A/N: If you've decided to continue on to this chapter, thanks! I'm glad you're enjoying it! (Or are at the very least curious; that's good, too!) Hope you like this chapter, too, now that we're getting into actual story lines .

And I still don't own "Doctor Who."

Enjoy!


Entry #2

Within an hour (I think, anyway – apparently my watch doesn't keep time in the Vortex, but based on the fact that I was able to finish that previous diary entry before arriving, I'm guessing about it took about an hour), the TARDIS had landed. It was time for Mancaterra, my very first alien planet.

The Doctor motioned toward the door. "After you," he smiled. "That way, you can experience all the wonder of the new planet, without my big shape in the way," he added with a wink.

I laughed and walked towards the door. I was just touching the handle when the Doctor, who had been following behind me, suddenly exclaimed, "PSYCHIC PAPER!"

I jumped. "Huh?" I said, shaking my head. "What? What about it?"

"It's still in my coat pocket," the Doctor said sadly. "I should go grab that; never know when you might need it." He started walking towards his room, where he'd left his long, brown coat earlier. As he reached the other end of the control room, he turned back to me and said, "Feel free to go on outside without me, if you'd like. Just don't wan – "

"-Der off," I finished as he did. "I know, don't worry."

"Yeah, that's what they all say," the Doctor responded. "And then what do they do? They wander off! Then what happens, hm?"

"They wind up hanging from a barrage balloon in the middle of London during the Blitz?" I supplied.

The Doctor blinked. "Well, that was rather more specific than I was going for, but, yes! That too! Point is, nothing good happens. So, no wandering off!"

"Yes, Sir!" I saluted. "I promise."

"Good." And as quick as anything, he was back to his hyper, grinning self. "Won't be a moment!" he said, sprinting down the hall to his room.

I decided I'd wait for him in the TARDIS, anyway, even though he'd told me I could start out without him (as long as I didn't go too far). I thought he should see my reaction. But, I found that I couldn't help but sneak a peek out the door, at least. I opened the TARDIS door just a crack and peered outside. I smiled: it looked beautiful. The trees were filled with pink, yellow, and white leaves, and there wasn't a cloud in the sunny blueish-purple sky.

"Wait a minute," I thought to myself. "Sky?" The Doctor had said that Mancaterra was entirely underwater. I took another peek, opening the door a bit wider this time. Yeah, that was definitely sky. And that was definitely odd.

I heard the Doctor's footsteps returning from his room. "Doctor?" I called down the hallway, once I figured he was within the range to hear me.

"Yeah?"

"You said Mancaterran cities are entirely underwater, right?"

"Yup, domed in on the sea floor," he answered, emerging from the hallway (with his psychic paper).

"And, these domes, are they clear?"

"One-hundred percent," he smiled. "You can see all the pretty little fishies and other sea creatures floating around outside; it's really quite spectacular."

"But – "

"How can you see the creatures, if the cities are on the sea floor, where light doesn't reach?" the Doctor interjected, assuming he knew what I was going to ask. "Well, they've got billions upon billions of extremely bright, but extremely tiny, lights floating around in the ocean, too. It makes it bright as day inside the cities – when it's supposed to be day, anyway; they turn it off at night."

"That is definitely very cool, but, that's actually not what I was going to ask," I said. "I was going to ask why there's sky outside, if we're underwater."

"If there's what?" the Doctor asked, surprised. "There can't be! Are you sure it was sky?"

"Doctor, this may be my first time on an alien planet, but I'm pretty sure I know the difference between 'water full of fishies' and sky full of birds," I answered. "And this was definitely sky."

The Doctor knitted his eyebrows. "Impossible," he said, heading for the door. "There is definitely no visible sky in the Mancaterran cities." He opened the door and walked out, as I followed behind him.

Once outside, the Doctor looked up – and frowned. "You know, Cate? I think that that is definitely sky."

"I thought so," I said.

He looked around the area we had landed in. "In fact, I think…" He trailed off, gazing around a bit more. "Yes!" he suddenly shouted, causing me to jump for the second time in less than five minutes. "But no!" He turned to face the TARDIS. "Oh, come on!" He seemed to be talking to the TARDIS at that point. "First trip, first trip ever out of her galaxy – she even knew where she wanted to go! – and we missed!? How is that fair?"

I tapped him on the shoulder. "We aren't on Mancaterra, are we?"

"Ah… No. No, we're not. I'm sorry, I really am," the Doctor apologized. "We seem to have missed," he added, shooting a glare at the TARDIS. "We aren't even fourteen-billion light years away from Earth, I'm afraid."

"Oh, well, it's alright, honestly," I said. "It's my first trip, right? So really, this was the best time to miss, because anything will be amazing to me! Except, you know, Cardiff in 2008, because I've already been there." I looked around me, noting again the pastel-colored leaves and blue-purple sky. "But I'm definitely thinking that this isn't Cardiff in 2008, so we're good!"

