Infinite DC

Nina concentrated better when her music played – and Huey Lewis and the News’s “Perfect World” was just the tune to progress recalibrations between Steven’s Type-X T.A.R.D.I.S. and the Type-Z models outside. Four connector cables ran in-between them, each one linked to the Type-X’s control console.

Sitting lotus style on the grated flooring, Nina did her part in ensuring the T.A.R.D.I.S.es (or “T.A.R.D.I.,” as Cara preferred the term) were properly in sync for Steven’s plan.

Then there came another jingle, one commonly associated with the ringtone of a cell phone, sounding from the control console.

Nina knew it to have been the connotation of a transmitted message.

She shot to her feet and brought it up on the scanner.

Her hazel eyes enlarged with dread, rusting out of the Type-X posthaste.

“Min,” she called, emerging out of the module and into the warehouse portion of the outpost. She found her older incarnation between two of the Type-Z’s. “I just found out where they’re taking the other versions of Neas.”

Min stared on her with sanguine eyes. “That’s good. Where are they?”

“Well…it’s a little vague…but Min’s text mentioned something about an arena where they’re going to fight to their deaths.”

Min went pale. “Oh, no.”

“The games.”

The gruff Australian voice of Max Rockatansky, her companion in the years she had spent in the Mad World, spoke just near them. He had been tending to his modified V8 Interceptor, since returning from his retrieval of Shel, when he overheard their conversation.

“Immortan Joe,” he said. “He’s restarting his arena games.”

“That’s where they’ll be taking them,” Min indicated. “Joe and his boys are in league with Davros and the Daleks.”

Nina bafflingly flinched. “Since when?!”

“Since the ‘Chrome Gods’ bestowed their grace upon his people,” Min scathingly remarked. “Let’s get the War Rig ready. We’re movin’ out.”

“Don’t go in alone,” Max advised her. “It’s not smart.”

“We’re not going in alone.”

The confident smirk on her face, as well as her gist, resonated to Nina.

“Oh, that’s good,” she eagerly snickered. “That’s real good!”

In one blink of a second, the regenerations of the Gladiator, with their three companions chosen by Davros, were teleported from the Dalek flagship and to the Citadel – the stronghold of Immortan Joe.

It was clear at the point of their arrival how much the flagship was more welcoming than the dark, partially flooded cavernous area they materialized in. Another holding cell, this one fitted with a vault door to seal all of them inside. The only source of light came from a hole at the center, which currently permitted the light of the moon.

“Well, this sucks,” grumbled Kimbyr, who was up to her thighs in water.

“Tell us about it.”

Kimbyr smiled, recognizing the smoky yet attractive voice that addressed them, further inside the cavern.

Within the shadows, they spotted a statuesque, hooded figure.

It stepped out under the moonlight and removed its hood.

Long, flowing locks of dark brown hair unfurled; its owner – an African American woman with light mocha skin and dark puppy dog eyes – looked on the new arrivals, beaming.

“Man, I forgot how tall we were,” Kimbyr scrutinized her.

“Do we know each other?” She asked, frowning.

“Not for another life, Alicia.”

Picking up on Kimbyr’s context clues, Neas nodded affirmatively. “Another of our regenerations,” he surmised.

“Is that what this one is?” Alicia motioned to Kimbyr. “I mean, I recognize all the rest of you…but she’s a bit of an enigma to me right now.”

“What do you mean ‘this one’?” Kimbyr sensitively complained. “Is that anyway to treat the woman who’s been keeping watch over your young companion?”

Alicia looked on her with new resolve. “You’ve found Autumn?! Oh, my god! Is she alright?! We got separated in the rift, the second Davros and his Daleks found us! Oh, god! Please tell me she’s okay!”

“She’s fine,” Mandy assured her. “They’ve got her back on their flagship with the rest of our friends.”

“If she’s on their ship, then she’s not fine.”

Out from the same shadows where Alicia emerged spoke yet another voice – this one branded with a thick Scottish twang. Just as Alicia before him, the Scotsman showed himself in the light of the moon.

He was a tall, thin-faced man with a tousled mop of silver-grey hair and intense eyes framed by unruly, expressive eyebrows. His nose was hooked, his ears were big, and his eyes were sharp and silvery. His slender frame was buried beneath layers of clothing, from a bluish gray hooded top worn under a Crombie coat to black trousers.

