40 - The Lords of Ancrazar

THE HOODIES OF ANCRAZAR

Part The First

We start this intelligence-insulting episode of the life of the world's only heavily-pregnant transsexual Cambridge graduate amateur archaeologist to find said heavily-pregnant transsexual Cambridge graduate amateur archaeologist trapped in the deepest darkest vault of Touchwood Three, forgotten, alone and with no obvious way to escape, or even inclination to do so.

However, by an incredible amount of luck, Ben discovers she is not actually locked in the cell - in fact, the cell door is wide open, she just hadn't been able to see it over her orb-like stomach which now boasts a circumference of 196 centimetres. Realizing at last this is why Katie escaped days ago and ran off laughing, "Ben is a loser! Ben is a loser! Ben is a loser!" our for-want-of-a-better-word main character struggles to get off the cell bench and squeeze out through the doorway.

Ben plans to return to London and blackmail Professor Dixby Leam of Royal Holloway to perform a backdoor abortion, then celebrate by taking the Professor to the gay club The Pink Elephant, which coincidentally is directly beneath the Royal Holloway offices. Ben first learned of The Pink Elephant after they used the internet to place a restraining order over her.

After just five hours, Ben manages to get her hugely swollen girth out of the cell, where upon three floating articles of clothing confront her and roll her up against the wall.

"Wallet!" hisses a voice from the empty hoodie.

"Do you HAVE to mumble in a monosyllabic way?" demands Ben, peering over her gravid stomach. "It's totally infuriating!"

"Monosyllabic?" jeers another hoodie. "There are TWO syllables in 'wallet', you bitch!"

"I'm not giving you my wallet! Mainly because I don't HAVE a wallet! I don't need money! I am like the Royal Family, only better. I have a degree from Cambridge."

Some floating knives join the floating hoodies.

"Fuck off!" Ben shouts at the sharp bits of metal floating in front of her unprotected eyes. "And if I were you, I'd put those evil floating carving knives in a kitchen drawer. You might hurt someone. Someone important. Like me, for example!"

"Britney thinks she's clever," observes one hoodie.

"Yeah. How about we cut her open?"

"Yeah. Slash her pretty face up. Her last albulm was shite."

Ben realizes that if she is to survive the next few minutes she needs some kind of clever judo move that will knock the knives to the floor and defeat one of the hoodies. However, it quickly dawns on her she doesn't know ANY judo moves at all, let alone ones that would useful against possessed inanimate objects.

Lips trembling and eyes weeping tears of a thousand of a thousand sociopolitical stereotypes, Ben realizes all she can do is throw up her arms to cover her face and pray a miracle happens.

Luckily, this causes her to lose her centre of gravity, and she falls over, flattening her attackers beneath her huge sphere of smooth, tight pink skin - kind of like the Giant Breast bit in "All You Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask". Or the cliffhanger to The Creature from the Pit Part Two. Except, less erotic.

Either way, Ben has single-handedly defeated her assailants in a totally unbelievable plot twist.

Just then, more floating objects cluster around Ben, who is now unable to move, like a turtle on its back. She looks around at the long-flowing gowns and porkpie hats, incense burners, who circle around the prostrate poser with sinister intent, and Ben struggles to lift her head enough to watch this stunning display of CGI and coathangers.

"It's Lindsey Lohan!" one of the sentient robes shouts.

"She's let herself go," muses another. "Like Weightgain 4000 let-herself-go."

"I dunno. She looks more like Madonna to me."

"Shut up, Curtis. I know Madonna, I've met Madonna and THAT lifeless unfortunate, THAT is no Madonna."

"Uh, hello?" Ben shouts up at them. "Who are you?"

"Shut it," says a porkpie hat.

"I dunno," says one of the robes. "Maybe telling Lindsey here our entire life history with no regards for security or credibility, might get some issues off our chests and let us harmonize and bond."

"Wanker," the incense burner sneers.

"We are the exiled outfits of King Richard of Camelot. Our world is being ruled by the usurper King John, brother of Richard. When we came to this land, we lost Richard in a Mongolian betting shop, and until we find him again, the Round Table is totally useless, so we want you to drag up as Richard and act as a human sheild to fight the battle while we all hide somewhere nice and safe."

"Really?" Ben asks, awed.

"No, we're just fucking with your mind."

