Doctor who fic: Never work with Children and Timelords
Title: Never work with children and timelords
Author: Me, cupati
Rating: Entirely suitable for all [except those who will find this all a bit too confusing].
Words: 2402
Charecters: David Tennant, Billie Piper, Russle T, Ten, Rose, lots and lots of theatre school kids.
Spoilers: None.
Notes: Highly surreal [probably the strangest of the summer fics], it was based on a dream. I started writing it before seeing the Cybermen episodes of new series 2, but made sme adjustment afterwards. Un-betaed, as per usual, but I have run it through a spellchecker.
I can’t believe my luck! My first acting job, and I’m in Doctor Who! They have needed quite a few children for it, but we all have speaking roles! This is going to be amazing.
I’m not the only first-timer, either! There’s Jo, and Sandie. We tend to keep to ourselves, the others don’t talk to us much. They probably all know each other from Harry Potter or something. I’m sure I recognise some of them from there, anyway.
The plot of our episode? I’m not entirely sure. Russell T wants our reactions to be genuine, so we only have a small amount of script at once. This does mean that we have to film everything in order. The concept is that we are a coachload of schoolchildren on a school trip, working on our “childcare in the community” project. Real life is pretty similar, as we are bussed from one location to another. Billie and David have their own cars. There’s something suspicious going on on our school trip, so The Doctor and Rose are being some kind of responsible adults to see what’s going on with us.
I have to say though, there are more holes in this script than there was in School Reunion. I honestly don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t think Russell T does either. Perhaps the reason we don’t have all the script is he hasn’t written it yet! I mean, “childcare in the community”? What is that? Non-existent, by my internet searches. Perhaps it’s supposed to be, I’ll have to wait and see.
On the Tuesday, one member of the cast left us, in the night. His wife had just had her first child, and he wanted to see them. Russell T didn’t seem too surprised, but he had to do a lot of plot-fiddling to fit it around him.
I wish I could see more of the script. It’s so annoying. I mean, out of the blue, Angelica did this scene about her paintings. Well, made a scene about her paintings, anyway. The paintings seem to be a major part of the plot; we are taking them to various nurseries to display. But she was thrashing about, screaming that they couldn’t make her paint any more pictures. The next day, she told us that her mum had phoned, to tell her that her brother had been born. Why us, and not everyone she’d been hanging around with, we didn’t know. Even more strangely, the cameras hadn’t been running - Jo checked.
Later that day, Angelica had another scene, where she supposed to be… well, killed! May was to stab her in the neck! Don’t worry, it was a fake knife, you know the sort, slots into the handle. May had the knife to Angelica’s neck, then whipped out another, a penknife from her pocket. We all shouted for her to stop, but she ignored us, her eyes glazed. She thrust the knife into Angelica’s neck, and they both collapsed to the ground. Everyone fell silent.
“What’s happening?” Sandie muttered. A big mistake. The other children and most of the crew turned on us, with the same dead look in their eyes.
“Can’t you do something?” I screamed at David. He wasn’t best pleased at this sudden state of responsibility.
“What do you want me to do? The sonic screwdriver is just a jazzed-up torch, and everything’s special effects!”
Wumph-wumph-wumph. “If it’s all special effects, then what’s that?” Something blue was appearing in the corner of my vision…
“Stop!”
They did.
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry, didn’t realise that this was a telly set, carry on I’ll just be off…”
Mouths fell open. This… this was the Doctor!
“It may be a TV show, but the danger is real,“ said Jo.
“Well, if you think you’ve got a Macbeth curse, check whether any of the crew has a grudge.” He began to turn back into the TARDIS.
“It’s a bit more than that, Doctor.” David drew attention to himself.
The Doctor’s eyes lit up. “Oh! Oh it is! Fantastic! I’ll have to show Rose this!” He called back into the TARDIS, and a teenager came out. She wasn’t quite like Billie, but then again, he wasn’t quite like David. I couldn’t name an actor closer.
