[it was,] thinks the Doctor, [bound to happen sooner or later. Genetics, karma, statistical probability.]

A sense of dread crawls up Doctor's back as he *hears* the distance twixt himself and his deranged persuer shrink by the nanosecond, the relentless pounding of bare feet growing louder and louder over the controlled fall his twisted ankle has made his flight. [when this was over, i'll have to have a serious talk with someone about the woeful state of repair of the footpaths.]

"You can't fight art!"

[about ten metres,] he estimates, [each way. i wonder what happened to my hat.]

"I'll make you famous!"

[at least it's not "notting in ze vurld can stop me now" i suppose.]

The knife scores the sole of his left shoe as he lunges in an uncomfortably dramatic fashion over the top of the embankment, stretched to the point of dislocating every longitudal joint. There is a terrible drawn out moment, that moment you experience when when making your first abseil and you're at the very edge just past the point of no return hindbrain screaming that you're going to die, and then his fingers find purchase and his body reacts and he gives thanks for not actually having read 'Ptashnei's Practical Physics, 3rd Edition' as he loops up onto the branch, his pursuer shooting past beneath him.

"Philistine!" the artiste yells, coming back and looking up as the Doctor hefts himself painfully upwards and out of effective melee range. "I knew there was a reason I never saw you in art appreciation class!"

"I'm very much afraid you have me confused for a canvas," the Doctor counters, very much wishing the young man below was Alice and he the Chesire Cat. "Still, you couldn't ask for a more captive audience." He flashes a huge grin, and is rather disappointed to find himself remainingly distressingly solid.

A spasm of unrestrained anger flashes across features that at least one of his companions would doubtlessly find alluring. "How dare you criticise an artform that you have not the conceptual framework to understand!" The snarl accompanies more flowering of red lines across his body.

"You're a poseur, capable only of denigrating that which you are incapable of creating yourself!"

"Whatever you say," the Doctor calls down, rumaging through his pockets, rather annoyed that his dellusional attacker is too far away to Whammy. Quite apart from the fact he has been chased up a tree, the utter stillness of the campus in the wake of that terrible scream is very very disturbing. [and it had looked like being such a nice little adventure.] Then he finds what he is looking for, a discovery that is greated with a little laugh of triumph.

(Riot Foam. Product of Mega City Justice Dept) the label on the canister reads. (Use only in open spaces)

"Now you're laughing at me!" his pursuer fumes. "Laughing at my art. I won't stand for it, I won't!"

Wincing in pre-emptive sympathy, the Doctor drops the canister. There is a metallic tinkle, a sudden WHUMF and a protracted series of muffled protests. He looks down.

The artiste glares impotently back, enshrouded in a vaguely spherical mass of porous, congealed foam, struggling and getting precisely nowhere.

"Awfully sorry," the Doctor calls out, already beginning to clamber awkwardly down from his perch. "It'll dissolve in a few hours, but until then I really think it's for the best."

Although unintelligable, the reply is very rude.

Wil bites his thumb nervously, not *quite* sure what to do. [i hate pop quizes,] he sulks self indulgently for a moment. As far as he can tell, the young woman is fine, though what fine is for a extra-universal species he's only just met is an unknown quantity, as is why this particular example of it should just suddenly collapse. Admittedly, it had been after hearing that disturbingly familiar scream.

[disturbing not in that i've heard it before, exactly, anyway,] he qualifies that last thought. You just tend to hear a similar class of thing when with the Doctor.

He scurries over to the sink, looking for a glass or a mug or something along those lines. He finds one, a certain whiff indicating that he isn't alone in his appreciation of alcohol. Whatever it is is rough and oily smelling enough to resemble vodka, never one of his favourite brews. The tap is simple enough to use, and his need is urgent enough to preclude fastidiousness, so he just fills the thing up then hurries back, sloshing the tumbler's contents onto the supine form. It hits with a loud slap.

Nothing immediate happens.

"Aw, hell," the teenager mutters, hurling the glass against the wall, which catches it in a tensor field quite unnervingly. He makes for the door, the idea of desperately pounding for help making itself the closest thing to a good idea his still somewhat alcohol fuddled brain can muster.

[one minute after a crises and you know naff all what to do. what a me-] A whimpered moan stops him i the act of turning the handle. Whiplash has nothing on the speed at which his head turns back to Gui. The lilac tint to her pale skin seems strangely washed out, the pupils expanded [dilated, idiot, the term is dilated] so much that she has almost no irises to speak of.

The words escaping in whispered breaths from her lips are, scarily, un-translated. What ever the hell language this is, it's something the TARDIS hasn't encountered and something the TARDIS can't understand. And if that isn't bad enough, the *sound* of those alien words make his aural nerve endings want to retreat through his toes.

[we are so fucked.]

[for once,] the OtherWil mutters from the reptillian darkness of his hindbrain, or at least it seems to be from there, [i agree with you]

Something strikes the door. Hard.

"Who's there?" the voice answers back, sounding slightly more familiar. "Where's here?"

