Many Of Horror [open]

[jinxmckay]

"What's wrong with you?" Jinx muttered, running her hands over the console of her TARDIS.

The hexagonal control panel hummed with life, purple light eminating from the dials and buttons. She stroked the levers lightly, frowning. There didn't seem to be anything wrong at all, but this was definitely not the place that she had keyed into her co-ordinates monitor. And her TARDIS did not make mistakes like this. It didn't just decide to dump her in Cardiff when she hadn't even wanted to come to Earth today. She'd been all set for a visit to the Vegas Galaxy to unwind after that business with the rogue Sontaran, and that's where she'd been on flight to, until some bizarre something had pulled her off-path and onto Earth. That was very wrong.

It did occur to her that there was probably a reason for it. She'd given the TARDIS a once-over and there didn't seem to be any sort of malfunction or mistake, although she would conduct a thorough search later. She didn't think it was a technical fault. Maybe her TARDIS was simply being petulant and forcing her to go to Wales out of moody spite. Her TARDIS was like herself in that respect; stubborn as a Dalek on the warpath. Perhaps she'd done something wrong and her TARDIS was trying to get her back for it. But she took a moment to run through everything in her head, and came up blanks. And she would have remembered, even if it was something so trivial as having spilt her coffee on the controls.

She put her hand on a lever, considering resetting the co-ordinates and leaving. But if she was here for a reason, maybe there was something bringing her here. Rift disturbance, maybe? She wasn't up for cleaning out any alien messes, but she didn't want to miss a party if there was something going down. It wouldn't hurt to have a look, and then back to the TARDIS once she'd satisfied her curiosity.

Looking down at her light grey tank top with the singe mark over her ribs, she decided with unusual sensibility that she should get changed first. She ran to her wardrobe, pulling off the shirt to replace it with a black t-shirt with a yellow Batman symbol that she'd picked up (and by picked up she meant 'stole') on her last visit to Earth, and a big black hoodie over the top, that also worked to conceal the gun in one pocket of her jeans. Straightening the long string of blue glass beads hanging around her neck, she checked the contents of her backpack to make sure everything was there (she knew it was, but where was the harm in double-checking?) and strode out of the front door of her TARDIS, which was cleverly disguised as a stone obelisk.

Nothing seemed to be happening. Nothing that she could see. But where was the best place to get gossip? The local, of course, so she headed to the pub. And also, she wanted a drink. She strode through the building and to the bar.

"Vodka and coke on the rocks." she recited.

Had to have ice. She always had ice. Lemon sometimes, lime if she felt like it, but ice was a must.

[Lt Hollie Saunders]

beep

Hollie's attention went to her vortex manipulator as it made the ominous sound. Last time she'd listened to than noise, she'd ended up stuck in Cardiff. Granted, it turned out to not be a completely bad thing, but it was a bitch to be stuck. The blonde loathed being tied down in such a fashion. Not after being able to travel anywhere and anytime.

Which is why she was a little hesitant to trust the small machine on her wrist. Lokking around, she brushed a piece of stray hair behind her ear. Oh, hell, what was the worst that could happen. Pressing a few buttons, she discovered the signal was coming from somewhere local, and her mind was made up. A few more buttons, and the blonde disappeared.

Materialising in the back of an alley, Hollie fixed her hair, looking around. not far from where she was standing, a rather conspicuous stone obelisk was standing. Walking away from it was a small redhead. The time agent frowned - god than rang a bell. She set off after her, her red heels clicking on the pavement. She followed the woman into the small pub, the Gatekeeper, and watched as she settled herself at the counter. As soon as she spoke, it clicked.

Well, if it wasn't Jinx. The two of them had travelled together briefly, a few years back. Not for very long, but a shared love of weapons and trouble had meant that they got along well, if not for the best of reasons. She walked closer, standing behind the redhead with a hand on her hip.

"Well, how about that. It seems all the fun is gathering in Cardiff" she mused loudly.

outfit

(hope the ad lib on the relationship is okay...)

