Part One
Oh, hello again. Papa Elf here. You’re, uh, you’re here for another story, aren’t you?
Well, you’re in luck, because – as you probably already know – elves love to tell stories. I’ve, uh, already told you one before. Remember? The story of Buddy the Elf and how he reunited with his biological father and saved Christmas?
Uh, well, I guess you can call this a “follow-up” to that story.
While this is kind of still Buddy’s story, it’s really the story of Neas, the Gladiator of Gallifrey – that someplace pretty far from the North Pole…pretty far from Earth…it’s another planet in another dimension, as you might have, uh…as you might have guessed.
You see, Neas isn’t just one person – she’s two.
And they didn’t just save one Christmas…they saved two.
It’s a “Holiday Duality,” as we call it here in the North Pole.
It all started on the day of Christmas Eve. Santa was preparing to set off and deliver presents to all the good little boys and girls of the Earth. But something really horrible happened that day.
“The presents have gone missing!” Ming-Ming (that’s the head elf) cried to the gasps of everyone in the workshop, including Buddy and his wife, Jovie – the only living humans in the North Pole, including their daughter, Susie.
“How many are missing?” Santa asked Ming-Ming.
Ming-Ming was great at taking inventory of all the presents prior to delivery. But, the number he gave nearly had some of us fainting: “Half a million are missing, Santa.”
“Who would steal half a million presents?” Buddy asked.
“How could they steal half a million presents?” Jovie also asked.
Elf security soon reported that the, uh, culprits were still on the…on the premises. This urged Santa to place the workshop on lockdown. Buddy volunteered to search for the culprits of the crime, so Santa assisted him…and so did I.
We eventually found the culprits in the storage room.
They were three funny-looking guys in really bad elf costumes – the ears were, uh, cardboard cutouts by the look of it.
At the time we caught them, these small, yellow cylindrical creatures tossed the stolen presents through some sort of magical portal in the storage room. They threw in the last stolen present before they jumped through it themselves. “Those were some weird little elves,” Buddy said of the culprits.
“They weren’t elves, Buddy,” I told him. “T-They were imposters.”
Not knowing where the presents and the criminals had gone, Santa placed the call to Neas. Now, uh, Santa was keenly aware of Neas’s existence, even though Neas journeyed across many worlds. “She’s more of a myth than I am,” he once said of her. She was so special that she was placed on the “Super Nice” list – and, uh, rightfully so. She’s saved Christmas dozens of times…once from the Grinch himself and another time from an evil magician.
However, Santa’s call didn’t reach out to just one version of Neas. Two versions intercepted it.
And by “versions,” I mean “regenerations.”
Neas, being a Time Lord, has this special gift for becoming a different person every time she gets badly hurt or near the point of death. The two we got that answered Santa’s call were very beautiful (and very tall) young women – one a lovely African-American lady with blond hair (named Alicia), the other a redheaded Englishwoman (named Maureen). Perched on Alicia’s shoulder was Neas’s lifelong companion, Gizmo (a Mogwai).
Both arrived outside the workshop in their domino-shaped TARDIS (that’s short of “Time And Relative Dimensions In Space”) ships, donned in festive regalia. We could hear Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas” playing out of their TARDISes.
Clearly, they were dedicated to the mission of saving Christmas.
“What’s the emergency, Santa?” Maureen asked in the utmost sternness.
Santa filled them in on the situation and Buddy led them to the scene of the crime. Alicia and Maureen scanned the area with their sonic screwdrivers (they aren’t…they aren’t actual screwdrivers – just little probing devices that make whirring sounds). Together, they discovered the portal used by the culprits was more science than magic.
“It’s an inter-dimensional portal,” Alicia said. “And it’s heavily unstable.”
“What does that mean?” Buddy asked.
“It means the stolen presents weren’t just sent between two dimensions,” Maureen said, “but scattered across multiple others.”
This news discouraged Santa, Buddy, Jovie, me, and all the other elves.
We thought all hope was lost.
But, uh, thankfully, Alicia and Maureen reassured us, “With both of our TARDISes, we can recover the stolen gifts in literally no time at all. Each of those presents carry a nuage energy signature that we can easily track…like gingerbread crumbs.”
So, uh, the Gladiators enacted their “Save Christmas” operation, conjoining their TARDISes – despite being physically separated. Buddy volunteered to accompany them across several universes. He told me later that he saw a world where everyone and everything were made out of LEGOs (as in the plastic brick construction toys) and that he also met some guy named “Lord Business.”
Halfway into their mission, just as they visited their 4,050th world and collected a total of 100,000 presents, Alicia and Maureen discovered that the multitude of the stolen gifts ended up within one dimension – one that neither Alicia nor Maureen (or even Gizmo, for that matter) had been to in a very long time.
A little town called Kingston Falls.
