First Mission: Brotherly Love
Disclaimer: Doctor Who is a copyright of the BBC. The PPC is the intellectual property of Jay and Acacia. I created Agents Karma and Nemia, but I don't actually own them in any legal sense. If you steal them, however, I can still bring down the wrath of the PPC community on your head. You don't want that.
Agent Karma was reading. She was also upside-down. As she spent most of her free time reading, she had decided that she needed to spice it up a bit. The book was propped up on its spine in front of her, turned so that the words were facing the right way from her point of view. When she felt like she needed more of a challenge, she could always turn it right-side-up. Until then, shifting her position to turn the page was harrowing enough.
“’We’re recruiting,’ they said,” she muttered as her lower body wobbled in the air and she pressed the top of her head and the palms of her hands into the thin gray carpet to support it. “’Step through the portal,’ they said. “’Will this involve hair-raising adventures to other worlds?’ ‘You could say that,’ they said. Might have warned me those worlds would be the creations of pimply human hormone monsters.”
[BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!]
The alarm pierced through her eardrums and straight into her cerebellum, upsetting her balance and causing her to fall to the floor. Undaunted, she bounced from her stomach to her hands and knees and then to her feet. She rushed to the console at such a speed that her momentum nearly caused her to collide with it, only to find that Agent Nemia had beaten her there. “Weren’t you asleep in the corner a few moments ago?”
Nemia shrugged. “You know me. Eat, sleep, kill Sues. This is the most interesting part of my day.” She glanced at the screen. “Well that’s novel. He’s a he.”
“Jack slash?” Karma guessed.
“Not even close. He’s the Doctor’s brother.”
“Fantastic. What part of ‘I’m the last of the Time Lords’ don’t these people get?”
“You can’t blame them too much for that, given all the confusion about the Daleks.”
“No, but I can blame them for sleeping through freshman English class,” Karma said, peering over her partner’s shoulder. “Disguises?”
“Slitheen?” Nemia asked hopefully.
“You always want Slitheen, and you have yet to justify it. Are there any in this story?”
Nemia sighed. “No,” she admitted. “It takes place entirely on the TARDIS, which is parked in an unspecified location.”
“It’s a Nine fic, right?” Karma’s partner nodded. “Probably Cardiff, then. We should just go as humans.”
“Why? There’s a whole universe of grisly monsters out there! Why do we hardly ever get to use them?”
“Oh, fine. Autons, then. They can blend in well enough if they have to.” She elbowed her partner out of the way and set the coordinates, then pressed a button causing a purple vortex to appear. “What do we need to bring?”
“Not much, I don’t think. It looks like a short one, and if we’re going to be Autons we’ll have built-in weapons. Just grab the Cannon Analysis Devices and the notepad and let’s go.”
* * *
Rose wandered into the Control Room. Seeing the two dark clad legs sticking out from under the console panel made her realize she'd found the Doctor. "Does she ever not need something fixed?," she asked making him jump. There was lots of noise as his foot hit the tool box, knocking it into his hole, and hit his head. She heard several words muttered darkly as he pulled his feet down into the opening that the Tadis chose that it was best not to translate. "Ooooo, that's gonna hurt in the mornin'. Sorry," she said as a glaring, oil smothered, Time Lord rubbing his head appeared.
The assassins watched from the other side of the console. Their in-canon bodies looked much like their normal ones, only somewhat stiffer and with an eerie sheen to the skin. “What just happened?”
“I don’t think I want to know,” said Nemia. “But what’s a Tadis?”
“A Mini-Reaper?” Karma suggested hopefully
Nemia shook her head. “If so, let’s not try to track him down. I have a feeling that Headquarters is brimming with unseen paradoxes. He’s better off staying here to devour the Sueverse.”
Karma sighed disappointedly. “I guess so.”
"You can make it up by making me some tea. Now then, hut to!," he growled. She jumped and walked off.
Agent Karma flinched. “Ouch. I don’t think the Doctor would have done that even back in the days when female characters were required to scream at the drop of a hat. And you only ever need one full stop.”
“Are you going to chatter in my ear all day, or are you going to make a charge list?” asked Nemia.
