Story: Life, Death and the Storm: It Fell From the Stars

Time for something a little bit different. This is a first draft that I'm intending to put on fanfiction.net rather than the BEA, because it's the first chapter of a complete story that I've already mostly got figured out in my head. It is (as the tag will indicate) an NGE and Doctor Who crossover piece, making use of something from Doctor Who that has to my tremendous shock and surprise not been used in any fanfiction piece on fanfiction.net. If that is wrong, please provide me with a link because I'd love to read that.

I have provided a link at the bottom so you can see the thing in question. It would probably go into an author's note on the site.

As it is a first draft, please point out all the myriad ways this can be improved upon. My own critical gaze is a little skewered on that regard having written it.



It was a beautiful day for a hike, and a rather fortuitous occasion to take a day off. At least, that is what Meiji Matsura  had thought when he'd awoken this morning. He had not been proven wrong, to his tremendous delight. Meiji loved to explore, and this forest was the perfect place to indulge in that particular vice. Smell that air! Fresh, unpolluted. All natural! Embrace this beautiful environment. Unspoiled. Untainted. Feel those insects feasting on his blood! Okay, that last may well be a little bit annoying. But he could live with that, if it is was the only price to standing here in this wonderful place on such a glorious day!

Not even that loud crash just a few feet ahead could dampen his spirits any. Sure made him jump, but he was still pretty cheery! Meiji made his way forward cautiously, cautiously. He may be an eternal optimist, but he had absolutely no idea what had caused such a loud noise. Could have been anything, so far as he was concerned. It sounded like an explosion, and the evidence ahead certainly seemed to bear that. In particular his thoughts went to the crater in the ground up ahead, with some sort of silvery sphere sitting dead centre of it all. No, he soon realised. Not an explosion. A landing. That silver thing had landed. A meteorite, perhaps? It didn't look like what he'd expect of any such thing, he'd expected a sort of rock... but then again he didn't really know what a real meteorite would look like at all. Maybe it looked silver because of the heat, or something?

Then the silver sphere unfurled, and Maiji realised he wasn't looking at a ball, but a silver suited man huddled into a fetal position. The figure stood up, and began to look around its environment as though curious about where it had landed. Or maybe it was searching for something?

"Um, hello down there?" Meiji called out, waving his hand at the man. "Welcome to Earth, I guess? Can I he-"

A flash of silver later, and those were the last words Meiji Matsure ever spoke.

======

It was Shinji Ikari's honest opinion that he had seen very few good plans in the course of his life. This did not seem like one of them. Even so, he did not quite have the heart to refuse the request. It was all in his nature, just as it was in the nature of his new friends to try and drag him into this mess. He glanced to his left. Kensuke had spotted its arrival about an hour before, streaking across the sky and landing in the forest. Of course he'd be all excited about something like this. Of course he'd be desperate to see firsthand the mysterious and unexpected meteorite before any military presence got to it.

Unexpected. That was the strange part. There were various satellites in place that could predict the coming arrival of such probes, but apparently nothing had been announced about a near hit to Tokyo 3. Had there been any such thing, they'd never have seen it land. Everyone would've been either in shelters, or in his case the Geofront. Meteorites can do a lot of damage, after all. Even the small ones, due to how fast they were travelling through space without friction to slow them down. Which did raise a few questions about where this one had come from. Not for the first time, Shinji checked his phone just in case he got called back. If this was an Angel, then he was currently engaged in roughly the stupidest thing he could possibly be doing. But no. Nothing. He had a good signal, so it wasn't even that. Just... nothing.

They trudged on through the woods. At least it was a beautiful day for a hike, if nothing else.

"You know what I bet it is?" Kensuke began, looking excitedly around at everything with his camera.

"Aliens," Toiji said, sounding a little bored. "That's what you've been saying for the last half hour now. Wanna try a different tune or something?"

"No wonder of the majesty of the universe, that's your problem!" Kensuke sniffed, not even slowing down in his filming of - well, everything. "Here we are, about to meet -"

"Potentially meet!" Toji interjected.

"Fine, fine! Potentially meet alien life, and you don't even seem to care! I, on the other hand, can't wait to see what sort of propulsion system they used to get here without getting seen!"

"Sounded more like they crashed from the way you talked about it."