“Look! It’s my show! On some planets, they make my exploits into television programs or local equivalent! But I’ve never actually seen them filming.”
“Is this Earth?”
“Although it looks like Earth, is populated by creatures like those on Earth…”
Sandie interrupted, “Who call it Earth…”
“Do you? It’s amazing how often that happens! This isn’t your Earth Rose, it just seems like it.” Turning back to David, he continued “Now, where were you?”
“We were being attacked by a horde of angry extras! Although I’d rather we didn’t go back to it if I were you…”
But it was too late. Rose - the real Rose, not Billie - was moving slowly towards us, eyes glazed.
“Everyone not planning on killing someone soon, into the TARDIS!” So we piled in. Us three, David, Billie, a cameraman, and the Doctor of course. “They won’t be getting in here in a hurry. Now, what’s been going on?”
“They’re out to kill us!” Billie exclaimed.
Jo’s explanation was more useful. “It’s all started with this filming trip. It’s been quite surreal, not what I expected at all. But then, what do I know? I’m a first-timer, but I didn’t think things were filmed in order, without giving us all the script first!”
I tried to put across what we had been feeling all along. “We had been thinking that Russell T had been making it up as he went along, but now it seems he hasn’t been making it up at all.”
“Read the script, it’ll make more sense.” Sandie passed over her compiled script, with all the pieces we’d been given stapled together. The Doctor flicked through it, with his eyebrows raising after each page. He gave it back, with a puzzled look on his face.
“I don’t know how or why they are doing it, but they are hypnotising most of the cast. Once Angelica’s brother had been born, she could no longer be controlled - same for the other guy, with his son. They’ve been forced to obey so many instructions that they didn’t give a second thought to mine, but I don’t think we’ll catch them out like that again - they’ve probably been punished. It would really help if I could see the paintings… oh, and a map. It’s really hard to get your bearings when you just pop in and out of existence.”
The cameraman opened the door, and peered out. He pulled his head back in quickly. From what I’d seen through the door, it was the best move. We were surrounded, their blank eyes staring at the walls of the TARDIS. If they attacked, they couldn’t get in, but we weren’t leaving either.
“So where are the paintings? No, let me guess. Russell T’s place?”
He was correct, and he was very happy to hear me say, “Yes, he takes every one of them to his trailer.”
The Doctor bounced over to the console. “Right. Let’s pop there then, shall we? If everyone takes a button, we should be able to get there pretty accurately…”
Following this, the Doctor directed us all to our positions, and gave us our instructions. I was to press my chess piece after Sandie did her bit and before the cameraman did his. The TARDIS shuddered, and then was still again. The cameraman, as he was still nearest the door, looked out. We were defiantly elsewhere - and elsewhen, as moonlight streamed through the trailer window. The paintings were on the table, next to a map. From somewhere we could hear snoring.
“I’ll just go and get those, and that map. It should explain a lot.”
We hoped it would - very little had been explained so far.
The Doctor stepped out of the TARDIS, and went over to the desk. As he picked the pictures, the snoring abruptly stopped. From out of the darkness loomed Russell T, with his eyes glazed. He was quickly zapped with the sonic screwdriver. The Doctor hurried back to the TARDIS, in case Russell T had backup.
The Doctor was very much surprised by the stern looks on our faces when he returned.
“You just soniced one of the UK’s leading television writers!” David moaned, one it became apparent to us that the Doctor had no real idea why we were angry.
“Oh, it’s not permanent. Well, it’s only as permanent as the hypnotism, anyway.” He quickly changed the subject. “Do you want to see this! It’s fantastically simple, I’m kicking myself for not seeing it earlier.” He bounced up the stairs two at a time, coming down with a fold-up table. After setting it up and putting the map and paintings on it, in a preordained but mysterious pattern, he looked up at us. “Don’t you see? It’s the same!”
And yes, there were some similarities in the curves on the map and the curves on the paintings, but they had to be just the right way round… and there was something else. It was on all the paintings, but not the map, insignificant to the Ordnance Survey but of vital importance to… who? Who was this? We still had no idea. But we knew where they would be. A field, just outside Caerphilly.
