Chris and Carya was not meant to happen. In this instance, I bowed to pressure from the readership on my forum. They unanimously insisted that Chris had to accept Carya as his wife. Of course, morally, he does, but he keeps insisting he isn’t in love with her and doesn’t need a wife in the usual sense. It goes without saying, that although they were trapped in a glass bubble utterly naked for the course of a day in the previous story nothing happened between them. Carya is still a virgin and so is Chris.

But there is no real reason why Chris needs to be celibate, except I wrote him that way from the start. When he is first encountered as a young adult in the first of the New Lords of Time stories, the Chinese TARDIS, his brother gently teases him for being a daydreamer, having long hair and generally being a bit girly. In Tamar Tephi, the two brothers confront the question of Chris’s sexuality and conclude that he ISN’T gay, just different. And again, in Transcension, when Chris talks to The Doctor, he says that his problem with girls isn’t that he prefers boys, but that he has no interest in either. He wants to dedicate his life to meditation and teaching others to strive towards mental and physical perfection along with him. He is an aesthete who eschews mortal pleasures!

Meanwhile, having wrong-footed all of the readership who assumed Chris WAS gay, I then introduced Spenser as a character and had him fall in love with Davie. Davie, of course, is already engaged to a girl, he likes TARDIS engines and fast cars and has an adrenaline rush when he’s in the midst of a crisis. Nobody expected it, not even those who watch Torchwood and know perfectly well that relationships are never that clear cut in fiction or real life.

So having established that Davie is heteroflexible and fully intends to do right by both Brenda AND Spenser, its back to the long haired, sensitive, girly Chris, who finally admits he does have those sort of feelings and that Carya is the girl for him. Now he has to tell him mum and dad!

The scenes with his family were going to be much longer. I intended to have Sukie coming home from school and exploding with joy to find out, and his father doubtful about the arrangement. But it didn’t need all of that. The family reaction can be taken as read.

The virtual reality in which the two of them first express their love for each other properly, is the science fiction element of this story. Some readers found the idea a bit too far-fetched. Others accepted that the smart young people Chris has surrounded himself with could recreate something like the virtual world of the Time Lord Matrix.

The fact that it wasn’t real, of course, meant that when Chris did have sex with Carya it was only in their minds. He could still back out in the real world. But of course he wouldn’t do that. He’s an honourable boy.

Some readers have pointed out, incidentally, that Chris could have stopped the illusion any time. He does so when Carya is injured. So in fact, he is being a bit of a tease in going through with it all along.

The fact that Carya is injured for real, of course, is in line with the thinking in the real Matrix. That’s the Gallifreyan one, of course. The idea of a virtual world created by mental power augmented by computers, was a Time Lord one way back in the 1970s. The APC Control - Amplified Panotropic Computations was a place where unreal things happened but REAL death could occur. Sorry, Hollywood, Keanu and all. We got there first. And the New Lords of Time are doing it all over again.

Îngeras, is Romanian for Angel. Don’t ask why it is also an alien word for them! Malokhim is derived from the Yiddish for the same. The Yiddish for angel is malakh, with malakhim as the plural. I changed the spelling slightly to Malokhim as I was a little concerned about offending Jewish people by directly using a word which seems quite widespread in their religious writings for a secular purpose.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malakh