And of course, Shinji didn't particularly care to voice the concerns creeping in on the condition that Kensuke was right about that being an alien arrival. Were they friendly? If they did crash, and they did have an engine of some sort capable of propelling them across the stars... what would happen if that fuel ignited? What if they were friendly, but were carrying some weird space plague? So many concerns! So many unanswerable questions! But he could not bring himself to point these out to his friends. Kensuke was far too excited about all of this, and he couldn't bear to crash his friend's hopes like that. It simply wasn't his way of doing things.

"Hey, zoning out again?" Toji smirked at him. "Thinking about Ayanami again?"

"Wh-what? No! No I wasn't!" Shinji insisted, a little stronger than he'd intended. Great. Now they really would think he had a crush on her. "I was just... I was thinking about-."

"Aw man," Kensuke interrupted, coming to a dead stop. "Looks like someone already beat us here!"

Shinji looked up ahead. Yep, it certainly looked that way. It was a military truck, parked just a little bit up ahead. Judging from the tracks and the angle it was parked in, it had arrived perpindicular to the route the three of them had taken. Kensuke was already trying to sneak around, trying not to get spotted if they hadn't been already... but something was eating at Shinji about this scene.

"Come on, we gotta get around that thing without being seen!" Kensuke hissed, pulling at Shinji's arm. He resisted, and pushed his friend back with one hand while the other raised a finger to his lips.

"Don't you hear that?" Shinji asked.

"Hear what?" Toji replied, idly scratching his head.

But Kensuke got it, and he started to frantically look around the forest. "Exactly," he said. "We should've heard something by now. Voices, footsteps - something! No way would they leave their vehicle unmanned like that, unless something got very hairy!" Kensuke beamed. "This is the perfect chance for me to get a look at the real deal! Come on, guys!"

Not quite the hoped for reaction, but that was simply how Kensuke was. It was like a siren's call. He ooed and he ahhed at the truck, but only until he walked around the side when his face went white and he scrambled back with a whimper. The two of them were by his side in a heartbeat, and when they saw what he had seen the other two boys had much the same reaction.

Blood. So much blood. Too much of it. Vitae. The stuff of life. Strewn about and soaking into the ground beneath the soldier left behind to man their vehicle. He was still clutching his gun in his arms, yet his neck... his neck had rather a worse grip on his head, which had rolled a little in front of the body to stare up at the sky as if to ask why it would deliver something so cruel, so evil. So very, very deadly. But whatever had done this ahd not been satisfied with a mere decapitation. There was a clean slice right through the gut, prompting the intestines to hang limp and useless through the mighty gash. While we're at it, we couldn't possibly ignore the giant silver spears pinning the soldier's torso to the side of the very vehicle he was supposed to guard, that was a detail which rather caught the attention after all. Shinji was not a medical expert by any means, but he could take a pretty good estimation of the time of death. Within the last hour. Whatever had done this was still nearby. Lurking somewhere among the trees. Waiting for a chance to strike again.

On the bright side... he knew the answer to one of his questions now. Hostile. Definitely hostile.

===

Rei had long since decided that sleep was an inefficient biological necessity. It was an unusual phenomenon that placed all species that experienced sleep into a state where they were extremely vulnerable from predators when they could be doing other far more essential tasks. Curious phenomenon. Rei did not care to indulge in curiousity. Unfortunately she did have to indulge in biological necessity, which meant that she had to awaken on this particular morning. Today was her re-activation day. Today, she would attempt to prove herself once again useful to the commander.

She shifted out of bed and performed the basic functions required for hygenic purposes before leaving through the front door. It was not that she was anxious to get there, nor was she worried about a repeat of what had occured the last time... She had faith that it would have been fixed. Whatever issues were involved in Unit 00 running amok, it would be resolved. She would not force the commander to injure himself again. She was expendable. Replaceable. He was not.

A sound caught her ears, and Rei stopped mid-step. She turned. Slowly. That was not a sound like anything on Earth. The wind kicked up as if it was being displaced by... something. An object appearing where there had been no object before. It was curious, but something was attempting to manipulate her perceptions in a subtle manner. It almost worked. She still saw it. It was... a box? Yes, thats was right. A blue box appearing in the middle of the street, completely ignored by the few other people that happened to pass it by. Rei stared at it and somehow felt a certainty that she was witnessing something impossible.

