrived in the control room, never having taken any turns.
Since he still hadn’t gained on the dinosaur, Gurgen figured chasing them was futile. He hatched a harebrained scheme. The central console looked like it might support his weight so he started to climb.
The Doctor was beginning to wonder how they’d deal with this situation. His hearts were almost bursting from his chest at this point. How the princess was keeping up, he didn’t know. He had to admit that she had heart, if only one of them. They ran into the control room again.
The Doctor glanced up and spotted the Beast, perched high above.
With a nod of his head, Gurgen managed to invite The Doctor to pass right underneath him.
Once they had passed the Beast, The Doctor whipped around and waved the screwdriver at the acrocanthosaurus. Sparks erupted all around, momentarily disorienting the creature.
At this point, Gurgen shouted, “Crazy Horse!” and he launched himself, beard first, down upon the unsuspecting dinosaur.
The beast looked up at The Beast and promptly disappeared, back into the beard. Gurgen slammed into the steel plate floor. Keeping still because every single movement hurt Gurgen whimpered, “ow.”
The Doctor ran to him. “It’s ‘Geronimo!’, by the way,” he instructed while checking Gurgen over with his screwdriver.
Beast clambered to a sitting position. Shaking his head, he explained, “Beast keep mixing them up.”
“Erm, boys, not to put too fine a point on it, but I think it’s coming back.”
The boys paused and listened intently. Sure enough the acrocanthosaurus’ hungry screams emanated from the beard.
“Close it! Close it!” Beast shouted.
“I’m trying! I’m trying!” The Doctor shouted back. He frantically waved about his screwdriver, trying this setting and that.
The dinosaur sounded like it was mere feet away.
“Now would be a good time!” Maeve insisted.
“Hang on, almost there,” The Doctor tried another setting and the cries stopped.
“Thank God!” Maeve sighed, both hands clutched to her chest, “You sealed it.”
The Doctor helped The Beast to his feet. “Not exactly,” he said. He stood across from The Beast staring at the beard. He breathed rapidly for a moment or two. Then he sucked in a large breath and plunged into the beard.
Maeve and Gurgen stared at the Doctors body sticking out of the beard, the head and upper body, gone from view. They stared at each other, then back at The Doctor, then back at one another.
Maeve tentatively moved forward, intent on extracting The Doctor when he popped out on his own.
“Ok, we’re good … no carnivores of any kind to be seen.”
Off of the odd looks his companions gave him, he explained, “Couldn’t close it anymore … There’s something about our dear Beast’s body that gave him the energy to keep the portal closed. But now that I opened it, I don’t have the energy needed to close it again.”
“… so …” Maeve wondered, “what about the acrocanthosaurus?”
“I shifted the portal by a couple of million years and … basically … hoped for the best. Here’s to optimism, right?”
“Right … now that that’s taken care of,” Maeve said, “more trivial concerns.”
“Oh?” The Doctor wondered. As both men turned to her. Maeve did her best to cover her legs.
“Could you look somewhere else? I’m not used to showing this much leg in the company of men.”
“What? Oh, certainly!” The Doctor spun around. He noticed The Beast hadn’t followed suit.
He seized Gurgen by the shoulder. “Turn around, Beast, give the lady some privacy.”
Reluctantly, Beast tore his gaze away from those fine looking legs.
“I don’t suppose you have any dresses in this castle of a vessel?” Maeve asked.
The Doctor waved at a doorway behind him. “Through there, second door on the left … that’s the wardrobe … not sure there’s any dresses in there. Oh, and mind the crocodile.”
Maeve gasped, “There’s a crocodile?!”
“No, but there could have been,” The Doctor said. After a moment’s hesitation, he added, “In light of recent events that was probably not the best remark to make.”
But already, he heard Maeve’s feet head in the indicated direction.
He turned to The Beast and whipped out his screwdriver again, scanning and checking it every few seconds. “Now, about this beard of you …”
Eyes growing large with apprehension, Beast beheld his chin growth. For the first time ever, he wanted it to be further away … kind of hard when it’s attached to your face. “Beast cut it off?” he wondered aloud.
“No, no, I mean yes, it’s your beard, you do with it as you want. But wouldn’t you like to know why? Why it is as it is? Who made it like that?”
