A/N: Sorry for taking so long to update this. I got completely sidetracked...
Just to remind you:
As Donna tried to form the words for her next question, the light seemed to intensify, making her surroundings shimmer. "Doctor!" she screamed; and that was it.
She disappeared from the room.
Part 11
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Every nerve in her body seemed to be under attack. Donna couldn't work out which way was up as she fought for breath. Then that maddening spotlight switched off, and she was left standing, or sitting, or perhaps floating, in the dark.
"Where am I?" she shouted. "You'd better tell me right now or so help me I'll break every bone in your body. That's if you've got bones. If not, I shall stamp all over you until I've squished you into a pulp!"
There was no answer, and no sound.
"Can you hear me?! I want answers and I want them now!" she demanded loudly. "You've been pestering me for weeks, so you'd better have a bloody good reason why!"
Still no answer. Then a distinctive aroma wafted up.
"Is that toast? Are you actually making toast? Don't tell me I've been avoiding outer space toasters! That really is a turn up for the books!" she mocked them. "I bet you don't even have marmalade."
Her surroundings were slowly revealed as the 'house lights' were gradually lifted. She was seated in a large square hammock, which weirdly didn't swing, set within a room that could have escaped from any number of science fiction films. All around her were small pieces of machinery, painted in camouflage colours, as was the rest of the space. Not exactly what you'd call exciting.
"You could have tried harder with the décor," she complained as her gaze explored the room, disclosing hardly anything worthy of note. "All of this is old hat. Don't you know that? Or don't they have a decent Ikea where you come from?" She wrinkled up her nose in disgust. "Not even a Captain Jean-Luc Picard to meet. What rubbish aliens."
There was movement behind her, but she couldn't turn her head or body around to see.
"It's no good hiding back there!" she yelled. "You won't get anything from me if I can't see you."
Almost immediately something small slid into view. If Donna had been feeling generous she would have said it looked like a version of Tinkerbelle; but she was pissed off now, and merely thought it looked like a mouse in a dress.
"Come on then, tell me what you want with me and why you've bothered to do all this; using your best Bond villain voice, of course," she goaded the creature.
"You are Donna Noble," the tiny thing stated in an ethereal voice.
"Guilty as charged. And?"
"We need you, Donna Noble," it continued.
"Well I'd sort of worked that one out for myself," Donna retorted sarcastically. "Are you likely to tell me why?"
"You are the most important woman in all creation."
"Now you've lost me," Donna admitted. "Did you really say most important woman in creation? 'Cos that ain't true. I'm not even the most important woman in our house, let alone our street."
That seemed to rile the little being, and it glided nearer to emphasise its words. "You are she of the prophecy."
"Not me, love. You've got the wrong person," Donna insisted. "This is clearly a case of mistaken identity, so we'll say no more about it if you let me go home now." She tried to stand, but found she was incapable of any movement whatsoever. "Here, what's going on?" she huffed.
"We need you to unlock the key," the fairy mouse told her sternly.
"And I keep telling you that I don't know what you are on about!" Donna asserted. "Either you tell me how I'm supposed to be this person you keep going on about or let me go!"
The creature flitted about agitatedly. "The prophecy says you will use your magic amulet."
Donna frowned in confusion. "The only thing I've got that is remotely like that is my necklace. It was left to me in the box where I found Dad's old army bits."
Fairy Mouse seemed pleased about that. "We have chosen the correct day! You wear the magic amulet."
How could they not see it hanging around her neck? Donna tilted her head down as if she'd be able to see her necklace by doing so. "I always wear it when I want some luck. If I use it to do whatever it is you want me to do, what happens after that? Are you holding me to ransom, or am I likely to get dumped in the middle of a field in the back of beyond, ending up sounding like some lunatic? Because I am warning you… I'll hunt you down and have your guts for garters!"
The fairy mouse fluttered about, trying to calm her down. "We need help with saving our planet," it admitted sadly.
"You do?" Donna immediately felt sorry for it.
"It requires a great sacrifice, but we have waited patiently for you to be whole," it explained.
Rage swept through her. "I'm not exactly in pieces here, mate! What are you on about? Who has to make the sacrifice?"
The answer chilled Donna to the bone.
"You have to."
Suddenly she hoped the only thing she would sacrifice would be not getting a slice of that toast she could smell.
Donna also desperately hoped that the Doctor was what he said he was, and manage to rescue her. Little did she know that he was frantically trying to do just that.
Everyone around him was screaming blue murder, or rushing about with microphones to interview people. He ignored all that in order to thrash about with his sonic screwdriver, trying desperately to get a decent reading of the frequency that had teleported Donna out of the room. After a sudden brainwave he pointed it at the seat where Donna had been sitting, and finally got a useable readout.
