Exterminate!
Their screams still echoed in her ears as she ran. She had to get as far away from them as she could. Her heart was pounding a frantic, desperate beat throughout her body as her lungs burned, crying out for more oxygen. She struggled to breathe through the sobs that racked her body. All she could see was the death that had surrounding her only moments ago; the faces of a hundred screaming, tortured souls being torn from their existence on this planet. Why? That was the only thing she could think. Why had they done this? Why had they chosen here? Why now? Why this? Her legs begged for rest, pleaded for her to stop running, but she couldn't. She had to flee.
Craft Note The wedding dress is introduced with studied casualness — "it didn't help" — but it carries enormous weight. Lucy will wear it for the entire story. It's the costume she had on when she lost her fiancé, her guests, her father. The story never gives her a change of clothes because there is no pause long enough, no safe enough moment, for her to become someone other than a bride who survived her own wedding. , or at least it had been, before they arrived.
"LUCY WAIT!"
She recognised the adolescent voice calling out to her and looked back. The root of one of the monolithic trees collided with her still running feet and she found herself hurtling head first for the floor. She wasn't sure if she had blacked out, but the boy to whom the voice belonged was immediately at her side, panic etched into his young face. Gabriel, his name was; he had been her ring-bearer.
"Lucy! Lucy! Are you okay?"
Her head was throbbing, she was cut and bleeding everywhere she looked, her ankle felt like it was being bludgeoned with something large and heavy and she had just witnessed a hundred or so people massacred in under a minute.
"I'm… I'm fine. I think I twisted my ankle though."
She struggled to sit up, but managed with Gabriel's help. Her heart was still beating a furiously and her breath was still short and sharp. She tried to calm down.
"How did you get out, Gabe?"
"Hid under the altar until those… Things… Left. I saw you duck out through the wine cellar, so I followed you."
He was whispering, and kept looking around, much like a wildcat. It scared her.
"Did they follow you?"
"I don't know. I heard them shouting a little ways back. Those voices…"
A look passed over the thirteen year old boy's face – terror. Sheer, unadulterated terror of the kind Lucy felt. She knew, in that moment, that he too could still see the faces of the dead, could still hear the screaming. It broke her. Until now, adrenaline had kept her grief at bay, but now – Now it washed over her like a solar storm of the kind they got back home on World-Internal · Planet Andrazi Lucy's home world — not Earth, but a human colony planet far from it. The story establishes it has its own star (Proximus), its own cultural institutions (the Ancient Earth Museum), and its own regional identity. Lucy is recognisably human but culturally distant from Earth, which is why she knows what a plunger and a whisk look like only from a museum field trip. . She grabbed the boy and pulled him close, holding him tight and hoping he would understand that she was there with him. He cried, soft and almost silent, while his fingers dug into her shoulders with all the pain he could not bear. Her eyes remained dry; the screams wouldn't let her weep for the lost.
Neither of them knew how long they sat there, huddled together, praying that this would all be a bad dream. Eventually, Gabriel spoke.
"I thought they were a gag at first. You know one of Uncle Lucian's practical jokes… I mean, Fan Lexicon "Salt-Shaker" The long-standing fan nickname for Daleks, derived from their distinctive silhouette: dome head, cylindrical body, and ringed skirt. The description dates to their first appearance in 1963, when viewers found them simultaneously terrifying and, on reflection, slightly ridiculous-looking. The story uses it precisely as Doctor Who always does: to establish the gap between how the Daleks appear and what they actually are. → TARDIS Wiki: Dalek "
The mention of her fiancé ripped through her, bringing with it flashes of his dying face. She never heard his last words to her.
Craft Note · Foreshadowing This line does double work. Immediately, it describes the Daleks — the harmless-looking salt-shakers that just massacred a hundred people. But it will also describe the Doctor, who arrives in a blue box, mutters about Dorothy, and names his ship "Sexy." The story plants its thematic key early: the most dangerous things — for good or ill — tend to look ridiculous first.
"Do you think he meant those things?"