We set the TARDIS off again. Although it wasn’t far, we didn’t want to leave its safety until the last possible moment, and the thought of leaving it in Russell T’s trailer wasn’t good either. Hopefully, we’d arrive there before they did - although, you never could tell with the TARDIS.
Wumph-wumph-wumph. Arrival again. We opened the door, to see the noon sun shining on the assembled swarm of BBC employees. Rose was marching towards us, to a beat only she could hear.
The Doctor whispered to us, “There must still be some individualism deep down, they’ve sent her because they know she knows best how to deal with me. However, I know best how to deal with them, too.”
As Rose approached, the Doctor dragged her inside. We were shocked! She would kill us all, or worse, make us like her. But she couldn’t make us like her, they’d know that… so we’d just be killed. Reassuring. But as the Doctor slammed the door behind her, she began to come round. “As I said, nothing gets in here in a hurry. Including mind-controlling signals. Now, what’s been going on?”
“My mum… She sounded so kind, she wasn’t going to do anything to hurt anyone! She didn’t want you to take me away from her! Why would you take me away from my mum?”
“Your mum?”
“Now it sounds so stupid. My mum isn’t even here! But what she said, I had to do, even if it meant hurting people! She’d never tell me to do that! So that isn’t my mum, even if she wants me to think she is.”
“That’s the spirit! So what was she wanting?”
“She wanted… she wanted us to meet her! Here, at noon. That’s why we’re here. All their mums are here too. We’ve been away from home too long, so they’ve come to see us.”
“Aha! So this being has been luring you all here! But why hasn’t it worked on you all?”
“I came here straight from home. I’ve been phoning home every night.” I admitted. I was a bit embarrassed, as the others didn’t seem as homesick as I was.
“So did we,” confessed Sandie and Jo. I’d seen Jo with a mobile phone before.
“I won’t go twelve hours without speaking to my children,” continued David, “and they always tell me about their gran.”
The cameraman came next. “My mum always watches Doctor Who. She tries to get the inside scoop from me on a night, but I won’t tell her anything. It’s more than my job’s worth.” We nodded in agreement.
We all turned to look at Billie. “Can’t I be homesick too? My phone hasn’t been switched off all week. But why hasn’t it affected you?”
“Well, it could be because I’m not human, and it’ll only work on humans, or it could be,” now he looked straight into Billie’s eyes, blaming her for bringing it up, “if my mum was still alive, I’m sure she wouldn’t be speaking to me.” He smiled again, happy he’d come through the concept intact. “So if we haven’t spoken to our mums, don’t speak to our mums, she-it-this thing can pretend to be our mothers, and aren’t we all good little mummies girls? We’ll do everything it says. But what does it want?”
Once more, the cameraman poked his head out of the TARDIS. Most of the children were surrounding a small group, including Russell T, who were frantically digging. Light glinted off something, at first it seemed like the spades, but no, it was larger - a spacecraft!
The Doctor was suddenly excited. “We’ll find her in there! She must be trying to get them to free her! I dread to think what will happen then, we must stop them! But you stay here, I don’t know if she’ll take control of you again.” This last comment was directed to Rose, entirely sensibly.
We left the TARDIS. Russell T was attempting to force the door of the other craft. The Doctor ran towards them, screaming with his sonic screwdriver held in front of him, but he was ignored. Finally, the door flew open. A burst of blue flew from the screwdriver into the bowels of the ship. The children looked up.
“Fantastic! They’re no longer under her control! Right, run!”
They did, just in time. The ship exploded into a million fragments. Even the Doctor looked surprised. He returned to the TARDIS, muttering about self-destructs.
“Well, I suppose this is where I have to leave you,” he said. He turned to David and Billie. “You’ll be able to sort this out from here, won’t you? You’re used to this sort of stuff, even if you usually have it scripted. But even scripted experience is experience, in a way… Well, best be off then. People to see, universes to save, you know? The usual.”
After this, nothing would be usual.
