Text Key

"Audible speech."

'Directed thought, telepathic speech.'

The Christmas Invasion

Chapter 1 – Arrivals

Military personnel intermingled with plainclothes advisors and civilian scientists in a space intended for half the number of bodies present. The noise of a dozen telephones being picked up, put down, and dialed mingling with the clatter of three times as many keyboards only added to the tense atmosphere as the brainpower of half a dozen separate organizations was set to figuring out the situation.

Americans might have referred to the space as a 'war room'. Barely separated from the controlled chaos by a thin pane of glass, Harriet Jones, Prime Minster decided she would rather call it a 'command centre'.

First contact – or at least, first 'official' contact – did not immediately justify the trappings of war, no matter what President Winters and his right-hand slime seemed to think. It had been a British satellite on a British broadcast, which meant that Britain had first crack at it, no matter how badly the so called 'Leader of the Free World' wanted to be responsible for cocking it all up.

Not that Harriet Jones would have faulted some outside help, given that all they had figured out about their imminent 'guests' was that they were going to arrive in approximately five hours and didn't speak English.

Still, Torchwood had oh-so-generously given her a call and the donation of a universal translator that would be arriving shortly, so they weren't completely out of their depth even if the other offer they'd pushed forward was far from comforting. Rather, it felt like a darker threat than the aliens up above.

Harriet dismissed the thought as the UNIT officer in charge of this particular operation entered her little room again. Major Richard Blake was a large man of a largely professional demeanor, but he was one of her favorites out of all her UNIT contacts, never mind the Torchwood set, if only because he didn't idle with nonsense and secrets more than his job required.

"They'll be here in five hours, Minister Jones," he said.

Anything else he could say was cut off by the sound of a phone ringing, not from the main area, but from the very room they were sitting in. Her personal mobile, in fact.

A lump of lead settled into her stomach, only to shift slightly as she noted the caller display coming up blank. Not a call from home then. That would have been the last thing she needed tonight.

"Bad news, Minister Jones?" Major Blake asked.

"A poor sort of Christmas present, I would think, but I will be finding out shortly," she said before picking up the call. "Harriet Jones, Prime Minister."

"I know who you are," the caller said, cutting her off before she could ask who they were and how they got this number. "They're called the Sycorax."

The voice was unfamiliar, but the accent was easily identifiable as Scottish. Highlands, if Harriet recalled correctly, which when paired with a voice that seemed to play hopscotch between being 'comforting' and 'intimidating', created something that demanded attention just by existing.

"Excuse me?" she asked.

"The aliens that hijacked your broadcast, yes, the unpleasant looking fellows in red," the mystery caller said again, as if speaking to a simple child, their voice buzzing around the R's like an agitated bee hive. "They are called the Sycorax. An interesting, if somewhat… unpleasant species to deal with."

"How do you –," Harriet began to ask before shaking her head. This could be the lifeline they needed, the edge that information granted. "I'm putting you on speaker," she said before motioning for an aide to bring over an appropriate speaker. "Run a trace while you're at it," she whispered.

"Their chosen… aesthetic is very distinctive," the caller continued, their cool tones filling the room easily now that the phone was attached to the appropriate equipment. "Admittedly, it is hardly possible to produce a universal encyclopedia, given the length, breadth, and duration of history, let alone the interference of however-many time travelers mucking up the history and altering timelines so certain things exist and others don't, but my… experience leaves only one other group given to the blood-bone-and-voodoo look and – believe me – if the Faction Paradox was the one knocking on your door, your world would have been over ten times before tea-time yesterday and twice before tomorrow."

Somehow, the idea that things could be infinitely worse was not a comforting one. "Back to the subject of these… Sycorax. What do they want?"

There was barely a pause between the question and the answer, but it was enough to let the word that followed fall with the weight of the world.

"Everything."

The bustle had filled the command centre stilled as every head seemed to turn towards the glass-partitioned room and the phone that lay on the table within.

"They want your land, your minerals, your precious stones," the caller said, their words as cold and dark as the echo of leaden coffins closing in the depths of ancient catacombs, not even the buzz of that Scottish accent around the R's softening the facts as they were delivered. "Every possible resource that could be squeezed from this rock – be it oil, water, or blood – they want. Including you. This is no compliment; the Sycorax are slavers. To them, you are chattel and fit for all that implies."

