The Doctor's Companion

Prologue

I had always believed in miracles, in truly magical moments without the proper words to explain them. I had always believed in the unseen, in people and places that others doubted simply because they had never laid eyes on them. I had always known that there was something out there for me, but I had never really known what it was, only that as soon as the opportunity came up, I would be a fool to waste it.

And when that day came, I didn't waste my opportunity. I ran after it.

Literally. |

Chapter one

"Shaina Applewhite, come up to the board and work out question fifteen for us." Mr. Huffington is one of the rudest, most arrogant and definitely most sarcastic people I have ever met. I'm not even kidding; whenever he talks, I just have this urge to throw something at him. He does his best to get on my nerves, and he enjoys every second of making me miserable.

I got up out of my seat and headed up to the front of the classroom. Grabbing the marker, I stood there for a few seconds and stared at my paper. I had answered the question, now I was trying to find out where to start.

"Ms. Applewhite, we don't have all the time in the world," my geometry teacher reminded me.

"I'm not sure if it's right," I explained.

"Well, a blank board is definitely not right, so go on."

So I started writing. I confused myself more and more every time I tried to show how I had gotten my answer. When I was done, Mr. Huffington tore my answer apart. Literally. He erased parts, drew lines through some things and moved different parts around with arrows.

"Does that make sense?" He turned to me, eyebrows raised.

I blinked a few times. "Uhm… no."

Mr. Huffington went on and on. After a while, I stopped trying to listen. Obviously I wasn't going to understand; when had I ever understood anything he was saying? The only thing I think I ever understand that year was, "Pack up now, it's about time to change classes."

Oh, those sweet words.

I wasn't the only person who was lost. Surveying my classmates, the glazed-over, I-have-no-idea-what-you're-talking-about look was written all over everyone's faces. Some people fell asleep. Others began to doodle. I saw a pair of girls in the back listening to music with their headphones threaded through their hoodies. A pack of guys started passing notes to each other and throwing crumbled pieces of paper at the back of each other's heads while Mr. Huffington wrote on the board.

After almost an hour, I thought my head was going to explode. I raised my hand. "Mr. Huffington, can I go to the restroom?"

"Go on ahead." He went back to the teaching.

I hurried out the door. Honestly, I didn't really need to use the toilet, I just had to get out of there. I can't sit still for long, especially not if Mr. Huffington is at the front of the classroom lecturing about who-knows-what.

As I was stepping into the restroom, movement caught my eye. I just saw the edge of a dark loafer and black slack pants disappearing around the corner. And for some reason, even though just that little glance hadn't struck me as odd, the urge to follow whoever was running down the hallway had overwhelmed me. Still to this day I believe that the feeling was just as much supernatural as it was my own human curiosity.

But despite the origin of the feeling, I ran after the person anyway.

I could still hear their footsteps, but I couldn't see the figure in front of me at first. I kept going, though, unearthly inquisitiveness fueling me. I went around a bend. The hallway was silent now, so I stopped to look around.

That's when I saw it.

The creature obviously wasn't the thing I had been trying to pursue, as the clothes I'd seen before were absent. But there it stood in front of me. My blood ran cold, and terror welled inside of me. Its head was that of a human's, but it was skinless and hairless like a skeleton, with empty black pits for eyes. The body was that of a large brown spider with eight very thin, long legs.

I was too horrified to let out a scream. The human-spider was only a few yards from me, and I knew that if he attacked, I had no chance of fighting him.

Out of the blue, I felt hands on my shoulders, pushing me down. "Don't move," an unfamiliar man's voice whispered in my ear, his British accent letting me know for certain he wasn't from around here, "it's blind, but its sense of smell is incredible and it can sense movement very well."

I did as I was told. The man's body was shielding me from the thing, but I knew even he couldn't stop it from hurting us.

Or I thought I knew.

The man slowly leaned up. I saw him pull something from his belt. It was long, silver on both ends and bronze in the middle, with a black concaved area where his fingers wrapped around it. The end pointing outward was shining green. It was a strange contraption, like nothing I had ever seen.

The human-spider clicked angrily. "Do you think you're little glowing stick scares me, Time Lord?" His voice was raspy, making my whole body tense up.

The British man laughed. "You would be a fool for it not to."

"I am a fool, you say?" The creature's laugh was bone-chilling. "This does not mean much coming from the Time Lord whose love for humanity has been his mortal flaw from the start."

Their conversation was making absolutely no sense to me. I curled my hands into fists against the cool tile floor, wondering how in the world I had ended up here.

British-man's 'little glowing stick' started to glow brighter. The green light shot out of the end, slamming right into the spider-human, who had been too slow and big to dodge it. At first, it looked as though it had done nothing but shine light onto him. The spider-human cackled. But then the beam widened until it was covering his whole body. The beast stood stone still, illuminated by the green light for a moment, and then a large white flash overwhelmed my eyes. There was a sickening pop! sound, and the hallway filled with smoke. When it cleared a few seconds later, it was apparent that the spider-human was gone.

