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Writing Challenge: Deck 11: Angels, Dinosaurs, Time Lords...

Posted on Mon Jul 16th, 2018 @ 3:18pm by Lieutenant Vaemyn & Akira Zhuri
Edited on on Mon Jul 16th, 2018 @ 9:44pm

Mission: Holographic Horrors
Location: Holodeck 2
Timeline: 17 hours after entry into the dark matter storm

Prompt 1: Dinosaurs on a spaceship
Prompt 2: Weeping Angels


=== [Midnight] ===

Akira had been quick to respond when the ship collided with the Dark Matter ion storm; Daytona had required a moment to dress, but in a flash Akira was in her uniform and ready to go, so after a kiss to her lover she quickly blinked out of her quarters to report to the Bridge, but instead of reappearing at her desired destination, she found herself in a random corridor. Akira looked around in confusion, then attempted to once again blink herself to the Bridge. Failing once more, she found herself in another corridor, but this time she wasn't alone; a strange winged figure, a statue, was in the middle of the hall, the figure's hands hiding its face as though weeping. More than a little unsettled, Akira took a step back from the stony figure and looked around once more, this time to find an access panel so she could run a diagnostic on the holo-emitters to find out why she couldn't blink to the Bridge. She didn't get to look for very long because suddenly she felt a hand, a stony hand, on her arm, and then the most awful feeling as her matrix was ripped from its current location to somewhere else, a place, she realized, that was not the Hera...


=== [Current] ===

“Intriguing.”

Vaemyn’s idle comment drew a pained groan from his long-suffering assistant, who had now been working for fifteen hours straight. They had been headed to the mess hall for some dinner before she and Vaemyn turned in for some desperately needed rest, but now they were simply stood in a hallway, staring at a stone statue that had seemingly appeared out of thin air. While not unusual in itself, since holographic anomalies had been popping up ever since the Hera had ploughed into the dark matter storm, Vaemyn was regarding the stone statue from a meter away with intense interest.

“Tell me, Nadene,” Vaemyn said curiously, “what mythological figure of your world does this statue represent?”

Exasperated, tired and hungry, Lieutenant Nadene Assim had to stop herself from replying with something very ill-tempered. “It’s an angel, Vae,” she replied instead with a weary tone. “That’s what the wings signify. It has some representation in some old Earth religions and in some post 20th century fiction. It’s just a statue, it’s nothing, so let’s eat, okay? You can examine it all you want later.”

“But the wings, the pose,” Vaemyn continued, unfazed and ignorant of Nadene’s annoyance, “they suggest a form of divine messenger that is remarkably similar to ancient depictions of Vorta. The hands over the eyes also suggest…ah.” Seeing Nadene on the verge of meltdown, Vaemyn laughed, his hands raised in mock surrender, although he kept the statue firmly in his peripheral vision where his hungry eyes could keep examining it. “Do go on, Nadene, get some food and sleep, you have more than earned it. I shall be quite alright on my own. It is, as you have said, merely a statue and is no threat. Please trust my instincts as a coward to recognise danger.”

Even so, Vaemyn was somewhat hurt when Nadene thought about it for barely a moment, smiled, waved goodbye and then went on her merry way. Surely at least a little concern would be warranted. Still, Vaemyn returned his full attention to the holographic statue, staying a few meters back to consider the specimen in its totality rather than its individual aspects.

Of course, Vaemyn had no idea what was going on. Evolutionary pot luck and some genetic tampering had granted the Vorta with a remarkable ability to comfortably not blink for minutes at a time while experiencing intense curiosity, an autonomic physiological reaction akin to a Klingon’s relentless battle rage or a human’s irrepressible sex drive. Of course, after a few minutes of simply examining the stone and absent-mindedly using the provocative stonework as a muse for other thought chains, Vaemyn finally blinked.

And the statue moved. It didn’t walk, fly, wave, move its hand or anything else. One moment it was three meters in front of Vaemyn, and the next, it had seemingly teleported a meter forward in the miniscule fraction of second, in the literal blink of the eye.

