A shameless recycling of the key plot element to 'Human Nature', but literally everything else is new.
This story follows the events of "The Race For Time", but works on its own.
- Features in minor roles: Benton, a time echo of Clara Oswald, the Brigadier and the Peter Pratt Master.
==== ==== EPISODE 1 ==== ====
{In which Sarah discovers what it's like to lose the Doctor...}
Clack. Whooosh.
Clack. Whooosh.
It was the sound of not one, but two people on roller skates nearing the TARDIS' second console room. They would enter very soon from the inner corridor, a place with bleached white walls and strange round circles in them. Almost all of the rooms and hallways inside of the space craft, had a clean, futuristic design, but the second console room was one of the few exceptions. Its wooden panelling, the inner railing around the hexagonal console, and even the console itself showed no resemblance to any highly advanced piece of technology as humans could imagine them. Stained glass roundels as well as the ornaments in the wooden furniture were more likely to remind the occasional visitor of the Edwardian age in Earth's old England.
"...And then, here we have it!" The cheery sounding voice of a man echoed down the corridor and into the room, followed only shortly by the man himself. From the corridor rolled in a lanky, grinning fellow wearing a dark red frock coat on top of a white shirt and a plaid waistcoat. His unusual fashion sense described the man's personality without the use of words. He was timeless, yet eccentric. Silly, yet fun-loving. Ingenious, yet mad.
Trailing after him, other than the ends of his impractical long wool scarf, was a young woman in a jumper adorned by a red neckerchief, and combined with a loose cut pair of trousers. Her name was Sarah-Jane Smith and unlike her extraordinary Gallifreyan friend, she came from Earth – the mid 1970's to be precise. Admittedly, she had not stood on a pair of roller skates for a very long time. Rolling along with little control over her direction, she had almost missed the entrance to the console room had she not gotten a hold of the door frame in the last second.
The Doctor, as usual, was much better at it – just as he was at almost everything he tried his hand at. He swirled around as he made his entrance and exclaimed: "The second console room!" On his face was a grin so wide you might be led to believe he had just discovered the room for the first time in his very long life. But Sarah knew him good enough to understand that he was just joking.
"Yes, I know that one already.", she told him and pushed herself away from the door frame to roll towards the railing which surrounded the hexagonal console in the centre. "Come on now, there are plenty of other places in the TARDIS to show me, aren't there?"
"Well, yes. Of course there are.", the Doctor admitted and stepped forward, past the railing towards the console, although swaying slightly with the set of wheels under his feet. "Just hold on a minute, I will quickly set the coordinates for our next destination before I forget about it again, and then we may continue your guided tour." After he gestured for Sarah not to wander off without him, he pulled down a cover on the furniture piece which housed the controls and pressed a few buttons. "The Louvre, you said? I know a great place where we can park the TARDIS nearby! There's a little modern art gallery just a few streets off the Champ Élysées. I'll land us next to a Piet Mondrian and everyone will think we're part of the exhibition. Ha ha!"
"Modern art?" The young woman crossed her arms and leaned over the railing to watch him work. Her feet kept sliding thanks to the roller skates and she had to correct her posture several time to keep herself from clumsily dropping to the floor. As she spoke, she could barely keep herself from laughing. "You can hardly call a 1950's police box modernart, can you?" Back in Britain, the TARDIS' outer shape was neither modern nor art at the point in time she was from.
With a smug smile the Doctor turned to face her. "Did you know that Red, Blue and Yellow was painted in the 1920's? I dare say that we will look quite futuristic in comparison, then."
There was no arguing with his extensive knowledge or logical deduction, especially not if they were just joking in the first place. Sarah rolled her eyes thinking 'That Doctor!' and pushed herself back from the railing – though without letting go, so she would not roll throughout the room uncontrollably again.
Tidy as he was – or sometimes, anyway – the Doctor closed the cover of the controls again before turning around. "I set a delay, so we have plenty of time to look around the TARDIS still.", he casually mentioned and nodded into the direction of the TARDIS' inner corridor. "Come on-!"
Just barely had he been able to finish speaking, when the time machine was suddenly shaken violently by the impact of an unknown force. Since both of them were still standing on roller skates, Sarah slipped immediately, without any prior warning and she would have fallen to the floor had she not been holding onto the inner railing of the room already. It was just in the second she thought that for once she was safe from being thrown about the ship when she looked up and saw the Doctor falling towards her. Unlike her, he had missed the railing and instead reached now for his companion to steady himself on, but the force of impact as well as his weight were too much for Sarah to catch. Not only did he knock her down to the wooden floor, but ended up sprawled crosswise over her, too.
"Ow! Doctor!", she called out as the first moment of surprise had passed. "If you need me to catch you should lose some weight on the next regeneration!" There was no harm done, but she was compelled to complain just for the sake of it. His tall figure had her buried underneath with little hope of freeing herself, although she was trying to push herself up onto her elbows.
It did not require another order for the Doctor to quickly scramble back up to his hands and knees. "Sorry, Sarah. Are you all right?", he apologized rather briefly before looking around the room for a clue to what had just happened to them. Neither her cheeky remark nor her state of health really interested him, but the cause of the crash. Almost instantly, a frown of worry appeared on his face.
"Yes, I am, thank you. But what was THAT?", Sarah demanded to know.
She finally managed to sit up, but at the same time, she could feel distinctly a series of smaller shocks running through the TARDIS. It was as if the machine herself was shivering. With eyes full of frightened concern she looked up to the room's ceiling. A noise just began to ring out which sounded like the big bell of a church tower.