Ben thinks for a moment, then decides to shove a whole packet Fox Glacier Mint in her mouth (without opening it first) and feels the corridor swirl around her, a strange sensation of floating bliss sweeps over her, and she passes out.

"I knew we shoulda cut her throat!" comes a muffled shout from beneath Ben's stomach.


Part The Second

Ben wakes up from a dream she was appearing in Extras with Ricky Gervais chasing her with a chainsaw. "No! I'm not 'avin a larf! I swear! I have a first! I would never larf!" she screams, to find herself in a slightly redressed dungeon, and has swollen larger during to out-of-sequence filming schedules.

A floating robe enters the dungeon and introduces itself. "My name is Mukkamukkawowwow but you can call me High Chancellor Pre-Usurpation Era, Second Class. We intend to use you as canon fodder in our war against our deadly but unseen enemy. Any questions? No? Splendid!"

"Wait a minute!" shouts the bemused Ben. "I will never willingly be used as canon fodder."

"So? Did I say I needed you to be willing? Besides, look at yourself! You are a divine gift from the God of all Chavness - a ripe, swollen fertility figure that we can just roll down a hill like that boulder in Indiana Jones, which will crush all those that stand against us. OK, you'll probably die horribly, along with your unborn offspring, but on the bright side, you will save us some bother. Surely you cannot refuse?"

"I so fucking CAN refuse!" Ben shouts. "I want riches and power!"

"And I want a threesome with Nicola Bryant and Caroline Morris," the robe snaps. "Life is one long drawn-out disappointment. At least YOU don't have to suffer it for long. Honestly, not one thought for someone else. What a selfish little bitch. Honestly!"

The robes float out, grumbling.

Ben is left alone, and so decides to entertain herself by lecturing the audience at home that when pretty criminal hoodies mug people it is a serious crime, especially when knives are used - since the audience of course are too retarded to have worked this out for themselves. Ben then starts noting that common people tend to become criminals because they are all crackheaded sluts who scrounge drug money off each other who cannot control their emotions or get degrees.

"If only they could be as dignified and sophisticated as me," Ben sighs before her gargantuan stomach rumbles in demand for more Fox Glacier Mints and absinthe.

Suddenly, a hoarde of floating clothes swoop into the room and start to dress Ben. She screams as a hoodie big enough to cover a four wheel drive is pulled over her head, awful trailers encase her feet, and a gold coloured chain wraps itself around her neck.

"No!" she screams. "I'll look like a chav!"

"There's nothing else on this entire... fucking... planet... that will fit you!" her Hoodie shouts at her, kind of like a brain damaged version of the Sorting Hat from Harry Potter. "It's either this or wander around naked, and, frankly, some of us are trying not to vomit at the sight of you."

"Hoodies can vomit?" Ben echoes, baffled.

"Oh, Christ, you can HEAR the brain cells dying, can't you?" the necklace opines.

"I don't want your clothes!"

"Tough!" the trainers denice.

"You haven't even given me trousers!"

"No one was brave enough to go there," the hoodie admits.

"But don't worry, the Ceremony of Sucidal Despair starts now," the trainers anounce, forcing Ben to goosestep out of the cell and into a banqueting hall so large Ben can actually fit inside. There is even a table full of meat, wine and all sorts of vegetables.

"There you go, Lindsey," the necklace laughs. "All the food a slut in your condition could want."

"But that's CHAV food! I can't eat that!"

"Guess you'll have to starve then," says one trainer to the other.

"Oh, pity," laughs the other trainer.

Ben wails unhappily that she's ravenous, but the hoodie jeers at the fact her belly wouldn't let her actually be able to reach the food anyway.

"Why are you doing this to me?" she sobs in an unbelievably irritating way.

"Part of the ceremony, innit?" the necklace sighs. "The whole idea is that you get so depressed, when we hurl you to your death you won't care. It'd be really nasty to sacrifice people who wanted to stay ALIVE, wouldn't it? What you think we are, savages?"

"I am angry!" Ben whines. "But I will never suffer total soul-crushing dispair!"

"You haven't met your fiance, have you?" the hoodie laughs.

"What fiance?!"

The door opens and a long-flowing gown enters... and this time, someone's wearing it.

"Oh shit!" Ben gasps.

"Meet Rose Tyler," the necklace booms evilly...