“Right!” Karma fumbled with the notepad and pencil. “Eek! No precision grip!” She did the best that she could manage with her stiff plastic fingers.
Meanwhile, Nemia pointed her CAD at Rose, who had just returned with the freshly brewed tea. [Rose Tyler,] it said with a beep. [Human. Canon. 46% OOC.] She then tried the Doctor. [The Doctor. Time Lord. Canon. 52.5% OOC and rising.] Nemia shook her head sadly. The phrase “and rising” almost invariably meant trouble.
Suddenly, there was a knock at the door. Rose got up from sitting next to him crossed legged and went to answer the door.
Nemia looked as puzzled as she could manage with a nearly immobile face. “Suppose you’re in a dimensionally transcendental spaceship on an alien planet where the people don’t know about such technology,” she said to Karma. “And suppose that someone knocks on the door of said spaceship, which is camouflaged. What do you do?”
“I don’t know. Ignore it? Check the scanner? Grab something to defend myself with? I think actually answering it would be pretty low on the list.”
“Doctor, there's someone here who says he knows you."
"Well, several people know me," he said getting up from the opening, grabbing his tea, and walking with her back to the door. "The Brigader, the Daleks, the Cybermen, and once, I met this dangerously handsome man named Christopher Eccleston...,"
Nemia cocked her head. “What? I... um... wow.”
“Gah!” Karma began whacking herself in the face with her notepad. As she was currently made of plastic, this proved to not be as much of a distraction from the mental pain as she had hoped. “That was stupid in Oceans Twelve, and it’s even stupider here.”
The Doctor opened the door. His body went rigged and his face dropped to that of shock. A young boy, 16 by the looks, stood looking up at him. He woar something along the lines of what the Doctor woar. Black leather jacket, black jumper, black denom pants, had dark hair, only his was longer, and had soft brown eyes.
Karma tensed even more than was natural for an Auton and scribbled the charges so furiously that her pencil snapped in half. She started to scream in frustration, but her partner stopped her.
“Sh! The Marty Sam is here, and he can hear you. Here, I brought a spare.” She handed a pen to Karma, who nodded thankfully, then unfocused her eyes to look at the Words that flowed through and and gave shape to the story. It was too painful to look directly at the denom pants the boy was woaring. “Just how soft are his eyes, I wonder,” she muttered under her breath.
"Theta?," he whispered. "Theta"'s tea cup fell from his hand and broke into thousands of little pieces. No one ever called him Theta, except for...
“His friends from college?” Karma suggested.
"Ted?," he whispered back.
“What kind of name is that for a Time Lord?” Nemia muttered aloud. Then she saw the Words. “Uh oh! Watch out, there’s a--”
The world flickered out briefly then reassembled itself as it had been a moment before, knocking the assassins flat on their backs and leaving them dizzy and disoriented. To make matters worse, an Author’s Note boomed in their head. It said simply, Who is Ted?
“--chapter break,” Nemia finished unnecessarily.
“That has got to be the most useless Author’s Note ever,” Karma complained.
"Ted..." The two stared at each other for a moment before the Doctor scooped him up into a hug. And were those...tears? What the heck was goin' on here!?!
“Simple: the author is being an idiot,” Nemia said.
"But I thought...And you...I'm so glad to see you squirt," the Doctor said ruffling the boys hair.
“Squirt?” The tip of Karma’s pen snapped off. “That’s so... so... so domestic.”
“I don’t have another one,” Nemia informed her.
“That’s okay. These hands are so awkward, the notes are barely legible anyway. I’ll just have to remember them. Want to check the CAD?”
“Bad idea. I don’t think it’s made to handle such high levels of OOCness.”
They looked on as Rose, who was inexplicably slow in this story, could not figure out who Theta was, and needed Ted to explain that “he’s big ears over there.”
"Oi! You always were heartless. I thought we agreed, no comments about the ears!"
"No, you agreed. I never said anything."
“How could Ted have a history of teasing the Doctor about his ears?” Nemia wondered out loud. “If he and Nine had met before, the Doctor would have already known that he survived the Time War.”
