Author's Note: Well, rather surprised at the immediate and quite positive response I've gotten from reviewers. Quite heartening, it was. So the next chapter is coming up! Snuggle down, play the Doctor Who Theme song, and enjoy this 'episode'!

(¯`·._.·(¯`·._.·(¯`·._.·/ Panic Moon: They Never Listen \·._.·´¯)·._.·´¯)·._.·´¯)

"What?"

"What, what?"

"Well, what happens next?"

It took all of the Doctor self-control not to scream in frustration, not that his companion was helping much.

Amelia Pond had pivoted on her heels, leaning back, placing her hands on her hips, narrowing her eyes, scrunching up her nose, and huffing at him. For some strange reason, even though this was all her fault, she had decided it was her job to give him the full 'annoyed-bordering-on-angry' treatment because he wouldn't answer her stupid question.

She waited for the shocked look and the backpedaling that always came when she glared at men from this stance, but he was looking past her entirely.

"You just had to open it, didn't you?" he asked the air behind her head.

She stomped on his foot, a childish gesture yet effective way of securing his attention. "Oi, you stared at it just as eagerly as me. And it was funny."

"Funny?" he stalked forward, glaring at her. "Funny? You just saw yourself killed—"

"Is the 'evil' part rubbing off on you?" she wondered under her breath.

"—and you still think it's funny? But you had to open it. First of all, anything that pops out of the Vortex is usually dangerous. But when it specifically says, 'KEEP AMY AWAY FROM THIS AND DON'T LET HER OPEN IT, AND WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT WATCH" in my handwriting—"

"I was curious…" she weakly protested.

"And curiosity killed the cat," he snapped.

"I'm not a cat!"

"Yeah, you're just a stupid ape!"

He paused at the hurt look on her face. "Okay, that came out a bit harsh. And you're not just an ape. You're actually closer to a chimpanzee; you have far less differences in the nucleic acid sequence for hemoglobin in your bloodstream—okay, I'll stop talking now."

She stopped tapping her foot. "Thank you. Now listen, whoever sent this obviously knew I was going to see it, and the best way to get me interested was to tell me not to watch it under any circumstances. Come on, Doctor, you know you would have watched it, you just get to lecture me because I got curious first. Besides, aren't there any other, I don't know, time travelers, who might want to play a trick on you?"

"There are no others."

"Don't give me that," she fumed. "Daleks. They can travel in time, can't they?"

"Yes, but…"

"But what?"

"They can't write. Not in my handwriting. Besides, I scanned it with my sonic screwdriver, and it's the real deal. A security tape from the moon Nalkov 5, in the fifty-second century, just after the colony was founded. It's not a fake."

Amy's eyes lit up as her mind raced. Traveling with the Doctor had perfected her already sharp cognitive skills, allowing her to see past the obvious and into the murky grey of creating theories. She was nowhere near as skilled as the Doctor, who seemed to be able to deduce the strangest schemes from practically no information. Still, she already had a pretty good one about what was going on in this weird tape that had popped out of the Time Vortex, apparently showing the Doctor murdering her in the future.

"So you know the coordinates of where that thing came from?"

He nodded.

"Then we're going. Except perhaps a week before. Gives us time to deal with the problem."

He stared at her, shocked. "You see a video of me killing you and you want to go there? Do you have a death wish or something? Because now that we've seen it, it's become a part of our timelines and we can't interfere—"

She leaned forward and whispered one word in his ear, one word that stopped him up short. Then, she smirked as he stood gaping.

"So don't you think we ought to go and help them?" she insisted, pushing him around and giving him a little shove towards the Tardis controls."

"Amelia Pond, you are a genius," he breathed.

"Thank me later, fly this big blue box of yours now."

*DW*DW*DW*DW*DW*DW*DW*DW*

Major Ashkar was not in a very good mood. First of all, he had told the Company that no civilians should be sent before the military had deemed the area safe, and the entire moon was at least under the process of being surveyed, but they had ignored his advice in favor of the potential of profit. Then, of course, they go and blame him when the janitors, build crew, and staff start to go missing—after he specifically warned them not to travel outside the compound. Then, when they discover that there are monsters, and vicious, brutal, mindless ones at that, who are attacking the colony, are the civilians evacuated? No. They decide to send more civilians—a scientist, a biologist, for goodness sake, to try to learn from it all. Yeah, right. The Company just wanted to see what technological advances they could gain from this fiasco; even if they couldn't make money off of selling land to colonists, they could still gain so much from simply learning about these creatures' skins.

