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The roistering Russian celebrations had come to their end. The last drunken muzhik had rolled away down the hill, the Grey Wolf had been packed off with a final vodka-dunked Bonio, and still the presenters remained unaccountably, though not in the light of recent experience wholly unpredictably, absent. Even the supersensational stage act hired at vast Proprietorial expense by the disappearing duo to cover for just such moments as these had yet to fully meet our discerning Audience's high expectations; and it was ominously clear that neither Boneless L's indefinably flawed take on 70's nostalgia nor their lustily jaw-free rendition of nearly their famous hit _Rah Rah Rasputin_ would be able to hold the fort forever -- however much the restive crowd might feel that it had already. But some few, we like to think, kept the eternal torch of Hope burning in this dark hour; and if such there were, we are pleased to report that their touching faith was about to be vindicated gross-time. The stage lamps stuttered and strobed. The singing lampreys broke off mid-rah and hastily decamped for the rivers of Babylon, or in their cases more likely Berkshire, there to slither down and weep for their worsting at the hands of the Philistines. Then did a fabulous Presence burst, nay even bust, onto the stage. Bleach-blonde hair masterfully coiffed by Messrs Muss & Co. -- fresh warm rope burns in lieu of cold uncaring jewellery -- these mostly revealed by an elegant yet daring banana-yellow ballgown spangled with blue rhinestones that ever and anon spat random sparks of static electricity, the right-hand side of its slit skirts carelessly tucked into the waistband of her Marcel Proust Fan Club knickers -- the long expanse of shapely gam thus exposed, set off with a golden garter that did double bandolier duty for carrying what were presumably emergency rations in 'Rhubarb & Custard' and 'Hellfire Vindaloo & Lager' sachets -- ngh -- nghh -- *nggghhhh* -- ! Which, er, is a classical allusion in Old Low Salacian, from the myth which tells how flashing-eyed Kytherea first invented the nosebleed. Oh yes, indeed indeedy deed! _"Honey,"_ the Musical Box crooned randily, _"sugar sugar!"_ An exaggeratedly feminine cartoon black panther clad in a few strategically placed studded leather straps immediately swooshed through the air to pull the presenter's skirt down. "Ladies, gentlemen, Lurve Daleks, and other styles of sophont too damn' sexy for this salutation -- " Candy Harcourt cried exuberantly from the stage, "That's 'down into its proper alignment'," the Third Doctor warned the Author. __"You are my Candy girl!"_ "-- stand by for our all-singing all-smoking all-stonking presentation of the Best Series/Story Arc award!" Oh, alright then! Kinki's actions were appropriately retconned. _"And you've got me watching you"_ "And it gives me great pleasure to -- 'hem, but to get back to the subject -- " Kinki swooshed back to the bar, growling maledictions against all buttinsky amateur proofreaders. _"In a Fine Art film or two!"_ " -- will you please welcome back my partner-in-crime, my hunkafunky he-man assistant for the Nite, our very own Head Voting Machine Wrangler -- the mighty man himself -- " And with those very words, a huge voting booth rolled onto the stage, drawn by a team of twelve Linux penguins, sporting rather more in the way of leather straps and spiked collars than most Linux penguins are wont. Standing atop it in all his glory was the deplorable Captain Leader, saluting for all he was worth and dancing a frantic little goosestep on the spot. "*Doom, havoc, red justice,*" this apparition bellowed as he accepted the adoration of his devoted public, all one of her, "and MANIFEST DEMOCRACYYYYYY!" "_CAPtain LEAder!_" quoth the MM Musical Box, a la Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. No-one else amongst our jaded Audience took much notice, except for a claque hired by a farsighted management for just such occasions as this. Alas, the claque was instantly suppressed by spontaneous vigilante action. Piqued, the differently good Captain now displayed his overmanly knowledge of how to capture the Masses' attention by drawing his deadly DeSpameters and firing directly into the crowd, picking off one innocent spirit after another. A sudden and profound silence, pierced only by the heartbroken wailing of woman (namely an untimely aquavit-bereaved Benny) ensued. Captain Leader leapt lightly down to the stage, inasfar as one can do such a deed whilst shod in depleted-uranium-heeled jackboots. "I see," he intoned, in tones of awful menace which sounded to certain of those present mysteriously like the Grey Steward of old in Museless psycho-mode, only with the self-inclusive misanthropy turned up to 17, "that this unseemly abbreviation of My Theme has robbed the groundlings of their due respect and terror. *Once more, with feeling!