[jinxmckay]

Jinx tilted the drink, suspiciously. She knew that vodka and coke was supposed to have one eighth of vodka in it, but this seemed like much less. Maybe it was because of all the ice. She did like ice, as she'd said, she had to have ice. But she didn't like almost the whole glass to be filled with ice and take up all the drink space, and water down the alcohol in the process. Which meant that it had less of an effect. Which meant that she'd have to buy more. And was thus spending more. She looked suspiciously at the barkeeper over the rim of her glass. Maybe it was all a scam. They were probably trying to take her money. And Jinx loved money.

Fine, so maybe the money that she was buying this drink with wasn't exactly hers, exactly. Although she wasn't sure where you drew that line. She had earned it, in a way, by hard work. That hard work being taking the money. Just because she was a thief didn't mean she was lazy. She worked for her money like anybody else did. Only instead of sitting in a box in an office typing out things for a boss, she went out and got her wages straight from the source, tax free.

She rotated her wrist, shaking the glass slightly so that the blocks of ice clacked together. Tilting it to her lips, she drained the liquid and tipped a couple of ice cubes into her mouth, crunching them between her teeth. Then somebody spoke, very close behind her, and she glanced quickly over her shoulder, seeing who it was just as she recognised the voice, and she grinned.

"You'll have to point me to where the fun's at. My TARDIS seemed to think I should join."

[Lt Hollie Saunders]

"Oh, you just need to know where to look" she laughed, slipping onto the empty barstool. She smiled at the bartender, and he nodded back, sliding over a gin and tonic. She'd been here often enough before - she'd been to pretty much every bar in Central Cardiff. Not much else to do. She sipped the drink, musing.

"Mind you, things are starting to get interesting." she admitted. "You seen the zombies yet? Mass hysteria and target practice - it could actually be described as fun" Technically they weren't zombies. but the complications of explaining Gelth was too much effort. Hollie didn't know much about the blue faced body stealers. She'd thought they were extinct until they'd spotted one outside the warehouse.

She rolled her eyes as Jinx mentioned the Tardis. "You're still travelling around in that clunky old thing?" she teased. Secretly, she was hideously jealous. Who wouldn't be? To have such an advanced piece of technology at you fingertips....well, the little vortex manipulators hardly compared. Especially when they got bloody stuck. "Although if you must stick with it, you might want to fix the chameleon circuit. It seems a little confused"

The blonde uncrossed her legs, pressing her denim clad knees together and taking in her friend. " So Jinx, what brings you to lil' old Cardiff?" she asked, sipping her drink again.

[jinxmckay]

"I do know where to look; I came here. And look at that, you're just full of info."

Bars and pubs were always the best place to find information, dates, or transport to Alderaan. No, that was Star Wars, she was getting confused again.

"Zombies?" Jinx asked, perking up.

Actual animated corpses? Running... well, probably more staggering... around looking for brains? Jinx loved the human tales of zombies, and Night Of The Living Dead was one of her favourite ever films. No, maybe Shaun Of The Dead was even better; Jinx loved Simon Pegg. He was brilliant and funny. She'd have to TARDIS over to wherever he lived and stalk him some time. Although she had learnt that meeting celebrities often got her disappointed, especially when she got them mixed up with the characters they played. Where was she? Oh, right, zombies. Yeah. Well, she completely believed that there could be real zombies. There were real vampires, of course, the Time Lords had fought them. Though that had been before her time.

"It sounds fun!" she said, perhaps getting a little too eager in her mental fantasies of facing down corpses with a shotgun.

"Clunky? Old? My TARDIS is the best TARDIS in the universe!" she said indignantly, drawing herself up.

Especially compared to the blue piece of boxy rubbish that the Doctor deemed transport. At least her TARDIS usually took her to exactly where she wanted to go. And it had weapons, and that was very important for a good ship. The possibility to blow the enemy to buggery if needs be.

"It's stubborn, not confused. I guess she's too much of a snob to mimic the stonework of Cardiff."

She slid her glass against the counter, gesturing for the barman to refill it with the same as she'd just had.

