Author's note - I am so incredibly sorry about the horrendous accent used during this chapter...

Autumn Skies breathed heavily as she ran from her pursuer. At first, she had been having a lovely time, she had met this charming pegasus stallion via a dating agency and he had seemed genuinely interested in her work as an artist. However, as the drink began to flow he appeared to take on a more sinister side - becoming angry and even threatening a waiter for refusing to serve him. Soon after that, the advances came. Autumn liked to think she had class, being an artist and the sort to avoid colts of a certain manner, but she was quickly beginning to rethink the idea of meeting strangers for dates as she ran.

Her hooves hit the ground faster and faster as she galloped as hard as she could, trying to avoid the colt a few meters behind her. Running through the rain had weighed her down significantly, the water clinging to her coat and mane, the delicate silk dress she had been wearing torn at the edges from trying to escape.

She banked left, and her hooves slid on the wet cobbles, causing her to fall heavily, her left forehoof folding outwards with a sickening crunch. She could see him now, slowing to a trot, and she tried her best to get out of sight, hoping a member of the city guard would find her as she backed up against a jewellers’ shop, cradling her hoof, blood flowing from the wound between the cobbles, dispersing like ink as it hit the water.

“Well... hey there. Thought you could get away from me?” he grinned, brushing his windswept and bedraggled black mane out of his face, his wings trying their best to shake themselves out before folding up.

“Please, leave me alon-” she started, before receiving a purple hoof to the side of her face. She cried out in pain as he struck her, before the same hoof was forced against her mouth to hold it closed. His other foreleg hooked through the neckline of her dress, pulling and tearing at the black silk as he attempted to run it up and down her chest. Autumn began to weep, her worst fears becoming reality as he dragged her, kicking and screaming, the adrenaline making her forget about her broken limb, into an alley.

She screamed once more as a blue flash illuminated the mouth of the road, her attacker reduced to a shadow against the wall; a pair of smouldering horse shoes left fizzing against the cold wet stone.

“So, Doctor, are you ready for this? I should warn you that the girls are a little intense. Not in a bad way, of course, but they can be a bit eccentric when it comes to their field of expertise.”

“Which would be?”

“Forensic analysis. Malditof is actually on loan to us from the University of Stalliongrad. As for Elsie and Emmess, well, they’re my little girls. I can’t help but adore them.” Avian said with a broad smile, obviously a very proud parent indeed. The Doctor nodded in response, preparing himself, and Avian opened the wooden framed glass door leading to the laboratory.

Inside was a fascinating sight, all manner of glassware on three long benches, a record player in the corner blaring out the greatest hits of “Gallop DMC” and a huge glass structure suspended in the air above the far end of the benches. The Doctor heard Avian gasp upon seeing the supposed disarray, but didn’t appear to care, lost in his own fascination with the strange scientific development of this equine society. He stopped every now and then to look into conical flasks, taking readings with his screwdriver, his face varying between looks of interest, confusion and schoolboy-like giddiness.

“Malditof? Elsie? Emess? Are you there? I’ve brought a visitor?” Avian yelled, looking around.

There was a crash, and some cursing in a language that the Doctor wouldn’t have been able to understand without the TARDIS translation circuit. The brashness of the female voice, heavy with accent, made him blush slightly.

“I know what that means. Come out here at once.” Avian responded, giving the Doctor a sorry glance. Eventually, a deep blue unicorn mare, who the Doctor guessed to be around thirty years old, poked her head out of a store room towards the back of the lab. Her jet black mane was tousled, thick goggles perched on top behind her horn; he noticed that she was wearing a lab coat, stopping just before what looked like a series of tiny red stars on her flank.

“Mine apologies professor. I am vorking on zhe protein still.” she said, disappearing into the side room again for a moment, before trotting out and dusting herself off with her hooves.

“I imagine so... Do you know where my daughters are?”

“Da. Zhey have gone down to zhe canteen. Ve have managed to isolate an energy signal along vis zhe protein; I believe ve should be able to extrapolate an identity for zhe protein soon. I am vaiting currently for a treeptic digest to complete, zhen ve can know for certain.”

The Doctor clears his throat, becoming bored of being ignored by the slightly odd foreign mare, trotting up to the glass masterpiece at the back of the room and looking at himself in the reflection.

