"Weeeeeell, it looks as if the temporal flux capacitor is misfiring on three circuits, but that's no matter. I can circumvent the malfunction by diverting energy to the binomial vortex converter and... and... Blimey! I'm talking to myself again, aren't I?" The tall man in the brown pinstripe suit banged the central control keyboard with his fist and the ship's engines whined a bit in protest.
The Doctor looked up from his control panel and gazed mournfully around the empty Tardis. All around him the walls gleamed warmly yellow, as if the sentient spaceship was trying to give him what meager company she could by dressing up for him a bit, but there were no sounds at all except the twittering of machinery and his own voice.
This was the way it was for him now. Always.
The soul-crushing events on Mars had made the Doctor even more leery of companionship than he had been before. The last person he tried to befriend - Adelaide Brooke - repaid him for his rescue by shooting herself, and now the Doctor was terrified of any conversation that lasted more than an hour. What was he becoming? A monster? The Master? Or something even worse? He seemed to cause death and destruction anywhere he went, no matter how hard he tried to help... and lately it just seemed as if there was no place he could go that did not result in doom for somebody else. He flitted from planet to planet and galaxy to galaxy chatting genially with strangers and visiting some of the most phenomenal sights in the universe, but it just seemed a bit... hollow now.
What did he say to Rose once? "There's a lot of things you need to get across this universe. Warp drive… wormhole refractors… You know the thing you need most of all? You need a hand to hold." He didn't have that any more, and never would again. He simply couldn't risk it.
He sighed heavily and slogged morosely toward the living chambers, where he still preserved the rooms his companions had used while they still traveled with him. He slipped quietly into a pink and yellow chamber, which still smelled faintly of Keira roses and earl gray tea. The table by her bedside held a hologram - his little tiny Rose, perfectly preserved forever. He lay down on her bed, gazed longingly at the hologram, and just... sniffed. Deeply. Ahhh... roses. Ah. Rose.
Blimey! Self-pitying nonsense this was! He was doing it nearly every day now! He sent her away to be happy, it was the right thing to do, she was better off and he knew it. And even if it was a mistake, there was no fixing it now, so lying around mooning at her memory wasn't going to help anything. It wouldn't bring her back, it wouldn't fill the holes in his hearts, and it wouldn't stop the prophecy that lingered always in the back of his terrified mind.
He will knock four times.
Maybe that's why the Doctor never wanted to spend much time around other people. He was afraid they'd start knocking.
Bah! Time to pull himself out of this funk. There was a whole, fantastic universe out there, filled with untold wonders, the whole of space and time at his fingertips, and he was lying here pining for hours over the image of one human woman. He needed... he needed... what? He needed a new adventure, perhaps. Some new mystery to solve, maybe some new people to save. A little bit of his patented, Time Lord heroics and he'd be right as rain.
Or he'd accidentally kill somebody else while indulging in his fantasies of being a hero rather than a power-mad, genocidal monster.
Davros called him the destroyer of worlds. The accusation broke him, because it was accurate. How many people had died because of him during his travels? How many innocent lives had been snuffed out as collateral damage while he whisked around, pretending to save the universe? How many companions had he lost? Had he finally lost count?
He breathed in deeply. A faint smell of roses and earl gray tea. She was happy. Surely she was happy. And somewhere, in that parallel universe, part of him was happy, too. The psychic connection lingered. He could tell that much. The metacrisis Doctor was living the dream he held in his deepest hearts. He could faintly sense mornings filled with the domestic clatter of family, afternoons filled with the excitement of scientific discoveries and new adventures in the explorations of Torchwood, and evenings filled with... Rose. Embraces, confidences. And then... ah! No! It wasn't his right to look any further. Those sensual, private moments did not belong to him. That was the one adventure he could never have. But... part of him was having it.
He was both comforted by this and bitterly envious.
Well, at least not everything he had ever done turned to ash. There were two people out there somewhere who had benefited from something he'd done. It was time to find somebody else who would as well. Surely there was an adventure out there that he wouldn't screw up.
He dashed back through the deserted hallways, back into the control center of the Tardis, and tugged vigorously at random levers while banging whatever button happened to be handy. He was going to go somewhere. Anywhere. It didn't matter where. He'd just set some blind coordinates and see where they took him, in all of time and space, as long as it was away from the burning memories of his overwhelming shame and the people and places forever closed off to him.