The box was alive. No, more than that. The box was <i>powerful</i> in a way that didn't mean anything to her. Had she the ability to do so, she still would not have dared probe any deeper into what that power was. It was like she had caught the shattered reflection of an endless abyss, and if she had tried to stare too hard into it then she dared not imagine what might stare back. Even so, none of that was capable of perparing her for what occured when the front door opened and a man stepped out.

To begin with: He wasn't human. Even if she hadn't seen the box appear out of thin air, she could have said that. There was something wrong about him, in a different way that the box was wrong. Neither belonged here. They belonged elsewhere. How did she know this? Why did she know it? Rei could not answer these questions to her own satisfaction. She knew. That was all. It would have to be enough, at least for now.

The stranger held the appearance of a tall man. European, long dark hair. Wore a plain brown tweed jacket with elbow patches, a dress shirt and navy blue trousers. He was looking around pretending to be casual, even to the point of making a mild adjustment to his bow tie. And then he looked directly at Rei. She would never forget those eyes. It felt as though if she tried to continue on her way and ignore the strange man and his box, she would be incapable of doing so.

"Hello miss," the man said. "I'm The Doctor, and I couldn't help but notice you staring at me. Not that I could blame you, I am rather a fascinating person, but you!" The strange man that identified himself as The Doctor leaned down, eyes level to Rei's, and he whispered "You're much more fascinating, aren't you? Oh, so much more." She did not blink, but nor did he. It felt like he was looking right through her, as though their staring contest lay bare every secret she might have locked away within her mind. They were not even her secrets. Not really. "Has there been anything odd falling from the sky recently?"

Rei extracted her phone, and immediately checked for any such information. "Yes," she said, upon discovering Kensuke's twitter feed. "An unidentified meteorite appears to have landed in the forest. Approximately one hour ago."

The Doctor's mood changed a little bit then. "We'll talk again. Thank you."

And then he was running back towards his box. Rei was not surprised to see it vanish in the same manner that it appeared. In spite of herself, Rei was rather anticipating that second meeting. Sometimes even she succumbed to curiousity.

===

A dead body. A dead body. Lying in front of him. No. Not just dead. Dismembered. Mauled. Savaged. A soldier cut down by something from another world. Shinji could swear there was a hint of surprise in his long dead eyes, as though the attack had been so swift and so sudden that he had no time to react. Whatever did it was still here. Still somewhere around, lurking among the trees. Waiting. Watching. Did it enjoy making them squirm? Why not get it over with?!

A movement caught his eye, and Shinji turned for a better look. A man stepped out from behind a tree, and the first detail that caught Shinji's attention was the firearm he was clasping with both hands. Immediately following this was the dark suit, slightly muddy brown as if to blend in with the forest. He was soon joined by three others, who moved to surround the three kids, each brandishing a gun, each appearing as if from nowhere.

"Who the hell are you?!" Toji exclaimed, first to recover his wits.

The tallest member of the group turned and gave a warm smile, directed towards Shinji, and only then answered the question. "We're his bodyguards, you could say. Kid like Shinji here is far too valuable to leave unprotected. Come on. It's time to get the three of you the hell out of this place." One of his colleagues drew his attention and passed over some binoculars. The grimace was noticable in spite of his efforts to conceal it. "Let's not waste any time. Everybody in the truck, you kids in the back. Just stay calm and everything will be fine."

Bodyguards? Him? Why? Because he was a pilot. But... why? Was that enough of a reason for them to protect someone as worthless as him? No. Not just that. He was the commander's son. Obviously someone may come to the (incorrect) conclusion that Gendo Ikari could be swayed or emotionally invested by terrorist demands involving the capture of his son. It was not hard for him to see the use in providing secret bodyguards, not to protect but instead to catch would be kidnappers in the act. How better to ensnare a potential enemy than to leave them a nice, juicy worm out in the open?

One of his... bodyguards was pulling the silver spear out of the... Out of the corpse. He saw it slide down a little at first with nothing holding it in place, and then it was pushed a little more firmly down by use of a gun barrel. Even these people were disgusted by the sight, but they needed to do this if they wanted a speedy getaway.