“Don’t tell me he’s another regeneration of us!” Neas quipped.

“Actually, I don’t know who he is,” Alicia spoke of the Scotsman. “He wouldn’t tell me his name when I introduced myself to him.”

“Who I am should be no concern of anyone’s under these circumstances,” the Scotsman firmly established. “Isn’t that right, Candace?”

Candace stiffened at the utterance of her name by a man she hardly knew.

“Uh…y-yeah…I suppose,” she puzzlingly stammered.

She endeavored to question his awareness of her identity until she heard clicks resounding inside the cavern. At first, she believed it to simply be in association to the cavern itself, but the clicks were too articulated.

“Anybody else hear that?” She questioned.

“Hear what?” Neas queried.

“That clicking.”

“Oh, that’s just our friend over there,” Alicia said, pointing to a specific spot in the eclipsed section of the cavern.

Squinting through the darkness, they could make out what appeared to have been a sick, malnourished extraterrestrial being that closely resembled a Parktown prawn. It sat leaning against the cavern wall, visibly weak.

“He’s a prawn!” Kimbyr excitedly categorized.

“And a big one at that,” Neas noted.

Kimbyr proceeded to click her tongue, communicating with the prawn.

“You speak his language?!” An amused Lindsay distinguished.

“Bits and pieces,” Kimbyr said. “I happened upon his people in one dimension. A messed-up place in South African called ‘District 9’ – a concentration camp for prawns who only needed food and shelter.”

The tone she reminisced in was notably sour to Neas. Clearly, this “District 9” was someplace he was not looking forward to witnessing, once he reached her regeneration.

“I’ve noticed the sequence of clicks he’s been speaking in,” the Scotsman said. “It’s been the same for the last few hours.”

“His name’s Jeremiah Williams and…he’s scared,” Kimbyr desolately interpreted. “He misses his wife and son back in the district…and he’s not even certain he’ll see them again.”

“Poor guy,” Neas uttered. “How did he get here?”

Kimbyr conveyed the inquiry to the prawn, who clicked a response.

“He says he was brought to this world through a space-time rift that opened in the district,” she translated.

Candace looked to the Scotsman. “Is that how you got here?”

“I just took a wrong turn at Albuquerque,” he shrugged.

“And now they got us all here for their stupid death arena,” Dwonch petulantly said. “Why don’t they just get this over with already?! What’s the delay?!”

The lock on the vault door unbolted, drawing everyone’s attention to it.

In stepped a few skeletally developed men, their torsos, arms, and heads covered in white powder. Alongside them were two Daleks.

Coarse breathing followed them in, along with the man behind it – one of old age and a stocky build. His hair was long and white, and his eyes were piercing blue. He was in poor shape. Large boils pestered his back, and he suffered from respiratory issues. Only a mask decorated with horse teeth to resemble a skeletal jaw aided him, as it stayed connected to a large breathing apparatus on his shoulders.

But nothing was more off-putting than the bulletproof, medaled Plexiglas armor he adorned, molded to give him a muscular appearance.

Much like the men who ushered him, he was coated in white powder.

“Who or what in heaven’s name are you?!” Candace reacted in repulsion.

“I am many things,” the pallid man said, his Australian-accented voice augmented by his mask, “but you will address me as ‘Immortan Joe.’”

Mars snorted. “Immortan Joe? Seriously?”

SLAP!

Her head swiveled from the might of the backhand delivered by one of Joe’s powdered entourage. It stung the right corner of her lip, yet the pain was temporary; her anger, on the other hand, was lasting towards the man responsible.

“You will not speak to Immortan Joe in such manner, filth,” he snarled.

“Her tenacity is admired,” Joe commended. “It is that very spirit why I bargained with Davros to have you ten women kept alive. You each would make superb wives…and breeders. Two of you may be quite old for the latter position, but you all are quite healthy and pure.”

Kimbyr gagged. “I just threw up a little in my mouth – more on thinkin’ about intercourse with you than bein’ livestock!”

Joe’s breathing juxtaposed with his rage. “And it is that refusal that has brought you to my arena! You all will battle against my greatest challengers: my sons, Rictus Erectus and Scabrous Scrotus! And should you implausibly survive their wrath, you shall face the fiercest warrior gifted to me by our Chrome Gods!”