"Nope, not Cardiff at all!" the Doctor replied happily. "In fact, not Earth at all, so at the very least you still get your alien planet. It is still in your solar system, though." He paused, looking puzzled. "We really missed by a lot, didn't we? Strange, usually we don't wind up this far off…"

"Where precisely is here, though, Doctor?" I asked.

"Oh of course! Sorry, we're in Capital, the… well, capital city of the planet Minerva, in the year…" He paused to lick his finger, and held in the air for a couple of seconds. "The year 10,000, give or take, by my estimates."

"Ten-thousand…" I repeated, amazed. Then I realized something. "But wait, Minerva? Since when was that a planet in my solar system?"

"I think it was the year 5100, approximately," the Doctor said. "You remember hearing about the hypothetical Planet X, out past Pluto?" I nodded in response. "Well, turns out it wasn't so hypothetical – although it did take them around 3000 years to manage to find it. So, Planet X became Minerva." He grinned at me. "Although, it should be noted that Minerva is not the tenth planet, which would have been more fitting with its old name. It's actually the twelfth."

"Twelfth!?" I asked, surprised. "But, where did the other three – no, other four – come from?"

"Well, first of all, Pluto was reinstated as a planet sometime in the late 48th century, when the definition of 'planet' was changed to, 'Any body that orbits a star or set of stars and can support a population of at least four-billion,' so that's the ninth," the Doctor explained. "Then there's Charon, which is actually a binary-planet system with Pluto, but is still a planet itself, so that's the tenth. Then there's Eris, which used to be just a scattered disk object, but was determined to be the eleventh planet in the 49th century. And lastly, there's Minerva, the twelfth planet."

I took in everything the Doctor said. "Wow," was all I could manage in response.

"Yeah, neat, isn't it?" he smiled. "Just think, next time you're back in 2008, you can laugh at all the people who say that Planet X doesn't exist!"

"And that Facebook group called, 'When I Was Your Age, Pluto Was a Planet,' just got a whole lot funnier," I said, more to myself than the Doctor (though he did chuckle a bit, even if he wasn't quite sure what I meant).

"So, what do you say we start exploring, eh?" the Doctor asked, gesturing down the path in front of us. As we wandered through what appeared to be a residential area, he explained a bit more about Minerva's history. The planet originally hadn't supported any life ("Completely lifeless planets are rare, but not unheard of"), but a scientific team composed of humans, Martians, and Saturnites had terraformed Minerva in the 53rd century to make more room for the ever-expanding populations of the other eleven planets. Although the rest of planets had immigrants from any other planet, Minerva is the only truly mixed-species planet.

The Doctor soon decided that I absolutely had to try this Minervan desert, which was essentially a regular Earth-like sugar cookie frosted with this "unbelievably delicious" Plutonian sweet sauce; so, off we headed to find a bakery. We reached the center of town, only to find it eerily quiet.

"Doctor," I started, "I know you said that there originally weren't any living creatures on this planet, but are you entirely sure that there are now?"

"There are supposed to be," he said, clearly bemused. "This doesn't make any sense."

"Well, maybe everyone's just… inside the buildings," I suggested. "Or maybe they take a siesta in the afternoons!"

The Doctor shook his head. "I've been here a couple of times before, and they never used to take siestas… But even if it's a new trend, now wouldn't be the right time: it's too early in the day," he said, pointing at the Sun in the sky to explain how he knew.

"Is it possible that it's so early that no one's awake yet?" I asked.

He shook his head again. "No, judging by the Sun, I'd say it's about 10am, 11am at the latest. The town center should be bustling at this hour, or at the very least it should be shuffling. Something is very, very wrong."

He scanned the street ahead of us, while I turned around and gazed around the way we'd come. It was then that I noticed something off in the distance that might have been keeping everyone inside. "Um, Doctor, might that 'something wrong' be a gigantic wind storm?"

"It certainly could be, but I find that highly unlikely; terraformed planets have extremely stable weather," the Doctor answered without turning around.

"Well, apparently, Minerva doesn't!" I exclaimed, grabbing him by the arm to turn him around. I pointed at the wall of dust and debris moving quickly from the horizon towards us.

The Doctor's eyes widened. "Oh. Yup, that's a problem." He looked at me, took my hand, and said, "Run!"

You know, I always thought it would be difficult, running hand-in-hand like that. You can't swing your arms like you normally would, and if you run more slowly than the one you're with, you're going to get dragged (or wind up dragging them, if you're the faster one). But somehow, with the Doctor, it works. I wasn't really thinking about it as we were running – I was more concerned with not dying – but afterwards I realized that it had been extremely easy. I don't know how to describe it, really… It just felt natural, I guess, even though it isn't. It just worked.