"I don't know…"
She didn't want to think about Dad, or Lucian, or anyone who was in the cathedral. Right now, she just wanted a way out; off this planet and back to Andrazi. She looked around for the first time in a long while. Thankfully, they weren't in a clearing. The trees, with their giant leaves, formed a canopy overhead that protected them from even the sky. She suddenly remembered why she had chosen this place for her wedding; the leaves trapped the light of Proximus during the day and radiated the excess energy at night. The forest glowed, a pale, magnificent orange – The Forest of Gold. She had even consented to have journos there, because she knew the pictures would be stunning; on every newsfeed throughout the galaxy. People could call her talentless for being a reality-stream star, but no one would deny that she had a talent for creating unforgettable experiences. She almost laughed at the irony, but suddenly her mind was overcome with the faces of the dead and dying.
"Lucy! Are you okay?"
She tried to shake it off. She was back in this unforgiving reality. Back in the place where all she had known and loved had been destroyed by demons in metal shells. She finally broke down.
"Why? WHY?! What did they want?"
Gabriel stayed silent. She tried to get a grip on herself. If there was to be any hope of surviving this nightmare, she had to get a grip. She looked up at her ring-bearer and found him deep in thought. When he finally spoke, it was slowly and deliberately, as if he was trying to solve a maths problem.
"I think… They were – are – looking for something. The black one said something about a key. And, um, a starlight bridge? Or stardust, I'm not sure."
Well that made no sense. Couldn't they just have asked? To Lucy, it seemed as if the monsters had been created for the express purpose of killing anything that wasn't like them. It sickened her. And then, for what seemed to be no reason at all, Gabriel brightened up.
"I've still got your ring! Hang on."
He fished it out of his pocket and handed it to Lucy, chuffed with himself for having done his duty. It was a simple, but elegant band, made from original Earth platinum; incredibly rare these days. Even rarer was the diamond, set perfectly into the top. It refracted the light from the trees in a way no other diamond ever could. Legend had it that the diamond had fallen from the heavens to Earth in the 21st century where it was found by a man with many faces. He had called it the Doctor Who Canon White Point Star A Gallifreyan crystal — the rarest diamond in existence, existing nowhere in the universe except on the Time Lord homeworld Gallifrey. In "The End of Time" (2009), the Master used one as a signal anchor to begin drawing Gallifrey itself through the time lock. The story places a fragment of this same diamond in Lucy's wedding ring, giving the Daleks' search a canonical motive: it's a fragment of Gallifreyan technology that could open pathways across time. → TARDIS Wiki: White Point Star , and he used it to call across the stars to another world. Later it was cut into six smaller diamonds, the only diamonds of their kind in all the universe. This one had been in Lucian's family for generations. Lucian had said to her that no matter where she was in the Universe, if she had the ring, he would find her. She kissed the ring and wished he could find her now.
"Lucy, did you hear that?"
Silence had fallen over the forest; not even the wind made a sound. Lucy looked around. Even the light from the trees seemed dimmer. All around them, darkness seemed to be approaching. Gabriel stood up. Lucy tried, but her leg shot sharp tendrils of sheer agony through her body and she fell once again. Gabriel lifted her up and she supported herself on his shoulder. The only things she could hear were heartbeat and Gabriel's quickened intake of air.
Something moved behind them, almost – but not quite – dragging on the floor. The two of them turned to face it, whatever it was. She stared through the trees, hoping to find some sign of movement, of humanity. She only found darkness. And then that terrible, screaming voice echoed through the forest.
"The human female has the Fragment."
It clicked. The diamond; they wanted the diamond for this bridge key thing. She held it up, and called out to the black, hoping that they were reasonable.
"Here! If you want it, you can have it. Just let us go! Please!"
The silence was absolute. Nothing moved or made a sound for what seemed like ages; she even held her breath. In her mind, she prayed. She wasn't even religious, but she prayed.
The monster emerged from the shadows. She could see why Gabriel had thought they were a practical joke. It had no legs, just a skirt of half spheres; no torso or thorax, just an extension of its armour that ended with a domed head, decked with two white lights that looked like ears and an eye-stalk that glowed blue. Instead of arms it had what looked like a Alien Perspective Dalek Manipulator Arm & Gunstick Lucy describes the Dalek's manipulator arm as a plunger and its energy weapon as a whisk — because she knows these objects only from a school trip to the Ancient Earth Museum on Andrazi. This is elegant worldbuilding: the narration stays in her perspective even when describing canonical Doctor Who monsters. To her, these are historical kitchen tools. To the reader, they're immediately recognisable. ; she remembered those names from a field trip to the Ancient Earth Museum on Andrazi when she was little. It looked harmless, but she was more afraid now than she had ever been in her life. It glided closer, and then stopped. When it spoke, it screamed.