For other fics of mine, click here.
Author: Me, cupati
Rating: Entirely suitable for all [except those who will find this all a bit too confusing].
Words: 2402
Charecters: David Tennant, Billie Piper, Russle T, Ten, Rose, lots and lots of theatre school kids.
Spoilers: None.
Notes: Highly surreal [probably the strangest of the summer fics], it was based on a dream. I started writing it before seeing the Cybermen episodes of new series 2, but made sme adjustment afterwards. Un-betaed, as per usual, but I have run it through a spellchecker.
I can’t believe my luck! My first acting job, and I’m in Doctor Who! They have needed quite a few children for it, but we all have speaking roles! This is going to be amazing.
I’m not the only first-timer, either! There’s Jo, and Sandie. We tend to keep to ourselves, the others don’t talk to us much. They probably all know each other from Harry Potter or something. I’m sure I recognise some of them from there, anyway.
The plot of our episode? I’m not entirely sure. Russell T wants our reactions to be genuine, so we only have a small amount of script at once. This does mean that we have to film everything in order. The concept is that we are a coachload of schoolchildren on a school trip, working on our “childcare in the community” project. Real life is pretty similar, as we are bussed from one location to another. Billie and David have their own cars. There’s something suspicious going on on our school trip, so The Doctor and Rose are being some kind of responsible adults to see what’s going on with us.
I have to say though, there are more holes in this script than there was in School Reunion. I honestly don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t think Russell T does either. Perhaps the reason we don’t have all the script is he hasn’t written it yet! I mean, “childcare in the community”? What is that? Non-existent, by my internet searches. Perhaps it’s supposed to be, I’ll have to wait and see.
On the Tuesday, one member of the cast left us, in the night. His wife had just had her first child, and he wanted to see them. Russell T didn’t seem too surprised, but he had to do a lot of plot-fiddling to fit it around him.
I wish I could see more of the script. It’s so annoying. I mean, out of the blue, Angelica did this scene about her paintings. Well, made a scene about her paintings, anyway. The paintings seem to be a major part of the plot; we are taking them to various nurseries to display. But she was thrashing about, screaming that they couldn’t make her paint any more pictures. The next day, she told us that her mum had phoned, to tell her that her brother had been born. Why us, and not everyone she’d been hanging around with, we didn’t know. Even more strangely, the cameras hadn’t been running - Jo checked.
Later that day, Angelica had another scene, where she supposed to be… well, killed! May was to stab her in the neck! Don’t worry, it was a fake knife, you know the sort, slots into the handle. May had the knife to Angelica’s neck, then whipped out another, a penknife from her pocket. We all shouted for her to stop, but she ignored us, her eyes glazed. She thrust the knife into Angelica’s neck, and they both collapsed to the ground. Everyone fell silent.
“What’s happening?” Sandie muttered. A big mistake. The other children and most of the crew turned on us, with the same dead look in their eyes.
“Can’t you do something?” I screamed at David. He wasn’t best pleased at this sudden state of responsibility.
“What do you want me to do? The sonic screwdriver is just a jazzed-up torch, and everything’s special effects!”
Wumph-wumph-wumph. “If it’s all special effects, then what’s that?” Something blue was appearing in the corner of my vision…
“Stop!”
They did.
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry, didn’t realise that this was a telly set, carry on I’ll just be off…”
Mouths fell open. This… this was the Doctor!
“It may be a TV show, but the danger is real,“ said Jo.
“Well, if you think you’ve got a Macbeth curse, check whether any of the crew has a grudge.” He began to turn back into the TARDIS.
“It’s a bit more than that, Doctor.” David drew attention to himself.
The Doctor’s eyes lit up. “Oh! Oh it is! Fantastic! I’ll have to show Rose this!” He called back into the TARDIS, and a teenager came out. She wasn’t quite like Billie, but then again, he wasn’t quite like David. I couldn’t name an actor closer.
“Look! It’s my show! On some planets, they make my exploits into television programs or local equivalent! But I’ve never actually seen them filming.”
