Chapter 1 – The Landing –
A small unattended and underused office sat on the side of the building, dust now gathering in the corners, and cobwebs hanging down. With so many rooms in the buildings, there were a few scattered around that nobody had looked in for months, in some extreme cases, even years. The air conditioning and heating vents had been shut down for this part of the building, so it faced both extremes of the weather situation.
The calm and quietness of this room could easily have been cut with a knife. But a knife was far too subtle, and just simply wouldn't do, and instead a strange screeching noise scraped apart the calmness and rattled the windows. Despite the windows even being closed, the few papers that were there on the floor scattered from a gentle breeze. A small piercing light pinpricked in the middle of the room, and the TARDIS, the familiar blue police box appeared, slowly but surely edging its way back into reality.
The Doctor opened the door, and stepped out. He took a deep breath and looked around. He had followed a distress signal here, not knowing exactly what it was. He knew of nobody round in New York who knew how to contact him, certainly not in this time. To make matters worse, the date was the 12th of September, 2001, and therefore there would still be panic on the streets from the attacks, he sighed, wondering why he had all of a sudden taken a fashion of answering these ridiculous distress calls. He knew very well they hardly ever lead him to a worthwhile adventure. In fact, one outrageous event occurred when an impressionist had contacted him pretending to be some obscure deep voiced brat that had sounded familiar, only to find out he'd been given the wrong persons phone number. He was beginning to grow weary of these events, and was starting to lose hope in finding adventure. Needless to say, he turned around and closed the door, then walked over to the window.
Funnily enough, as he had somehow assumed, those two lumbering towers had gone from the skyscraper line. He laughed, he had never liked those buildings anyway, obscuring the view. He much preferred the countryside and nature walks, but then remembered that they rebuilt them in 10 years anyway, and pondered off back to the TARDIS. A young cleaner had popped her head in, presumably to see what the noise had been. The Doctor stared at her, but she wasn't looking at his face, she was staring at his clothes. The Doctor had lost all care for what people thought about his unique attire, it was his own, and that was that, for nobody else could claim to have his excellent taste in taking several colours and fashion styles and merging them all together into one wearable suit. He smiled at his own genius, and realised the woman was still standing there.
"Well, can I help you m'dear lady?"
"Oh, err no" she blushed, looking away from him "thanks, I mean" she hastily added, and rushed out, shutting the door quickly. The Doctor grinned, humans worried over the most trivial things, he would most certainly hate to be one of them he mused to himself, especially to lose his dashing good looks and intelligence. He brushed a piece of dust that he noticed had fallen on his shoulder from the aging roof, and walked out of the room, shutting the door behind him. He looked down the corridor, who noticed his little cleaner friend was talking to one of her friends, who looked remarkably like each other, except her friend was slightly older.
They appeared to be gossiping about something, and one of them pointed over to him. He raised an eyebrow to them, for they did appear to be oblivious that he was staring at them gossiping away and pointing. Nevertheless he waved at them grinning as he had noted Earth tourists did so often, and walked into the lift. Perhaps that was what he loved most about humans, they made a massive fuss about something small, like the tea going cold, or being late to a friends house, when something massively important like an alien invasion, or a government conspiracy went completely ignored and regarded as manic obsession.
He jabbed at the bottom floor level buttons in the elevator, his stomach fluttering slightly to his delight as the elevator swooped down at a rather comparatively slow speed, a speed he calculated as about 81.23mph, give or take .02. However, something that rather startled him, as much as it roused suspicions was that on every floor he stopped, which appeared to be about every 10, several people were waiting to board the elevator. However, they all would put one foot in, then take one look at the doctor, and most of them would then back away, ushering to themselves, or step in nervously, only to depart a couple of floors later.
He sneered slightly, for even though he wasn't in the slightest bothered what people though of him, this kind of behaviour was very insulting, especially with such a large number of people. In fact, so distracting was this behaviour that he even failed to think about why he was here, what the distress signal was for anyway, and concentrated solely on how on earth he could possibly offend or intimidate so many people. Come on he thought to himself, what could possibly be wrong? You can figure this out! He was immensely intelligent, so he must simply figure it out soon.
But unfortunately it seemed to be a human matter, and humans rarely acted on logic, which made matters all the worse for the doctor. Finally, after what had seemed an eternity, and for a time lord to seem it was all the more distressing, for they were more adept to longer periods of time than humans anyway, the elevator finally came to the ground floor. He stepped out, finally glad to be out of that cramped room and peered around. There was nothing really unusual for an average New York day, although he did realise that he was still inside the building. He smiled and strutted along, walking to the edge of the building and trotting up the stairs to outside, humming some obscene tune, hoping he wouldn't seem too attention attracting, which was ironic especially given the fact the song in particular was written in 2011. Stepping outside he sniffed the air and wrinkled his nose.
Never could hot dogs or donuts really, didn't really like them, and couldn't see what humans saw in them. He heard police sirens going off in the distance, however getting louder very quickly, and he deduced they must be coming near hear quickly, perhaps he might be able to see what that distress signal had been about, it could have something to do with whoever the police were chasing. However, he never really had ever had a fondness for the police, and they were too open to bribery for his liking. He preferred to stay out of their way most of the time, they caused a lot of trouble to whoever they got involved with, even passers-by, as he had observed. He looked around, trying to see if there was anything he should look for, then as he turned and looked up to stare at the building he had come from.
No, that's impossible! He thought outloud. For while the building was not entirely too impressive on it's own, despite being the tallest in the city, it had an identical building right next to it. He had just come out of the Twin Towers. He went to double check his watch, to make sure he had mixed up the date, and come before September, but never found the time to. A fist connected with the back of his head and he was pushed downwards onto the ground.
He could feel cold iron being wrapped around his wrists tightly, and some angry voice yet youthful voice uttering something about arrest and silence. He couldn't really tell, the world around him swam furiously, colours all blending and merging into one colour. His vision blacked out, and the voices and sounds of New York drowned out and echoed out into silence. For one of the first times he could remember, the Doctor had actually been getting some rest. Had he been conscious he would not have been too happy at that prospect.