*" The Musical Box sighed the sigh of one much put upon, but after a couple of nervous crackles it cranked itself up and obliged the entire jolly company to drain to its dregs the cup of bitterness and regret, namely by launching into the following jingle as the Co-Host from Hades cavorted on a nightmare-headed hobbyhorse about the stage like, and no surprises here, a mad thing: _"They doubt him, they flout him, they dub his art trash,_ _They die in a space-blaster's nuclear flash!_ _CAPtain Unificated Holy Communal People's Independent Republic of Wellbeloved, Eternally Dedicated to and Inspired by the Quintessential Exquisiteness of the Triply Incomparable Dandy LEAder!"_ The final crashing chords of this scanless wonder met with a wild piratical shield-waving yodel from the loon onstage, and a stunned silence from the audience, partly from those who had no notion which half-arsed totalitarian hell-hole in space was being reffed, and more ominously and significantly from those few who did, and that too well, matey. "That," heckled Ninth, advancing in a no-nonsense manner on the stage with a hand extended in poky accusation, "is about as tasteful as Harry Windsor turning up to a party in full SS fig, except that your Comrade Presterjohn John Thomas Kim Carmody-Park hasn't even had the decency to start pushing up daisies. And may I just add that as stupid villain names go, 'Captain Leader' is the most pathetically stupid I've heard in fifteen hun---" "SUPER AUTARKIC LOVELY PURE BURNING WITH ADMIRATION FOR THE DANDY LEADER LOVE HEART STRIKE!!!" screamed the enraged co-host, hurling his saw-toothed shield through the air with more spin on it than Alistair Campbell on a carousel juggling Catherine wheels. With a dreadful whine it parted the hair of several guests, sheared through the outstretched wrist of the Ninth Doctor, and returned to its wielder, subsiding as it did so into a contented purr. The Doctor's hand flopped messily to the floor. Rose screamed. "OY!" the Doctor howled, holding his spouting stump aggrievedly up in the air. "Tourniquet!" The Fourth Doctor's scarf was immediately confiscated, over the tombstone-toothed one's indignant protest, and applied to the purpose. Marchie Marchant-Ivory flapped his great ears in amazement, and could be heard confiding to Kyra, "And I thought *Toonside* was gratuitously violent..." Candy commenced flogging her partner-in-mayhem with a passing Christmas Squid. "Behave!" she warned him. "Or I'll cancel your subscription to _Big Stamened Orchids_!" Captain Leader let out a wail of horrified despair. "Can such cruelty stand, and the very Earth not rise up against it?" A marked lack of tectonic activity beneath Candy's platform-heeled glass slippers, within whose Mirabiline[TM] platforms a tiny pirate holodrama of _Valentine Does Verona_ continued to play itself out with the grace and discretion appropriate to she who graced them, appeared to answer this tricky conundrum with a pretty conclusive 'Well, *yeah*! Duh!'. Sometimes we think Reality was brought up in a barn, we really do. Meanwhile the Doctor continued to bark instructions at Rose. "Don't just stand there! Jacket right-hand inside pocket, tube of Anti-Maiming Glue, *stat*!" As the detached member was duly Bostiked back into the fold of corporal unity, Candy made shift to calm the rising squalls of popular disgust by explaining, "BUT-T-T-T-T... we wouldn't like anyone to get the notion that we were, like, *supporters* of His Dandy John Thomasship! Actually the costume kind of, you know, ask no questions, fell off the back of an inadequately secret policeman who won't be needing it any more; and we had to infiltrate the dump and dupe the dope, defying death to deliver democracy by -- " "Oh, go on then: chop my hand off *and* pinch my gigs, thanks a lot!" " -- borrowing the unique Wellbelovedian e-voting booth technology, which with a few last-minute adjustments for local conditions is finally making it possible for us to present the most successful That's What I Call an Adrics Award Ceremony 2005 EVER!!!" Candy looked around and frowned at the strange silence which greeted this well-nigh hallelujable announcement. "Yay us!" she added pointedly, and bent down to glare at the groundlings until a sufficiency of weak-willed types had yielded up her due applause for one reason or another. "So without more ado, let's see what sagas of splendiferousness are up for this year's Best Series/Story Arc award! Take it away, Maestro!" The Roberts Master slumped in dejection, and slouched off with his get-out-of-here-with-yer-boom-boom-boom-before-I-call-a-Doc. The ever-chivalrous Captain Leader