In the general Big Finish discussion thread, talk turned to the Paul Spragg Memorial Competition so I thought a thread here where we can share any previous entries we have submitted and feel comfortable sharing might be better than spamming up the general discussion topic.
I haven’t submitted in years but here is what I have done in the past…
The Wise Little Prisoner [Seventh Doctor]
Synopsis
“It’s not magic they fear, though they’ll tell you otherwise… They’d be the first to use it if they could harness it.”
Fleeing a lost battle that has seen her regiment destroyed, Supreme Commandant Gahelm 57 of the Anantia, a once peaceful race reluctantly drawn into war by necessity, has chosen a primitive planet on which to take refuge. Here she hopes to wait, undetected, and begin to formulate a plan to regroup before rejoining the fight.
She could not have chosen more unwisely. For this is Earth, in its designated year 1409.
Its indigenous, most advanced species is Man. And it has found her.
From what she can tell, it certainly has a long way to go - it burns and drowns its own for fear of witchcraft. If it does this to its own kind, what hope does Gahelm have?
Wounded and with no weapons, Gahelm is cast in chains and locked away in the blacksmith’s shed, awaiting execution. She finds it hard to reach any conclusion other than that she is completely and utterly finished…
Until she becomes aware that she has a fellow prisoner – an odd little man in a Panama hat, Paisley scarf and check trousers – who is awaiting the same fate. After a terrible run of horrendous misfortune, Gahelm has finally gotten lucky.
She is locked in with the Doctor.
“No, what they fear is the unknown. You’re different from them… So you terrify them…”
Fear, the Doctor says, manifests itself in two distinct ways, which way depending on whom the fear grips. With their captors, fear perpetuates terror but the Doctor has a tale to tell about how fear can change a world for the better. And now he has a captive audience.
He has seen it bring peace to an entire galaxy.
Once, far from here, one lone soul was brave enough to stop fighting and, for no discernible reason, extended a hand of friendship but was cruelly slain. This act of cowardly fear brought pause for thought on both sides and led to the end of centuries of antagonism.
Gahelm sees no escape given that they cannot fight their way out, yet the Doctor insists that between them they have all the weapons they need. To her amazement, this strange man is able to manipulate their way out of captivity using only his words, something Gahelm had long forgotten was possible.
She is now more determined than ever to return to her people, but not to fight with them. She intends to enter into peace talks and bids her saviour farewell, totally oblivious to the fact that the Doctor’s story was in fact meant solely for her.
Because it was about her.
“And you terrify them because you know something they don’t…”
Opening Page
Finished.
She couldn’t be anything but. Still bearing the scars of battle and finding herself stripped of any weapons, she had been in no position to put up a fight. The battered journey to this blasted rock had seen the fire in her belly and the spark in her heart both starved of fuel. She arrived hungry, weak, lost.
It had been her intention to touch down somewhere primitive in order to lick her wounds and formulate a provisional plan to regroup with her fellow soldiers. Rather than letting the despair of there being none of her own regiment left defeat her, she tried with all her might to dwell on there being others.
It was just bad luck that she had landed here.
There were plenty of unpopulated planets in the vicinity, although she wouldn’t have been able to breathe on them and she most definitely saw that as a priority. Besides, she had thought, Earth did not have an advanced species with the capability of detecting her, so she would be free to batten down and gather her strength.
Alas, advanced or not (and most certainly not), the primitive people who merely happened to be winning the evolutionary race on this planet were not as unobservant as she had hoped. Her escape pod had disconcertingly begun to malfunction on its descent and irritatingly crashed atop a hill among hills, hills which had the bothersome quality of surrounding a small settlement of these creatures.
She had noted, during all of this, that even when filled with the bigger emotions like fear and anger, one still has trouble shaking off the little ones. It was when the villagers had surrounded her sorry frame, half thrown from her capsule, that she realised that as well as being frightened, bruised, vulnerable and alone, she also found herself quite a little bit miffed actually.
