And the power of the people shall come to believe they do rule

[mickey-cops.livejournal.com]

((Continuing from this post.))

In the passageways beneath the park, where a group had gathered to break down a long-closed door, a laser beam was widening, and a broad circle began to blacken the surface of the wood, the locks melting and streaming down in shining rivulets, to puddle at the doorstep. The room was getting hot, now.

Outside, all at once, the rides all stopped. Animatronic figures jolted still; boats bumped each other confusedly; rollercoasters fell to the bottom of their tracks and did not continue up. The lights inside the buildings flickered off; the perpetual background noise of music and soundeffects went silent.

Below, the hole in the door began to crackle and spark around the edges, and for just a moment all the eyes trained on the door could see through it a fathomless darkness. An odd, organic silence filled the air; everyone's breathing and small movements were audible, but so too was a new absence of sound, as though the walls were all holding their breath.

And then the air around the door began to shimmer.

Comments

[hear-the-drums.livejournal.com]

He blinked a few times before hitting the necessary sequence of buttons to shut off the laser.

"That looks..." he struggled for the right word. "Uncomfortable."

[late-born-myth.livejournal.com]

"Thank you. It is, a bit," said the goddess, holding still in her half-back bend, half-clamber, looking like nothing so much as a babysitter who'd tried to climb into the Tunnels O' Fun after a child and gotten stuck in the process. (If babysitters commonly wore chitons and rucked-up dark wool cloaks, and were unreasonably beautiful.) The wing that was half in the darkness had vanished from view, though by its angle it ought to have been visible; she didn't appear to have noticed.

Instead, she was looking down at the puddled metal from the locks, which had begun to send creepers up towards the door in the moments before she'd wedged herself in. They'd stopped, for now, and Psyche said in satisfied tones, "It worked, though."

[caycep]

Cautiously, Cayce approached the door, trying to peer past Psyche. She raised her flashlight and pointed it into the darkness.

[hear-the-drums.livejournal.com]

"Insofar as you've found a way to keep them from putting it all back together again, yes, I'd say you have." The Master stepped forward –though it still makes you a bit nauseous– and carefully looked over the hole, how she'd wedged herself into it. "Not exactly the best position to reach the lock on the other side from, though, is it?"

[mickey-cops.livejournal.com]

The flashlight's beam ended at the burnt far edge of the door: not reflecting back or dying away, but simply going no further. Psyche's shoulder and arm, twisted up awkwardly up and back, were still fully visible, but nothing else was, not even the back side of the door.

It was an odd, living kind of darkness they were peering into - black and impenetrable, but containing a kind of not-quite-color that seemed to shift as you gazed at it; it was rather like the darkness that came when you closed your eyes in a dark room. The light might balk at entering, but it contained a kind of potentiality for light.

The silence that had come when the door opened was still there, beneath all their voices; it was spreading like a low mist in the bottom register of their hearing.

[caycep]

Cayce bent down and twisted a scrap of metal off of one of the rivulets on the floor; it was about the size of a marker pen and still quite warm to the touch. She bent it back on itself and with a quiet "'scuse me" to Psyche, she reached across the goddess and flicked the scrap into the darkness.

[markoftherani]

The Rani rolled her eyes and glanced at the Master. Impetuous, unscientific; so stupidly human and also so very like...

...the other Time Lord who was approaching, causing the Rani to do a double-take.

[mickey-cops.livejournal.com]

There was no sound of it hitting the ground.

[caycep]

"Well. This is sufficiently creepy, isn't it," Cayce observed to no one in particular. "Can someone go grab John Constantine? I bet he'd like to see this too."

[a-lonely-god.livejournal.com]

The Doctor wasn't paying so much attention to Cayce's test as he was to that wing, half disappeared in that strange sort of darkness. He was leaning rather close over the Master's shoulder to see, too, but he couldn't really be blamed for that; physical distance got a bit tricky to judge when you got all spread out in a mind link. -Neither of them had made any motion to withdraw from it.-

He pulled his eyeglasses from his pocket and slipped them on.

"Pysche, could you pull the outside wing in for a minute?" he asked lightly, in an intentionally casual sort of way.

[late-born-myth.livejournal.com]

"Which side is outside?" she queried, glancing over both her shoulders. And then stopped, arrested, at the one that seemed half-missing.

"...Oh." Hesitantly, she reached back with one arm - still visible, why would it be visible and not her wing? - and said, distractedly, "But...I can feel it. I can't..." her hand was waving around in the darkness. "I can't touch it, but it's still there, I can still feel it there."

[a-lonely-god.livejournal.com]

The Doctor frowned, considering, and pulled out the sonic screwdriver.

"Your wings don't exist on the same plane," he said thoughtfully, half in question.

[late-born-myth.livejournal.com]

"No. No, they're - I have to - " she began to wriggle back out, though she kept one arm still poked through the hole, reaching back with the other. She got caught, a little, in her cloak, and her movements became almost panicked till she got both feet under her again, and both shoulders clear.

"Is it still there?" she asked desperately, looking back.

(It was.)

The door hadn't begun regrowing, though all that was holding it open now was one arm to the elbow and one hand to the wrist.

[hear-the-drums.livejournal.com]

"I'd get the sonic screwdriver through that hole," the Master told the Doctor, watching Psyche's wing reemerge from darkness. "It's not like staring into the Void...."

[markoftherani]

"Wait," the Rani interjected. She detached a small remote from her sensor device and pointed it toward the hole. She studied the readings, frowned slightly, and then cautiously extended the device into the darkness.

((As they say in Trek scripts, "insert tech here". The Rani's gizmo scans along the entire electromagnetic spectrum for all types of radiation; it also scans for sound well outside the range of human hearing on either end; and finally for any kind of animal life-forms.))

