"Here we go again." I slap my hands together. "I can't wait to learn how to fly the TARDIS."

"Oh, well you'll just have to wait." The Doctor grabs his long brown trench coat I hand to him. "And we might not make it out of here alive, yet."

"Don't be silly, of course we will." I wink. "You're the Doctor and I'm your companion. "What can stop us?"

"Oh, lots of things." He muses. "Daleks, Cyberman, guns..."

"Well something got you mopey." I open the TARDIS door carefully, because I've learnt now that no matter how tempting the situation, it's always better to enter a new world slowly.

This one is in ruins. There's smoldering ruins of rubber and metal. A sort of stinging smell of acid and smoke fills the air. The atmosphere is hot and sticky. A few odd tufts of very sick looking brown grass stick up here and there, underneath the blood red sky.

"This is charming." I rub my hands together, looking around in disgust. "How can anyone live here?"

"Their planet was destroyed. Completely and utterly... obliterated." The Doctor bends down beside a mound of rubble and moves away a large sheet of metal. He sighs and fingers something underneath. When I peer over his shoulder I see it's a young Borsik. Definitely dead. I shiver a little, despite the fact that it's sad.

"Well at least we know what we're up against." He stands back up again and uses his sonic on the ground. "Aha! Footprints. Lousy tracks you leave, my friends. Look at your huge footprint.....s." He adds the s on the end as we admire the hundreds of dints in the earth. "OK, OK. So more than I thought, then." The Doctor surveys the wasteland. "That's OK I suppose..."

"What are we fighting exactly?" I ask, imaging all sorts of alien races - birds with hooked beaks and weird pudgy fat aliens which roll around on scooters.

"Something far worse than we've come up against yet - Cyberman. Metal men. They don't want to obliterate the universe, they want to make everything and everyone like them. A clone universe. They have suits of armour, if you like, protecting their outside. When they make someone like them they have to..." He pauses, staring into the distance slightly.

"What?" I ask, imaging some sort of reprogramming.

"Uh... they strip away everything else, and cram the vital organs into a metal suit that just functions purely on energy alone. That's probably why they love this planet."

"Oh, gross." I screw up my face. "Wouldn't that be... painful?"

"That's why we don't get caught." He spins around dramatically and jumps backwards as a metal arm comes into view.

"Explain your origin." The - what I'm assuming is a Cyberman - says. Its voice can only be described as metallic, almost like a Daleks. Kind of like Darth Vader. 3 ports that serve as its mouth light up every time it talks. And it has sort of like a handle thing that stretches from each ear.

"Oh, hi. Yeah we're here to help." The Doctor says unconvincingly. If all else fails, he just seems to start blathering out anything. I almost smirk, then remember the danger we're in. "Uh... your energy readings on this planet are off the scale! Don't you think it would be safer for you to sort of... move on? I mean you can see the air sort of shimmering now and then can't you? There's tonnes of radiation in the air. You go playing around with a lot of things metal and you're going to wind up dead."

"Cyborg Kan decrees we stay here until the portal is complete." It says in the same monotary tone. I'm guessing along with everythig else, it also can't feel or exhibit emotion.

"He has given me permission to delete any unknown life forms on this planet Borat." He holds up his gun.

"Hang on a moment." The Doctor puts his hands in the air. "Not to be disrespectful at all but this Cyborg Kan sounds like a real thick nut...Heh." He laughs outrageously. "Get it?" He says to me softly.

I roll my eyes. "Hello - Cyborg about to kill us here."

"Sorry." He stops laughing. "But seriously - what do you mean by portal? Where are you going next?"

"I am not authorised to tell you. You will be deleted." It says flatly, raising its gun again.

"DUCK!" A voice behind us commands. Without a second thought we jump to the ground and there's the sound of an explosion and the Cyborg falls backwards with a bullet in its chest. The Doctor kneels beside it, watching the beeping light on its chest slowly start to go out, and pulls out the bullet lodged in its metal armour. He looks around to see nobody behind us.

"Ah, gold tipped." He nods approvingly. "This one was part old technology then. They must be getting desperate if they're using old upgrades. Would have thought they'd be onto something like reinforced steel." He runs his finger around the bullet.

"Uh.. .gold?" I ask cluelessly.
 
"Well on the old Cybermen, it used to shus down their respitory system, so to speak because of its un corrodible nature..." He swivels around as footsteps sound behind us. I look around and see another Cyberman - presumably our rescuer - come at us cautiously before lowering its weapon slightly.

"Hello there!" The Doctors says cheerily. "You must be new to the program then. I'm the Doctor, this is Darcy."

"Greetings humans." It says. Though I'm no genius, I detect a slightly different wavelenth in its voice. The Cyberman's voice had been monotary and flat, where as this one rises and falls with the use of inflection.

