Doctor Who and the Cake of Finality
It was a dark and stormy night. Somewhere. Presumably.
Adric was doing maths for fun when the Doctor walked in, largely. As usual he smelled of whisky and knitting patterns. His face wore a solemn, albeit a somewhat bug-eyed expression. The rest of him wore the contents of an Oxfam. A Super-Savers Oxfam.
Adric looked up from sums so complex that they contained no actual numbers.
"Can I help you, Doctor?" he asked in his annoyingly sensible voice.
"Hmm?" said the Doctor. He seemed preoccupied. More so than usual. Somehow.
"Can I help you, Doctor?" This time Adric sounded slightly irritated, as though dealing with a small child less sensible than himself.
"Hmm? Ah!" He paused. "Ah!" The Doctor seemed to have recovered his train of thought. It was a derailed, smouldering train, resembling Thomas the Tank Engine on a meths bender. But a train nevertheless.
"Adric," continued the Doctor, milking the dramatic tension for all it was worth, "Adric. Adric, I have something very important to say to you."
"It's alright, Doctor," smiled Adric, reassuringly yet insultingly, "Romana explained That to me."
"Hmm? Oh, no, not That. This is even more important than That."
"I see," patronised Adric. "Then perhaps you'd like to tell me what it is."
The Doctor fixed Adric with a look of hatred. Steaming, burning hatred. The kind of hatred that would die just to inflict Peter Davison on him.
"Adric, The Fate Of The Universe could be at Stake. Sorry, stake." He reached into his absurd pockets and produced a box far larger than should have been able to fit into such a small amount of tweed. Because he was that cool. The camera zoomed in on it, obligingly. Then zoomed out again to allow a medium shot, a hint of wobble in no way undermining the drama that was unfolding in this white cardboard setting, enhanced as it was by the undoubted musical talents of the best the BBC Drama Department had to offer. His name was Peter Howell.
"This box, this innocent-seeming lead-lined box with the biohazard symbol and the runes of power and the unmistakable air of dread, contains The Single Biggest Threat To The Safety Of The Universe That The Universe Itself Has Ever Contained."
He paused dramatically, his eyes going all big as he stood utterly still for an alarming length of time.
Adric waited politely and uninterestedly for the next installment. It seemed to take an entire week.
"This box, this innocent-seeming lead-lined box with the biohazard symbol and the runes of power and the unmistakable air of dread, contains The Single Biggest Threat To The Safety Of The Universe That The Universe Itself Has Ever Contained."
Adric had an alarming sense of déja vu, but decided not to comment. The Doctor seemed to be approaching calm, and Adric didn't want to intrude on his bizarre personal mental narrative.
The Doctor dropped his voice to the lower case. Except for starts of sentences. And proper nouns. He had a good Catholic education, you know.
"Inside this box, Adric, is the one thing of which even I am afraid. Yes, even I. I, Tom B...the Doctor. I who have faced special effects too terrifying to contemplate, I, who have faced monsters even cheaper than this fanfic. I who have fought and defeated the forces of Davros, the Master, Mary Whitehouse. I, who have survived a number of episodes featuring Harry Sullivan, any number of seemingly un- escape-from-able cliff-hangers, I..." Here, the Doctor seemed to recall that he had been going somewhere with this. He gazed into the distance, moving his lips silently, as if engaged in deep thought or trying to recall a line from a particularly good script.
"Adric, here in this box, in this very box...is...The Cake of Finality."
Adric looked up. Again.
"Cake?"
"Yes, Adric. Cake." Tom paused again, unable to believe what he was about to say. "But this is no ordinary confection. This cake has the power to destroy The Universe As We Know It."
"What does that mean?"
The Doctor exploded. Metaphorically.
"What does that mean?! What does that mean?! It means destroy the Universe, only it sounds better. Really, Adric, sometimes you can be most appallingly mind-blowingly, tediously obtuse. Whyever did I leave Romana in E-Space?"
"She left you, Doctor. So did K9. Again. Don't you remember?"
"Don't interfere with my rhetoric, Adric, Gallifreyan rhetoric is so dizzyingly complex and perverse that a tiny brain such as yours couldn't even begin to contemplate its complexities and perversities."
"Yes, Doctor," said Adric, meekingly. Which is a smugger version of meekly, that conveys an overwhelming sense of the speaker's own superiority and invites 'a good slap.' It wasn't a typo.
"Good."
"Why are you telling me this, Doctor?" Like any good companion, Adric was careful to end all sentences with the Doctor's name and a question mark.
"What a helpful question plot-wise, Adric. I'm telling you this, Adric, because I will not always be here, Adric, and although my life- span is considerably longer than yours, Adric, I nevertheless feel the need to burden you with the responsibility of inheriting the Keeperdom Of The Cake Of Finality in the event of my untimely demise or regeneration into a useless beige fuckwit. Adric."
"Yes," said Adric.
"Is that all you can say?!" exploded the Doctor, again metaphorically although with him you can never be entirely sure. "Adric, you don't seem to realise that this involves Responsibilities. Not to mention Temptations."
This sounded promising.
"What kind of temptations?" asked Adric.
