The little shadow that runs through the grass

Strange is gone.

The other Koschei is gone, and Theta is screaming himself raw.

Katie is gone.

Koschei—her pilot—is human now, and off spinning across the universe with the Doctors.

Mess sits at the console with the finger over the ‘off’ switch on the personality matrix. She’s not moving; she looks like a ghost version of herself, dark circles and puffy reddened eyes and unnaturally pale.

Then she moves away from the switchboard, and goes walking down the hallways again with her arms folded around herself.

Mess is kicking her heels idly and spinning in her chair, scanning the universe like one might surf the Internet, when she stops.

Leans over the console and types rapidly, pulling up a few screens and activating a few more sensors. She’s barely breathing, her face gone pale in the glow from the panels.

When the information is confirmed, she leans back with a hand over her mouth. Of course she knows what this physical reaction is, she knows what to expect, but—well—the nanite body hurts.

He’s gone.

It takes a while before her eyes go dry and scratchy, and she’s able to take a steady breath again.

8.) Day of Favorites! What’s your character’s favorite ice cream flavor? Color? Song? Flower? 

Ice cream flavour: Mint chocolate chip gelato.

Colour: Red. Scarlet, crimson, ruby, rose, fire-engine, apple, blood and flame; a sunset and a bowl of strawberries on the countertop.

Song: She’ll say “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by the Proclaimers just to tease, but she really doesn’t have one—there’s 5,000 songs on her playlist from Earth alone. If you walk into the TARDIS when she’s cleaning, it’s a toss-up between Bessanian wind serenades,

Flower: The pink cichorium from the mini-moon of Delta.

9.)  Who does your character trust?

Harleen has the women inside her head, the faces watching her. But she’s strong and smart—Messy thinks of her always in those terms, her two defining traits—and she cares about people, she cares deeply, in a way a lot of therapists and professionals don’t, and Mess trusts her instinctively.

John is a clever, deranged, chain-smoking booze-swilling bastard, there’s no question. He fights and fights and he never stops trying—he’s scrappy and contrary, and Mess honestly admires that about him, she wishes she could be more like that. She trusts him without question.

Doctor Strange will be a hero, no matter what happens to him—he has that… quality, it’s hard to put a name to it, but—a greatness. A determination? Something unyielding and right. Lilly is bright and sharp, like a knife or a gemstone, and gives off flashes of light; Hotaru is one of the kindest and qualifiably good people she’s met.

And Koschei is her pilot and her thief, and if he tells her to fly into a sun she will set the coordinates and gun the engines. (He actually did so one time; she filled all the corridors with Lego blocks afterwards. She always, always swears she’ll never agree to another insane plot and then does it anyways before she’s realized. Bugger him.)

7.) Is there one event or happening your character would like to erase from their past? Why?

Messy woke up slowly, breathing out and curled up warm and letting herself go weightless, and realized it was dead silent in her head. She immediately crowded in on the network, bolting straight out of sleep. Alkira’s pilot was under arrest on Rassilon’s orders, and she’d hidden him in her corridors. They were trying to extract him. She wouldn’t let them.

The voices of the network were silent: everyone was watching, holding their breaths, cringing. None of them could look away. Younger TARDISes were being shushed as everyone held still. Alkira’s voice was unnaturally loud among them, unnaturally high-pitched and thin—it was surreal.

There was murmured, urgent conversation, crackly from the camera feeds. “Go in and extract the information from her hard drives,” one man snapped to another.

I won’t let you, Alkira bit out, baring her teeth.

More hushed whispers. A couple of them left. They were milling around the console, talking, nobody could quite get what they were saying. Alkira was going staticky and shaky with panic, they could all feel it.

One man came back and flicked some switches on the console, and plugged something in. He adjusted the power supply, turning the thing on, and started adjusting dials on it. The rest were huddled around him, watching intently.

They all heard her screams until the moment they died away.

When she came back online she spoke in a monotone voice and the pilot was dragged out in cuffs. She wouldn’t answer anyone after that, and everyone recoiled from the blank emptiness of her mind. Fear shivered through them all, uncontrollable trembling. One or two of the younger TARDISes were weeping.

We should have done something, Messy remembers saying aloud, quietly, to no-one in particular.

Are you contesting the will of Rassilon? came the answer immediately, cutting across everyone’s noise. It was as if his TARDIS was staring them all directly in the face, inches away, the words hissed out. Do you think he was wrong?

Messy didn’t answer. None of them did, and eventually the connection dropped; Messy was left alone, far away on a distant planet, with the memory of Alkira’s screaming on file.

She still refuses to delete it. It doesn’t matter what she feels.

6.) Describe your character’s happiest memory. 