"The damage is superficial," the man said after peering at it for a moment. "Let's get the hell out of here!"

Two in the front. The three friends in the back, and two more of the bodyguards sat in the back seat. It was a vehicle that was not made for comfort, not that Kensuke seemed to care all that much. He was like a kid on christmas day. Merry christmas Kensuke! You get to ride in a military truck! This probably made his year. Forgotten was the sight of the dead body, the blood, those wounds, the guts and those eyes. Those cold dead unstaring eyes had lost their purpose. They would never, ever see again.

His thoughts were interrupted by the bodyguard that was apparently in charge of the others. The mountain of a man was smiling down at him with a kindness Shinji did not feel he deserved. "Try not to dwell on it too much," he said. "Kid your age seeing a dead body for the first time... Hell, it's not easy for anyone to take!" he chuckled a little, and gave Shinji's hair a friendly toussle. "But you didn't throw up! That puts you ahead of most folk! Listen, if you want to talk about what just happened... Go right ahead. No shame in it, right?"

He only cared because it was his job. His paycheck demanded that he keep Shinji safe, keep him sane, keep him able to pilot. That was the only reason he cared. The only reason any of them ever cared. They had a use for him. He had a purpose in his father's eyes.

"What should I call you?" he asked, not expecting a real name. If he was protecting from the shadows the way they had been until this point, that meant his identity had to be kept under wraps.

"Fumihiro," he answered just a little too quickly. "Call me Fumihiro."

"Well, mister Fumihiro!" Toji interjected, tapping his foot impatiently. "It's good you're sorting out the pilot over there, but he's not the only poor traumatised kid in this truck!"

"Quite so, Mister Suzuhara!" Fumiho said, looking pointedly at Kensuke who was, quite incidentally, arguing quite passionately with the other agent about whether he could keep his camera or not. "Is there anything you need to get off your chest?"

"Well. I was wondering what you saw through the binoculars."

"The rest of the investigation team," Fumihiro winced a little at the memory. "We should've stopped you coming here, but we thought they would've turned you around before you got anywhere near anything. Please accept my apologies for not preventing you from doing something completely stupid."

Toji was glaring at Fumiho, not remotely pleased with the situation, but Shinji felt obliged to say something. Anything at all. Just so long as it would make it stop appearing before his eyes every time he blinked. Would he sleep tonight? Would he sleep ever again? "What will happen when we leave the forest?"

"Probably drop an N2 on it," Fumihiro replied. "Something like that, whatever it is, it needs killing. If that doesn't work, you'll probably have to sort it out. Either way, it's dead. Whatever it is. You've got nothing to worry ab-"

The word was never completed, for it was interrupted by the sound of breaking glass. This particular alarming noise was almost immediately thereafter followed by their vehicle swerving, tossing all five of them in the back around like ragdolls. Shinji's world spun around him, and he clamoured for something - anything - to hang onto. Fortunately there was a handle hanging from the ceiling for this very purpose, so he was able to use it to steady himself and take better stock of his situation.

===

The Doctor hated travelling to parallel worlds. Hated it. Well, maybe hate was too strong a word. Disliked? No, still too strong. How about didn't appreciate? Yes. That was a bit more like it. On the one hand it always provided such wonderous and fascinating variations on elements he knew of as the established norm. Love that part. Love strange and unusual and new. It was why he did this, why he started this in the first place oh so very long ago. He was a different man then. Had been several since, too.

Ah, but that was where the appreciation for parallel worlds had to come to a close. Because everything was different, it meant most of what he knew was frankly wrong. The word wrong was not one he liked applying to himself. Never did. Never would. Wrong applied to himself was, for lack of a better word, wrong. Worse yet was the concern of his subconscious (or maybe even his sub-subconscious) forgetting they were even in a parallel universe in the first place... resulting in him making false assumptions that got everybody killed. He hated getting everybody killed. Loathed it. Despised that.

It went a little deeper than his ego, obviously enough. It wasn't too hard to realise. Every time he went into a parallel universe, things went a bit.. wibbly. Like that one time he watched an entire planet burn. That was a bit nasty, especially when he barely returned in time to his own universe to put a stop to it. Had nightmares for decades after that. There was a good reason the Keller Machine used that particular memory to frighten him. Even so, a few centuries didn't exactly make it into a pleasant memory. Merely a "not quite as bad as these others" memory, which rather said a lot about the life he lived.