helped him on his way with a bump o' the boot on the seat, and fished around in his (own) armoured bum-bag, extracting a wodge of screwed-up papers, the oddly ballotlike majority of which he tossed into the air and blasted into glowing ash. The sole survivor he smoothed out, coughed, and proceeded to read: "The first nominee is that sodding great hunk of Red Taffy to which *some* of us have already been drinking more than their wimpy capacity, some alt-Docwalloping or other by that flagrant delicta, that flame-haired succulent succubus of depraved dominance, or to those of us who know somewhat of the Old Church Slavonic bog graffiti, Mistr---" (Here our hero was cut off by unfortunately slipping in the fast-growing puddle of his own drool, a mishap in which he was ably assisted by a well-timed shove from his very own peroxide-haired succulent succubus of etc.) "The _Books of Taliesin_ by Helen Fayle!" Candy announced, looking rather flushed herself and whisking a large privacy screen around them both. A scene began to form upon the screen's scintillant outer surface, upon which the audience concentrated with fanly devotion and a deep wish not to contemplate the festering mass of corruption which writhed and quibbled about rhubarb and custard behind its seemly façade. --- He pitched sideways from the Black Throne, caught by Elphin before he hit the porphyry floor. 'Now perhaps you know why they call that the "Siege Perilous",' Elphin said half-humorously as he helped Kastchei to his feet. 'Are you always this reckless?' 'I had something of a reputation in my youth,' Kastchei admitted dryly. 'Why does that not surprise me?' Elphin's reply was equally laconic. 'That was foolish: those who sit in the chair frequently see more than they intended; they say Morgaine would spend hours in it, making sense of the images.' 'The table is cut from a living branch of the world-tree,' Kastchei said, running his hand over the deep fissure again, looking thoughtful. 'The obsidian throne amplifies the connection, especially when the one sitting in it is dragon-born - and Morgaine's blood was practically pure. Her time-sensitivity was astonishingly acute for one so many generations removed from the first-born. It takes an extremely disciplined mind to touch that of a dragon directly and make sense of it.' 'Was there any truth to the stories that she could see her path through time to take the course she needed?' Kastchei nodded. 'Oh yes. How else do you think she caught me, eventually?' Elphin couldn't resist. 'Given your much-vaunted superiority, I rather thought you _let_ her.' --- Down went the privacy screen: down came protective elder hands over the eyes of the young and impressionable, sparing them the sight of Captain Leader having a thoughtful post-privacy rummage up his capacious nostrils with the crossed segments of a Twix bar, though alas, not sparing us, welladay and what a swizz! Flicking the desecrated chocolate contemptuously to the groundlings, where after some minor unpleasantness it was promptly sequestered in Sixth's capacious pockets for 'a thorough chemical and microbiological analysis' nor never seen no more, His Proximate Supremacy declaimed, "The second nominee is, wossname, a farcical cop comedy which hints at horse-scaring serum-sprayin' sex 'n' violence _en nachos grande_ but meanly and repeatedly fails to deliver, by. by. by That transmarine hillbilly gender-bender who plainly seeks to lead astray the susceptible nature of My Squeeze with invisible psychic rays -- !" Various pieces of electric kit around the stage crackled and fused as a salivary aerosol infiltrated their works. Various diamonds flew from Candy's knuckle-duster as she addressed her opinion of this conversation's trend with a stunning, smashing blow to the small unmasked portion of her cohort's ugly mug, "_Busted_," Candy declared loudly, "by BK Willis!" With a sweeping swirly-thing motion, she replaced the privacy screen about them just as the Kevlar-Klad(TM) green-eyed monster of what we wot surged homicidally upwards for her throat. Ignoring the Batmanoid sound-effects that continued to issue from behind it, the Audience copped (geddit? geddit? Gor blimey, you lot, I've raised more laughs reading the _Critique of Pure Reason_ to Codlingthorpe Working Men's Club on Cup Final night!) THIS.! --- The ambulance pulled up then, just as Nyssa got the last of the rope undone. He answered Tegan as the paramedics rushed over to help him onto a gurney. "It was about dawn," he said, still perfectly -- almost eerily -- calm and rational. "I was out for my morning run. As I passed this alley, I finished off the last of the juice I'd brought with me and I threw the bottle into the gutter..." He trailed off, gaze growing distant again, and for a second Tegan