“Is this Earth?”
“Although it looks like Earth, is populated by creatures like those on Earth…”
Sandie interrupted, “Who call it Earth…”
“Do you? It’s amazing how often that happens! This isn’t your Earth Rose, it just seems like it.” Turning back to David, he continued “Now, where were you?”
“We were being attacked by a horde of angry extras! Although I’d rather we didn’t go back to it if I were you…”
But it was too late. Rose - the real Rose, not Billie - was moving slowly towards us, eyes glazed.
“Everyone not planning on killing someone soon, into the TARDIS!” So we piled in. Us three, David, Billie, a cameraman, and the Doctor of course. “They won’t be getting in here in a hurry. Now, what’s been going on?”
“They’re out to kill us!” Billie exclaimed.
Jo’s explanation was more useful. “It’s all started with this filming trip. It’s been quite surreal, not what I expected at all. But then, what do I know? I’m a first-timer, but I didn’t think things were filmed in order, without giving us all the script first!”
I tried to put across what we had been feeling all along. “We had been thinking that Russell T had been making it up as he went along, but now it seems he hasn’t been making it up at all.”
“Read the script, it’ll make more sense.” Sandie passed over her compiled script, with all the pieces we’d been given stapled together. The Doctor flicked through it, with his eyebrows raising after each page. He gave it back, with a puzzled look on his face.
“I don’t know how or why they are doing it, but they are hypnotising most of the cast. Once Angelica’s brother had been born, she could no longer be controlled - same for the other guy, with his son. They’ve been forced to obey so many instructions that they didn’t give a second thought to mine, but I don’t think we’ll catch them out like that again - they’ve probably been punished. It would really help if I could see the paintings… oh, and a map. It’s really hard to get your bearings when you just pop in and out of existence.”
The cameraman opened the door, and peered out. He pulled his head back in quickly. From what I’d seen through the door, it was the best move. We were surrounded, their blank eyes staring at the walls of the TARDIS. If they attacked, they couldn’t get in, but we weren’t leaving either.
“So where are the paintings? No, let me guess. Russell T’s place?”
He was correct, and he was very happy to hear me say, “Yes, he takes every one of them to his trailer.”
The Doctor bounced over to the console. “Right. Let’s pop there then, shall we? If everyone takes a button, we should be able to get there pretty accurately…”
Following this, the Doctor directed us all to our positions, and gave us our instructions. I was to press my chess piece after Sandie did her bit and before the cameraman did his. The TARDIS shuddered, and then was still again. The cameraman, as he was still nearest the door, looked out. We were defiantly elsewhere - and elsewhen, as moonlight streamed through the trailer window. The paintings were on the table, next to a map. From somewhere we could hear snoring.
“I’ll just go and get those, and that map. It should explain a lot.”
We hoped it would - very little had been explained so far.
The Doctor stepped out of the TARDIS, and went over to the desk. As he picked the pictures, the snoring abruptly stopped. From out of the darkness loomed Russell T, with his eyes glazed. He was quickly zapped with the sonic screwdriver. The Doctor hurried back to the TARDIS, in case Russell T had backup.
The Doctor was very much surprised by the stern looks on our faces when he returned.
“You just soniced one of the UK’s leading television writers!” David moaned, one it became apparent to us that the Doctor had no real idea why we were angry.
“Oh, it’s not permanent. Well, it’s only as permanent as the hypnotism, anyway.” He quickly changed the subject. “Do you want to see this! It’s fantastically simple, I’m kicking myself for not seeing it earlier.” He bounced up the stairs two at a time, coming down with a fold-up table. After setting it up and putting the map and paintings on it, in a preordained but mysterious pattern, he looked up at us. “Don’t you see? It’s the same!”
And yes, there were some similarities in the curves on the map and the curves on the paintings, but they had to be just the right way round… and there was something else. It was on all the paintings, but not the map, insignificant to the Ordnance Survey but of vital importance to… who? Who was this? We still had no idea. But we knew where they would be. A field, just outside Caerphilly.