"Apparently, zombies. I might as well stick around to watch."

And maybe if they needed help, she could assist in dispatching them.

[futuredoctor]

It was supposed to be another fruitful and prosperous day in his little coffee shop. For some reason, the Doctor's shop had earned the reputation of having one of the best coffees and deserts around Cardiff. Even though Starbucks was still hailed as the best coffee shop, the Doctor was happy that he's still got the moves in the business world.

Unfortunately for him, his TARDIS key suddenly beeped and the Doctor's business 'streak' had come to an end. Before starting up his little business venture, the Doctor had set-up the TARDIS to be on the look-out for any big problem around this corner of the galaxy. With the old age of his TARDIS, the Doctor doubted that such a system would work, but the situation seemed to be so great that his good old girl had to warn him about it. He took out his TARDIS key and it felt burning hot. The Doctor suddenly left his shop from the back door and headed to the alley where his TARDIS was parked.

His TARDIS, unlike his predecessor's, was like a big spacious nightclub. With the background lights of the TARDIS blinking red, the Doctor headed to his rather futuristic console, which had a large touchscreen, and saw that there was a disturbance in the Rift. It so happened that the Gelth have punched through the Rift and are now scattering around Cardiff to possess dead bodies. Such a situation reminded the Doctor of what almost happened back then in Cardiff, but the situation seemed more dangerous than ever as Cardiff is about to become the Land of the Dead.

Exiting his TARDIS and keeping it a second out of synch to hide it from anyone else except him, the Doctor headed straight to the city circle and saw policemen backing down from the Gelth 'zombies', who seem to possess extreme strength.

"Oh this is not good," the Doctor said as he fixed his hat for a second or two.

"TIIIME LOOORD!" the Doctor heard one of the Gelth shout to him. The Doctor gulped and suddenly ran away from the city center, wherein the Gelth suddenly started to run towards him.

Not knowing where to go, the Doctor entered the Gatekeeper and deadlocked the doors with his sonic screwdriver. He then proceeded to use his sonic screwdriver to temporarily place a sonic shield around the hinges of the door to prevent any Gelth 'vapours' from coming in. He looked at the barman and smiled, "Hello Tom. Have you heard of the news?"

"Funny you should ask me that," the Doctor heard the bartender say as the man opened the telly on the bar and switched it on the news. The situation seemed to be present all throughout Cardiff and the authorities are planning to contain the situation by blocking off Cardiff from the entire world and do something along the lines of blowing up the entire place to prevent the 'zombie virus' from spreading.

"Well, they've acted quickly," the Doctor said as he looked at the already panicking patrons and he said, "Alright you lot shut up! None of you are going to die and I can find a way, which doesn't involve shotguns, to stop this menace."

Even though the people began to quiet down a little, the Doctor himself wasn't sure he could take on an entire army of Gelth. The best he can do is trap a couple of them inside a temporal compressor made out of a vacuum cleaner. The Doctor stood at one of the tables, "Alright! Someone get me vacuum cleaners. If we're going to survive this, we better be armed. Ghostbusters style!"

[Lt Hollie Saunders]

"Zombies?" Jinx asked, perking up.

Hollie chuckled at the immediate cheerfulness that entered her friends voice. For the general public, this invasion was apocalyptic, mass hysteria inducing stuff. You could tell the preferable people as the ones who enjoyed the new dramas. "Well, technically not. Gelth apparently. But I find that zombie treatment works just as well.

"Just because it's the best doesn't mean it isn't clunky"Hollie teased, knowing full well that such statements would get Jinx arched up. "Stubborn you say? I wonder where it gets that from?"

Before she could continue, the doors slammed behind her. Hollie's head whipped around, blonde hair flying from underneath the red bow as a hand slipped to her wiaist, instictively gripping the gun she kept there. Her eyes took in the older man, and more importantly, the sonic instrument he used to deadlock the doors. That acton alone got her hackles up. She didn't appreciate being caged in. Leaning her back against the bar, she watched calmly as the man spoke to the barman and the pub erupted into a panic.