“This partnership with your so-called ‘Chrome Gods’ won’t last for very long,” the Scotsman forewarned Joe. “They’re nothing more than exterminators that see all other life as inferior. You think yours is any different to them?!”

Candace listened intently to the Scotsman’s warning; his words had an air of familiarity to them, as if he knew the Daleks on a personal level.

Nevertheless, Joe did not heed them.

“You know nothing, old man! You and your compatriots will rest here this night… for at dawn, you fight to the death!”

Keeping to his schedule, Immortan Joe had his War Boys remove the prisoners from the cavern and escort them to his arena – a deep crater, close outside the parameters of his citadel, with a guarded, inclined dirt road that ran into it. Joe and his two flanking Daleks sat inside a makeshift spectator’s box, suspended by thick, durable chains near the edge of one corner.

Multiple weapons were strewn across the arena floor in isolated caches: chainsaws, shotguns, vehicles, etc.

Joe and his savage followers paid no expense to get a good show.

“Anybody got a plan for how we’re getting out of this alive?” Alicia asked.

“Yeah…we fight,” Sanders replied.

Alicia scoffed. “I asked for a plan, not a death wish.”

“For now, that’s the best plan we’ve got,” Candace supported. “If I trust any of you are still the Gladiator that we were back in the Time War, then I know we’ll get through this, just like we did then.”

“Just try to look out for yourself more than us,” Neas advised her. “Any of these guys get you first, then it’s just gonna be Pop, Dwonch, Sloth, Jeremiah, and the Scot left standing.”

“And I don’t think we’d stand as great of a chance with just the five of us,” Lauren stated before she side-turned to the prawn, the U.N.I.T. general, the disfigured Fratelli, and the Scotsman. “No offense.”

“Eh!” Sloth grunted.

“None taken,” Dwonch sneered.

Jeremiah clicked what Lauren could only interpret as a reasonable sentiment.

The Scotsman, however, remained mute.

The game began once Immortan Joe’s sons, Rictus and Scabrous, arrived down the inclined road on cruelly overhauled automobiles. They were accompanied by bands of Joe’s War Boys – more challengers for the Gladiators and their fellow participants to face.

Rictus and Scabrous were men of hulking figures.

Rictus, Joe’s youngest son, was a shaven beast standing at seven feet tall. Like his father, he breathed clean air through tubing worn on his nose and connected to an apparatus on his back. On random areas of his armor were baby doll heads of varying sizes.

His brother, Scabrous, dwarfed him by only an inch. He was also fitted with a breathing apparatus, which he decorated with human skulls skewered on the exhaust ports of what was once an engine air filter. He wielded a long staff with an even longer chainsaw at the end.

Knowing Scabrous to be their most tangibly challenging opponent, Neas set his sights on him firsthand. He took off his black hoodie, baring his untucked purple shirt, and tossed it at Scabrous’s head to blind him. He proceeded to strip off his loosened blue-and-grey striped necktie, wrapping it around the blinded Scabrous’s neck and tightening it to choke the hulking man.

The others followed his lead, engaging with Rictus and the War Boys.

All the spectators viciously hailed as the brutal conflict raged on.

Margie and Lindsay, having recent experiences in combat through the Mortal Kombat tournament, exhibited superb martial art proficiencies in taking down several of the War Boys.

Candace, Sanders, Neas, and Sloth – being the tallest and strongest altogether – centered their tactic of brute strength against the biggest War Boys like Erectus and Scrotus. Sloth tossed a few around like rag dolls, whereas Candace, Sanders, and Neas tussled in the dirt and exchanged fisticuffs with the others.

Alicia and Lauren motivated on agility and other forms of martial arts, similar to Margie and Lindsay. Lauren received one blow across the face that left a bloodied cut to the side of her head, but she did not let it slow her down.

Mandy and Dwonch demonstrated flawless firing accuracy with the available rifles, some of which were alien in design, gunning down as many powdered freaks that dared to come near them.

“Five rounds rapid, suckas!!” Dwonch vigorously chanted over the gunfire.

As much as Dwonch seemed to be enjoying the fight, Mandy saw how progressively stacked the odds against them were. She struggled with the idea of using the mask still pocketed in her trench coat. It was meant as a last resort, in case this deadly clash went south…and matters were becoming precariously close to that aspect.