Startled but fascinated, Vaemyn abandoned his internal ruminations about dark matter to focus more intently on the statue. Small wings, long flowing robes, hands over the eyes, all unchanged…except that the statue had moved a meter without being observed. How? How would a holoprogram act in such a bizarre and specific way?”

Still curious and idiotically blind as ever, Vaemyn deliberated closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, only to find an outstretched stone hand centimeters from his neck, the other hand and forearm still obscuring the angel’s eyes.

“Well now, that is entirely too close!” Vaemyn exclaimed, panicked as he hurriedly backtracked, still keeping an unblinking eye on the angel. Unfortunately, those same genes that had enabled the Vorta to stop themselves blinking when curious had a downside: when in danger, they constantly blinked. Thus, quietly becoming more concerned by the minute and feeling a distinct loosening of his bowels, Vaemyn was powerless against the autonomic response that forced his eyelids closed, and despite gaining ten meters on the monster before blinking, Vaemyn found himself once more with a stone hand near his throat after his eyes opened again.

“Well,” he muttered fearfully, already feeling that instinct to close his eyes. “I do believe that the operative word is ‘shit’.”

Indeed, his words proved poetic as Vaemyn’s eyes closed and he instantaneously vanished, leaving the suddenly smiling angel behind to continue wreaking havoc on the Hera crew.




Akira had lost track of how long she had been in this strange place, mainly because something seemed to be amiss with her matrix as her internal chonometer didn't seem to be functioning normally, but also because she had been more than a little preoccupied with surviving. Already, she had come across a flock of pterodactyl, a triceratops, a tyrannosaurus rex, and now a pair of velociraptors, highly intelligent predators that she seemed to have trouble shaking. Slowly, she peeked her head out of the little nook in the decorative bulkhead where she had been hiding; she couldn't hear them anymore, but that didn't necessarily mean anything since they could be sneaky creatures, so Akira ventured out just a little further to get a better look. At first glance, she seemed to be in the clear, so she removed herself fully and made her way over to what looked to be some sort of computer interface she had found earlier; it was in a language she didn't recognize, but maybe with a little luck she would find something to give her a clue as to where she was!

A little way down the corridor, Vaemyn appeared out of thin air with a sudden if anticlimatic pop, looking quite shocked indeed. Staying absurdly still, as if the slightest movement would invite catastrophe, Vaemyn’s eyes darted around the space.

It was a spaceship of some kind, certainly, but it couldn’t be any more different than the Hera. Whereas the Hera was brightly lit decorated in optimistic silver and gold, this new spaceship was dark, cramped and filthy. There was dust and filth everywhere, large spider webs were on the walls and doorways and the smell was truly appalling, rather like a sewer. Untidy acid green conduits were splayed everywhere around the ceiling, and as Vaemyn instinctively covered his nose with his hand, fighting the urge to gag, he further realised that it was sweltering.

“Well, this is a lovely change of pace,” Vaemyn muttered sarcastically. He tapped his combadge, but he fully expected the answering bzzzt that indicated non-functionality. The combadges had been finicky since the Hera had ploughed into the dark storm, and it was just typical that they would decide to stop working now.

Thus, painfully aware that his violet skin and blue undershirt seemed to glow in the poor light, Vaemyn reluctantly walked forward, trying hard to ignore the distant (but angry) animal sounds in the distance. After carefully edging through a narrow doorway of sorts, Vaemyn spotted a figure standing over a control console.

“Well, hello there!” Vaemyn called with false cheer, then immediately regretted his too-loud shout as his voice echoed. “I do hope you’ll forgive my ignorance, but I am somewhat turned around. Have you seen a starship hereabouts? Big silvery disk, couple of elongated engine nacelles underneath? Or perhaps have you spied a large grey door? If so, I shall be on my way.”

