"You're completely mad." Ronnie glared at Marcus, who whined and shoved the file at her.
"Just look! There are traces of the Doctor all throughout history, looped into important events, saving the world, that sort of thing. But he never gets publicly recognized. He becomes an anomaly. This one here," Marcus fishes around for a paper, "states from a record in the year 5412, which sounds crazy but based on the fact that there is all sorts of time travel out there, its not quite so crazy, but anyways! It's a quote from some woman, 'we get that word from you, you know. The word for healer, and wise man throughout the universe.' The Doctor, he created the name, we get it from him!"
"So?"
"So? SO? If we can find this man, it might be the most spectacular discovery yet! We could become famous, rich and famous!" Marcus' eyes were animated, and full of greed."
"Okay," Ronnie started, "Say that you are right, and the Doctor is real. Would you really want to capture a man who is the sole cause of our world today? One who saves so many lives?" Marcus looked at her as if she were stupid.
"Sure, yeah we might be dooming the universe, but look at it this way. We'd be rich and famous!" He grinned wildly.
"Yeah, you're mad beyond hope." Ronnie pushed Marcus out the front door. Shutting it, she returned to sanity and reality.
Marcus had taken the file out the door with him, but a small slip of paper had made its way out of the file and now sat on the floor. Bending down to pick it up, Ronnie saw that it read:
TARDIS P#: 20-1-18-4-9-19
Ronnie shoved the slip of paper in her pocket before snatching up her purse and coat to go to the Laboratory.
-.-.-.-
Outside the tall science building at NYU, Ronnie looked around on shock. Some sort of secret army was stationed outside the offices, and above the building, was floating–a spaceship?
Ronnie panicked. Was everything Marcus told her right? Were aliens real? It sure seemed like it to her –an entire ship was floating above the entire city block. She ran up to one of the officers stationed outside the office doors, with a badge that read "UNIT"
UNIT? Marcus mentioned them this morning… Ronnie shook her head of thoughts and continued forward. Another guard side-stepped in front of her, cutting off.
"Where do you think you're going?" the officer asked her, looking down his rather large nose.
"I work here, thank you very much!" She spat at him, but upon saying this, he pushed her by the small of her back beyond the police barriers to the front door to the tall building, where another officer led her towards the elevator.
"Can I please ask what the hell is going on?"
"Theres been an incident, m'am. A species called the Jovole have located the body of one of their ancestors here, and they think we killed them." The UNIT officer told her in the elevator.
"Wait–what do the Jovole look like?" Ronnie made the connection, and the officer handed her a folded-up piece of paper. She looked at the picture, and almost smiled.
"I know exactly what to do. I can handle this." She gave the man in the red beret the paper.
"Well, we already have someone handling it. Or at least, trying to handle it."
"Who?" Ronnie laughed. No-one understood that her big project had to directly correlate with the Jovole. They stepped out of the elevator.
"The Doctor."
"Doctor who?"
"Just the Doctor."
"No name?"
"His name is the Doctor, and he's our best specialist."
"Sure." Ronnie rolled her eyes. Suddenly, she remembered what Marcus had told her, that the Doctor was the sole guardian of the Universe. Could all of that really be true?
She had no time to dwell on it, for the UNIT officer pushed her against the wall. Fiery bullets zinged through the air, narrowly missing the two. At one end of the hall were five UNIT agents, firing weaponry at the other end of the hall, where short, purple men in black armor were firing back. Ronnie gasped, as the Jovole seemed to recognize her. One aimed his gun at her, and terror covered her face. She closed her eyes, whispering a silent prayer.
Ra–
Ronnie was interrupted by the UNIT officer, who escorted her, stood in front of her, and fell to the ground at the impact of the bullet. She screamed, and ran across the hall to the laboratory door. She was thankful that she wore converse today instead of heels.
She slammed the door behind her, and promptly locked it. There was nobody in the lab, which made the gunfight just outside the door a hundred times more frightening.
Running on pure instinct and adrenaline, Ronnie dashed to the metal drawers that held the mummified Jovole specimen. She pulled it onto a cart, and grabbed her surgical tools. Now that she knew that her specimen was not human, she could examine it better without trying to figure out why the structures are different. Ronnie took her surgical knife, and made one long incision down the chest, cutting open previously stitched incisions. She pinned back the skin, and poked around the decayed organs. At the base of what was probably a lung, a small black box she had not noticed before sat, embedded in the organ tissue. She pulled it out with her tweezers, and attempted to open it.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you." Came a male voice from behind her. Ronnie spun around, to see a tall man leaning up against a blue police box, which had not been there before. He wore a brown tweed jacket, a blue bowtie, a white button-up shirt and black suspenders. His hair looked funny, parted off to the side, poofing up over his face. Ronnie made the connections in her head.
"You're the Doctor." She gasped.