So he wasn't what anyone might call delighted to encounter a fissure in the vortex that just so happened to lead to a parallel universe. Oh, universe. You shouldn't have. You really, really shouldn't have. Because once he'd seen it, he had to do something about it. Couldn't just ignore it, couldn't put the various co-ordinates in a message to Gallifrey, oh no! Nothing of the sort. Gallifrey didn't exist anymore, due to... various other rather uncomfortable memories. Something like this was his responsibility to clean up. A fissure like this couldn't be left unattended, oh no! Matter would fall from one universe to the other, extending the fissure just that little bit more. Which made it that much more likely that more matter would transfer over, on both sides. Eventually it would get big enough to do considerable damage to the nature of reality to both universes. Can't have that.

... He missed having people to tell this stuff to. That expression they got, somewhere between confusion and being dead impressed. He'd have to find someone else eventually. Someone that would in time become willing to die for him, in spite of whatever he might want. He couldn't help it. That was the effect he had on people, and didn't that gnaw on his conscience like a festuring wound?

Speaking of festering wounds... Just as he feared. Matter had transferred from this universe to the other. So now he had to go in there, into the unknown and retrieve it. Wonderful. The longer it stayed in there the worse this fissure would get, and he wouldn't be able to close it until everything of significant mass that had passed through it was safely was back where it belonged. Travelling through a fissure like this left a specific energy trail that made the very atoms ache to be back in their normal universe, aggravating the fissure and keeping it open. Even if he did somehow close it off the mere presence of significant fissure tainted mass would, inevitably, open up another one. No way around it except a retreival. If nothing else, the offending object would've left an echo on the -

No! No! No! Not one of those. No! That complicates an already pretty complicated situation, thank you very much. He hadn't actually encountered too many of these, and he was oddly grateful of that. It would have to be deactivated before he could bring it back home, so to speak. Dangerous thing like that. He'd only ever managed to disable one of them, and even then he'd had help. Admittedly it was himself that had been the helping hand, but it was still help. No time to worry about it now. He'd work out a thing later on, once he'd seen what the universe was like. If nothing else he could maybe warn a few people away, or lure it from a populated area.

He journeyed into the fissure, unhappy that he would have to temporarily make the problem worse before it got better. "Geronimo!" he yelled, answered only by his echo. Now. Let's follow that trail a bit, shall we? Earth. Not surprising, not at all. Landmass was changed quite a lot, and the population was a fair bit lower than it was for this relative timeframe in his own universe... Global catastrophe was written all over this.

It had landed in Japan, somewhere around about a city. The TARDIS landed smoothly enough, and a look on the scanner revealed that nobody on the street seemed to be screaming in pain. He was hopeful that someone saw something, and there was but one way to make certain. Time to pop out and say hello...

===

A few facts were immediately apparent; They had tipped over, Kensuke had landed on top of Toji but both seemed alright other than a few possible bruises to look forward to in the morning, and both agents sitting in the back with them were looking rather tense.

"Hey up front!" Fumiho yelled. "I warned you about drinking just before duty! I - Oh."

Curiosity is a terrible thing because sometimes, on occasion it forces a person to look upon a question they do not want to know the answer to. It compels you to know, if only so that you know how thoroughly screwed up the situation was. Right now Shinji was in the thrall of that curiousity. It was not so much that he had to know, but he needed to. He crawled a little gingerly towards the front, cautiously rose to his feet and peered under Fumiho's arm. His face went white. The agent that had been driving had something embeded into the side of his head, wedged into his skull. It looked like... a disc? A simple flat silver disc, protruding from the man's head. Like it had grown there. No. More like it had burst out. The only reason Shinji even knew it was silver was because of the tiny flecks he saw through the blood so much blood it was everywhere make it stop make it stop make it stop!

He'd only seen it for a second before Fumiho gently pushed him back to his seat, but it was enough to leave him shivering in fear.

"Is... is the other one alright?" he asked.

"I'm just swell!" came a voice from the front. "But I think I'm stuck! You'd best go on without me."

