Hour One (short story)

Hour One was the first release and first full story in the Doom's Day multimedia series, released on 5 June 2023 on the Doctor Who website.

It was released in celebration of the 60th Anniversary of Doctor Who.

The story followed the eponymous assassin Doom.

Summary
Doom has 24 hours to live after a complication on New Venice. This is how her story begins...

Someone has sent literal Death after Doom. Unless she can find the Doctor she is gonna meet certain doom. Only Terri can help her with that, if Doom can persuade her.

Plot
On New Venice, an assassin named Doom stumbles out of a ballroom and onto a terrace wearing a beautiful holographically-generated ballgown and holding a staser rifle, convincing herself that there are worse places to die. Knowing that she is living on borrowed time, she tries to think fast. She checks her life signs on her vortex manipulator and decides to phone her office.

On a distant grey planet, a nondescript office block holds the headquarters of the Lesser Order of Oberon, which is so important that the entire city around it had been built to cover for it. Doom's call reaches the headquarters' office, where the highly disinterested office worker Terri does not even react. However, hearing it continue to ring forces her to answer, where Doom's hologram springs up to meet her. Desperately trying to explain her situation, Doom is interrupted almost immediately by another call from an important Judoon Vice Admiral, and she despairs.

Picking up Doom once again, Terri once again lacks interest, and Doom's increasing agitation simply gives her more reason to ignore her. Doom eventually gets through to Terri by claiming that her mission was a set-up, but Terri is still more interested in proving that Doom got her targeted kill at Duke Derek Gamma's Masked Ball so the requisite funds can be transferred to the Lesser Order's Guild Account. Doom confirms she visited, but killed the one person she was not supposed to, as the Doctor was there. This makes Terri take notice and, believing that Doom has killed the Doctor, describes it as a bad mistake and begins the necessary paperwork. However, Doom explains that the Doctor is alive but she has only 24 hours to live, causing Terri to instead begin a Death-In-Service Report early. Doom lets her holographic outfit return to normal while trying to calm down.

Doom thinks back to her mission on the Grand Balcony. Despite believing herself to be an expert at not being noticed in any room, she was shocked to see an old man staring directly at her, simply stating, "I wouldn't". He insisted he could help her and introduced himself as the Doctor. With Doom highly sceptical that he would help an assassin, he again insisted that she should abort her mission before she made a terrible mistake. She snuck away, still feeling the Doctor's eyes following her, located her target on the dancefloor with one of the Cauldron Princes, and fired her staser, when everything went wrong.

Doom desperately explains to Terri that she needs to find the Doctor again to try and fix her situation, but she continues to fill out her death form. Doom, however, insists that she remain on the Lesser Order's rota and begins to get an idea: as operatives are sent anywhere in time and space to make their kill and are given precisely one hour before being teleported away, she reasons that she has up to 24 chances to find the Doctor before she dies.

Suddenly, something dark moves from the end of the terrace. Despite believing it at first to be the Doctor coming to check on her, Doom quickly realises that it is a moving, living shadow, which she quickly describes as "[her] actual Death". She begs Terri to send her a new list of targets, and she does, allowing Doom one more look at the sunset of New Venice before teleporting. Scrolling past The Alderton Array and Madrigal's Escalation, Doom selects the Stormcage Containment Facility as her next mission, knowing someone who knows the Doctor very well might be there. As the shadows lunge towards her in the shape of a giant screaming skull, she teleports away and tells Death to wait; she is going to find the Doctor.

Characters

 * Doom
 * Terri
 * Judoon
 * Judoon Vice Admiral
 * Old man
 * Death

Worldbuilding

 * New Venice features an android string quartet and crystal gondolas.
 * An assassin being sent to kill the Doctor is described as a practical joke akin to buying tartan paint.
 * Terri decides that the music to be played at Doom's burial should be the "Macarena", calling it "a classic".
 * In previous missions, Doom had overthrown the Daedalus Conspiracy, sealed the Mandeville Dimension, and saved Princess Agatha from her seven deadly husbands.

Continuity
to be added