"A Vacuum cleaner? You know, fire works just as well" she said calmly.

[jinxmckay]

"Oh? And they're stealing bodies? Just dead bodies or alive ones too? Or are they killing people and then stealing their bodies?"

It did make a difference, really. Dead people were already dead, so they weren't exactly being hurt. Was the danger simply a public outrage over the dead people of Cardiff going wandering, or was there actual danger of the things killing people? And possibly eating their brains? Or maybe she should drop the brains theory until it was proven either way.

Jinx looked up as a man walked into the pub. Well, not walked. More like barged. Rudely. But with a sonic screwdriver. Which made her raise an eyebrow, and then the second when he started locking all of the doors. Jinx had been to pub lock-ins before, but she had a feeling that this was not what was occurring.

"Who the hell are you?" she demanded, and then to Hollie "Who the hell is he?"

A little miffed at his suggestion that they wouldn't be able to use shotguns, she was still curious as to how he hoped to use a vacuum cleaner to solve any problems at all, when a vacuum cleaner certaingly could not fit a zombie inside it, and a shotgun or a good axe would be much more effective. Jinx curled her fingers around the small laser pistol she kept in her pocket, her thumb finding the custom sliding switch on the top. Slide forward to load it. Forward and across to set it to automatic and keep it on loaded. A bit like the gear stick on a car. Naturally, the trigger was used to actually fire the strong, and usually lethal bolt of energy from the gun. She slid her thumb across to check the dial she'd built in to put it on different settings. Yeah, this definitely wouldn't just singe somebody's shirt.

She wasn't worried about any zombies. Not least of all because her TARDIS was sitting just outside the (okay, locked..) pub for her to make an escape if she wanted. But, run? Why would she want to run when she could fight?! She wanted a fight, she wanted to blast some zombies, and she wanted a shotgun. Why hadn't she made a laser shotgun? She had a feeling that there was a sawn-off shotgun somewhere in the weapons store of her TARDIS. She had seen it when she'd been fetching an automatic rifle, which she'd lost on her last trip to Earth. Or it had been confiscated more like, damn humans.

"You, uh, do realise that these aren't actually ghosts?" she asked sweetly, jumping down from her stool to walk towards the man.

[futuredoctor]

"It would if they were gaseous and if this thing happened centuries ago with Gwyneth, but the situation requires-" the Doctor ranted off before stopping upon realizing that the woman knew much more knowledge on the aliens compared to the others. Has she met them before? Is she league with them? Judging by her outfit, she's probably one of those alien hunters out there hanging about Cardiff just for fun. "You know an awful lot about the Gelth."

Then he got confronted by another woman and this time he got chills in his spine. Something was awfully wrong about her. Something within his rather complex mind kept lighting up and bugging him at the same time. He took out his magnifying glasses and used it to look at her. After a minute, he takes out a stethoscope and places it in the valley of her bosoms. The Doctor fell back upon hearing her heartbeats, "No way. Now this is madness, not as in madness Sparta, but madness indeed. How did you...escape it all? Everybody was locked it. Rassilon, Romana, The Woman, everybody!"

Suddenly the Doctor heard the door of the pub being hit from the outside. Tom, the bartender, took out his shotgun and cocked it. "Tom! Put it down!"

"But I'm not going to get my brain contaminated by those-"

"That's no zombie! Those are the Gelth. Survivors of the Last Great Time War and they've broken loose from the Rift and are now possessing all the dead of Cardiff," the Doctor then turned around to the 'well-informed' duo and he used his sonic screwdriver on their weapons. He did the same with the bartender's shotgun, "Clogged up your weapons now. They're jammed and you wouldn't hurt a fly. Now this is why we need a vacuum cleaner. I can calibrate it with some jiggery pokery to suck out the Gelth out of the dead bodies into a spatial distortion within the vacuum. It's not much, but it the spatial distortion can hold up to fifty Gelth. If I had anything with similar properties to a White Point Star, then that would be perfect but we can improvise our way through as long we don't harm any of the bodies!"

