"Another distress signal?" Rose asked, a little apprehensively. She still had nightmares of the last distress signal they had answered, 50 storeys and more below the Utah salt flats.
"Nope." The Doctor was twirling dials and pressing buttons with frenetic speed, all the while keeping his eyes on the flat screen set just above the console.
"Then what is it?"
"It's two separate distress signals!" Jack jumped in, enthusiastically working away on his third of the console. Rose was currently sprawled over her third, trying to hold down two stubborn levers on opposite sides of her.
"Two signals, but highly similar," the Doctor continued, now peering intensely at the screen, "Same language, but thousands of years and millions of miles apart. But you know what's really interesting? What's really really interesting?"
"What?" Rose asked, slightly exasperated. There were a half dozen knobs and buttons pressing into her torso, and she was sure her waist was going to cramp soon if she didn't get up, "Can I let go of the levers now?"
"What?" the Doctor distractedly glanced her way for a split second, "Yeah, you didn't have to hold on to them all this time. A second would have been all right."
"Well, thanks for telling me!"
Ignoring Rose's glare, he pointed to the two patterns repeating themselves on his screen.
"What's interesting is that one of them is addressed to me!" he said gleefully.
"So…it's from someone you know?" Jack said, looking over the screen as well, "Or it's a trap?"
"No idea!" was the reply, "Let's go find out!"
The TARDIS landed with a great jolt that sent them sprawling into one another, laughing. Their mode of travel was at once so absurd and so - well, no other word would suffice, would it? - fantastic, they couldn't help but laugh each time the TARDIS landed somewhere and sent them into an untidy mess.
"So where are we now? And when's now?" Rose asked, dusting herself off as she stood up.
"An uninhabited planet orbiting some obscure star in a really deserted part of the Milky Way galaxy," the Doctor said.
"In other words, you don't know," Rose quipped, her eyes batting eloquently, causing Jack to go into a coughing fit as he tried to hide a snigger.
"Nobody's ever come here, who'd name this forsaken piece of rock?" The Doctor burst out, "People have better things to do than go around naming planets that nobody ever lives on, you know."
"But somebody must be here, or else the signal wouldn't exist, right?" Jack cut in.
The Doctor gave a gangly shrug.
"That's what we're here to find out."
0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o
The atmosphere was safe enough, though a little too thin for Jack and Rose. There was barely life here, in the form of red grass that grew over every inch of land on the planet. There didn't seem to be any other life form, except a variant of the grass that grew underwater.
A red sun hung over a blue-purple sky, and an everpresent wind made the blood-red grass sway rhythmically on the numerous hills.
As the two humans were equipping themselves with small canisters of oxygen to augment their breathing, the Doctor looked at his console again, and frowned.
"Bad news?" Jack asked. The screen showed the terrain around them; the TARDIS had landed on a shallow dip among the hills. The red grass was tall here, reaching over a metre in height, all around.
"Maybe." The Doctor switched to another display, where a beeping dot was shifting rapidly towards the centre of the screen, "The source of the signal is getting closer. And moving much faster than a humanoid can run."
"That doesn't sound very…distressed," Rose said slowly, "So is the source a humanoid?"
"Yes, but the TARDIS won't tell me what kind."
"Let's go meet the neighbours then," Jack half-joked, surreptitiously patting the small blaster he had strapped to the inside of his vest. He knew the Doctor abhorred using guns, but sometimes there was just one way to communicate.
They opened the doors and stepped outside. Rose breathed in, and found the air to be clear and cold - and very sparse. She was glad she had her breathing tube hooked about her ear like a mobile phone's hands-free set; the end of the tube was metal and curved towards her mouth like the kit's microphone would.
The three looked around the waving sea of grass, looking for a humanoid that could move incredibly fast. Jack spotted it first and he tensed, hand ready to reach for his gun.
The figure appeared on the crest of the hill immediately before them, framed against the violently coloured sky. The light of the red sun shone around her - and through her, diffracting through the contours of her body, shimmering through the many strands of her hair, which wavered in the wind like the grass.
She seemed to be made entirely of glass, and glided as if she were on wheels. Rose, remembering the last Dalek and its distress signal, shuddered.
"Cold?" the Doctor immediately asked. Even when he seemed entirely distracted, Rose knew - hell, the whole world seemed to know - that his attention was always on her. He always seemed to have half an eye at least on her.
Rose shook her head.
"Just remembering somethin'" she murmured.
The figure came to dead stop about ten feet away from them. She seemed to be human in form, albeit one made of glass, down to the fluttering edges of her gown, that seemed to be a cross between a dressing gown and a kimono.
"Doctor?" the figure spoke in a ringing, echoing voice, entirely unaccented and uninflected.
0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o
AN: More to come...hopefully.