"Escape From the Daleks of New York" - Part Four

Part Four

            Brain’s call to the Duke worked to perfection. The Duke and his caravan arrived at the abandoned New York Public Library no less than half an hour after Brain called, mentioning the “gift” that he had for him. That gift turned out to have been a woman with black hair and her face painted in black-and-white makeup, wearing a black corset beneath a black leather jacket, along with a black bouffant skirt and matching knee-high boots.

            “Which one of youse is dah Duke of New York?” she asked with a distinguishable Boston accent.

            “I am,” the Duke stood forward.

            She approached him with a seductive gaze. “Well…I’m heres.”

            “And who are you?”

            After a few smacks on the gum in her mouth, she answered, “Name’s Jean, but youse can call me ‘Jeannie’. Ya know, like Barbara Eden? Duh pigs brought me in ‘bout a week ago, and I hears ‘bout dis ‘Duke’ and how he’s a real bad mother—”

            “Shut yo mouth!”

            “I’m only talkin’ ‘bout you, Duke. I can be yer new squeeze, know what I’m sayin’?” She cozied up to him, the scent of the raspberry gum in her mouth seeping into his nostrils. “I really dig duh powerful types like youse.”

            As this scene of seduction played out, it was observed from the shadows by the Superintendent, Brain, Maggie, Cabbie, and Snake. Brain and Cabbie began to feel nervous in the presence of the Duke himself, whereas Snake started to become impatient from waiting.

            “Where’s this team of yours?” Snake asked the Super.

            “I don’t know,” the Super answered, growing impatient himself. There the Duke was, only a few men accompanying him. They were all easy pickings for the Titans – that is, if they came when the Super contacted them.

            But, alas, they were a no-show.

            To make matters worse, the Duke took “Jean” (Cara’s latest disguise) up on her offer and escorted her back to his car to return to his hideout. As he did so, Cara shot an uncomfortable glare towards her hidden associates, mouthing something to them. Between the makeup and the rapid movement of her black lips, the closest they guessed to what she said was, “Get me out of this!”

            The Super, however, looked at this more as an alternative rather than a setback. “Change of plans,” he announced to the group. “We’re going to infiltrate the Duke’s lair before he gets there.”

            “Are you crazy?!” Helman roared at him.

            “You can’t just waltz into the Duke’s place,” Cabbie said. “That’s suicide!”

            “Well, it’s exactly what we’re gonna do!” the Super declared, before he pointed straight at Cabbie and strictly demanded, “And you’re gonna take us there in your well-fortified cab!”

            The Super’s strict demeanor was enough to force Cabbie into complying. He drove the group to the Duke’s hideout in the Grand Central Terminal. Of course, he didn’t park all that close to the hideout, so as not to alert the Daleks on guard near one of the decommissioned train cars.

            At the last minute, the Super cooked up a plan: Brain and Maggie were to distract the Daleks, while Snake and the Super snuck into the Duke’s hideout and waited for him to return with Cara.

            The Super’s plan worked rather well, with Brain managing to carry an actual conversation with the Dalek guards about their Dalekanium chassis. But, as Snake and the Super infiltrated the hideout, they happened on one room where the President was sitting while being looked after by two of the Duke’s goons. Snake made short work of them both, although he was wounded when one of the goons fired a crossbow arrow into his leg.

            “Mr. President,” the Super approached him. “Do you still have the key?”

            The President motioned to the briefcase that he was still handcuffed to. “Y-Yes,” he stammered, visibly distraught from his ordeal. “P-Please get me out of here before they find out that I have it.” His plea fell on deaf ears, as the Superintendent was more interested in detaching the briefcase from the President than saving his life.

            Noticing his actions, Snake grew suspicious. “What are you doing?”

            The Super didn’t answer. Instead, he jimmied the lock on the briefcase open, finding the key inside – a blue card with a microchip design irradiated through bioluminescence, shining on the satisfied face of the Superintendent. “This is exactly what I’m looking for,” he said, taking the keycard out of the briefcase and pocketing it away in his suit jacket.

            Now Snake was getting angry, not just from the Super ignoring him but the way he was diverging from the plan entirely. “Hey!” he hissed at him. “That’s not the reason we’re—”

            BAM!

            With the empty briefcase, the Super clocked Snake over the head, rendering him unconscious. The President witnessed this in baffled surprise that quickly transfixed into mortification when the Super handcuffed him to his chair. “W-Why are you doing this?!” the President asked him.

            “It’s for your own good, sir,” the Super told him. “I’m sorry.”

