Disclaimer: BBC owns all the rights to Doctor Who and all characters, villains, and other copyrighted material associated with it. If I did own Doctor Who, I certainly wouldn't be writing this...
I lived in a tiny, little town (about a mile square) in rural America. My hometown had been a stop on a railroad, but that railway has long since been abandoned. In more recent times, the old railway had been converted into a "Rail-to-Trail" and the old depot has been converted into a very nice independently owned restaurant.
I lived about five miles outside of town and, for that reason, I never made many childhood friends. It didn't help that I was a self-confessed bibliophile with an odd taste for obscure legends.
It wasn't until I entered the local high school that I found myself making friends with other misfits.
I was the geekiest of them: I was of average height for a girl my age, skinny, dirty blond and bespectacled. I was never to be seen without a book and never wore anything that could have been described as stylish. I was a proud member of the Quizbowl team and played the flute in band. That combination alone should have made me a social outcast at any other school but, thanks to the immensely tiny nature of the student body, my school was different.
My best friend was a short, dark-haired girl named Jeni. She was smart and had claimed numerous times that she was really a genius who hid her slightly insane mind by pretending to be an average, well-behaved student.
Everyone who saw the two of us as friends thought that the match-up was a little odd. Jeni was abrasive, outspoken and even violent on occasion. I was quiet, thoughtful, and a pacifist in the extreme. Some people even commented that the two of us being friends were akin to the Devil making friends with an angel.
Jeni never did figure out why I enjoyed being her friend, although her prevailing theory was that fragile, defenseless Elisabeth hung around her as protection. I, on the other hand, was fairly confident I knew why she enjoyed having me as a friend: for some unknown reason, I was one of the few people that were not terrified of her, and I was the only person patient enough to put up with all of her antics.
I lived a very ordinary, safe life until I was seventeen. That was when my life changed. A lot.
My high school was a very well-meaning, if very under funded school. The average size of a graduating class was about 75 students. In other words, everybody knew everybody else and there were very few secrets.
To say it was odd then, when four new students showed up all at once and nobody knew anything about them would have been the understatement of the year. Nobody seemed to know where they lived or where they'd come from. For their part, they didn't seem inclined to disclose this to any of the numerous students that tried to reach out to them.
After the initial "new kid" buzz died down (much too quickly in my opinion) the four students did not disperse into any of the established groups that were a tiny town's version of cliques. Instead the four students stayed together, forming their own group that no one was willing to approach.
Most people might have brushed off their odd behavior, but I had grown up on tales of the supernatural, and I was fairly convinced that some slight form of precognition ran on my mother's side of the family. By any means, the foursome gave me the willies.
They never spoke, unless asked a direct question and sometimes not even then. I had yet to see them eat anything (of course, with cafeteria food being the way it was that might not have been anything unusual). Then there was the way they would seem to stalk people. Perhaps it was only my paranoia, but I often noticed that they would take turns staring at one person for the entirety of lunch or class. They were always immaculately dressed (which was unusual for boys in my grade) and tended to dress in grays, browns, and blacks. They looked a lot alike; all four had pale skin, dark hair, and dark eyes. This, coupled with their tendency to dress alike, lent itself to the way I saw them as interchangeable. The few times I had been forced to sit near one of them I discovered that, despite their nice clothes, they stank of something I didn't recognize. Everyone, student and staff alike, gave them a wide berth.
Author's Note: I know this is where the first chapter originally ended, but I think it wasn't interesting enough to hold most people's attention, so I'm going to combine this chapter with the original chapter two.
"Don't you think the new kids are creepy?" I asked Jeni at lunch finally.
She looked over at me, as if I were the insane one and said, "You're actually not obsessing over those UFO's today?"
I smiled my best apologetic smile and replied, "Well, I figured you didn't want to hear any more about green and blue lights in the sky. Also, I didn't feel like getting called stupid and crazy today."
"You really need to stop reading those UFO books before they corrupt what's left of your mind," she continued unabated.
"Okay, what about… huh… what's-his-name that was in English today? What'd he ask Mrs. Wysocki for?" I asked hoping to change the subject before I got called stupid again.
"I don't know, but Mrs. Wysocki wasn't very happy that he interrupted her review was she?" Jeni let me be for the moment, content to yammer on about our English teacher's odd reaction to what was, apparently, the new sub's request to speak with a few of her students.
After a few yup's and half-hearted nods from me, Jeni realized I was losing interest in the conversation and said, "All right, go back to sleep, Liz."
I instantly reached for my book that I had left on the table next to my lunch. It was a relatively old book I'd found on one of the shelves in the school library. It would have been terribly overdue if it hadn't been for the fact that I hadn't actually bothered to check it out. I figured that no one would miss it as it, like many of the books in the school library's nonfiction section, had not been checked out since shortly before I was born.
The book in question was a UFO conspiracy book. It had a big, plump section on Area 51 and the Roswell crash. It also had a chapter on alien involvement in the building of everything from the pyramids in Giza to the Empire State Building.
I was almost to the chapter on "Alien Time Travel" when the bell rang to signal the end of lunch. I snapped the book shut and collected my lunchbox, hopped up from the table and sped walked to my locker, dodging the religious crazies that gathered around the pole in front of the bathrooms everyday to pray.
