Thanatos Engine
Once, many centuries ago, I found myself trapped in a Thanatos Engine. If you don't know, these are mysterious machines left dotted around the universe in pockets of hyperspace by higher beings, which trap and kill unsuspecting time travellers. No-one knows who made them or why, and there are many theories, the most popular of which blame my lot, the Time Lords, and the Time War, which seems to get the stick for all the weird shite littering the universe. My theory is that they were left there by either the Eternals or the Guardians, or us, or another super-race we don't yet know about, purely for Their own amusement. Maybe, if that's so, they were left over from the Game of Rassilon. Whoever is responsible, Thanatos Engines are a rare but very real risk for time travellers. I never thought I would ever fall foul of one, but fall foul I did and it would indeed be ironic if it was my own race, the Time Lords, that was behind the Thanatos Engines.

It happened just after I'd come back from mediating at the Draconian/Zygon Summit in the year 5793. I was shagged out (in more senses than one) and had returned to my TARDIS for a nice long hot bath and a pot of coffee. Lush! I'd just dematerialised and set my TARDIS in temporal orbit around the planet Valyonskia and was on my way to the bathroom when the whole ship shuddered as if struck by an enormous cosmic hammer and a light as bright as a thousand supernovas exploded in my head. I passed out.

I woke up to find myself flat on my back staring up at a grubby white concrete ceiling. My back ached which told me I’d been lying on the hard concrete floor for quite some time, but apart from that, I felt fine. I sat up to see that I was sitting in a long, slightly curving corridor, the ends of which were out of sight around the curvature of the high, white-painted concrete walls. I got to my feet and looked in one direction, then the other. They both presented the exact same aspect. Sick, eye-bruising light came from fluorescent strips embedded behind glass at regular intervals in the outer wall. The air was uncomfortably warm and dry. I stared at the diminishing perspective of walls, floor and ceiling. Where the hell was I? What was this place?

At first I was confused, and wondered whether I’d been drugged, kidnapped, or zapped into a parallel universe or VR-scape due to a TARDIS malfunction. Then anger came, anger at the cunts who had done this, and myself for drinking or taking whatever it was that had landed me here. I kicked the walls, ran one way, then the other; I shouted, screamed, tried to smash one of the lights (the glass was too thick), spat, and pissed against the wall. Anger spent, I slumped against the wall. Then somehow I realised were I was. I was inside a Thanatos Engine.

My mind flooded with fear. Thanatos Engines were designed for one thing and one thing only: to kill those who they trapped. For a Time Lord like myself, this meant eternities of agony. I would be killed, regenerate, be killed again, regenerate, killed again, regenerate, and so on until I reached the end of my regenerative cycle (and no Time Lords around to grant me a new one). I was then only in my third incarnation, so I had ten more to go! I cursed the Time Lords for the ‘gift’ of regeneration and also for creating the Thanatos Engines, if indeed we had.

Eventually my fear subsided, and a strange and welcome sense of calm settled over me. I was even almost excited; to see inside a Thanatos Engine, a thing of legend, was an opportunity not many ever got. And, of course, now I’d worked through all the reaction emotions, I was determined to escape. To escape a Thanatos Engine, such a thing had never been heard of! But bollocks to that, I was Doctor Skagra, I was special, and it would take more than some tossy ancient god-machine to get the better of me.

Yet to effect my escape, I would have to call upon the assistance of those whose names I had recently cursed. And so, cursing the buggers yet again, I took a crumpled fag packet from my jacket pocket, formed a small tesseract out of it, and composed a psychic message to the Time Lords containing all the details of my plight. I watched it dematerialise with a sneer on my lips, not expecting a response but – drat them! – hoping anyway.