"Tempting ones."
"What kind of tempting ones?"
"Look." The Doctor opened the box. ponderously, to reveal...a cake. Not a poncy metaphorical cake like the Hand of Omega (which was neither hand nor cake), but an actual cake. With chocolate. And icing.
Adric salivated.
"To get this cake, I had to crawl unaided through the Dog Swamps of Metebelis Three, scale the Shuddering Cliff of Stupidity on Skaaaaro, read the manual, start all over again, offer my own intestines in a sacrifice which involved a temporary crossover with American hit TV show 'Angel', survive the horrors of the dreaded Fun Park Of Rassilon, and then stagger back across miles and miles of literal desert."
He paused for effect, because this was quite a good line.
"And at the end of all that, Adric, I was really, really hungry." Adric gazed in awe. Of all the Doctor's achievements, this one was the most angrifangelised. At this moment, Adric really wanted to be the Doctor. Or possibly Romana.
It was the chocolatiest cake he had ever seen. And he hadn't eaten in five whole minutes. (By an amazing fluke of astronomy and cultural convergence, Alzarian minutes are exactly the same length as Earth minutes. This conveniently allows us to convey both Adric's thoughts and an accurate impression of the immensely long duration of time involved.)
Sensing Adric's greed, Tom snapped the box shut with his unique enormousness of gesture. "Do not eat this cake, Adric. Never eat this cake. No matter what happens, no matter how much you may be kidnapped, beaten, tortured, hit, spat on, yelled at, etc, never, never, eat this cake."
"Why not?"
"BECAUSE IT'S THE CAKE OF SPACKING FINALITY AND EATING IT WILL LEAD TO THE DESTRUCTION ON THE ENTIRE SPACKING UNIVERSE YOU STUPID LITTLE MONGWEED!"
Adric flinched as the Doctor's use of caps lock compromised his earsight. "Alright," he said meekingly.
"Adric, I've met you. You'll eat it. I know you'll eat it."
"Then why are you entrusting me with its Keeperdom?"
"Because I'm enigmatic."
The Doctor placed the box, with Tree-of-Knowledge conspicuousness, on Adric's overly-tidy desk, crushing his Airfix Death Star.
"Right, I'm going down the pub. I'll leave The Cake Of Finality with you to allow you practice restraint. Don't eat it." He walked out, largely.
ooh eee ooh, oooh eee ooooh...
The Doctor placed the box, with Tree-of-Knowledge conspicuousness, on Adric's overly-tidy desk, crushing his Airfix Death Star.
"Right, I'm going down the pub. I'll leave The Cake Of Finality with you to allow you practice restraint. Don't eat it." He shook his head, trying to repress the feeling that he had been here before, and removed the haunting wail of sinister early-synthesised music from his brain. He walked out, largely.
Adric stared at the box and the broked Airfix parts before him. He was really, really hungry. He started to chew at the edges of his Badge For Mathematical Excellence. The gold edging caused a spasm in his teeth, like when God punishes you with tinfoil on your Nestle KitKat.* He wondered if that effect could come in useful someday and be followed by a poignant close-up and silent end credits.
He really was really really hungry He wondered if the Doctor would have any food in the drinks cabinet He meandered out along the endless similar-looking corridors until he found the object in questing so hungry that he started eating the punctuation in this paragraph
He tried the inlaid mahogany door.
"Bugger off."
Adric frowned, annoyingly. "Excuse me?"
"I am the TARDIS, momentarily gaining sentience for the purposes of this story. And you'd really better not go in there."
"Is there any food?" asked Adric.
"Just The Cake Of Finality sitting tauntingly on your sterile desk. I lost the kitchen."
"But I can't eat the cake. The Universe would be destroyed."
"Do you know what would happen if you drank his five-hundred year brandy?"
Adric thought about it. "It'll have to be the cake then," he said finally.
It was a nice cake. It was an exceptionally nice cake. But as he chewed ravenously on its perfectly textured sponginess, he couldn't help but be troubled by the Universe's impending doom. As he swallowed each yummy chocolaty morsel, he was gripped by a sense of hopelessness and guilt. And of just how LOUD the Doctor was going to be when he found out.
Speaking of which...
The slamming of the TARDIS door, the crash of the hatstand on the ground, and the slurring of a particularly obscene rugby song about Rassilon alerted him to the Doctor's return. He went green with guilt and too much cake.
As the Doctor's footsteps made their dramatically uneven way towards Adric's room, the irritating little twat was weeping snotty tears and contemplating his own inevitable and imminent demise. Although a bit of him couldn't help thinking that it was a bloody nice cake.
The Doctor staggered through the door.
"Adric?"
By now Adric was a gibbering wreck, smeared in snot and chocolate, but still miserably chewing away at the remnants of The Cake Of Finality. His spirit was broken. He could face no more.
"Adric?"
"Mmphh...mmph...hungry....mmph...destruction...mmmpghf..sorry."
The Doctor brushed away the sprayed cake particles.
"Adric?"
"Mmmph?"
"You really are a gullible little shit, aren't you?"
*The Doctor boycotts Nestle. Ask him why.