They had a language in which they spoke to each other but she hadn’t a clue what they were saying. Unfamiliar with Man, she tried her best to get the measure of it. It didn’t seem like a logical beast, for despite her evidently not being welcome it seemed quite keen for her to stay, going to the trouble of casting her in chains and incarcerating her in this curious little shed. It appeared to be an armoury, with lots of simple metal objects strewn about the place. It had clearly been where the chains she was shackled in had been forged. Odd place to throw a prisoner, she thought.
Yes, finished. She couldn’t be anything but.
As her eye roamed, it took in several other peculiar little details and it was only then that the fact dawned on her. This was her first time on an alien world. A sharp surge of excitement swelled briefly among the dread. Ah, there was that spark in her heart. She found it as her eye fell on the man shackled in the opposite corner. It looked like the rest of them, so she had little hope of being able to talk to it. Nonetheless, she understood it…
“They think you’re a witch,” it smiled.
The Jackanapes in Question [Third Doctor]
Synopsis
“Look, mate. I don’t know who you think you are swanning around in that daft cape of yours but will you get it through that thick grey mop that I am NOT this Master bloke?”
Joseph Lemaître is having a hell of a day…
Someone has driven into the back of his Allegro, meaning he’s arrived late at the office yet again. Getting his boss to believe him would be hard enough as it is without having to explain that he was run into by a vintage canary-yellow roadster. That’s the last straw. “You’ll have to do better than that Lemaître!”
He’s for the chop and he knows it…
To make matter’s worse, Joseph is now 85% sure that the reason his wife Joy is so desperate to get him out of the house all the time is because she’s having an affair with that dishy new neighbour over the road. Joseph knew the moment he moved in that Joy would go ga-ga over him and, well, why wouldn’t she? Tom is a thoroughly modern man perfectly in tune with the Britain of the 1970s.
Joseph’s just a relic of another time and he knows it…
So the last thing he needs right now is for some mad geezer in a cape to keep insisting that he’s someone he isn’t.
How is he going to save his job, marriage AND get his car fixed when this crazy old Doctor won’t stop harassing him about being some fella called the Master?
“What the hell are you talking about, ‘interstitial vortices’!? What I want to know is what you’re going to do about my back wheel!”
The Doctor’s arch nemesis is the ‘master of disguise’, yet the Doctor always saw through him. But what if - just one time - he was looking too hard?
Joseph Lemaître may look the part and have the correct sounding alias but he is just a very ordinary man having a very bad day. However, the Doctor is convinced that he is actually his old enemy, simply up to his usual tricks… We follow Joseph as his day goes from bad to worse, exacerbated by the Doctor’s continuous attempts to unmask him as the renegade Time Lord criminal known as the Master.
The Doctor’s various ruses to uncover him include driving him off the road in Bessie and endangering his position at the offices of a respected pharmaceutical company. When events come to a head and it becomes dreadfully apparent that the Doctor is catastrophically mistaken, he cannot do enough to help Joseph.
He makes things right at Joseph’s office, pays to fix his Austin Allegro and also has Mike Yates cease his undercover stake-out as ‘Tom’ in the house over the road…
Opening Page
It is a rotten feeling to suddenly find oneself a dinosaur. The realisation that this was what he had become had hit him hard, in many ways considerably harder than the bright canary-yellow vintage roadster which had ploughed into the back of his Austin Allegro on the M40 but a few moments ago.
He had been unhappily making his way to the job he didn’t much care for and which he wasn’t much good at, having once again said goodbye to Joy, leaving her free at home to drool over the handsome young thing that had recently moved in over the road. A thing called Tom with very tight jeans.
He had been spending his commute in the usual way - contemplating how all of a sudden he was a middle-aged shell of a man left behind, seemingly by everybody, to languish twenty years in the past - when the incongruous motorcar had shunted him forwards with a force he hadn’t thought the vehicle would be capable of when he had initially glimpsed it in the distance in his rear view mirror. He had had no choice but to subsequently swerve onto the hard shoulder to let this maniac pass.
