Box of Tricks
by AstroGirl
"Hello, what's this?"
As Vila approached it, the glint of blue he'd caught out of the corner of his eye resolved itself into some kind of large wooden box. It looked like real wood, too. Probably worth a lot of money. At least, it would be back on Earth. You could never tell about these backwater planets, though. Half of them seemed to think wood grew on trees. Which, all right, it did, technically, but that wasn't the point.
He stepped up to the object cautiously, half expecting it to explode or open up and disgorge some kind of hairy monster, but it just sat there. Vila glanced back over to where Blake and the others stood talking to the local rebels, but they were all deep in conversation, and none of them seemed to have noticed that he'd wandered off. Typical, really.
Maybe the box thing belonged to the rebels? Some kind of storage locker or something? It seemed awfully conspicuous out here, though, standing there all blue against the bare brown rock. Not for the first time, Vila wondered why they had to keep meeting people in these horrible, boring rock pits. Why not on a beach? Or maybe a nice, friendly pub?
Oh, well. He wasn't in any of those much more pleasant places, no matter how hard he might wish. He was here, and the strange box was here. Maybe it belonged to the rebels, or maybe it was Federation -- there were some confusing and rather disturbing signs on it, now that he looked more closely, involving words like "officers" and "police." Either way, there must be something interesting inside, right? Weapons, explosives, surveillance equipment... Maybe Blake's friendly local contacts over there were working with the Federation, and whatever was inside was part of some kind of elaborate trap! That sort of thing had happened before.
Well, there was one way to find out. Vila peered at the lock set into the wooden door. It gleamed invitingly back at him. Perfectly simple looking mechanism, by the look of it, not even electronically controlled. He'd have it open in a jiffy, and then he'd see what he could see. Visions of Blake praising him for foiling the locals' elaborate plan for betrayal danced in his head. He'd be a hero!
He was so lost in this pleasant little fantasy that it took him a second to notice that the door hadn't actually opened at his efforts. He frowned. All right, perhaps it was a bit trickier than it looked. He fished out a slightly more elaborate probe.
Six probes and several increasingly implausible fantasies later, the door finally opened. Which was interesting, because he hadn't actually been doing anything to it just then.
The face that suddenly appeared on the other side blinked at him in mild surprise and then flashed him a grin full of supernova-bright teeth. "Hello. Can I help you?"
Thank goodness it wasn't a hairy alien. At least, the man didn't look like an alien, and the only hair was a mop of curls on the top of his head. He didn't look Federation, either, not with those clothes... Not unless he was very, very high up, indeed, and could dress as eccentrically as he liked. In which case Vila was in very big trouble.
He belatedly realized that he was staring, and summoned up an ingratiating grin. "Er, hello."
"Hello." The stranger smiled again.
Vila suddenly realized he was still holding the lock-probe and shoved it ungracefully behind his back, hoping it hadn't been noticed. "Yes, well, I suppose I should be going. Sorry to bother you."
"So soon? What a pity. And we were getting along so well. I'm the Doctor, by the way."
"Oh, er, I'm V--" A wanted man with a big, fat price on your head, idiot, said a voice in the back of his mind. It sounded remarkably like Avon. "--very pleased to meet you." He took a half step back. He hadn't had very good experiences with doctors.
Unfortunately, in the course of this maneuver, Vila forgot all about keeping his hand behind his back. Out came the probe, and the stranger's eyes fixed on it instantly. Oh, hell. Well, perhaps he wouldn't recognize it for what it was. This was a highly specialized and sophisticated piece of equipment, after all, not the sort of thing you'd find lying about the local junk shop. Maybe he could claim it was something else? A toy? Nah, nobody'd believe that. Medical device? Something to clean your teeth with? No, better not. Judging by the set of choppers on this fellow, he was a real fan of dental hygiene. He'd probably want to borrow it.
"I say." The man flashed his toothy grin again, as if in answer to Vila's thoughts. "You were trying to break into my TARDIS!"
"What?" TARDIS? Was that some sort of fancy word for "large blue box?" A code name for some horrible secret government project? "No, no, not at all. I'm shocked at the very suggestion! I'm a--"
"How very enterprising!"
"--law-abiding citizen, me. I..." It suddenly penetrated his mind what the fellow had just said. He broke off, blinking. "What?"
"May I?" Not waiting for an answer, the "Doctor" plucked the probe from Vila's fingers, turning it this way and that, inspecting it with the appearance of careful interest. "Ah. A magno-powered variant-gauge twelve-circuit zed-interface lock probe, if I'm not mistaken. Very nice. Bit primitive, but gets the job done. Well, I say 'gets the job done.' I mean if one's not dealing with Gallifreyan technology of course."
Okay. Apparently he wasn't going to buy "it's a novelty shaver" as an explanation. Vila swallowed hard.
The man grinned a bit wider, which Vila wouldn't necessarily have thought physically possible, and slapped the probe back into his slightly-shaking hand. "Why were you attempting to break into my TARDIS?" The Doctor's voice has suddenly lost its brisk and cheery tone and slid down into a lower, strangely compelling register.
