The room was dark. There were lights high above her head in the domed ceiling, but they had long since burned out and been forgotten. Black tendrils of ivy crawled over and around each other up the walls, strangling what few bulbs still struggled to work. Miranda took a step forward, baseball bat in one hand, a heavy sack in the other, her trainers crunching on years' worth of unchecked ivy growth. The small sound became unbearably loud as it echoed through the chamber, and she heard several small noises respond from different points in the ivy. She winced. Big, clumsy human feet. No help for it, unfortunately.
PLOIMP!
Miranda jumped. There was water in here. She tiptoed forward to the edge of a round...pond? She leaned over and poked the dark surface. Ripples spread out, disturbing the carpet of algae on the surface, exposing several patches of dark water. Looking closely, she was just barely able to make out moving silhouettes beneath the surface.
PLOIMP!
A large bubble, roiling up from the depths, erupted near the far edge, followed by a dark shape with fins that briefly broke the surface, then disappeared just as quickly. Miranda stepped back from the edge as a precaution. She hoped it was nothing more sinister than carp. Either way, she didn't think her quarry could swim. Now, to locate that rustling...
BEEP BEEP BOP BEEP...
Miranda dropped the sack and fumbled in her pocket for her cell. So much for stealth. "Where are you?" a male voice crackled brusquely through the line, filling the chamber with harsh echoes.
"Close," she snapped back for what had to have been the tenth time in as many minutes.
"But where exactly? Last thing I need is for you to get excited and start smashing something important."
"Well, don't worry, all that's near me right now is the fish pond."
"Pond...? Ah, the swimming pool! Haven't been that way in ages."
Miranda looked at the swampy water in disgust. "Oh, that's vile," she remarked aloud. "Where're you?"
"I'm uh..." his voice trailed off momentarily. "Let's see...glowing bundles of cable, big flashy orb-things all over the floor...a unicycle? When did I ever have a unicycle?" --Miranda rolled her eyes-- "Well, I don't see any of 'em in here. What've you got?"
"Stand by..." she murmured, flipping the phone shut and pocketing it, eyes trained on a rustle in the ivy a few feet to her right. She crouched slowly and picked up her sack and then began creeping towards the movement. Flipping the bat upside down, she clenched the rubber grip tightly as she stalked it. Peering close, her eyes finally began adjusting to the gloom. She saw the gleam of little eyes and pounced.
As the bat hit home, an awful little squeal erupted from the viney overgrowth and several small furry creatures leaped clear and disappeared. "Ah, crap! There's a nest!" she groused, kneeling to pick up the stunned little critter that she'd struck. Stunned or dead, she couldn't tell for sure. She straightened and dropped it into the sack. She set the bat down and pulled out her cell.
"What'd you find?" the male voice asked at the press of a button.
"Oh, found one of 'em, but I think they've got a nest in here now," she commented mildly.
"That's it, Miranda, no more pets!"
"For the eight hundreth time, Doctor, they're not pets!" She shook a loose strand of hair out of her face and composed herself, fighting the irritation that brimmed so close to the surface these days. "I would have neutered them if they were."
"Still, a whole year studying an alien world, and you bring back the rats?"
"Don't start with that! You were a scientist once. You have the choice of spending your limited anthropological time studying diverse and numerous unknown human cultures or the local fauna. I had to prioritize! How was I supposed to know that your funky mood lighting would stimulate their mating drive, causing them to chew through the cages--which I told you were inadequate two weeks ago, I might add--and proliferate over half the TARDIS? Excuuuuse me for not anticipating that!"
"Oy! You're not putting this on me! I never gave you permission to bring them on in the first place! Travel through space and time? Sure. Infest my TARDIS with little crawling disease-pots? No."
"They weren't diseased when I brought them on. Anything they might have now would have had to come from your TARDIS. Anyway, how come is it that the great and powerful Timelord sees an ounce of fur with feet and freaks out? We would've had them by now if you hadn't spooked them."
"You try being locked in a room with plague rats and you'll understand."
Miranda's response was delayed when she realized the voice was coming from the archway instead of the cell phone. She glared at his lanky form, hidden inside that beat-up leather jacket, and put the phone away. "Was that before or after you wrote Hamlet? I keep forgetting," she drawled.
He merely produced that horrid, cheeky grin and crunched over the ivy, into the room. "After." He strolled to the water's edge and eyed it curiously. "At least, I think this should be the swimming pool." The large aquatic critter Miranda had spotted earlier made another appearance and another large bubble. The Doctor made a face and stepped back, almost colliding with Miranda, who had strolled up behind him to watch. "Wouldn't stand too close," he advised.
"D'you suppose that thing's a meat-eater?" Miranda wondered aloud, hefting her rodent sack in jest.
The Doctor studied the gently fading ripples, scratching his very short hair. "Dunno." He looked down at her. "Dip a toe, see what happens." Miranda elbowed him in the ribs. "Ow!" the Doctor protested, pretending insult as much as pain.
"Anyway, shouldn't we be mouse hunting?" Miranda moved away from the water's edge, noting all the little rustling movements she could see in the ivy on the floor. She hoped they were all caused by nothing more sinister than her rats. There were parts of this TARDIS that she knew not even the Doctor had fully explored.
"Could just seal off this part of the TARDIS and flood it with toxic gas, you know," he remarked off-handedly, following her through the ivy.
"Not a nature lover, eh?" Miranda quipped. "Anyway, all we really need is to pick up a few dozen traps."
The Doctor suddenly pounced into the ivy and when he stood up again, he had one of the critters dangling by its tail. "Nature's fine. Love nature," he insisted quickly. "Outside, that is. Inside, nature's nothing but a pest," he clarified, wagging a disciplinary finger at the little creature. "Aren't you?" Unexpectedly, he tossed it towards Miranda. Thinking fast, she opened her sack and caught the squealing animal before it would have landed in her face.
"You were directing that last comment at the rat, right?" Miranda asked.
The Doctor stopped short and snapped his fingers. "Traps! That's what we need!"
"The TARDIS doesn't have any. I checked the inventory, such as it is. I also searched several of the storerooms."
"Impossible!"
"You think I'm swinging this stupid bat around just for fun?" Miranda groused, following the Doctor's long-legged march out of the room into the greenish light of the corridor, pulling the door shut tightly behind her.
"I'm sure I had a few live traps tucked somewhere. Must've done."
"Oh sure, since the TARDIS is just chock-full of other sensible things, like unicycles and swimming pools."
"Whatever you did on that vacation of yours, it certainly didn't improve your mood any," the Doctor commented mildly.
Miranda's hand automatically clenched the grip of her bat. She knew he was only joking, but it did her residual raw nerves no good to be reminded of the past year. Everything about it had been the exact opposite of relaxing, and she strongly suspected the Doctor knew that much, though hopefully no more. She was so edgy, how could he not have picked up on it? She forced her angry response deep down with the rest of her emotional rubbish and loosened her hold of the bat. "Sorry. You were saying something about having live traps--?"
The rest of her question was jarred from her mind and mouth as the floor pitched sharply and she slammed face-first into the bulkhead. She dropped the rat sack and heard the aluminium bat go clanging down the corridor, then felt her back slam solidly into something that stopped her cold. Head swimming, she sat up from where she'd rebounded onto the floor, her face stinging, and realized she'd lost her glasses.
