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Gold and Relative Dimensions [Worm/Doctor Who]

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Rereading (because we need MOAR UPDATES!!)

'Run' and Taylor who roof hops and runs away from things like Hookwolf takes off into the distance while the Cybermen and the Doctor have barely started their stately jog :p
 
Certainly looks interesting.

Minor nitpick, as someone who lives in London. Trains to Cardiff run from Paddington Station, which is also the terminus of the Heathrow Express. King's Cross serves the east coast railway lines north from London.
 
Gravitas Hunt said:
Certainly looks interesting.

Minor nitpick, as someone who lives in London. Trains to Cardiff run from Paddington Station, which is also the terminus of the Heathrow Express. King's Cross serves the east coast railway lines north from London.
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But then I wouldn't get to make the Potter ref. Plus, i did Google it. Unless Google is wrong, there is at least one train from King's cross
 
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Cyber 1.2
  • Threadmarks
    • Cyber 1.2

    ************************

    Rule one about working with a cape, hero or villain: when they say run, you run. The resident cape tended to have a better idea of what was dangerous and what wasn't. Though the Doctor didn't appear to actually be afraid as he told me to run, he turned to run alongside me. Point in his favor, but it said a lot about the danger of these things. Whatever they were, robots or otherwise, I agreed with the Doctor's assessment. I might not have trusted the possible Stranger, but danger was danger, and I didn't know if I could control the robo-bugs well enough to actually use them to our advantage.

    So running was the chosen option. The two of us dashed down the behind the scenes corridors of King's Cross as we heard the clanking of metal feet behind us. The Doctor kept pace with me easily, threatening to overtake me a few times, but I was nearly as tall as he was. Since neither of us were breathing all that hard, I decided that I wanted to get some answers.

    "What are those things?" I asked as we turned a corner. The area must have been completely off-limits, as it looked like we were heading back toward where train maintenance was normally done.

    "Cybermen," said the Doctor. What was that I heard on his voice? Was it pity? Guilt? Sometimes I wished I had Lisa around still. Okay, it was a lot of the time, but her power would have been useful here. "They're a race of beings that have removed what they see as the weaknesses of humanity. They think that all humans should become like them."

    "By race of beings, you mean… they're alive?" I asked. "They aren't robots?"

    "No," the Doctor said as we passed another corner. He had his litle tinkertech wand out and was waving it about, looking back and forth. "They're definitely not robots, Taylor Hebert. They're cyborgs if you must call them something other than Cybermen."

    "Cyborgs," I said, thinking of both Mannequin and Defiant. The two of them had replaced parts of their bodies with mechanical equivalents, or in the case of the Slaughterhouse member, more or less all of his body had been replaced. From what I'd understood, the tinker formerly known as Alan Gramme had been a brain in a jar within that contraption. I hadn't seen any biological parts on these Cybermen. Were they the same? Could I trust that the Doctor was telling the truth about this? "The bug things, what were they?"

    "In here," the Doctor said, ducking into a room to the side and closing the door after I followed in. He pushed his tinkertech device up against where the metal door met its frame, letting it whir a bit. The two of us ducked to the side of the door as the Cybermen passed by, seemingly missing the fact that the door was shut. I glanced about the room. It appeared to be some sort of break room, likely used for conductors when they didn't have this area of the station walled off. There was a refrigerator, two tables, a couch, and a forty-inch television hanging on one of the walls. The Doctor turned to me and asked, "What bug things?"

    "You didn't see them? There were three of them on the Cybermen. They had needles on their tails." The Doctor's eyes narrowed at my description, and there was something almost dangerous behind them. Of course, given what I'd seen of the man so far, that probably meant that he recognized them. Wait. He'd said that they wanted to make all humanity like them. They'd said something about preparation to be 'upgraded.' I had a sinking feeling in my stomach, even as the creatures I felt moved further down the hall on the shoulders of the Cybermen. They seemed to be going back somewhere. Maybe they were still looking for us, thinking we ran further.

    "Cybermats," hissed the Doctor. "Oh, I think we've found our missing people."

    "That's what they're for," I said, reaching out with what had to be my power toward the bugs. I could feel the articulated parts within them. Liquids, tinier bugs within the liquids. Nanomachines, maybe? "They turn people like them. Change their underlying selves away from what they are."

    "Cyber-conversion, they call it," said the Doctor. "Cutting themselves off from all emotion until they end up little more than a brain in a metal box."