Instead, there was a bright yellow streak pulling in just behind him.
Had this happened to anybody else, they may very well have exited their own car forthwith, gaining some serious satisfaction from slamming their own door for emphasis, and fuelled by righteous indignation and adrenaline-laced fury promptly remonstrated with the perpetrator, but such was Joseph Lemaître’s current state of mind his immediate thought was simply, “Yep… That’s about right.”
After all, he was - as he had so recently discovered - a dinosaur…
Not as much of a dinosaur as this bloke, though… Glancing in his wing mirror at the ridiculous contraption which had hit him, he saw the other driver exit the yellow monstrosity in question and begin making his way over to Joseph’s car. He was a tall man with a mop of grey hair and if his car weren’t daft enough then his choice of clothes more than made up for it.
A cape (cape!) billowed out behind him, enhanced by the motorway traffic whizzing past at considerable speed, as the man sauntered towards Joseph’s Allegro and knocked on the window with all the misplaced authority of an officer of the law. This authority is so often misplaced in genuine policemen but this fella had been the one at fault, so why on Earth was he acting like he had done nothing remotely untoward? No, more than that – like he was fundamentally and squarely in the right?
On account of Joseph’s lamentable lack of self-esteem, he instinctively wound down his window half way and apologised.
“Sorry that’s as far as it will go.”
“And this as far as you go, old chap,” the man said, a slight lisp permeating his aura of breezy arrogance. He gave off the vibe of someone who had just beaten a grandmaster at chess but who wanted to make it appear as if he did that sort of thing all the time for breakfast. “The game’s over.”
Not a clue what the mad old duffer was on about, Joseph suddenly had an idea about what might be going on. Rubbing his beard, he asked the smiling madman, “Should you be out by yourself?”
Better to Travel Hopeful [Seventh Doctor]
Synopsis
“History says your ship never made it, that you remained lost. Adrift… I can’t argue with that. All I can do is to make sure you don’t finish your days alone. Tea?”
Humanity Salvation Vessel Noah-Gamma never made it to its destination…
Owing to a catastrophic malfunction, nearly all of its crew perished in cryo-sleep and the only survivor wasn’t awoken in time. Revived millennia too late, that same malfunction has prevented the survivor – Lalaka Wood – from instigating a course correction and joining the rest of the colonists who presumably did make it.
Her crew lost, she is destined never to make it to humanity’s new home. Instead, she is condemned to drift forever forward through uncharted space, her only company being the ship’s computer and a food dispenser to which she uploaded some AI software years back, primarily to settle a debate she was having with the computer about biscuits.
Oh, and then there’s the funny little man with the umbrella who drops in every couple of years…
“You make a pretty good case, Doctor, for why you can’t take me with you every time you leave but I don’t know… There’s something about you which makes me think you’re lying.”
The older she gets, the wiser she becomes. He isn’t waiting for the ‘time’ to be right – he’ll never take her with her. She will never, ever get off this ship. History says she was lost, so lost she must stay. With each of his visits, the more she comes to accept this. She even comes to relish the company – who wouldn’t? Knowing life could have been better but having realised it could have been a heck of a lot worse, Wood eventually dies aboard the Noah-Gamma at a grand old age surrounded by her computer, her food dispenser and the Doctor.
Except she was right… The Doctor was lying.
History never said she was lost. History said that after touching down on the human race’s new planet, Lalaka Wood’s trauma at losing her crew sent her mad and, once elected into power, turned her into a cruel dictator who not only subjugated her own people, but also led humanity into the most terrible conflicts…
The Doctor wasn’t making sure history ran its course, he was changing it.
He had to stop that from happening. The computer knew this, of course, programmed by the Doctor to fly ever on and to lock Wood out of its controls once the stasis booth awoke her naturally. Calculating and manipulative, perhaps, but he wasn’t acting out of malice. While she may well have been a terrible human being in one life, the Doctor understands that in this one she’s merely a patient on account of his meddling.