Scanning some more, he added, “The portal, that’s in and of itself not that special. But encoding both the portal and the energy to keep it hidden in your beard … that’s Time lord genetic engineering.”
“Time lord sciency stuff?” Gurgen wondered, “Doctor mean to say there be more of Time lords?”
His screwdriver seemed to suddenly lose its allure. The Doctor briefly studied the tips of his shoes.
“There used to be,” He finally admitted, “I’m the only one left.”
In an instant, Gurgen stepped forward and grabbed The Doctor in a massive hug that oddly resembled quite a few submission holds in wrestling.
Using what little air he could yet force into his alien longs, The Doctor breathed, “And we’re hugging … quite tightly … ow, ow, pain.”
Beast released The Doctor from his grasp. “Beast be sorry,” he apologized, “Beast get bit carried away. Doctor see, Beast know what it be like … being alone. Peoples no like to be around Beasts.”
“Well,” The Doctor tried to explain, straightening his jacket, “I wouldn’t say that I’ve been alone.”
But Gurgen was not deterred, this discovery of a fellow lone spirit needed to be commiserated, with alcohol, of course. From the depths his coat, which, for all the items he was able to store in it, seemed to be bigger on the inside as well, he produced a flask.
He took a big swig from it and handed the flask to The Doctor, declaring, “Us lonely men need to stick together. Here’s to being alone together.”
The Doctor chuckled a bit. “Well, I’ll drink to that!”
He followed the Beast’s suit and took a similar swig … which resided in his mouth for about one half second before being expelled in a brilliant mist across the TARDIS’ central console.
With sparks flying from the console, The Doctor demanded, “What the hell is this?!”
Gurgen smiled. He knew very little about nigh on any topic it was possible to have a conversation about, but he knew booze. “Absinth!” he beamed, “the good stuff … 92% … from Czech republic.”
“You drink this?!”
“Yes,” The Beast cheerfully said.
“For fun?!”
“Yes,” The Beast cheerfully said.
“You’re insane!!!”
“Yes,” The Beast cheerfully said.
Regaining his composure some, The Doctor said, “Remind me to never save the Czech Republic.”
“Hey!” Beast objected, waving his arms about in grand gestures, “That be where the good absinth be from. Doctor do save Czech republic!”
“It was a joke,” Maeve explained, seizing Gurgen’s flailing arm, “The Doctor will save the … whatever country that is.”
She folded her face into an expert pout and told the Doctor, “No dresses.”
She had apparently come across some puffy pants that were popular in the sixteenth century and had combined it with an eighteenth century Austrian cavaliers jacket with a long sleeve Pink Floyd t-shirt underneath.
“Wonderful!” The Doctor observed, “And not an inch of leg in sight!”
He stormed off to some storage compartment while he told the princess, “And now you can cover it up again!”
“How so?” she called after him.
The Doctor rushed back to the anachronistic pair in the center of his space-time box. He tossed a bright orange suit at Maeve and an extra-extra-large version of the same at Gurgen. “We,” he explained, as he was already stepping into his own suit, “are going to the Chernobyl power plant, right in the middle of the meltdown … hence the radiation suits.”
Maeve repeated with a total lack of comprehension, “Chernobyl … meltdown … radiation … what does any of that even mean?”
Gurgen placed his massive paw on Maeve’s shoulder. “Chernobyl be power plant … it make electricity for lights and stuff … When plant melt down, it make lots of radiation. Radiation make Maeve sick or dead. That be why us wear suit.”
“Couldn’t have put It any better myself, Beast,” The Doctor said. “Someone zip me up,” he added, making vain attempts to reach the zipper himself.
Beast indicated the zipper and told Maeve, “Maeve take that and move it up.”
She executed the instructions expertly but never the less asked, “Why don’t you do it?”
Beast’s eyes glazed over, he looked out across the TARDIS’ control room, casting his gaze back in time. “Beast do that once, when girl ask. Beast pull bit hard … girl be mad at Beast then.”
He rubbed his cheek. “Very mad.”
“Oh, Beasty,” Maeve consoled him, adding a little side hug for good measure, “I’m sure she’ll forgive you in time.”
Still looking at that unseen point across space and time, Gurgen mused, “Girl tell Beast to hurry up and die.”
“There are more girls in the universe, Beasty,” The Doctor interjected as he shoved big bowl shaped items into their arms, “many … many more girls … but anyway, some of them will like you. Now see if you can get into those.”
