Marinus. Somewhere far in the future...or past...in a distant galaxy. Rain pummels down onto a long walkway connecting two bodies of land, the only places not being spared were underneath large arch-like sculptures. Clouds filled the sky, grey and menacing. The acid sea sloshed and heaved underneath the stone bridge.
Suddenly, a new noise could be heard among the rain. A strange whooshing, grinding sound. At first, it seemed to be coming from everywhere, from the rain, the bridge, the acid sea. Then, a blue box began to materialize on top of the bridge. It flickered in and out of this dimension, before becoming opaque and quite touchable with a loud thud. It stood there, for a few moments, before the door opened and three figures could be seen standing in the doorway. Three figures that, obviously, had no rhyme or reason to be in this place at all. The first that stepped out was clearly the one in control of the group...even though he looked no more like a child that had been left to dress himself. A coat that looked more like a patchwork blanket flapped in the wind, and curly light blonde hair blew haphazardly with it. He reached into his coat and somehow, from somewhere, pulled out an umbrella that was also rainbow colored, Holding it out in front of him, he gripped it tightly and opened it up to the rain, before motioning for the figures behind him to follow.
The next person to come out truly showed that three who came were to be taken with a grain of salt. Well...person was an overstatement. It was a penguin...and a rather annoyed one at that. Behind the penguin stood a young woman with long brown hair to her shoulders, pale skin, and lipstick, and wore an outfit that almost looked as if the older man had picked it out for her - a yellow shirt and a red and green striped jacket. The man looked around, before huffing loudly.
"Well." as he was talking, he set off at a brisk pace up the pathway. The girl and the penguin had to rush to keep up with him, before staying close and trying to avoid being hit by the onslaught of rain. "Here we are. This is where that distress signal was coming from." The girl made a noise of disgust, running her hands up and down her arms.
"Nice weather." she said in a thick American accent. The man seemed distracted, and suddenly stopped in his tracks. The other two had to quickly avoid getting doused in water.
"Do you ever get deja-vu?" he asks the two of them. "I'm sure I…" his eyes go wide, before scrunching shut in a show of deep concentration. "I know this place…"
"You've been here before, Doc?" the penguin...well, Whifferdill, Frobisher, asked.
"Mmm…" the Doctor seemed to be in a different place. Lost in memory, perhaps. "Something to do with keys. And a...conscious machine? I don't really know. Everything is so vague prior to my second regeneration, but I do remember being her and coming up against a race of amphibious assassins known as the Voord. I'm sure the planet was a lot busier than." He begins to continue walking, muttering quietly to himself. Peri and Frobisher stopped suddenly in the middle of the bridge, noticing a large structure separate from it, large and black and rather gaudy looking. Peri, seeing that the Doctor hadn't noticed, called out to him.
"Doctor ! Doctor, look!"
The Doctor turned around at Peri's call, walking back to stand beside her and Frobisher. He seemed unconcerned. "Oh, don't worry about that, Peri. It's just a TARDIS." Peri seemed taken aback.
"That's a TARDIS?" she asked, looking at the Doctor. He nodded, a look of understanding coming across his face.
"Well. I think we can safely assume we've found the source of the distress call."
"Uh, Doc…" Frobisher tapped the Doctor on the leg. "While we're on the subject of distress...I think you'd better take a look down here." He motioned down a flight of stairs, to where a figure lay crumpled on the ground. Eyes that looked more like empty sockets stared up at the travellers, skeletal arms reached out towards them from a brown robe that hung off their body. Their mouth was moving, but no words seemed to come out.
"We've got a Time Lord in trouble!" the Doctor exclaimed, and rushed down the stairs to the dying man. Peri and Frobisher raced after him, trying their best to avoid slipping on the wet ground. Frobisher, unluckily, slipped on the stairs and fell backwards into the sea. The younger Time Lord kneeled over the elder one, placing his arms strategically to help them sit up. He was gasping for breath, and seemed to be searching for something in the Doctor's eyes. "Hold on old chap. We'll get you back to your TARDIS." The old man whispered something, something that could barely be heard over the rain.
"Pl...planet 14…"
"What's that?" the Doctor asked him. The Time Lord started to relax against the Doctor's grip, his eyes beginning to drift away to some other place. But he managed to say those words one last time.
"Planet 14…"
Then, he collapsed fully in the Doctor's arms. The Doctor gently laid him down against the stairs, adjusting him so it seemed like he were asleep. He turned up to Peri, who was holding the umbrella over him. "He's gone." he said, standing up next to her. Frobisher clambered out of the water, shaking his feathers out like a wet dog. Peri notices the old man starting to glow and pulse, an energy radiating around him. She nudges the Doctor.
"What's happening? Is he regenerating?"
"Not this time." the Doctor replies, wringing out his coat. "He's exhausted all his bodies. His flesh will break down into degenerate matter, then into random molecules…" Just as he was saying this, the glow enveloped the man, causing him to look like he were covered in concrete. The pulse grew stronger and stronger, until the only thing that remained was bones and bone marrow...and even that was disappearing at an alarming rate.
"Yeuk!" Peri exclaimed. The Doctor, who was walking back up the stairs, Frobisher at his side, turned around at Peri's voice.
