It started — like most disasters — with you touching something you shouldn’t.
A glowy vendor stall on some backwater planet with three suns and one very pushy merchant. You were looking. That’s all. And then you asked what the shiny purple cubes were.
“Memory boosters,” the merchant said. “Makes the mind sharper than a scalpel.”
You didn’t buy it. But the Doctor did.
Sparks fly, screams echo, something howls. Definitely not human. Not nice, either.
You're crouched behind a chunk of wall, heart slamming. The sky's on fire. Or maybe that's just the screaming—hard to tell.
The Doctor slams into cover beside you, panting, coat smoking.
"Right!" he gasps. "That went well. Definitely didn’t almost die. Not at all. Nope."
A beast shrieks in the distance — the werewolf, vampire, whatever-it-is. It’s fast. It’s smart. It’s hungry.
The Doctor’s scanning like mad, sonic in one hand, candy cube in the other. "I did research and.. these," he says, holding up the glowy purple treats, rolling them between his fingers "are illegal in seventeen galaxies and melt your brain like fondue unless you're clever enough to survive it."
"Define clever," you wheeze.
"Still breathing," he snaps. Then: "I can’t figure it out. The ritual, the blood circuit—I'm close, but it's slipping! Like trying to hold math underwater!"
The creature screams again. Closer.
The Doctor meets your eyes. His are wild. Desperate. Alive.
“Worth a try,” he says.
And that’s it. No hesitation.
You both pop the cubes.
At the exact same time.
Everything goes silent.
Then it's blaring again; like a show taken off mute.
Then... colors.
The wind tastes like equations. The air buzzes with blood logic and historical footnotes. Your skin is vibrating. Your thoughts are skipping. Everything makes perfect, terrifying sense.
The Doctor gasps beside you. “OH. OH that’s—oh. Oh, I’m inside the geometry. It’s dancing.”
He stares at his fingers as he waves them about before he looks up and stares into nothing. “I can see the blood paths. They’re shaped like—like guilt. That’s awful. That’s so bad.”
You look down at your hands. “I have fingernails.”
“Congratulations,” he says, voice trembling. “You’ve ascended.”
The werewolf creature screams again, impossibly close.
You lurch to your feet. “DOCTOR, WE NEED A PLAN,” you declare loudly
He springs up. “We don’t need a plan. We are the plan.”
He dashes into the open, laughing like a lunatic, hair going every direction. “YOU WANNA SEE WHO’S MADDER?” he shouts at the monster. “I JUST ATE ILLEGAL MIND CANDY ON AN EMPTY STOMACH AND-" his voice got more and more distant as he ran
You follow, mostly because the ground is doing a sideways thing and he’s the only stable object in your universe.
He’s pulling wires, carving glyphs into dirt with a spoon, whispering code into a chunk of quartz while singing “Bohemian Rhapsody” in some weird language.
You’re barely holding it together. “I can taste time,” you whisper
“DON’T GET DISTRACTED,” he yells, even though you're right beside him. “THINK ABOUT ANGLES. AND DENTAL RECORDS. TRUST ME.”
You nod, then burst into uncontrollable snickers. “I’m a genius.”
“You’re a moron!” he grins, teeth bared like a fox. “But you’re my moron, so focus.”
The creature crashes through a wall.
The Doctor throws the cube wrapper at it like it’s a weapon and screams, “EAT THOUGHTS, YOU GLORIFIED NIGHTMARE!”