"Did you see it?" Toji yelled. "What the hell happened?!"

"I don't know. One second we're driving fine, the next... Look, forget me! It'll take too long, just go!"

Fumiho's eyes hardened and he rose to his full, formiddable height. "You heard the lady, let's move."

They were leaving her? Just like that? That poor woman, sitting in the front seat, trapped with a corpse. The dead body of someone she'd probably worked with for years. Developed a raport with. Someone she knew, trusted, maybe cared for a little bit... The fear in his heart hardened into something else entirely, and his entire body language completely transformed. Then, he said something he would've thought impossible a minute before.

"I'm not going."

"What do you mean you're not going?"

"I mean, I'm not going! Not without her! Not without everyone! You can take my friends, but I'm staying behind!"

Shinji glared up at the man, knowing all too well that this was someone could easily carry him away. It didn't matter. The thought of letting someone get hurt on his account, letting someone else throw away their lives for his sake... No. It wasn't worth it.  He wasn't worth it. Nobody should let themselves get hurt on his account, no matter what they thought. He knew the truth that they kept from him. He knew that he was worthless. Just a bait on a hook and nothing more.

"Go check the surrounding area," Fumiho instructed to the remaining agent. "We will be with you shortly." Without a word, the agent left, and once he was gone Fumiho crouched down to better stare Shinji face to face. "You're a lot stronger than I thought you were. I could just drag you out of here, kicking and screaming and everything. It would be easy."

"But you'd need to carry all three of us," Toji interrupted. "Right, Kensuke?"

"Heck yeah! Let's stop wasting time and get her out!"

Fumiho smirked. "Fine. I'd have done the same thing in your position, probably. Hang in there... Hisako. You'll be owing me for this one!"

"Get bent!" 'Hisako' yelled from the front. "It's not like you to let kids like that order you around!"

"What can I say?" Fumiho chuckled, making his way towards the back of the truck. "They're braver than I thought they'd be. I'll be with you in a minute, sit tight!"

A gunshot is much, much louder than television indicates. The experience doesn't transfer, not even a little bit. Same with explosions. If you were running away from an actual explosion, and you were anywhere near close to it as some people seemed to be... your eardrums are ruptured. Simple truth, makes a lot of sense when you think about what's actually happening. Shinji had found out about some of that the hard way. The last one, well, that was something Professor Akagi had mentioned when he'd brought up the first point during training.  That same first point was no less true when standing five feet away from someone firing a handgun into a forest.

"I have sighted the hostile," the agent stated. "But, I can't keep track of it. It's... It's jumping around far too quickly for me to keep track of!" As if to illustrate the point, after each shot he would look around the forest in all directions, then after a moment readjust his aim and fire in a completely different direction to where he was firing before. "Get going! I'll keep it distracted and be with you in a moment!"

He was off into the forest before Shinji could react. Alright. He crawled out first, and saw the agent hiding behind a tree, periodically taking potshots at... something. By the time Shinji turned to look in the general direction, it was gone. If he could at least see what he was running from, if he could at least see that... Then maybe this wouldn't be quite as scary as it all seemed. Whatever it actually looked like couldn't be worse than the images dancing in his mind at the moment. The three boys rounded the vehicle, just in time to see Fumiho pulling Hisako out through the window. She did not seem pleased with the rescue, but pulled her gun and pressed back against the top side of their former transportation. She peered around the corner and waved back to the group.

"That means all clear," Kensuke whispered. "No sign of anything hostile."

While they crept forward, Shinji couldn't help but glance back towards the direction of the gunshots. He heard a mangled scream, and was running off into the forest for a better point of view before he even knew what he was doing. He had to know. He had to see it. In spite of all reason, he had to know what he was running from. His imagination would not leave him alone otherwise. It would damn him with monsters, with devils and goblins from the very pits of hell. Whatever it was surely could not be worse than that.

The first thing he saw was the dead, mangled  body of the agent as it slumped to the ground. Once it was out of the way, only then did he see it in all of its terrible glory. His expectations were disappointed. He had seen Angels. Otherworldly beings that were completely beyond human comprehension. In comparison this being was familiar. Too familiar for comfort. It was.. a man. Simply a man suited in silver from head to toe, showing not one inch of skin. It even covered his face, hiding it completely from the outside world. Yet there it was. An alien life form, and it looked... human. A skinny human adult, probably male, not exceptional height. Neither too small or too big. Its only distinguishing feature was the light greyness covering it. In spite of all that, Shinji knew one other thing. It may have no face. It may have no eyes. But from the direction its head was facing he did know one incontrovertable, unavoidable fact.

