Part 2 – Three Wishes

"How dreary, a white void!" announced the Doctor. He stared down at his hands, which seemed, like the rest of his body, to have adopted a translucent glow.

"It's cheap to maintain!" snapped the old man in front of him. "Who am I? I, sir, am the White Guardian!"

"I guessed as much," replied the Doctor dryly. "It's never the Graff Vynda K or Edward Underdown is it."

The White Guardian wasted no time in getting down to the nitty-gritty.

"You may have noticed two things young man. One, I appear in the form of your earliest, and wisest, self. And Two, you are dead."

"Well then just how am I here?" asked the Doctor. "I’ve had plenty of visions of the after-life, and none of them involved chatting away to a smelly old badger in a starchy shirt."

"You've done more good than most in your lifetime," explained the Guardian. "So it's been decided, most generously, that a reward is in order! You have ninety days reprieve, during which you may do whatever you like without fear of reprimand."

"I never feared reprimand anyway!" the Doctor boomed, slightly narked at the Guardian's arrogance.

"Fiddle!" replied the Guardian. "Listen, I return to you your TARDIS, Doctor. You may break every law of time, space and decency you like. You may tinker with the past, wreck the future, be incredibly naughty in casinos. I shall personally clear up the timelines at the end of your ninety days. It shall be like that period of time never happened. You may act without consequence."

"So if, for example, I decided it would be a bit of a laugh to... debag the Monitor of Logopolis, you wouldn't stop me?" the Doctor queried, raising en eyebrow.

"I certainly would not!" replied the Guardian haughtily, before adding "Go ahead Doctor – try it!"

--

The Doctor walked briskly towards the labyrinthine stone structure that dominated the planet Logopolis.

"Excuse me," he began, grabbing the attention of a robed attendant who was squatted on the ground, chanting in the direction of his naval, "Where might I find the famous Monitor, noble leader of your race and all-round goodie?"

"The Four Hundred and Twenty Second Monitor of Legopolis is in the Virtual Reality Suite!" commanded the Legopolitan clearly, before returning to his murmuring chant.

"Is he now," muttered the Doctor. "Well now, I wonder what he's up to."

The Doctor clapped his hands together three times. Stepping through what felt like a wall of solid water, he found himself in a curious chamber. He took in the scene before him and gasped. The Monitor, dressed only in a thong, was laying on a long stone pillar surrounded by topless young dancing girls. The Doctor scratched his thin thoughtfully.

"Doctor!" cried the Monitor as he spied his visitor. "I… in the name of research, you understand…"

One of the girls sidled up and rubbed her breasts in his face.

"Program end!" barked the Monitor.

--

"Your secret’s safe with me, Monitor," smiled the Doctor as the pair of them exited the Reality Suite and walked along the dusty plain back to the TARDIS. "And, let’s face it, if you had all this technology… well, you would, wouldn’t you?"

Back in the Console Room, his debagging plan having backfired, the Doctor was lost again among his thoughts.

"That's it then," he pondered. "I can do whatever I like. I have the whole Universe to explore, and this time I don't have stinking morality to worry about. The ultimate freedom!"

The Doctor’s mind drifted back to the scantily-clad and not disagreeable women he had encountered on Logopolis. Few were the occasions in the Doctor’s many lives when he had got some. Unfortunately, his many fans down the years had never stopped banging on about their image of a great asexual hero, one who never smoked, or drank, or had sex. The times he sobbed in his hands, if only they could just worship an asexual, non-smoking hero who went down the pub every weekend. Would it really have hurt? Or a tee-total, non-smoking hero whose only vice was his addiction to rumpo. That would have been fun and, he always thought, not uncreditable. But the Doctor's fans were relentlessly demanding, so he had always kept his brief relationships subtle and behind-closed-doors, so they never found out.

He hadn't lived to excess, of course, someone would have noticed if he'd turned up on Traken with a massive hangover, or taken on IMC smelling of fag-ash. He'd had three wives, and a bevvy of girlfriends, not to mention a couple of experimental encounters. Which positively made him celibate given his two thousand year lifetime. Some, no most, humans had a more bumpy bedpost, and they lived for a fraction of the time he had lived for.

But suddenly that had all changed. He could live now live without consequence. He could do whatever he liked. And no-one would care.

The Doctor strolled towards the waiting TARDIS with new vigour. And then he stood in the doorway, raised his hands in a mock-salute, and cried "BRING ON THE GIRLS!"