Some of the aides and scientists looked sick at this declaration and not all of them were the image of youthful idealism. Harriet Jones might have been one of them if she'd never encountered the Slitheen. No, the universe at large had already disabused her of the notion that it was a 'nice' place.

"Do you know how they intend to go about it then?" she asked. "They only have one ship. What capabilities are we dealing with here that one ship is deemed sufficient to conquer an entire planet?"

The caller chuckled, a low rolling sound that had more in common with a landslide than human mirth. "A good question, Harriet Jones, Prime Minister. Here's the short answer; they don't. Not without playing dirty."

"And what's the long answer?" one of the scientists – ah, yes, Mr. Llewellyn from the Guinevere-1 Project – asked.

"The Sycorax are lazy. Rather than learn a modicum of the local history and custom, they make like most imperialists; come in with a show of power, cow the masses, and make their outrageous demands. Never cared for that sort, coming into someone else's house assuming they know best when all they have is a misplaced and overinflated sense of nationalism."

A few agents, mostly ones that Harriet Jones recognized from the Torchwood 'donation', stiffened. The speaker, not being physically present to see the reaction to their words, continued.

"Unfortunately for you, their show of power isn't one that you can easily countermand. Tell me, have the Type-A Positives started acting strangely yet?"

"What does that have to do with –"

"Their demands?" their mysterious caller finished. "You have them outnumbered, outgunned – not that they'd know that, what with the lack of research –, and nearly all of their weapons are exclusively intended for close combat. To make a hostage demand, one needs a way to impose a threat. Without weapons, that leaves something that cannot be so easily countered."

"Biological warfare?" Major Blake offered.

"A good guess, but a bit... oh, there's a lovely term I've heard on Earth for the idea I'm trying to vocalize here, ah… ass-backwards for those interested in a healthy slave-population, wouldn't you agree?" they said. "No, they have another method of taking control of the situation, one that will hand them control of approximately a third of your population."

"Hypnotism?" someone asked from the back.

"Aight, who the fuck invited the bloody Master to this little questionnaire–" a different voice from their caller muttered over the speaker before being cut off. Harsher, younger, and definitely British compared to the softer Scottish tones of the voice Harriet was already calling 'The Professor' in her head.

"Of a sort," the cooler voice said as they resumed control of the phone. "It's called 'blood control' and they're using the blood sample that you sent off in your ill-fated probe as the keystone to their plan. Used correctly, it can be a powerful method of control, capable of giving those under its control complex commands… so long as those commands don't run counter to the subject's basic instincts."

Harriet Jones swallowed down the dread that was building in her lungs. "And those commands would be?"

"Climb on top of the tallest thing you can and wait."

I was waiting.

Technically, 'I' was on the phone, but it was a different 'me' doing the talking. Zeke was a different life with a different mind, different thoughts, and a different voice that nevertheless was part of the same pattern as the human called Delaine, even if he had been into it in a different way than most of the others.

I could have given the information myself, yes, but Zeke was native to this universe, in a roundabout way. Plus, I trusted him. Between that, his silver tongue, and a mind sharper than most laser beams, I had no issue letting him have full control over 'our' body for the interim, even if it was a small hassle maintaining the balance needed to stop myself from slipping back into the driver's seat.

After all, doing that allowed me to deal with another problem.

I gave Gemma another imaginary kick to the head, which worked since both of us were currently in an imaginary state. "'Who the fuck invited the Master'?" I snapped. "That's what you felt so compelled to fuck-up this delicate balancing act for? A cheap shout-out quip based on a TV show that doesn't even exist in this 'verse?"

Gemma gave me a look. "Like you and the rest haven't done the exact same thing."

"I think the difference between that and this was that 'that' involved the person who was supposed to be in control trying to be funny or relieve stress while 'this' was stupid and an interruption of something kind of important to unfuckulating the timeline," I said as I crossed my arms and rolled my eyes. "'Who the invited the Master'…"

"Y'never complained about my quips when I had primacy," the young witch muttered.

