He began talking rapid-fire, like he did a lot, while his hands flitted around the cryptic controls of the TARDIS. Screetching surrounded the area- he still wasn't taking River Song's lead on the brakes. But that was no never-mind to anyone, you couldn't wear your brakes out on the pavement of a time vortex.
"You remember all those frozen Daleks and other races in the museam, turned into stone because they'd been erased from time and space but then they were still there?" he said, never looking up at Amy nor Rory, "It's called Time-matter. Solid time- physically manefested time. It creates itself when huge chunks of existance go poof."
Rory scoffed, feeling enabled by the limited research he did before he'd gotten jaunted away the day before his wedding. He liked to try and show he had that knowledge as much as he could after he'd taken the Doctor aback with his lack of 'bigger on the inside' noncery. It gave him a significant- nay, necessary- sense of ability in the face of this mad wonderman. It kept him from feeling inferior in his beaus eyes, as long as he could catch the Doctor off-guard once a day. "Time...-matter? I'm not a scientistwhatsit or a timelordupit, but I had gotten the impression there was time, and there was space," he asserted firmly.
"Like an X-Y-Z graph with an extra axis." Amy chimed in, trying to simplify it for herself more than anything and seek confirmation she wasn't totally off-base. She was completely void of all inferiority complexes in front of these men. She was a woman, women have other assets besides knowledgeablity.
"Well, yes and no. You obviously can't fit an extra axis into a graph like that because it's... impossible. Time is just sort of all over, hence wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey." His hands wove his fingers all over in indecipherable patterns in the air, until it saw Amy's unimpressed look at his explanation, and he decided his hands were better off swiveling a knob (secretly it had no function he knew of, but the more thingies he touched the more impressive his handling of his ship seemed... he was a man with a need to impress, too) as he hastily continued, "But anyway, Time-matter. It creates itself when huge chunks of existance go poof. And we made a LOT of existance go poof."
"But we brought it back."
"Au contraire, we re-made it. All the time-matter drifted in the void until we re-made the universe, because it couldn't have possibly managed to fit into what was left... really, we're lucky Earth didn't get squished, probably would have if we had left it long enough... and NOW!" A pause was made for effect while he finally configured their destination and the TARDIS screeched solid, his smile twinging itself into existance, "It's going to start twinging into existance. Right now it's lingering in the void because it's slowly concentrating itself into one time, like how any rock forms, getting condensed ever so slowly."
"But it'll be filling all the empty vaccums of space, maybe?" Amy suggested, more or less letting the Doctor carry his conversation. She knew that smile, it meant something fun was going down and she should just ride straight into it.
"Nice try, but no. It'll do about the same as it was going to do before we fixed the universe."
Rory was alarmed. He didn't like the idea of rushing into danger, ever... the spoilsport. "What, crush Earth?" he said incredulously.
"Yes, now you've got it!"
"But it's still got space to go. It can just... I dunno... float away." Amy insisted.
"Amy, now you haven't got it. Masses of dusty rocks that will in total add up to the equivalent of every planet and it's contents that ever existed, minus Earth and your precious vaccum of space, which never held matter, all surrounding the Earth like a meteor shower that spans the entire Milky Way and beyond? The sun will be blocked out, the atmosphere will get all muddled, huge planet-sized rocks will bump into Earth. It'll be like putting a grain of rice in a tin of chestnuts and shaking it about and expecting it not to be touched. Although in this case the rice would be kind of... crushed. So it's kind of like when you have a container full of rice and you get to the bottom and some it all powdery. That powder is Earth."
"That does sound bad, how are we gonna stop it then?"
"Oh you're gonna love it," the Doctor smiled widely, receiving a grin back, and a man looking between them, lost for words again. But he would get over it. After all, he'd climbed back in the TARDIS by choice.