The Tardis lurched, howled and whizzed off in the new, accidental direction. As he closed in on the new destination, he felt a voice whisper in his head. A sweet voice, soft and calm and very soothing. It slithered into his brain, uninvited, and filled his synapses with tranquilizing sensations: a favorite meal, a warm, soft bed, a lover's embrace, an invitation to... sedation and oblivion.
"Welcome, traveler. Welcome to my domain. If you are lonely, find comfort, if you are weary, find rest. If you are heartsick, find your solace in my world. I offer you Elusia."
The Doctor reared back in apprehension and barely controlled rage as he fought the hypnotic spell of the voice. "Who are you?" he found himself shouting aloud to the gleaming walls. "Why are you inside my head? How are you doing this?"
"I am your final destination, lonely traveler. Come to Elusia, and you will never need to roam the stars again."
It was a trick. Something was trying to invade his tortured mind and lull him into a trap. He glanced at the monitor displaying Elusia and read the bio-geographic profile. No air. No water. Beneath the layer of ooze lay a core of fissured obsidian. He couldn't possibly survive there for any length of time.
"I'm not liking the sound of that "final destination" business. Sounds a bit... final. Don't start knocking!" Furiously, he punched some new coordinates into the mainframe and the Tardis began to veer away from the black planet that now loomed on his approach screen like a prison opening its gates to lock him away.
"I wish you no harm, traveler. I can tell that you are lonely. I will give you comfort. It is clear that you are weary. I will give you rest. I know that you are heartsick..."
"I am FINE! I'm always fine! And I'm out of here. BYE!" With a few more lightning commands from his hands (and at least one from his left foot) The Tardis swooped into warp drive, headed directly for
another planet about a parsec away from the dominion of that mysterious voice and out of the range of its insidious spell.
The globe now on his approach screen was a mark three earth-like planet that appeared to have normal atmosphere and plenty of solid ground. It was also clearly populated. Well, this seemed as good a place as any to stop. Maybe he could touch down and find out more about this mysterious Elusia place, investigate what was going on, and determine why it tried to lure unsuspecting travelers to their... final destination.
The Tardis landed.
He grabbed his coat and ventured out to examine his new surroundings. Around the gently sloping countryside he could see a smattering of cottages and villas... (Looks like 18th century Europe, with perhaps some economic and socio-architectural influences from Zarkofica - 9...) and near the middle of the village square, there was what appeared to be a tavern. Maybe he could stop for a drink, chat a bit with the bartender. Bartenders always liked to chat. It was almost part of the job description - a universal truth, from galaxy to galaxy.
Inside the darkened tavern walls he saw a number of humanoids from many different worlds huddled over their libations, playing human chess, Balhoonian blackjack and Dravidian darts in various corners of the room. Eh, he'd always been a bit rubbish at Dravidian darts. Those sentient little missiles didn't seem to like him and refused to obey his commands. Still, he might just give it a go. Just for the hell of it.
As he approached the gaggle of people gathered around the dart board, he heard a heated conversation between two worried-looking Flerians.
"I'm telling you, she's sucked in another one! My mate, Raldif... she got him. Nothing left but bones, there was."
"Hold on a second" said the Doctor. "Who got him? Who got who?"
"That... THING out there on that black planet! She got my friend! Raldif! Lured him in, chewed him up, spit him out and his spaceship with him. We found his bones... awful, it was."
"You're hysterical, Rodidus. There's nothing on that planet except for a great blob of ooze. I've passed it dozens of times during my merchant routes and it never called to me," replied the other Flerian as he sipped his drink.
"Yeah, well, maybe she just didn't want you."
"SHE doesn't exist. I'm telling you, there's nothing on that planet that can sustain any kind of life at all. There's nobody there to entrap ANYONE."
"I wouldn't be so sure of that," said the Doctor. "There's a pretty broad spectrum of things that can be called 'life', after all, and they don't always look like what we'd expect. I'm the Doctor, by the way",
he added, holding out his hand.
The Flerians ignored the gesture.
"Now, why would SHE want somebody like poor old Raldif and not me?" grumbled the second Flerian. "Look, merchant vessels pass safely through that quadrant all the time. Nobody bothers them, nobody speaks to them, nobody sucks them in and spits them out like you say. Hell, the Chancellor of Dividium once ordered a science vessel to draw near for observations. They stayed there nearly two years, trying to confirm all these allegations of weird voices, and neither of the scientists on board ever saw or heard anything."