was afraid he was about to slip back into that catatonic trance they'd found him in. But then he spoke again, and there was a strange, almost reverent hitch in his voice. "I did a great wrong, but then... Justice Man showed up. Justice Man saw everything. I was judged on the spot and then..." "Go on, please," Nyssa urged. "And then I was punished." He smiled as he said this, lying on his stomach as a medic swabbed antiseptic on his welts. "I was punished by Justice Man and my sin was purged from me!" Nyssa arched an eyebrow and glanced at the notes Tegan had taken, frowning disapprovingly at the cuckoo-bird doodle she'd drawn beside that last statement. "Okay, sir, I think that will do for the moment. We just need your name and address, then you can give us a formal statement and a description of the perpetrator at the station after the doctors release you." "Perpetrator?" the man asked as they loaded him aboard the ambulance. "Officer, _I_ was the perpetrator. _I_ was the litterbug." "No, no. I mean the person who assaulted you. This 'Justice Man'. I assume you will want to file charges?" "Charges?" The man's expression became positively beatific. "Officers, there won't be any charges. What happened to me wasn't assault. It was..." He sniffled, eyes moist. "It was _justice_!" The ambulance pulled away as Nyssa took another glance at Tegan's notes. There was now a second, larger cuckoo-bird drawn beside the man's parting words. And this time, Nyssa couldn't quite fault her for it. --- Under cover of the general chuckling and Aussie-specific whingeing that followed, the Dire Dyad reemerged from the privacy screen, now both much bedecorated with sticking-plaster, sundry contusions, and spinning crowns of multicoloured stars above their respective nappers. Captain Leader's adamantiumite aegis of invincibility now sported a mysterious bend sinister across its entire diameter, gleaming with the argentine glamour of the finest gaffer tape; Candy wore her left Heel of Spiky Death in a sling; their countenances shared a feral expression which might equally have been a grin or a snarl. Reclaiming the public attention by flaming a random lurker in the rafters with his shocking pink DeSpameter, Captain Leader spake, and spake he thus: "The third nominee is some interminable string of stereotypical anime toss-offs in which the usual suspects put on inappropriate genders and hang around in skyborne sushi bars, at least that's what I garner from feedback having long since killfiled my hated riv--- AAARGH! Willis the Unavoidable *a-g-g-g-gain*!?!" He spun (three times on his jackboot-heel) round on Candy to demand sympathy and a complete account of all her netly transatlantic movements of the Noughties. Alas, this romantic ambition was thwarted by his partner's notoriously limited attention-span, for somewhere into the first clause of his speech that fair lady had whipped out a copy of _Guys with Great Guns_ from her capacious magazine-rack, with which to while away the rest of his sentence. Whether it was the steam rising from her forehead, some Issue arising from the crud-stewn abyssal plains of his own black and midnight psyche, or the simple revelation of that publication's residence so close to our nymph's great big brassy heart, this tale does not tell. What we must report is that with a Cossack-dance of rage and a great hollow cry of the dread incantation 'Flobalobagob!', the Captain began to. change. His features seemed to flush, flow, and deform. A vile unearthly odour, as of some translunary luncheon-meat-based halitosis, boiled suddenly up to sicken and blast the very digestions of every mortal within three rows or so of the stage. Candy flung down her magazine, panic writ large on her every expressive feature, and redrew the privacy screen in haste, hollering as she disappeared into the pinkening gyre, "_Spring Surprise_, by BKWillisaaaarggh!" Even the sophisticated tail of Kyra could be seen, by those who were watching it and we choose to maintain a discreet incuriosity as to their possible motives, to be switching with a definite air of unease, as she reached decisively for the volume switch, in order to drown out the appalling sizzlings, slobberings, and spurious claims to the throne of Scotland that now spat like hot pork fat from beyond the screen of sanity. Thus, and thankfully, the Audience were instead treated to -- --- When he saw the foreigners, the Guide breathed a sigh of relief. Both were still human, so maybe he'd caught them in time to avoid another tragedy. He addressed his warning to the man in the buff coat and Panama hat, who was leading. "No stay here! Very bad if you fall in magical cursed springs!" The man grimaced. "Thanks, but your advice is a bit late." He pushed his long brown curls out of his eyes and