“It’s a Sue story,” Karma said dismissively. “Logic need not apply.”
"He's got you there Doctor. But, really, Ted. Who are you? How do you know each other?" There was a long pause as Ted looked from one to the other. The Doctor finally spoke.
"He's my little brother.”
“Like Hell he is,” Nemia muttered. Then, with a glance at the words, she added, “Watch out. Here comes another chapter break!” She and Karma managed to stay on their feet this time by bracing themselves against the console, only to be knocked down by the ensuing Author’s Note. How he survived. P.S. Don't forget your end of the deal Romanathethird.
“So much noise,” Karma whimpered, curling up on the floor where she had fallen.
“Don’t be a baby. Up you go.” Nemia dragged her partner back up onto her feet.
"So," Rose said. "How exactly did you survive?," she asked slowly, then adding quickly, "Not that I'm not happy, 's just, he told me they all, and, ummm," she looked down from the two pairs of eyes staring at her. Well, this definetly took the cake for most awkward/embarrassing moments. 'Note to self,' she thought, 'Don't talk!' She mentally slapped her head.
“Neat trick, that” Karma muttered.
“Wasn’t awkward till you made it so, love,” Nemia said sympathetically. “Oh dear, we’ve made it to the origin story.”
“See, the thing is, we never exactly, er, fit in, on Gallefray. We were like two black sheep in a flock of white. They were, as he put it, "Stuffy old bags." He was right too. They never did anything to meddle with time, or save peoples lifes with their knowleage. Theta one day stole - sorry, "borrowed"-," he put air quotes around the word as his brother gave him a look. "Two Tardis'. People thought he only stole one, really what he did, was take one, put in this old girl, and got the heck out of there. He gave the first one he moved to me.”
“TARDIS is an acronym and not a possessive,” Karma said automatically, but her heart was hardly in it anymore.
“Don’t you think people would have noticed how many TARDISes were missing regardless of how they were transported?” Nemia asked.
“Sue logic,” Karma said. “Shush, now. He’s going to explain how he survived the Time War.”
Ted did so, in a more succinct fashion than either of the assassins would have imagined possible, given his apparent penchant for rambling. In fact, it took him all of one sentence. “I didn't know anything about it.”
Nemia just stared at him. “You didn’t know about the Time War? Congratulations, you are the worst Time Lord ever.” She looked to Karma, a helpless expression on her face. “How is that even possible?”
“Once again: Sue logic. You might as well ask why, if the Doctor has a brother who’s as crazy as he is, we haven’t heard about it in the forty years we’ve been watching him.”
“Or why the Doctor couldn’t sense that Ted was still alive, what with the telepathy and all.”
“Hold that thought. I think he’s going to explain it now.”
“See, Time Lords grow special bonds with their siblings. The closer the siblings, the closer the bond. It's not the same feeling when a sibling dies as it is when you realize there's no one left. You still feel a shock, and know they're gone, but it's not the same. At the time, I was too over whelmed by the fact that they were gone to notice it. Besides, you can always feel it. A sibling dead, or your entire race for that matter.”
“Um, what?” Nemia asked.
“I think he’s trying to say that the Doctor was so distracted by sensing so many dead Time Lords that he didn’t notice that Ted wasn’t among them,” Karma explained. “I guess it’s plausible, but given his comment at the end of ‘Dalek,’ I sort of doubt it works like that.”
“So do I.” She paused. “Oh no. It’s worse than we thought.”
“What is?”
“Listen. Or look at the Words, if you like. He has a sister too.”
Karma quickly read ahead. “’Her name was Thomasina. The name means twin.’ Eek! As if a little brother weren’t bad enough.”
“No kidding. And why is the Doctor speaking in third person?”
“Dramatic flair, I think. But it isn’t working very well. Oh, look, that’s all right, then. She died three-hundred years ago.”
Nemia nodded. “Killed by Daleks, apparently. ‘And to this day both of her brothers will do anything to kill a Dalek that threatends them.’ Because, you know, the fact that it’s a Dalek, the fact that it’s threatening them, and that nasty little genocide thing just aren’t motivation enough.”
