Plot bunnies! Plot bunnies! They're living under my patio! Aagh!
Anyway, here's the new offering, another one that just wouldn't freaking die already! And allow me to be very direct: THERE WILL BE SMUT! Most of the sci-fi elements, as often happens in my stories, exist to justify the naughty bits. Hope you enjoy them, nevertheless.
This story will be, I believe, five chapters, and I will post the chapters in fairly quick succession.
Disclaimer: I did some research into Hawaiian history and folklore... none of it quite suited me, and my story so I made up my own. The volcano, the legend, the luau sites, the hotel, the beach... it's all completely invented by me. The only true parts are the bits of Hawaiian language I use, and even that is without knowing anything about the grammar!
Request: If you read, review!Mahalo!
ONE
"Hawai'i!" he shouted from down the hall.
"Wha?" she shouted back, her mouth full of toothpaste. She was barely awake, still in her pyjamas, and it was obviously too early for anyone, even a Time Lord, to be shouting random geographical locations at her. She hadn't even had her coffee yet.
To her dismay, she then heard his trainers on the floor, coming nearer. She groaned quietly, and just continued brushing her teeth.
"Hawai'i!" he said as he got to her and leaned over the doorjamb. "Anomalous time activity. Console room. Come look!"
"There are Hawai'ians in the console room?" she asked cheekily, as he jogged away, back down the hall from whence he came.
"Oh, just come!"
She spat into the sink. "After I put on clothes!"
"Whatever," he hollered back.
She put on a pair of jeans and deep pink tank top, and dragged herself into the kitchen. She could smell coffee from metres away. There, the Doctor stood in his fitted brown suit, holding a steaming cup. He walked forward as she entered, and handed it to her.
"Thanks," she said, confusedly.
"I knew you'd come here first," he told her, before pouring a cup for himself.
She turned toward the table, and noticed two laptops sitting, facing the chair where the Doctor usually sat. One of them looked decidedly non-terrestrial, the other looked like hers.
"Is that my Powerbook?"
"Yeah, sorry. You left it in the library, and I thought it would come in handy. Hope you don't mind."
She shrugged. What was he going to do? Mess it up and not be able to fix it? Correct the grammar in her MD thesis? Read all of her Top Secret e-mails? Know that she went searching for photos of baby koalas yesterday?
She sat down in her usual spot across from his, and got ready to hear about time anomalies in Hawai'i.
He plopped down, and said, "Okay, look here." He turned the alien laptop toward her so she could see the screen. She glanced at the keyboard. It looked like a much smaller version of one of the panels of his main console, and the readout on the screen looked a lot like a type of data blipping away, that she had seen on the screen attached to said console.
She had seen it, but of course, she had never understood it.
"What am I looking at?"
"The thing on the far left that looks like an old-fashioned mercury thermometer, that's a measure of anomalous time activity. So far, we can't tell what's happening, only that something is."
"When you say we, you mean..."
"Me and the TARDIS."
"Of course."
"The thing in the middle shows the date and time."
"I'll take your word for it," she said, as the display was in Gallifreyan.
"On the right, you'll see the Earth."
"I will?" she asked, squinting.
"Hold on," he said. Then he turned the device around, tapped some keys, then faced it toward Martha again. "There."
"Oh yeah." On the right, she now clearly saw the southwestern part of the United States, Mexico, Central America, and the northwestern part of South America. And to the west, Hawai'i. And there, there was clearly some activity. A thick pulse was concentrated there, and nowhere else that she could see.
"Now hit the button that says Revolution Surveillance."
"You're kidding, right?"
He shut his eyes tightly, trying to visualise. "It's the first button below the map. I think. Just try it and see what happens."
She used the white ball to move a pointer to the button he had indicated, then pressed down on it, as she had seen him do a few times. It clicked, and the map began to change.
The date and time began to scroll through what she assumed were more numbers, and she could see the pulse on Hawai'i grow bigger and smaller at regular intervals.