"SHHH!" Akira replied hastily; so focused was she that she didn't even bother to turn around to see who was speaking. "We don't want the velociraptors to come back," she said in a hushed tone as though this should have been obvious, but after a moment longer it finally dawned on her the realization of what was going on: she was no longer alone, and not only did she recognize the voice but he had described the Hera! Quickly, she stopped what she was doing and spun around to take in the sight of the Vorta Science Officer she served with.

"Oh thank goodness!" Akira said with relief, walking up to him to give him a hug, which wasn't entirely altruistic, she wanted to see if he was real or not. "I am so glad to see a familiar face! I've been here almost since the Hera was jolted out of warp, I have no idea what's going on, please tell me you have a sitrep."

Flummoxed, Vaemyn nevertheless patted Akira’s back kindly, intensely grateful to see a familiar face. "We appear to have accidentally entered a dark matter storm,” he explained, stepping back. “It is disrupting our computer systems and causing random holoprograms to run amok. Without the safety protocols, of course, since they’re just as much software as everything else and prone to disruption. I was about to grab dinner when I was abducted here, but...oh.” Vaemyn’s eyes widened in alarm. “Did you say velociraptors? Large reptiles, powerful legs, small arms, lots and lots of...ah...teeth?”

"I did say velociraptors," Akira replied with a nervous nod. "And there's a tyrannosaurus rex running around here too, I think he ate whoever started this program; I'm fairly certain we're in one of the holodecks, but I can't feel the walls and I can't access the program or the main computer directly to get us out of here, and in my explorations of this place I found the bloodied remnants of a Starfleet uniform with an arm with very, very big teeth marks in it... I am so ready to get out of here," she explained with an agitated shudder.

Vaemyn gulped before nodding fervently, moving to the computer console. It was completely unfamiliar, using alien symbols and a strange configuration, but he nevertheless started tapping buttons randomly, causing the green-hued to react in bewildering ways. “If we figure out this program, we can manipulate it, control it. Akira, have you learned anything about this setting?”

"I've been trying, but without my connection to the main computer, I don't have a fully developed translation matrix to run the symbols through; if I was in my Herald body, the built in translator could figure this out in seconds, but ever since the events on Granweh, I've been afraid to use it," Akira said with some remorse. "Hey, you wouldn't happen to know how long I've been in here, would you?" she asked, letting her worry show through.

Vaemyn glanced sideways at Akira with concern at a sudden realisation, although he kept working. Nobody had thought it odd that Akira hadn’t turned up for the staff meeting, assuming that she had had encountered some minor trouble, but now it made a disquieting sort of sense. “It has been just over seventeen hours since we entered the dark storm,” he said gently.

"Seventeen... hours?" Akira replied, trying to contain her shock; did no one try to look for her?! "Well, I... I'm sorry I haven't been able to make more progress in all that time, but... circumstances have been working against me," she tried in vain to dismiss the severity of the situation. But then something caught her attention, a reflection on the surface of the console, and when she turned to see what it was, she gasped then put her hand on Vaemyn's arm to silently direct his attention to the winged statue standing behind them. "H-how did that get there?"

“How did what...” Vaemyn said as he turned, then he yelped. “That creature sent me here!” he exclaimed, clutching Akira’s arm frantically while the stone angel watched them impassively. Vaemyn didn’t even quite know why the angel unsettled him so, but he felt it nevertheless, a deeply unsettling shudder that rippled through his entire body. Remembering what he’d learned earlier, Vaemyn forced himself to keep his eyes open, but the impulse to blink was awfully potent.

“I saw this thing in a corridor,” he explained to Akira in a hushed whisper. “It is fast, unimaginably so, but I believe it can only move when unobserved, like a quantum effect. It touched me and transported me here, yet I do not know what it could do if it touches us again. We could be teleported into space!” Forcing his mind to work through the haze of panic, Vaemyn’s purple eyes flicked to Akira, keeping the angel in his peripheral vision. “We cannot stop looking at it, even in the fraction of a second required for blinking, but you are an AI. You do not need to blink, yes? You can alter your avatar’s code since it’s a minor alteration, and I shall...I shall try to comprehend this computer to discern an escape route.”

