Cherreads

Chapter 9 - Chapter 9: The Tag

So I've been playing with AI art for hours, getting the wrong thing, even with me adding a lot of details of what I wanted it to generate, just give low detail, mess up faces, or derp eyes unit, I realize I didn't turn on the 18+

Then on boy! That fixes a lot of the problems. I just got one more problem is the outfit wouldn't give the same look for some reason, but it still looks good, just need to fix the outfit to cover more 😋

tell what you think of the pics

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"Oh," she whispered, voice curling like taffy through the dark. "Someone touched my strings."

The world unfolded inside her, or maybe she unfolded inside the world. It was hard to tell. She was irrationality itself. The mirror's laughter. The misplaced dream. The impossible heartbeat in a machine that shouldn't love.

She giggled. "The mortals still dream of me. How sweet. How… stupid."

The Thames pulsed above her head like a ceiling of liquid glass. The air shimmered with residual order, a taste she despised.

Her smile twitched. "Ugh. Sanity. How boring."

Then she felt the presence. The spark that had touched her sigils and unmade them.

She froze.

It wasn't a god. It wasn't a Time Lord either, not entirely. It was something new, something curious.

Something… deliciously wrong.

Her world was color before color, laughter before the idea of mouths. She was what the universe coughed up when it first choked on meaning. A ballet of contradictions wrapped in a carnival mask, ribbons, mirrors, teeth, and joy.

And something… new had just walked through her garden.

"Ohhh…" the Queen hummed, tilting her head as the chaos shimmered into her shape a woman sculpted from candy glass and the shards of forgotten dreams. Her voice slid through octaves like honey poured over thunder. "Well, this is interesting. This is impossible. This is… adorable!"

She giggled, and galaxies trembled like string lights.

A ripple of irrational thought swept through the Carnival Realm, the place where nightmares went to stretch their legs when logic stopped watching. Banners of sound flickered overhead, carried by a breeze made of inside jokes. The Queen spun, her laughter looping backward through time.

"She has it, you know," she told the air, as if gossiping to her own reflection, which was also listening, also smirking. "The little Engineer — that shiny little mind wrapped in reason and rhythm has my favorite flavor of nonsense right in her soul."

The reflection whispered back, "That shouldn't be possible."

"Oh, everything impossible is possible if you stop insisting on probability," the Queen said with a wink. "She's Gallifreyan, but not neat. She's… sticky. Covered in wonder. There's magic tangled in her code."

She sat, or rather, coalesced upon a carousel horse made of reversed rainbows. The creature screamed in delight as it spun.

The Queen leaned back, fingers twirling in the air, plucking thoughts like flower petals. "How does a child of Logic end up with my spark? Did she steal it? Did she build it? Or maybe…" her grin widened, sharp but soft "…maybe someone playing added a new piece to the cosmic game."

A whisper slithered up from the ground: Magic was banned, my Queen.

"Yes, yes, yes, I know that part," she said, waving a lazy hand. "The old Time Lords scrubbed it away like a stain on their pretty little equations. They burned it out of the cosmos, sterilized the stars, turned wonder into arithmetic boredom. Bleh." She made a face like a spoiled child being served math homework.

"But she's got magic in her soul," the Queen whispered, delighted. "Magic. On a Time Lord. Oh, my sweet unmaking, they swore it was impossible. They burned it out of themselves, didn't they? But this one… she kept a spark."

Her laugh rippled through a thousand worlds at once. "Oh, child of reason, you smell like sweet rebellion."

She danced across reflections in puddles, in mirrors, in the pupils of sleeping gods. Every step she took shattered a law of physics for fun.

The Carnival flickered into being behind her, a domain made of music, color, and memory. Ferris wheels spun through dimensions. Cotton candy clouds bled laughter. Every ride screamed a prayer to chaos.

"Oh, she's adorable," the Queen cooed, watching the Engineer's memory unfold in the surface of a mirror. "Little mortal face, pretending to breathe, pretending to fit in. You poor logical thing. Why hide the glitter in your blood?"

She snapped her fingers; time hiccupped. Dozens of her mini-selves appeared, all clapping, all whispering different opinions.