Don’t hyperventilate. Are you really going? Can I see? Don’t overheat. Shut off all unnecessary tasks and thoughts. Stay still. You’re going to go the opposite way and faceplant, I want video feed. Keep breathing. Everything goes through this, stop pestering her…

“Almost ready?” The people inside her are waving sonic probes, whirring and clicking away; their supervisor stands with his hands folded inside his sleeves, his robe trailing behind him on the floor. The blond woman’s making notes on a tablet, tapping away, while one of the mechanics makes a last-minute adjustment to the temporal engines. The poking and squeaking and winching up is driving her insane.

Jump, and do your best not to come back down, comes the warm familiar voice.

Thanks, Alkira, she returns, just as everyone is ushered out of the console. She’s empty for her first flight—she has to be able to take over for the pilot at any given moment, in case of an emergency. And if she crashes, there aren’t any casualties.

She’s alone.

Don’t think about it. Don’t think, just breathe. Panic is closing a fist around her stomach. “Coordinates received?” says the entralink.

“Yes,” she says as steadily as possible, which is not very.

“Begin takeoff sequence.”

Run the program—the engines start thrumming, everything lights up. Reach in, pull the switches, lean back and brace yourself. Keep breathing, slow and deep.

Vworp, vworp, vworp…

Shit, the parking brake! Messy yanks it off as fast as possible, please gods nobody saw that, and jerks forward into space. She’s hurtling through everything, buffeted by billions of timestreams—explosions of noise and light and matter—spinning wildly and being flung around and stuck in freefall.

Nothing. Her mind’s white and blank. For a moment she thinks she’s screaming, but she isn’t making a sound out of shock. She can’t move.

Then suddenly everything is back in focus, and Messy kicks back—floundering, pulling herself up to the surface—and sends out her scanners: there, the exact point in spacetime. For a moment she stalls against the currents, jarring and shuddering under the pressure, and then lets herself be pulled along to circle back around. She hops to another timestream—balance, don’t fall, keep your knees bent and stay low—jumps to the next one, misses the next one and goes tumbling head over arse, keeps sliding.

It’s a million different directions, faster than the blink of an eye. She can’t think, it’s pure reaction.

It’s flying.

When she finally lands, and sends off the transmission, she spends about an hour just shaking and laughing hysterically and clinging to the ground for all she’s worth, and dragging in deep breaths. And then pushes off again.

Anonymous asked: RANDOM QUESTION BECAUSE UH REASONS! So we all know who the Doctor stole his TARDIS from, but who owned you before the Master did?

Hello, random person. *blows a kiss*

It’s… *blows out a sigh* her name was Aliane. Her family was very, very rich—old money, and on Gallifrey that means old money—and she was given everything she wanted, including membership to the Time Lord Academy, because that was where the elite went. And she wanted to go straight to the inner-inner social circles, she wanted to be an icon of Gallifrey. This was back before the Great War, before Rassilon and his idea of ascending—ruling the universe actually seemed like a legitimate idea.

She wasn’t a bad person, she was just… we weren’t really alike. She didn’t like traveling unless it was for shopping or parties, and I didn’t want to leave her alone—it was more proper to be by her side, you know? And I wanted to be stylish and admired like her, very badly. I wanted to be her friend. But I’m not a cool person by nature, not really, and we didn’t really get along as beings—I don’t think she ever saw me as a person, just as you’d view a car or a purse. It made things easier for her, it was less complicated. 

She didn’t want to be stuck with an old model, so when the newer updates came along… all of this sounds self-pitying, doesn’t it? Like a bloody teenager. I had nasty moments, trust me, we fought. Like I said, she really wasn’t a bad person—we just weren’t that compatible.

So I was put in storage, mostly. I did some work for the Academy staff, but everyone upgraded to the new models and I was about ready to be junked. And then Koschei came along—and you know the rest.

Because why not.

3.) Name one scar your character has, and tell us where it came from. If they don’t have any, is there a reason?

The nanite body doesn’t scar, bleed, or bruise. She could walk through something if she wanted—the cloud would dissolve and reform—but it eats up a lotof energy.

The ship itself? There’s a handful of stairways leading to the ceiling and doors opening onto walls; sometimes Messy’ll screw up the dimension alignment or get her geometry wrong, and sometimes things have been sealed away on purpose. She needs regular maintenance, and she was already obsolete when Koschei stole her—a lot of random junk has been hobbled together, screwed in and duct-taped on. Imagine a doll with two different eyes and half its hair dyed pink and a robot arm and a stuffed bear leg: that’s about the way of it.

4.) How vain is your character? Do they find themselves attractive? 