“Not to mention that if he’s vowed to kill all Daleks he comes across, he fails spectacularly in ‘The Parting of the Ways.’” Karma shook her head. “I never thought I’d say this, but good on the Daleks. The last thing I want is to have to scour the universe looking for a twin sister Sue who’s also a Time Lady.” She stopped suddenly and clamped her arms around the console. “Here we go again. Third time’s the charm, right? Let’s not let go until after the Author’s Note this time.”
There was another chapter break, then the Author’s Note came thundering into their heads. Well, what do you think this chapter is about!?! I'm tired of writing summary's. I'm not good at them to begin with, plus my chapter's seem to be short most of the time!
“Well why bother writing anything at all then?” Nemia asked irritably.
Karma snickered. “I know you just meant in the Author’s Note, but I agree with the other meaning, too.” She checked the Words. “Uh oh, the story is almost over. I say we get him when he goes to his TARDIS to move it into the Doctor’s. Nothing’s written about that, but it’s the only point at which he’s away from the canons.”
“Sounds like a plan.” When Ted left the TARDIS, the assassins followed behind.
Nemia gasped the moment she stepped outside. Snow was falling and the sun was shining. When she looked up the sky appeared to be clear and blue, but when she looked down again she thought she could see it changing colors in her peripheral vision. The street was lined with gas lamps that shone as brightly as electric ones, and the pavement beneath their feet shifted and rippled as though it did not want to be there. “What the..? I thought you said we’d probably be in Cardiff!”
“Hm?” Karma, seemingly unfazed, turned to look at her partner. “No, I said we’d be in Probably Cardiff. And look, here we are!” Out of curiosity she caught a few snowflakes on her tongue, then immediately spat them out. They were cold enough, but they tasted like styrofoam. “I’m not sure exactly how it works. I think it’s somewhat quantum. The setting can’t be any more specific than the author gives it reason to be.”
“And where exactly did you learn about this?”
“Something I read. Come on, we’re losing him!”
Nemia chased after her, still dumbfounded. “What sort of books have you been reading?” she asked, but her partner did not hear her.
They caught up to Ted just as he was stepping into his TARDIS. With a burst of speed unusual for an Auton, Nemia lunged at the hapless Stu and tackled him to the floor, then pulled him to his feet and stood him in the doorway to keep the TARDIS from locking Karma out. “This is the PPC!” she shouted enthusiastically. “You are under arrest! You don’t have any rights for me to read you. Agent Karma, list the charges!”
Karma nodded. “Theodore ‘Ted’ Sigma, since I’m sure you think that’s your last name, you are charged with the following: causing physically implausible events for the sake of comedy; creating Mini-Reapers, e.g. Tadis, Tardis, the Brigader, and Gallefray; excessive punctuation; tampering with the characters of the Doctor and Rose Tyler; making Rose Tyler act like a maid; making Rose Tyler act like an idiot; breaking the fourth wall; causing the Doctor’s anatomy to go all wonky; dressing like the Doctor; inventing verbs; inventing fabrics; thinking that “Theta” is the Doctor’s first name; having an inappropriate name; arbitrary chapter breaks; useless Author’s Notes; unnecessary contractions; making the Doctor act domestic; saying the Doctor has always had big ears; being the long lost brother of a canon character; being a Time Lord after the Time War; giving Rose psychic head-slapping abilities; using apostrophes to form plurals; not using apostrophes to form possessives; giving the Doctor a twin sister, who also has an inappropriate name; declaring in an Author’s Note that you have nothing to say; causing Probably Cardiff to manifest and, last but not least, being a Marty Stu.” She took a moment catch her breath, then added, “And all this in less than four pages. That has to be some sort of record.”
“You have quite a memory,” Nemia commented.
“Thank you. Theodore Sigma, your sentence is death. You may not appeal. Any last words?”
“What? No! I’m too adorable to die!”
Karma shook her head sadly. “I don’t know why we let them have those.” She flipped her hand up and leveled her wrist gun.
“Wait!” Nemia shouted, making her partner jump. “I want to try something first!” Then, without further ceremony, she gouged out Ted’s eyes with her bare fingers. “Yep, they really are soft. Sometimes the Sueverse can actually be fun.”