I then set off along the curving corridor in the direction I’d been facing when I’d first sat up. The corridor went on its gently curving course for what felt like miles, and I walked for hours, wondering if the makers of this particular Thanatos Engine intended to bore its victims to death. The curvature was so slight that the corridor, if it formed a ring, would have had a diameter many miles across. Eventually, I noticed a change in the quality of the light: as I walked, the harsh fluorescence seemed to be tempered by a soft, natural luminescence. In the distance, I began to discern a small square of bright whiteness. On seeing this I instinctively broke into a run, but almost immediately pulled myself up. This might look like daylight, but it could just as easily be a dispersion field. So I slowed to a walk and approached the mysterious, tantalising light.

As I got nearer I could see that it was a square of sky, white as paper, flecked with grey striated clouds. I ran the last hundred metres or so to where the corridor ended abruptly, as if the end had been sliced cleanly off. I peered over the edge to be met with the dizzying vista of a two-hundred-foot drop onto sharp, jagged rocks. To either side, a vast white wall stretched into the distance. And above too – I looked up but I could not see where wall ended and sky began. Ahead, the vista of sky was almost blinding, and in the distance I could see the line of the horizon stretching from side to side into the distance, curving ever so gently. Beneath me, between the wall and the horizon, the harsh, rocky plain.

Apart from my ragged breath and my pounding heartbeat, there was no sound whatsoever. I called ‘Halloooo!’ into the desolation, but there wasn’t even an echo.
So that’s what They – whoever They were – wanted me to do! Fall from the corridor’s end to a messy death on the rocks below. Fuck that. I turned and set off back along the corridor, oddly disappointed. There had to be more to it than that. Or were They expecting Their victims, driven mad by thirst and starvation, to leap willingly to their deaths? Again, fuck that. I set off back the other way along the corridor, deeply apprehensive for what I might find at the other end.

Once I passed the now-dried piss-stain I was in new territory and my trepidation increased. What would I find? Another deadly drop? Or something else? Some other means of death, something more fiendish?

I soon found out.

In the distance, I discerned that the corridor seemed to end – the lights stopped, and there was a blankness. As I got nearer I saw that this end of the corridor was the closed opposite of the other end – a concrete wall blocked the entire way. As I got close to it I saw that its edges didn’t quite meet the walls of the corridor – there was a gap of about an inch all the way round. I tried to peer through this gap and in doing so touched the wall with the palms of my hands. Immediately the wall shuddered and lurched, seeming to fall towards me. I quickly darted back, staring up at the blank concrete white face. And then with a groaning and rumbling, the wall began to advance along the corridor towards me.

I backed away in shock. The wall – or block, or whatever it was – continued to advance, at a rate of about a metre every ten seconds. I pummelled my fists against it, to no avail. Then I turned and walked quickly away, my mind racing, the true fiendish implacable horror of the Thanatos Engine dawning on me.

Whatever I did, I would, eventually, be pushed out the other end of the corridor to plunge to my death on the rocks below.

It was inevitable. Like death. Which was, I supposed, the point.

I ran back and beat at the wall, and screamed, and raved. And – it stopped!

But only for about ten seconds. Then it recommenced its rumbling, inexorable advance.

One thing was now obvious about the designers of this Thanatos Engine: They were cunts. Fucking, fucking, *FUCKING CUNTS.* Almost certainly, then, the Time Lords.

I ran all the way to the open end of the corridor, and stared out at the dusty plain. It would take ages, days maybe, for the moving wall to reach this point. I could just sit on the ledge, stare out at the view, wait for it to nudge me off onto the rocks.

‘Bollocks to THAT!’ I shouted, and jumped. My body plummeted onto the sharp rocks and was smashed and broken to bits. I died.

And, of course, I regenerated.

I had resolved to kill myself, working quickly through my remaining regenerations until I reached the end, but, in my new incarnation, I found this idea abhorrent. Perhaps it was something to do with having a new body, but I wanted to live! I therefore set out into the rocky plain, not even looking back at the giant concrete white edifice that contained the Thanatos Engine.

I walked for what seemed like days, using regenerative energy to sustain myself. At length I found a small wood and a lake. I’d walked so far that the Thanatos Engine could no longer be seen, it was somewhere out of sight beyond the horizon, waiting like death, or disease, out of sight but not out of mind. I fashioned a home out of stone and lived by that lake for a few centuries, sometimes yearning for freedom, but content to have escaped the Thanatos Engine, the only being ever to have done so.