It was looking right at him.

===

"I am not here to meddle," The Doctor repeated to himself. Not for the first time, and not for the last. "I will not meddle. I am simply here to retrieve some lost property, and then I'm gone! I am not interested in that very odd little girl that did not smell quite right and had a mind like..."

Like what? He didn't know yet. Something had touched his mind just for a moment, and only a moment before concealing itself once again. It hadn't tried to read his mind or anything like that, it was more like he was being asked a question. "Who are you?" he mumbled. Yes. That was always the question they asked wherever he went. Seemed reasonable a mind like that - whatever it might have been - would want to know the same thing. The girl was not quite human, but nor was she not human. Interesting paradox. Genetic experiment? To what end? Blue hair and red eyes were not sufficient explanation... "A side effect of the global catastrophe? Nah. It would've hit more people than that..."

He was gearing up to meddle. Bad habit of his. It's a parallel world, it'll all end in tears. Retrieve and leave. That's the deal. If only he had a way to deal with... that. Not a plan. It would have to be a thing. Things are better than plans nine times out of ten. Enemies can predict plans, but things... ah, now those are much harder to predict.

His first impression was that of a normal forest. Perfectly normal, except for the simple fact that something completely deadly was here that really should not be here. It could be lurking around any tree, or even hiding in one. They could be stealthy when they wanted to be, but then again other times... other times they liked to make their presence known, just to put the fear of whatever god you believed in right through your very being.

The gunshots were a big help, even if they wouldn't help whoever was firing. Bullets were too slow to hit this thing. Lasers could manage it. Barely. Except it wouldn't be that easy... The Doctor ran, already thinking about what to say to whoever he found shooting at it. The scream came, and he pushed himself that much harder.

"Whoah!" The Doctor gasped as he skidded in place, then dove behind a tree. Mirror. Mirror! Where did he keep that blasted - ah ha! He used it to peer around the tree, and took in the sight of his intended target. "There you are. Now, how do  I shut you down..."

But he had bigger concerns at the moment. A young boy, maybe fifteen or fourteen years old appeared out of nowhere and stared in horror at the sight in front of him. A dead man with a large arrow protruding from his chest. Had it not been for the kid's instinctive response to freeze in place, he would've been killed on the spot. Normally, he would've talked to him. Kept him calm. But right now that fear was keeping him alive. He hated himself for doing it, but The Doctor waited until it left with a trademark noise - a woosh of air - telling him without needing to see. He used the mirror to scan the area. Gone. For now. The boy clutched his mouth and slumped to his knees, tears streaming freely down his face.

"Hello there!" The Doctor said.

"Aargh!" the boy leaped a little and landed on his back. Crawling away with ragged breath, he asked the obvious question. "Who... Who are you?!"

"That's a very good question," a female voice said, preventing him from answering. "Step away from the Third Child, and nobody gets hurt."

"I'd answer the question and do as she says," a rather large, my goodness aren't you massive, man said. Interesting how they both crept up on him like that, interesting that they're wearing some form of forest based camoflage, and very interesting that they seem so protective of this particular boy while not paying particular attention to the two behind them. "We've had a rather bad day, what with a mysterious serial killer on the loose."

"I suppose you think this was me. That's how this usually goes," The Doctor said, very carefully stepping away from the boy.

"Nah, no way" the boy with glasses said. "No way someone like that could take down a team of soldiers! Look at how scrawny and lanky he is!"

"... Thank you?" The Doctor replied.

"It... It wasn't him, Fumiho!" the 'Third Child' said, scrambling to his feet. "It was... it was this other man! He was silver all over! I saw it!"

"Thank you, Shinji," the large man said. "But for all we know, that grey man was wearing spandex that he took off just now. Please sir, I would hate to have to shoot you in front of these children. They've seen quite enough blood for one lifetime in the last half hour. Who are you, and why are you in this forest?"