Part the Third

Ben wails and screams and tries to curl up in the corner and hide. Yet, somehow, the huge pregnant hoodie-clad archaeologist STILL manages to be completely visible. The necklace giggles and explains that they discovered an old eyelash during a trip through the Powell Estate and then used their advanced technology to grow a complete clone of the owner.

"Seemed like a ridiculously impractical waste of resources at the time," one trainer admits.

"Yeah, we're quite lucky this situation arose to justify it all really," the other chips in.

"Too true, otherwise we'd look like a right bunch of loonies," the necklace agrees. "Ere, you feeling your mind drifting to the bottom of a black pit of misery and despair yet?"

Ben whimpers. "Need... Fox Glacier... Mints! Need Mints!"

"Better go to plan B," the hoodie decides. "OK, blondie, you and Rose Tyler shall be married before we send you off to absolute certain no-holds-barred no-beg-your-pardons inescapable blood-drenched elimination."

"But I'm really gay!" Ben wails.

A beat.

"Damn," the necklace grumbles. "She'll probably ENJOY being married to Rose..."

"No, no, I'm actually a man."

"...what?"

"Yes! I am a man trapped in the body of a woman."

"...ooooh-kaaaaaaaaaaaay..."

"Not metaphorically, LITERALLY!"

"Excuse me just one moment," says the hoodie, and drags itself (and Ben) over to the window to start violently throwing up down the side of the castle. This goes on for about six or seven seconds, with ridiculously gross sound effects as Ben and Rose sort of smile awkward and try to ignore this in a polite, civilized manner.

"Uh... Ok... OK... I'm... Oh no..."

The hoodie sticks its hood out the window and is sick again.

"Why are there ALWAYS FUCKING CARROTS?" the hoodie moans, before being sick again.

"You finished?" asks Ben.

The hoodie groans nauseously in the affirmative.

"Right. Well, this all makes sense to me now!" Ben booms theatrically to take attention away from her struggles to stand up again. "You want me to marry Rose so SHE will be the power behind the throne once the usurper has been unseated, so you lot can be the ruler by proxy!"

"Uh, no, this actually just to make you want to kill yourself," Rose points out.

Ben ignores her - so at least he treats the clone the same way as he would the original. "I don't even know if this enemy of yours ARE tyrants! I bet they're just sophisticated, suave and trying to help stamp out chav scum! They're all housebreakers and muggers, you know - it doesn't matter how many benefits they get or how many rent-free housing estates, they all become knife-weilding criminal crack whores who beat up their own stepsons! THEY MUST ALL BE EXTERMINATED!!!"

The hoodie starts screaming.

At first, everyone assumes the hoodie is just remembering the fact he is enveloping an unwilling transsexual - then, they assume he can't cope with this classist snob facism. Then, they realize the hoodie is actually screaming in PAIN, over the sound of tearing. Ben is suffering another growth spurt and her expanding stomach slowly bursts out of the hoodie, who screams, "OH GOD! THE PAIN! THE SALTY PAIN! OH, IT'S GETTING DARK! IT'S GETTING DARK! THERE'S NOTHING THERE! I'M OFF MY FAITH! OH, GOD, PLEASE... SOMEONE... TELL MY BROTHER... HE'S... ANNOYING... ARGH!"

Finally, the ruins of the hoodie are flung in opposite directions acrosss the room. Instantly, the necklace and the trainers faint dead away in horror at what they just witnessed.

The now gargantuan (and topless) Ben takes a Fox's Glacier Mint to calm herself and offers one to Rose, saying, "If you want this, you'll have to rescue me from this hideous place."

Rose turns and runs from the room.

"Hey! Get back here, you silly bint!" Ben shouts, but the gigantic ball she now resembles cannot do anything but stay where she is.

After a few moments, the sound of a low growling noise can be heard before her, like the sound of an animal...

...but it's just Ben's stomach, so she has the mint.


Part the Fourth

Ben gives a horrified gasp as a series of intense stomach aches strikes her with the force of a flatulent flea. Moaning, Ben's incredible genius determines to work out what is the cause of this abdominal abnormality, and comes to the conclusion she has either just gone into labor or her internal organs have finally liquefied for twenty-seven years of neat absinthe. Either way, it's serious.

