"Golly, gee," Wil muttered, "I didn't expect this."

 Slowly, Wil turned from the ugly, beautiful, undefinable, somewhat recognizable creature before him towards his Otherwil self. Aloud, with a flair and a courtly bow, exclaimed, "Oh great personal psychosis, meet public psychosis. Public psycho, meet mine. You should get along well together. Speak amongst yourselves, whilst I see to the other guests."

 Otherwil glared at Wil with contempt, and at the "Vicar" with malice. "He is _my_ soul to torture and no one else's responsibility. Get your filthy tentacles off 'im!"

 The beautiful woman-turned-ugly bubbly tentacled mass burbled discontentedly.

 "That's gross," Otherwil commented, "there's no way you'll get anywhere if you remain so uncharismatic and dull. You've got to work with sarcasm and well-timed insult, O Blubberbutt."

 Wil, meanwhile, was making as if passing out champagne to guests who formed sporadically out of shadow and mist, and then disappeared into the surrounding darkness. With half an ear he was watching, and half an eye was hearing, what was going on between his subconscious and the flabbergasted thing. Quite disgusted with the whole proceedings in general, Wil had half a mind to pummel both to semi-consciousness. Actually, slowly, everthing was going in halves, he decided. So, for the next guest, he only poured half a champagne. "There - go!" he murmered, half distracted by the two- or three-fingered (he couldn't tell) seemingly thumbless hand holding half of the glass. If everything was half, then the owner of the hand would have four or six fingers. And only a quarter glass of champagne. Oh well.

 All of this was beyond the experience of anyone involved. Otherwil was successfully enraging the creature which had turned into a vision of Wil. "I'm not fat!" the Wil-like figure grated in a childish whine.

 "Yeah, well I was confusing your underside with your head, which it seems is filled with the same useless sort of mass. It weighs you down, you know. Might as well chuck it and replace it with an abacus."

 Wil was surprised. There were two reasons for this. One, from this view, Otherwil was pitiful and lame. Surprising, considering that he was merely giving the creature the treatment usually reserved for Wil himself. The creature had adsorbed enough of Wil to feel attacked by Otherwil. It seems a little introspection could be quite useful. Two, the voice at the other end of the three-fingered half-full half-glass-holding hand was saying something.

 "Hey - help -"

 Wil turned fully.

 "What?"

 "Hey, Wil, help me!"

 "How?"

 "More champagne."

 And running.

 He didn't have the feeling that he was running from anything in particular. He simply couldn't stop his feet. They kept moving. He told them to stop. He shouted at them to stop. He pulled out a notepad, wrote "Hey, feet: STOP!", tossed it down at his feet, to no avail. The echoes of his feet became variable. He seemed to hear his feet saying "stop what, stop what, stop what?" as they slapped on the floor.

 His legs were beginning to get numb, and still his feet slapped away at the ground.

 Hours, days, nanoseconds later (what is time to one who measures time in the pounding of feet and who is asleep), he woke up exhausted.

 It seems he had been sleepwalking. Or sleeprunning. When you are asleep, how can you tell in what manner you arrived where you did? Most likely by observing your own personal state of being. If you're wet, you probably swam part of the way. If you're sitting in a car, you drove. If you're gasping for breath, you probably ran.

 Jadi looked about and found that he was in a stuffy stone chamber, gasping for breath. That is, Jadi was gasping for breath and not the chamber. All around the room were deep and dark alcoves, in which figures writhed. Almost like a nightmare.

 Jadi wanted to run, though his legs shrieked in protest. As he turned, preparing to force his feet into a mad, though self-willed dash to somewhere other than here, he heard a voice. "Help me!"

 "Wil!? Where are you?"

 "Help me!" the voice repeated, much quieter; barely a whisper.

 Jadi glanced at the alcove from which the voice came. As the light of the room paled a bit, he saw Wil standing there.

 "How can I help you?" Jadi whispered.

