The First (comic story)

Summary
September 12, 1915: adventurers in snow banter with each other: a biologist named Dr. Clark, James Wordie, and apparent leader Mr. Frank Wild. There is also a photographer named Jimmy—who thinks he sees something in the snow. Tentacles come out of the snow and grab Clark, who believes it is trying to communicate with him. Martha, outside TARDIS, admits to the Doctor she was wrong: the Antarctic is beautiful and she wants to leave. The atmospheric density jacket he’s given her should keep her warm. He has a soft drink and popcorn as they wait for the start of and eventually watch the aurora australis, light emitted by particles excited by energetic charged particles travelling along magnetic field lines into the earth’s upper atmosphere. He puts on his glasses and sees a hole in it as if something’s broken through. He uses the psychic paper to pretend to be Dr. John Smith from the Society. The Doctor sees the downed Clark’s hand to be translucent. Jimmy uses his box brownie camera to take a picture of Martha. It is a Kodak Brownie number 0. Jimmy introduces himself as James (Francis) Hurley. When they are questioned, Martha tells them the name of their ship is HMS Fantastic. They go to the ship, the Endurance, ship of Ernest Shackleton’s ship. Shackleton failed to get to the South Pole twice. This was the Imperial Trans Antarctic attempt, an attempt to cross via the South Pole. He fails at this too but the Doctor does not want to reveal that due to the web of time. Shackleton thinks the Doctor is a spy from someone else such as Amundsen or Mawson. The psychic paper does not work on Shackleton. Rosie once took Shackleton to the Palladium to see a mentalist and those illusions didn’t work on him either. Locked up in the hold with Jimmy as company, the Doctor finds a jar with something egg like in it and glowing. Mr Wild has a bit of blood covered alien tentacle in his hand. Jimmy tells Martha they are here to know they’ve been somewhere that no one else has been. Martha compares that to her and the Doctor, they are the same but they do not take prisoners or photographs. Shackleton’s driven, determined, that is why the paper won’t work on him. A possessed Clark attacks Shackleton and Wild in a dark room. Clark has seen them and their minds. The ice, he says, wants them. Clark gets outside and climbs the rigging as something attacks the ship. Jimmy lets the Doctor and Martha out. As a huge alien thing, octopus-T-Rex-like rises up out of the ice with tentacles grabbing Jimmy, on the rigging, Clark wants to get a good view of their deaths… It opens with an entry from the diary of James Francis Hurley, Sept 19th, 1915. The Doctor tells Shackleton that bullets won’t hurt the thing. Shackleton orders Wordie and Wild to man the harpoons. Martha notices the thing is made of ice while the Doctor tells her inside is a beating heart beneath the crystalline life form and there are veins. Shackleton orders McEllroy and Macklin with him as the harpoons hardly bother the thing. Shackleton points a revolver at it. He scares the monster away. The Doctor explains his sonic screwdriver to Macklin, “suitable for medical readings, blowing up mad computers and well, putting screws into things.” Clark is being changing into something inhuman. His blood stream is carrying something malign that is rewriting his DNA. The Doctor tells Shackleton he is a practical man and won’t put the Doctor and Martha back into the hold because the Doctor is good in a fight and can make a mean omelette. Jimmy tells Martha that Shackleton always wanted to be the first to reach the South Pole, the first to reach the other side of the Antarctic. When the Doctor talks about the fact that he is here to improve the food, Jimmy tells him that in a week they may have to eat the dogs! Wordie tells Shackleton that Clark is going to die. Morning brings no light. An expedition goes out to hunt the monster. The Doctor whispers to Martha he is very worried: everyone in the Endurance Expedition is supposed to survive. That fact made Shackleton a hero. Everyone lived. Martha asks him if that is the reason he is going along with the hunt: to get history back on track. They view penguins running from something. The monster comes up under the group, knocking one sled cart over. Martha finds a strange glowing shard and the Doctor touches it and glows and seems translucent to an alien ice creature that is humanoid shaped. It thinks they must study the Doctor further and orders the Mind Core to terminate the experiment. The beast blows up and samples are taken. With the storm worsening, they have to set up camp on an ice ridge, waiting for the snow to clear. The Doctor felt the minds of the aliens. They killed the creature. The Doctor opens a shard of the creature and finds a rubbery, blubbery bit inside. It was once a whale. In a nutshell, they changed it to something more ice-like. Clark is trying to fight off something the aliens want him to do and tries to leave. Frank Wild finds Clark trying to leave. When Wild points a gun at him, Clark spits an icy breath as him and gives him a bit of frostbite. Robert Clark leads the pursuing group, including the Doctor and Martha to a cave. In front of it, three of the aliens emerge from the ground. The middle one says, “The Skith receive you all with pleasssure!”

