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

Below...

[late-born-myth.livejournal.com]

Psyche lunged towards the hole, heedless both of the path of the laser and the dust particles and rivulets of metal starting to drift back towards the door. She wedged her shoulder and half her upper body into the the opening, and they ceased their motion.

Blinking back at the laser, neck craned around and looking fairly absurd in the ungainly half-in-half-out position she'd managed to get herself into in the three-foot diameter opening, she squinted and then asked in a rather strained voice, "Would you mind...?"

[hear-the-drums.livejournal.com]

The Master gaped, head tilting slowly to one side. "What?"

Granted, immortal was immortal, but really.

Above...

[a-lonely-god.livejournal.com]

The Doctor froze in the darkness of the radio booth, and his hands went automatically to the controls for the loudspeakers and Cayce's music system, flicking switches on and off rapidly. Nothing happened, and after a moment he slumped back in the chair with something like shock, turning his eyes upward at the darkness between him and the ceiling.

Master?

[late-born-myth.livejournal.com]

"...Switching that off, now? Please?" she finished, grimacing (prettily) and sounding a bit testy. Her skin was starting to tingle, in what she remembered as the way it had in the days she was still capable of getting sunburned.

[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."

[hear-the-drums.livejournal.com]

The Master could hear him, and wasted no time in filling his head with the odd –wrong– images he was presently receiving. But that wasn't the reason the Doctor had reached out, and there was no more time to play games.

Maybe you should come down here.

[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?"

[a-lonely-god.livejournal.com]

Coming, he whispered, and stumbled in the dark and out of the room and down the stairs.

As creepy as the park could be before, it was twice as eerie now, in the silence and stillness and darkness of everything powered off and dead. -This is what an amusement park looks like after all the amusees go home.-

People were standing in doorways wearing confused or anxious or resigned or a dozen other expressions. He ignored them, but as he neared the door that would lead him down to the others, he belatedly he remembered the communicator, and raised it to his lips.

"Fett, if you can hear me… you can tell anyone who asks that there's a hole in the door."

Even in the dark it wasn't hard to find his way, following the steps the Master had taken earlier and heading toward the presence of more Gallifreyans than he'd felt for years. Or would feel again.

He came into the room just as Psyche finished speaking.

[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.))

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

As the park fell silent, Una stopped just short of pulling the pin on her last grenade and let her hand fall to her side. She held her breath for a moment and closed her eyes, waiting for the jerk sideways through the megaflow...

And nothing happened. She opened her eyes again and turned to Sam.

Who was still a llama. She had half-expected, though she couldn't have said why, that he'd have been changed back now, but no; still shaggy, brown, and quadripedal.

"Well now," she said, and couldn't think of anything else.

[iron-and-latin.livejournal.com]

Sam looked around at the still, silent and dark wreckage they'd created. He didn't know what he had expected, but…

"That's it?" he asked, voice sounding over-loud in the stillness. "Just… oops, we broke it?" His big llama eyes went wide. "What if we're still stuck here, but now with nothing working?"

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

Una smiled thinly, but there wasn't any humour in it. "Well then, we'll really be in trouble, won't we?" She cocked her head, glancing up at one of the nearby speakers. "They're probably offline too, aren't they? And the phones. Otherwise I expect we'd have heard a report from the Doctor by now." She chewed thoughtfully on her lower lip. "Suppose we could go search for him—them. And see what's up below. Or ... we wait." She turned a full 360 degrees, surveying the silence and the wreckage. "It feels like everything is waiting, doesn't it?"

[iron-and-latin.livejournal.com]

"Maybe big SIS just got annoyed with us and left," Sam continued, almost not heeding anything Una had just said. "That would be pretty typical of this place, with its brother from the past who you have to tell that his dad's dead, and its demon played by Johnny Depp who looks like the demon who killed your mom, but oh whoops, he's actually kind of a nice guy, even though he's a damn demon, and it turns out that Holy Water in his Universe is much more powerful so you just crippled him for life- or existence- or whatever, and you better feel guilty about that for a good long time, you stupid kid, and its romances with TV characters, and its, whoops, now your brother's gone and we think he might have turned into a duck of all things, and its actors who are going play Cylons someday and doesn't that just fuck everything all to hell, and its damned homicidal wack-job of a psychic alien whose idea of an interesting afternoon is stealing your blood and then making you relive the worst moments of your life over and over and over while you're still awake, and if this whole thing goes post-apocalyptic and we start eating each other, the llama's going to be the first to go, and I don't want to die a camelid!"

His voice as he spoke got more and more rushed and panicked, and by the end he was practically hyperventilating. There was a sense he would have gone on if he'd had enough breath to keep speaking. And what made it worse, really, was the vaguest sense that if that watchful element of the park was still there somewhere, it was probably just amused at the sight of a llama having a full-blown panic attack.