A couple of the patrons brought to the Doctor a rather large vacuum cleaner and the Doctor smiled at what they brought. He took off his hat and thanked them, "Here we go!"

The Doctor then took out his old sonic screwdriver, which looked liked his Tenth incarnation's sonic screwdriver, and tossed it at the blonde woman, "Find speakers and use Setting 101C. That should emit a hypersonic wave that would annoy the Gelth outside like hell and should give me about enough time to finish this before that thing burns out. Now the rest of you lot better move towards the second floor! I'll tell you all to come down when we cleared them all out."

The Doctor then used his current sonic screwdriver to open the vacuum and he began now to fiddle with it. He then looked at the blonde lady and grinned, "By the way, only this sonic screwdriver can remove the deadlock seal I placed on the door. Mine's the latest model and that's like a centuries old model. So basically, you're stuck here and the only way you can survive is to listen to me. Trust me, you do not want to get ripped apart by the Gelth. It's fortunate they are one of the species in the galaxy who are weakened by wood though."

[jinxmckay]

Jinx frowned, not her angry 'gonna kill you now' frown but more a confused expression that possibly made her look just a bit like a sulky child. Who was this man and what was he doing here, acting like he owned the place and throwing his weight around? Well, he seemed to know what was going on, which she admitted was more than she did at the moment. But that wasn't her fault, as she'd only just arrived here and had no idea about the situation until right now. Jinx shoved her hands in the pocket of her hoodie and gazed at him curiously (up at him, as it happened, and feeling a bit short since her last regeneration had been decidedly taller) as he stared at her. She was tempted to stick her tongue at him, that or tell him to get the hell out of her face, but then he started listening to her heartbeat and for some reason she paused, standing still to let him. There was only one reason he would want to check her hearts...

His reaction pretty much said everything. She stared, her eyes widening as she realised. He was... a Time Lord? Well, she had suspected, she supposed, slightly. He did have a sonic screwdriver. But they were all dead, and gone, and he seemed as surprised that she was alive as she was about him.

"Escape it? The War?" she asked, moving forwards to stare at him a little more urgently "I was never in the war. I... missed it."

That still smarted. A War against the Daleks, who Jinx happened to hate with a particular passion as they were responsible for her current regeneration. Not that she disliked her current body, in fact she absolutely loved the hair. But being 'exterminated' by a race of ridiculous metal morons was still not fun, and she would have enjoyed blasting a few hundred of them to high hell. Unfortunately, she hadn't even been around during the war. She'd been... asleep.

"The Ice Warriors froze me." she explained, so that the other man wouldn't think she was a complete coward or anything.

Besides, even if she was to be called back to fight in the War, there was a strong possibility that they would have passed her by anyway. Aside from the fact that she was only part Time Lord (she seemed to think that the percentages stood at 70% human, 70% Time Lord, a scientific impossibility of the first degree and, she feared, only possible because the computer chip in her head kept her running like a tripped circuit), there was also the fact that she had run off from Gallifrey, having stuck two fingers up at the stupid snotty Lady President and hopped it in a stolen TARDIS.

She was about to ask him what his Time Lord-y self was doing here in an alive manner, when he sonic'd her gun and she glanced from him to the weapon in outrage. The bloody git! Sonic her gun! Well, she could reverse it, no problem-o, easy peasy pumpkin pie, but that wasn't the point!

"I wasn't going to hurt a fly, I was going to shoot Gelth-zombies! How do you expect to win if you put our weapons out of service?" she demanded hotly, shoving her gun back deep into her jeans pocket for the time being.

She still watched him, a little curious despite herself, and managing to follow the concept of what he was doing with no great difficulty. After all, she was a genius. Standing behind him, she frowned as she watched.

"Yes, but you can't get them all with that! It's far too small!" she said, and then mimicked him with a scowl "Trust me, you do not want to get ripped apart by the Gelth... We wouldn't be in danger of that if you hadn't screwed up our weapons!"

Drawing the only thing she could use at the moment from her pocket, she pointed her own sonic screwdriver under his nose, faint purple light buzzing at him.