Meanwhile, Ms. Mars put to use sword-fighting skills she learned from Willy with a Sontaran plasma blade – a lightsaber-like weapon that was effective against Scabrous’s chainsaw staff and other War Boys that threatened her with similar hardware.

Gen kept herself hidden behind one cache of weapons on the arena floor.

She shirked from fighting, too horrified by the ghostly, skeleton-like men that wanted her and her friends dead.

Only when she witnessed Sloth overpowered by a group of War Boys did something snap in her; that gladiatorial instinct expressed there and then from her preceding and future incarnations.

In the cache, she found a bō staff – her weapon of choice.

She took up arms with it, rushing to Sloth’s aid and expertly twirling the staff to flick away the War Boys swarmed around him. Noses, teeth, and skulls were cracked, shattered, and broken in the process.

“Thank you, Gen,” Sloth acknowledged.

Gen nodded and smiled, joining at his side to take care of the remaining foes.

Kimbyr, Jeremiah, and the Scotsman had yet to decide their place in the skirmish, merely observing while dodging any flying bodies or bullets that whizzed past them. To the Scotsman’s surprise, Kimbyr acquired the notion of filming the entire engagement on her camera phone.

“Seriously?!” He rebuked her.

“What?” Kimbyr naïvely remarked.

Jeremiah broached his own displeasure of her actions, right before he was snatched away by a few War Boys.

“HEY!” Kimbyr yelled, catching them in the act. “Bring him back here!”

She and the Scotsman attempted to pursue, but they were soon cornered by two more War Boys that barred their way with chainsaws.

They were helplessly imposed into watching the wild, powdered individuals chain Jeremiah’s arms and legs to the back and front ends of two vehicles. Jeremiah pleadingly clicked for his life, yet it was only noise to his tormentors.

The prawn’s body was ripped in half, blood and organs spraying.

“NO!”

In her rage, Kimbyr tossed her phone, striking at the head of the barring War Boy to her right. Recoiling from the blow, he blindly slashed his chainsaw at the torso of his comrade, which caused him to double over.

It was just the chain reaction of events needed for Kimbyr and the Scotsman to move by the two men and take vengeance on those responsible for Jeremiah’s demise. Together, they succeeded in confiscating one of the two vehicles, with the Scotsman serving as passenger and Kimbyr as driver. Still fueled by fury, she barreled over multiple War Boys, turning the battle in the favor of her fellow regenerations and their allies.

Dwonch fired on the other vehicle that still dragged Jeremiah’s severed lower half on its bumper, turning it into a conflagration on wheels and eradicating the passengers inside, once a bullet struck the gas tank.

The displeased Joe bore witness to the mediocre will of his men that resulted in an unwelcoming deduction of them. Most were either gravely injured or dead.

These are true worthy adversaries, he subconsciously fathomed.

His consideration towards the spectacle sharpened, sighting two of the Gladiators – the aging blonde and the young black man – at the mercy of his two sons.

Bloodied and bruised, Candace and Neas laid side-to-side as Rictus and Scabrous advanced on them, one cocking a shotgun and the other starting up the chainsaw on his staff. Having sustained many injuries, the two Time Lords were too depleted to retaliate.

“Did you imagine this to be how your day would end?” Candace flippantly questioned to her future incarnation.

Neas grinned. “Nope. Way worse.”

Just as Rictus and Scabrous neared them…

POW!

The two hulking men were run down by Kimbyr, their bodies thrown over the vehicle and landing to the ground with sickening thuds on the other side.

Believing his sons to have died from the devastating attack, Joe stood from his perch and growled loud enough into a microphone for every spectator around the arena to hear.

All was silent. The fight had ceased, with only the Gladiators and their associates left standing among litters of bodies.

“We played your game and survived!” Candace shouted to Joe. “What else have you got?!”

Joe made no riposte. Instead, he pointed to one area of the arena.

They all looked, seeing no one and nothing there…

…until a gargantuan humanoid being materialized.

Taller and brawnier than Rictus and Scabrous combined, it was not of the present dimension.

It had reptilian skin and dreadlock-like appendages protruding from a head partially obscured by an elaborate, utilitarian metal mask. On its wrists were razor-sharp blades extended to a foot long.

There was no question that this rancorous lifeform was Joe’s fiercest warrior – the one gifted to him by Davros and the Daleks.