Well, the running worked, anyway. The "not dying" part almost didn't. The Doctor and I were running as fast as we could, but the wind storm was obviously faster than we were. It was catching up with us quickly; given just a few more seconds, I have no doubt that it would have swept us up.

But, luckily, just as we were starting to cut our safety buffer really, really close, the door to one of the stores on the street opened. A young woman, who looked like a human about my age but with emerald green skin, stuck her head out of the door. "Hurry up!" she yelled to the Doctor and I. "Get in here, quick!"

She didn't have to tell us twice. The Doctor and I changed course and dashed into the store. The girl just managed to shut the door before the wall of dirt and debris blew past the store.

"That was close," the girl sighed. Then she looked at the Doctor and me with a mixture of awe and fear. "What in the name of all things good or evil were you thinking, being outside during the storm!?"

"Well – "

"No, I take that back," the girl interrupted the Doctor, who'd started to answer her, "I don't think you were thinking to begin with! There's no other way to explain why you would be outside at this time of day."

"I'm sorry," I apologized, "but we're… travelers. We aren't from around here. We hadn't caught the latest weather forecast; we'd only just arrived."

"Latest weather forecast?" the girl asked. "What's a weather forecast?"

Before I could answer, the Doctor countered with a question of his own. "You don't need them, do you, weather forecasts? You don't need people to predict the weather, because you always know exactly what it will be."

"If a weather forecast predicts the weather, then yes, you're right," the girl nodded. "Our weather is scheduled, all terraformed planets are like that."

"That's what you meant by 'this time of day,' then," I guessed. "There's always a storm like this at this time of day."

"Exactly," the girl nodded. "Look, I get that you're tourists and everything, but the weather's been on this schedule for thousands of years. You must be from really far away to not know that, at 10:30am every day, there's a huge windstorm."

"Yeah, sorry, but that's exactly it, we're from really far away," the Doctor told her. "I'm the Doctor, by the way, and this is my friend Cate. Thanks for saving us."

The girl smiled. "I'm Zara, and I'm glad I was able to help."

"Nice to meet you, Zara," the Doctor replied. "Now, you say there's a storm like this every morning at 10:30?" It sounded like simple small talk – like any tourist trying to get his bearings in a new place – but I recognized the look on the Doctor's face. He had picked up on something strange about this weather schedule, and now he was on a mission to get to the bottom of it.

Zara was none the wiser to the Doctor's intentions, however, and answered the question nonchalantly. "Yeah, every day."

"For how long, exactly?"

"Oh, I don't know exactly how long it's been; the storms started in 6800 or 6900, I think, but don't quote me on that."

"The storms started?" the Doctor asked. "Just, poof! Started up one day on their own? Not aided by the scientists in charge of maintaining the weather?"

Zara shook her head. "As far as anyone knows, they just started on their own. The scientists couldn't get them to stop, but the storms were running on a daily schedule, so in the end they just got factored in and we Minervans got really good at wind-proofing things. That's why all the buildings are still standing now."

"Funny, that, because terraformed planets are supposed to have very stable weather," he said, starting to pace. "Perfectly stable, in fact. Sure, you get the occasional necessary rain storm, maybe some snow, even some good old-fashioned thunder storms every now and again, but they're all factored in to your weather patterns by scientists. On terraformed planets, weather doesn't ever just happen. The question is…" He stopped his pacing and looked out of the store window. "The question is, why is Minerva different?"

"Look, honestly, Sir, it's not a big deal," Zara said. She couldn't know that something like this is never "not a big deal" to the Doctor. "Like I said, we've wind-proofed everything, so the damage is minimal if anything. And hardly anybody dies anymore."

Well, that was the last thing the Doctor needed to hear. "Hardly anybody?" he repeated, turning to face Zara. "Hardly anybody is still too many for my liking. No, Zara, this is, in fact, a 'big deal.' Something here is terribly wrong, and I am going to figure out what that is. And then, I'm going to fix it. Cate," he added, turning to me. "I'm feeling like a trip to the library, to do a little research. What do you say?"

"I say that that sounds like a great idea," I smiled. "Count me in."

"Can I come, too?" Zara piped in.

The Doctor raised an eyebrow at her. "Don't you have a store to run? I was assuming this is your shop."

"Oh, well, yeah, but… I can skip a day," she responded, somewhat sheepishly.

"I thought that you said this wasn't a big deal?" the Doctor pointed out smugly.

Zara's cheeks turned slightly blue, which I assumed was her race's (whatever that might be) equivalent of a blush. However, she'd regained her pride in time to answer. "Well, you said that I was wrong. I guess the only way to find out who was right is to go with you."

The Doctor grinned. "That's the investigative spirit! Well, sort of. Close enough." He shrugged. "Anyway, to the library! Allons-y!"


To be continued...