"Being on the shit list of every creature that's ever crossed a Constantine, you got a pass. Plus, you got a fair corner on acerbic wit and sarcasm; it's just when you try to be anything outside of that, it sucks," I said. "Now, shut up, I think Zeke's just about done teaching his 'class'."

I pushed away from the middle-ground of my mind, the sounds of the waking world coming back as if I had been underwater and was just now resurfacing.

"– know this?"

"You could say I have approximate knowledge of many things," Zeke and I said together.

'Welcome back', he thought as we reached synchronicity again. 'I trust there will be no more interruptions from the mixed nuts?'

'It's a peanut gallery, and no, there will not,' I agreed.

"How?" someone said. Not Harriet Jones, but one of the others in the room. Torchwood or UNIT, I wondered absently. In the end, it really didn't matter, though I had less love for the former.

"My means are beyond you, my methods the stuff of madness, my theories suspect, and I suspect that if you could see my tie, you wouldn't like that either," Zeke said. "But the Earth is protected, and not just by the likes of UNIT and Torchwood. You can put faith in that. Code Nine arriving in time with our hostile party, by the way. Thought you would like to know. Goodbye, Minister Jones."

The Time Lord dropped the phone back onto the hook and, for the brief moment we were both in and out of control of our body, shuddered. Then it was just me in the driver's seat again. Just as the system was designed.

'What's your plan now?' Zeke asked as he settled back into his place in the 'backroom' of my mind.

'To find a good place to sit of course. I wouldn't want to miss the main event,' I thought as I stepped out of the public telephone box and tuned out the other voices. Thankfully, the street was empty; one of the few perks to being out alone late on Christmas Eve.

I let Zeke's body change into my own regular shape; roughly about the same height but a noticeably skinnier frame, though a lot tougher by Asgardian default. The feeling of change was almost non-existent in between those shifts, at most it was the burn of melting wax running alongside the inside of my bones as strands of hair altered their composition from relatively short curls to a longer, lazier tangle of chaotic and uncoordinated waves.

I reached up to tangle my fingers in it with a grimace. "That asshole keeps resetting the length," I muttered, making the mental note to whip out a knife or a razor as soon as I had a spare moment, a cutting implement, and a mirror.

'Didn't you have something to do? Someplace to be?'

I rolled my eyes at the impatience. Ordinarily, I would have just summoned one of my bikes from the warehouse, but there was a call for stealth tonight. Not ordinarily my wheelhouse of operations, being something of a bruiser and leg-breaker in function, but it was a rare day when any of us got what we wanted.

I pulled on the coat, making sure it was securely in place before I launched myself off of the pavement, landing on one of the rooftops nearby for only a second before darting to the next.

'Flying would be faster,' one of the others said.

'Yeah, but I'm not the best at happy thoughts,' I replied as I leaped across a particularly long gap with all the effort most people put into stepping over a crack. The resistance as I touched down on the other side was a passing presence, but reassuring in its own way. 'Especially since I don't think Selby came with me this time.'

The voices in the back of my mind turned slightly worried, but for now, his absence was survivable in the way a dislocated arm was. It hurt and it wasn't particularly fun, but I wasn't actively dying. Just miserable.

There was another reason why I wasn't flying apart from personal preference; like the motorcycles, it had a way of garnering attention. Except instead of people complaining about the noise to police, it was radar monitors alerting the air force. And on a night when an alien invasion was in the air, travelling by rooftop at night with only the light of a cat's grin moon to guide me, invisibility was my greatest ally.

What I would do after this encounter with the Sycorax…

Well, I'd always been one for winging it. I'd figure it out.

For now, I was free.

This regeneration was highly irregular.

The Doctor hated the phrasing immediately. 'Highly irregular', yech. Officious, snotty, and oh so very stick-in-the-muddy, all within the space of two words. It'd be the sort of thing that an officiant of the most boring stripe would say when asked to speed things up in a time of crisis and that was not very Doctor-y.