            He vanished into the darkness thereafter, leaving Snake and the President to be captured by the Duke and his men, mere minutes later.

-----------------------

            Assisted by their saviors – the Titans – Gumball and Anais helped Oswin to stand upright again, following the missile attack on her. “There’s not a scratch on you!” Gumball observed of her Dalekanium chassis.

            “Are we seriously just gonna ignore the fact that there’s a Dalek right in front of us?” a skeptical Garfield “Gar” Logan (the “Beast Boy”) asked his fellow Titans.

            “Yeah, and it hasn’t once attacked us,” Conner (the “Superboy”) indicated.

            “Because she’s not like the rest of them,” Gumball explained.

            “She?” the fiery Kory Anders noted his pronoun usage.

            “Her name’s Oswin Oswald,” Anais told the Titans. “She was once a human before the Daleks converted her into one of them.”

            “And you trust her based on this information?” Dick Grayson (the “Nightwing”) inquired.

            “That and the fact that she’s protected us from this nightmare reality we’re in, ever since we met her,” Gumball stated.

            “A likely story!”

            All heads turned towards the shadows that the gravelly-sounding voice spoke from. Gumball and Anais saw a balding, gray-suited gentleman emerge. “Who the what are you?!” asked Gumball, spooked more by the man’s menacing aura than the way in which he entered the scene.

            “Super,” Grayson addressed the man. “We got your call.”

            “And yet none of you showed!” The Super irately grumbled. “Where were you?!”

            “We were on our way to you, until we saw these two kids in danger,” Gar said, gesturing to Gumball and Anais.

            Noticing the Watterson siblings, the Super nodded understandingly.

            “Ah, yes,” he said. “The Gladiator’s companions.”

            “Wait. You’ve seen Cara?” Gumball reacted in alarm.

            “Where is she? Is she safe?” the deeply concerned Anais asked.

            The Super grinned. “She will be, once I’ve inserted this into the Dalek’s machine.” He pulled out the bioluminescent keycard from inside his jacket to show Gumball, Anais, and the Titans.

            Conner beamed with hope as he looked on it. “Is that what I think it is?”

            “The literal key to stopping the Daleks,” the Super verified. “All that remains is to find out the precise location of their machine.”

            “MADISON SQUARE GARDEN,” Oswin stated.

            The Super raised one of his bushy eyebrows in question. “I beg your pardon?”

            “THAT IS WHERE THE DALEKS ARE KEEPING THEIR MACHINE – MADISON SQUARE GARDEN.”

            Her intel left the Super feeling immensely satisfied. “Well, thank you for that vital information. I promise your sacrifice will not be in vain.”

            “Her sacrifice?” Anais quizzically reflected on the Super’s words. Before she knew it, a green gelatinous portal opened right behind Oswin and the Super kicked her right through it.

            The portal closed immediately afterwards.

            Gumball saw the device that the Super used to open the portal. It was the same make and model as the one he had seen Rick Sanchez and Cara use during their recent scrape with the Overtakers back in Elmore. He was too stunned and infuriated by what the Super did to Oswin to even bother asking where he got Rick’s portal gun from.

            “Why did you do that?!” he yelled.

            The Super coldly looked on him and replied, “Because I’m the only hope the multiverse has against the Daleks…against the Void.”

"Escape From the Daleks of New York" - Part Three

 

Part Three

            Once the Junior Entertainment Manager aboard the starliner Alaska, Oswin Oswald was now a literal shell of her former self. Sometime during the period she was stranded on the Dalek Asylum, she was converted into one. Even though she managed to retain her human consciousness, believing she had set up camp in the cockpit of the Alaska, it was all a delusion to hide the nightmare that she had become in reality.

            Then she met a man with a bowtie – he called himself “The Doctor.”

            He helped her to see what she had become and realize that she didn’t have to succumb to the conversion. She was still Oswin Oswald in consciousness, something the Daleks could never take away from her.

            When the Dalek Asylum was blown into oblivion, Oswin thought she had perished with the rest of the defunct Daleks. But something pulled her away…away from the asylum…away from death…away from reality itself. She would come to discover that something to have been a dimensional rift that opened during the explosion and transported her and several other Daleks across the multiverse. She ended up with a faction of Daleks dedicated to erasing universes that they deemed imperfect into the Void.

            She relayed all this information to the Watterson siblings, though Gumball and Darwin remained skeptical due their previous experiences with Daleks. “This feels way too much like a trap,” Gumball said. “And this ‘Void’ thing – how come we’re just now hearing about it?”