"I don't know," Vila replied without really thinking about it. "Thought there might be something interesting inside, I suppose."
"Really? Well, that's reasonable." The breeziness was back as if it had never gone. "And quite right, too. There is something interesting inside."
"Oh?" said Vila. He discreetly attempted to peer inside, but the Doctor's bulk blocked his view. He had the strange, disconcerting impression, though, of far too much space beyond.
The Doctor dug into the pocket of his large brown coat, fished out a paper packet of something, and popped one of the somethings into his mouth. "Me."
Vila laughed weakly at that. It seemed impolite not to. "Er... Can I ask why you're standing inside a large box in the middle of a quarry in the middle of nowhere? Or is it personal?"
The Doctor flashed his smile again. "Certainly you can ask. It's good to ask questions. Sign of an active mind." He held out the packet. "Jelly baby?"
Vila thought at first that this was meant to be the explanation, and his brow wrinkled up in puzzlement until he belatedly realized that it must refer to the food, or whatever it was. "Oh! Oh, right. Thanks." He took one tentatively and peered at it. It didn't look dangerous...
The Doctor made an encouraging hand-to-mouth gesture, and Vila raised the object to his lips... only to drop it suddenly with a start as a loud noise came roaring across the sky.
The vehicle swooping towards them was clearly Federation; if it hadn't been obvious from the markings, the fact that it started shooting almost instantly would have been a good enough hint. Vila let out a yelp as a rock exploded into the air not two meters from him, and another as a large hand grabbed his shirt and dragged him backward into the box. He was fairly sure he saw one of the local rebels fall as the door swung shut in front of his nose, and he caught the distinctive hum and flash of the teleport in the distance just as his view was cut off entirely.
Vila felt a surge of panic rising in his gut. If they'd all teleported away, why was he still here? Had Gan or Jenna or whoever was on teleport duty forgotten him? Was he stuck here, inside this incredibly conspicuous target, about to be blown to pieces? Had his bracelet malfunctioned? He pushed and poked and slapped at it, hoping desperately to get a response.
And then a tiny voice in the back of his brain quietly suggested that there was something even more important and disturbing than his lack of bracelet function, something he really ought to be paying attention to right now. He looked up. And up. And around...
The Doctor smiled at him from across the impossibly large space. The impossibly large, impossibly impossible space. "Yes, that's right," he said as Vila began to open his mouth. "It's bigger on the inside than the outside. Well done, very perceptive." Vila shut his mouth, then opened it again. "Yes," the Doctor said before he could get out a response. "It's alien technology. Well, alien to you, not to me. I'm alien, too, you see. To you, of course, not to myself. That would just be silly. And your communications device doesn't work -- I assume it's not working and that's why you're abusing it, rather than because you enjoy slapping machinery around? Good. It's not working because you're technically no longer in the same dimension as whatever it is you're trying to contact. It's all about dimensional transcendence, you see, very simple, and I don't know why people are always telling me I don't explain things properly. That was all perfectly clear, wasn't it?"
Vila wasn't at all sure he'd followed anything past the word "alien," but he nodded anyway, because it seemed to be what this fellow expected. Apparently he was either an actual alien, or crazy, or very possibly both, and either way Vila reckoned humoring him was probably a good idea.
The Doctor appeared to approve of this response. "Of course it was. Now, let's see..." He touched something on the control panel, or whatever it was, in the center of the room, and a viewscreen activated on one of the walls.
It showed the Federation flyer coming directly towards them. Vila flinched as it swung its weapons to bear, then let out a cry and squinched his eyes shut as the viewscreen flared up in a brilliant burst of blaster light. This is it, he thought. This is how it finally ends. After everything I've--Hang on. Shouldn't he be dead by now? He didn't feel dead. Or even injured, really. He sniffed the air carefully. No smoke. No screaming coming from the Doctor. The blasted wreckage of this TARDIS thing hadn't fallen down onto his head.
Tentatively, he opened one eye. Everything looked normal... Well, as normal as a bigger-on-the-inside alien whatsis housing a crazy man in a fourteen-foot scarf could possibly be expected to look, anyway. On the viewscreen, the flyer was receding into the distance.
Vila opened his other eye and patted himself down, just to make completely sure he was in one piece. "Nice force wall," he said weakly. "You'll have to give us the recipe."
"Yes," the Doctor replied, but his voice was distant and low, and Vila wasn't entirely sure the man had even really heard him. He was staring at the viewscreen, his mobile face gone all quiet and grim. The screen zoomed in a little -- too close, for Vila's tastes -- on the charred corpses of the men and women Blake had been talking to only a few moments ago. Vila swallowed and looked away. Probably he was in the wrong line of business these days, because he didn't think he'd ever be able to look at a dead body without feeling sick, not if he lived another hundred years. Which he probably wouldn't, and that was the sort of thing looking at dead bodies made him think about, which was another very good reason not to want to look.
Right. Time to think about something else instead. He stared down at the strange control console in the center of the room, which immediately provided an excellent and welcome distraction. Buttons, levers, switches, dials, readouts, lights... none of it made any sense to him, and none of it was labeled in any comprehensible way, but it was all very interesting and shiny. He trailed a finger across it, wondering what would happen if he pushed this button or that one.