Ben waddles out of the dining hall as fast as she can, gripped with an agony lesser than or equal to that of imagining a paper cut, and crying out with pain. "Rose!" she shouts. "You are some kind of woman! Help me out here! I am far too noble and sophisticated to suffer the sensation of shitting a watermellon with razor blades imbedded in it! GOD DAMN IT!" Either the contractions are getting closer, or else she is suffering the worst constipation known to human kind.

As she heads round the corner, she sees a large dog-like creature with huge fangs approaching.

It takes one look at Ben and runs off through the musty passageways, yelping with terror.

"Charming!" Ben sneers. “Oaaaagh!” she adds, suffering another birth pain.

Ben then spots the Rose Tyler clone running through a door into a courtyard, and she struggles to follow. "Oi! ASBO girl! Get back here!" she shouts.

"No fucking way!" Rose screams back. "Can you hear that series out shouts and crashes and not-too-far-away explosions?"

Ben grips her jiggling stomach as the pain intensifies to the point something with pain centres in its brain might briefly be aware of it. "Not really. I've been more interested in trying to find a way back to Earth before this squirming parasite beneath my flesh gets any closer to an exit!"

"The castle's under attack!" Rose shouts.

"Oh, there's always SOME excuse," Ben moans.

"Excuse? Those brave sentient pieces of clothing are being blasted into lumps of steaming polyester by laser-guided projectiles! Asshol the Usurper's army of white liesure suits have surrounded the castle and storming the walls! If YOU had just gone to your death like you were supposed to, none of this would happen!"

"Oh that's right! Aaaag! Blame me! If you lot were a bunch of healthy chav-hating facists... Errrrrrgh! ...you could have sorted this out for yourselves! You're just a bunch of... Aaaaaaagh! Oh god oh god oh god!"

As Ben starts to repeatedly bash her fists against her hard, boulder-like stomach with a series of dull thuds, a hoodie is skewered through the midriff by a spear. "The... humanity..." it gasps before slumping dead. Ben shakes the lifeless jacket and demands directions to the transmat device, but gets no answer.

Just then, Mukkamukkawowwow arrives along with a collector's edition light sabre and screams at Ben to lead the defence against Asshol - either Ben will be slaughtered in the fighting, or be slaughtered when Asshol destroys the castle. "Don't you care that this entire civilization will be annihilated because of your bone-idleness?" Mukkamukkawowwow demands.

"No particularly, no," Ben admits, before doubling over her mammoth mound and screams in agony.

"Fine!" snaps Mukkamukkawowwow, floating over the spreading puddle of warm liquid. "This was a dumb plan, anyway! Use nuclear weaponary, I said, but no. We have to travel to a distant planet and get some knocked-up knickerless bimbo to use as a terror weapon! Mutally assured destruction my ass!"

"Oh god!" says Ben, realizing that for once in her life she HASN'T been incontinent, but rather her water has broken with all the sensible timing of a Channel 9 TV executive. "I knew I'd break something trying those judo kicks... maybe that's why there aren't any kicks in judo? I just don't kn--Ow ow ow ow ow, ow! Ah! Oh my god!”

Rose arrives, grabs Ben by the hair and slowly hauls her out of the courtyard to the transmat room.

"Rose! You've come back for me! YOU DO LOVE ME!"

"No way," Rose grunts, heaving Ben through a doorway. "I just need a human shield, and you're overqualified."

Outside, the carnage continues as hoodie after hoodie falls to join the heap of liesure suit corpses, awash with bleeding courdory and tartan. The horror grows to the point that several ties hang themselves to escape the slaughter, and a reinforcement battallion of baseball caps add to the wholesale destruction! The castle which has stood for longer than the stars have twinkled in the skies finally falls, and with it die the hopes and dreams and loves of a race of sentient clothing that were the most wonderful and wacky race in all of creation.

Anyway, moving on.

Rose drags the sweat-soaked Ben into the transmat room and desperately adjusts the control dials, the latter having a long drawn out whine, since she has to speak up over the gurgling in her stomach. "Ooooohhhh… The pain is unbearable! I don't want a baby! How can I possibly keep my position in the Cambridge Archaeological trust with an illegitimate half-cabonossi baby? My archaeological research pay is a pittance I can barely live on! I need it all for me, I can't share it with some offspring? OoooOOOOooooh… What will the Prince of Wales say? He's the patron there, you know! No, Rose, YOU'LL have to adopt the baby and pretend its yours. You guttersnipe have litters of sordid, petty criminals at the drop of a hat!"