The Skith fire ice knives into the hands of the men with guns. The Doctor tells Shackleton to stand down to save his men’s lives and Shackleton listens to him. On a flying upside-down top, the aliens bring them into an ice cave called Oppressor One. The Doctor jokes that their new home will need some nice curtains and get the central heating fixed…gets spruced up a bit. Martha mentions their spaceship looks grown like crystals in a dish. The Doctor explains it is rift technology, old science and that the ship made a hole. The possessed Clark explains the Mindcore which is the home of the aliens’ greatest minds, collects, advises, and monitors. The Doctor mentions “we” had something like this back home but then the aliens ask about his home he lies. He tells them Cheltenham. The aliens take Martha and the others for study and the Doctor threatens the aliens if the others and Martha are ever hurt. One alien puts a hand over the Doctor’s mouth for him to be quiet. Shackleton is quiet; James admits to Martha he’s scared as the humans are in a large cavern. Here, there is a giant octopus in a stone, ice tank, a squid in another, and a giant dinosaur like sea monster in a third. In the center is a giant sized half human, half pig trapped in ice. The Doctor wakes up upside-down with an ice cream headache from hell. In with him, is a fire being. It explain they are explorers, scientists, pursuers of truth. They experiment, cultivate specimens. When asked about himself, the Doctor lies again: son of a butcher and a baker, gluten intolerant, and a vegetarian. He says mealtimes were a nightmare. The fire like being starts to torture the Doctor to get the truth. In the larger cavern, the aliens explain to Martha how they were experimenting with a whale and introducing Skith DNA to it, when it escaped and made contact with Clark and the field morphing, started to change him as well. The alien tells Martha he likes her and her inquisitive mind. He explains they are of the four galaxies and collectors prime of the crystal sea. They are the first to see Earth. The giant pig monster man is a Byndalk and it breaks free. Skith One destroys it at the suggestion of the Mind Core. It was the last of its species and the aliens claim to feel bad about it. The Doctor’s mind shows the alien torturing him images: a Gelth (possibly something else) or a shadowy creature like a witch or ghost; a Daemon, three Daleks, Sutek, a robot mummy, and a Sontaran. Some of these are known to the alien torturing him and these some have been encountered by the Skith. The Doctor claims he’s a writer of fiction and a quiet, stay at home lad. As Martha is taken to a stone table to be studied, Shackleton reminds Clark of how he gave him hell in front of the whole crew and irritates Clark so Clark can fight back. As Clark moves to the control console before the aliens he punched down can regroup, the MindCore calls to him to finish changing. He uses a switch to terminate the aliens and they ice blast apart. The fire creature with the Doctor has the TARDIS, found and retrieved by the MindCore. They figure the Doctor is alien. The alien explains they prize knowledge above all else. That alone had value in an uncertain universe. Their race credo: if you are not the first, you are nothing. Their Ownworld can see Oppressor One and know the Doctor has beaten them to the “prize”. This means they have failed and the alien says, “And the Skith do not like to fail!” From its hands, it zaps the Doctor in an ice ray, firing at his head…

Characters
to be added

Continuity
to be added