Maeve and Beast did as instructed, leaving The Doctor to cajole his craft to the indicated place and time.
“Beast gone blind!” Gurgen shouted. Arms outstretched, he started running. The Doctor tripped him and when he was splayed across the floor, he twisted the helmet around.
“It be miracle!” Gurgen exclaimed.
At the elation of having regained his ability to see, Gurgen almost missed the ancient Wolga truck sounds.
The Doctor donned his own helmet and grabbed his team by various arms to lead them out of the TARDIS.
They found themselves in a concrete basement. The walls hadn’t been cleaned in a decade. Several patches of encrusted calcium showed where water seeped through the walls continuously. The whole scene was illuminated by a series of light bulbs, dimmed by age and grimed that had long since settled on them too. In fact, the brightest source of light was a flashing alarm hanging above a sign that warned, in Cyrillics of radiation. In the far corner, the ceiling had cracked and some unknown substance was oozing through from above.
“Don’t worry,” The Doctor told Maeve who had come to stand next to him, “We’re safe in these suits.”
He pulled a worried face and said, “Hang on.”
He waved about his screwdriver and checked the reading. “Yes, we’re safe,” he confirmed.
Maeve grabbed him by the shoulder. “Doctor! It’s the Beast! The radiation has gotten into his suit!”
The Doctor spun around to see Gurgen twist, turn and gyrate in an unpredictable pattern.
“Demons! The radiation has awoken demons inside of him!” Maeve insisted.
“Hang on.” The doctor calmly walked over to The Beast, ignoring Maeve’s insistence to hurry. It was a few seconds before Gurgen held still long enough for him to press some buttons at the base of his helmet. Gurgen instantly ceased his erratic movement, querying The Doctor, “What Doctor do that for?”
“His intercom was set to music,” he explained.
Maeve breathed a sigh of relief.
“Now what us do?” Beast wanted to know.
But before The Doctor could formulate a plan. A rather grating female voice interrupted them.
“So there you are … what took you so long?”
The Doctor closed his eyes and whispered, “No, no, no, why did it HAVE to be you.”
He threw his arms wide and spun around. “Missy! How have you been? Miserable I hope. And you’ve brought some friends I see.”
Unlike themselves, Missy didn’t wear a radiation suit. She wore her habitual nineteenth century governess outfit. On either side of her stood a cyberman, two more stood perfectly still behind her.
The Doctor whipped out his screwdriver and tested the environment again. “Oh,” he said, “how silly of me.”
He turned to his friends. “You can take off the suits, there’s barely any radiation. I seem to have misread the comma.”
Gurgen, glad to be rid of the confining garment, peeled of the bright orange contraption. Maeve settled for removing the helmet.
“Seize them,” Missy told the cybermen.
“Beast crush tin men?” Gurgen asked The Doctor.
“You can’t,” was The Doctor’s reply.
But when the lead cyberman grabbed Maeve, Gurgen charged anyway. He dealt the cyberman a crushing blow, squarely in the middle of its face … and promptly sank to his knees, clutching his paw.
The cyberman seemed entirely unaffected.
Undeterred, Gurgen, from his crouched position sought to topple the metallic mammoth. He slammed into it with all his might. While this did shake the cyberman a bit, it quickly grabbed Gurgen by the scruff of the neck and tossed him to another member of his little detachment.
Gurgen struggled against the iron grip of this second cyberman until The Doctor strolled over and told him, “It’s ok, Gurgen. You did well. Now save your strength.”
Next The Doctor went to Maeve to tell her not to worry and that he’d get this sorted straight away.
The two remaining cybermen dragged him away from the princess and dumped him at the feet of their mistress.
“Thank you so much for bringing Gurgen back to me,” Missy said.
The Doctor frowned and echoed, “Back?”
She ambled over to Gurgen and patted him on the head, “My own little, living, TARDIS.”
She withdrew her hand. Smelling it, she added, “Might be in need of a bath … in bleach … but at least he’s functional.”
“You did this,” The Doctor surmised, “You altered his DNA … made the portal grown inside his beard. And, from your point of view, you did so five minutes ago.”
She checked her pocket watch. “Seventeen, actually. I was getting a bit bored, truth be told.”
