There's a howling in the factory yard; there's a pounding in my head...
It's closer now, so close he can feel the energy building in his solar plexus, coiled and waiting between surges, can feel his hearts straining, and it's all right, for once. Time to go and all that, and so he tosses a grin at Rose through the pain, says his last words -- fantastic last words, really -- and throws his head back. He's overwhelmed
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She can provide.
She backtracks, pulling open the door and sticking her head in. Single new wanderer, taking this better than some - or at least fightier than some, but Dmitri is of the mind that this is a good thing - and already holding the Rift accountable. Okay. She can work with this.
"Thank you for redeeming your one-way ticket through Transuniversal Rift Airlines," she says, tossing her towel onto the desk by the door and not even bothering to announce her presence. "You've landed in Chicago, Illinois, in the United States of America, on Earth. It's somewhere around six in the evening local time, January 25th, twenty-ten, the weather today is cold and breezy with scattered flurries and a high temperature just below freezing. Your point of arrival is the Conrad Hotel, offering free food and lodging to those who find themselves displaced from their home universes; I'm Dmitri Lang, and I'll be your orientation officer for the day."
She sighs.
"Mind the swirly grueple portal."
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And with that, he whips out his sonic screwdriver and starts scanning the Rift, frowning to himself. "I doubt it's transuniversal, though. The walls have closed, and I should..." He frowns again.
"...Or I could be wrong." He turns back to her. "Chicago, though... I haven't been in Chicago in ages. Good hot dogs, shame about the weather. Just how many of us are there?" By which he means Wanderers, not Doctors, though either one is a valid question in this case.
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She kicks her heels idly, narrowing her eyes at the sonic screwdriver. 'cause that... oh, she knows that little implement.
"As for other universes, I came from the next Chicago over. I've kinda walked a mile in everybody's shoes. Other things to be aware of: two homo-organic species called angels and demons, undergoing metamorphosis from a human baseline at age sixteen, kinda-sorta at war in most places, some places more literally than others. And a psychic journal network, and a whole host of humans with what folk around here call supernatural abilities."
She shrugs.
"This may be a terribly personal and inappropriate question, but you wouldn't happen to be of the two-hearted sensing-all-of-space-and-time persuasion, would you be? I ask, because I just did a little cross-reference in the back of my head of people who bust out sonic screwdrivers, pulling data from not one but two different universes, and... yeah, didn't come up with too many, all told. Fewer than three."
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The implications will be hitting him in 3...
2...
1...
"Wait a minute, how do you know about Time Lords? Have I just gone all Chatty Cathy all of a sudden, 'Hi there, have a detailed explanation of my innards'?" He takes a moment from frowning at the readings coming from his screwdriver to look indignant in her general direction. "The sonic's hardly standard kit, so it'd have to be one of me, and it's obviously not this one, or you'd know me already, so would you mind terribly describing me to myself, thanks?"
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She gives him another good stare, but there's not a lot of mistaking that sort of... Doctorness. Oh, tone, accent, body, and inflection are all off, but this all sounds like his sort of insanity.
"One of you," she says, jabbing a finger at him, "owes me an explanation for this, and I do already have the other guy on a hook." And she has the evidence in her journal to prove it.
Right. Probably not going to unleash GLOBAL BADNESS if she does give out an APB, unless the Doctor also has secret Thanecrazy past lives, which would be just her luck but would also mean she'd rather not piss him off. Besides, house odds say she can get a journal message out before he can hunt anyone down.
...she really kinda resents having come to a point in her life where all of this is normal concern.
"Right-o; the Doctor, Doctor. Scrawny beanpole of a thing with a fondness for mixing blue and brown, camel coat, very expressive hair - not ginger - London accent, occasionally bespectacled, and if he had a shapeshifter form, it would be a blackfooted ferret. And trust me, as to how I know what I know, odds are good you don't want to."
Listening to ten rounds hand to hand with Thane, for one.
"We're pals. Have been for a while, at home and abroad." Which is actually less of a nothing to fear from me, good sir and more of a ...and if you do turn out to be the Surprise! Crazy! edition, we're in a basement full of archangels and I'm packing heat.
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But at the description of the other Doctor, he breaks into a grin that's wider and toothier than his face should be capable of supporting. "Don't know him. Means that's after my time, then. Fantastic. Who knows? I could've been turning into him before I came here."
The grin falters a bit, then. Right. He'd been dying. This is just the second time he wasn't meant to survive something and did anyway.
"Never explained regeneration to you, did I? Old Time Lord trick. Our little way of cheating death." There's something slightly bitter in those words, if you listen closely enough, but he keeps on going. "Run into something that kills us, and we just come out of it a whole new man. Most of the time, anyway. Good to know I managed to finish regenerating somewhere, at least." He shoots a glare at the Rift.
"Right, then. I'll need to have a chat with myself, at my earliest convenience. Can't wait to see how I turned out." Again, the somewhat goofy grin. "In the meantime, what's this about angels and demons and a metamorphosis?"
He's obviously not getting back through the Rift right off; might as well see what the locals are like.
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She's just going to take it as writ that it is.
"We've got futures, we've got pasts - William Shakespeare was knocking around here for a while. One thing your post-ego was, he was selectively bad at explaining things." She snorts. "Let's put a 'moderately familiar' on that concept.