He sighed internally. He could understand their curiosity; after all, he would love to have the sort of armor that as far as they could tell, nothing could break. The only thing that hurt these great monsters—disgusting ones, too, looking like a giant sort of slug-octopus mix, huge, and with thick, hard skin—were the old, outdated Sonic weapons. It didn't even penetrate the skin—nothing did, no bullets, Gamma Rays, radiation, explosions, lasers, nothing!—except the sonic beams. The quaint blue laser-like blast took far too long to recharge, but as long as they were facing only one of those things, they were fine. Still, he hated facing them, not unless he absolutely had to. He had already lost enough men to these vicious beasts.

All of this made him upset, yes, but the true cause of his bad mood lay in the young, naïve, brash, and, of course, unforgivably bossy woman crouching down examining the dead monster in front of them.

On of his lieutenants standing behind him cleared his throat awkwardly to report. "Sir, the radar is picking up movement twenty clicks south-southwest, and forecasts say there's a storm tonight, a bad one."

The woman's head snapped up. "Another storm? Again?" Major Ashkar had to bite back his unprofessional reply of 'well, you're the scientist, you tell me,' and let her continue with her complaints of how it would definitely flood, and she couldn't afford to lose another body. Then, of course, she proceeded to ignore his statement that they should really get out of there, right now.

Civilians, women, and bloody intellectuals who thought they knew everything and were only good at getting themselves killed, then getting angry at you if you saved them. The three types of people whom he hated the most. This woman, this Professor Carson, just happened to embody all three of them simultaneously.

"Alright, you three down there, stand behind it, you two on the side, and hoist on three. One-and-a-two-and-a-UP!"

He couldn't believe it. She was commanding his men. His men. It seemed like she was ordering them to carry it back, which was against Company regulations (No civilians are to see the deadly indigenous population; their way of trying to cover up and stop rumors, he supposed) and highly dangerous.

"Ms. Carson—"

"Professor Carson to you," she snapped back.

"Professor Carson, there are more of these things, live ones, on the radar, and we have a storm due in about—" he glanced at the time icon on his wrist computing unit, "—twenty five minutes. If either of those reach us before we reach the compound, we're all dead."

She looked him straight in the eye with that impertinent, cheeky attitude that he could never stand. "Then you better tell your men to move it, or what is it you military blockheads all say? Double time?"

Major Ashkar was definitely in a bad mood today.

*DW*DW*DW*DW*DW*DW*DW*DW*

Something was bothering the Doctor about her whole idea, and Amelia Pond decided it was the fact that she had figured it out before him. Sure, she was his companion, but sometimes she thought the job specification was more like bobble-head: just nodding along as he went on about transdimensional wavelength converters and such. He had told her she was magnificent, and brilliant, and all of that, but she got the feeling that underneath he wished he was the one who had thought the whole thing up. After all, what other reason would he have to be searching for every single little flaw in her plan? Not to mention piloting the Tardis even more roughly than usual, sprawling her across the floor time and time again.

"It will be dangerous," he mused.

"Yeah? No more dangerous than flying around in this thing. Is it always this bumpy?"

"Aha!" His eyes lit up at the trill of discovery—probably another 'flaw' in her theory, and she rolled her eyes again. "How can we tell? If you're right about this—"

"Of course I'm right. Doctor, you were holding a gun, you were acting all weird, and threatening people, then you shot me. And you don't do guns! So it was obviously a shape-shifter."

"Yes, well, Miss Amelia Pond, I have found a huge flaw in your plan."

"We can have a codeword to determine if it's really us or something."

"No, I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about the part where you get shot."

"Oh."

That certainly did present a problem, Amy mused. If he shot her, then doppelganger or not, she was dead. If she didn't die, there was no way for the tape to be made, and no reason for them to come in the first place. However, despite all her logic warning her against it, she still felt the irresistible urge to find out what was going on.