“Are you quite through?” Karma asked irritably. “It’s just that he’s screaming now, and it’s hurting my ears.”
“Okay, go ahead and kill him.”
“Thank you.” With that, Karma fired a round of small plastic projectiles out of her wrist and into the boy’s head and chest. He slumped in Nemia’s arms. “Great. You’ve got the remote activator, right? Let’s portal somewhere to dispose of the body, preferably somewhere whose existence is one-hundred-percent possible.” Now that the Stu was dead, the universe would be restoring itself to its canon state retroactively. Soon, Karma knew, Ted the Time Lord would have never existed.
Nemia, who was still holding tight to the dead Marty Sam, glared at her. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
Right on cue, a violent blast of light erupted from Ted’s body. Karma’s self-preservation instincts took over and she flattened herself against the fluctuating ground. Nemia gritted her teeth and braced herself against the doorframe, stubbornly holding onto the corpse. Then the light faded and the Time Lord’s head shot up. He drew a deep, gasping breath. His face was different than it had been moments earlier, not least of all in that it was significantly less mutilated. “Oh crap,” Karma muttered. “How could I have forgotten about that?” She unleashed another round of bullets, and the boy’s body went limp once more. “How many more times am I going to have to do that?”
“Probably eleven. Since the author seems not to know that the Doctor had any previous incarnations,” she shuddered at the mere thought of such ignorance, “it’s unlikely that she gave her original character any.”
“Fantastic.” There was another explosion. “Eek! He’s alive again. Aw, look! He’s got red hair this time. The Doctor would be so jealous.” Eleven rounds of plastic bullets later, Ted XIII was dead and not ginger.
“Now can we get out of here?” Karma asked.
Nemia shook her head. “Something’s still wrong. I can feel it. Something... fanfictional.” She dropped Ted’s body and craned her neck around the door frame to get a look at the exterior of his TARDIS. “Why is it a police box? That’s an awfully big coincidence, don’t you think?”
“Casualty again, I believe. Besides, if he dresses like the Doctor, why shouldn’t his TARDIS dress like the Doctor’s?”
“I wonder....” Nemia pointed her Character Analysis Device into the TARDIS. It beeped loudly, and the agent shook her head. “Come here, Karma. I think you’re going to have to see this to believe it.”
Karma went to her partner and looked at the readout screen on the CAD. [Teds Tardis. TARDIS. Noncanon. Magical Sue Artifact? Bit Character? Mary Sue? Probably Mary Sue. Just kill it.] “Um, huh?”
“Makes sense, doesn’t it?” Nemia asked. “Ted is The Other Time Lord. This is The Other TARDIS.”
“Wow. Okay.” Karma took a step back and addressed the blue box. “Teds Tardis, you are under arrest for being the second TARDIS the Doctor stole, surviving the Time War, transporting a Marty Stu, and being a Probably Mary Sue. Because this job just gets weirder every day. Your sentence is death. If you have any last words you can cram them, because I am not going to let you inside my head. Um, Nemia? How do we kill a TARDIS?”
“I think I know. If I’m not back in ten seconds, have fun spending the rest of your life in Probably Cardiff.” Before Karma could respond, her partner had shut the door on her. The TARDIS went vworp vworp vworp and disappeared.
“Nemia?” Karma stood in shock for a moment, then began tapping her foot in anxiety. She counted nine taps before a hole in space ripped open in front of her and Nemia stepped calmly through it, remote activator in hand. “Sweet Sophia, what did you do?”
“Deposited the TARDIS in the Eye of Harmony singularity and portalled like Hell,” Agent Nemia said equably.
Karma gaped. “Where did you learn to fly a TARDIS? And, more importantly, can you teach me?”
“Sure, the next time we just happen to stumble upon one. Now let’s get back to Headquarters. I could use a nap.”
[Author's Note: Here it is, my first PPC! The best thing I can say about the fic is that it was mercifully short. Beyond that, I hated it. You’ll be seeing some Mini-Reapers eventually, as well as learning more about Karma and Nemia and their backstories, but right now I’m just getting into the swing of things.]