"Sent you here? I saw one of these when I was attempting to blink to the Bridge, but I paid it no heed; it's possible one of these sent me here just as it did with you," Akira replied as she disabled passive blinking within her matrix so that her eyes would stay open at all times; she had already disabled most of her other passive actions, like respiratory and heartbeat emulation so she would not alert the nearby predators. "I am watching it now, do what you need to do, just be mindful of anything else that could harm us," she cautioned as she stared at the winged statue.

“Ah yes, it is becoming quite the list,” Vaemyn said with a nervous smile as he got to work on the alien computer, no small feat when he could feel the angel’s malevolent presence behind. A dark matter storm was perilous enough, but holographic dinosaurs? Quantum-locked predatory statues? What next? Surely they couldn’t run into anything worse.

After a couple of minutes of frantically waving through the green-hued symbols, however, Vaemyn had to give it up. Discerning the language and symbology was simply not possible in the time allowed, not when even a small distraction could disrupt Akira’s concentration and kill them both. Or could Akira even be killed? She was a hologram, after all, so her program was probably safe, backed up somewhere, but Vaemyn didn’t have backups. Not any more.

“Computer,” Vaemyn finally said, desperate even though he knew wouldn’t work, “just...I don’t know, send us somewhere else! Send us to the Bridge!”

And just like that, he and Akira were zapped away without even the courtesy of the blue sparkle of a Federation transporter. Discombobulated, Vaemyn looked around in panic before realising that he and Akira stood a large room full of computers and control interfaces, all with chairs: plainly a Bridge. Oh it was dark and damp, plus there was still an atrocious smell, but there could be no doubt.

And they weren’t alone.

A trio of human-looking people stared right back at Vaemyn, all equally bemused. The one in the center, smartly dressed with a suit, bow tie and a chin sharp enough to fence with, waved hesitantly. “Hello!” he said cautiously. “I take it you took the teleporter?”

"Did we?" Akira answered cautiously, her eyes darting about in search of another angel statue. "Did the statue come with us? Is it gone?" the blue-skinned hologram asked in a worried tone; she didn't see it, but that didn't mean that is wasn't there or others like it on the way.

“Statue? Did you say statue?” the red-haired woman repeated in a Scottish brogue, her eyes wide, but the other (much more modestly dressed) man interrupted her. “Wait, sorry, who are you?” he asked, his own English accent softening the question.

“Lieutenant Vaemyn,” Vaemyn answered, still thoroughly confused, then gestured at his crewmate. “Akira Zhuri. We’re not entirely sure how we got here, to be honest.”

It was perhaps a trick of the light, but Vaemyn thought he saw a spark of revelation in the bow-tie man’s eyes. Even so, the man didn’t give him time to consider, approaching Vaemyn and Akira and shaking their hands enthusiastically.

“Why, it’s a pleasure to meet you!” he exclaimed with cheerful enthusiasm. “I’m the Doctor, and these are the Ponds, Amy and Rory.”

“Oh, right,” Vaemyn said, still as befuddled as ever as he peeked over the Doctor’s shoulder at the two in question. Which one was which? Oh never mind, just assume the redhead is Rory...

“So, judging by your uniforms I’d say you’re military, but not real military, probably a science-led organisation,” the Doctor rambled at top speed, his hands waving around without a whit of self-control. “You’re a...oh, you’re a sentient hologram!” he exclaimed again at Akira, grinning. “I haven’t met a nice hologram in so long. And you, you’re a Anephian!”

“No I’m not,” Vaemyn answered blankly.

“Ah,” the Doctor said, frowning. “Hespiod?”

“No.”

“Geriod?”

“Nope.”

“Heskialatriopoloan?”

“Ah...no.”

The Doctor opened his mouth to make another guess before the redhead gave him a firm slap on the back of the head. “Doctor, focus,” she insisted with irritation. “We’re trapped on an alien spaceship full of dinosaurs about to crash into Earth in thirty minutes! Can we please focus on that?”