"I don't know ," Jadi calls back. The door seems like a fairly normal construct - apart from the odd material of its construction of course --should be fairly easy to destroy. [assuming i want to of course,] he muses.

"I was down by the river, then I found myself here," the voice answers. Definitely female, now his still slightly fuzzy brain *really* concentrates on it, sounding despairing and lost.

"I was..." Jadi begins, then trails off. Where *was* he before this. He thought he had been at the pub, but something nags at him, something he can't grasp hold of and beat into submission. "I was talking to someone," he volunteers after a moment. [why did i say that?] "I'm called Jadi, by the way."

"Jadi?!" the other person calls back. "It's me, Angela!" There's the sound of someone moving on the other side of the door. "I never thought I'd say this, but I am so unbelievably stoked to hear your voice!"

"Bloody hell," he mutters. [makes two of us.] "I thought I recognised the voice." He smiles, taking a step backwards. "Hold on, I'll kick down the door." "Okay," she replies, and again he hears movement. "I'm clear."

There's something deliciously physically satisfying as the door crumples beneath his boot, snapping off its hinges. The pleasure of taking first action against a sea of sudden troubles. The pleasure of getting closer to someone in this darkness.

Well, not darkness, exactly. Angela's cell is for some reason somewhat more luminous than his own, though a clouded over night would be brighter still. Jadi blinks a little, then walks into Angela's cell. Then he feels her arms wrapping about him, drawing succor from his presence.

[i could get to like this.]

And then he feels Angela's lips on his, and nothing else for the moment really seems to matter.

"What's going on?" she asks, her voice a little colder, a little harder than she remembers it being. "There's no one about."

"I don't know," the shorter of the two answers, responding to the authority in Angela's synthetic voice. "A whole bunch of us engo students were getting sloshed when there's this Maker-awful noise over the PA, then our barkeeper goes into a fit."

"We can't raise anyone," the other adds. "And Frwja-"

"Barkeeper," the first intercedes.

"-He starts talking in some shit scary language between calling out about white monkeys crawling out of his pores."

"We need to find the Doctor," she declares, setting her filters to screen out non-Time Lord biosignatures then boosting their reception to eleven.

"Duh," the second says. "Why do you think we're heading to the fucking med centre? Are you Arts or something?"

On the limits of her perceptions, she discovers him, but it is a Doctor who seems distinctly abnormal. In a system so suddenly disrupted as this campus has been, that can only mean he is in serious serious smeg. She sets off at a run, leaving the two women to glare offendly after her.

[oh doctor, why now of all times?] she asks herself in despair. [why must every thing come crashing down so painfully fast. the goddess must really really hate me.]

She discovers him crouched in the corner of a sunken lawn, a book kicked violently to one side, hat crumpled in long fingers, eyes wide and staring, pupils black pools that even the Shadowmaker at her core finds disturbing for some ungraspable reason. Brain activity scans show wierd, dangerous things - at least to a human mind; what they mean to the Doctor is unknowable.

"Doctor, it's Angela. What's happened to you?" [at last, i sound like who i used to be.]

Her words cause him to twitch slightly. Something that looks like pain crosses his features, features so unlike Jadi's. [oh, goddess, what happens when he finds out what i really am? when i tell any of them?]

A phrase escapes from twixt lips pursed over tightly clenched teeth. She rewinds, enhances, repeats her audio buffer. "Riders on the Storm," she repeats it, wondering what it means. Her systems run a reference search, turning up only a couple to archaic pop culture.

"A very groovy song," the Doctor mutters, drawing Angela's attention to him fully once more. His pupils have shrunken by a half milimetre, his brain activity metamorphising into some completely new pattern.

"Are you alright?"

"No. I'm escaping a nightmare I'm not sure isn't real."

He backs out onto the balcony, slams the door shut, looks around for some means of escape, doesn't find it. The gibbering horror surges forward, crashing like a wave against the plastisteel wall, making it shudder, pseudopods hammering against it again, again, again. It takes less than a minute for a spiderweb fracture to appear and spread rapidly.

"Ah, Maker!" he curses and leaps over the edge, screaming at the top of his lungs, limbs windmilling.

She closes the Arch Chancellor's ruptured eyes, tries to ignore the terrible expression frozen on his face. The screen of his workstation has been shattered from within, a worrying phenomena considering cathode ray tube technology hasn't existed in this arm of the galaxy for well over three centuries.

Something has to have come through, something has to have caused that incredible scream, something has to be responsible for almost the entire campus falling into a collective coma, something has to explain why some people remain totally unaffected by whatever it is that has happened. [something, always something.]

Sighing, she takes the bottle of brandy standing on her former boss's desk and examines it, more from a lack of any immediate course of action than actual interest. She snorts; the old lush didn't even get to have a final drink it seems. Dying cold sober, what a nasty way to go, senses - what few he possessed - undulled so that the pain of demise could be experienced in full.

Checking her chronometer, she heads back to the theatre. [perhaps the vicar has found the solution.]

The two old men are anything but happy as they bolt down the excedingly generic seeming corridor, panting as their bodies already begin to feel the stress of so much sudden exertion.

The Hordes are close on their heels.

To be Continued...

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