Sorry for the long break everyone. A lot has happened in the last few months, not including this virus outbreak. I lost my grandmother in December, and found out the day before the funeral that I am pregnant, due date being her birthday. There has been a lot of processing, and I thank you for your patience with me.

I also moved last month, just before the virus hit the news as more than just some people with a bad cold. During the move, my laptop was damaged, and I've only just got it functioning again. I am working to restore the updates I previously had ready, and to bring more to my characters.

Thank you again for your patience,

-Lee


The TARDIS materialized in front of a white stone wall and Martha stepped out first followed by the Doctor.

"Where are we?" She asked.

"Ah, smell that Atlantic breeze. Nice and cold. Lovely. Martha, have you met my friend?"

They looked up to see the Statue of Liberty. "Is that...? Oh my God! That's the Statue of Liberty!"

"Gateway to the New World. 'Give me you tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to break free...'"

"And here I thought he meant me." Zuri piped up from her seat on a bench nearby.

"Zuri!" The Doctor bounded over to give her a hug. Martha continued to stare at the statue.

"That's so brilliant. I've always wanted to go to New York. I mean the real New York, not the new, new, new, new, new..." Martha trailed off.

They walked to the edge of the island with a view of the Manhattan skyline.

"Well, there's the genuine article," said the Doctor as he flung an arm over Zuri's shoulder. "So good, they named it twice. Mind you, it was New Amsterdam originally. Harder to say twice. No wonder it didn't catch on. New Amsterdam, New Amsterdam."

Zuri nudged him in the ribs. "Well anyone could get tired of it if you keep repeating it."

"I wonder what year it is 'cause look, the Empire State Building's not even finished yet." Martha pointed out. Sure enough, the building was still under construction, with metal scaffolding around the top spire.

"Work in progress," the Doctor agreed. "Still got a couple floors to go, and if I know my history, that makes the date somewhere around..."

Martha found a newspaper on the bench were Zuri had sat moments ago. "November 1, 1930."

"You're getting good at this." The Doctor praised, then he saw the paper and took it from her.

"Eighty years ago," Martha added. "It's funny 'cause you see all those old newsreels in black and white like it's so far away, but here we are. It's real. It's now." She laughed and then looked at the Doctor. "Come on, you. Where do we go first?"

Zuri sighed. "It's never that simple."

The Doctor held up the newspaper, revealing the headline. "I think our detour just got longer."

" 'Hooverville Mystery Deepens.' What's Hooverville?" Martha asked.

The Doctor, Zuri, and Martha strolled through the park.

"Herbert Hoover, 31st President of the USA, came to power a year ago. Up till then, New York was a boomtown, the Roaring Twenties, and then..." The Doctor began to explain.

Martha caught on quick. "The Wall Street Crash, yeah? When was that, 1929?"

"Yeah. Whole economy wiped out overnight. Thousands of people unemployed. Suddenly the huddled masses doubled in number with nowhere to go. So they ended up here in Central Park."

"What? They actually live in the park? In the middle of the city?"

"Yeah," said Zuri. "Where else could they go? No jobs, no means to keep their homes. The park is public, and the crackdown on homelessness would just lead to the arrest of more people than they know what to do with."


They arrived at Hooverville; a collection of quickly put together shacks and tents with random fire barrels placed throughout. Zuri smiled softly at a mother with her child, trying to show him how to start a fire.

"Ordinary people. Lost their jobs. Couldn't pay the rent and they lost everything. There are places like this all over America. You only come to Hooverville when there's nowhere else to go."

Zuri could hear shouting from another part of Hooverville. A man and a boy, maybe seventeen, were fighting.

"You thievin' lowlife!" The first man punched the boy. Two others came and tried to break up the fight.

"Loaf!"

"I didn't touch it!"

An older man stepped out of his tent and tried to stop the fight. "Cut that out!"

The two men ignored him and keep fighting.

"Cut that out! Right now!" He pushed the two men apart.

"He stole my bread!"