"Oh, I thought we were in a dark matter ion storm being chased by stone angels," Akira remarked, dumbfounded at the strange, quick-talking man with the bow tie. "Wait a minute, how do you know what I am?!" Most people couldn't tell she was a hologram, she often had to tell them she was, and then came the part where they tried to figure out just how aware she was, as though they could discern if she was truly sentient or not if they could just figure out where there programming ended and the soul began...

“It’s not too hard, really,” the Doctor explained, although he was already turning away to the next problem, looking around the bridge. “No respiration or eyelid movement, but really, the tailoring is a dead giveaway. Look at your uniform, it’s perfect, no ruffles or dirt anywhere. Only holograms make perfect clothes.”

Akira actually looked down at herself to see that even after hours of running and crawling around in dirty places, her uniform was in fact pristine. "Oh," she said with a flush of purple to her cheeks. "Right, well, I hate to break it to you, but I'm not the only hologram in this room," Akira stated, hoping that once these individuals knew the truth that maybe they could offer some help. "We're in a big room on our ship whose sole purpose is to make holographic environments for recreation, and outside this holographic environment is the very real danger of a dark matter ion storm that is causing our ship to malfunction. Can you help us get out? Please say that you can, because I have been stuck inside this program for seventeen hours."

Vaemyn facepalmed, his hand hitting his forehead with a loud smack. “Akira, they’re holograms. Their programming specifically stops them from true self-awareness. They can’t understand their true nature.”

“Never be too sure,” the Doctor said with a knowing smirk, tapping the side of his nose. At Vaemyn’s wide eyed shock, the Doctor stepped forward swiftly to wrap his arms around the Vorta and purple-skinned AI, talking quickly and quietly so that neither Amy nor Rory could hear. “I may not be the true Doctor, but I swear to you both, I will get you out of here and back to your ship, safe and sound. You can trust me.”

"Okay, that was unexpected," Akira replied bluntly, thinking it would take quite a bit more convincing to get the holographic characters to understand and agree to help. "So, what's the plan? In the seventeen hours I've been here, I've been unable to transfer myself out or call for the door."

"Doctor, what are you doing? We don't have time for this, Earth is going to launch missiles any second!" Amy reminded the Doctor; clearly, she was not able to grasp the truth beyond her programming.

“Yes, quite right,” the Doctor replied with a jolly wave of his hand, hurrying to one of the consoles and tapping buttons with blindng speed. “Amy, Rory, here’s the plan. I’m transmitting this ship’s ID signature to my TARDIS. You two are going to get in there and fly away so that the missiles will target the TARDIS instead.”

Rory rushed to the Doctor, distinctly consternated. “Doctor, I really hope there’s more to this plan, as I’d really like not to get blown up today.”

“Oh don’t be a baby, the TARDIS eats nuclear weapons for breakfast,” the Doctor retorted. Seconds later the entire group was zapped instantaneously to another part of the bizarre alien ship, but while everyone else was recovering and looking around, the Doctor was already pushing Amy and Rory towards a nearby big blue box.

“Alright now, in you go,” he said loudly, ignoring Amy and Rory’s very vocal protests as he herded them into the impossibly snug blue box. “Just wait for the big bang and you’ll be fine, just push the blue wibbly lever and you’ll be home and you can go back to making babies.” After shutting the doors and briefly turning away, the Doctor suddenly became alarmed, swiftly turning back round, opening the doors again and sticking his head in. “BUT WAIT UNTIL YOU’VE LANDED THIS TIME! The last thing we need is that happening again!”

With that, he closed the doors once more and pulled an odd cylindrical object out of his jacket pocket, aiming it at the blue box. The box them proceeded to groan loudly, as if in protest, before with the blue light on top of it flashing, it gradually vanished from existence.

With perfect nonchalance, the Doctor whirled back around, grinning in excitement. “Well, now that that’s sorted out, how about we get you two home?”