""
Instinctively, she ducked, pulling Gabriel down with her. Two bursts of fiery hot blue light crackled through the air over their heads. It would fire again, she knew it. Gabriel grabbed a rock and hurled it at the creature. Had it landed anywhere else, the action would only have served to anger it. Instead, the rock collided miraculously with the monster's eye-stalk.
"My vision is impaired! My vision is impaired!"
Lucy turned to Gabriel.
"We need somewhere to hide!"
"Well, the Energy Mill is at the bottom of the hill by the river."
"Then let's GO!"
Gabriel helped her up and they ran. Every step was agony, but she couldn't give a damn at the moment. She just wanted as much space between her and that thing as she could get. They stumbled through the forest as fast as they could. She could hear them closing in around them and willed herself to go on.
They broke through the treeline and into the blue light of the twin moons. The Energy Mill loomed over them, a behemoth of human ingenuity and engineering. Lucian's father had designed the technology that had made this place possible. The water on this planet was imbued with the energy that the trees radiated. Lucy didn't know how it all worked, but she knew that the Mill extracted the energy from the water, making it safe to drink and at the same time providing power for the colony.
"EXTERMINATE!"
Lucy and Gabriel ran faster. They crashed through the Mill's massive doors and into the vast interior. The place was, thankfully, empty of people. Before her lay row upon row of colossal energy storage units. She suddenly had a very good idea.
"Gabe, I need you to look around for an energy coupling. Make sure it's got a ton of insulation."
Gabriel looked from her to the battery and understood. He let her go and ran off, around the corner. She could hear him searching for almost five minutes, making a terrific racket. He came back victorious though, and handed her the three foot long coupling. It was a black bar, about as thick as a bottle of wine, and on either end was an intricate device that resembled a wine glass, albeit one with a large spike in the centre. She had seen a docu-stream, one of those survival-in-space ones, where a man had used one of these batteries and a coupling to jump start a space ship. Her plan was similar, she guessed, and if it worked then she would be able to fight these monsters off. There were literally thousands of these little Fusion-S batteries here.
She remembered the ring. Lucian would be proud of her. She turned to Gabriel.
"If you see one of those things, point the coupling straight at it, okay? I'll ram the battery into the other end and we'll blast that thing all the way back to hell."
The teenager smiled nervously. Lucy hugged him. Finally, there was hope.
"Thank you Gabe."
He didn't respond, but when she let him go he seemed almost cocky, like he thought he could do anything. She clutched her wedding ring and thought one simple thought. If you want it, I dare you to come and get it.
"The humans have been located! Exterminate!"
The voice had rent through the air suddenly and violently, knocking any and kinds of arrogance from her mind in an instant. That inhuman, soulless scream terrified her once more, bringing with it all the images, all the faces and all of the pain.
She started to tremble as she stood there with a teenage boy, looking down the corridor of power sources and waiting for the inevitable. The inevitable arrived. It glided toward them, almost gracefully, entirely without fear. But it did not fire.
"EXTERMINATE!"
She didn't know how, or why, but she was suddenly calm. It would end, one way or another she reasoned.
"Gabriel! The coupling!"
Gabriel did nothing. The monster was drawing nearer.
"GABE!"
He snapped out of it and finally pointed the soon-to-be-business-end of the black bar at the creature. Lucy looked right into the monster's glowing blue eye-stalk and smiled.
Craft Note · Genre Payoff The story has been loading this moment since its title. Every time a Dalek screams "EXTERMINATE" the word has been associated with horror and helplessness. Lucy's three-word reclamation of it — cool, quiet, aimed — inverts that entirely. The reader has been trained to hear that word as threat; now it's defiance. The story earns this in a single line.
She plunged the battery, red-cap first, into the back of the coupling.
A thunderous, white hot bolt of beautiful lightning burst forth from the coupling and connected with the monster. Lucy couldn't see or hear anything for several seconds after the instant that her makeshift weapon had fired. It was all whiteness and noise.
She closed her eyes and tried to shake off the ringing in her ears and the black spots that were popping in her eyes. All was quiet. She looked up and found the monster. It was still.
Gabriel, on the other hand, was shaking. He looked shell-shocked, and was staring at the coupling with utter disbelief.