“You know,” he starts, “This is a protein found in Time Lord brain chemistry.”

There is another crash, causing the Doctor to grin - evidently she was paying attention now.

“Yeees,” he started, stepping slowly around the glass representation suspended from the ceiling, “That’s definitely it. You can tell from the beta helices interfacing with the haem group just there.” he finished, pointing at the tiny green glass bead representing a molecule of cysteine, approximately an inch away from a grey bead that he had assumed to be the ferrous component of a haem ring nearby.

“Doctor... What does it mean?”

“Well, it confirms my suspicions that a Time Lord is involved - that protein is only secreted after an experience with the Untempered Schism - literally a hole looking into the time vortex. I’m really really worried. Usually the Lens shouldn’t affect brain chemistry like that. Someone is putting far too much effort into trying to communicate and it’s quite literally killing them. I don’t think they’d be able to last much longer... I just don’t understand where they’re getting the energy to do it... they might not even be able to regenerate if it kills them.”

“Ah, yes, you mentioned regeneration once before... a very useful little trick, if I may say so.”

“Hmm. Anyway, Malditof was it? You said you’d detected an energy signature? Can you tell me where it came from?”

“Not as of yet. It is being problematic.”

“Well, no worries. I should be able to trac-”

The Doctor was interrupted by a member of the city guard bursting into the lab, his uniform still soaked, heavily out of breath. He trotted up to Avian before saluting, visibly deflating after the exertion of finding the pair.

“Sirs, there has been another attack.”

“Why the rush, my dear fellow? It’s hardly as if-”

“We’ve got a survivor sir. The Commander will meet you at the scene - just off of Sunglow lane in the entertainment district.”

Avian’s eyes grew wide with shock, before he hurriedly put his sodden hat back on his head and reached for a raincoat. Seeing the Doctor without such protection, he levitated an umbrella and slipped it into his pocket before they both set off following the white stallion who had raised the alarm. Turning back as they left, Malditof cursed once more, looking at the protein she had painstakingly built from the fragments she had been able to detect.

Outside the castle, the rain had died down momentarily to a mere drizzle, the type to form an eerie mist capable of permeating nearly anything. The Doctor yawned, able to see the moon through a gap in the cloud - he had been expecting to run the whole way to the scene, but due to the dire nature of the situation, a chariot pulled by two white pegasus guards had been commandeered. Climbing aboard, the Doctor looked to Avian before speaking, hoping to ask a question;

“So... Why do they call you Avian anyway? Bit of a strange name for a horse? Let alone a unicorn?”

Avian laughed slightly uneasily, unsure as to how to proceed with the small talk for a change.

“Well... My parents were ornithologists, and interestingly enough, both pegasi. I’m a bit of a genetic abnormality as that goes.”

“Yes, I was wondering about how that worked actually, with the four types...”

“Four? Ah, you mean the Princess - she’s a special case, a very powerful magic user. Anyway, it turns out that it’s a bit of a dice roll when you’ve got all three types of pony in a bloodline. My great grandfather on my mothers side was a unicorn, his wife a pegasus. My paternal grandparents were a Unicorn and Earth Pony couple. My wife is a unicorn, and our daughters are too. It’s a little confusing, but I could have old Batsy down in the archive show you some of her research if you wish? She’s an archaeologist... well, genetic paleontologist is the title on her office door but she’s more interested in artifacts than her actual job... Nevertheless, she’s a very bright pony indeed.”

“Oh, no need to go out of the way, I’m sure I’ll figure it out for myself. After all, I’m sure I’ve got the time.”

“There was something that I wanted to ask of you, if I may be so bold?”

“Go ahead?”

“Well, you’re aware that we’ve met before, you’re aware that you must have met the Commander and Her Majesty before... I guess what I want to know is why you’re not bothered about it. At the previous crime scene, you hardly seemed irritated or dare I say ‘freaked out’ at all?”

“Ah, that’s something you get used to with time travel. Back in my universe I had a friend, the Brigadier, he was the first human I’d met out of sync. More followed him, maybe I’ll tell you about some of them.”

The Doctor looked over the side of the carriage as they descended to the street below. He was a little surprised that the pegasi pulling the golden chariot were able to work out where they were going, assuming that they functioned in a similar manner to pigeons... big, four legged, armoured pigeons. As they sunk through the layer of mist, he could see a larger carriage, obviously the city’s equivalent to an ambulance, parked at the side of the road.