sent an icy look at the little blonde woman in brown velvet behind him. "_Isn't_ it, Doctor?" The woman sighed. "Now, Nyssa..." --- ".Chaos Eddy Stewite!" Fourth concluded his urgent explanation to a curious Harry Sullivan, in hammily hushed tones and wiggling his impressive ears by way of conveying the horror, the horror! That giant of naval intelligence paused in his glass-polishing, absent-mindedly to mop his honest brow with the bar-rag in question. "Ugh. But I say, Doctor, I thought that was Trader Grey's dark oppo's eviller alter ego?" "Mmmm?" The Doctor nodded encouragingly. "And. therefore?" "By Jingo, Doctor! You mean to say there's *a whole race of them*???" "Yes! Of course! How succinctly you do put things, Harry!" The Doctor banged his forehead three times ritualistically on the polished bar-counter, his tongue lolling outwards on each downstroke to mop up any handy spillages. "Excuse me. I think I need to go and have a long conversation with a jelly baby - " "Oh, hullo hullo, wait a minute there! Something's up!" Said something proved to be the writhing mass and fume behind the hard-used privacy screen, which was now being taken up lock stock and two steaming spam-gebbeths into the rafters by means of a robotic dureum-alloy net let down from the _deus ex_ apparatus. Kinki revved up her legs to approximately 4800 rpm before shooting forward onto the stage and bouncing gleefully all over it, finally calming down enough to push a little LoveSkull-shaped button on the side of the voting booth. A tasteful little scroll of gold-leaf decorated floral-backed rice-paper slipped out of the machine with an understated whirr. This Kinki automatically raised to her mouth -- visibly restrained herself -- remembered where she was, and doffed the handcuffs again -- and finally, *really* finally, read out the long-awaited result. "And the winner is. Oh, yeah, this is my kind of contest. A surprise *write-in* victor." <dramatic pause> "_Yes! I shudder with a thousand spiritual ecstasies at the privilege of re-endorsing the adorable chicitude of our dear elderbrotherly Dandy Leader, who alone in his incomparably godlike elan conducts us with nonchalant but very large strides towards our paradisiac destiny of Perfect Love and Equality or else! Huzzah!_ Rrrrr. my naughtiness, with 303,543,121 votes!" Kinki shook, among other things, her head. "What a. ".loser! Oookay, I think we can disqualify that one. That means the *real* winner would be the former runner-up, which is. "._No! My imperfect revolutionary consciousness is thanklessly incapable of fully confessing the exquisiteness of the Dandy Leader, and self-critically longs in its very bowels for the administration of a lovingly corrective 30-kilovolt shock!_" The booth expressed some programmed reflex or other by extruding a short thick telescopic spike of ineffable purpose from the centre of its faux-morocco voting stool. "Ooooh, incompetently re-rigged booths, *much*?" Our anti-heroine went with fell intent to assess the possibilities of the unspeakable rod. In the wings, way ahead of her, Kimiko clicked her claws. The reticulum ex machina returned; deposited the Captain and His Squeeze in a groaning, malodorous, and hung-over-looking heap onto the boards; and swiftly whisked Kinki up whence they came, before worse things could befall. Kyra, meanwhile, took advantage of the unavoidable hiatus in stupidity to pick up the fallen declaration and read out Wot We Were All Waiting For, Mush!: "And the winner is -- _Spring Surprise_, by BK Willis!" Captain Leader bounded up, beside himself with envy and wrath, and both of him fell to stoning Candy with a complete Folio Society edition of the works of the Rev Lionel Fanthorpe. "Nyaaargh! Strumpet! Minion! Traitorous thrower of competitions in favour of bulging-bicepped bumpkin beefcake!!!!" Candy whirled her chainsaw protectively around her head, framing the scene in whole blizzards of romantic confetti. "Love you too, O Tosser of Literature, but we didn't even have a ^Hed entry!" "And whose fault was *that*?" shrieked her partner's left enantiomer, in tones of unanswerable righteousness. "Besides," snarled the right, if such a descriptor can justly be applied to such a hemi-anti-hero, "if you hadn't taken a dive on the reprogramming, it wouldn't have matt--- " ".Guy/s," Candy interrupted urgently, "like, *incoming?!