"That… Was… Awesome."
He burst out laughing; the kind of laugh that is unique those who have just been through hell and come out of the other side, shaken but okay. Lucy hugged him once more, and suddenly found herself laughing and crying at the same time. They were safe. They would survive. She could go home.
"Human technology is useless! We are supreme!"
Every good, hopeful thought was wiped from her mind. She didn't need to see it, to know that they were as good as dead. Her arms were still around Gabriel's neck. She gripped him tighter. This was the end, but she could not give up hope. She closed her eyes and gripped the ring tighter than ever. She knew that Lucian wouldn't find her, but she begged the Universe for someone, anyone who could help them.
The sound was faint, but it grew louder; a slow, steady oscillation of immense, timeless power. The monster advanced.
"EXTERMIN – "
It was silenced by the resounding BOOM that filled the air. It sounded like something very large had just fallen from thin air. Lucy opened her eyes and looked over. The monster had disappeared. In its place stood a box. A blue box, with windows, doors and a little light on top. Lucy couldn't help but stare.
Craft Note · Tonal Shift The Doctor's entrance is a masterclass in Doctor Who's signature register. The story pivots from horror to comedy in four sentences — the man who just materialised his box on top of a Dalek is mildly puzzled about the floor height. The contrast is not accidental; it is the point. Doctor Who has always used the Doctor's absurdist cheerfulness as a pressure valve after horror. It earns its laughs by taking the horror seriously first.
"That's strange. She doesn't usually get the height of the floor wrong."
Somehow Lucy understood that "she" was the box. The man patted the door, as if consoling "her". He looked down and saw the plunger-like arm that was sticking out from under the box.
" Although you could have told me."
He was positively bouncing with excitement, and had yet to notice the two terrified souls who were still staring at him.
"Wait a minute! That makes me Dorothy! I liked Dorothy. She had spunk. Oooh that's a good word. Spunk."
He suddenly turned and pointed straight at Lucy.
"Tell me, is your name Glinda?"
"Uh… no. It's Lucy."
He strode up to her and Gabriel like he owned the place.
"Good name, Lucy. I like Lucy. Just stay out of cupboards, you could get lost."
He was mad, Lucy decided, and Gabriel seemed to agree. But still, there was something about him that put her at ease. In the back of her mind, she remembered what her dad used to say. The most dangerous things in the Universe look harmless, even ridiculous. But something could be both dangerous and good, right? She didn't know why, but this man seemed like a good man. Mad, but good.
He stopped in front of them and smiled, like a naughty child.
"Now, Lucy. Toto. Did anyone here call for help?"
Tell Me a Story About: A clandestine rendezvous. | Genre: Thriller/Horror | Style: 3rd Person Narrative (Past Tense) | It Must Have: 1) A wedding ring 2) A diamond 3) A celebrity. 4) DALEKS! | Someone must say: "It's the wicked witch"
The Whoniverse
The world Lucy inhabits: its rules, its technology, and where it sits in the Doctor Who universe
Gabriel overheard the Daleks mention "a key" and "a starlight bridge" — which the story connects to the White Point Star fragment in Lucy's ring. In canonical Doctor Who ("The End of Time," 2009), the White Point Star was used by the Master as a signal anchor to begin drawing Gallifrey through the time lock. A fragment of this diamond could, logically, serve as a bridging key between locked or sealed temporal locations — hence "starlight bridge."
The Daleks want it as a tool for spatial/temporal conquest: a key that can open passages between sealed points in time. The story wisely keeps the details abstract; what matters is that the object on Lucy's finger is cosmically significant, and that she has no idea.
Andrazi is a human colony world — recognisably human culture, with its own star (Proximus), its own institutions (the Ancient Earth Museum), and its own regional identity distinct from Earth. The detail of the museum matters: Lucy knows what a plunger and a whisk look like because she saw them in a display case. Earth is ancient history to her, exotic enough to be museumified.
This is a quietly ambitious bit of worldbuilding. The story takes place in a future where human civilisation has spread across the galaxy, Earth is a cultural relic, and a wedding on a forest planet can be attended by journalists broadcasting to "every newsfeed throughout the galaxy." The Daleks haven't changed; the humans have spread. The story uses this to reframe the Doctor's arrival: he's not rescuing humans on Earth, but humans far from home.