"Shapeshifters, what about mind-controllers?" she wondered out loud, trying to save her theory from being ravaged even more by the Doctor.

"Naah, no reason to be worried!" he exclaimed. "I'm a Time Lord, we're one of the more psychic species, enough to be able to resist practically any form of mind control."

"Oi, you big egoist, I wasn't talking about you! What if something tries to mind control me?"

He shrugged. "I'll give you lessons, but now is not the time. Now we are debating whether this horrible idea of yours to plunge right in is a horrible idea or—"

"The Tardis isn't moving." She smirked. "We're here."

"Amy, get away from that door, we haven't finished our discu—"

"When has that ever stopped you! Come on, Doctor, I'm going, and if you want to try to keep me safe, then you better come with!"

He sighed, trying to swallow the strange feeling that it was him whom she needed protecting from.

*DW*DW*DW*DW*DW*DW*DW*DW*

The moment he stepped outside, it hit him. They were on Nalkov 5, a moon that was colonized in the beginning of the fifty-second century (and for once the Tardis had landed in the right year), and the compound was just as it should have been. Actually, he and Amy were more in a metal corridor than 'outside', but it was the thought that counted.

No, the more he looked around, the more he could tell how wrong their whole environment was. Nalkov 5 was the most popular, famous, and populated moon in the whole system, and eventually became the gambling center of this whole quadrant, because land here was supposed to be so cheap. So where were all the people?

Then, the other little 'off' details began to trickle into his mind. There was no life on this moon—the atmosphere was hospitable enough, but it was a rather cold and dreary place, just grey stone (until the neon lights covered it up, not that Time Lords ever went to Nalkov 5, as it was only gambling—against the rules), and there were horrible storms that caused flash-flooding here into the roiling icy seas. If there were no indigenous life forms, then the shape-shifters were from the inside, and those were always far more difficult to discover. If it even was a case of shape-shifters they were dealing with here.

However, the big thing that had been nagging him, ever he had scanned the disk and discovered the year, was the sonic gun. Sonic guns had been out of style for nearly fifty years; he should know, as he was the one who turned the last factory into a banana plantation.

Something was definitely wrong here, and he was the Doctor, so it was his job to set it right.

*DW*DW*DW*DW*DW*DW*DW*DW*

Something was wrong here, definitely. Artarsal could feel it in his gut, the twist of his coelom that marked something out of place. Most of the time, Major Ashkar didn't care if someone had a bad gut feeling, but Artarsal was one of the few non-human members of this party; a member of a telepathic race hired by the Company as psychic military consultants.

"Check the heat signature scans for the number of life forms in the building," he recommended. "Something feels off."

Major Ashkar swallowed. "Another runaway and death?"

Artarsal quickly shook his head. "No, I know what that feels like, this feels like something…out of place is here. Something that doesn't belong on this moon, or anywhere, really."

"You sure it doesn't have to do with the monster we just carried in?"

"Well, those feel wrong too, but this is a different kind of wrong."

Major Ashkar liked solid facts and statistics, so it took a little time to get used to working with a psychic whose idea of informing him was 'this type of wrong' or 'that type of wrong.' However, Artarsal had saved all of their skins enough times for him to appreciate the alien's abilities. He didn't hesitate in radioing into the security hub and asking for the scans. He wasn't too surprised when he was told that he had two humanoids with no Company-regulation computing units just sort of wandering in the storage units of the compound.

Slowly, he raised his wrist-computer to his lips and held down on the screen, radioing his own men. "Go to Corridor 12, the South Entrance. We have some unregistered stowaways, and we're going to corner them. I'll meet you there. Do not shoot unless provoked, and have your guns on the setting 'stun'. If they've got information, they're more use to us alive."

Then, he turned to Artarsal. "Ready? 'Cause I don't care what type of 'wrong' this feels like, we're going to find out."

*DW*DW*DW*DW*DW*DW*DW*DW*

Well, you all did such a good job reviewing last time, you're getting me spoiled! Special thanks to all those who cared enough to chime in, and to those of you who missed out, now is your chance! REVIEW!