Visions of The Crystal Feast. Day 0

Hello!

This year to celebrate the holidays I commissioned Becsantus to draw thirteen alternate universe versions of the Thirteenth Doctor. These images will be released one day at a time until Christmas Day along with a short story chapter about the Doctor pictured. The art is fab and it's been fun to create so I do hope you'll enjoy!

There's also a bonus! Given that each Doctor is a different sexy variant based on a kink/bodytype/fetish and the day each one comes out has already been locked in, I've decided to also run a little game for you.

If anyone can accurately predict the specific type of kink/fetish each Doctor is from 1-13 (1 being far left, 13 being far right) they will win a free 5000 word commission for whatever they like.

Additionally, if anyone can predict which order these Doctors will be revealed, (again with 1 being left and 13 being right) they will win another 5000 word commission.

You can DM me or comment below for your predictions if you'd like to play, or just with something nice if you so desire.

Without further ado, the prologue to: Doctor Who and the Visions of The Crystal Feast.

-o-o-o-

“Merry Christmas!” The Doctor beamed, throwing open the doors to the TARDIS and ushering Yaz through them into the snow beyond.

The chill hit the Doctor’s young companion like a slap to the face after the nice warm environment of the console room and she let out an involuntary gasp, clutching her jacket tight around her. “Ah, c… cold!”

The Doctor planted her hands on her hips, lips pursed with disappointment. “I did tell you to dress warmly.”

“No you didn’t!” Yaz protested, staring at her designated driver in indignant disbelief. The Doctor was often quite scatter-brained, usually in ways that were suspiciously convenient for her. She shivered and looked The Doctor up and down.

The blonde was in her usual outfit, long grey coat, rainbow jumper, yellow suspenders and blue trousers that were just a little too short and left her ankles bare. Yaz wondered why The Doctor wasn’t cold herself given her clothing, but then she remembered every time The Doctor had grabbed her hand or been pushed up against her she had always been remarkably cold-skinned. Perhaps The Doctor’s people just had a comparatively colder internal temperature? She shifted her feet in the snow and sighed, one day she might actually get the answers to her questions about her friend, but it wasn’t likely to be soon. She still didn’t even know what species The Doctor was.

“Huh, well I did when I rehearsed this conversation in my head.” The Doctor shrugged before grabbing her by the shoulder and turning her towards the vista they’d landed at. “C’mon, look at that! Isn’t it beautiful?”

Yaz’s eyes widened as she finally took notice of the landscape. “Oh… wow.”

They were standing on an island, barely large enough to fit them and the TARDIS, in the middle of a vast frozen lake. The shiny black surface glowed with reflected colours, and Yaz looked up to see a vast swirling aurora of light billowing overhead. It wasn’t the only thing occupying the sky, far from it. The biggest mountain she’d ever seen in her life was stretching up into the night, a single stone monolith filling the sky and going up, up, up, until it faded from view, the heights hidden by clouds and the aurora.

“That’s… incredible!” she grinned.

“Mount Revelation.” The Doctor sighed, admiring the colours shining off the falling snow. “Wider than the whole UK three times over, so tall it actually pierces the atmosphere of the planet. The top few hundred metres are totally airless, poking out of the world’s exosphere.”

“How does that happen? How does a mountain get so big it comes out of the planet’s atmosphere?”

“No idea.” The Doctor said with a delighted grin. “But that isn’t even the best bit. The Mountain is littered with cave systems from top to bottom, the colonists who landed here two thousand years ago still haven’t fully mapped them. There are interior lakes the size of London, massive chambers big enough to hide armies inside with room to spare. Some of the fauna in the lower sea chambers dates back to the planet’s prehistoric era, hidden away from extinction events nice and safe inside the mountain.”

“There are people living in there?” Yaz whistled.

“Half a billion.” The Doctor nodded, taking her hand and tugging her down onto the snowy ice. Yaz tensed as her boots hit the frozen surface, nervously tapping the ice with a foot. “Here’s the best bit though, because of all the radiation the mountain soaks up at its peak, there’s a core of unique crystals running down the whole thing, like a massive radio tower, picking up psychic signals from all across the multiverse.”

“Psychic crystals?” Yaz frowned, slowly making her way after The Doctor with gentle, cautious steps. “Like… looking into a crystal ball and see the future?”

“Nah, the crystals only work when they’re connected to the core growth. And it’s not just the future, there’s a rift in space and time running through this whole system, the core picks up signals from the pasts, presents and futures of hundreds of different realities, and you can see them if you find the right spot.”

The Doctor spun on her heel, eager to see Yaz’s impressed expression, but her face fell as she saw her companion a dozen metres behind her, slowly picking her way forwards. “What are you doing?”

“How thick is this ice?” Yaz winced.

“Hundreds of meters, this is the largest glacier for twenty million lightyears.” The Doctor laughed, “It’s not gonna fall out from under you, now come on!”

“I wish you’d said that earlier!” Yaz grumbled, picking up her pace and catching up to the blonde laughing at her.

The hike across the ice wasn’t as long as Yaz had expected, as a pair of locals on an animal that looked like an enormous cross between an alligator and a dachshund slid up beside them and gave them a lift to the colony.

Amazingly, the mountain seemed even larger now that Yaz was as its foot, craning her neck all the way back to stare up into the sky where it’s upper reaches lay hidden. “This thing is stable, right?”