Ignoring the laboring Ben, Rose sets the timer and jumps on the raised platform.

"Oooh God… Hey, where are you going?" Ben demands.

"Earth!" Rose says, and waves.

Ben grimaces, back arched and screams, red in the face from another cramp. "You can't leave me alone! Oooooh…Ooooh… I can't do this! This is incredibly chavish!" she sobs.

"Don't think I'm gonna help ya," Rose says. "You look like the Queen in Alien: Ressurection!"

Ben flutters her eyelids. "You mean, I have a certain royal nobility to me?"

"No, I mean you look ripe to split open any second,the taut skin ripping like paper, disgorging its contents in aspectacular display of gore."

"Eww!"

"Welcome to motherhood. See ya!" says Rose as she teleports to safety.

There is the distant sound of explosions and Ben looks at her rippling stomach in annoyance. "No! I won't let it end like this! Ooooh... Ooooh... I have a first! I have an MA! I am undertaking research towards a PhD on 'The Ritual and Cultural Significance of the Stonehenge Landscape'... Ahhhh... Ooooh... it's just taking years more than I expected... Pain! So... much pain... what with all the constant drinking and... mindless sex! Ooooh... Oooh god... So cultured... Ooooh... And I WILL SURVIVE! I MUST SURVIVE! THE CHAVS MUST DIE!"

After about an hour, Ben finally decides to get up and, panting, moaning, sweating, wincing and generally being pathetic, gets onto the teleport transfer platform and, despite the horrible pain which would cripple anyone without a central nervous system, she manages to hit the button.

A screen lights up:

NO COACH PARTIES PLEASE

Groaning, Ben hits the emergency button, and another screen lights up.

WARNING:
USE OF TELEPORT MAY CAUSE
MOLECULAR DESTABILIZATION
THAT IS HIDEOUSLY DISGUSTING
AND GROSS. YOU REMEMBER
THE REMAKE OF "THE FLY"?
TIMES THAT BY FIFTEEN
MILLION TIMES AND YOU'RE
STILL NOWHERE NEAR
HOW FUCKED UP AND
DANGEROUS THIS IS!

Leaning against the wall, Ben manages to press the activate button.

FINE, BITCH, BUT DON'T
SAY I DIDN'T WARN YOU

As Ben's distorting, swollen stomach gathers itself up to expel its contents and her head snaps from side to side, the teleport engages and Ben vanishes moments before... I dunno, some neutron bomb goes off. The castle explodes in some Freudian symbolism. Do I honestly look like I care? Do I? No, I don't.

Ben finds herself in an alleyway in London, next to the surprised Rose clone.

"Hah!" Ben laughs and gets to her feet. "Another gesture of solidarity against the Chav hordes!"

"You're not pregnant any more," Rose notes with vague interest, and indeed she is right. Ben is once again the slender, narrow-hipped Britney clone of the last half dozen stories, and there is no trace of her patrurience at all.

"Hah! She shoots, she scores!" Ben laughs. "That malfunctioning teleport must have sent the baby off somewhere else, maybe some other point in time and space as we know. Let's see anyone get THAT through an alimony court, huh!"

"What are you going to do now?" asks Rose.

"Well, I need a new human plaything to attend to my simple wishes, and since you have nothing to live for, you'll be the one."

"Piss off," Rose says.

"No, Rose, you shall take me to La Roche Wine Bar For Civilized People To Get Drunk!"

"What's wrong with a pub?"

"CHAVS! THAT is what is wrong with pubs! Now, accompany me."

"Why, so you can treat me like a piece of dirt? I tell you, that baby is lucky not to be lumbered with you," Rose says, before skipping off to join Touchwood.

Ben shrugs, and uncharacteristically ponders just where her child ended up, in a rather obvious segue to the next scene...

On the 23rd of November, 1983, in Hastings, a young couple are idly wandering through the park. This is Elaine and Glenn Wallace, who are taken aback when a ten-pound baby materializes on the grass in front of them along with a length of umbilical cord.

After recovering from the surprise, they decide to adopt the child and claim it as their own. Glenn favors naming the boy St John, but Elain likes the name Thomas, and as they head back home with their new son, they agree to comprimise with Thomas St John Wallace...

THE END