In the end, the tesseract worked. Someone answered my distress call, and so I was rescued by the Time Lords – or rather, one particular Time Lord. Guess which one? Yes, that cunt the Doctor. It pains me every day that I owe the bastard my life. It makes me hate him even more and I sometimes wish he’d left me to die in that rocky wilderness. Anyway, rescue me he did, and, as I had regenerated into a female body, I became his companion for a while. Yes, I, Doctor Skagra, was the Doctor's companion! I now burn with shame at the memory, and curse that incarnation of me. I try to forget her just as the Doctor once tried to forget his 'War Doctor' incarnation. I refer to her as the 'Twat Skagra' though I'd wager that's what you lot think of me all the time anyway. I didn't stay with him for long, though, and legged it when my sense of gratitude wore off and I came to my senses.

And at night I still sometimes dream of that white corridor and the implacable death that waited within it. Death comes to us all, even Time Lords like myself, and all of us, by merely existing, are trapped within our own personal Thanatos Engines. Now there’s a cheery thought.
(Dr Skagra glorious glargzhem, Wed 5 Mar 2014, 18:10, 11 replies)

Aww, I thought you'd died :(

( BraynDedd Natasha Kaplinsky's labia majora, Wed 5 Mar 2014, 18:14, closed)

I've never really 'got' this.
I've seen a large quantity of it a number of times, and I generally skirt around it, but I still don't know what it is, what it does, how it does it, nor how it even got here.
(eViLegion Chief Commissioner of the Scottish Lunacy Board, Wed 5 Mar 2014, 19:28, closed)

It's like pigeons.
They don't do anything, but they're still all over the fucking place.
( .Yeti. El amor en los tiempos del cólera, Wed 5 Mar 2014, 20:25, closed)

I can't understand why he does it.
I'd get it if it was a response to trolling, but he's been doing it for fucking ages. I can't work out what he gets out of it, unless it's some mental cosplay gone too far.
( BraynDedd Natasha Kaplinsky's labia majora, Wed 5 Mar 2014, 20:48, closed)

The thing is... I don't actually mind it.
Like a mountain, or a large lake, it's just sort of there without causing any problems. I have no call to get angry or abusive about it, and what little I've read of it has been inoffensive (if a little odd).

I'm just baffled by it.
(eViLegion Chief Commissioner of the Scottish Lunacy Board, Thu 6 Mar 2014, 17:00, closed)

Nothing confuses me more than this. I just want to know why :(

( BraynDedd Natasha Kaplinsky's labia majora, Fri 7 Mar 2014, 12:29, closed)

qotw is moffat's erotica outlet
if he didn't use the skagra account to spam all this shit on here it'd leak into the tv scripts and he'd be arrested for obscenity
( drimble he'd been white, he'd been black, Wed 5 Mar 2014, 22:58, closed)

Wierdly almost the exact thing happened to me in Stoke recently

( DinivanX Has stinging piss after drinking Pact Coffee, Thu 6 Mar 2014, 12:36, closed)

To answer your questions
and assuage your perplexing bemusement, I simply post my (true) stories here because that is the remit of this website.

In case you'd forgotten: this website asks people to post stories every week in response to a question generated by its users.

And that is what I am doing.

Yes - it really is that simple!

Zygankes, I knew humans were thick, but by Rassilon's ridged and glistening rod, not *this* thick.
(Dr Skagra glorious glargzhem, Fri 7 Mar 2014, 18:41, closed)

can't be arsed reading all this
but if anyone can confirm that someone pissed in their own mouth during the story then I may reconsider.
( sneep used to date Freddie Starr's hamster, Sun 9 Mar 2014, 15:02, closed)

Sorry, no.
I did piss up a wall though.
(Dr Skagra glorious glargzhem, Sun 9 Mar 2014, 16:20, closed)