    Okay. Definitely Mannequin-like, but where he'd wanted people to become like him, the Cybermen actually succeeded at it. Assuming the Doctor was telling the truth, which, given that he hadn't tried to throw me to these things, I was willing to extend him the benefit of the doubt. For now. Until the end of this crisis, I was going to have to follow his lead, but at the end of it, I was going to figure out just what he knew about this world's cape culture or lack thereof. The Doctor was the first I'd seen of them here, after all.

    I almost asked why they'd do it, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense, from a villain's point of view. Building off the belief that a lack of emotion allowed cold logic to seep in, it was easy to see the best path toward a goal. I'd done it often enough, pushing my own emotions out onto the swarm so I could think about how to handle something safely. The problem was that sometimes the emotion needed to come back in order to realize that doing something a certain way was wrong. "Beyond converting more humans, what's their goal?"

    "Well… I'm not really sure on this one," said the Doctor. "Usually it's the creation of more Cybermen, something to bring their home planet here, or something to get them back to the rest of their empire. Whatever it is, it's bad for the Earth. So we need to stop them."

    Slipping my glasses off my face for a second, I gave the Doctor a hard look. Planet. He was claiming that the Cybermen weren't from Earth. Which, I suppose, wasn't entirely out of the question. Scion wasn't exactly human either, nor were the Endbringers. The conversion of an entire species into these things sounded almost like an infection. He was right, though. Assuming that the Doctor was telling the truth, they did need to be stopped. The issue was… He'd gotten past those policemen by flashing something at them.

    "Oh, don't look at me like that. I have a plan." The Doctor held out his tinkertech device.

    "What, you're going to whir at them with your wand?" I asked.

    "Screwdriver," the Doctor corrected.

    "How is that a screwdriver?" I asked.

    "It's sonic," he said, crossing his arms with a bit of a pout.

    "So, the plan?" I prompted. I could feel the Cybermats scurrying around, back and forth. I didn't quite have a hold on them yet, but I knew where they were. I could feel them as they were doing their purpose, and I almost had a handle on their senses. Maybe my power was making up for lost time, or maybe… I don't know. Something was certainly strange about it.

    Passenger, any time you want to make sense...

    "We'll go in and disable their power source, and then when they come back to investigate, I'll convince them to leave."

    "You still haven't said what the power source is," I said.

    "We'll know it when we see it!" The Doctor aimed his 'sonic screwdriver' at the door and activated it again. It popped open, moving inward, and the Doctor stepped outside. After a few seconds, he ducked his head back into the room and asked, "Well, are you coming along?"

    I breathed out a sigh of exasperation and followed the Doctor. Luckily, the Cybermen appeared to be… Oh, thank you passenger, now I get to use the optics of the Cybermats. As they… Oh geeze. That poor man. These things were like a robot version of Nilbog, and they needed to be stopped. Why couldn't I stop the Cybermat from doing it? It needed to stop. No. No converting the police officer. No.

    Gunshots. I watched as the Cyberman that had dropped this Cyberma"t that I was controlling brought its hand to its chest and walked steadily forward toward the shooter, even as bullets plinked off of its armor. How dare that human try to resist? It would need to be elimina— "DELETE!"

    I gasped out, leaning on the Doctor. When had he started holding me up?

    "Well, Taylor Hebert, isn't this interesting?" The Doctor asked quietly, and then he helped me to my feet.

    "What?"

    "It doesn't matter," the Doctor said, perking up as he gestured to the room we were near. "We're here! Come on, Taylor, it's just a bit further. Allons-y!" He used his tinkertech 'screwdriver' once more to activate the wall panel.

    "Doctor, the Cybermen aren't here," I said, stepping into the room. The door shut behind the two of us, and screens lit up near the robotic arms. What I hadn't seen when we looked into the room before were the bones that laid at the feet of the tables. They were picked clean of whatever flesh had been on them previously, but what surprised me was the lack of blood. "I think they're in the station proper."

    "That just means we need to hurry and get them back here, Taylor." The Doctor licked his finger and held it up in the air. "Hmm… This way, I think." He led the way into the back, and I started to follow him. Two steps, and then I stumbled as my power picked up on more inputs. A lot more inputs.

    "Doctor," I breathed out. Cybermats. I knew how they felt now. I could even control them a little bit, but they still had their own direction. Convert. I could feel it. If someone tried to resist conversion, they would be removed by the Cybermen. They were there. Seven thousand eight hundred and sixty-two Cybermats. Why were there so many? And why were seven thousand eight hundred fifty-eight all clustered together?