"Yes I am. And you must be the young scientist who's working on the sole reason that New York is now being attacked."
"Uhm, yeah," she stammered, "you're an alien. Right?"
"Yu–p"
"But you have a British accent."
"Lots of planets have a British accent, I'll have you know." The Doctor stood up straighter, defensive. "But I'm not here to talk about accents, no, I'm here to talk about how we are going to convince the Jovole to cease fire. And you're going to help me!"
"How?" Ronnie questioned, "I'm a Laboratory assistant, this specimen is my first ever project that I get to work on alone, and somehow, because of me, my city is under attack. Can you shed some light on why I mean anything? I'm not important!"
"Oh, human girl, in all my 1,000 years of Time and Space, I've never met anyone who wasn't important." The Doctor stared her down, then took the small black box that was covered in dust. "Take my hand, we're going to save the world!" He grinned. Automatically, Ronnie let her hand take his, and the Doctor led her out the back door of the lab.
They ran from the lab to the roof, fast and non-stop. They dodged Jovolian gunshots and hid from incoming fleets of soldiers. Ronnie had never experienced more activity in her 25-year life than she had in those twenty minutes. When they could, the Doctor told her all about the Jovole, how they thought the humans killed this commander (who had been displaced in time to 200 B.C), and how they wanted revenge. The Doctor held tight to the small black box, while Ronnie held tight to the Doctor's large hand.
They stood atop the roof, 800 feet above the ground. Right above them, was the massive Jovolian spaceship. Ronnie gasped in awe, while the Doctor called up towards the ship.
"Take me to your leader!" he shouted, grinning wildly. Ronnie wondered how he could be so calm and playful in this situation.
Light particles surrounded them, and before she knew it, Ronnie stood, still holding the Doctor's hand, in the belly of the Jovolian spaceship.
"Oh my god." She gasped, clinging to the Doctor. He patted her shoulder, and whispered in her ear:
"Look strong, but not menacing."
Ronnie did as she was told, and the Doctor let go of her hand. She felt cold and alone, as the Doctor stepped forward to speak to what appeared to be the leader of the Jovole. Ronnie's head was fuzzy and spinning from all this new activity, but she could still hear what they were saying.
"You do not represent the humans, Time Lord."
"Of course I do, I've saved their lives enough to deserve that kind of role." The Doctor said in reply. "I have here proof that no human ever killed your Lord General."
"You have the Lord General's black box? Impossible, a black box cannot be removed from a young body."
"Of course it's not possible. The Lord General was displaced in Time and Space, probably from the touch of a Weeping Angel. Those nasty buggers are known for doing such. But not the point, the point is, your Lord General was sent back to the year 200 B.C, Egypt. They worshiped him as a God, thus why he was so perfectly mummified at the time of his death."
"Then what was the cause of death?" the alien voice growled.
"Old age. Doesn't happen all too often with you lot, all whizzing about, entering wars. I went back to greet him, he seemed quite happy there. Now, if you would please stop attacking this planet?"
Ronnie's head cleared, and she could see the Doctor handing the short purple man the black box. The purple man plugged it into an intricate, massive computer-like thing, and turned it on. In foreign symbols, he read what appeared on the screen. After five minutes, the purple Jovole turned back towards the Doctor.
"Very well, Time Lord. We will leave this planet immediately."
"And never come back." The Doctor said in a deep, angry tone.
"Very well." The Jovole said hesitantly. Suddenly, the Doctor and Ronnie were back on the roof, all the other Jovole gone, and the ship starting to move away.
"Yeah! And don't think about coming back!" Ronnie shouted happily. The Doctor just grinned a little, happy to have just saved the future of the human race once again.
The Doctor and Ronnie walked back to the lab, where the blue police box still stood.
"This, Ronnie, is my TARDIS. It stands for Time and Relative Dimension in Space."
"It's a blue police box, though."
"It's a disguise. Got stuck on Police Box, however. Never really cared to fix the Chameleon circuit, I like it too much."
"Okay, but what does the TARDIS do?"
"It travels in Time and Space. I'm a Time Lord, the last of. I have nobody to travel with now."
"You've got me." Ronnie took his hand. The Doctor smiled down at her, and opened the doors with a snap of his fingers. She gasped, awestruck, at the enormous room in front of her. She stepped inside.
"It's bigger on the inside!" She stammered, eyes wide open. The orange room of metal, concrete and glass circled from the floor to the ceiling, like a sphere. At the center, on a large glass platform stood a tall console that reached all the way up to the top of the room.
"Yeah, it is." The Doctor grinned wildly. He dashed up to the console with long, crazy legs, and began to twist a few knobs, and pulled down on a large lever.
The TARDIS made a deep bell sound, indicating that she was ready for flight.
"All of Time and Space, everything that is, was or ever will be, where do you want to start?"
So thats the end of the first "Episode" of Between Two Lungs! What do you all think?
Please review!