"What's this, a feed of what's been happening over the past year? Revolution Surveillance?"
"Yep," he said. "On twenty four cycles, the time activity gets stronger, then wanes away somewhat, then gets stronger again, et cetera. It never goes away entirely, but during the day, it is very faint. It's at its peak around midnight."
"Okay, so where do we start?"
"Well, Miss Jones, I'm glad you asked," he chirped, before turning her own laptop to face her.
On the screen she saw a Los Angeles Daily News article, headlined, "Hawai'i Disappearances Still Unsolved."
"People are going missing from this one area," he said, not waiting for her to read the article.
"The Makua Malama Hotel and Resort?" she asked, reading ahead.
"Right. They own nine different luau sites in the area, in addition."
"Luau sites?"
"You know, those campy fake bamboo and grass huts where they host luaus on the beach, designed to trap tourists," he explained. "Fire dances, hulas, roasting pigs and whatnot."
"I see."
"The thing is, if you look at a map... hit Control-Tab."
She did. "Okay." She was now regarding a plot map of ten sites.
"If you look at the map, you'll see that the Makua Malama's holdings form a crescent."
"Yes, I see that."
"And can you guess what's right in the middle of that crescent? Right in the cradle?"
"The mysterious temporal disturbance?" she asked with a smile.
"Right you are," he said. "According to the article, there have been at least fifteen disappearances, in the past three months, possibly more, before the pattern was noticed. Now, in the area of that temporal activity, you'll also notice that there is a dormant volcano called Puka Manawa."
He looked at her meaningfully, waiting for her to come to some sort of conclusion.
"Sorry, I need more."
"Puka Manawa, in the Hawaiian language, means, roughly, Bottomless Hole in Time."
"Oh! Oh, that is significant! Is there some kind of, say, local legend that tells us why?"
"Exactly what I was wondering. I checked into it, but the only thing I could find was a supposed mountain god sort of thing, called Ai Pule, who is said to control the volcano," he told her, sitting back in his chair. "He eats... pieces of people. Arms and legs first, then the torso, and the head is the dessert."
"Lovely."
"Legends tend to ring with truth somewhere - a lot of human mythology has to do with interstellar activity and aliens and things like that, stuff that people can't explain in any other way. The stories get passed down, and they evolve and so on. Anyway, I would find it very hard to believe that this legend is completely unrelated to what's going on - that would be an awfully big coincidence, given the geographical 'convenience' of it all. But I can't quite work out how it all fits together."
"Are you thinking Ai Pule is an alien?"
"Maybe, but unless and until I know his or her non-Hawaiian name, or come into contact with it, I would have no clue. Naturally, I can't just throw myself into a volcano..."
"Well, with the time anomalies, shouldn't that narrow it down? Wouldn't there only be a handful of species in the universe who can manipulate time?"
"A handful? As far as I know there's only one. And you're looking at him."
"But there have to be other ways... portals and stuff... do those exist?"
"Yeah," he said, pulling his hand down over his face. "They do. And they do tend to be anomalous, especially on Earth. I suppose someone might have stumbled upon one. Plus, there's something called a Vortex Manipulator that the Time Agents used to use."
"Well, what species are Time Agents?"
"Human, mostly. Humans, thousands of years into your future. I had a friend who was a Time Agent for a while... but even then, the technology is stolen from us, from research accomplished by the Time Lords. Stolen, then modified, dumbed-down almost so as to be unrecognisable, and super-rough to use for travel but..."
"Okay. So, again, I ask, where do we start?"
"I was thinking we should check into that hotel, attend a luau or two, see what we can see."
"Well, I can think of worse ways to investigate a possible time-travelling alien who eats human heads for dessert."
After checking into the luxurious Makua Malama Hotel, the Doctor got immediately on the phone to reserve two seats at one of the luau sites that night. Martha sat in the lounge chair on the balcony and leafed through the luau brochures she had picked up in the lobby.