It’s not about what her nanite body looks like, or even her interiors. In the end, Messy thinks more in terms of “useful” than “beautiful”. There’s joy in movement: hopping from timestream to timestream as fast as possible, or swinging around a star in circles. And she enjoys relaxing, soaking in energy, letting the walls and corridors breathe in fresh air as she puts up her feet for a bit. But attractive is confusing: she’s a tool. That’s what she was built for. 

5.) What’s your character’s ranking on the Kinsey Scale? 

Purplish-blue.

Or, in other words, like Jack Harkness, but with the John Barrowman aspect removed.

Messy is attracted to intelligence, wit, and confidence; before it was Ko’s crooked smile and long deft hands it was the work he did at her console, the plans and charts he uploaded—the way his brain lights up like forked lightning, striking everything. Physical attraction is new—she knows logically what it is, signs and symptoms and all that, she can poke fun at it, but actually experiencing it is… well. There’ve been a few people she’s attracted to as well as Ko, and it generally bobs along as well as a lead balloon.

2.) What are your characters most prominent physical features?

On the outside: a red telephone box from London, England, Earth, circa twentieth century. Take that, Christina Hendricks. (Although now that Inspector Spacetime’s gotten a cult following, it’s become a hipster thing and she really wants to switch it up.)

On the inside: the console room is a translucent sphere cut neatly in half by a floor, tiles swirling across it in surreal shapes; the walls pulse with gold and green and copper and purple, with the hub glowing bright in the centre. Half the switches will be flipped, two-thirds of the buttons will be blinking, and something will always be spinning in the air. If there’s no movement or light or sound, there is something very, very wrong.

Stairs spiral around the hub and hallways branch off, into hundreds of rooms. If you want a rock Zen garden to sit and mediate, there’s that; if you’d like a private movie theatre with a drinks bar, there’s that, too. (Don’t ask about the goats.) Mixing and matching dimensions is like pulling open the wardrobe in the morning.

As a nanite being? She’s a bit taller than average, a slim build, dark-skinned and brown-eyed. Nose and teeth and fingers in working order, both legs accounted for. She wishes she had the hourglass figure Idris has, but she does like her own smile.

Describe your character’s relationship with their mother or their father, or both. Was it good? Bad? Were they spoiled rotten, ignored? Do they still get along now, or no?

‘Mother’ and ‘father’ are nice ideas, but she has no experience of them. Consciousness comes slowly when you’re growing: first me and not-me, then colours, shapes, and sounds (bad/good, scary/happy/funny/sad/tired), then names and numbers. The databank fills up with knowledge like water pouring into a bath. You get memory files and programs to run.

When you’re growing you’re surrounded by other pre-TARDISes: bumps on a bit of coral, twigs on a branch. The soft burbling hum surrounds you, chattering voices constantly in your head. The knowledge you get is shared—secrets whispered, stories passed along, giggling and gossiping. From first awareness to completion you’re never alone.

She doesn’t understand where personality comes from, what makes one TARDIS like green over yellow or another hate the smell of chlorine. When you’re linked to so many minds all the time everything blurs together, voices overlap, you get overrun by different people. But it happens. Soon you run to one friend first, or ask another TARDIS about traveling to the Centaurii. One TARDIS will be loud and bossy, standing out amid the crowd, while another will come up with endless ideas. When you’re finally finished—ready to break free of the planet and fly—you are your own being, grown-up, fully formed.

‘Mother’ and ‘father’ are the people who guide you, aren’t they? They nurture you and care for you. By that logic, Messy guesses she’s had thousands of mothers and fathers.

“They get one hold in your soul and they’re everywhere, like slime, they stick to everything. They’re evil.”

The sisters were always linked to each other’s minds, chattering softly, a hum of background noise. When one cried or laughed or howled, it rippled outwards—soft pulsing through the network. When a TARDIS sickened, they all felt it.

She can still remember it curdling in her bowels, nauseous, clenching in on itself like a fist shy from the sky. No answer lies there. It cannot care, especially for what it no longer knows

Like a black ink stain, blacker than black—her sister’s strained raspy breathing, the tenseness in her muscles as though readying to flee or pounce, the stare. The unblinking, unmoving stare. 

They reached out. They tried to help her. All her sisters, Messy included, all of them tried to communicate. She bit them. She screamed to tear their ears apart. She was panicking and vicious and they all felt it, it was warping them—

They left her. They disconnected. Alone. And it hurt like cutting off a limb to treat that place as a thing unto itself, independent of all else, and confront it on those terms. But it was necessary, and it was done.

The Nightmare Children have never just infected organic beings. None of the TARDISes have ever visited Ash Tree Lane again.

Picture that. In your dreams.