            “Yeah,” Darwin concurred with his brother. “Cara’s never mentioned it to us, and she’s fought the Daleks for a lot longer than us.”

            “Maybe she’s just now hearing about it herself,” Anais suggested.

            Gumball shook his head. “All the more reason not to take what this Dalek…”

            “Oswin,” Anais corrected him.

            “Ugh!” Gumball moaned. “Alright. All the more reason not to take what Oswin says at face value. Let’s at least wait and see what Cara thinks about this.”

            “Well, I trust Oswin’s intel,” Anais said. “It sounds credible enough to me.”

            “YOU MENTIONED A TARDIS,” Oswin recalled to the Watterson siblings. “IS THE DOCTOR WITH YOU?”

            Anais raised a confused brow. “Who’s the Doctor?”

            Gumball and Darwin knew the answers to both Oswin and Anais’s inquiries. But, before the boys could answer either of them, the windows to the diner shattered and the floorboards busted from underneath its foundation. Oswin and the Watterson siblings saw it was the pack of vagrants that they thought to have eluded earlier.

            Oswin fired her gunstick, managing to exterminate quite a few.

            Unfortunately, the ones that came through the floorboards were successful in snatching up Darwin. “HELP!” the fish-boy cried.

            “DARWIN!” Gumball and Anais yelped.

            They did what they could to pull him away from the vagrants, but they weren’t strong enough. Darwin was sucked right into the hole in the floor to the horror of his two siblings.

            “WE HAVE TO LEAVE!” Oswin told them. “I’M SORRY!”

            Following her advice, Gumball and Anais reluctantly fled the penetrated diner with her. She acted as their protector on the way out, firing her death ray on the vagrants that attempted to break their escape.

            With Darwin’s kidnapping, it dawned on Anais and Gumball how they needed Cara’s help more than she needed theirs.

-----------------------------

            Cabbie graciously drove Cara, Snake, and the Superintendent to the location of the Brain. His place of residence looked to be the New York Public Library, left in a dismal state upon the city’s transformation into a prison. Cabbie parked his beloved cab a short distance from the entrance; he usually hated the thought of leaving it alone on the street, but he made a special exception for Snake and his new “friends.”

            As soon as they were at the door, Cabbie took off his shoe and knocked. While he did so, Cara glanced over at Snake and noticed him checking a device on his left wrist that appeared to be a unique wristwatch – except this one counted down instead of up. “What’s it counting down to?” she asked Snake, who only responded by shooting her the coldest stare she had ever been on the receiving end of. It was enough to make the Gladiator shiver and remark in her quirky way, “Sorry that I asked.”

            “Who is it?” a woman asked from inside Brain’s building.

            “It’s me,” Cabbie answered.

            “Who’s me?”

            “Cabbie.”

            “What do you want?”

            “A few people here want to see Brain. It’s important…”

            “No way, Cabbie!”

            “One of them’s Snake Plissken.”

            After a brief moment, the door unlocked and opened to reveal an alluring young woman with long dark, curly hair and wearing a purple-violet dress that bared her shoulders. She surveyed the four people in front of her, including Snake. “You’re Plissken?” she asked him, before her dark brown eyes settled on Cara and the Super. “And who’re these two?”

            “Associates of Snake,” Cabbie replied. “They all want to see Brain.”

            “Why?” the woman inquired, guardedly.

            “We want to meet the Duke,” the Superintendent told her.

            The woman glared over Snake, Cara, and the Super for a long moment. To Cara, she seemed like a very distrusting woman, which made a lot of sense, considering the setting. After her moment of glaring passed, she finally led them all into the building. She lit a torch to light their path through the dark and dreary interior.

            Along the way, Cabbie introduced them to the mysterious torch-bearing woman. “This is Maggie – Brain’s squeeze.”

            “His ‘squeeze’?” Cara found the title revolting.

            “Yeah,” Cabbie verified. “The Duke gave her to Brain just to keep him happy.”

            Now Cara was even more revolted. “This place really is a nightmare.”

            Maggie brought the group into the main hall of the former public library, which served as Brain’s private room. It was a cluttered mess of an area, containing machines used to make a substance Cara could only guess to be gas from the smell, diagrams of the entire city, including the 69th Street Bridge, and leftover library books that were in decent condition for text that hadn’t been read in decades.

            The man himself named “Brain” sat by a lit fireplace on a reading chair that doubled as a throne. He was a haggard-looking man with scraggy hair and a five o’clock shadow, wearing a filthy, overused lab coat and a black cloth tied around his neck. When Snake got a good look at him, he bitterly uttered a name, “Harold Helman.”