I spun my com and yanked open my locker. I grabbed my binder out of the bottom of my locker and manipulated it with one hand so the flat side was up and my book was underneath it while I simultaneously tossed my lunchbox into the spot I had just vacated with my other hand. Balancing my binder and book in the crook of my elbow I pulled my history and physics textbooks out of my locker and slid them into place on top of my binder. Careful not to drop the precariously balanced load, I switched arms and pulled my book out from underneath my binder to put it on top of the textbooks. This done, I wrapped both arms around the load to make sure it was secure and headed off to class.
I had to speed walk to History because it was at the far end of the building from my locker and only just made it before the bell rang.
Despite my interest in my book and the premise of the next chapter, my History teacher lectured for a long time and, being so close to exams, I didn't want to miss anything important. Once he finally gave us our work, he handed out a large enough assignment that I only barely finished before the bell rang for the end of class.
It wasn't as much of a rush to my last hour class as it was to sixth hour. I wandered into the Distance Learning Lab a full three minutes early and glanced around the empty classroom. Well, it should have been empty. Mr. Crance usually wasn't in the room when I arrived, but I had forgotten that he wasn't at school today. I jumped involuntarily at the sight of the sub. According to the blackboard, his name was Mr. Smith. He was very tall and thin and was wearing a blue suit with brown pinstripes. He was currently writing out what looked suspiciously like a complex physics problem on the board. I hurried to my seat and dumped my things on the desk. I sat down and waited for the rest of the class to trickle in.
Next in the door was my friend Abbey, who still sat across the room from me and then Jeni who, despite her assigned seat being in the row of tables behind me, still sat to my left everyday. Last was Kym, who usually never sat down in a seat, but today decided to sit down next to Abbey.
It was an interesting thing that Jeni hadn't been in Physics at the beginning of the year. Not more than a few months before, she'd suddenly been transferred out of her Chemistry class and into the Physics class.
Of course, by this point that was no longer a topic of speculation and gossip and I didn't think anything of it as I picked up my book and began to read about time-travel and aliens.
"Don't you do anything in this class?" asked Mr. Smith in an odd accent that I didn't immediately place. He sounded confused and, if he were new to subbing, I didn't blame him.
"Not since the seniors left," I muttered without putting my book down and flipping to the next page. It was true enough that the four of us, the only juniors taking physics, hadn't done anything since we'd taken the final exam (or in my case: exempted out of it) with the seniors, who had graduated two weeks earlier.
"But this is Physics. Newton's Laws. The Theory of Relativity. E=mc2. Don't you want to learn something?"
"Not if we can avoid it," someone muttered. I suspected that it was Kym. "Can I go work on yearbook now?" Definitely Kym.
"Don't you ever stop reading that?" asked Jeni, waving her hand in front of the page I was reading.
"No," I mumbled. I snapped the book shut. It had been getting a little strange anyway. The author, who I strongly suspected had been locked up in a loony bin after this book was published, kept talking about an alien that had repeatedly visited Earth for centuries. "The Doctor," the author claimed was a time traveler who had been present at all sorts of events. He included a picture of a supposed wood etching of the Doctor's "time machine." It looked fake to me. Since when did they have police boxes in 12th century Germany?
"Is that book of yours any good?" asked Mr. Smith.
Everyone in the room groaned.
I frowned. It wasn't my fault I could get carried away when I was describing a good book. "It's different," I started. "On one hand it makes some really good arguments about some pretty unexplainable events, like the New York City Central Park massacre of 1930. On the other hand, I've gotten to this chapter on possible time travel and it gets just plain weird. It keeps talk about certain images cropping up in old artifacts and manuscripts the world over. Some of the stories that the author tells are really creative."
"Time travel is impossible," Jeni broke in. She was fiddling with her brand new phone. She wouldn't say how she had procured it, but I suspected that she had lifted it off of someone.
"But wouldn't it be interesting?" I argued right back in one of our friendship-old banters. "I mean, to see the things that really changed the world."
"If you could avoid screwing it up," Jeni argued right back.
"Yeah, well, what if…" I started.
"Nah-uh, time travel is a bad idea," Jeni interrupted me.
I shrugged my shoulders, "Whatever. I still think it would be neat."
I considered picking my book up again, but the seriously creepy story about mutant pig-people living in the sewers of Manhattan was getting to me so I decided against that.
In an uncharacteristically bold move, I asked, "Mr. Smith, what do you think?"
"About time travel? Nah… just a really good science fiction idea…" he muttered uncertainly.
I suddenly recognized the accent and blurted out: "Are you from Britain?"
"No," he answered looking a bit puzzled.
"But you have a British accent, I thought," I mumbled, worried that I might have been rude.
"Oh, well, my folks were from there." He sounded as if he was trying to cover for a slip, but that might have been my mom's paranoia coming through.
I looked over at what Jeni was doing. She was pressing buttons rapidly on the phone and muttering quietly to herself. She finally smacked it and shoved it in her pocket.
Author's note: I'm afraid that not much is happening yet. Don't worry, the next chapter will be much better. I hope.