Dumbfounded, Vaemyn poked Akira’s shoulder hard as if to confirm that she was actually there, and he wasn’t dreaming. “Do you have any idea what just happened?” he asked her faintly.

"No idea whatsoever," Akira replied to Vaemyn, just as dumbfounded as he. "I'm just going to assume that a reality exists where that made sense, and then press on and get back to our reality. Sound good?" she asked her fellow Starfleet Officer. she was really having a hard time wrapping her mind around this Doctor-fellow. What kind of name was 'the Doctor' anyway? And a doctor of what?

Vaemyn was having much the same thoughts, but finally, his own quick Vorta mind was starting to catch up. “Normally we access the holodeck exit by voice commands,” he said quickly focusing on the next step. “But the dark matter storm is disrupting our computer systems and disrupting voice recognition. Akira’s program has enough focal complexity and code density to stay coherent amidst the disruption, but her program seems to be the only one unaffected.” Which could have dire consequences for the captain’s wife, he realised bleakly, but stayed on track. “So what’s your plan?”

“Well, it’s a bit of a work in progress, but I’ll get there in the end, I usually do,” the Doctor replied, and with enthusiasm he moved to a nearby damp wall, waving his bizarre cylindrical device at it. “Just talk amongst yourselves, I’ll be done in a mo. Attracting Angels with sonic vibrations is a bit tricky, but they do love a good sub-aural symphony.”

"Angels? You don't mean those statues that somehow sent us here, do you?" Akira asked, hoping against hope that somehow she had misheard the Doctor. "Why would you want them to come here?!"

Akira wouldn't get an answer because all three of them went still when they heard and felt it, the slow thud thud thud of monstrous footsteps growing closer; this was not a good sign...

"Oh no, the T-rex!" Akira exclaimed softly, recognizing the sound right away.

"Well at least it's not the raptors, those guys are tricky little buggers," the Doctor replied, undaunted by this new complication as he continued to aim his strange device at the wall. "Any second now!" he said to the wall as though his words were capable of bending the wall to his will.

Not willing to wait around for the T-rex to eat them, Akira grabbed Vaemyn by the arm and pulled him along to try to find a place for them to hide, leaving the Doctor behind to do... whatever it was that he was doing. Honestly, at this point Akira didn't think this holographic character was capable of helping them at all if all he was going to do was point his device at a wall and yell at it in a bizarre attempt to bring those Angels statues here.

Vaemyn didn’t need much encouragement, following Akira without protest, but unfortunately, there were no convenient hiding spots for the Vorta and the hologram. The Doctor for some unfathomable reason had teleported them to a dead end, the terminus of a massive ten meter tall corridor, and as the huge T-rex finally rounded the corner, Vaemyn and Akira found themselves back with the Doctor.

“Ah, Doctor,” Vaemyn said uneasily as the monstrous tyrannasaurus rex stomped forward, “I hope you’re not relying on us to fight that dinosaur, because we’re not soldiers.” He glanced back at the house-sized door that the corridor ended in, but with no apparent controls, he and Akira had no way of opening it. “I’m genetically engineered to be a coward, and I don’t think my friend here is really the type for violence, so if you have a plan...”

“Working on it,” the Doctor answered awkwardly, nerves for the first time starting to affect the mysterious hologram as the exceptionally large dinosaur got closer, glaring malevolently at the trio. “I haven’t negotiated with a tyrannasaur for a few centuries, so I’m a little rusty in that department. Do either of you speak late Cretaceous dinosaur, by any chance?”

When the Doctor asked that, something within Akira clicked and she suddenly pulled away from Vaemyn, stepping forward to face off with the deadly T-rex. It roared at her, but she did not back down; her whole posture had changed and she carried a confidence she lacked just moments ago. The T-rex became uneasy that this pitiful creature would not back down, and when she brought her hand up to reach for him, he recognized the gesture. Slowly, the T-rex bent down until his giant muzzle was right in front of her, and Akira tenderly placed her hand on the scaley nose.