            “Who’s that?” Cara asked.

            “The ‘Brain’ in front of us,” Snake told her. “I knew him four years ago in Kansas City. You remember, Harold? You ran out on me. You left me sitting there.”

            Helman stood up from his chair, eyeing Snake. “You were late.”

            “We were buddies, Harold,” Snake hissed. “You, me, and Fresno Bob. You know what they did to Bob?” He suddenly drew his gun on Helman, prompting Maggie to draw her knife and advance on Snake.

            The Superintendent quickly stood between the two men before a bloodbath ensued. “Hold it! HOLD IT! Nobody cares about any of this! The universe cannot wait for you men to settle your petty squabble!”

            “Who’s this suit?” Helman indicated the Super.

            “I am the Superintendent,” he told Brain. “And I’m the man who’s going to save your reality.”

            Helman scoffed, glancing at Snake. “He’s joking, right? He’s completely out of his gourd!”

            “Maybe he is,” Snake said. “Or maybe you know something about those Daleks that the Duke doesn’t want anyone to know.”

            “Like what?” Helman retorted.

            “Like the machine you’re helping them build that will exterminate your whole world!” The Superintendent bellowed, his voice echoing throughout the entire abandoned complex.

            Maggie looked on Brain suspiciously. “What’s he talking about?”

            “He didn’t tell you?” The Super played on her suspicion. “Your boyfriend here has sold out humanity to the Daleks – more so than the Duke has.”

            “I didn’t sell out anyone!” Helman stormed. “The Duke and the Daleks forced me into designing that machine for them, only on the pretense that I, Maggie, and a select few would avoid being sent through the machine’s gateway and allow us to continue existing through other realities.”

            “If you believe any of that, then they should’ve called you ‘Moron’ instead of ‘Brain’,” Cara belittled. “The Daleks don’t do ‘salvation’! They’re going to leave you and everyone else in this reality to be thrown into the Void!”

            “And how do you know any of that?” Helman asked her.

            “Because I’ve dealt with the Daleks more times in the past than anyone standing in this room,” Cara said. “Believe me when I say that you’ve endangered yourselves by giving them exactly what they want.”

            Helman examined her face. The hardened expression on it told him that she was telling the absolute truth. Slumping back into his reading chair with his head in his hands, he muttered, “I’ve doomed us all.”

            Taking advantage of his guilt, Cara asked him, “Why did the Daleks abduct the President?”

            It took a moment for Brain to collect himself and respond. “He literally holds the key to the machine. A failsafe that those tech wizards up in D.C. figured out before I did. Once it’s inserted into the machine, it’s game over for the Daleks and, by default, the Duke himself.”

            With this information, Cara requested of Brain, “Arrange a special meeting between the Duke and me.”

            “The Duke just doesn’t meet with anyone – special or not,” Helman clarified.

            Cara smirked. “Oh, he will want to see the ‘gift’ you present to him.”

            “What gift?” Brain asked her, but she left the room before she could’ve given him a direct answer.

            Meanwhile, the Superintendent declared, “I’m going to make some arrangements of my own. With this special meeting between Cara and the Duke, I smell a potential sneak attack for my team.”

            “What team?” Brain asked him. “What are you people talking about?!”

-------------------------

            Gumball and Anais ran through the New York streets for minutes, with Oswin lagging close behind them. The siblings – mostly Gumball, who was faster than even his slow-paced little sister – had to decrease their speed just to accommodate for Oswin’s bulky, sluggish Dalek chassis, which was designed more for patrol than elusion. Luckily, they were far enough away from the vagrants to stop and take a breath.

            “We have to go back for Darwin!” Gumball insisted.

            “We have to get back to the TARDIS!” Anais debated. “Gumball, we’re totally out of our element here! Without Cara, we’re as good as dead!”

            “What about Darwin?” Gumball asked her. “He’s as good as dead if we don’t—”

            BOOM!

            A powerful explosion erupted right where Oswin had strolled, knocking her off course and through a nearby brick wall. Gumball and Anais were shocked by the sudden attack, which was perpetrated by the most vicious-looking vagrant that they had seen roam the streets. His hair was spiky and his teeth were as sharp as a shark’s.

            “The traitor’s been eradicated,” he said. “Deal with the leftovers.”

            Anais recognized his chilling voice. It was the same one that she, Gumball, Darwin, and Cara heard over the radio earlier in the TARDIS – the one that broadcasted the memo regarding the abduction of the President.