The British-man stood up, pulling me to my feet.

"Uhm…. thank you, I guess," I said after a moment.

"Not a problem," he replied.

"So." I swallowed. "What now?"

"Well, I've got an awful lot of running to do." He tipped his head and then started off.

I didn't even flinch. I quickly followed after him without much of a thought. We ran down the hall and out the double doors into the sunlight. In front of us stood what looked like an old blue telephone booth, except all the doors were wooden with only little windows on the top half of them. The words POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX around the top, where there was fastened what looked like a light, although it wasn't on. It was strange, an especially bizarre sight standing right outside of my middle-of-nowhere school.

But the he didn't hesitate to open the door and go inside, so I did the next best thing.

I followed him. |

The rest after that is a bit blurry. I'm not really sure what happened. All I can remember is suddenly feeling extremely weak and falling to the ground, blacking out before I even hit the ground.

When I opened my eyes, I was very disoriented. I was lying on a chair covered in a blanket in a room I had never seen before. I couldn't remember how or why I was there, only that I wasn't in school anymore. I sat there for a few moments, weighing the options of getting up and wandering or waiting for someone to show up. I finally decided for the former. Throwing off the blanket, I stood up and walked toward the entrance to the room. Light from the end of the hallway drew my attention. I headed down that way and stepped into the room. The sight made me gasp.

The ceiling was high and the sides were curved, making the room appear airy and bigger. The orangey-gold light made everything seem a bit eerie. There were holes in practically everything, although it seemed to be designed that way: the walls, the floor, the support beams. In the center of the room was a slightly elevated glass platform with multiple staircases leading up to it from what looked like other hallways. In the center of this platform was a glass tube filled with shining bluish globe that reminded me of a lava lamp, surrounded by a panel covered in buttons and knobs and other peculiar-looking control devices. There was a chair on one side of this contraption, a keyboard sticking out of the other. The tube was fed into what looked like a huge steel spiral, which reminded me of the old air-conditioning vents in my school.

All in all, this odd sight was both weird and wonderful, still to this day literally one of coolest things I have ever laid eyes on. I wandered around, getting a closer look at some of the details. I reached out my hand to place it on the tube when out of nowhere came a voice: "Curiosity killed the cat, you know."

I jumped back, startled. It was the voice of the British man I had heard before, and instantly I remembered all the events leading up to my being here. "But wait, wasn't this just a box thing?" I wondered aloud.

"Just a box thing?" The man shook his head. "Oh no, this is the TARDIS."

"The what?"

"The TARDIS. Time and relative dimension in space."

I stared at him like he was crazy, because I was thinking that maybe he was. Then again, I was seeing all of this, so maybe I was the lunatic.

"It's bigger on the inside, as you can see," he continued, "It's just disguised as a police telephone box from 1963."

"What is it actually?"

"A time machine, per say."

"Excuse me?" I gave him a look. "You're telling me we're inside of a time machine?"

"Not just any time machine, no. We're inside the TARDIS, the last one left."

"So there are others?"

He looked down at the floor, his eyes suddenly filled with an overwhelming sadness that made me want to cry just looking at him. "There were others."

I cocked my head. For the first time, I actually gave this man a good look. He was tall, about four or five inches taller than me, and rather good-looking. He seemed to be in his late twenty's. The British man had longish light brown hair that fell into his face, causing him to have to flick it away often. His eyes were chocolate brown and full of knowledge, life-changing experiences and, of course, that grief I had seen before. He was wearing those same shoes and pants I remembered seeing before, as well as a tan dress shirt, corduroy sports jacket and red bow tie. When he moved, I noticed the suspenders holding up his slacks and what looked like a watch on his wrist, although I didn't catch sight of the face.

"What's your name?" I asked him.

"My name?" He appeared taken aback for a moment, but then his face resumed his previously casual expression.

"Yeah."

"Why, I'm the Doctor."

"Doctor who?"

A strange smile spread over his lips. "Exactly."

I had no idea what that meant. "You're crazy, aren't you?"

"Crazy?" The Doctor seemed to ponder this for a minute. "Well, I've been told many times I'm a madman, so I suppose I am."

"Then how did you get here, if you're crazy? Don't they lock up crazy people?"

He chuckled. "They're trying to lock me up, some of them."

"So you've escaped?"

The sorrow increased, and then sank back. He merely nodded. "Alright, you've asked enough questions. Now I have some questions for you."

"Okay." I crossed my arms.

"What's your name?"

"Shaina Applewhite."

"You're American, aren't you?"

"Yeah, and you're British, aren't you?"

