The doors to the TARDIS flew open and a gust of wind, the Doctor, and a bunch of bananas blew in.
"Sorry, terribly sorry, get these back to you in a minute! Just need them for configuration of the, er, blue flickering thing-y right over here!" the Doctor screamed at the open TARDIS doors.
"Right. Okay. Right. Blue, blueblueblue, you're just a light aren't you?" The Doctor pressed some buttons and pulled a lever. The blue light went out.
"There's that settled then. AMY!"
The Doctor walked to the doors and stuck his head out. He crinkled his nose.
"Guess not every species gets the hang of plumbing," he muttered at the bananas as he threw them out.
When he turned around Amy was standing behind him. "Amy!"
"Doctor?" Amy said, "What's up? Still haven't gotten to the bottom of the apple pie mystery?" She smirked.
"It is actually very hard to make a good apple pie, believe me I tried, and it is especially hard in medieval Europe. Not many condiments around, you see." The Doctor walked back to the console. Amy quickly closed the doors to keep the wind from blowing in.
"Well maybe she is just very talented at baking apple pies," Amy said as she followed him to the console. "That does happen, you know."
"People? Being good at things?"
Amy raised an eyebrow.
"Well I guess it does happen, but not like this, Amy." The Doctor pressed some, seemingly random, buttons and the all-too-familiar noise started to sound.
Amy leaned against the console. "Where are we off to now, then? Some other planet famous for its fruit, whatever it may be? Nothing lethal to humans I hope."
"No, actually… No." The Doctor ran around the console, flipped a few switches and came to a stop in front of the telephone mounted on the middle of the console. "Actually I just wanted to make a call. Terrible reception this side of the galaxy so we had to scoot over a few inches. Light years. Oh well. Same difference when you have a time machine."
He picked up the receiver and immediately dropped it. "Owww, that is HOT!"
He shook his right hand in the air a few times, and then licked his skin where it had touched the receiver.
"Hot? How can it be hot?" Amy frowned and looked down at the receiver dangling against the console. It started to smoke.
The Doctor scrambled around in his pocket for his sonic screwdriver, found it, and pointed it at the receiver. "Well thermal disturbances can sometimes happen…" Before he could finish his sentence there was a loud bang, and the lights in the console room flickered. They went off, and on, and off again. Amy tried to hold on to the console, but everything slipped under her fingers in the dark. As she fell to her knees she heard the Doctor crashing into the console next to her.
"Watch it, I'm down here!" she yelled.
"Sorry! Hard to see in the dark, hold on!"
Amy saw the sonic light up in the dark as another crash shook the console room. Blue lights flickered up around her. "There we go!" the Doctor screamed. The console room shook once more, knocking Amy against the floor, and then everything went quiet.
"Ouch," she muttered under her breath. Shakily she tried to stand up.
"What did just happen?" she asked in the general direction of the Doctor, who seemed to have slid off the stairs leading up to the console platform by the same crash that knocked Amy to the floor.
"Well the phone got all hot, then the room started to shake, then the lights went off, I turned the emergency lights on and after that I fell down the stairs." His voice came from the bottom of the stairs.
"Yes, I know all that," Amy said, and craned to look at the Doctor over the top edge of the stairs. "But I meant why did it happen? Where are we even, are we still floating in space somewhere?"
"No I don't think so." The Doctor got up, dusted off his jacket and pulled the tips of his ears. "Right, everything still attached, good." He dived under the console and started rummaging through a pile of haphazardly stacked items. "Most likely she crash-landed us here for maintenance." An mask landed on the console floor. It looked like a transparent oxygen mask, but with buttons on the side engraved with complicated circular patterns.
"Crash-landed? How do you mean crash-landed?" Amy leaned her elbows on the railing around the console platform. "What went wrong?"
The Doctor's head emerged from under the console, "Well, I may have fiddled a bit with her configuration over the weekend. It was a slow weekend, you weren't around." His head disappeared again. "Afraid I touched some things that were not meant to be touched. At least not by me. So she overheated and broke down, and safety protocol landed us on the nearest planet. Ah, there we are!"
There was a loud bang, and the Doctor crawled up from underneath the console.
