"No, no..."
John's voice buzzed in his ear.
He looked down at the street below him.
Of course, he had prepared for just such a situation. Each of the thirteen possible outcomes of his meeting with Moriarty had been accounted for, and planned down to the last detail. There was no way that he could lose.
The crash mat had been fully inflated. One of his assistants on the ground had given the signal that it was okay to drop. John was in the perfect position. All Sherlock needed to do was let go.
The phone skittered along the roof behind him.
Everything had been said. Nothing more needed to be done.
He slipped silently from the rooftop and into nothingness.
It was all a little disappointing, Sherlock thought. Everything had slotted into place much too easily. In the end, Moriarty had provided him with quite an underwhelming conclusion to what he had hoped to be an entertaining game.
The great Sherlock Holmes, cheating death with a well-placed building and a bag of air.
How boring, he thought.
He braced himself for impact, and his world was swallowed up by blue darkness as the curtain was drawn on his "final" case.
However, as he sank into the shadows, he couldn't help but feel that something was amiss. It was none of his doing, of course - his plans, as ever, were faultless.
But he had expected the feeling of falling to have stopped by this point. He had yet to reach any form of physical resistance, disregarding the air rushing past him as he plummeted downwards.
In addition, there were... noises. Mechanical noises buried not so deep within the blackness that surrounded him; noises which were not muffled by any means. And smells - the smell of sulphur, electrical fires...
As moments flickered past, Sherlock's mind wrestled with the information his senses were providing him.
No sensation of landing. The combined sounds and smells were those one would expect to find... where? A poorly maintained factory? A laboratory of some kind?
No. Sherlock shook those thoughts from his mind. He had fallen - was still falling - from the roof of St. Bart's. Whatever he was falling into hadn't been there before he had gone up there to meet with Moriarty, so clearly it needed to be mobile.
A laboratory on wheels? That was stupid. A military craft, then? There was no vehicle he had ever encountered that would satisfy all of the criteria. In this situation, he had no option left but to deduce that it was, in fact, a vehicle he was unfamiliar with.
It was a bitter deduction for him to swallow.
Regardless, it would have to be a very large vehicle, and - judging by the smells - one in some considerable degree of distress.
So, to recap, instead of falling into a soft, safe inflatable bag, Sherlock was instead hurtling into a massive, unidentified, and potentially dangerous moving machine.
"That's just wonderful," he muttered to himself.
"Ahaha!"
To Sherlock's surprise (another painful revelation - how tedious this day was becoming), a man's voice broke through the gloom.
"A visitor! An unexpected one at that. And I thought I locked that door too," said the voice. From some distance away - Sherlock guessed at between ten and twenty feet from him, a ridiculous measurement which confounded him to no end - there was a flash of sparks from some minor electrical explosion. Sherlock's mind was racing even faster than usual.
Suddenly, a grating, groaning sound swelled up and out from unplaceable spot in the dark. There was another display of sparks, a snapshot of a cavernous, impossible room as it lit up for a fraction of a second, and then the world around Sherlock lurched.
A huge flat wall grazed past him, and seemed to curve up around him as he continued to fall, swooping up and beneath his body. The side of his calf kissed the hard surface first, sending him tumbling down and along the wall as it quickly became a floor. He barreled a few feet further before colliding with a set of railings and, finally, coming to a halt.
A final spray of light exploded in the distance before the chamber around him became fully illuminated. Sherlock's vision blurred as he struggled to acclimatize to his surroundings.
A huge moving pillar dominated the centre of the room (Room? Sherlock frowned). It was surrounded by a mess of screens and switches that tangled together in a manner that defied all common sense. It was clear to see that this was a control room of some sort, though for what vehicle, Sherlock still couldn't say.
He pouted and tried to focus.
A frustrating distraction emerged in the form of a young-looking man in a tweed jacket. The tweed man teetered out from behind the pillar and fiddled about with some of the wires dangling from one of the control panels.
"Sorry about that," said the man. He straightened his bow tie as he continued to rummage around in the wires. His expression lit up in a split second, as he drew a slim instrument from between the cables and gave it a preparatory swish. It made a pleasant whirring sound, but that still didn't make Sherlock feel any happier about the situation. The man in tweed continued.
"The old girl's a bit temperamental when it comes to phasing through interdimensional subspace rifts at the moment. Takes a while to get her back in full working order," he said, heartily slapping a one of the control units around the pillar. There was yet another shower of sparks, though this time it was, at least, reassuringly smaller than the last. "Mind you, I don't suppose there are many people that'd be all too happy about having all their atoms scattered across the whole of time and space and then snapped back together. Never mind, we're all in one piece." He paused, and squinted at a flickering monitor that hung limply from a single cable. "Well, mostly in one piece. I think. Anyway, I'm alive, the TARDIS is still here, and - " he beamed over at Sherlock, " - and we have a guest. And you're alive too. Brilliant! Day keeps getting better all the time!"
Shakily, Sherlock got to his feet. He brushed his hair from his face and donned a sour expression.
"A time machine," he spat. "I fell into a... a time machine?"
"A hello would have been nice," said the man. He strolled forwards and stretched out his hand for Sherlock to shake. "I'm the Doctor."