In that moment, the Doctor halted his rushed attempts of freeing his feet from the roller skates and looked up as well. But his face showed more than plain worry now; His wide eyes and a gasp suggested a deeper kind of fright that had taken a hold of him. "The cloister bell!", he exclaimed breathless, almost as if he had not wanted to speak it out loud. With just one foot free of the wheels which had brought about his fall, he unsteadily pulled himself back up by the railing and swayed over to the console.
Sarah frowned, but there was also confusion mixing back into her expression. "A cloister bell? What good is a cloister bell inside a time machine?" Unlike the Doctor, she allowed herself the proper amount of time needed to untie the laces of her roller skates. She was not keen on stumbling or falling again, especially so if they were heading into a dangerous situation.
"The cloister bell is the worst kind of alarm that can ring inside a TARDIS.", she heard him explain gravely. "It means that either the TARDIS itself, we, or the universe are in great danger! It means impending doom!" All the cheerfulness was now gone from his voice, wiped wholly by the meaning of the alarm, and replaced with great seriousness and a mild panic underneath.
When Sarah finally got back up on her feet and joined the Doctor, he had opened up all the wooden covers of the TARDIS' control stand. Another shock ran through the ship that felt to Sarah too much as if the machine was convulsing under the force of some mechanical illness.
"I don't know how yet, but something has hit her right at the centre. The link to the Eye of Harmony is failing." uttered the Doctor out of gritted teeth. He was holding onto the console tightly and after the next shock, which turned out slightly more violent, Sarah wrapped her arms back around the railing in hopes not to be thrown off her feet again. With her limited understanding of this technology, she had no idea what he was talking about, but knowing very well that the TARDIS had proven to be practically impenetrable so far, things looked pretty serious.
"Come on, old girl! Hold on for me, just a little while longer!", the Doctor ordered.
Almost out of instinct, Sarah replied: "I AM holding on!"
"I wasn't talking to you, Sarah!" He harshly corrected her and went around the console to man another set of controls. "This won't do, I will have to drop us out of the time vortex now. We can only hope that we end up some place where the environment is not too hostile…!" With a flick of a switch, the TARDIS' wheezing and whooshing sounds filled the empty corridors and rooms inside.
"Or some time.", Sarah added quietly for herself and secretly hoped for anything but a snow-capped planet inhabited by cannibals and deadly wildlife.
The TARDIS had not finished her process of landing yet, when the lights in the ceiling began to flicker. There was a rumbling sound as the time machine touched down and as Sarah turned her head to look at him, the Doctor was flicking another switch to dim the lights in the space craft.
She looked around the room with wide eyes, frightened by the change of atmosphere. "Doctor…?" This time she did not even formulate the whole of her question. He just had to know that she was confused about what was going on and needed to know how bad things really were. Once an absolute minimum of light was left inside of the TARDIS, the last ringing of the cloister bell finally faded away.
"I've shut down most of the systems to preserve power until I can locate and fix the damage. We might just be able to make another jump, but it won't be far and it won't be stable, so I would prefer not try our luck if it is not really necessary." explained the Doctor and limped, with one roller skate still on a foot, over to the staircase leading outside. Annoyed by his inability to move faster, he forcefully pulled the shoe off. In the balancing act of removing it, he almost fell again, but caught himself just in time to make it safely to the door.
"Let's see how far we made it then, shall we?", he called out to Sarah, who followed him immediately. Presumably because he did not want to get his socks dirty, the Doctor took a hold on the door frame and leaned outside as far as he could.
Beyond the TARDIS' doors laid dark green meadows, which stretched towards the horizon underneath an overcast, greyish sky. Cool air was swept into the time machine by a breeze that smelled like salt and felt humid to the skin. The cry of seagulls was heard from overhead. Eventually, Sarah pushed herself into the space between the Doctor and the open door of the police box to get a better look at their new surroundings. In the distance, the meadows stopped short of a steep cliff, revealing a dark blue and greenish sea beyond.
The dismal look of the landscape was almost too familiar.
The Doctor held a finger into the breeze to measure the direction the wind was coming from, then licked it afterwards – opposed to doing it the other way around. If there was anything to taste, then it was probably the salt. "Aha. The coast of Cornwall!", he declared with a light smile and a quick shrug. "It's not the Louvre and it's not UNIT either, but given the circumstances, this is just as good!"
At the same time, his companion just sighed in relief. Good, old Britain at last! She took in some more of that seaside air while she was peeking out, but the Doctor already headed back to the console.
"Still, we shan't be long.", he announced and rubbed his hands clean in the wool of his scarf. "We will be sitting ducks here as long as the TARDIS' defences remain lowered."
Their worries just never ended, did they? Reluctantly, Sarah followed him back inside. "I always thought the TARDIS was impenetrable.", she told her friend and joined him back at the console. "How could something like that happen? It's not a late gift from our adversary on Skania, is it?"
"It's funny that you mention it." The Doctor turned back to face her, but he could not keep looking at her for long until his eyes began to wander just like his thoughts. "A focused beam of light through Etabonite is one of the few things known to be capable of bypassing TARDIS' outer defences and damaging the conducting paths directly. But to use it for this purpose would be entirely pointless. It takes another time machine to follow us into the vortex, and even then, it's a much more efficient weapon when used with Abraxian energy compression. The amount of Etabonite available on Skania would have sufficed for a single shot at most…"
"A single shot was all that was needed."