Miranda tingled painfully all over, as if her entire body had fallen asleep. Lights began to flicker back on, and Miranda remembered where she was. The Doctor! Her muscles felt rubbery and sore, but she forced herself to get up. She winced, noticing a nasty burn ringing her right wrist. She looked at the cart. The restraint seemed to have been blown open by the electrical current. Feeling shaky and strange, she got some relief from seeing that the tube and its associated controls were completely deactivated.
"Doctor?" she called out, seeing that the tube was still swirling with glowing Time Lord essence. She saw no movement within.
"Hunnngh." Miranda turned and saw Ace start to wake up. She held her head with one hand and staggered to her feet, blinking groggily at Miranda. "Blimey, what happened?"
"You okay?" Miranda asked, feeling foggy on that last point, herself.
Ace grimaced. "Yeah. You?"
"Little electrocuted, I think, but otherwise...help me get the Doctor out." Miranda indicated the disturbingly quiet tube.
Ace stared at the wreck that was formerly Goran's machinery. "Blimey," she said again, shaking her head. "I keep missing all the best bits!"
Miranda shuffled achingly over to the tube, trying to see how the thing latched. "Scarf? Doctor? Can you hear me? Are you okay?"
"I hear you."
The voice sounded strained, and very soft, but Miranda sighed in relief. She patted the tube. "Okay. Ace and I are going to get you out of here."
Ace joined her at the tube, and together they figured out how to release the clamps holding it shut. Miranda let Ace do the actual work of lifting it open, and both of them instinctively stepped back as the tingly essence vapours spilled out and dissipated in the air. Miranda chanced inhaling some of them, hoping for a little pick-me-up after everything she'd just gone through.
"Miranda, look!" Ace suddenly exclaimed.
Miranda opened her eyes and looked into the tube. "What the—?"
The Doctor was gone. His clothes, including his big hat and tattered scarf, lay crumpled in the bottom of the tube, but there was no sign of his actual person.
"He disintegrated!" Ace gasped.
"No way," Miranda spluttered.
"He must have." Ace looked panic-stricken.
"But he just spoke!" Miranda was beginning to feel likewise.
"Then where'd he go?"
Miranda stared at the pile of clothes in growing horror. She had no answer.
The pile moved. "I haven't gone anywhere!" Scarf's voice—sounding weak and a little distorted—cried. Then a tiny, wrinkled hand reached out from under the brim of Scarf's hat and shifted it aside.
Miranda and Ace shrieked.
"Is it really that bad?" the tiny creature asked, with Scarf's voice.
Miranda honestly didn't know what to say. It looked—for lack of a better word, --like a gremlin. Papery thin, greyish skin, a large, hairless head with a pair of astonishingly big, rheumy eyes on either side of a beaked nose that blinked at her with open intelligence. It bore a weird resemblance to Scarf, and when it spoke again, it had his distinctive, toothy mouth. "Well, don't just stand there gaping at me!"
"What happened to you?" Ace demanded.
The little gremlin-Scarf glanced down at himself briefly, and then glared at her. "Isn't it obvious? I'm old!"
"You're tiny," Ace said, sounding as though she were still trying to convince herself.
"I've been deprived of my essence. We Time lords can live a very long time even without completely regenerating, but this is what happens to us when we do."
"Can we fix it? If we give you your essence back, can we—?" Ace's question was cut off abruptly by the sudden pinging of an alarm. "Now what?"
"Must be a security alert, probably initiated when you demolished these controls," the mini-Doctor said.
"Well, no worries, then. All the androids are gone," Ace shrugged.
Miranda felt her insides start to shrivel up, and she turned to an adjacent bank of machinery that hadn't been damaged by her cart. She watched one of the screens display something like looked suspiciously like a schematic. Several areas of it were blinking. "But there's still the Dalek robots. And they don't fool around," she intoned worriedly.
"And there're those incubation chambers. What if you didn't turn this thing off in time?" Ace added.
Miranda felt like crying, but instead just drew a deep breath and sighed. "Never a dull moment, is there?"
"Quickly, let's get to the TARDIS," Scarf squeaked. "We'll be safest there."
Thankful for another brain, Miranda nodded. "That works for me." Turning back to the tube, she saw Goran still lying on the floor, unconscious.
"Will one of you mind giving me a lift? I regret to say my legs seem a fair bit shorter than yours, presently," Scarf remarked wryly.
Miranda experienced a moment of squicky uncertainty, but brushed it aside. "No problem. Ace, can you toss Goran in here for safekeeping?"
"Gladly."
"Fantastic. Doctor, if you'll excuse me..." Miranda apologised gently as she reached for the baby-sized Time Lord.
"One moment," he said. He quickly wrapped himself in his scarf for decency and donned his hat for style before allowing her to pick him up.
Ace began to drag Goran towards the tube.
"My sonic screwdriver!" the Doctor interrupted.
Ace quickly rifled through the pockets of his discarded coat and tossed said object at Miranda. The Doctor caught it quickly from his perch in Miranda's arms. Ace threw Goran into the tube and latched it shut with a satisfied flourish. "Let's get out of here!"