Not waiting for further comments from The Doctor she continued, “It all got a bit tedious, you know, traveling with this.” She showed him her wristband. “Especially lugging the help around …” She tapped a cyberman on the head.
“But now, thanks to you, old friend, I once again have a fully functional TARDIS. The beard folds into itself, you see.”
She made a grand gesture. “Now I can go anywhere, any time, with all the cybermen I want.”
She walked right up to The Doctor. “Or would you like to stop me?”
“Is that even a question?” The Doctor replied.
“It’s easy enough,” she declared. She pulled out some sort of device and caused an image to pop up in midair.
“Little Gurgen,” Gurgen whispered.
In the image a little boy appeared, six or seven years old, protected from the elements and the radiation by nothing more than his East German Sandmannchen pajamas. He wandered through the corridors of the power plant, in search of his daddy-dear. Military men rushed past him, on this or that urgent mission. They had no time to check on the lost little boy.
“Suppose I showed you a little boy,” Missy began, “and I told you that he’d grow up to become the tool your greatest enemy uses to conquer the Universe … could you then kill that boy.”
“Never,” was all The Doctor replied.
She looked at the image. “From right here, I can see a dozen different ways to make him stone dead in under five seconds. How about it? Just whip out your trusty old screwdriver and deny me his services.”
For some reason, all this talk of that magic wand of The Doctor, made Maeve notice that the right hand pocket of her suit felt a touch heavier than it should. She slid her hand inside, taking care not to alert the man in full plate armor holding her.
She got right up in his face. “Kill him, and prove that you’re no better than me, or let him live and hand me the Universe on a platter.”
The Doctor lowered his head. A smile grew across his lips. “You’ve really got me beat this time, Missy. I mean, it’s a genius plan.”
“Why thank you!” Missy chirped.
“The rewriting of his DNA … using a nuclear meltdown as cover … hiding a portal inside a beard … And most of all that power you stored in his body to hide the portal until it was fully functional.”
“All that power …” he repeated, intently looking a Maeve, then at Gurgen.
Maeve clutched the screwdriver in her pocket. How had he said this thing worked? She whipped it out.
“Just point …” she said. She leveled the device at her hairy knight.
“… and think,” The Doctor added.
Gurgen was not known for his powers of comprehension. He was the one person on the planet, possibly the Universe, who failed to understand Velcro. But causing mayhem and beating up people and tin men alike, that he understood.
He shook off the cyberman’s arm and punched again. While it still hurt plenty, the results were quite different. He buried his fist straight into the cyberman’s head. He charged one of the cybermen holding The Doctor even before Missy could react. That fact that she needed him alive made her hesitate.
“Knock him out!” she eventually said. But Gurgen had already dropkicked the cyberman to the floor. Back in the day when he first started out in the world of wrestling, he had simply stomped towards his opponent, suffered whatever the opponent could throw at him and smashed in his face until his paws hurt. But he had since learned to avoid his opponent’s punches, to duck and weave. The cybermen, not known for their speed of movement failed to gain purchase on the elusive Beast.
He grabbed one of them by the arm, tore it clean off its socket and bashed a second’s head in. Next, he grabbed the headless body by the ankles. Using it as a great big club, he bashed the penultimate cyberman into expensive looking junk.
Down to her last cyberman, Missy ordered him, “Oh just kill the bastard.”
The cyberman aimed his blaster. Beast frantically tried to find something to use as a weapon.
“Just stand up straight!” The Doctor shouted.
The Beast complied, trusting that other people had a better idea than him as to what needed doing. Hell, most plantlife had a better idea of what needed doing than him, including the proper way to operate Velcro.
The cyberman fired. The bolt hit Gurgen straight in the … beard. And disappeared, not causing any harm.
Maeve seized the heaviest object she could a) find and b) lift, which turned out to be a fire extinguisher and hurled it at Gurgen.
The Beast grabbed the extinguisher by the nozzle and, in a beautiful arc swung it at the cyberman. One second later, another decapitated body joined its friends in blessed obsolescence.
Missy aimed some sort of device at Gurgen but just as she fired, The Doctor banged his hip into hers, causing her to miss.
Gurgen stampeded over. He grabbed Missy by the wrist and twisted it until she let go of her weapon. A crunchy sound spoke of the demise of her teleportation wristband.
“Doesn’t it become quite tiresome to always be foiled,” The Doctor inquired as he popped his head right next to hers.