"Okay, soldier, what we have here is an odd little bit of hereditary morphology manifesting itself in what local parlance calls a few distinct species: angel, demon, nephilim, human. Angel plus angel equals angel, angel plus human equals human or angel. Parallel that on the demons, and angel plus demon equals naphil, singular more often just nephilim these days, but that rarely happens as... are you all right?"
The journal disappears back into her messenger bag, and there's a familiar itch on her shoulderblades because that... there's something of a reaction there, and now that she's got that verbal inertia to a stop, she's not sure she likes it.
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And then she calls him 'soldier', and something in his expression shuts down completely. His eyes meet hers, and there's something cold and appraising in the way he looks at her, gauging how much she knows... But it only takes a moment before he breaks eye contact, pointedly looking at the sofa, instead of her.
When she asks if he's all right, he tries to smile, and it doesn't work out as well. "Used to be a soldier," he says, looking up slowly. "But the war's over, Dmitri Lang. Now I'm just me. Just a tourist." Now I'm nothing at all.
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"Ganesh dancing mambos on a melancholic mouse," she says, and then mouths half a paragraph in silent Chinese as she takes a step back from that look. Because there is something she knows - about wars, about wars the Doctor fought in, and that gives her a direct link into the darkest part of her recent history - and his, for a value of 'his' that means the other one here, and if that look says anything, it might just be his-as-is-standing-right-in-front-of-her, too. And that's not...
That's...
"We interrupt this social anthropology primer," she says, while half of her mind is still trying to work out what she wants to say and what she doesn't want to say and what she absolutely has to, and then she launches a metaphorical boot at her own ass and shakes her head. If nothing else, she can avoid freaking out about it. "...I'm really sorry, and I don't say that lightly."
Dmitri Lang makes a point of living a life of very few regrets. Unfortunately, this is kinda one of them.
"Um. There's going to be something you'll want to ask the other guy about," she says. "...and he'll probably not want to tell you anything. And I'd be a lot less cryptic about this but I don't know you - it's a thing, tinker-tailor-tourist, that might just be for Time Lords to tell - but ask him about someone named John Thane."
She can't quite keep her voice from twisting on that name, but she swallows it. She won, after all, and it should all be well behind her, dragged out of the ring to leave space for the next thing to be faced, but of course Chicago never works like that. Life probably doesn't anywhere.
"Right here, right now, probably nothing dangerous; nothing that's going to jump out and cuff you to a wall, but it's going to be lurking under a lot of shadows until you get a briefing on that, and I am not the one to do it," she finishes. "Species and subtypes, sure, history of Chicago, local attractions and which you can set your watch by the explosions thereof, Chicagoland Who's Who, but... get cake, compare notes, and you might want to be sitting down when someone tells you."
...that didn't sound at all ominous. She grimaces. And here she's usually so good at avoiding the vague, cryptic bullshit she has no tolerance for at the best of times.
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"Look," the Doctor says, raising his hands. I'm unarmed. All I've got's a sonic screwdriver... Completely nonlethal, though I could probably put up some very menacing shelves, if I'd a mind to." He gives her a somewhat tentative grin, and looks very much like a man who really, really wants to be considered harmless -- no, one who really wants to be harmless, but hasn't quite worked out the trick of it yet.
And then she starts talking again, and he shuts up and pays attention.
"John Thane," he repeats, his expression gone solemn and worried. "Got it." There are questions he could ask, questions he probably should ask, but he's not quite sure bringing any of them to her would be a good idea.
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She mutters something else, dragging her hands over her face and quickly reordering her hair.
"Okay. Angels. Demons. Angels have white blood, low body temp, breathe in carbon dioxide, breathe out oxygen. Demons? Blackblood, hotblood, huge oxygen req. Conventional wisdom says white blood good, black blood bad, conventional wisdom gets a boot up its ass here in the Windy City, seven times out of ten. Local powers. You're standing in the Conrad Hotel, archangel central, run by Vincent Sterling, who's a good guy. Off in Cicero is the Main Gauche Apartment Complex, run by a Neqa'el demon named Elashte, who's also a good guy, or at least pretty damn convincing about it. Then there's Torchwood in the Kashtta Tower over on Wabash and Lake; they like you. At least, they like the other you. Hell if I know; they might like you if they get to know you, assuming you don't know them already.
"We've got supernaturals - elementals, sorcerers, shapeshifters, if it sounds a bit unscientific, get used to it, it's the way the Rift and the world works. Coming through changes something about you. Usually it's like you fall through into comic-book land, sometimes it gets silly. I've got a friend who doors sing for. Mostly 80s music. It'd make sense if you knew him. On a fortune cookie: if you turn into an Aye-Aye, blame Osscy."
She points at the Rift. Osscy is the Rift. It's good to know.
"Covered the journal network - supports custom locking to whoever you want it to, just write 'locked to so-and-so,' fun for the whole family; there's a coffee shop called 'The Coffee Shop,' staffed by brave and brilliant people, and if you take your hot drinks there, you have a better-than-average chance of being blown up; Grant Park is slightly feral, it's a bit of a shock if you come from most other places; if you run into folks calling themselves the CLF it probably means that Satan is our mayor again and they may want to kill you for not being native to this universe; the Rift has a thing for throwing wildly different people with the same damn face through, so just ask before you go jumping to conclusions; and the Cubs have filed for bankruptcy. Any questions?"
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