            On his command, more vagrants emerged from the shadows, surrounding the defenseless Gumball and Anais.

            And then, out of nowhere, a green tiger leapt in and attacked one of the vagrants.

            “What the what?!” Gumball exclaimed.

            A few other vagrants were hit with a blast of fire that engulfed their bodies, making them flail around in agony and panic.

            The situation only got weirder when a white dog appeared between Gumball and Anais and barked at the vagrants standing in front of them. But it was no ordinary bark; it was like a sonic boom that emitted from its mouth, piercing through the vagrants’ eardrums and drawing blood out of them. They fell to the concrete in suffering.

            The lingering cronies were removed from the street by something faster than a speeding bullet, disappearing in the blink of an eye.

            All who remained was the sharp-toothed, spiky-haired vagrant, dumbfounded by the turn of events. “What is happening?!” he cried. “Who is responsible for all of this?! Show yourself!” In his ranting, he received a massive jolt of electricity through his body that rendered him unconscious.

            With all the vagrants incapacitated, Gumball and Anais watched as their saviors formed a line across from them. They consisted of a green-haired boy (the one who had transformed into the green tiger), a woman with fiery red hair and emerald-colored eyes, a masked man in a blue-and-black suit and armed with electric-powered batons, a boy wearing a black t-shirt with Superman’s insignia on it, and the white dog with the powerful bark.

            “W-Who are you guys?” Gumball stammered.

            “We’re the Titans,” the masked man answered.

"Escape From the Daleks of New York" - Part Two

 Part Two

            “Don’t shoot her, Snake. We don’t want her to go and change faces on us.”

            Cara heard the voice of an elderly man speak directly behind the gun-toting MacReady lookalike, who she figured to be the one named “Snake” from the way he obliged to the command. Snake then stood aside to allow Cara to see the elderly man who just spared her life. He was a balding gentleman in a gray suit and tie.

            “Thanks,” Cara told him. “Mister…?”

            “I am the Superintendent,” he introduced himself.

            Cara frowned at his name/title. “Of what?”

            “Of the multiverse,” the Superintendent clarified.

            “Hmph!” Cara scoffed. “I thought that was my job.”

            “Your job is more as an enforcer, Gladiator,” the Superintendent elaborated, “which is precisely the reason why we need your help in dealing with the Dalek threat that this New York dimension has been facing.”

            “I’m sorry, but how is it that you know so much about me and the multiverse?”

            “Let’s just say I’ve had a few journeys through it myself – the hard way. In those journeys, I learned of a machine that the Daleks are building that will open a gateway into the Void.”

            Cara inquisitively frowned again. “The Void?”

            The Superintendent nodded in affirmation. “A secret dimension where people and objects from the universe are erased due to being mistakes. The Daleks have deemed this dimension of New York ‘imperfect’ and so they will discard it into the Void.”

            This information surprised Cara. “How am I only just now hearing about this so-called ‘Void’?”

            “I figured you already had before meeting me,” the Superintendent stated.

            “I mean, yeah, I’ve been to a lot of places in the infinite D.C. over the last few thousand years, but never have I visited or even seen the Void.” Her skepticism over this “Superintendent” character heightened as she then asked him, “Why would you figure I already knew about the Void?”

            “Aren’t you with Gumball and Darwin Watterson?” he asked her.

            Now her skepticism was at an all-time high. “Seriously, who are you?!”

--------------------

            Anais began to feel relentless as she wandered throughout the endless interior of Cara’s TARDIS. As much as it intrigued her to explore the alien spacecraft, she couldn’t help but feel obligated to go out and help Cara. Yes, she was scared – terrified, more like it – but Cara was kind enough to bring her along on the interdimensional journeys she shared with her big brothers. The least she could’ve done was help her.

            In wandering the corridors, she happened upon what she assumed to be the entertainment room, which was where Gumball and Darwin were at the time. She noticed them watching themselves on the flat screen television set mounted on the wall. “Are these home movies?” she asked them.

            Darwin giggled at her observation. “That’s what we thought at first, until we realized there was no possible way Cara could have home movies of us.”

            “Then what is…this?” Anais indicated the footage of Gumball badly skateboarding.

            Gumball could hardly contain his excitement when he told her, “We have our own show! And I’m named after it! It’s on some weird channel called HBO Max – I guess it’s one of those multiverse networks or something.”

            “We’ve been watching stuff we’ve never done or haven’t done yet,” Darwin said. “It’s like a window into our future!”

