"Really?" The Doctor asked Will. "A Bhut Jolokia? The ghost pepper. Ominous name."

"Yeah, I guess. I can't remember the name. The point is, she was in a medically induced coma for three days. Doc, you gotta stop this before it gets going."

"And you're sure? You're really sure?"

"There's no mistaking that look. You must know the one I mean. I mean, c'mon, this can't be the first time someone fell for you. I bet you've broken your share of young girls' hearts."

"Oh, yeah. Happens to me… quite a lot, actually. Must be the teeth."

"Yeah, teenage girls are totally into oral hygiene," Will said sarcastically.

"Thought so, yeah," he said, missing it.

"Look, Matt should be back tomorrow. Just... take it easy on her, will you?"

"Absolutely. I'll be as careful as I can," he said. "Evening, Will."

"Night Doc."

The Doctor walked out into the corridor, and was about to head back to the broom closet with the TARDIS in it when Sue walked past him. "English! This way," she said, raising her right hand over her head and snapping to get his attention. She didn't stop walking, and just intrigued enough to let the disrespect pass, he followed her to her office. He came inside, and she closed the door and sat down behind the desk.

"I believe you have something of mine," she said without preamble.

"Oh, have I? Sorry, I just found it in… uh… sorry, what're we talking about?"

"Oh, come on, Doctor. You didn't think I'd be stupid enough not to have a security system, did you? I've got you on camera." She unlocked her bottom desk drawer and pulled out a small white cube. "It's not like it'll do you the least bit of good without this. Much like your ridiculously loud tie wouldn't be the same garish disaster without your spiky haircut."

The Doctor wasn't listening. He was leaning over to examine the cube, specs on his nose. "A 4D holographic memory core with quantum folding capacity. Oh, that's lovely, that is." He looked up at her. "And definitely not from around this neighborhood."

"No, it's not," she said. "Who are you?"

"The Doctor. Who are you?"

"Sue Sylvester."

"No, I don't mean your assumed name. I mean who are you and what planet are you from?"

"Sue rolled her eyes and sighed, marveling at the young agent's inept nature," Sue said, rolling her eyes, sighing, and presumably thinking him inept.

"Sorry?" he said.

She pointed at a digital voice recorder sitting next to the datacube. "I've decided the world deserves a chance to live vicariously through me, so I'm drafting a novelization of my life. I'll get Noam Chomsky to transcribe these when I'm done."

"That's all well and good, but my question remains unanswered."

"Earth. I'm from Earth. Ohio even, if you think it's remote enough to be a world in its own right."

"What?"

"C'mon, Doctor. You're giving your government a bad name. Who are you with? MIB? CIA? MI6? MI5?"

"You can't be from Earth. You just... can't. How could you have this?"

"Salvage."

"You found it?"

"Nineteen years ago I was taking a sabbatical in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, like I did every summer. I was... ten... and looking to reorient myself with my more primal instincts."

"You're saying you're only 30 years old?" The Doctor asked, disbelievingly.

"29. I was camping alone under a rock outcropping, with just a hunting knife for defense. I only ate what I killed myself. After a few days of eating nothing but raw rabbit flesh and using the blood to keep myself cool-" the Doctor pulled a face at this mental image, but she carried on without stopping the story. "-I could almost have believed I was hallucinating. I saw a massive fireball hurtling towards the Earth in the distance. I was sure I had imagined it. But the next morning the smoke was still there, so I went to investigate." She leaned in closer to him. "It was a ship. A space ship. That's where I found this."

"A likely story," The Doctor said, arms folded. "No way there's any truth to it, of course."

"Well, for one thing, you couldn't just salvage a 4D holographic memory core with quantum folding capacity. It's not just gonna fall out through a window. That's not an intergalactic thumb drive you've got there. That's the computer core for an entire space cruiser. The entire collected knowledge of an entire species is in there, yottabytes of information. It'd be hard wired into the very heart of the ship."

"Alright," she said shrugging, "so I was good at salvage. I learned a thing or two when I collected scrap metal for the Bolivian Navy."

"When was that, at age 7? Your story's starting to slip. Not that it's much of a story. The day you're 29 is the day I'm only 100."

Sue stood up to face him, getting mere inches from his nose. "None of that really matters," she said. "The point is, I found all this at the crash site. I know where it is, and you don't, and your government wouldn't have kept you hanging around here for a month if it wasn't important that you find it. I consider myself a freelance paranormal investigator and I've already been on the case for twenty years. So when you get tired of running into dead ends and you're ready to hand the investigation over to me, I'll be here waiting to take you there. Now get out of my office. I'm already going to have to burn this track suit to get the residue of inadequacy out, and I don't want to replace the carpet too." She went back to her chair and sat down, busying herself with paperwork. Clearly this interview was terminated.