"What a naughty boy!" Akira said to him with an unfamiliar accent. Actually, it wasn't entirely dissimilar from the strange Doctor's accent. "You should know better than to go shouting at strangers like that! Whatever will they think of you?" she chastised the T-rex kindly as she continued to pet the giant reptile. After a moment, Akira realized what she was doing and she looked at her hand like she didn't even recognize it. "H-how did I do that?" she asked, the strange accent suddenly gone.

“I don’t know,” Vaemyn said back to her, flabbergasted. “Doctor?”

The Doctor looked back at them with a mix of astonishment and intense intrigue, his green-lit sonic probe still working away at the wall. “I’m not sure,” he said, then as the T-rex hummed under Akira’s touch, the Time Lord’s eyes widened, his mouth dropping into a comical O. “Well, I think they might be...um...flirting. Does your friend normally do that with strange dinosaurs?”

His own eyes widening in shock, Vaemyn looked between the very disproportionate new couple and the Doctor. “Flirting!? No! Well, okay, maybe she does, I don’t know Akira that well, but I know that she as a lover onboard the Hera. No, the computer disruption from the dark storm shouldn’t be disrupting her like this...””

Vaemyn’s assumption that Akira was unaffected by the widespread system corruption was incorrect; Akira was affected by the program running now, it had been corrupting her matrix, which was why she could no longer feel the walls of the holodeck or call for the arch, but it had been happening so slowly and she had been so preoccupied with other things that she never noticed the corruption burrowing its way through her firewalls. She looked at Vaemyn and the Doctor, her face full of confusion and fear.

"I don't feel so good," she said, and as soon as those words left her lips she began to flicker, her uniform being replaced by a strange armor and her face covered by a mask that looked rather reptilian in design. "What are you monkeys doing on the Ark?' she demanded, and while the voice was still hers, the tone and the accent seemed to indicate that Akira was no longer Akira.

Very conscious of the massive tyrannosaur, Vaemyn took a step backwards, holding his hands up in surrender. “Ah, Akira...we...er...”

“Took a wrong turn!” the Doctor said cheerfully, turning around and wrapping around a friendly arm around Vaemyn’s shoulders. “I’m the Doctor, and this is my friend, Vaemyn. I’m a Time Lord from Gallifrey, out in the constellation of Kasterbrous, and he’s a-“

“-Vorta, from the Dominion,” Vaemyn said hurriedly, with a touch too much enthusiasm as he caught on to what the Doctor was doing. “We were tracking some Angels, you see, and we’re trying to stop them from causing trouble...”

“So we sort of materialised onto your ship by accident, sorry about that,” the Doctor continued, still grinning. Spotting something behind the T-rex, he added, “Speaking of which...”

And then, bizarrely, the Doctor slapped a hand over Vaemyn’s eyes while he closed his own, and immediately there was a great roar from the T-rex followed by a great metallic smash as its body impacted the floor. As lizard-Akira spun around, and the Doctor and Vaemyn opened their eyes again, they saw the T-rex awkwardly getting up while an immobile winged statue stood next to it, having seemingly appeared out of thin air.

"You brought the Weeping Angels to the Ark?!" Akira bellowed in outrage. Then she looked up to her pet T-rex. "Smash the Angels!" she commanded, and with another flicker of her matrix her dark hair and blue skin was replaced by reptilian skin with crests. As the T-rex turned to swing its tail at the Weeping Angel, the now reptilian Akira drew a strange looking rifle-type energy weapon as she advanced upon Vaemyn and the Doctor.

“Ah, right, there’s a slight miscommunication going on here,” the Doctor said in a rush as the Angel was thrown into a wall with an almighty smash, the T-rex roaring in exhiliration. Unfortunately, in the literal blink of an eye, the T-rex was again flung bodily back down the corridor, staying in the air for an impossibly long time before finally hitting the floor, sliding along it until it hit the far wall, a fully fifty meters from where it had started. This was apparently the knock out blow for the giant dinosaur as it feebly tried to raise its great head before surrending into unconsciousness.