"That's enough!" The older man looked between the two of them. "Did you take it?"

"I don't know what happened. He just went crazy." The boy protested.

The first man lunged at him but was held back.

"That's enough!" The old man insisted. Other residents of Hooverville wandered over to see what's going on. The time travel trio came closer as well.

"Now think real careful before you lie to me." The older man stared them down.

"I'm starvin', Solomon." The boy finally hung his head. Solomon held out his hand and the kid reached under his coat and pulled out a loaf of bread, handing it over.

"We're all starvin'," Solomon said as he tore the loaf in half, handing each man a piece. "We all got families somewhere. No stealin' and no fightin'. You know the rules. Thirteen years ago I fought in the Great War. A lot of us did. And the only reason we got through was because we stuck together! No matter how bad things get, we still act like human beings. It's all we got."

The crowd scattered as the Doctor stepped forward.

"I suppose that makes you the boss around here?" He commented.

"And, uh, who might you be?"

"He's the Doctor, that's Zuri, and I'm Martha."

"A doctor." the man scoffed. "We got stockbrokers, we got a lawyer, but you're the first doctor. Neighbourhood gets classier by the day." He held his hands over a fire barrel, trying to warm them even a little bit.

Zuri gave him a smile. "How many people you got living here, Solomon?"

"At any one time, hundreds. No place else to go. But I will say this about Hooverville. We are a truly equal society, black, white, all the same. All starving." The man laughed. "So you're welcome, the three of you. But tell me, Doctor, you're a man of learning, right? Explain this to me."

He pointed to the Empire State Building, looming unfinished over the city like a watchtower. "That there's going to be the tallest building in the world. How can they do that, when we got people starving in the heart of Manhattan?"


The Doctor, Martha, and Zuri took a stroll through Hooverville, smiling at the children as they ran past. Zuri wanted nothing more than to return to the TARDIS and prepare a feast for these poor people, but she knew that she couldn't. They would interfere enough as it was with this point in time. Still, she snuck a granola bar into the pocket of a person passing by, thinking surely no one would notice.

The Doctor did.

But he kept his mouth shut, deciding instead to get more information out of Solomon. The leader was setting coffee over the fire to heat as they approached.

"So..." The Doctor held up the newspaper from before. "Men are going missing? Is this true?"

"It's true alright." Solomon sighed, ducking just inside the tent behind him.

"But what does missing mean?" Zuri asked from the tent door.

The Doctor nodded. "Yeah, men must come and go here all the time. It's not like anyone's keeping a register."

Solomon invited them in to sit. "This is different."

Martha leaned in. "In what way?"

"Someone takes them. At night. We hear something, someone calls out for help. By the time we get there, they're gone. Like they vanished into thin air."

"And you're sure someone's taking them?" The Doctor confirmed.

"Doctor, when you got next to nothing, you hold on to the little you got. Your knife, blanket, you take it with you. You don't leave bread uneaten, fire still burning."

"Have you been to the police?" said Martha.

"Yeah, we tried that. Another deadbeat goes missing, big deal."

"So the question is, who's taking them, and what for?" The Doctor ran a hand through his hair.

The young man from before, Frank, Zuri remembered, poked his head in the tent.

"Solomon, Mr. Diagoras is here."


The group trailed after him back to the center of the camp.

"I need men. Volunteers. I got a little work for you and you look like you could use the money."

"Yeah?" Frank called from the back of the crowd. "What is the money?"

"A dollar a day," said Mr. Diagoras.

The crowd grumbled.

"What's the work?" Solomon spoke.

"A little trip down the sewers. Got a tunnel that collapsed needs clearing and fixing. Any takers?"

"A dollar a day?" Solomon scoffed. "That's slave wage. Men don't always come back up, do they?"

Mr. Diagoras looked a little peeved. "Accidents happen."

"What do you mean?" the Doctor said. "What sort of accidents."

"You don't need the work, that's fine. Anybody else?"

The Doctor raised his hand.