Unless this latest incarnation was going to head that way, though the fact that he'd responded to the thought so negatively seemed to point in the opposite direction. Just as well; he'd always been against that sort of thing and it was at least one sign of something that was staying the same. No need to go off the Valeyards – no, not the Valeyard, the rails, the rails – just yet. The Valeyard may or may not be later and may or may not be avoidable, but it was certainly not a problem for this model.

If the Doctor had any choice in the matter, it wouldn't ever be for any model that followed his either.

Still, this regeneration was different. The Vortex energy was overloading the circuits, melting parts of his brain the moment the regeneration was done stabilizing them, and he should have had at least a version of consciousness… well, a while ago. It was hard to tell if it should have been minutes or hours, because even the usually impeccable time sense of a Time Lord was skewed, winding too fast or too slow and sometimes vanishing all together as he bobbed through different levels of his consciousness.

Memories mingled with dreams and forebodings, warnings from past selves merging with absolute nonsense and nightmares.

Games where the rules changed at every turn, spiders crawling out of every possible crack to envelop him in their tickly embrace as their mother and master came out of her hole to feast before the world flipped, dumping him into the canals of Venice.

The Doctor gasped as he finally managed to clear his head of the water and then slipped back under as a gigantic raven with a ball and chain locked around its angle swooped down at him, the bright orange of its prison clothes whipping in the wind.

Instead of sinking further, the skin of his back hit freezing cold metal. His clothes had disappeared in the transition from one dream to the next, the only indication that there was anything on any part of his body was the whisper of a thin white sheet above him and the feeling of fine, rough-grained twine tied around his toe. The Doctor raised his hands to pull himself up, only to bang his elbows and wrists against a stainless steel ceiling only a handful of inches above the table he lay on.

An old memory of claustrophobia crept in, drawing the walls of the freezer – it had to be a freezer, why was he in a freezer – closer and closer until it was a metal coffin pressing up against his sides, his chest straining against cold steel with every desperate breath –

"Oh, we can't have you giving yourself a heart attack on account of some silly little nightmare. No, that would be boring, even if you do have one of those to spare."

The voice was a collection of shattered glass in every possible color assembled into the shape of words and shoved into the ears of everyone who had to listen and upon being exposed to its very unnatural sound, and even the disappearance of that crushing pressure couldn't change the fact that the Doctor was terrified.

There was a short list of things that terrified the Doctor by this point in his lives. Most of them were abstracts or situational. Claustrophobia, the death of a companion, the death of his TARDIS. But the ones that came with names could be counted on his hands, depending on the week. Davros, maybe. The Master, variable.

This thing fit into neither of those categories, and the Doctor knew that if he was calling anything sentient 'a thing', it was either because he didn't – or couldn't – understand it or that it had gone far past the boundaries of being anything else.

What it was – in a strictly visual sense, because he still didn't have anything beyond 'thing' – was a cross between a corpse, a wax-model, and a mannequin, the proportions just far enough off to cross out 'human' entirely.

It had the approximate shape down; two legs, two arms, a torso, a head, the appropriate number of digits – well, at least when it came to the hands, as it was hard to tell anything about the feet with the shoes on. It just did everything else wrong.

The most attention grabbing thing, after that voice, was the face or lack thereof. If not for the way the mouth parted so smoothly with those needle teeth just behind its 'lips', the Doctor might have mistaken it for a minimalist commedia mask rather than the thing's 'true' face.

The hair over that was a shiny purple-black that belonged to wigs, the translucent paper-white skin clung too tightly to limbs too thin for any living human, and for all the Adam's apple in that pale throat bobbed and danced as the creature twisted its head around in that birdlike fashion, there was no blood moving in those veins.

"Why are you here?" the Doctor asked, watching the neck. The black pits the creature called eyes would give nothing away, but maybe that bobbing, dancing thing would.

"What an elementary question." A shiny purple tongue, so deeply colored as to almost be black darted out between its shark-like teeth to swipe across its lips. "To be amused, of course. Why is anyone else?"

A sense of distaste settled in the back of the Doctor's mouth. It was in his mind and while he wanted to shove it out, there wasn't anything he could do. His latest personality wasn't set yet; the boundaries of his mind were too soft and ill-defined to have anything so concrete as a 'defense'.

"And what's so amusing about me?" he asked.