[dangeroushabits.livejournal.com]

"Careful," John said from the back of the room. It was one of the great mysteries of his life how he so often turned up when conjured by pure coincidence. In this case, after the interesting explosions and whatnot had stopped, he'd got tired of standing around in the dark and came down to see what the hell they'd managed to fuck up down here. "Big black nothings aren't usually as empty as they look."

[hear-the-drums.livejournal.com]

"Really?" The Master dropped his jaw in a campy expression. Then he rolled his eyes. "She can take care of herself." –centuries ago, Magnus had learned the same lesson about this sort of thing (I told you, idiot, she's more capable with a few flora samples, a scalpel and some string than you would be with an entire Academy lab at your disposal complete with assistants) and it hadn't been pretty–

You just didn't talk to the Rani that way unless you were on her level.

Three guesses at which two people qualified.

[markoftherani]

The Rani's primary attention was absorbed in her scanner –and frankly, the "magician" didn't even rate the fifth tier of her attention to begin with– but someone looking closely might have seen the faintest smile flicker across her face.

"And I don't need you to say that for me," she said to the Master, but it wasn't especially venomous. In fact, to the right ears (again, three guesses as to who might be the owners of those ears), it might have sounded almost affectionate.

[dangeroushabits.livejournal.com]

John shrugged. It wasn't the first time he'd been told off by someone with more brains than sense, and if something big and bad and decidedly unbound by scientific principles snatched the woman through that hole and regurgitated what was left in so many slime-covered bits...well, that wouldn't be a first, either.

He also wasn't sure these people had much to be superior about, considering they appeared to have just broken the park without any real idea whether there was anything to be gained from it or if things would right themselves again, but this didn't seem like the time to say so. So he just leaned on the wall and smoked, watching with one hand absently fingering a talisman in his pocket he really hoped he wouldn't have to use.

[mickey-cops.livejournal.com]

Typically for its use in the park, the scanner's readings were more peculiar than helpful. Held outside the door, the data being received concerned everything but the space on the other side: it provided perfectly normal detail about everything to the last molecule on the edge of the opening, but beyond that was nothing. And not the same sort of nothing that was beyond the gates, where "nothing" had been the data received; this was simply a sort of goodnatured utter refusal on the instrument's part to believe that she meant to scan further beyond that point.

When pushed out into the space, though it remained as fully visible as her hand, its effective range shrank instantly to zero. Of the environment it was now in, it reported a temperature of 37 degrees centigrade and a balmy radiation level of 108, the chemical composition being similar to the air outside with a very slightly higher amount of nitrogen and oxygen. But as to what lay before it, or around it, the scanner flatly declined to speculate.

[markoftherani]

She scanned the interior of the room one more time, then reached through the gap one more time, to confirm that the ridiculous, impossible readings were exactly what they seemed to be, and that her equipment wasn't actually broken.

Having confirmed this, the Rani muttered a particularly vile Gallifreyan curse concerning hypothetical unnatural doings of the two founders of the Time Lord society and stepped back.

"Ridiculous. Even the vacuum of space has ambient radiation of one form or another," she snapped.

[a-lonely-god.livejournal.com]

The Doctor wrinkled his nose at the Rani -in the familiar ever-old complaint.-

"That is so wrong. Even in comparison to what's going on right now." He glanced down at her device and suggested thoughtfully; "The outside could be temporally out of phase with us. Or exist on a different spatial plane. Which actually seems pretty likely, when you think about it."

The most obvious planes were ruled out, since the Time Lords would be able to see those, but there was a broad spectrum of higher and lower planes that he could identify with the sonic screwdriver, and any others that were unfamiliar should at least trigger some sort of reading. Though it would still leave them with the question of how to align the two disparate planes of existence, if that turned out to be the problem.

He crouched down and started flicking through settings at a rapid pace and studying the returning information.

[late-born-myth.livejournal.com]

Psyche, having settled down a little from her panic, was now looking rather self-conscious as she continued to hold both hands in the hole. She cleared her throat, and with a quick glance around at all the non-Gallifreyan members of the expedition, said to the Time Lords (and Lady):

"Excuse the interruption; I can see you're a little confounded by what you've found out so far," (she let the "so what else is new around here" go unsaid in both word and tone, as she figured it was pretty damn obvious to anyone paying attention) "but would you mind summing it up for the rest of us? With particular attention to whether you've found anything through there likely to be damaging to normal humans?"

[caycep]

There was a tiny snicker from the direction of Cayce Pollard. Who, contrary to common sense and fed up with the Time Lord superiority act, was about to reach into the gap with her flashlight to wave it around and see what happened.

[hear-the-drums.livejournal.com]

Honestly, the Master wouldn't mind the if the humans did start sticking their limbs around in dark holes. Because at this point it didn't amount to superiority, it amounted to three scientific minds analysing the situation in a way that best suited them. If the rest of the crew didn't like it, they were more than welcome to risk their ordinary, non-immortal human hides as they saw fit.

"We will offer an update as soon as we have gathered enough information to have some sort of general picture." If there was one thing he hated, it was being rushed. "If you would prefer to do a half-arsed job of it, you're welcome to; it might even work. But do us all a favour then, and don't accept our assistance in the future." A brief glance of irritation in Cayce's direction. They didn't need or want the love of the group (at least he and the Rani didn't), but they damn well deserved their respect.

You see? he said to the Doctor, via the link. This is why I don't bother. A little cryptic, but the Doctor would be able to feel the emotions that carried along with the comment. It was clear enough.

Out loud he said, "Anything?"