"Ah, you're not a Cyborg are you?" The Doctor moves around, tapping on the metal armour. "You can't be. You wouldn't have killed one of your kind because you felt compassion or even anger. Because they don't feel anything, just the need to kill. Who are you?"

"Well I should think you'd thank me for saving your life." It says with a small jerk of its gun. "I'm completely human, but I made this suit out of the ruins. Well, the first one I made was from the odd bits and pieces lying around but when I killed my first cyberman I took apart its metal armour and made myself a proper suit. Fools them every time."

"That's... brilliant." The Doctor says admirably as the human/cyberman walks over to the dead cyborg. He crouches beside it and sighs. All of a sudden there's a feeble beep. I jump about half a meter away and stare at the ground. 

"...Cold..." The Cyberman stutters.

"Well it's part new technology because it's still alive. We'll have to fix that." Our rescuer says.

"Wait!" The Doctor springs forward but our friend rips off the metal plate on the Cyberman's chest. I look over, intruiged, to see a few slimy things hanging out.

"Oh... gross. Is that... flesh? Ugh." I make a face and suck in an air full of breath.

"Let me do that." The Doctor roughly pushes the human/cyberman's hands away and puts his own into the gooey mass of dripping organs. "I'm sorry." He sighs to the cyberman and uses his sonic to stop the rapid flashing light. It deactivates and completely powers down. It's arms, which were slightly in the air fall back to the earth.

"You alright?" The humanoid - yeah that's what I'm calling it - asks me. I break my stare away from the morbid pile of stuff with a small shrug.

"Just peachy... I don't have a strong stomach. What's your name? And how did you get here anyway?"

"Oh good one." The Doctor puts his sonic back and stands up. "Yes, what is your name and... how did you get here? Do you work for Torchwood?"

"You can just call me Stan. And please. Like I could be bothered with that puny bunch."The Cyberman starts walking back the way it came from. "No I was space traveling. I sort of crash landed here unintentionally. It wasn't a bad planet to crash land on, mind you - plenty of energy - the only thing lacking is a way off this dump." He kicks a pile of metal on the floor.

"Oi! This is a planet!" The Doctor says hotly. "And it had aliens inhibiting it too, before the Cyborgs forced them all to evacuate."

"Oh yeah, the Borsik. There was nothing any of us could have done. They simply came too fast and there was far too many of them."

"But what are the Cyberman building? Some sort of portal? To get out of here?"

"They want to go back to the planet with all the people." Stan says with a shrug. "Earth, of course. There's billions of us. Can you imagine a race with a billion more cybermen?"

"They'd certainly take over all the other planets." The Doctor muses. "So we just get in there and stop them. You've got the armour, you could penetrate the base and just shut down this portal."

"But it's not that simple." Stan leads the way into his rapaired spaceship. I can't help feeling like I've seen it before, but I shake off the feeling. Of course I haven't. "Poor old thing." He pats the mended spaceship. "This thing was a real beauty before it was destroyed. But yes, you see I kind of need... something else to power my space ship. A portal that big to transport an entire cyborg race somewhere has got to leave some sort of power traces that I can pick up on."

"You were just going to let the Cyberman come to earth while you re-powered your ship!?" The Doctor asks in disbelief.

Stan snorts, meeting the Doctor's intense gaze with his metal eyes. "Do I look like someone who would just let the entire human race die? It's not like that." He sighs. "I don't have the resources. I don't even know how they're planning on creating a portal out of... nothing." It sits down on a box in the centre of the room and puts its heavy metal head in its hands. "I'm just 1 person... I guess I was afraid of going in there alone. But I thought if I could catch them up with my spaceship when they started the teleportation process... I could blow a hole in the entire portal and blow it up in the transportation process."

"That would kill you..." The Doctor nods, understanding. "And... all the Cyborgs - destroying the portal would mean you'd go into a time lock."

"Sorry to interrupt the nerd bonding process." I frown. "Portals? Teleportation? And what's a time lock?"

"It's a... time lock." The Doctor searches around for words I can understand. "It's like a universe inside a universe."

"No one can get in, and no one can get out. Ever." Stan finishes. "They freeze in time."

"There's got to be another way." The Doctor says thoughtfully.

"Well I don't see any other way of getting off this God-forsaken place do you?" Stan asks angrily.

"Can we build some suits like yours in a few hours? Then we can all go together." I suggest.

"Oh, good thinking." The Doctor pats me on the head. "Knew I liked you for a reason."

"Yeah you keep forgetting." I say lightly.

"It can be done." Stan says eagerly. "But we have to hurry. There's been massive power surges lately. Whatever they're building, it's almost finished.

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