"What the hell is that?" Orin Scrivello asked his girlfriend as he gazed at an object in the sky.
Of course, the question was a rhetorical one; Orin would never ask his girlfriend anything. A piece of trash, that Audrey was. She couldn't even tell a drill from a file. She wouldn't survive a day in the dental profession. He was really only dating her because of her body - surely that would attract someone that he actually was interested in.
But Orin wasn't focusing on any of that right now. Right now, Orin was staring at a box in the sky. First, a total eclipse, and now this... thing? Orin reached into his black leather jacket and pulled out his handheld container of nitrous oxide. He needed a laugh just about now. As the gas filled his nose, he let out a deep, throaty chuckle. It wasn't a big laugh, but it was enough to get Audrey's attention.
"What did you say?" she asked him, taking her focus off a popped seam in her black-and-white dress.
"'What did you say', what?" he said, suddenly feeling frustrated with her. Why couldn't people ever address him properly?
"Doctor!" she squeaked, moving her hands to her face in a defensive position. "What did you say, Doctor!"
"Good." With that taken care of, Orin turned his gaze back to the sky - especially that box, getting bigger and bigger. As it got closer, he could see that it was blue and looked like the telephone boxes they talked about uptown. But the outside was made of wood rather than glass, and nobody used phone boxes anymore. It was 1982, for Christ's sake! There was also the fact that it was in the air, but Orin disregarded that when he realized that soon enough, it would hit the ground.
He wasn't the only one who had noticed the flying phone box; citizens from all over Skid Row were looking out their windows and standing on their stoops so they could see what was in the sky. As they began to see what would happen when the box hit the ground, panic began to ensue in the small town. People had dropped what they were doing, and some were screaming about the apocalypse.
The box was heading for Shmendrik's market just a few blocks down. That, Orin could see. But he didn't rush to evacuate people from the area. They probably figured it out already - in fact, there probably anyone wasn't in there anymore.
"Should we help them, Doctor?" Audrey asked him, making sure to add the word 'Doctor' at the end.
They didn't need help. He wanted to be the one to cause them pain. He loved that pain; he craved it. Instinctually, he turned his beatings to the nearest person to him. He clenched a fist and punched Audrey in the face. "Shut up, you ditzy cow!" he yelled as an addition. He could see her face turn red where he hit it, and it turned him on.
As Audrey's face stung, she backed away from her boyfriend. The box in the sky neared the small market, and in a flash, everything happened at once. The box hit Shmendrik's, a wave of energy rocked the ground, and in her daze, Audrey fell into the arms of another man.
Orin stumbled as the earthquake rumbled under his feet, but regained his balance quickly. "What was that?" he asked himself under his breath, starting to pace towards the disaster which had struck only moments earlier. Then, he stopped to bring his girlfriend along, and was panic-stricken when he saw Audrey in the arms of none other than Seymour Krelborne.
It was an accident that Seymour had caught Audrey in the first place. He was on his way to pick up a new kind of plant food for his new Audrey II, and had just happened to be outside by Orin and Audrey when the earthquake hit. Seymour didn't mind catching her; in fact, he had had a crush on her for years. But when he saw that she was with her sadist boyfriend, he knew to back off. Unfortunately, it was too late for Seymour to pull an innocent act, because as soon as Orin saw him, the kid was dead meat.
"You trying to steal my girl, Krelborne?" Orin asked, advancing on Seymour and pushing him away from Audrey. "There'll be worse than a root canal for you."
Seymour cringed away from the dangerous dentist, trying to stand up for himself but failing miserably. "N-no, Scrivello," he murmured, clutching the 5-dollar bill in his hand tightly. "Not stealing her, S-Scrivello."
"That's what I thought," Orin said, grabbing Audrey's arm and spitting on Seymour.
Audrey, trying to take a neutral position, pointed to the blue box which crashed just in front of Shmendrik's. "What do you think that is, honey? Let's go see." Even though she hated being with her so-called boyfriend, she would like it even less to see him and Seymour fight. So she dragged Orin to the market where the strange box had landed.
The box was weird, that was for sure. It had landed upright, and it looked like not a scratch was made on it. Smoke was billowing out of every crack, and it seemed like the thing was from a different place, a whole different world. Half the town had come just to see what it was, and maybe even what was inside.
"Honey?" Audrey asked Orin, who gave a big grin. "What do you think's in there?"
Orin adjusted his steel-toed boots and positioned himself in a fighting stance. "Well, why don't we find out?" With that, Orin kicked the doors to the box, which swung open with ease.
At first, all that could be seen was pillars of smoke. Some of the residents had to back up just to breathe, but not Orin. He had taken in much more harmful gases in his studies; this wasn't bad in comparison to some of the other things he breathed.
But then, as the smoke began to clear, the inside became visible, and it almost looked like it was bigger on the inside-
"Out! Out!" a voice called from inside, and three people ran out of the blue phone box. First, a man with short blond hair and blue eyes; next, a redhead wearing clothes that showed off her curves; and finally, a man with dark brown hair and a dark blue bowtie. As the three dashed out of the box, the one wearing the bowtie shut the doors, and the three turned around to see crowds of people staring at them.
"Um, Doctor?" the blond-haired one said to the bowtie-wearing one. "Why are there people on the seventh moon of Digiramus?" He had a British accent. Audrey had never heard one before, but liked the sound of it.
"Doctor?!" Orin jumped down into the crater to face the bowtie-wearing person. "I'm the only doctor around here. Orin Scrivello, DDS." He held out his hand, and as the man began to shake it, Orin pulled it behind him into a half-nelson. "What was that, some kind of magic trick or something?" he asked the man quietly.