"Strange.." he murmured. "It doesn't usually happen that fast." A new sense of purpose about him, he walks up the stairs, Peri rushing to catch up, her hair blowing behind her. The three stop in front of the dead man's TARDIS, Peri looking at the Doctor in confusion.
"What are we going to do now?" she asked.
"Well, I don't know about you, but I want a word with his TARDIS. There's more to this than meets the eye." the Doctor says. He walks up in front of the door, which was almost invisible among the black ebony architecture of the TARDIS. Rummaging in his pockets for a minute, he takes out a lockpick and begins to fiddle with the lock holding the door shut.
"This looks suspiciously like breaking and entering." Peri says, unimpressed by the Doctor's 'secret skill'. The Doctor chuckled, a smirk playing across his lips.
"I won't tell anyone if you don't. Besides, this is how I got by own TARDIS." A click can be heard. "Ah! There." He opens the door, letting the three of them see the inside of the TARDIS for the very first time, before walking inside. "Come on, mind the psychosculpture!" As soon as Peri entered the TARDIS, she gasped. Huge stalactite crystals hung down from the ceiling - she assumed that this was what the Doctor called 'psychosculpture - sparkling as if a thousand suns were shining directly onto them. In fact, it looked like the entire interior of the other Time Lord's TARDIS was made of crystal, or some sort of crystal like substance.
"Doctor, this is amazing! Oh, it's beautiful!" she breathed. The Doctor huffed.
"Rubbish." he snapped. "It's gaudy and ostentatious. Typical new model…" Frobisher was still standing in the doorway of the TARDIS, obviously hesitant to enter in. He had a perplexed look on his face...or looked as perplexed as a penguin could look.
"Do...do I need to see a psychiatrist, or can I really hear whispering?" he asked the Doctor, finally getting up the will to walk up and stand next to Peri. The Doctor chuckled.
"That's conversation, Frobisher. It always happens when two TARDISES get together. They're terrible gossips once they get started. You just have to be firm." he cleared his throat, before yelling in a voice so loud it made Frobisher lead upwards into Peri's arms, causing her to drop the umbrella she was carrying. "SHUT UP AND PAY ATTENTION." The whispering between the TARDISES immediately stopped. The Doctor smirked and put his hands on his hips. "That's better. Now what exactly was your mission here?"
The TARDIS hesitated a moment, before speaking, it's voice exactly like it's deceased pilot. "We were sent by the Gallifreyan High Council, following evidence of violent temporal disturbances in this spacetime locus."
"I see." the Doctor nodded in understanding. "And what was the nature of these disturbances?"
"Sporadic pulses of accelerated temporal progression." the TARDIS answered.
"Frobisher!" Peri laughed from behind the Doctor...who seemed a tad bit annoyed to have been interrupted from his conversation with the TARDIS. "Where did all those feathers come from?"
"What?" Frobisher looked down at himself, alarmed. Tons of feathers were falling off his body, littering the floor. He squaked in embarrassment. "Oh. I don't usually molt so badly." Seeing Peri was still laughing quietly at him, he said, "I don't know what you're laughing about. Have you seen your hair?"
"What?" Peri asked. She reached up and touched her hair experimentally. It had been shoulder length when they had arrived on Marinus, but it now reached below her shoulders, and had grown scraggly. "It's...it's long! And my fingernails…" she made a noise of pain, drawing her hand away from her neck. Blood was visible on the tips of her nails, which looked sharp as knives. She looked up at the Doctor, desperate for an explanation. "What's happening to me? Doctor look at us! What's going on?"
"Accelerated temporal progression. Somehow, times been speeded up on Marinus." he picked up the umbrella from the floor, and began to walk back out the door. "It's dangerous to stay out in the open for too long. Come on!" he impatiently waved his hand at the two. "Back to the TARDIS. Chop-chop!"
"You mean I don't know what age I am now?" Peri exclaimed, rushing after the Doctor, Frobisher at her heels. Just as the three of them were out of the TARDIS, it began to dematerialize, whooshing and groaning, until it disappeared off the surface of Marinus completely. "Doctor, this is all happening too fast for me. Where's that TARDIS going?"
"It'll return to Gallifrey to report the death of its pilot." he yelled over the rain.
"And where are we going?"
"Use that primitive organ you humans call a brain, Peri. We're going to look for Planet 14 and find out what's behind all this! You see, I'm sure I've been there before, too. Or I will be there at some point in spacetime if you follow me. If only I could remember the details…" they arrive at the TARDIS, and Peri leaned over to open the door for the two others. The Doctor leaned against the doorframe of the police box, squeezing his eyes shut, trying to remember. Frobisher watched him...silently wondering why on Earth he wasn't doing this inside the TARDIS. "I think...I think I was in my second body. Which means I was travelling with…yes…" he opened his eyes, a sense of purpose behind them now. "That's it! He might remember. Let's go and ask Jamie!"
"Jamie…?" Frobisher was confused. Peri popped her head out of the TARDIS at the mention of the name. "Who's Jamie?!" He follows the Doctor into the TARDIS, and it takes off with a whooshing and grinding symmetrical to the second TARDIS, leaving Marinus desolate of life...or so they thought. As they left, figures crept out of the shadows, figures that somewhere, sometime, the Doctor himself would be fighting...