"Well," said the Doctor. He sounded cheery again; apparently the dead bodies hadn't bothered him for long. "All right. Let's see if I can guess. The chaps who were firing at us... Representatives of an evil galactic empire? Tools of a totalitarian regime? Kill, conquer, oppress, that sort of thing? Am I right? Of course I'm right. Do you know how I know? The 'good guys' almost never go for black ships. Why is that, do you suppose?" Vila looked up, his attention momentarily diverted from the strange, shiny appeal of the control panel, and opened his mouth to answer It seemed to be a rhetorical question, though, as the Doctor kept right on talking. "Well, that and the shoot-first-ask-questions-later attitude. That's generally a clue."
Vila closed his mouth and nodded. He wondered if this was what people meant when they complained that he tended to babble. It was odd being on the other side of it.
"Which makes you the plucky rebels, hmm? Fighting for freedom, that sort of thing?"
It looked like it might actually be Vila's turn to talk now. Unfortunately, he'd suddenly realized that he had absolutely no idea what to say to this... person. "Er, yes, I suppose."
The Doctor rubbed his hands together and flashed that ridiculously wide grin once again. "Wonderful! And it's a lucky for you that I'm here. I don't like to brag, but I do have quite a lot of experience at this sort of thing. I'm sure we'll have it all sorted out in no time!" He gave Vila a hearty slap on the back.
The combination of the unexpected impact of the Doctor's hand between his shoulders and the even more unexpected content of his words startled Vila so much that his entire body gave a twitch, and he felt himself starting to lose his balance. Instinctively, his hand pressed down hard onto the control panel as he steadied himself. Buttons and levers yielded beneath his hand, and the transparent contraption in the center of the hexagonal console slowly began to move. A rather distressing grinding noise filled the air.
The grin on the Doctor's face rapidly transmuted into an expression of shock. "What did you do? What did you do?"
Panic rose in Vila's throat. What had he done? He'd activated... what? Was it a defense system? A weapons system? Was this TARDIS thing a ship? Was it a bomb? "I didn't do anything! I didn't do anything! I'll fix it! Look, look! It's all right!" Frantically, he stabbed at the controls he'd accidentally pushed. Or were those the same controls? Had it been these ones? "Is there an off switch? There's always an off switch!" Vila was wailing now, but he couldn't make himself stop. "What did I do?"
The Doctor groaned and shoved him roughly aside. Vila glanced up at the viewsceen. It didn't show the surface of the planet any more. It didn't show anything.
He felt a little faint.
The Doctor muttered and mumbled and pressed and thunked at things in a fashion that, frankly, looked more random than Vila's own attempt.
"Is it all right?" he asked, his voice weak and hopeful.
"No! It is not all right! You've dematerialized us, and you've managed to erase the coordinates."
"Oh. That doesn't sound good." Vila patted himself surreptitiously. He didn't feel like he'd been dematerialized. Maybe you couldn't tell?
The Doctor sighed and ran a hand through the tangled curls of his hair. "Well, so much for spearheading your galactic revolution. We'll be lucky if we ever find our way back there."
Vila considered this for a moment. So, they were on a ship? And they'd just left the planet? "Er, where are we going, exactly?"
"Oh, there's no telling. Anywhere. Everywhere!"
"Anywhere? You mean... what, anywhere? Places outside the Federation, even?" Places where he didn't have a price on his head and people weren't trying to shoot him? That didn't sound too bad at all.
"Mmm. Anywhere in time and space. Absolutely anywhere!"
"And you say we can't go back?" A slow smile spread over Vila's face. Not his fault for abandoning Blake and the others, then. Couldn't be helped, could it? It didn't make you a coward or a bad friend if you left because you'd been kidnapped by an alien. Well... effectively kidnapped. The Doctor had forcibly pulled him in here, anyway.
"No." The Doctor was looking at him speculatively. Vila gave him a charming smile and tried hard to look like the sort of person you'd want as traveling companion. "Hmm. Well, since you're here... I don't suppose you can make tea?"
Tea? Vila blinked. All right. He could play tea lady to a space-and-time-traveling nutter... No, wait, better think of him as "eccentric." That sounded less dangerous and more fun. Right. He'd just stay here with this nu-- er, eccentric, in his nice impregnable box, very far away from the people who'd been trying to kill him for the last year. It didn't look like a bad place, really, and if he ever got bored he could always pop out and see if they'd landed near something worth stealing, or somewhere with a nice, quiet pub. Right?
"Mate," he said, in what he was rather proud to note was a smooth and confident voice. "I can make you the best cup of tea you ever tasted. Special Restal secret formula!" Actually, he had several special secret formulas for tea-making, most of which involved alcohol in one fashion or another. "Just leave it to me!"
The Doctor nodded. "Well, then. Welcome aboard."
Vila took his outstretched hand and smiled. This wasn't exactly what he'd planned to do with his life, but what the hell. It had to be safer than hanging around with Blake.