"Many things. Your mutable nature, your travelling ways… your insistence on 'pacifism'." The word was almost said like a joke. "And put in the right context, your face as well."

Something about that ticked at a box of danger, making the fact that the Doctor was in no position to do much of anything irrelevant. "You won't take my body," he said, scrambling to his feet and readying what control he had over his mindscape.

The thing moved, closing what gap there had been between Time Lord and elder nightmare in a heartsbeat. "I'm not interested in your body," it said around that black, needle-y grin as it pressed a long fingernail into the Doctor's forehead. "I'm just making sure neither of the players in this show gets the idea to run away."

The thing stabbed its fingernail through the skin and into the Time Lord's brain and the Doctor knew no more.

Five hours. I could have walked like a normal person and still made good time, but there was something to be said for showing up to a party early. It gave me time to plan and time to get a measure of the situation.

The fact that I'd set up shop in the belfry of what was easily London's most famous landmark didn't hurt either. For all this Christmas was darkened by the assholes descending from space in their ugly piece of crap rocket rock, the holiday still held the chance of being a bright one… at least for a few that somehow escaped the event unscathed. People were still going to die, I noted. Exposure, bad falls, existing conditions exacerbated past the point of no return… some people might even try to pull themselves free from the equipment keeping them alive in their quest to reach the rooftops. Others not affected by the blood control might take advantage of an opportunity to make a murder look like an accident. Others… well, they would take their awakening on the edge of a roof as a sign that they needed to take that last step themselves.

Whatever the cause, there was no question that people would die today, and those that didn't stood a fair chance of having Christmas become the anniversary of a loved one's death.

So that meant ending this game as quickly as possible.

First there was the enemy. The Sycorax ship was an ugly thing, interrupting the otherwise perfect witching hour, but it also lacked any clear point of access from the outside. The fact that it was also hanging a few miles above London limited my options even more, because even if it came even lower to the ground, getting up there would require teleportation or flight proper, the last of which would definitely be noticed by everyone, even if I borrowed a set of wings for the venture. The first required some idea of where to land.

Second, there was something wrong with this universe and I needed to figure out what.

'Excuse –'

I cut Zeke off. 'Not like that. It just… feels wrong. Like I'm missing pieces just by being here, and not just because of Selby.'

As a demonstration, I tried calling on the Rider. The spirit had been bound to my soul and part of our shared metaphysical self for millennia and had never resisted my call since our joining.

Yet, I was getting all of – "Nothing," I said, watching my hand spectacularly fail to catch fire. "There's no magic."

That was a pain in my ass, because it meant I was suddenly short a whole lot of options and right before a crisis just beginning to commence. I ran through a quick battery of tests, just to see what I did have left.

The results were pretty clear, though surprisingly schizophrenic.

Psychic powers were fine, spirit-based abilities were in the clear, and anything that ran off life energy worked like a charm, but anything that was solely classified as 'magic', be it ritualized, wild, or somewhere in between, was right out.

"So Block-Transfer Computations and the Termina Masks are fine, but Wingardium Leviosa is going out of line?" I asked the empty air as I stopped pulling for an energy that simply wasn't there. It was like someone had gone back to the beginning of the Doctor's universe and beat the concept of magic like it like an unwanted step-child until it died.

'They do have a fairytale on Gallifrey, about how Rassilon and his fellows excised all irrationality from the universe,' my personal Time Lord replied.

'But souls are rational?'

'I don't think even Rassilon would have dared to tamper with those.'

Something twitched on the edge of my consciousness and I looked down at the city. Small figures were climbing up to stand on the edges of buildings, shoulder to shoulder as they looked up towards the sky.

The Sycorax had begun their play and I had about five pieces of a plan. I shoved most of the artifacts back into the warehouse, trading them for pieces of a more electronic nature. Then, I started to take them apart, quickly putting together a cheap – by my standard, at least – general use signal scanner with a small screen.

As to where to aim it? UNIT had a base of operations in the Tower of London, if I recalled correctly. Something to do with an Archive…

'The Black Archive, but not until the 50th anniversary, I think.'

'It's their fucking London HQ, you inconsistent fuck.'