    "Just a second, Taylor," he said, and he waved his sonic once more. A door opened in the back of the room, revealing pure white walls, lit by some sort of omnipresent unseen source within. The walls were smooth, made of some material that I couldn't identify, and the only break in them at all was an arched metal doorway with a split down its center. The Doctor used his device on those, and it opened, leading to another room that, though surrounded by similar walls, had a cylindrical pillar in it. Surrounding the pillar were what looked like computer consoles of a sort. I didn't recognize the language on the keyboards, but that's definitely what they were. The Doctor walked around the pillar, looking at it and shaking his head. "No, no… this can't be right. This definitely isn't right."

    There. They were in there. Within the central pillar, I could feel each and every one of them. Cybermats crawled within it, devouring, feeding… multiplying. They were using whatever this power source was to reproduce. I could feel them, and when they matured, they'd go out and create more Cybermen to maintain their source. They'd convert this world, and they'd take it from this planet to the next until all were Cybermen. Until all were one under their Cyberplanner.

    "Doctor, I think we found the power source," I said quietly. "And where they came from. There's got to be over five thousand Cybermats in that thing."

    "It's worse than that, Taylor," said the Doctor. "This is a TARDIS."
     
  • Threadmarks
    • The Cybermen have had access to Timelord tech twice in recent Who, once when Missy showed up and she was using a Gallifreyan supercomputer to MATRIX everyone who died and then there was the whole Mr Clever fiasco.
     
    Ellf said:
    Cyber 1.2

    ************************

    Rule one about working with a cape, hero or villain: when they say run, you run. The resident cape tended to have a better idea of what was dangerous and what wasn't. Though the Doctor didn't appear to actually be afraid as he told me to run, he turned to run alongside me. Point in his favor, but it said a lot about the danger of these things. Whatever they were, robots or otherwise, I agreed with the Doctor's assessment. I might not have trusted the possible Stranger, but danger was danger, and I didn't know if I could control the robo-bugs well enough to actually use them to our advantage.

    So running was the chosen option. The two of us dashed down the behind the scenes corridors of King's Cross as we heard the clanking of metal feet behind us. The Doctor kept pace with me easily, threatening to overtake me a few times, but I was nearly as tall as he was. Since neither of us were breathing all that hard, I decided that I wanted to get some answers.

    "What are those things?" I asked as we turned a corner. The area must have been completely off-limits, as it looked like we were heading back toward where train maintenance was normally done.

    "Cybermen," said the Doctor. What was that I heard on his voice? Was it pity? Guilt? Sometimes I wished I had Lisa around still. Okay, it was a lot of the time, but her power would have been useful here. "They're a race of beings that have removed what they see as the weaknesses of humanity. They think that all humans should become like them."

    "By race of beings, you mean… they're alive?" I asked. "They aren't robots?"

    "No," the Doctor said as we passed another corner. He had his litle tinkertech wand out and was waving it about, looking back and forth. "They're definitely not robots, Taylor Hebert. They're cyborgs if you must call them something other than Cybermen."

    "Cyborgs," I said, thinking of both Mannequin and Defiant. The two of them had replaced parts of their bodies with mechanical equivalents, or in the case of the Slaughterhouse member, more or less all of his body had been replaced. From what I'd understood, the tinker formerly known as Alan Gramme had been a brain in a jar within that contraption. I hadn't seen any biological parts on these Cybermen. Were they the same? Could I trust that the Doctor was telling the truth about this? "The bug things, what were they?"

    "In here," the Doctor said, ducking into a room to the side and closing the door after I followed in. He pushed his tinkertech device up against where the metal door met its frame, letting it whir a bit. The two of us ducked to the side of the door as the Cybermen passed by, seemingly missing the fact that the door was shut. I glanced about the room. It appeared to be some sort of break room, likely used for conductors when they didn't have this area of the station walled off. There was a refrigerator, two tables, a couch, and a forty-inch television hanging on one of the walls. The Doctor turned to me and asked, "What bug things?"

    "You didn't see them? There were three of them on the Cybermen. They had needles on their tails." The Doctor's eyes narrowed at my description, and there was something almost dangerous behind them. Of course, given what I'd seen of the man so far, that probably meant that he recognized them. Wait. He'd said that they wanted to make all humanity like them. They'd said something about preparation to be 'upgraded.' I had a sinking feeling in my stomach, even as the creatures I felt moved further down the hall on the shoulders of the Cybermen. They seemed to be going back somewhere. Maybe they were still looking for us, thinking we ran further.

    "Cybermats," hissed the Doctor. "Oh, I think we've found our missing people."

    "That's what they're for," I said, reaching out with what had to be my power toward the bugs. I could feel the articulated parts within them. Liquids, tinier bugs within the liquids. Nanomachines, maybe? "They turn people like them. Change their underlying selves away from what they are."