            “O…kay?” Anais dubiously uttered. “Wouldn’t that be a little…unethical?”

            “The only ‘unethical’ thing about this is that we’re not being paid to watch ourselves,” Gumball countered.

            Anais groaned. “Whatever. I think we should better our time by going out there and helping Cara.”

            “But she told us to stay here in the TARDIS,” Darwin reiterated.

            “And do what? Watch TV and eat junk food while she risks her life?” Anais argued. “What if she doesn’t come back? We could end up being stuck here in this ship and in a parallel world for the rest of our lives!”

            “Anais, there’s a reason she’s called ‘The Gladiator’,” Gumball indicated. “She’s dealt with dangerous situations like this all the time.”

            “In any of those scenarios, has she dealt with it alone?” Anais inquired.

            Gumball hesitated on his reply. “Well…uh…actually…she’s had a little help.”

            “So she’s always had you guys around to back her up?” Anais followed.

            “Well, yeah,” Darwin answered. “We’ve always been there for Miss Cara.”

            “Then what makes this situation any different?” Anais concluded.

            “Because it’s the Daleks, Anais,” Gumball said. “The last time we went up against them, we had a lot of help. Remember? I saved a Powerpuff Girl.”

            “No, you didn’t,” Darwin denied.

            “That’s not what I heard,” Anais also negated.

            “My point is…” Gumball gritted his teeth in frustration before he calmly reasoned with his little sister, “We can’t risk our safety if it means putting you out on the frontlines.”

            Anais folded her arms in discontent. “Fine. I guess all that talk about you guys saving countless worlds from several interdimensional threats was all a big joke, wasn’t it? I might as well have just stayed home, if this is what it’s really like.”

            Darwin and Gumball watched her walk out of the entertainment room in a huff, leaving the boys wallowing in a sea of guilt…but not without a sense of realization.

            “She just totally guilt-tripped us, didn’t she?” Darwin deduced.

            “Mom has taught her well,” Gumball sulked.

----------------------

            The Watterson children wandered the desolate streets of the alternate New York. Not only were the streets desolate, they were filthy and reeked of hot garbage that was littered all around. “This was more than just Daleks,” Anais observed. “This was humanity surrendering itself to a state of decay.”

            “Yeah, that tends to happen after an alien invasion,” Gumball cynically indicated.

            It was then that Darwin pointed with one flipper and alerted, “Look over there.”

            Following his flipper, Gumball and Anais spotted the site of a massive plane crash. Bits of wreckage were scattered over the street corner. Judging from the flames that still consumed them, the crash occurred recently.

            “This has to be the plane that the President was in,” Anais surmised.

            “So…where’s the President?” Gumball asked.

            Before anyone could take a guess, they suddenly heard the nearest manhole cover popping open. A vagrant man crawled out of it, scaring the living daylights out of the Watterson children. They ran in one direction, only to turn back when groups of other vagrant men stormed their way, some armed with clubs that rapped against walls and other objects.

            “We’re surrounded!” Darwin cried.

            Anais saw only one way out of their predicament: a nearby abandoned establishment by the name of “Chock full o’ Nuts.” “Quick! In here!” she directed her older brothers, running inside along with them.

            They watched as the vagrants passed through, not paying any mind to them or the place in which they hid. Nonetheless, the circumstance still left Gumball shaken. “What the what was that all about?!” he asked.

            “Maybe you guys were right,” Anais huffed. “Maybe we should have stayed in the TARDIS. This is way too dangerous.”

            “DID YOU SAY ‘TARDIS’?”

            Gumball, Darwin, and Anais jolted at the high-pitched, stilted, robotic voice that spoke from within Chock full o’ Nuts. Darwin and Gumball recognized its register all too well, chills shooting down their spines. They all slowly turned to face a lone figure that lurked in the shadows.

            A Dalek!

            The Watterson children were prepared to scream and run away again, until they heard the Dalek say, “DON’T BE AFRAID. I WON’T HURT YOU.”

            “Don’t believe it!” Gumball warned his siblings. “It’s just tricking us, so that it can bait Cara!”

            “OS…WIN…” the Dalek sputtered.

            “Ya see?!” Gumball exclaimed. “It’s already declaring victory! It said, ‘Us win!’”

            “OS…WIN…” the Dalek sputtered again.

            Anais raised a curious eyebrow, listening closely with her long pink rabbit ears. “Sounds like it’s saying, ‘Oswin’,” she discerned.

            “MY NAME IS…OSWIN OSWALD!” screeched the Dalek.