"Who were those two scientists?" asked the Doctor.
"Calidriuo and Melacepia. Husband and wife team. Lovely couple, they are, and top-notch at their jobs. Calidriuo's a really impressive guy - courageous, inventive, charismatic, and absolutely brilliant.
Wouldn't a seductive space monster call to HIM if she wanted to prey on men in space? If Calidriuo says he never heard a voice, I'm thinking there's no voice there to hear," insisted the second Flerian.
"Yeah, well maybe she kept silent because he had his wife with him. Didn't want the competition." suggested the Doctor with a hint of amusement.
"Heh. There's that. Melacepia's a force to be reckoned with herself - if somebody ensnared Calidriou she'd probably set the interplanatary terraform module to reconfigure the planet's atmosphere, dissapate the ooze and drag him out of there to safety with her bare tentacles. Heh. Fabulous woman. He's a lucky, lucky man."
"You say it was a husband and wife team?" asked the Doctor. "Not a solitary scientist, traveling in isolation, on his own?"
The second Flerian shrugged. "I travel on my own through that quadrant. It's never bothered me."
The Doctor pondered for a moment. "What's your name?"
"I'm Marvis."
"You happy with your lot, Marvis?"
The Flerian stopped to ponder this a bit. He smiled. "Yeah. Got a lovely hive of mates waiting for me back at home. Business is going well. We'll be broadening our commerce routes to the third trisect next quarter, and I just got tapped to manage the new routes - about four of which pass right by that innocent little ball of ooze that supposedly kidnaps people."
"And you want to protect those routes..."
"Well, yeah. If we have to divert the commerce routes to avoid the so-called psychic manipulation field of a dead ball of ooze, we'll lose thousands of ducatiums a year due to extra fuel costs and extended travel time. Look, my hive has almost 50 people in it. It's a big, big family. I gotta feed them all!"
"You've got a lot of people relying on you..."
"And I'm telling you, Doctor, there's somebody... or something out there!" implored Rodidus. "She's feasting on people who stray too near. When we found Raldif, his whole vessel was covered with rust and rot, as if it had lain to fallow for a hundred years. And his corpse... it was bent and hunched over, like the remains of an old, old man."
The Doctor considered this for a second. "This friend of yours... Raldif. Did he have a hive?"
Rodidus shook his head sadly. "He did... once. But... ah. Poor bloke. He was just starting out, you see. Just got his second mate, was beginning to lay the gridwork for the incubation cells when the earthquake hit...killed his mates, ruptured the grid, and he wasn't even there to help. He was on a trade mission at the time. When he got back to the home planet, his whole family was gone. His mothers, his children - everybody. We all tried to help him recover - I even offered to let him live in my hive for awhile, but he was just inconsolable. He got into his ship, headed out to do his normal trade runs... and never came back."
"He went out there by himself?"
"Yeah."
The Doctor thought a minute longer. "So... has this ever happened to anybody else?"
"Yes" said a gravelly voice behind them. It came from a tall humanoid with blue, scaly skin . "Yes, Doctor, this has happened to other people as well. Vilabrio from Quantum Four, Aliqusis from Kaata Floko... Kanor El from Morok. All of them traveling alone. That thing, whatever it is, doesn't speak to people who travel with a crew and it doesn't seem to be interested in anybody who self-identifies as female. Or anybody who appears to be particularly happy. Just sad, lonely men... out there by themselves."
"Who are you?"
"I'm Ilrusik, deputy security officer on Beablux - 4. We've been monitoring that "innocent" little blob of ooze ever since Captain Irodin disappeared into its orbit two months ago, trying to figure out what caused him to just... vanish like that. And we just found his ship. It just... reappeared in the orbit of Beablux last week, all torn up and aged like it had been left in pouring acid rain for decades. Inside, we
found the body of a very, very old man."
"See? See!" shrieked Rodidus. "I'm tellin' ya, Doctor, that blob kidnaps people! Feasts on them and then spits them back out, throwing the corpses back to their homeland for burial and laughing at us all!"
"Deputy Ilrusik, can you take me to that ship?" asked the Doctor. "I'd like to see what's inside."
End Chapter One