As he remains a Doctor, the least he could do was to make house calls…
“It’s over now… Plot a course to wherever you choose or shut down completely. Computer, Dispenser 26 - you’ve just saved the human race.”
Opening Page
Ten years to the day after she awoke, and about fifteen thousand after she was supposed to have arrived, Lalaka Wood roamed the corridors of the beaten up old crate she called ‘home’ once again, taking the long way round to the observation deck. She had never really understood why the Noah-Gamma even had one of those when the crew was always intended to be in suspended animation for its journey to the new world. Precious little views to take in, after all, when you’re frozen in time.
Now though, she was grateful for it. Time was all she had, having had the misfortune to survive whatever it was that had destroyed her crewmates as they slept. It had asphyxiated them but her pod remained unaffected until it wore down naturally and she awoke. As a result of the malfunction, she was now permanently locked out of the system. The stasis pods were beyond repair which meant that she could never return to sleep and navigation was fried, leaving her completely unable to steer the ship, for which the computer had been incredibly apologetic.
So of course she was going to take the long way round to the observation deck. There had been no need to hurry in millennia. Well alright, a decade relative to her but who’s counting?
She was, that’s who. She always counted. It used to drive her mad but now it was a comfort to chart the passing of time. It gave her perspective and perspective gave her focus, something it could have been so very easy to lose having spent the last ten years alone.
Not that she was truly alone, of course. The catastrophe may have wiped out her friends and fried anything which might have extricated her from this mess but the computer had nonetheless remained online. Perhaps not as stimulating as shooting the breeze with Rama and certainly nowhere near as comforting nor as electrifying as feeling the warmth of Ido’s chest, talking to the computer did at least ensure that conversation was not something she had to do completely without.
Naturally, with only a computer to talk to she had begun to yearn for another voice in those early days. This was partly why she had uploaded some of the Artificial Intelligence software she had found to one of the food dispensing machines. It increased the number of voices on board exponentially but, more importantly, it also served to settle a months-long debate she had been having with the computer about biscuits.
Unfortunately, it sided with the computer, which did nothing for her rather fragile state of mind at the time. She had spent the first two years railing against her lot anyway so to be ganged up on by a pair of machines, both of which she knew for a fact had never even eaten a biscuit, was the last straw. She screamed for weeks. Over time though, the burning rage dissipated.
The reasons for this were twofold. Not only was Dispenser 26 a surprisingly good listener, able to dish out rather sage advice alongside a fish supper, there were also the visits from that strange little man who popped by with his blue box and umbrella every couple of years.
That was another reason she counted. It gave her a clearer idea of when she was due another visit from the Doctor.
Crystal Visions [Eleventh Doctor]
Synopsis
“What can I say? Dreams really do come true!”
Groggily waking up from a half-remembered dream in which a man-sized anthropomorphic pelican assisted her on the most important account her company had ever landed, Sadia Azimi once again blinks into the world and goes about her morning, readying herself in time for when her regular lift to work arrives.
Just like any other day.
Except today isn’t like any other day. Today she is amazed to answer the door, not to Martin like normal, but to that man-sized anthropomorphic pelican, dressed in an immaculately pressed suit with latte in wing and seemingly very anxious to get cracking on the Romero account.
“Yes, Doctor. But not the psychedelic cheese dreams…”
Sadia has questions. A lot of them. How can a pelican talk? Why does it work in Leadership Development? Why is it acting as if nothing is amiss and continuing to follow her around? Why does it insist they’ve worked together for years? How can her dream be real and, most importantly, just why has
all of this happened to her?
Luckily, her next door neighbour’s rather unusual house guest is at a bit of a loose end while Craig’s at work and he might just be able to make sense of it all. After all, he’s apparently a Doctor of some kind…
“Yeah but they’re best. Eternal love and security? When you can have a giant talking bird or a house made of marshmallow?”