"Ah hah!" he cried out triumphantly. "Now I've got you! I've just got to tweak the tertiary quantum setting, activate the flow and I should…"
There were several loud screams again as his senses were swamped with copious sources of input, the room fizzled around him, and he promptly disappeared from sight in a flicker of sparkly lights.
"Fantastic, darling!" Bunty applauded, and set about making the most of this strange phenomenon. She could easily imagine Donna getting sponsorship, the nightmare of the threat of cancellation taken away, and her programme taken up by numerous foreign television channels after this.
Trying not to pant heavily, the Doctor found himself in a darkened room as he came to. His inner senses told him he had blacked out momentarily and that worried him. Why had he lost consciousness? Nothing within the transportation beam should have done that.
Clicking his tongue to the roof of his mouth he could taste an atmospheric disturbance that made his body tingle. One way to describe it would be to liken it to a wine glass vibrating when an audio speaker hits the right frequency. Something there had tuned into his personal frequency almost perfectly. The question wasn't only how, but why? Allowing his brain to work quietly in the background on that one, he returned his attention to his current location.
It was obviously an enclosed room of some sort because there was no movement of air to indicate he was out in the wilderness; and the temperature was way above absolute zero, so he wasn't merely floating in space. Plus, of course, a form of gravity was acting upon his body, but there wasn't any indication he was on a planet. Whatever the mechanism was that had moved his body it had placed him gently down; and for that he was eternally grateful. Most of the flooring in spaceships was flipping hard! You'd think someone somewhere would have invented space carpets by now. At least rubber matting did exist, and it provided ample enough comfort.
Holding himself very still, he tuned into his senses and gradually became more aware of his surroundings. It was one of those really boring places that smelt of little of interest… apart from the faint whiff of toast, he realised. It was a good job he had already eaten. 'Right, ignore the toast, Doctor,' he told himself. There was another fainter smell that he knew very well.
It was Donna's perfume. Now that brought a smile to his face as he thought about that moment in her bedroom. She'd been so close to kissing him; he knew that. Well he thought he knew that, thinking about it. Her pheromones had clearly said so; and weren't they delicious. Of course Luke Smith had had to disturb them at that moment! The little… Still, he could deal with all that disruption. He didn't have natural charm for nothing, he thought with a sniff.
And talking of Donna, he had to find out where she was and discover why she had been taken in such a dramatic way. It was strange how she had been taken from a live television broadcast; it was as though these aliens wanted maximum publicity. Was it an intergalactic version of Fathers For Justice? It could be. Except they hadn't chosen to dress up as superheroes; instead they had chosen a woman who had just appeared in front of millions of viewers wearing a black leather corset, stockings, wickedly high heels, a choker with a lead, and him. Not that anyone could accuse him of looking. Except he didn't necessarily need to run that list through his head, since that image had popped up within his working memory on several occasions, but he enjoyed it revisiting him nonetheless. At that point he was aware of the effect gravity was having on his blood stream for entirely different reasons, and he forced his mind to concentrate on the problem in hand rather than in thoughts.
Tuning into his gundog senses, as someone had once described them, the Doctor found himself creeping along an extremely narrow corridor. One that was no doubt full of miles of cables and venting ducts, if the usual space craft pattern had been followed. You'd think space architects would have a greater imagination about these things. Or at least add some lights once in a while.
Having internally grumbled to himself for several yards, he eventually found the end of the corridor, a light source, and the possible origin of the scents he had detected.
Okay, make that a definite; because he could clearly see before him, suspended like a bag of Satsumas, was Donna spread out most delightfully on a hammock of some sort. He could almost imagine her soaking up the sun as solar rays kissed her freckled skin whilst… A sudden sound made that daydream crash out of his head and forced him to concentrate on the display in front of him.
He heard an almost disembodied voice say, "We need your sacrifice, Donna Noble of Earth."
"Why? What's so special about me?!" Donna demanded to know.
It took a lot of effort on his part to wrench his attention away from the fact she was shackled by some means to the hammock. Jack would have had a field day with the possibilities!
"You hold within you great power," the voice continued.
The Doctor was surprised to notice that it belonged to such a small and cute being. But he wanted to know what sort of power they sought and how Donna would help with that.
"All I'm holding in at the moment is the urge to thump you one if you don't hurry up and tell me exactly what you expect me to do!" Donna cried out in frustration.
The fairy mouse twirled upward, dancing a demented dance as a star chart burst into life on some sort of monitor on the way. "This is your home," Fairy Mouse told her. "And this is the key."
"I don't think it is," Donna insisted. "That looks nothing like the Milky Way."
Ah, this was his cue. The Doctor stepped into the room to declare, "Donna is right. That isn't her home. You seem to have got your wires crossed somewhere."
"Who are you and why do you think such a thing?" Fairy Mouse queried.
"I'm the Doctor," he proclaimed. "And that is Kasterborous; the constellation where I came from."