"Found it, fixed it… Well sort-of." He smiled. "Now all we have to do is wait for her to recalibrate some settings and do a lot of other complicated stuff. Care for some exploration?" He held up a mask similar to the one that had landed on the console platform.
"That depends, where are we? And isn't it dangerous if we have to wear those." Amy pointed at the mask on the floor.
"Oh fine," he sighed, "I'll go check first. See if there's no flesh-eating ponies outside." He put the mask over his mouth and nose, and pressed one of the buttons on the side. "Put yours on too, I'll call you when I get outside." Despite the mask, his voice sounded like it always did. The button he had pressed lit up blue with every word he spoke. "It won't protect you from flesh-eating ponies, or any other flesh-eating organism for that matter, but it does the job against poisonous gasses and always provides enough oxygen."
As Amy picked up the mask and put it on, the Doctor walked over to the TARDIS doors. He cracked one of the doors open and stuck his head outside. Suddenly, he took a step forwards and disappeared from the doors entirely.
"Doctor!" Amy yelled as she ran to the doors. She stepped through the doors and was immediately thrown to the ground. She landed hard on her hands and knees. A hand gripped her upper arm, helping her up.
"It's all right, everything is okay. Just a little dimensional calibration error. Can't expect her to get everything right, not during an emergency."
Amy looked right in the Doctor's smiling face. He pointed at something behind her. She looked over her shoulder. Behind her, the TARDIS lay buried at an angle in the rocky floor.
"Did I just… Is that?" she stammered. The Doctor reached out and pushed the button on the side of her mask. "Now I can hear you," he said. "Ask again."
Amy turned towards the open TARDIS door and looked in. Inside everything was as normal but with the blue emergency lights on, only the floor was at a different angle than the ground she was standing on.
"Okay that is weird." She looked at the Doctor. "Next time a little warning when there is something weird at the door."
He smiled. "Ready to go see things? Whatever they may be? So far nothing that could eat you. I think. Maybe the ponies are really tiny here, hard to say." He pulled the sonic screwdriver from his pocket.
Amy looked around her. The place they had landed on was dark, made of rocks, and mostly very cold. In the distance she could see the silhouettes of what looked like trees.
"Doctor, are those trees?" she asked. "How can there be trees if there is nothing else? Don't all planets with life have some sort of ecosystem?" She turned to him, but he had already started walking towards the line of trees. Quickly, she ran after him.
The sky was a light purple without a visible sun or moon, but there was just enough light to see where they were going. The ground was solid rock. There was no trace of any animals, plants or water.
"Well look at that, they really are trees." the Doctor said as they arrived at the line of blackened shapes. Twelve trees stood in a straight line on the rocks. They looked like they had been burned long ago, leaving only their crooked skeletons. Black branches reached into the sky. The Doctor pointed his sonic at one of the trees. After he'd moved it up and down the tree, he looked at the sonic and frowned. "It's definitely wood." He took a step back looked at the other trees in line. "Someone must have planted them here, but why?"
"Plant a tree in a rock?" Amy scoffed. "You can't plant a tree in rock." She frowned.
"Yet here they are," the Doctor waved his arm at the line of dead trees, "and to be honest they don't look like they're flourishing."
"But it looks like they did, once." Amy walked up to the last tree in line, and pulled a blackened round shape from a branch. "This looks like an apple." She held it up for him to see.
"An apple, oh yes!" he said after poking it with the sonic. "That definitely is an apple!"
"Aren't you going to, you know, sonic it?" Amy asked.
"Anyone can see that's an apple," the Doctor said, and poked it with the sonic again. The sonic beeped. "Oh, she's ready! We should go back, Amy. Take the apple, I'll save the coordinates to this place so we can visit some other time."
He turned around and started walked back. Amy looked at the line of trees one more time. I wonder why he's so eager to leave, she thought to herself. Usually he is the first to investigate strange things like trees growing on rocks, but not now.
She followed him back to the TARDIS.
At the doors he jumped into the TARDIS, and landed with both his feet on the floor. It made Amy dizzy just looking at it. He took off his mask. "Just jump, you'll be fine!"
She jumped.
"Doctor, why didn't you want to stay on that planet?" Amy asked as she turned the burned apple over in her hands.