"I'm Gallifreyan, actually, but that's a long story." The Doctor paused for a breath. "How old are you?"

"I'm sixteen," I explained.

"And why did you follow me?"

This question caught me by surprise. "What?"

He repeated himself.

I chewed on my lip for a second. "I don't know."

The Doctor nodded his head. "So have you seen other Araneviro, or was that the first one anyone has seen around here?"

"What?" I asked, puzzled.

"Araneviro. That is the name for the beast you saw in your school. It is a half-human, half-spider formed when an Arane consumes a human, using the mortal's life force to recreate itself."

"What's an Arane, some species of freakishly large spider?"

"Something like that." When I raised my eyebrow, he went on. "Arane are an extraterrestrial race that presides on the planet Ara, right ahead of Arkheon, a bit farther from the Crab Nebula but just ahead of the Pleiades."

I was sure he was speaking another language, and he had to have been, since I literally had no idea what he was saying.

"In basic terms, Arane are not something you want to mess with. They don't have a taste for Time Lords, but it will consume any human being it sees-"

"So wait, so you're saying you're not a human being?" I stepped toward him. "What are you, then? What's a Time Lord?"

"All these questions," The Doctor replied, "If I answered everything you asked me, your head would explode."

"Just because I'm sixteen doesn't mean I'm six," I replied, irritated, "I do understand most things."

"It's not your age I'm talking about, it is literally your capacity to pertain this knowledge. Because you're a human, not to mention such a young one, you're unable to comprehend the entire truth about the universe."

"Then how come you know 'the entire truth'?" I wondered, putting air quotes around the last three words.

"Because I'm a thousand-year-old Time Lord-"

My eyes popped. "A thousand years old? You are crazy! You barely look a day over twenty-five!"

"Twenty-five? Oh, dear, I haven't been twenty-five for hundreds of years." The Doctor looked almost insulted by this, although I couldn't tell why.

I suddenly realized something. I had a feeling, sort of like how you feel on an airplane, but much smoother and quieter. I leaned down to touch the floor.

The Doctor raised his eyebrows. "Now you're acting a bit mad yourself."

"We're moving." I craned my neck to look up at him, my mouth falling open. "We're moving!"

"Well yeah. Did you think a time machine was just going to sit there and do nothing?"

I got back on my feet. "Where are you taking me?" And as soon as the words came out of my mouth, I felt the movement slow and then abruptly stop, as if we were landing. We had fallen onto something solid.

"Why don't you find out for yourself?" the Doctor said, indicating the door.

I blinked, calculating his response. Was he kidding, trying to trick me, or legitimately being serious? I wasn't sure if his 'serious' was even real, as insane as he seemed.

"Go on." He pressed his lips together in a tiny grin. "Do you really think that I would send you into a trap?"

Taking a deep breath, I went over to the door. I grabbed the handle and cautiously opened the door. A light breeze hit my face.

The sky was purple. Literally, it was a bright purple dotted with what looked like little golden stars. The ground below the TARDIS was grassy and clear. It was rather foggy, making the sight distance only about a mile in every direction. But I could see the back of a building in the distance. It was made entirely of sleek blacked-out glass covered by huge amounts of some sort of white material.

"What is that?" I asked, pointing.

"What does it look like?" the Doctor replied.

I squinted hard. Upon further inspection, I realized something that made the memory of the spider-human creature- Arane, I reminded myself- creep back into my head.

The building was built in the middle of a ginormous, thick spider web.

Without noticing it, I had gripped the Doctor's arm in fear. I let go immediately, stepping away from him. "Where are we?"

He stretched out his arms, but there wasn't much of a smile on his face. "Welcome to Ara, home of the Arane and the Araneviro."

I'd figured it out, but a freaked out "What?!" still escaped my lips. "If you think that I'm stepping onto this planet full of humongous spider things that like eating humans like me for breakfast, you're wrong."

"Am I?" He indicated the ground below our feet.

I literally screamed. We were now standing outside the TARDIS on the Araian ground. The doors of the time machine were closed. "What is a matter with you? Do you want me to die today?"

He patted me softly on the arm. "Calm down, you're not going to die. Don't you remember what happened last time we were attacked by an Araneviro?"

I glanced at his pocket. "That… that glowy thing."

The Doctor reached into his jacket and pulled it out. "This is called a sonic screwdriver."

"What does it do?"

"Basically anything you want it to."

"But will it kill all of them? There must be more, if they can make that huge thing."

The Doctor patted my shoulder. "Don't be so frightened. Stick close to me, however." He started forward. I stayed behind, not moving, and after a moment, he turned around to look at me. "Aren't you coming?"

"Why should I trust you?" I asked, trying to suppress the fear welling inside of me.

He smiled, and it was dazzling, the impossible grin of a madman. "Because I'm the Doctor, of course."|