    "Cyber-conversion, they call it," said the Doctor. "Cutting themselves off from all emotion until they end up little more than a brain in a metal box."

    Okay. Definitely Mannequin-like, but where he'd wanted people to become like him, the Cybermen actually succeeded at it. Assuming the Doctor was telling the truth, which, given that he hadn't tried to throw me to these things, I was willing to extend him the benefit of the doubt. For now. Until the end of this crisis, I was going to have to follow his lead, but at the end of it, I was going to figure out just what he knew about this world's cape culture or lack thereof. The Doctor was the first I'd seen of them here, after all.

    I almost asked why they'd do it, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense, from a villain's point of view. Building off the belief that a lack of emotion allowed cold logic to seep in, it was easy to see the best path toward a goal. I'd done it often enough, pushing my own emotions out onto the swarm so I could think about how to handle something safely. The problem was that sometimes the emotion needed to come back in order to realize that doing something a certain way was wrong. "Beyond converting more humans, what's their goal?"

    "Well… I'm not really sure on this one," said the Doctor. "Usually it's the creation of more Cybermen, something to bring their home planet here, or something to get them back to the rest of their empire. Whatever it is, it's bad for the Earth. So we need to stop them."

    Slipping my glasses off my face for a second, I gave the Doctor a hard look. Planet. He was claiming that the Cybermen weren't from Earth. Which, I suppose, wasn't entirely out of the question. Scion wasn't exactly human either, nor were the Endbringers. The conversion of an entire species into these things sounded almost like an infection. He was right, though. Assuming that the Doctor was telling the truth, they did need to be stopped. The issue was… He'd gotten past those policemen by flashing something at them.

    "Oh, don't look at me like that. I have a plan." The Doctor held out his tinkertech device.

    "What, you're going to whir at them with your wand?" I asked.

    "Screwdriver," the Doctor corrected.

    "How is that a screwdriver?" I asked.

    "It's sonic," he said, crossing his arms with a bit of a pout.

    "So, the plan?" I prompted. I could feel the Cybermats scurrying around, back and forth. I didn't quite have a hold on them yet, but I knew where they were. I could feel them as they were doing their purpose, and I almost had a handle on their senses. Maybe my power was making up for lost time, or maybe… I don't know. Something was certainly strange about it.

    Passenger, any time you want to make sense...

    "We'll go in and disable their power source, and then when they come back to investigate, I'll convince them to leave."

    "You still haven't said what the power source is," I said.

    "We'll know it when we see it!" The Doctor aimed his 'sonic screwdriver' at the door and activated it again. It popped open, moving inward, and the Doctor stepped outside. After a few seconds, he ducked his head back into the room and asked, "Well, are you coming along?"

    I breathed out a sigh of exasperation and followed the Doctor. Luckily, the Cybermen appeared to be… Oh, thank you passenger, now I get to use the optics of the Cybermats. As they… Oh geeze. That poor man. These things were like a robot version of Nilbog, and they needed to be stopped. Why couldn't I stop the Cybermat from doing it? It needed to stop. No. No converting the police officer. No.

    Gunshots. I watched as the Cyberman that had dropped this Cyberma"t that I was controlling brought its hand to its chest and walked steadily forward toward the shooter, even as bullets plinked off of its armor. How dare that human try to resist? It would need to be elimina— "DELETE!"

    I gasped out, leaning on the Doctor. When had he started holding me up?

    "Well, Taylor Hebert, isn't this interesting?" The Doctor asked quietly, and then he helped me to my feet.

    "What?"

    "It doesn't matter," the Doctor said, perking up as he gestured to the room we were near. "We're here! Come on, Taylor, it's just a bit further. Allons-y!" He used his tinkertech 'screwdriver' once more to activate the wall panel.

    "Doctor, the Cybermen aren't here," I said, stepping into the room. The door shut behind the two of us, and screens lit up near the robotic arms. What I hadn't seen when we looked into the room before were the bones that laid at the feet of the tables. They were picked clean of whatever flesh had been on them previously, but what surprised me was the lack of blood. "I think they're in the station proper."

    "That just means we need to hurry and get them back here, Taylor." The Doctor licked his finger and held it up in the air. "Hmm… This way, I think." He led the way into the back, and I started to follow him. Two steps, and then I stumbled as my power picked up on more inputs. A lot more inputs.

    "Doctor," I breathed out. Cybermats. I knew how they felt now. I could even control them a little bit, but they still had their own direction. Convert. I could feel it. If someone tried to resist conversion, they would be removed by the Cybermen. They were there. Seven thousand eight hundred and sixty-two Cybermats. Why were there so many? And why were seven thousand eight hundred fifty-eight all clustered together?