"Stuff to do, things to see! Can't stay put for too long, Amy, you know that!" He winked and pulled some levers on the console. The familiar wheezing sound started up again, and faded quickly.
"Where are we now then?" Amy asked.
"Earth!" The Doctor yelled, "back to the apple pie mystery! Better take that." He pointed at the shriveled apple in her hands.
Amy walked through the doors and stepped out in the warm sunlight of what seemed to be a summer's day. Right in front of her was a small wooden house with a small vegetable garden in front of it. The Doctor was already in it, sonicing one of the trees. As Amy walked up to the house, a man walked out the front door and yelled at the Doctor.
"Don't you dare touch those trees, get out of our garden!"
The Doctor spun around. "Ah hello," he took one of the man's hands in both of his and shook it awkwardly as the man tried to pull his hand back, "we don't mean any harm. We just came to look at your apple trees, very special apple trees aren't they?"
The man raised his eyebrows, but before he could speak the Doctor started again. "Where is your wife, or well, mother rather I think? I saw her here last week, maybe last month? Not entirely sure… Was last month March? I think she mentioned March."
"My wife's been dead some 7 years," the man said, "and my mother even longer."
"Oh," the Doctor looked at his shoes and then up at Amy, "guess we were a little too late." The man frowned.
"Would you mind if we looked at your trees for a bit, just a bit, we won't do anything. Well, we will do things, but nothing that will break the trees. No touching, promise." The Doctor put his hands up in the air and smiled at the man.
"Just looking," the man said, crossing his arms.
The Doctor turned to Amy. "Hold that out, will you?" he asked, and pointed at the burned apple she was still holding. Amy held out her right hand with the apple in it, and gave a little wave at the man with her left.
"Hi," she said, "I'm Amy, I'm with him." She pointed at the Doctor.
The man looked at her, and then back at the Doctor who had soniced the apple and was now sonicing the tree again while muttering under his breath.
"Sorry to bother you like this," Amy said to the man, "we're just trying to find out some things about apples. We're very passionate about apples." She tried to smile as warmly as she could. The man looked back at her, his eyes darting over her body and lingering for a moment on the apple in her right hand.
"I don't know where you come from but you sure bring weird tools." He nodded his head at the Doctor, who had climbed the apple tree and was now sitting on the lowest branch with his nose and sonic screwdriver pressed into a leaf. "His makes strange noises, and yours changes colour."
"Mine doesn't change colour, it's just a burned a-," Amy started, but when she looked down at her right hand she saw she wasn't holding a blackened burned apple any more but shining red-and-green one.
"Doctor!" she yelled, "my apple changes color, I mean… It's a real apple again! Not burned!"
"What?!" The Doctor yelled, jumping out of the tree. "It does, yes!" he said as he pointed the sonic at the apple again. "Oh, that is interesting!" He poked the apple with the sonic, and smiled at the man who was still looking at them with his arms crossed in front of his chest. "That's quite an apple don't you think, must be the sunlight that set it off. Not much sunlight where it came from…" The Doctor frowned, looked up at the sun and quickly back down again. "Still doesn't explain the pie though." He walked back at the apple tree in the garden.
"Daddy?" sounded a little voice from behind them. Amy jumped and quickly turned around.
"Who are these people?" the little girl now standing behind them asked. She had on a long dress, and her straight blond hair fell down to her shoulders. She pointed at the apple.
"Is that a real apple? We have an apple tree, but never any apples. Daddy says it's because it's the only apple tree we have. Do you think the tree is lonely?" she asked Amy.
"I, er… I don't know?" Amy stammered. She looked at the apple in her hand. At the top of the apple a tiny stalk broke through the peel.
"Doctor, this is really weird," Amy said at the tree, before she realized the Doctor was already standing behind her.
"Hello," the Doctor said to the little girl, "I think we have just the solution to both our problems here." He winked at the girl, and went down on his knees to dig a shallow hole in the place where he had been standing. "Amy, the apple please," he said without looking up.
Amy put the apple in the hole and the Doctor covered it with sand.
"Come along, Pond," he said to Amy as he stood up. He walked past her and stopped in front of the little girl.
"You know what I really like," he said to her as he put his hands on her shoulders, "a good apple pie. Everybody loves a good apple pie."