 "Killl himmmmm." Wil intoned, slowly raising an uncharacteristically stiff arm, pointing his finger at a figure on a stone table in the middle of the room. "He's hurting me."

 Jadi turned and pulled his blaster. With weary feet, he slowly advanced on the figure on the table.

 From behind him came the urgent voice, "Don't wait! Do it now!"

 But still Jadi hesitated. The figure on the table seemed strangely familiar in the half-light. Anyways, Jadi was tending to believe only half of what he was seeing.

 "ARRGGHHHHH! Now! Shoot him!" the voice behind him screamed in agony.

 Jadi half-turned.

 "But that's you, Wil."

 Her hands had merely started with bleeding. Now, the blood was gushing out in huge streams of red. Everything around her, her dolls, her rocking chair, her bed spread, everything was soaked and clammy from the cooling and coagulating blood that had sprung from her hand.

 Angela knew she should be fainting from the loss of blood; and so she did.

 A very comfortable feeling. A feeling she could embrace with ease. "Death is before me today ... like going forth into a garden after sickness." That was how she felt.

 Her father opened the door. "See, I told you they don't exist", he smiled. "It's just you bleeding to death. Now, come to your father, and let me ease your soul and drink your blood. That is what you want, isn't it? 'Like the odor of myrrh, like sitting under sail --'"

 Abruptly, Angela woke up.

 Or maybe not. She was in shadow, when she heard the popping of a champagne cork, and saw half of a table. A shadow next to her formed out of nothing into something, picked a glass from the table, reached across to where a half-full bottle of very fine champagne poured itself into the glass.

 "This is weird." she breathed, finally exhaling after the previous experience.

 "So what else is new?" she finished as she watched the foggy figure disappear along with glass and champagne.

 Emboldened, and thirsty, she went and got a glass. She reached across the table and surprisingly got her glass half-filled with champagne, along with a faint "- you - " which sounded familiar.

 She sipped at her champagne, annoyed at having only half a glass. With the champagne, her vision cleared a bit, and she saw Wil holding the bottle.

 "Hey, Wil. Help me." she said.

 Wil turned fully.

 She saw his mouth move: "-?"

 Angela finished her half-glass.

 "Hey, Wil, help me!" she called.

 Flummoxed, he replied "How?"

 Angela grinned, stuck out the arm that was holding the glass in the direction of the bottle.

 "More champagne."

 Silently, he mused. Was there ever such a thing as a game of chance? When mixing cards, the new constellation depended on the last, as well as the method which was used to mix the cards. When throwing dice, the results of the next throw depended on the way the dice were held, how they were tossed, how they knocked against each other.

 Very deterministic. In principle, at least. Well, to be honest, in one principle at least. Considering how many principles there are which govern the universe(s), or rather the many different versions of the one principle which describes the workings of the universe(s), one must say that all systems are very susceptible to even the mildest of influences, or not, depending on the system. Very chaotic.

 That's why games of chance are interesting: the mixture of possibility and impossibility.

 It is wildly impossible to have 5 Aces in a deck of cards. Unless an Ace was added before, during or after a game.

 Even the possibility of an Ace of Spades being added _after_ a game has some very serious consequences for several temporal card games he had both observed and joined in.

 Everyone has realised the obvious: the past influences the now. What they all forget, it seems, is that the future influences the now as well. In this universe more than usual, being so close to the dreaming state. Long ago, he had entered that dreaming state with Ian and Barbara and his own grand-daughter. It had been a horror trip then as well. The only surprising thing, in retrospect, was that he didn't recall having such great difficulty entering it with his TARDIS. Ah well, at that time, the TARDIS had been in much better shape. Or perhaps he should say a much different shape. Better or worse are such weighted words.

 But all this was still not helping.

 The zero room. He must get everyone into its relative harmonious safety.

 The Doctor got up and prepared to search for the bodies of his other two companions.

 Next person, next chapter, next week.