    "Just a second, Taylor," he said, and he waved his sonic once more. A door opened in the back of the room, revealing pure white walls, lit by some sort of omnipresent unseen source within. The walls were smooth, made of some material that I couldn't identify, and the only break in them at all was an arched metal doorway with a split down its center. The Doctor used his device on those, and it opened, leading to another room that, though surrounded by similar walls, had a cylindrical pillar in it. Surrounding the pillar were what looked like computer consoles of a sort. I didn't recognize the language on the keyboards, but that's definitely what they were. The Doctor walked around the pillar, looking at it and shaking his head. "No, no… this can't be right. This definitely isn't right."

    There. They were in there. Within the central pillar, I could feel each and every one of them. Cybermats crawled within it, devouring, feeding… multiplying. They were using whatever this power source was to reproduce. I could feel them, and when they matured, they'd go out and create more Cybermen to maintain their source. They'd convert this world, and they'd take it from this planet to the next until all were Cybermen. Until all were one under their Cyberplanner.

    "Doctor, I think we found the power source," I said quietly. "And where they came from. There's got to be over five thousand Cybermats in that thing."

    "It's worse than that, Taylor," said the Doctor. "This is a TARDIS."
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    Everyone out of the universe. Last one out hit the lights.
     
    Don't know how long you'll be waiting on this cliffhanger, but I do have plans for the rest of this arc and bits of the next one, tying into the full meta-arc of the "season."
     
    If anyone has any preferred time periods that they'd like to see Taylor go to, let me know.

    I do now have a metaplot more hammered out.
     
    The War of the Roses... :p

    Edit: Changed the Rose Wars to the War of the Roses. Because the author asked for a time period, not my fanfics title.
     
    Last edited:
    Ellf said:
    Nah, she's not taking Martha's place. Current plans, unless I solidify elsewhere, have this story taking place between "The Waters of Mars" and "The End of Time." Meaning Martha and Donna both have already finished their tenure as the Doctor's companions.
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    Hm... This isn't the first crossover I've seen that is set at that point. Interesting.
     
    Ellf said:
    Nah, she's not taking Martha's place. Current plans, unless I solidify elsewhere, have this story taking place between "The Waters of Mars" and "The End of Time." Meaning Martha and Donna both have already finished their tenure as the Doctor's companions.
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    Sorry, last few times I saw the "tie trick" used in fanfic, it was because the person the doctor did it to was replacing Martha in that EU.
     
    Mackon said:
    The Cybermen have had access to Timelord tech twice in recent Who, once when Missy showed up and she was using a Gallifreyan supercomputer to MATRIX everyone who died and then there was the whole Mr Clever fiasco.
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    Gallifreyan Tech is one thing, but Cybermen with access to genuine time travel tech have been very rare, at least in main continuity. If there is one thing that can be said of the goals of the Cybermen, it is that priority one is survival, by any means. It's easy to conflate them with the Borg, in that they survive my making more of themselves, but that isn't where their horror or strengths lie.

    NuWho strongly focuses on the unwilling emotionless aspect, whereas Classic focuses on (initially) the voluntary slow and gradual subtraction of humanity and self, while demonstrating endless adaptability. Classic Cybermen think around a problem, while modern Cybermen walk through it.

    Which is why Cybermen with consequence-free time travel tech is terrifying. No more need to build giant hidden tombs to go into hibernation for millenia, they can just skip the interviening time, or go back to the beginning of things and build a tomb underneath the future site of a major city and wait.
     
    Well now, just what is her passenger up to ... I'm not sure how the Doctor will feel about a Taylor that wants to keep a bunch of Cybermats around because "They are really useful.", though given the rate she's going at getting control over them she may be able to overwrite base programing soon and make them not 'want' to convert people. I'm pretty sure they can't de-convert people ... if nothing else, the standard process leave a lot of 'bits' left over.

    On the other hand a cybermat could probably do a fairly good job of dismantling a cyberman if it gets into melee range, it's specifically equipped with tools to put them together after all, heck, they might even be intended for field repairs as well as conversions, which mens it definitely has the parts and 'knowledge' to dismantle one. In a situation like this Taylor is likely to be very willing to go to lethal force.

    Good chapter though, and I love how Taylor is just dealing with this shit.
     
    Ellf said:
    Gunshots. I watched as the Cyberman that had dropped this Cybermat that I was controlling brought its hand to its chest and walked steadily forward toward the shooter, even as bullets plinked off of its armor. How dare that human try to resist? It would need to be elimina— "DELETE!"
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    Also no one commented on Taylor suddenly going Full Beepboop???? :V
     
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