Carol's Christmas Caper

The hardest part of Christmas, as far as Carol was concerned, wasn't the dinner. Nor was it getting the decorations up, or the cards written. This was mostly because, like any sane technopath, she cheated and used machines to do all of that for her - on the off chance that they worked correctly, of course. Daniel still wouldn't let her forget the time that the AutoTree had decided it wanted to be a rocket ship and left a huge hole in the ceiling, way back in 2015.

No, the hardest part was trying to get Sine a present.

Cauren was easy. Cauren hadn't seen half of what modern human civilization had to offer, and thus would be happy with quite a lot of things. It was basically like shopping for a kid all over again. But Sine... Sine was the sort of person who'd already been mostly everywhere, had already had everything at least twice and was most certainly not wanting for anything. And Carol was pretty sure that a Netflix subscription wasn't going to cut it.

No, this present had to be special. Because when one went gift-hunting for Sine, one had to go to some very great lengths.

And so it was that, one night, Carol borrowed the Sifter and began her search.

Cubic

The following is a response to the story posted by FormerVengeance here, as well as the various follow-ups. Also, be warned that it may change with future installations.

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"You've been on a cube kick recently, Carol."

Carol grunted, but didn't turn around. Sine wasn't wrong, though - most of the things running around the TARDIS looked like they had been cut from cubes, or had been cube-shaped some time ago. A reddish, eagle-shaped creature whistled as it flew in circles around the central column, follwed closely by a white-and-black, angular tiger, whilst a yellow, squared-off lion and a boxy green elephant pushed against each other, trumpeting and snarling irritably. Some might have suspected the technopath had been foiled by a Rubik's Cube at some point, and this was her way of taking vengeance upon the obtuse nature of the puzzle.

The problem was, she'd been like this ever since the adventure to save Ceneric. And it was all too obvious why Carol was doing this.

Perdition

The following is a collab with Cornwind Evil. He devised the main story framework, I took care of the writing. Enjoy!

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Sometimes, you think you know a person. You think you know their likes, their dislikes and their odd quirks that make them the unique individual they are. You hug them when they cry, you laugh when they tell you embarrassing stories of high school. You congratulate and scold them when the the comes to do so, you are there when they need you and not there when they don't. And then comes the moment when, out of the blue, they say or do something that completely changes your perspective on them and forces you to re-draw your mental picture of them, like opening packet of Digestives to find every third one is a Jaffa Cake.

Carol had her second moment when she saw the six-shooter Sine kept in a locked box.

She knew it was cursed the moment her "partner" opened it up. The hissing voices had hit her like a shot of whiskey hits the stomach, with the exact amount of unpleasant churning. The urge to simply reach out and grab it sat like a fat toad in the back of her mind, yet the rest of it was screaming in silent terror loud enough to prevent that from happening. What the technopath found the most unnerving, however, was the fact that, despite everything her head was screaming at her, the thing in front of her looked like a prop from a Lone Ranger set - almost innocuous, despite being... well, a gun.

Blinking, she looked up at Sine, and saw the grim seriousness on her face. Oh, dear. It was going to be one of those things.

"Carol... Do you remember what happened a week ago?"

Carol gulped, ignoring the metaphorical snakes in her gullet. "Yeah... That didn't go so well, did it?"

That had been the first moment.