The man with the bowtie stuttered for a minute, but then cleared his throat and began to clap. "Yes, you got us! That's for sure." He nodded to the other two strangers, who also began to clap. "I'm sorry if we frightened you. I'm... John Smith. This is Amy and Rory Pond. We're traveling magicians, and oh boy, did you get us!"
"Where you from?" a woman piped up from the back of the crowd. "Doesn't sound like you're from here."
John nodded towards the woman, and grinned, straightening his bowtie. "We're from Britain, in the London area." Then he looked at the different people who stood around them. "And obviously, you aren't. Where are we, exactly?"
"He doesn't know," a man murmured from somewhere in the group. Another asked how much time he spent at the bar. But Audrey had decided that she would help these people in any way she could. They were just confused and out of their realm. "You're in Skid Row," she said to them, motioning to the various shops which sat around the market. "You're downtown now."
"Skid Row... Skid Row..." John said to himself, and ran back into the blue box.
The other two strangers, Amy and Rory, seemed uncomfortable around all the new people. "So," the female one asked. "What's been going on lately here?"
"An eclipse, haven't you heard about it?" Audrey answered immediately, staring at the two of them. "There was a total eclipse of the sun just a couple of weeks ago." She wanted to mention the strange plant that Seymour had found, but she decided not to tell them, just in case the plant didn't turn out.
"A total eclipse of the sun, you say?" John shouted from inside the box. "Interesting."
The other man scratched his head, obviously at a loss for words. "Has anything else interesting happened?"
"Nothin' happens in Skid Row," Orin said, flipping his long, brown, fluoride-scented hair. "How dumb are you guys?"
The man, Rory, was about to respond when John burst out of the blue box and shouted, "America! We're in America, right? Northeast, somewhere around New Jersey, yep?"
Nobody answered him for what felt like a long time. "How're we supposed to know?" one man murmured. "That's uptown stuff."
"And, how far is it to uptown?" John asked, adjusting his bowtie once again. "Just wondering."
"More than half an hour," Audrey replied, trying to hide the smile on her face from helping these people. "I could help you find where you need to go. A nice hotel, a place to stay. It looks cramped inside that thing." She pointed to the box, and John beamed at her hospitality. Orin, however, did not, and was glaring angrily at her for trying to help these total strangers.
"Actually, that won't be nece-" Amy began to say before John cut her off. "That'd be great, thanks," he said, closing the doors to the box and locking them with a small silver key. "We'd love a place to stay. Uptown, then?"
"Sure," Audrey said, and began to help them out of the crater. Orin stood frozen, meanwhile, watching his girlfriend help three dentally-unhygenic strangers to a hotel uptown. He wouldn't dare to admit it, but he felt jealous that he was being left behind in the dust. Literally.
"You guys sure have strange clothes," Audrey said as the four of them walked up 10th Street. "Where'd you say you were from again?"
"London," Amy said, shrugging.
"England?" Audrey exclaimed, tugging at her dress. "So you flew here on an airplane?"
"Um..." Amy looked back towards the box, which people were now starting to examine. "Sort of."
"How is it to ride in an airplane? Are there really little bags of peanuts?"
"You mean you've never ridden in an airplane before?" Rory asked Audrey, who blushed.
"I've never been much of anywhere outside of Skid Row. I work at that little flower shop over there," she said, pointing to a florist's they were passing by. The sign in the window read 'Mushnik's Skid Row Florist', and sitting on the windowsill was the strangest of plants. Audrey herself had seen it before; she was the first one Seymour told about how he came to own it. It was quite a peculiar story, involving an old Chinese man and the big eclipse that was cast over everything. She didn't remember the whole story, just that the plant had become Seymour's and he was proud of it - if it would ever grow.
"What's that?" Rory asked, pointing at the little bud in a coffee grounds can.
"I-It's a plant," Audrey replied. "My coworker, Seymour, bought it a week ago. It's an Audrey II."
Rory shrugged it off, and retreated back to the other two. Amy placed her hand on her hip and blew a few strands of red hair out of her face. "I've never heard of one of those before."
"It's a new species or somethin'. Seymour couldn't find it in any of the books." Audrey cuddled her small leather purse as a chilled fall breeze whipped down the street. "We put it there to bring in customers, but you know..."
John, in the meantime, kept glancing back towards the mess at Shmendrik's. "Is there a way that we could sleep in a closer place? A hotel or something around here, by chance?" he asked. It didn't seem like he cared much about the plant, because he kept looking back to the commotion. Back and forth, back and forth.
"Well, there's Smitty's old place," she said, pointing to an old, rundown motel down the street. "Are you sure you don't want anything fancier, though? I've heard that street magicians make a lot of money."
"No, we'll do fine here. Thanks," John said, grabbing the arms of Amy and Rory and pulling them towards the motel. They were a funny group, the three of them. Odd, but funny. A break from the everyday.
And Audrey, standing in the middle of 10th Street in the dusk, decided that she liked them.
A/N
Well, will this get any views? That's the question of the day, I guess. Most Whovians aren't familiar with Little Shop of Horrors, and most fans of LSoH aren't Whovians. So keeping this current and popular will most definitely be hard. But you know what'll make it easier? Your support! Yes, you, reader who stares here on your computer or phone screen. Your favorites and follows will let me know that you guys care, so if someone in this small crossover could follow or favorite this story or me as an author, I promise to not feed you to Audrey II. Wait. Spoilers. Anyway, thanks in advance for the support, and I hope to see you in the next A/N!
-Cat