'Wasn't their headquarters at this castle-looking manor in the classic series?'

'Thank you for the correction, oh wise and all-knowing peanut gallery', I snapped back before tuning them out again. It wasn't like I had watched the series within recent memory. So, UNIT HQ. Of all the transmissions going in and out, I just needed to find the one that went straight up and required a babel fish to understand, trace the signal to where it was coming from, and...

What, use that to teleport directly into the probe they were using the broadcast in the first place? Yes, that would be a pleasant experience, not to mention an impeccable display of stealth and cunning.

I needed a better plan.

I started fiddling with the scanner, upgrading the scanner to all kinds of energy, primarily those associated with teleportation.

Trace the signal. Figure out both ends of it. Piggyback the transmat as it picks up Harriet Jones and her entourage, preferably in a form suited for stealth, and land where they did. From there, observe, protect, and gather information so that I could calculate the next stage.

There, that was a plan.

I had a dozen methods I could use to follow the teleport and a Termina Mask in mind for the last. I could trade control over to one of the others who had equally suitable forms, but once was quite enough for one evening.

'It's morning.'

'Shut up.'

Setting down my messily assembled scanner, I reached into the subspace that connected my warehouse to my reality and started mentally flipping through the different 'catalogues' before finding what I wanted.

The Twili mask was one of my Termina set, and while I didn't always appreciate the way it somewhat overwrote my personality with the thief whose soul it had been crafted from, that side effect would work in my favor tonight. After all, the thief wasn't the one who had nightmares about a man who shared the Tenth Doctor's face.

'Again, morning.'

'Again, shut up!'

I would call the transformation 'magic', except that it worked in this universe. Maybe it simply translated the transformation as me borrowing the Twili's bio-data or something similar to what the Zygons did. Whatever the Doctor's universe thought of it, I knew it as a tool that could be used to great effect.

The mask itself, despite the weight of its origin and abilities, was very light in my hands. Part of me recalled an old theory about the relative weight of a soul being approximately 21 grams, but my better sense shushed it.

I had things to do that were more important than trivia hour.

As if on cue, there was a shift in the atmosphere, breaking me out of my thoughts as a couple hundred windows shattered from the sonic boom.

'They called it a sonic wave on the show.'

I'm calling it bullshit. The show implied that every window in London exploded, but the physics don't work. Sonic booms break windows, yes, but rarely and most commonly at extremely low altitudes. I lifted up my thumb to gauge the distance between the Scyorax ship and the horizon. And they're not even close to 'kind of' low. It's not even approaching the idea of low. That's a couple thousand feet up, so barring deliberate action – which I wasn't, considering who we were talking about –, it was an example of impossible physics.

And on a separate but wholly related note: what an ugly piece of shit to be roaming the universe in. Alright, I would concede that running around in a retrofitted asteroid might be count as efficient camouflage – IN SPACE – and that fitting said asteroid with nasty looking spikes and such was a valid form of intimidation display, it still didn't change the fact that it was ugly and inefficient.

Another relatively minor reason why I wouldn't be terribly upset when Torchwood blew the slavers up, I supposed.

The scanner beeped. Alien frequency detected between UNIT HQ and the Sycorax Vessel, range and intensity in keeping with teleportation technology. Traced and locked.

"It's show time," I said as I slipped on the mask and felt the basic structure of my body change again for the second time in so many hours. Before the change was even complete, I was gone, leaving the belfry of Big Ben empty save for the odd nesting bird.

Teleportation was a surprisingly painless form of travel, Harriet Jones noted as the light overtook her and carried her away. Almost as simple as riding a lift, as long as you ignored all the things that could possibly go wrong between Points A and B. Of course, she would have liked it better with a dash of forewarning and if the ultimate destination wasn't the proverbial 'belly of the beast'.

The reality fit the imagery of the idiom well. Whatever modifications the Sycorax had made to their asteroid in making it space-worthy, a 'clean and inviting interior décor' was not among them. Poorly lit and cramped, the room they'd arrived in was roughhewn from the existing rock with only the odd device implanted through the rust-red stone giving away the intelligent and deliberate design behind it.