A unicorn was tending to what looked like an incredibly young mare compared to the other females he had met thus far, but maybe their looks didn’t correspond to their age as closely as it did with humans? After all, the princess didn’t look that old, but her eyes... her eyes betrayed the sort of things that his own companions had commented on. Her eyes looked ancient, easily far older than even him; a lonely goddess.

Jolting slightly as the chariot hit the ground, the Doctor climbed off and followed Avian round the corner of the alley. Duke was there, giving orders to the science team in Avian’s stead, but the scene had been as he suspected; a charred shape on the wall, a pair of horse shoes still where they had landed, marked with a little numbered white card as photos were taken of the scene.

Previous incarnations of the Doctor would have mused at why a pair of flimsy shoes were always the remaining parts of anyone vapourised by an energy weapon - one of those universal constants that never really made sense until now; evidently the metal was strong enough to survive the blast.

He raised the hoof holding his screwdriver to his face, and pressed the button with his nose, running the light around the scene, causing ripples in the slowly falling water droplets in the air. Holding it still for a second, the familiar red dots formed the same message for help as he had seen previously began to appear. Realising the message was the same, the Doctor looked down at his hooves, seeing the washed out blood trail the victim had left. He followed it.

“She’d obviously been dragged back here... Hmm. Looks like she got away from him for a second, maybe he was distracted? Another witness? Can’t have been the lens user *yet*, but I’d say at one in the morning, who else could it have been? A member of the city guard? A passer by? Forget it. I’ll ask her.” The Doctor thought to himself, trying to follow some sort of scene in his head.

He trotted out of the alleyway, wandering up to the medic who had been looking after the still shocked looking filly. A previous version of himself would have offered her a jelly baby, another a banana, but this time the Doctor had nothing to use to try and bond with her. The attending unicorn medic, one “Dr. Light Registrar”, according to his name badge, had just finished healing her broken hoof. He mentioned in passing that her name was Autumn, she was only fifteen years old and it was very fortunately only a light break. She would be able to walk on the hoof again in a few days - healing magic usually being a little unstable, but fine for such a comparatively minor injury. The Doctor mentally logged this - it seems that the unicorns do have limitations as far as their magic is concerned.

Watching the white coated individual leave, the Doctor slowly placed himself on the back of the cart next to her, under cover and out of the rain, and slipped a hoof around her as she still wept.

“Hello, I’m the Doctor. I’m with the police, I need to ask you a few questions?”

She continued crying for quite a while, at least a good thirty minutes. The Doctor knew this kind of cry. It wasn’t a cry of lament, of something done to the poor girl, barely out of childhood. No, it was that of a survivor unsure as to why their life had been spared.

He had practically invented survivors remorse, there was nothing he could have done to save even his own home, and even when the opportunity to bring it back had come, he chose to keep a planet full of silly, violent, ape-descendants. He spied Sir Duke from the corner of his eye, slowly moving towards them, and waved him away with his other foreleg. The pegasus obeyed, leaving them alone together.

“I’m sorry, Autumn is it? We really do need to talk, we’ve got a limited time frame on catching the one who did this,” the Doctor spoke up again.

“He’s... he’s dead.” she half sobbed.

“I’m sorry, I think you misunderstood me, I mean the pony who killed your attacker.”

Autumn turned to him, eyes full of legitimate hate, huge and reddened.

“Why should I help you catch them? They’re killing criminals?”

“Yes... you say them... why?”

She shifted awkwardly before crumpling slightly, under the belief that the strange brown stallion sat with her was a member of the city guard and fully capable of arresting her for hampering an investigation. She looked torn for a moment, before finally uttering her next sentence, almost reluctantly, her voice heavy with hesitation, unsure that she would be taken seriously until her eyes met his.

“There were voices... when he burned... Two ponies, I think.”

“Male, or female?”

“One of each.” she replied,

“Can you tell me what they said?”

Autumn paused again. She looked at the floor of the cart, before turning back.

“Romanadvoratrelundar delivers justice.”

The Doctor’s jaw dropped. He had been right on all counts; a Time Lord that he knew.

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