The most difficult part is always the beginning.
Very hesitantly, the pencil touched its tip to the paper. It recoiled then, leaving a tiny black mark. A rubber eraser came down upon the mark and obliterated it, and the side of a hand brushed the pink scraps away onto the floor. The lined sheet was completely blank except for a stain mark from a moist arm having rested upon it for a long time, and a dark smudge in the leftmost corner of the top row.
The hand descended again and wrote the word 'the.' It erased it, sweeping away another pile of eraser dust, and rewrote it more neatly.
The pencil tip broke on the hook of the 'e,' and a little comet of graphite appeared on the page. Out of habit, the hand tried to wipe this away too, but left a long smudgy streak. So the fingers twirled, and out came the eraser once again, with more salmon-shaded shavings drifting off the paper and adding to the growing pile. Then, annoyed, the hand crushed up the paper and picked a new sheet.
"Could you please stop doing that! It's very distracting, and it's also absolutely disgusting!"
"I'm writing!" exclaimed the wielder of the pencil indignantly, as if this excused anything. "You're interrupting my creative flow!"
"Oh? Reallllly?" The word was drawn out over a span of many 'l's with an exaggerated Estuary English inflection. With a queep and a clunk, a switch was thrown back and a lever clicked into place like the clutch of a car put into 'park'. The ambient noise died away, and the light lost its blue tinge. Sneakers danced on the warm grille that was the floor over to the seated young woman with the paper and pencil. The tall man leaned over her shoulder. "Oooh, look, you've written something. That's new. And is that the word 'the' I see before me? Such genius! I'm astounded! All those crumpled pages and all those shredded erasers all over my floor really were worth it, then!"
The interruption then snatched away the flat object the woman had been using as a desk. "Where did you get this?" he asked, expression crumpling in suspicion. "Is this what I think it is?" He turned it over in his hand, rubbing the edges with his thumb. "You've been sitting with this all this time? Haven't got any particularly violent urges at all? A sense of objectivism or supremacy, maybe?"
"If it's dangerous, why was it just lying around?" The woman brushed a long lock of wavy walnut hair back behind her ear, where it had slipped from her long braid.
"Well, it's not dangerous... okay, first of all, that's a really daft question, Xan, considering where you are, and second of all, it's not actually dangerous, it just... I don't know... could be..."
Alexandra Russell, paleogenticist, xenoarcheologist, and former Time Lady, paused and pursed her lips. "Why?" she asked, mildly irritated, and started to unfold. She was long-limbed and broad-shouldered and while she probably couldn't pass off as a full-grown man her body must not have tried very hard at being a woman. She was pretty nevertheless, or at least a few features if isolated would be, and had the kind of personality that had hijacked her physical appearance and made her look exactly like herself, and nothing else.
"Did you touch anything electric at all?" the man went on, ignoring her question. "Open socket sort of thing?" The man put the coppery slab of metal in a crate by his feet with care. This box was legendary; it supposedly had a lump of dark matter crammed in the bottom somewhere, giving the crate a mass of nearly a ton.
After pretending to think this over, Xan came to an answer. "Funny you should mention it," she said. "No, I didn't."
"It's just not such a good idea to use dalekanium as a writing desk. For all we know, that's what Ayn Rand did, and look what happened to her."
"Something happened to her?" asked Xan eagerly, now chewing on her pencil as though it was a stalk of wheat and she a Texas cowpoke.
"I really shouldn't tell you... This isn't a campfire, Star-girl, no time for spooky stories. Was that what you were writing, by the way?"
"What, a thriller? No. I was going to write a poem. And don't call me..."
"A poem? Was it about me? That's so sweet. I'm very touched." He reached for one of the balls of writing.
Xan snatched it from him before he could unfold it, gathered up the crumpled sheets of paper around her and dove for the door. She opened it a crack, leaned next to it, and tossed the sheets out into the intertemporal ether. "They weren't about you, Doctor," she said. "But you can't read them." The blue door clicked shut.
Raising an eyebrow, the lanky, handsome Time Lord leaned back, propping himself against the cluttered surface of the console. "You don't know where those'll end up," he told Xan, relaxing and adding with a lofty tone, "Or when. Who knows? One of them might land in the primordial ooze and disrupt the natural history of Earth." He grinned.
"Might just cause it, though. Who's to know?"
"Well, we could go find out." The Doctor touched a switch with his index finger, applying very slight pressure to it in an inviting way.
"I need to finish my poem first," said Xan. "You just wait."
Rolling his eyes, the Doctor propelled himself off the console and said, "For a few decades."
"The beginning's the hardest part," the girl told him haughtily. "I won't take long."
"Need any ideas? I could write you the first line or two, if you like."
She picked up the paper and disappeared into a door. "Don't even try it."
The Doctor snorted again and returned to his post by the console. "Why do you have to write all the time anyway? Why do you have to make up int'resting stuff? You're sitting in a time machine with an alien! I mean, come on!"
A few minutes later Xan reemerged. "Well, that was quick," said the Doctor.
"It's a haiku," the girl explained.
"All that time to write a haiku?"
"Yes."She slowly crumpled it in her fist and opened the TARDIS door again. The poem sailed out into the colorful tunnel, leaving the blue phone box behind as it journeyed through the dimensions.
"Was that one about me, too?"
"You'll never know. This is Zen I'm doing, okay? I create, and then I destroy what I create, so everything I make is new and unique."
"Ah. So it's like when rock bands smash up all their instruments after a show?"
"Yes, except..."
"You're not loud, ugly, and surrounded by a lot of screaming, legless groupies?"
"Exactly."
"D'you fancy a trip to a concert, then?"
"I don't know. Why?"
"'Cos there'll be monsters. And music," he admitted. "But mostly monsters."
"And peril?"
"Sure."
"Danger?"
"Absolutely."
"Yeah," said Xan, nodding. "Okay." The Doctor smiled and reached for a large dial in the mess of controls, then had to stretch all the way across the console to drag a lever upright. By degrees, the immense blue column rising out of the console shifted, some inner piston rising and falling.
"So, I was thinking of somewhere in the nineteen-sixties, you know, maybe one of the really good..."
A deafening crack! There was a flash, a crunch, and the lights of the TARDIS dimmed as whole structure rocked with an impact.