Well, that and the horde of skull-masked, saber-rattling aliens hissing and spitting at the humans in their midst. Major Blake barely reacted, while the other two in their party cringed back from the display.

Harriet Jones steeled herself. She did not have the luxury of panic. She was the representative of Earth and Prime Minister of Great Britain. She would not cower in the face of the unknown or the likes of the Sycorax. Even if she wished the Doctor was here to help, she would perform her duty with all the dignity she had. She had survived the threat of World War Three, survived the Slitheen, survived being promoted to the most powerful political position in her country, and she would survive this.

It was no different than dealing with most politicians, she told herself, except the politicians only wanted the facilitation of their own agendas rather than the enslavement of humanity… alright, perhaps the comparison was just a bit too far of a reach. On the other hand, there were probably a few people Harriet Jones had known in office who would have found the Sycorax good company.

The sea of Sycorax parted to let another through. There was little difference in the appearance of this one to the others, though Harriet Jones supposed it would be more apparent to one familiar with the species and culture. She, for one, wasn't interested in breeding that sort of contempt with them.

It spoke in its harsh tongue, the guttural growls and spittle-flinging snaps nearly incomprehensible until her aide, Alex, referenced the Torchwood translator.

"Er, we're to go down the hall and be presented to their chieftain, Fadros – I can't pronounce this, I can't even manage Polish surnames…" Alex murmured before trying again. "Fadros Pallu… Pallujiika? No, Pallujikaa. Fadros Pallujikaa, Master of Chains, Great Slayer, Chief of the Halvinor tribe."

"He has many titles for a man of so little scruples," Harriet Jones replied as they began to walk through the narrow hallway towards… what? Some arena, where they would be shown more of what their invaders were capable of? Or would it just be a straight threat of 'surrender or die', given from on high?

Through holes in the inner walls of the ship, various Sycorax – masked and unmasked – leered, hammering on the walls with sword pommels and fists as they spat out what she could only assume were alien profanities as the human delegation was paraded by.

"I haven't been treated to this much meaningless pomp and circumstance since my last visit to the American President," Harriet Jones quipped, trying to soothe the fear thrumming through her veins. If something went wrong…

"Fear not," someone whispered. "And don't react."

English. Oh, how Harriet had come to love the sound of the language in the short time she'd been surrounded by the harsh tongue of the Sycorax. "Where are you?"

"I'm walking in your shadow, Minister, at your side and at your back," the voice – female, airy, too close to be telling anything but truth – said. Harriet almost turned to look and she had a feeling that Llewellyn did, but the voice hissed, "Invisible and unseen. Do not call their attention to the discrepancy."

"Did the Doctor send you?" Harriet whispered as Major Blake asked, "What's your plan?"

"I sent myself," she replied. "And my plan is to remain unseen and unheard. An observer unless called to act. To preserve your lives or end theirs."

"Why?"

"I have no love for slavers, regardless of their species. If you do not trust me, trust in that."

"Can we not appeal –" Llewellyn began to ask before their shadow cut him off.

"To what? Empathy? Morality? Honor? Articles of war? Common human decency?" the unseen woman asked, the low volume of her voice doing little to hide her scorn. "You know what they are; they're slavers. Empathy, decency, and morality are not within their books. Honor exists between equals and so do articles of war. The Sycorax do not see you as that. To them, you are chattel, born to serve, obey, and play the part of Christmas dinner if the mood takes them."

As the scientist wilted, the woman seemed to regret her little speech, her somehow tangible presence quavering before settling on a much gentler tone.

"You have a… commendable outlook, Mister Llewellyn, trying to find the noblest traits in those so different from yourself. It is mere bad luck that your first encounter with the greater universe would be the likes of the Sycorax. Please… save your faith for those that deserve it. The universe is not so hopeless."

In that moment, Harriet Jones almost had a question. Not a 'Who', but rather a 'How'. How did you know Llewellyn's name, she wanted to ask, but before she could, their march came to an end and the question was swallowed up by dread as Harriet beheld what could only be the most important room on the Sycorax's ship.