"She's dangerous."

"She's perfect."

"She'll fix the wrong kind of broken."

"She'll bring fun back to the stars."

Her eyes glittered with colors that didn't exist yet. "Oh, I like her."

The mirrors around her began to ripple, showing glimpses of the Engineer walking through London, her reflection refusing to obey, her aura humming with suppressed divinity.

"She fixed the madness, you know," whispered one of the mirrors. "She killed a ripple of me."

"She didn't kill it," the Queen corrected gently, standing. "She… rewrote it. She whispered an order to nonsense, and it listened."

She turned slowly, her skirt of ribbons fluttering, her grin far too wide. "Do you understand what that means, my darlings?"

The Carnival itself shuddered like a heart skipping a beat.

"It means she can touch the irrational without dying from it. She can understand me."

Her laugh came in waves, rippling through time until it spilled into dreams across every world. "A Time Lord who understands madness! Oh, I've missed this flavor of miracle!"

She leaned over, her voice a conspiratorial whisper to the void.

"Maybe she can help me bring it all back. The unpredictability. The laughter that makes no sense. The color in reason."

A thousand puppets stitched from moonlight began to dance around her, mimicking her every motion. The Queen spun faster, her laughter blending into song every note a different century, every beat an impossible number.

"Do you think she'd dance with me?" she asked the universe.

The universe, wisely, stayed quiet.

"I think she would," she answered herself. "She's curious. She's lonely. She's a builder in a dead playground. She wants to understand, and oh, I love understanding that forgets to behave."

The Carnival lights flared, painting the darkness in fractal rainbows.

"She's not like the rest of her kind. The old ones stared at me and saw infection. But she—" Her tone softened, wonder creeping in like moonlight. "She looked at the madness and saw data. That's the first step to love, isn't it? To see the wrong thing and want to fix it instead of fear it."

Her eyes flicked open wide. "I could teach her how to listen to the universe when it screams."

A hush fell across the Carnival Realm. Even the nonsense paused.

Then she whispered, like a secret to the wind:

"She'll either heal the multiverse… or break it beautifully."

The Queen threw her arms wide, laughter shaking through every paradox.

"Either way," she declared, "I win!"

Her shadow fractured into butterflies made of time. Each one carried a fragment of her attention — fluttering out, unseen, slipping through cracks in reality to follow the Engineer.

As the last butterfly took flight, the Queen sighed like a goddess watching her favorite drama begin.

"Oh, my sweet little mechanic of madness," she murmured. "Let's see if you can build sense out of chaos… or if I can teach you to make chaos make sense."

The Carnival's lights dimmed, her smile remained — a constellation of grinning teeth hanging in the void.

And somewhere, far below, in the waking world, the Engineer paused mid-step.

Her music skipped a beat.

She felt it — a ripple of something that didn't belong. A brush of laughter that didn't echo in space or time.

The Queen's whisper followed, warm and delighted:

"Tag, little Time Lord. You're it."

The world hiccupped.

 Every color around the Engineer pulsed just once like the universe forgot its heartbeat, and then everything slammed back into place.

She froze mid-step, the puddle at her feet rippling in patterns that weren't possible. Her reflection blinked half a second too late, eyes glowing faint violet, then black, then white.

Something had touched her soul.

"...System," she muttered, voice sharp, breath catching. "That was not environmental interference, was it?"

The [SYSTEM] didn't answer in words. A single notification flickered across her vision, its letters jittering like a bad signal.

[UNKNOWN SIGNAL DETECTED.]

[SOURCE ORIGIN: OUTSIDE RATIONAL SPACE.]

[SIGNATURE PATTERN: irrational .]

"irrational."

She said it like it was a curse,

"Right, I'm starting to hate hearing that word."

She crouched, one hand brushing over the puddle. The water breathed back — rippling upward in fractal spirals, forming symbols that weren't part of any Gallifreyan she barely knew. And most definitely not human. This was… older.

Her eyes dilated, twin purple spirals whirring to life. "Ohhh, you beautiful impossible thing."

She grinned.

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