*" For now the 'Round hung at a deadly crisis. Whilst every gaze had been riveted upon the surprise-a-minute rigmarole on stage, sinister forces had quietly filed into the bar, surrounding the entire audience. From their fluffy bunny jackboots to their rakish Kill You Quick kepis, they were not something you would like to see, particularly at the wrong end of over-ornate knock-offs of the lethal Vanir energy-halberds, and one guess as to whether or no *that* was the case, hah? "Quicheaters!" Eighth hissed to the Don Magrs poodle with which he had been discussing the more self-indulgent aspects of postmodernism. "This can only mean -- !" "Beloved but erring comrades!" came a high, excitable, strangely engaging voice from the doorway. There stood a short, well-fed Eurasian man in an exquisitely cut black suit that might well have obtained the approbation of Beaux Brummel and Nash their very selves, save and except only a few trifling details such as the haloed hologram of the wearer on the breast pocket, the extraneous lobster atop the tall silk hat, and the Barney's Big Adventure T-shirt over which the whole ensemble was worn. "I *do* hope your more advanced elements might kindly accept our help in earnestly with tears of socially regenerate repentance denouncing their lapse into mortal cosmopolitan egoism-peccadillism? Their families, acquaintances, and random strangers they once sat next to on a CosyTransport will thank them for it!" The First Doctor snorted, strutted forward, and jabbed a stern finger at the logorrhoeac apparition. "And what, precisely, do you mean by this nonsense, h'mmm?" The Dandy Leader's charming smile crimped slightly under the pressure of the Doctor's formidable presence and inexplicable self-confidence. He peered curiously forward, as if straining to recognise something just on the very tip of his cerebrum, and not quite succeeding. Shortly he gave up, and patted the Doctor chummily on the arm. "I think --and don't quote me on this -- it means, 'My name is Presterjohn John Thomas Kim Carmody-Park. You are standing quite close to someone who stole my favourite costume. Prepare to die, unless you can be most awfully amusing.'" His Equality beamed confidingly. "That's rather good, isn't it? I tell you what, you can quote it after all." "Oh no, oh no!" Second declared, flapping his hands in a manner that has never boded no tyrant no damn good. "This won't do at all!" "You're so right!" The Dandy Leader fined himself a pettish smack on the cheek. "Dead men don't do quotes. Ah. Well, let's write it down for posterity, shall we?" Third swept forward like grim death. "Your reign of terror ends here, Carmody-Park!" "For you, for you, true. Don't I *know* you from somewhere?" Fourth said nothing, for he had sent Leela up unseen among the rafters and was surreptitiously confecting a Dialectic Disruptor under his big hat. "There should be another way," sighed Fifth. "But there isn't," remarked Sixth complacently, as they each drew very large Dalek guns from beneath their coats. And so on and so forth. "The Doctor!" screeched the Dandy Leader, getting it and losing it in one single mental act. "Doctors *everywhere*! Mwaaah! Meeep! Kill! Quicheaters! *Let's turn on those love-taps!!!*" And a general melee ensued, the villains' superior firepower and position amply counterbalanced by the presence of Doctors everywhere, not to mention the complete incompetence at hitting named characters inherent in their status as invincible elite stormtroopers. As the bar was thus re-sawdusted with commendable efficiency, Candy had it away upon her twinkling-nailed toes, half a Captain Leader under each arm. The right-hand aspect covered their retreat effectively by whanging the sawtoothed shield right at the Dandy Leader, producing howls of anguish as the wind of its passage blew off his hat and skewed his immaculate toupée. Thereafter was no quarter asked nor given, though many a bold warrior was admittedly laid low by Sarah Jane's scientific administration of a sockful of pennies to the occiput, which is about as near as we're going to get in pounds sterling. And so the grim struggle continued, with a little bit of zip and a little bit of zap and a squiggle of me pen, boom-boom-boom-boom, until finally Magnus and Varne got tired of waiting for their spot and joined in the fray _pro bono publico_, from which point forward the battle was rather brief and most distinctly one-sided. The Dandy Leader was not found amongst the pile of casualties to whom François subsequently went about administering Ogron anaesthesia before ejecting them into the car-park to await collection by the Nameless police force: the prevailing consensus was that he had snuck away like a bad 'un as soon as his fortunes began visibly to ebb, although conspiracy theories were not thin on the ground that he had been surreptitiously carried away to be held for ransom, eaten, tied up with liquorice, etc., as appropriate to the theoriser's favourite suspect. But barely had Sam Jones had time to start up a petition to Free the Wellbeloved One from the reeking dungeons of the tobacco industry (for tobacco is illegal on Wellbeloved, except for the Dandy Leader whose great soul is