It was massive, a veritable cathedral crafted from the stuff of a hundred thousand nightmares. Every curve of the domed ceiling was embellished by buttresses and braces of rusted iron and bones from creatures of worlds Harriet Jones would never see. Blobby sections of metal dotted with green-yellow crystal, served as stained glass high above, while red, globous lights provided illumination nearer to the 'ground'. Between those two extremes hung red, ragged tapestries, some plain and some adorned with lines of symbols she could only assume were representative of the Sycorax's written language.

"Pallasite."

She almost turned to look at Llewellyn. "What?"

"The… the windows, they're pallasite. It's a class of meteorite, stony-iron blend, specifically olivine in an iron-nickel matrix," the scientist explained. "The gems aren't supposed to be as large as that, only a centimeter or so across, but these are unmistakably pallasite meteorites. You can tell from the Thomson structures –"

"I'm sure this is fascinating, Mr. Llewellyn, but the fate of the human race is at stake here, so please save the science for later," Harriet said, movement among the Sycorax horde drawing her eye.

From the mob stepped what Harriet Jones could only assume was their leader. She recognized the curved rib-bone and the strange bird skull on his woven necklace from the broadcasts, along with the other bits of bone and ivory in his collection. Unlike the other Sycorax, who seemed to exist in various stages of undress and armoring, Chieftain Fadros was clad in long red robes in different shades of dark red that left nothing but his head and hands exposed to any elements he might encounter.

Staring down his nose at the human delegation, the Sycorax leader spoke but two syllables, the guttural scratch of the last drawn out to rattle in the air.

"Welcome… slaves," Alex read off of the translator.

Author's Notes

Welcome to the rewrite, beta'd by littleditto. Without their help, there would be a lot more typos, grammatical errors, and just general confusing combinations of words cluttering up the page. Hopefully I'll be able to work with them for a long time.

This rewrite is being done not only to assume a more mature tone for the story, but also to include more canon material and original content, which will include entire 'episodes' created from scratch. To those of you fond of the original: I will not be deleting it until this iteration of the story surpasses it in the story. Hopefully this version of the story does not disappoint.

As of 9/2/2017, this chapter has been updated to plug up some plot holes that came up at a future point in the text. Also to improve quality a bit.

The 'sonic booms breaking windows' counter-argument comes from Mythbusters and a 2014 article on the BBC News website titled 'Sonic Booms: Who Foots The Bills When Buildings Go Bang?'.

The identity of 'Zeke' is spelled out in a later chapter, but there are enough clues that someone familiar with the show could hazard a good guess now.

It is 'canon' that magic does not exist in the Doctor Who 'verse because Rassilon used time travel to retcon it from their universe (part of exiling 'irrationality' from the universe). Xenophobic and generally unpleasant, Rassilon also killed off most of Gallifrey's population in an attempt to render the rest immortal via the ability to regenerate. Then, in what is generally accepted as a dick move, he deliberately induced a limit on the number of regenerations.

There will likely be more Highlights of Rassilon in the Author's Notes of future chapters.

The Termina Masks are a reference to The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, though this set has been created for a planned story in this series (set previous to this one, obviously).

Twili are a race in the games currently exclusive to the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess game. I'll cover their abilities in the next Author's Notes.

All the stuff about meteorites that Llewellyn was talking about is referenced from Wikipedia's articles on Pallasite and Widmanstätten patterns / Thomson structures (there are two different names for the same thing, due to a technicality and some really complicated history concerning dead couriers and the importance of documenting your shit), which are accompanied by some pretty killer pics.

The Sycoraxic names are… weird, because according to the TARDIS wikia, 'Fadros Pallujikaa' is a translation of 'Tribal Leader', but links directly to an article referring to the specific character? I don't know, I'm just going to roll with it because I didn't want to just type 'the Sycorax leader' over and over again.

On the other hand, I kind of like that another Sycorax from one of the comics is literally named 'The Witch Bitch' (in Sycoraxic, it's Haxan Craw), but it's also sort of treated like a title since she addresses a companion as 'the human Haxan Craw'.

Anyway, feel free to ask any questions in the comments / review section. I will either answer them in-story or in the next Author's Notes. Reviews, criticisms, and commentary are, as always, welcome.