"Enough with the questions." If Mr. Diagoras looked peeved before, now Zuri was sure she could see a vein throbbing in his neck. She raised her hand with a sigh.

"Oh, n-n-no." The Doctor clarified. "I'm volunteering."

Martha shot him a glared and raised her hand, along with Frank and Solomon. "I'll kill you for this." She reassured.


The group climbed down the ladder into to sewers, then looked up at the hatch to Mr. Diagoras.

"Turn left. Go about half a mile. Follow tunnel two seventy-three. Fall's right ahead of you, you can't miss it." The man instructed.

"And when do we get our dollar?" Frank asked.

"When you come up."

The Doctor frowned. "And if we don't come back up?"

"Then I got no one to pay." Diagoras then made a shooing motion, and they turned to the tunnel on their left.

"We just gotta stick together." Assured Frank. "It's easy to get lost. It's like a huge rabbit warren. You could hide an army down here."

Zuri shivered. Martha struck up a conversation with Frank about where he came from, and the Doctor asked about Diagoras.

She was about to bring up the fact that they had no tools, point out how weird this job was when the Doctor froze.

"Whoa!" He crouched on the floor beside a mass, like a jellyfish, laying on the ground, giving off a sickly green glow.

"Is that radioactive or something?" said Martha. "It's gone off, whatever it is."

The Doctor slipped on his glasses and picked it up carefully.

"And you've got to pick it up."

The Doctor sniffed it, then held it out to Zuri. She backed away, waving her hands. "No thanks."

"Shine your torch through it," he said. "Composite organic material. Martha, medical opinion?"

"It's not human, I know that," she replied as Frank and Solomon gave each other puzzled looks.

"No," the Doctor agreed. "it's not. And I'll tell you something else. We must be at least half a mile in and I don't see any signs of a collapse, do you? So why did Mr. Diagoras send us down here?"

"We're right underneath Manhattan," Zuri commented.

"We're way beyond half a mile," Solomon confirmed.

"That Diagoras bloke, was he lying?" said Martha.

"Looks like it." The Doctor nodded.

"So why did he want people to come down here?" Frank's confusion was written on his face.

"Solomon," the Doctor nodded to himself. "I think it's time you took these three back. I'll be much quicker on my own."

Zuri was about to announce that she wasn't going anywhere without him when a faint squeal was heard down the tunnel.

"What the hell was that?" Solomon whispered.

"Hello?!" Frank hollered.

Martha was quick to shush him.

"What if it was one of the folk who's gone missing? You'd be scared, half-mad down here on your own." The teen reasoned.

"Do you think they're still alive?" asked the Doctor.

Frank shrugged. "Heck, we ain't seen any bodies down here, maybe they just got lost?"

More squeals echoed off the walls.

Solomon shook his head. "I know I never heard nobody make a sound like that."

The Doctor stepped a few feet further down the tunnel as Frank commented that it sounded like more than one.

Solomon aimed his torch down the next tunnel, and Zuri caught her breath. Lazlo.

"We need to leave, now," she stated firmly. The Doctor glanced at her, noting the faint wobble in her tone. You alright?

Yes, but we should go. More are coming.

I just want to ask it a few questions. The Doctor turned back to the creature before him, a man-sized figure with the face of a pig. Zuri sighed and took to watching the other tunnels, tuning out the offers of help the Doctor offered as she prepared to run.


The running came soon, and the Doctor led them to a ladder, ushering her up first. He sonicked the hatch, and they burst up into a small room, but Frank was caught by the pig men. Solomon and the Doctor frantically pulled, but it was no use. There were more of them, shoving Frank down the tunnel and climbing the ladder. Solomon was forced to close the hatch, shouting for the Doctor to lock it up, that there was no way to save him.

"We have got to go back down! We can't just leave him!" The Doctor argued.

"No, I'm not losing anybody else! Those creatures were from hell! Hell itself! If we go after them, they'll take us all. There's nothing we can do, I'm sorry."

Just then, a woman stepped from behind a shelf, gun in her hands pointed directly at them.

"Alright, put 'em up."