The Unexpected Hero

Trenzalore, Cybers and a Castle

*Rubie's POV*

It was dark when I woke up, but when I glanced at my left wrist to check the time, it was well past time for the sun to have risen. What the hell was going on? More importantly, where the hell was I?

Where was the goddamn Master when you needed him? Just like a man to disappear on you right when you need him.

Oh well, I may as well get up. Seems there's nothing better to do. Can't just sit here and wait for whatever entity to come and murder me in cold blood.

I could be really clever and try to find a way out, or I could just go down fighting. Or I could ignore both of those possibilities and pretend this was just a bad dream, but enjoy it while it played out anyway. Even though somewhere deep within me I knew it wasn't a dream...

So I got to my feet, stumbling a bit because I couldn't see and the ground was a little uneven. I bent down to touch it with my cold hands, curious about its texture. If I was on a spaceship, then why did the ground feel so cold and hard and rocky? Like I was outside? Strange.

I stretched both arms out to my sides, surprised yet again not to touch anything. In fact, I felt a slight breeze brush past me as I stood there feeling like a fool in my flannelette pajamas, realising with every passing second that this was no dream. I didn't need to be pinched to know that this was utterly real.

And if I knew plot lines like this any better, I still would have said I wasn't here to have a nice cup of tea and a biscuit. Someone wanted to kill me. Who, well that wasn't clear to me at this point. I wasn't happy with that fact, but facts are facts. Cold and hard like the ground beneath my chilled barefeet.

"Rubie will turn around and face the Cyber Controller," intones a familiar electronic voice. Of course, when I say familiar, I mean familiar in its uniformity. All cybermen sound the same to me, and they probably always will.

"Rubie will not!" I yell back, trying not to shiver with a deadly combination of fear and the increasingly cold breeze cutting straight through my pajamas.

A cold, metal hand grips my arm tightly. Before I can utter the tiniest sound of protest, I am spun around to meet this "Cyber Controller." Sounds like a bit of a tosser to me.

There's a cyberman holding my arm, though his (though I suppose it could be a her, beneath all that steel, who'd ever know?) Grip is now looser, and if I wanted to I could pull away any time. Finally, after having put it off as long as possible, I glance up to look as the Cyber Controller.

I don't know what I was expecting, but its not what I saw. The Cyber Controller looked just like the cyberman beside me, only the C symbol over its chest, hiding the emotional inhibitor within, was a shade of blood red. At least, I imagined it would have been, in this darkness it was rather hard to tell.

It didn't seem like either of my new pals were going to start the conversation, if you could even call it that. I was the sort of person that hated silence, so I decided to take the initiative.

"What do you want with me?" I asked insolently, wondering how they'd react to that. Too late to take it back now if they decided they didn't need me after all.

"Rubie will lead us to the Doctor," the Cyber Controller states, and its tone is less emotionless. Maybe its emotional inhibitor is glitching?

"Rubie will not!" Lacey would kill me if I did that! Even if I know that he's evil and that all he's going to do is hurt her and there's nothing I can do to help.

Well, if these cybermen can put up enough of a logical argument, maybe I can be persuaded to see things their way. I'm not going to tell them I'm almost sold to their way of thinking just yet though. They need to entertain me a bit more with a nice bout of verbal sparring. Been a while since I indulged in the luxuries of a nice argument. Hope I'm still as good at it as I used to be.