"Just let me have five minutes with him," the woman said. The Doctor got a better look at her. She was an attractive woman (he supposed) whose face was rather marred with an understandable amount of anger.

"Good cop bad cop. Interesting. Most would've tried going along with physical stereotypes, let the big man be the bad cop while the woman would be the good cop, which tells you all you need to know about in built sexism - But to answer your question, if I may just retrieve something from my pocket? Just my credentials, nothing more than that."

"Alright. But with just two fingers. No funny business."

The Doctor complied quite readily. He reached into his pocket with merely two fingers, while his other hand remained raised, fished around and pulled out his 'credentials'. It wasn't often he used this these days, especially since learning that his more dangerous enemies were training to spot it. Here in another universe? Everything old is new again. He tossed it over to the big man, who flipped it open and quirked an eyebrow.

"Hisako, put the gun away. He's a special agent. He's one of our lot."

She dropped the gun with a bit of reluctance. The Doctor smiled politely at her, and mentally filed away 'one of our lot' , the use of a codename rather than a real name, and their protectiveness of the 'Third Child'. Priority one was finding out what that meant without looking suspicious. Could be tricky. Hisako tossed the psychic paper back to him, providing The Doctor a chance to perform some sleight of hand - checking what it had last read without looking like he was checking it.

Then an arrow struck the ground in front of them.

"Don't move!" The Doctor yelled, following his own advise. "Stay perfectly still. It tracks by a combination of motion and brainwave detection."

"If it can, uh, detect brainwaves, why does it need to detect motion?" the athletic boy asked.

"It can't tell location from that alone. It tells it there's something alive in the area, but not where it is. Motion tells it that. Any motion at all."

"Why didn't home base warn us about that?!" Hisako hissed.

"And how did you even know about that?" the glasses wearing boy piped in. "It only landed this morning!"

The Doctor ignored those questions for a moment, in favour of keeping an eye on his target. It was like him. A stranger in a strange land. Look at it, just standing there, looking around like it owned the place. All grey skinned and humanoid, hiding within the dark secret of how it actually worked from anyone that might care to know. Created purely as an intellectual excercise, then sold for profit by those without scruples enough to care what such a weapon might do. What harm it may cause. It destroyed them in the end. Just as it destroyed all living things. He would drag it back to their home universe and away from this one. He would find a way to do it. He would.

"The magic of red tape," The Doctor replied. "And in case you were thinking it looks unarmed, its armaments are built in."

A moment of silence. "I don't think you really are from Sector Two," Hisako whispered. Her breathing was the same as the rest of them. Heavier than they might like. Even so, the desperation in her voice was quite obviously rising, and she was about to do something panicked and stupid. "I think that was a forgery. An excellent forgery, but still a forgery."

"Hisako...!" Fumihiro hushed, barely able to restrain his motion. They hadn't been attacked yet, and it seemed that they all believed him on that much. Another effect The Doctor had on people that he wished he had better control over.

"Stay calm and stay still," The Doctor said. "If you don't trust anything else I say, trust that."



"Why should I believe you? I think you're working with that thing!" she apparently came to a decision, and did something very foolish, swinging her arm to point her gun at The Doctor's head. "Call it off, or I sho-"

But her arm never completed the arc. A disc struck her at the elbow, and she wailed in pain as it cut through skin, nerves, blood vessels and muscle.

"Everybody! Behind the trees! Use the foliage for cover where you can!"

They scrambled for movement, desperate to stay out of sight, the Third Child frozen in place once again from fear. The Doctor's reaction was slightly faster than Fumihiro's, enabling him to ensnare the boy in a grapple and pull him behind the tree to safety as poor Hisako was cut to ribbons before he could do anything else. The hulking figure that he was by now thinking of as Fumihiro was able to get the other two boys to safety as well, though it was obvious which of the three he would have preferred to save. Looking out around the tree with his mirror, The Doctor felt yet another addition to the sack of burden he carried with him. Another life he could have saved, had he only worked a little bit harder for it. He'd mourn later alongside the rest of them. For now he had to prevent them from dying too.

"What is that thing?" the Third Child asked, beginning to tremble slightly.

"The most perfect killing machine ever devised," The Doctor answered. "A Raston Warrior Robot."