He stormed his way back to the broom closet with the TARDIS in it. She was infuriating! Completely infuriating! Arrogant, judgmental, with a superiority complex to rival Henry Van Statten's. He would not work with that woman! Not now, not in a thousand lifetimes, not if he had to spend the rest of his life here in this tiny little town.

And yet, she had the encoding device, and the computer core, and if he wanted to play it, he was going to have to find the ship. Under any ordinary circumstances the TARDIS would have picked it up without any problems, but nothing on his own ship was working properly. Without access to the time vortex the TARDIS was failing, and there wasn't much he could do about it. It got its sustenance from the universe itself and being cut off for this long was starting to take its toll. If another month went by this way, he'd have to start deleting rooms.

Two weeks. He'd give himself two weeks, and if he hadn't found anything, then he'd give in to her demands and let her take him to the ship.


"You sure you're up for this?" Rachel asked, and she seemed genuinely concerned. "I know how important it is that you keep caught up on your rest right now…"

"And miss this?" Quinn said? "If there's a remote chance of seeing you stunned speechless, I wouldn't miss it."

They were hunkered down in the bushes outside the gym, wearing almost absurdly clichéd burglar costumes. Rachel had insisted on making them herself – not that an ensemble of black with a black ski cap was hard to put together, even on short notice, but it still felt ridiculous. Each had a video recording device of some kind; Quinn had "borrowed" a flip cam from her father's study, and Rachel was using the video camera that she normally used to post videos of her singing on the internet. The quality wasn't great on either but Quinn had pointed out that that worked to their advantage. Even if someone thought the videos were faked, it seemed like it would be harder to create low res trickery than something too crisp and sharp to be real.

"Time?" Rachel prompted.

"11:45." Quinn replied.

"Quinn! How many times?"

The blonde sighed. "23:45 hours."

"Thank you. Was that so hard?"

"You're making too big a deal out of this," Quinn said. "All I want is evidence that I'm not crazy, not to be one of the Ghostbusters."

"Ssh! Quiet! I hear something!" She had her ear pressed up to the door and could hear a faint scuttling sound from within. She tried the door but it was locked. "You'll have to give me a boost up to the window if I'm going to see anything."

"I'm… not really supposed to be doing any heavy lifting, y'know?"

"Fat jokes? Really Quinn?"

"No, I don't… I wasn't… I'm just not supposed to…"

"You were the bottom of the pyramid for a whole year before you made head cheerleader," Rachel said. "You can give me a leg up for 30 seconds."

"Alright, fine," Quinn said, interlacing her fingers into a brace. Rachel stepped in and hoisted herself up to one of the narrow windows up above. She aimed the camera in through the window by extending her arm all the way up and panning around. "30 seconds was up a long time ago," Quinn said a minute later, her voice straining.

"Fine, fine, I'm coming down," she said. They sat down with their backs to the wall and Rachel rewound the video by a couple minutes. They crowded in around the tiny screen. They watched the video. Then Rachel rewound it and they watched it again. And again. And once more for good measure.

"Are you seeing what I'm seeing?"

"That depends," Rachel replied. "Do you see a spiderlike robot polishing the hardwood floor, while another one does the windows with a high powered sprayer?"

"Yeah."

"I'm seeing what you're seeing, yeah."


Bzzt Bzzt. Bzzt Bzzt.

"Hello? Who died?" Finn said, his face muffled by his pillow. "Rachel? Rachel what are you calling for at… what time is it?"

"…"

"2 in the... y'know what, I'm not even gonna say anything. What is it this time? Another nightmare about being in a dead-end career on an off-Broadway production?"

"…"

"Rachel, don't..."

"…"

"You're not making..."

"...!"

"Alright, okay, calm down."

"...!"

"Quinn? What's Quinn doing there with..."

"..."

"Alright, I..."

"..."

"Okay! But..."

"..."

"No, I'm not getting up. I'm exhausted. Between work, glee club, football, and school…"

"…"

"Yes, alright."

"…"

"Yes."

"…"

"Yes."

"…"

"Rachel, I don't want to…"

"…! … … … … … … … … … … …!…I… … … … … …!"

"Alright, alright, I'll watch it tomorrow after rehearsal."

"…"

"Yeah, okay."

"... ..."

"Tell her I love her too." He hung up.

Bzzt Bzzt. Bzzt Bzzt.

"Tomorrow I said! Goodnight, Rachel!" Finn Hudson shut off his cell phone for the night.