Meanwhile, another blink of the eye had the Angel standing at lizard-Akira’s shoulder, its stone hand mere centimers from touching her shoulder before it had been frozen by the Doctor and Vaemyn’s eyes. Alarmed, but trusting through deduction that this had to be part of the Doctor’s insane plan, Vaemyn focused on his crewmate.

“Akira, the Angel is behind your left shoulder,” he said anxiously, while the Doctor stared intensely at the Angel to keep it frozen. “Look, I know that you’re confused, but please trust us. We’re all on the same side here, the Angels are after all of us.”

Akira faltered in her focus on the Doctor and Vaemyn, and she stopped to look down at the weapon in her hand with confusion. Slowly, she reached up with one hand to remove the mask from her face, revealing Akira's now reptilian face.

"Vae.. myn..." Akira said uneasily as she looked at him. "Please, something's... not right... I need to get out of here," she struggled to say as this other reptilian personality tried to force its way through her.

“Programming conflict,” the Doctor said sympathetically. “Not to worry, though, I’m sure there are hologram experts who can put you right. Now, as for you,” he added theatrically, addessing the stone Angel while he snuck his right hand behind his back, “you’re too late, sunshine. Don’t be fooled by the purple skin or innocent look. My friend here is a walking temporal paradox, and I’ll bet you didn’t know that when you zapped him in here. He’s been cooking away, building to critical temporal mass, and he’s due to pop any second now.”

“I am?” Vaemyn asked uncertainly, not having the faintest idea what the Doctor was talking about.

“Yes, of course you are,” the Doctor confirmed with a cocky grin, placing a deliberate hand on Vaemyn’s shoulder with his other hand still concealed behind his back. Acting on hope, Vaemyn grabbed Akira’s scaly hand and pulled her to stand with him and the Doctor while the Time Lord kept talking to their stone foe. “All we have to do is keep you frozen for another minute or so, then the paradox matures and poof, no more Angels. Come on everyone, keep your eyes open as much as you can, we don’t have long to wait, it can’t teleport us away if we’re looking at it. This is an easy one.”

And then, as if in mockery of the Doctor’s words, the lights went out, leaving the trio in utter blackness. Vaemyn opened his mouth to scream in horror before just as suddenly, before he could even draw breath, the three of them were in one of the Hera’s brightly lit corridors.

“What?” Vaemyn said dumbly, before his brain finally engaged. The Doctor, meanwhile, was straightening his bow tie, looking supremely smug as he watched Vaemyn figure it out. “You tricked it? Into sending us back?”

The Doctor waggles his eyebrows gleefully. “That’s the thing about the Weeping Angels: they’re terrible at poker,” he explained with a wink. “They never can spot a bluff.”

"Where am I?" Akira said, but once again she had the accent indicating she wasn't quite herself. "I need to get back to the Ark so I can wake my sisters, we must defend ourselves from the Angels," she demanded.

"Oh right, I should probably do something about that," the Doctor remarked as he pulled out his trusty tool that seemed to do a little bit of everything, and aimed it at reptile-Akira.

Akira grew still as she felt this tool rearranging her matrix to bring the real Akira out, but the multitude of safeguards she had written into herself sent feedback into the Doctor's gadget, causing it to spark and the rewrite to her matrix to be left incomplete. Akira looked dazed for a moment, and when she looked at both the Doctor and Vaemyn, there was a clear sign of recognition, which should have been a good sign, until she opened her mouth to speak.

"Vermin!" Akira hissed, then she turned and fired her weapon at one of the bulkheads, exposing an entrance to the Jefferies tube system, down which she promptly disappeared.

“So that didn’t work,” Vaemyn said pointedly as he and the Doctor looked at the Jeffries tube that Akira had fled into.

After a few moments, his mouth opening and closing repeatedly as he tried to think of something to say, the Doctor finally gave up. “No, it didn’t,” he said awkwardly. After another long silence, he added contritely, “Sorry.”

 

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