The setting of the day was the top of the TARDIS. Literally they all sat on top of the TARDIS, Amy and the Doctor swinging their legs off the side, Rory deciding to cautiously wrap his legs around the apex. This was one of those times it would have been conveniant to have the Chamelion Circuit functioning (that, and every time it had been usurped) but the owner was no-nevermind about it. He was more concentrated on a particular other thing, residing in his hands. A strange sight indeed, large and black and shiny and completely repulsive to Amy, which is why she was on the other corner of the TARDIS' roof.
"So, what's with the beetle?" Rory plucked up the courage to ask, after having waited all of five minutes of silent tinkering by the Doctor while looking down over Surrey's streets. Yes, Surrey. There was no rationale to being over Surrey, they could have floated over anywhere in the world. Beyond his obvious joy surrounding the Human race, he figured the Doctor must have also had something for the British. Honestly, they spent at least one day a week there. That was a lot, all time-space-machines considering.
"It's a beetle," the Doctor replied, nonplussed and steady in his task. Whatever it was.
"... Yes, I realized," came a pointed snap-back.
The Doctor relented. "It's from the Trickster's Brigade. Usually it latches onto people, changes small events in their personal timelines and feeds off of the change, potential energy you know. When it does this to a particularly important person, though... well, you'll see."
We'll see, Rory sighed internally. It could never be explained from the start, that would be too easy. He could have asked what he meant by 'person' when they were dealing with this ridiculous solid time stuff, or how a beetle could mess with time, or a number of other things... but sometimes the list is just too exhausting to bother, he supposed.
The Doctor leapt to his feet- well, climbed in a slightly haphazard way, but it was as close to a leap as one could get at that moment- and held the sufficiently tinkered-with beetle up triumphantly. "We're going to chuck the garbage to someone else's alternate universe!"
The humans in the room- roof- turned and stared.
"...There aren't laws against that?" Amy inquired skeptically. She was sure it was equivelant to throwing compost in heaps into your neighbor's yard. Poisonous compost.
"Ah," the Doctor made an apologetic wave of his sonic, which he had appeared from out of his pocket. "Well, we're not throwing it into an existing universe. Well... actually, we're not throwing it anywhere, not like that. What we're actually going to do is make it into an alternate, parallel universe."
This did not help the gawking. When neither of them asked a new question, the Doctor realized they were speechless. He supposed the idea might have been a little bit out of proportion to normal people's perspectives of normal stuff.
"I'm going to convert all the time-matter into actual time and matter. The time-matter for everything will be a duplicate of what's in our universe. The matter that came from Nepune will re-form as Neptune, Skaro will turn to Skaro, etcetera etcetera."
The blinking, still-stunned man hunching over the TARDIS' lightbulb had his jaw well-dropped. "So... you're going to make a universe exactly like ours. Instead of ours being destroyed, ther'll be... two. Two universes, two Rorys and Amys, two Doctors..."
"No. You won't exist. Earth wasn't destroyed yet when we reversed everything, so it doesn't have a time-matter remnent."
"Still!" Amy laughed, "Paralell universes? There's paralell universes? Universes exactly like ours out there? Lots of Amys and Doctors?"
Rory furrowed his brow. Where was his name in that?
"Well... paralell universes aren't really paralell, are they? There's all sorts of small differances. They're all more of a jumble of information similar to our universe's. But we're going to make an actual, identical universe, except... Earth won't exist in it. So then it will reform itself around that and un-paralellize itself. Isn't that important?"
"Um. You make that sound important."
"It is. I don't know what would happen if two precisely exactly the same universes existed. They can't. Only variations." The Doctor nodded, clapping his hand on the beetle. "We'll use this little bugger! The time-matter is significant enough, it's about to wreck a whole planet. I put some Gallifreyan sciency stuff you wouldn't understand in it, but basically, I'm going Big Bang 3 here."
Amy whistled, quite clearly impressed.
The Doctor smiled. "Now, let's chuck this beetle at some magic rock! Alley-oop!