by definition immune to its addictive and syphilis-inducing effects, wherefore the motivation for his abduction becomes OBVIOUS to any right-on-thinking person!), when the forces of darkness and reaction moved to thwart her! --- [The lights went out and the stage went dark, seconds later columns of fire spouted stage left and right illuminating Magnus and Varne,] Magnus: "Well, here we are again, yet another presentation of the 'Best Dr Who character'." Varne: "We were wondering what we could do to top our previous presentations, but unfortunately human sacrifice was banned on the grounds of being too messy." Magnus: "Before we start, a few words about the proper ways to influence results. Death threats or threats of serious bodily harm will produce the result of us being interested in a serious interview with the threatener." Varne: "The bribes received were welcome but nowhere near big enough to influence us. In fact, one was insultingly low and for a character who was not even nominated. We will be having a word with those idiots after the show." [Darren paled.] Magnus: "There will of course, be no refunds. "Of course I do feel bound to point out that we are not the people to bribe in the first place. Those envelopes are supposed to be tamper proof. I should know, I helped design them, so I can hardly get away with reading the wrong result out." [Magnus waved his hand and a large cinema screen materialised, accompanied by a blackboard.] Varne: "Right, the nominations are: "Davros in "Eternal Flame" by K. Michael Wilcox." --- He grinned broadly. "Here you go, dear." "Doctor, I have sand in my gears again," Davros complained. "This Island of Fire is not what I'd hoped." --- Magnus: "What's the score on that?" [Varne moved towards the blackboard and wrote a 2 in the column labelled 'death threats'.] Varne: "The Imperial Daleks will kill us if Davros loses, and the Dalek Supreme will kill us if he wins." Magnus: "Put both of them down on our to do list. Mr Fisk is a bit more urgent, though. Now, who is next?" Varne: "Next we have Dorothee (Ace) from "In the Café of Reasonable Comfort" by Paul Andinach. "We have the clip here." --- Dorothee grinned. "Let's try that again," she said. "Me Dorothee. You Emma?" The blonde nodded, looking relieved. "The Doctor will be along soon. He had some shopping to do, he said." "And he couldn't let you watch him shopping?" Dorothee asked, raising an eyebrow. "Is he back to being a secretive git, then?" --- Magnus: "What's the score on that?" Varne: "Half a million in hard currency, plus a bowl of petunias." Magnus: "Somehow, I think I have missed a reference somewhere." Varne: "Anyway, next we have Tegan Jovanka in "Busted" by BKWillis. --- "That's right!" Tegan crowed. "Hooray for me! I got to work _on time_, ahead of _you_, and I didn't do _anything_ on the road that you can get on my case about! And to top it off, it's a beautiful day and I'm feeling _great_!" She struck a pose as they entered the office together. "This day will be _perfect_ for me, and I won't hear otherwise!" Jo Grant intercepted them on their way to their desks, the little blonde dashing over with her usual breathless energy. "Great! You two are already here. The meeting starts in five minutes, so you'd better go ahead and get to the conference room." "Meeting?" Tegan demanded. "With who?" "With Commissioner Tiberia, of course..." --- Magnus: "Well, Varne?" Varne: "About two million, I need to check exchange rates to get an exact figure, and a death threat. The union of airline stewardesses seems to be pissed off with her." Magnus: "And the final nominee is?" Varne: "Your favourite villain. "The Master from "Dehumanisation" by Paul Gadzikowski " Magnus: "I always had a soft spot for him. Those conflated plans with so many spots they could go wrong. In my experience, I prefer KISS." Varne: "Lord?" Magnus: "Do not call me lord, Varne, it means Keep it Simple Stupid. Anyway, what's the score on that one? Oops, better run the clip first." --- The more awkward the Doctor became, the more amused the Master became. "1: That's exactly the sort of imposition of one's will on others that you detest when you see it in me. 2: You're hardly at your most compassionate and responsible yourself right now." --- Varne: "The bribes were in currency I have never heard of, but we did get several death threats. plus two cases of grievous bodily harm. Totally garbled though, I am not sure if the threats apply if the Master loses or if he wins." [Magnus took the envelope and opened it.] Magnus: "Well the winner is Dorothee (Ace) from "In the Cafe of Reasonable Comfort" by Paul Andinach. Time to leave, Varne." Prelude - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 - Epilogue - Summary
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