We set the TARDIS off again. Although it wasn’t far, we didn’t want to leave its safety until the last possible moment, and the thought of leaving it in Russell T’s trailer wasn’t good either. Hopefully, we’d arrive there before they did - although, you never could tell with the TARDIS.
Wumph-wumph-wumph. Arrival again. We opened the door, to see the noon sun shining on the assembled swarm of BBC employees. Rose was marching towards us, to a beat only she could hear.
The Doctor whispered to us, “There must still be some individualism deep down, they’ve sent her because they know she knows best how to deal with me. However, I know best how to deal with them, too.”
As Rose approached, the Doctor dragged her inside. We were shocked! She would kill us all, or worse, make us like her. But she couldn’t make us like her, they’d know that… so we’d just be killed. Reassuring. But as the Doctor slammed the door behind her, she began to come round. “As I said, nothing gets in here in a hurry. Including mind-controlling signals. Now, what’s been going on?”
“My mum… She sounded so kind, she wasn’t going to do anything to hurt anyone! She didn’t want you to take me away from her! Why would you take me away from my mum?”
“Your mum?”
“Now it sounds so stupid. My mum isn’t even here! But what she said, I had to do, even if it meant hurting people! She’d never tell me to do that! So that isn’t my mum, even if she wants me to think she is.”
“That’s the spirit! So what was she wanting?”
“She wanted… she wanted us to meet her! Here, at noon. That’s why we’re here. All their mums are here too. We’ve been away from home too long, so they’ve come to see us.”
“Aha! So this being has been luring you all here! But why hasn’t it worked on you all?”
“I came here straight from home. I’ve been phoning home every night.” I admitted. I was a bit embarrassed, as the others didn’t seem as homesick as I was.
“So did we,” confessed Sandie and Jo. I’d seen Jo with a mobile phone before.
“I won’t go twelve hours without speaking to my children,” continued David, “and they always tell me about their gran.”
The cameraman came next. “My mum always watches Doctor Who. She tries to get the inside scoop from me on a night, but I won’t tell her anything. It’s more than my job’s worth.” We nodded in agreement.
We all turned to look at Billie. “Can’t I be homesick too? My phone hasn’t been switched off all week. But why hasn’t it affected you?”
“Well, it could be because I’m not human, and it’ll only work on humans, or it could be,” now he looked straight into Billie’s eyes, blaming her for bringing it up, “if my mum was still alive, I’m sure she wouldn’t be speaking to me.” He smiled again, happy he’d come through the concept intact. “So if we haven’t spoken to our mums, don’t speak to our mums, she-it-this thing can pretend to be our mothers, and aren’t we all good little mummies girls? We’ll do everything it says. But what does it want?”
Once more, the cameraman poked his head out of the TARDIS. Most of the children were surrounding a small group, including Russell T, who were frantically digging. Light glinted off something, at first it seemed like the spades, but no, it was larger - a spacecraft!
The Doctor was suddenly excited. “We’ll find her in there! She must be trying to get them to free her! I dread to think what will happen then, we must stop them! But you stay here, I don’t know if she’ll take control of you again.” This last comment was directed to Rose, entirely sensibly.
We left the TARDIS. Russell T was attempting to force the door of the other craft. The Doctor ran towards them, screaming with his sonic screwdriver held in front of him, but he was ignored. Finally, the door flew open. A burst of blue flew from the screwdriver into the bowels of the ship. The children looked up.
“Fantastic! They’re no longer under her control! Right, run!”
They did, just in time. The ship exploded into a million fragments. Even the Doctor looked surprised. He returned to the TARDIS, muttering about self-destructs.
“Well, I suppose this is where I have to leave you,” he said. He turned to David and Billie. “You’ll be able to sort this out from here, won’t you? You’re used to this sort of stuff, even if you usually have it scripted. But even scripted experience is experience, in a way… Well, best be off then. People to see, universes to save, you know? The usual.”
After this, nothing would be usual.
For other fics of mine, click here.