“Yeah, yeah, a minor setback,” Missy told him, “but …”
She grabbed The Doctor’s head and planted her lips firmly on his.
The Doctor just stood there, hunched over, arms stretched out wide, flailing wildly.
Gurgen looked at Maeve questioningly. Maeve just shrugged. She was used to people forcing themselves upon others, though in her experience, it was usually the men doing the forcing. These future times sure were different.
“but,” Missy continued, “foiled, I may be, but not quite beaten.”
She shoved The Doctor, still reeling from the kiss. With a beautiful vault one would assume impossible given her choice of dress, she leapt into the beard and promptly disappeared.
“After her!” Maeve decreed.
Gurgen thrust his paw in the air. “Yeah!” he hollered.
The Doctor restrained Maeve, however. “How about, ‘no’,” he impressed upon them.
He physically dragged them towards the TARDIS. “Not quite sure HOW Missy kept the radiation at bay, some sort of force field, I suppose, she’s big on force fields, you know. But anyway, now that she’s gone … well, better not to linger, you know.”
Maeve was still not entirely sure what radiation was. It seemed to be some sort of bad humor in the air. Indeed, she agreed, best not linger.
Gurgen paused at the door. He stared at the section of wall where the image of his younger self had appeared. His deductive faculties not improved by Maeve’s ministrations with the screwdriver, Gurgen tried to figure out if he could do something. Save little Gurgen from getting hit by too much radiation. Get him out before his brain got too fried. He, himself had already been hit by so much radiation, a little more probably couldn’t hurt, he supposed.
The Doctor placed his hand on the Beastly shoulder. “It’s no use, Beast. Whatever happened to you, back then, it already happened. There’s no changing it now.”
Gurgen looked The Doctor in the eye. The Doctor read a tremendous sadness in those eyes. Not that The Beast had suffered so much, not compared to him anyway, but for one of his limited comprehension, the weight placed upon him by a world that didn’t understand him and often didn’t care to try and understand him, it must be crushing him. The mileage on his soul outpaced the age of his body by a long stretch.
Beast for his part was wont to miss the blindingly obvious. He was the sort of person who’d run head first into a brick wall, pained fluorescent pink, that he had seen from a mile out and still be surprised that he hit something. But he did recognize something familiar in The Doctor, an old soul in a young body.
“Come along now, Beast, it’ll all be alright in the end.”
Gurgen nodded. He allowed The Doctor to guide him inside. Maeve shut the door behind them.
“I lied, by the way,” The Doctor admitted, “it won’t be alright. At least, I can’t guarantee it.”
Beast replied, “Beast know, but Beast thank Doctor for saying so anyway.”
In a flash, he pulled the flask from his coat again. “Us drink to it?”
“A very definite ‘not in this lifetime and probably none of the future ones’ to that.”
Beast shrugged. “More for Beast.”
The TARDIS made its usual ancient Soviet Wolga truck sounds again. Beast relaxed a bit, knowing that they were away from the evil reactor that fried his brain.
“Tigranocerta again?” Maeve queried.
They looked down upon a ghost town. The walls had been demolished in places, the stones having been reused to build other structures. Other than a lone boy tending a flock of sheep there was no traffic of any sort. No smoke from cooking fires curled up into the evening air. The magnificent capitol of the mighty Armenian empire lay in ruins, never to rise again.
“Yes,” The Doctor answered, “50 BC this time.”
It was Gurgen’s turn to remark, “King Tigran been fool. No know how to fight battles. No trust general to do it for him.”
The Doctor nodded his agreement. “Pretty accurate reading of history by my count.”
Gurgen looked upon the remains below. Thing were created, and then they grew, grew into great things, and then they died. It was the natural order of things and he didn’t feel sad about it, well not a whole lot anyway.
“So,” The Doctor tore him from his musings, “I’ve managed to tie the portal in to your mind. You make it go where you want now.”
“That be dumb,” Gurgen opined.
“How so?”
“Gurgen no have mind so portal no go anywhere.”
The Doctor chuckled, “Well, at least it won’t hurt anyone then.”
Gurgen mulled this over in his empty head. “True,” he finally said.
The Doctor clapped his hands together, “Shall we be off? Great adventures to be had!”
Maeve jumped a little. “Are we going to Bath now?” Before either man could answer, she added, “Actually, I’ve gone off Bath now … never mind.”