Actually, though she was leafing, she was only pretending to be interested in them. In reality, she was trying to calm her nerves. The room they had been issued was beautiful with cherry-wood shelves on one wall, containing a sliding cabinet with a television, satellite receiver and DVD player inside. The décor was, of course, modern and impeccable, including a firm, boxy armchair and ottoman with a chic Hawaiian black and white pattern. The lamps were opaque and sleek, and reminded Martha of lava lamps, and the art on the wall was abstract though simple. The bed had a white bedspread and red and white throw-pillows to accent it, in another chic Hawaiian pattern...
And that was just the problem: the bed. There was only one. Any time in the past when they had shared a bed, things had not gone well, at least for her. She always spent the night sleepless, unable to relax, painfully aware that he was just an arm's reach away, supine, dozing, dreaming... The night always brought with it new hope, and therefore, new angst. Thoughts always are more potent and exaggerated at night when one cannot sleep, nor talk out one's problems. Love within her always grew distorted, at the same time lustful and resentful. In the morning, she was always a mess, ill-equipped to run and jump for lack of sleep, and ill-equipped to help for lack of satisfaction.
Frequently, she wanted to scream and rail at the Doctor, force him to notice how much she was suffering, and asking him why, oh, why he couldn't just address it. Then again, she had never addressed it directly either. After all these months, he had to know how she felt, and yet he still did things like, say, book a hotel room with only one bed. She wondered whether he felt that choosing two beds would have been somehow too on-the-nose for him, too close to actually acknowledging the elephant in the room. Maybe next time, she ought to do the reserving.
The one consolation to being in love with a man who was totally hung-up on a former "girlfriend," if that's what she was, was that though he was not interested in Martha, he didn't seem interested in anyone else either. The Doctor, at least this Doctor, was fully aware of his allure; he was kind of gorgeous and he knew it. He often used it to his advantage, and yet sometimes seemed surprised when women (and men) would throw themselves at him. Nevertheless, his default personality was almost irrepressibly flirtatious, even with her, so when he used harmless chatting-up as a means of gleaning information, it didn't really bother her. So, unless his beloved Rose Tyler were to stumble out of a wormhole sometime in the near future, Martha felt she didn't have much to worry about. Actually, if that happened, Martha reckoned she would probably buy a one-way ticket home immediately, no questions asked. (This was one of the awful queries she had explored in the middle of the night, while not sleeping with the Doctor. And the one-way-ticket-home answer had been the somewhat cowardly, though honest-with-herself response.)
In any case, she thought it would be fairly discourteous of the Doctor to ignite any sort of "liaison" as long as he travelled with her, or any one woman. She reckoned she would probably feel that way, even if she didn't have the feelings that she had. She was glad that she had never had to discuss this with him.
And then, something in the stack of brochures actually caught her eye.
The Doctor came out onto the balcony and announced, "We are set. Dinner for two at Luau Hau-Ahi at six o'clock."
"Look at this," she said, pulling her feet in and making room for him to sit at the end of the lounge chair. He sat, and she handed him a brochure.
"Pohihihi Ao," he said, furrowing, reading the cover. "Camping trip."
"Right," she said. "Pohihihi Ao means mystery lights. You can go with a group and spend the night on a beach, from which you can observe the mystery lights phenomenon, of the volcano Puka Manawa."
"Oh! That's... wow. Mystery lights, eh?"
"Yeah. They probably have geologists on the case, examining it for sulfuric activity or something, but the brochure says the light show is totally unexplained."
"Okay, let's do it."
"I'll do it," she said. "Don't you think that you should visit more than one luau tonight? Reservations or not?"
"I suppose."
"Go to the sites after they've closed, even?"
"Okay, then," he said. "Go call and reserve your place on the beach. I'll pop back to the TARDIS and find you a sleeping bag and some sensible shoes. The brochure says you need your own."