Lucy is a reality-stream star — the far-future equivalent of a reality television celebrity. She's used to being watched, to crafting experiences for public consumption. She chose this forest specifically because "the pictures would be stunning; on every newsfeed throughout the galaxy." Her professional instinct is spectacle.
This background makes her survival arc more interesting. A celebrity who designs experiences finds herself in one she cannot control; a person whose job is to perform publicly is reduced to hiding in a forest in a ruined wedding dress. The celebrity detail also satisfies the challenge requirement ("a celebrity") in a way that is narratively functional rather than incidental — it tells us something about who Lucy is.
The Forest of Gold is named for its trees' behaviour: they absorb the light of Proximus (the local star) during the day and radiate it at night as a pale, magnificent orange glow. The forest is Lucy's wedding venue — chosen for its beauty and photographic potential. After the massacre, it becomes simultaneously a sanctuary (the canopy hides them from Daleks patrolling by air) and a hostile terrain (she's running through it in a wedding dress with a twisted ankle).
The Energy Mill at the forest's edge is powered by this same tree-energy system, filtered through the river. The mill is where Lucy improvises her weapon. The setting is not decorative; the world's ecology produces both the monster's hunting ground and the survivor's weapon.
"The most dangerous predators in the Universe look harmless, even ridiculous. They kill you while you laugh at them."
This is the story's thesis statement, delivered as inherited wisdom. It applies immediately to the Daleks — salt-shakers that annihilated a wedding party in under a minute. But the story plants it as a two-edged truth: the Doctor, who arrives in a comedy police box and immediately starts monologuing about The Wizard of Oz, is also dangerous. Lucy intuits this: "this man seemed like a good man. Mad, but good." Dangerous and good are not mutually exclusive. Her father taught her half the lesson; the story teaches her the other half.
The Craft
How the story is built, what it's doing, and what it leaves open
The challenge specified: a wedding ring, a diamond, a celebrity, Daleks, and the phrase "It's the wicked witch." Each is integrated rather than stapled on. The ring isn't decorative — it contains the White Point Star fragment and is the Daleks' actual objective. The diamond is the same object. The celebrity is Lucy, and her celebrity status shapes her character architecture. The Daleks are the story's engine.
The "wicked witch" line is perhaps the most inventive solution: rather than assigning it to a human character (the obvious move), the author gives it to the Doctor, looking down at a Dalek crushed under his TARDIS — which is both funnier and more characteristically Doctorish. The challenge requirement becomes a character moment rather than a box-tick.
Doctor Who has always operated in multiple registers simultaneously: the show can be genuinely terrifying in one scene and comedic in the next. This tonal range is not a flaw but the show's specific achievement — it proves that horror and comedy are not opposites but neighbours, and that moving between them quickly is a form of emotional intelligence.
This story executes the shift with real precision. The horror is earned first: a massacred wedding, a child's terror, a twisted ankle in a bridal gown, Daleks hunting through a glowing forest. None of this is played for laughs. Then the TARDIS materialises on a Dalek, and the Doctor wanders out muttering about Judy Garland. The comedy works because the horror was real. The reader's nervous laughter is relief, not dismissal.
The story ends before any explicit companion offer, but Lucy has all the structural hallmarks. She improvises under pressure (the makeshift Dalek-killer). She protects someone smaller and more vulnerable than herself (Gabriel). She has suffered devastating loss and kept moving. And crucially, she recognises the Doctor not as a threat but as a good man — "mad, but good" — which is exactly what companions see that others can't.
The Wizard of Oz framing — Dorothy, Toto, Glinda — is the Doctor's own reading of their meeting. He's already cast her. "Did anyone here call for help?" is an invitation. Whether Lucy steps through the door is a story the author leaves unwritten.
The story ends on the Doctor's arrival and his first question. We don't know: whether Lucy accepts whatever he's implicitly offering; whether the Dalek threat is ended or merely paused; what happens to the White Point Star fragment; whether Gabriel is safe; or whether the "starlight bridge" is ever built. The story stops at the moment of possibility rather than the moment of resolution.
This is the correct ending for a short piece introducing an original character. The Doctor has arrived; the darkness has been interrupted; Lucy and Gabriel are alive. Everything else belongs to a larger story. The refusal to resolve is not a truncation — it's a door left open.
Further Reading
Canonical sources, Dalek history, and comparative texts