“The mountain? Yeah.” The Doctor said, jogging up the flights of metal stairs that led up through the small town they’d arrived at towards a yawning chasm with lights inside. “You get minor rockfalls every now and again, sometimes a chamber will collapse, but it’s a once in a few hundred-year’s event. Mt Revelation is really sturdy, it’ll be hit by a rogue moon twenty thousand years from now and barely be scratched.”

Yaz glanced uncertainly up at the chasm’s top, where hundreds of thousands of stalactites and icicles loomed menacingly. Any one of them could drop and crush a house, let alone a person. Yaz wondered how the local police handled the situations when they fell, it would be hard to keep a three-story tall dagger of stone crushing a nursery out of the news.

She shook her head, it wasn’t any use dwelling on the ‘ifs’ of the situation, The Doctor had promised her it was safe, and she trusted her friend implicitly. As they climbed ever upwards she admired the city built into the mouth of the cavern. The buildings were like a mix of steampunk and gingerbread houses, all cutesy and Christmassy, but with huge brass pipes and stained windows. The people were much the same, wearing what looked very much like Victorian-era clothing, but with brass goggles, mechanised walking sticks, huge backpacks with valves and pipes, hissing as their owners went along.

“So this is Christmas?”

“Around here they call it the Crystal Feast.” The Doctor explained, waving cheerfully to a woman with three-lensed goggles and an immense pair of breasts barely covered by her low-cut bodice. Yaz flushed slightly, noting the red lantern dangling outside the building’s door, and the other woman lounging in an upstairs window, wearing Victorian-era lingerie.

“In the 44th century, Humanity has just come out of a nasty interstellar war with the Draconians, their empire essentially got halved in the conflict. That, plus the Ood liberation, lead to a whole new boots-on-the-ground colony initiative.” The Doctor hummed, pretending to tip a hat to an older man who looked at them in confusion through an inch-long brass monocle wired into his head. “Hundreds of thousands of people looking for a fresh start, with no faith in the empress or home politics, go out and start fresh on dozens of worlds like this. Sometimes it worked out, sometimes it didn’t, this is probably the best example.”

Yaz didn’t know what a Draconian or an Ood was, so decided to focus on the fact that humanity would apparently return to its imperialist habits in the future. It wasn’t a particularly happy thought. “An empire?”

“Ah… yeah.” The Doctor paused mid-step and screwed up her face, clearly trying to come up with a comforting response. “Look… Yaz, history’s not always a happy thing, people make mistakes, sometimes they make them over and over again, but it’s important to remember the good that comes too. Humanity falters on its journey more times than I can count, but it still achieves wonders, gives art and music and literature to the universe that inspires trillions over billions of years. They establish a peace between warring galaxies that lasts for nineteen million years, hold together alliances that fight back the Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans… Humanity can be terrible, and never more terrible than when they hurt one another, but you can also be… beautiful, magnificent!”

She came down the steps and gave Yaz a hug. “For every person that makes the universe a darker place, there are dozens of people like you. Dazzling, wonderful, brilliant humans.”

“Do we ever get it right?” Yaz sighed, squeezing the Doctor back and following her up the steps towards a glowing archway.

“Depends on who you ask, and for how long.” The Doctor flashed her psychic paper to a woman standing at the archway, who raised a brow, but stood aside to let them pass. “Time is relative. For some species Earth’s shining pinnacle lasts countless lifetimes, for others, it’s over before they can blink.”

“And for you?”

The Doctor paused, smiling slightly. “Being a time-traveller is a privilege, I can see all of your greatest moments at my leisure, see all the choices that led up to them, every little decision that leads to wonder and beauty and life.”

“Every decision?”

“Sometimes it’s the tiniest things that change the future, those fluid points that can alter everything.” The Doctor reminded her, stepping onto a small circular pad and pulling Yaz on after her.

There was an odd buzzing sensation and a flash of blue light, and suddenly the pair were standing in a wide, round room lined on surface with crystals. Some were cloudy and blue, others looked just like ice, some of them were even glowing like the aurora outside. Yaz let in an amazed breath and smiled at the Doctor, who was watching closely for her reaction.

“So, are we going to see that now?”

The Doctor flashed a crooked grin and sat cross-legged on the ground, patting the floor for Yaz to do the same opposite her.

“It’s a dangerous business, Yasmin Khan, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

Yaz sat down, then frowned. “Wait… is that Lord of The Rings?”

The Doctor looked sheepish. “Yeah… I accidentally gave John that line, a bit of a bootstrap situation. Mind you that’s nothing compared to Shakespeare, now that was… ooooh!”

She cut off as the crystals glowed around them and a haze shimmered in the air between their faces. “Here we go, hushing up. The crystals have tuned into our psychic rhythms, they’re projecting an image of time and space based on our thought patterns.”

“Do we… do anything?” Yaz asked, peering at the Doctor through the haze.

“No no, it’s all subconscious, you can’t get specific psychic responses with such a crude transmitter, but that’s all part of the fun.”

Yaz swallowed and focussed her attention on the hazy image swimming in front of her. She wondered if they’d see anything from an alternate reality, those had always been her favourite stories, and if what the Doctor had said about little choices or coincidences altering reality itself, what kind of weird and wonderful things could be shown to them?

Slowly, like water beginning to still after a stone had been thrown into it, an image began to take shape.

“Is that?” she asked slowly as the scene took form.

“Yeah.” The doctor nodded, equally confused. “It’s… a train.”

“An alternate universe train?”

“Well people still have to get around you know.”

Yaz’s eyes widened, suddenly realising why it looked so familiar as a mad blonde woman in tattered clothes crashed through the roof…