Closely following Sadia and Andrew Pelican around, this strange man with the swishy hair and dickie bow is closing in on the truth. While the Doctor initially suspects invasion (1100 years of repelling them will make you paranoid), he soon discovers the reality is much more mundane - a huge
misunderstanding borne out of a very embarrassing mistake…
After careful consideration, the benevolent Asherlox have deemed the inhabitants of Sol 3 worthy of contacting and have implemented their usual method of establishing first contact – scanning the mind of
one of the planet’s randomly selected inhabitants to get an idea of what the planet is like and how best to work up to saying hello without causing mass panic.
Unfortunately, the Asherlox do not sleep and have absolutely no concept of dreams. Assuming Sadia’s dreamstate is what life on Earth is actually like,
they have unknowingly blown their cover straight away.
Perhaps out of serious reconsideration, or more likely acute embarrassment, the Asherlox deem Earth not yet ready for contact and, having solved the mystery, the Doctor bids farewell to Sadia who now has a lot of work to catch up on…
The help from the pelican might have come in useful…
“Bye Sadia. And, I’m just saying, if you are going to redecorate… Marshmallow. Think about it.”
Opening Page
Waking up in the morning had never been her favourite thing but needs must.
Not for the first time, Sadia sulked that she couldn’t very well earn her living while fast asleep, and certainly not very efficiently if her dream last night were anything to go by. Thinking about it now with the benefit of hindsight, hiring a pelican to take charge of the Romero account was never going to end well no matter how good an idea it had seemed at the time. Not exactly discontented with her life, Sadia nevertheless sighed at the thought it would likely never be as exciting as her dreams suggested it might be.
As a means to amuse herself awake, enough to drag herself out of her obscenely comfy bed and to the intermittent shower she kept forgetting to get fixed, she allowed herself the relatively unkind thought that a pelican couldn’t exactly do a worse job of the Romero account than Martin was currently making of it.
As precisely no water washed over her, she waited the customary eleven seconds and braced herself for the piercing ice cold needles which never failed to finish off waking her up. She thought it funny how routine certain variances can become. She mulled over if there could ever be a deviation from routine or simply just the potential for a new one, because that prolonged burst of freezing cold belated water had once upon a time been an unwanted maintenance issue whereas, these days, it served a purpose.
And there it was, bringing with it some clarity and a modicum of guilt at her previous dismissal of Martin. Nobody would know she ever thought it of course but she would. Freezing back into the land of the living, Sadia Azimi soon turned her mind to the day ahead, leaving her dreams behind as they settled into fuzzy, half-remembered snapshots.
There is never a deviation from routine, only the potential for a new one and three years, four months, one week and six days ago she had switched to almond milk. Adding it to her freshly brewed coffee she checked the headlines and, as with every other morning, waited for Martin to arrive in his Mini, honk his horn twice and whisk them both off on another exciting adventure in Leadership Development. Eight minutes to go and, according to the website, this article on the Chancellor’s latest personal scandal was
going to be a three minute read. Having previously worked out the correlation between her own reading speed and the news site’s projected one, she knew that she would get it done in less than two.
Good, she thought, because that meant she could probably squeeze in a crumpet.
The doorbell shattered her morning to smithereens, drowning out Schubert’s Symphony No 9 and bringing with it a whole load of dreaded questions. Nobody ever rang her doorbell at twelve minutes past eight on a Tuesday morning so who on Earth was doing it now? Was it Martin and, if so, why hadn’t he sounded his horn twice and waited in his idling car? Why was he so early?
Naturally for a creature of such habit, Sadia got up cautiously from the little round table in the corner of her kitchen and made her way to the front door. As she hit the halfway mark of her hallway the doorbell sounded again. Reaching the front door, confused by the first ring and irritated by the second and opening it with a mixture of both, she hoped that she had been wrong about there never being a deviation from routine because she really, really didn’t want this to be the beginning of a new one.
Stood before her on the doorstep, dressed in an immaculate grey wool suit and somehow holding a latte, was an enormous pelican…
that keeps blinking in an out of existence, experiences “evolutionary” jumps through time etc. A person from this planet exists outside these events, and has to survive for what seems like years while the ever-changing events around them.