“Beast go back to wrestling now.”
“Why?!” The Doctor shouted, “You’re the strongest Beast on the entire planet, there’s no challenge in wrestling.”
“It be only thing Beast know. And Beast make pretend Beast no be super strong. Beast keep fans happy.”
“You’d be surprised at what you know. But ok, I’ll take you back.” He turned to Maeve, “How about you? Mystery … foreign lands … entirely different planets even!!!”
Maeve looked upon the hairy warrior besides her. He wasn’t terribly bright, true. And he could do with some personal hygiene, very true. But at least he was honest, was very unlikely to hurt her, and was strong enough to keep her safe … at least until she figured out his world.
She leaned in to the Irradiated Imbecile and clutched his massive arm with her own thin arms. “I’ll stay with him, I think.”
“Just my luck,” The Doctor lamented, “I just happen to pick up the two people who do not want to visit every corner of the Universe, twice over.”
“Doctor will live,” The Beast said with just a hint of a grin on his face.
“Don’t even think of offering me absinth!” The Doctor warned, also sporting a hint of a grin.
When he’d said his goodbyes, The Doctor set his TARDIS to pretty much anywhere. Something occurred to him. He threw the TARDIS into reverse. The TARDIS bucked and groaned but complied in the end.
He popped out, in the backstage area of Gurgen’s wrestling fed, mere feet away from Maeve.
“Just one more thing, Princess …”
She interrupted him, “DOCTOR! Where have you been?!”
“I was gone for a while, right?”
Maeve cocked her head. “Five months, I recon … it was just minutes for you I guess.”
“Quite,” The Doctor replied, “I see you’ve gotten over your aversion to showing some leg.”
As a response, Maeve made a pirouette, sending the edges of her plaid skirt whirling in the air.
“And marvelous legs they are,” The Doctor commented, nodding appreciatively.
“Quite liberating, actually,” Maeve observed.
“Right, what I was meaning to ask before we got sidetracked by shapely legs … would it be ok if I popped by for the OCCASIONAL dashing adventure?”
She grabbed him by the shoulders, spun him around and put him in a headlock. “You’d better!”
The Doctor tapped out, saying, “Learned some move from The Armenian Beast, I see.”
When she released her victim, he added, “Speaking of his hairiness … where is he?”
“Oh, he on in five, he’s just getting Dewi ready … that away.”
Maeve pointed The Doctor in the right direction and would have accompanied him, but a pair of young girls sporting backstage passes, caught her, insisting on selfies.
The Doctor went in the indicated direction quietly wondering who Dewi was. When he turned the corner, a huge maw filled with dagger sized teeth knocked him to the ground. Even before he hit the ground, he had his screwdriver out, not entirely sure if there was anything he could use the thing for against the acrocanthosaurus.
But before he could valiantly conquer both his own despair and the looming monster, Maeve caught up to him. “Oh, you’ve met Dewi … he’s quite harmless, you know.”
“Dewi?” The Doctor wondered.
From atop the dinosaur, seated in a saddle, The Armenian Beast called out to, “Doctor! Doctor be back! Absinth?”
Restoring his attire and his dignity, The Doctor leapt to his feet. “You’ve figured out the beard! … and how to tame dinosaurs, apparently.”
Gurgen patted Dewi on the flank, “Dewi be great big kitten.”
“Just be glad you’re not the ball of yarn,” Maeve confided, “Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have a match to attend to.”
Out there, in the arena, March ör Die by Motörhead burst from the speakers.
“Doctor no be stranger!” The Beast shouted as he headed through the heavy black curtains that separated the backstage area from the sea of madness known as wrestling fans.
The Doctor rushed back to the TARDIS, did his usual twisting of knobs and pulling of levers and found himself in the back row. He pulled out a pair of opera glasses which he picked up while on a definitely-not-a-date with Empress Sissi to the Vienna opera in 1855.
There they were, The Beast and The Princess. She led the acrocanthosaurus back to the backstage area while Gurgen got busy not ripping his opponent apart … which, given his strength, as insane as he was, he totally could. He was pulling his punches, The Doctor could tell … The fans couldn’t or they didn’t seem to mind.
“Don’t be a stranger?” The Doctor murmured to himself, “Oh Gurgen, I am so very, very much stranger than even you can imagine.”