When the Thing outside repeats Biff's three knocks and everyone else starts panicking, I decide it's time to plan my survival.

Step 1: stick as close to the Doctor as possible without looking like a weirdo. Granted, that might also be the most dangerous place to be, but he'll probably be able to handle the danger.

Step 2: listen to the Doctor. Whatever is about to go down, he's likely going to be the only one with any idea of how to handle it, so listen to what he says.

Step 3: don't attract attention—from the monster or the Doctor. I don't remember much about the show, but I'm pretty sure that people who gain the Doctor's attention either die for shock value or become a companion, and neither of those potential outcomes sound particularly appealing right now.

I nod determinedly, coming out of my thoughts just in time to hear Ayo instruct everyone to calm down and return to their seats.

"No! Don't just stand there telling us the rules! You're the hostess, do something!" The still unknown blonde woman shrieks.

"Hey! She is no more prepared to go out into Xtonic light on an air-less planet than you are!" I snap immediately, just managing to refrain from getting in her face.

Ayo shakes her head at me. "She's scared," she whispers, causing me to roll my eyes.

"We all are," I respond drily.

I hear four knocks, and I turn around to see the Doctor standing in front of the door with his hand raised, which I figure means that he was the one to knock. The Thing repeats the four knocks.

Okay, so I've decided to strike Step 1 from the list, because clearly this man is a moron that loves chaos and I don't think I could survive being in the eye of that particular storm.

The blonde woman continues panicking—so much so that I almost feel bad for snapping at her—while the other passengers shout at her to calm down, her hysteria apparently contagious as the others begin to look more and more uneasy.

"It's coming for me!" She cries, backing away towards the cockpit door, the ominous knocking seeming to follow her.

"Get out of there!" The Doctor shouts, rushing in her direction.

The lights go off, and I—and everyone else, I assume—am thrown off my feet as the crusader shakes, as if we'd just crashed into a another vehicle. When the crusader settles, I grab onto an armrest, struggling to stand, only to fall back to the ground when I feel a sharp sting in my ankle. As everyone else stands, I pull up my pant leg to examine my ankle.

"That doesn't look good," someone comments, and I look up to see the Doctor staring at my now swollen ankle. I'm about to respond when I happen to notice the screen behind him. It's only on for a second before it goes black, but it's long enough for me to notice the girl on it.

She looks familiar, I realize. There's nothing especially unique about her—Caucasian, blonde, pretty—but, knowing what I now know about the world I live in, she fills me with the same familiarity that the Doctor did. Now that I think about it, she might have been mouthing...

"Doctor?" said man glances away from my ankle questioningly. "Do you—"

Does he what? Know a blonde girl that might happen to be calling for him through the crusader tv screen thing? If memory serves, the dude is old as dirt, he probably knows plenty of blondes.

I can't even be sure the girl is important to the story, anyway. She could just be some actress I recognize from something else. She might not even be calling out for the Doctor, I could just be seeing things.

"—do you really think it looks bad?" I ask lamely. "My ankle, that is."

"Well, it certainly doesn't look great," he informs me, leaning down to grip me underneath my arm to help me stand. "How's the pain?"

"On a scale from one to ten, I'd probably give it a four. I think I just twisted my ankle when I got knocked over."

Jethro comes out from somewhere to grab my other arm, and the two help me into the seat closest to me.

"Has anyone else been hurt?" the Doctor asks once I've gotten settled and thanked both him and Jethro.

"It must have been an earthquake," Professor Hobbes says, probably more to convince himself that nothing strange is going on, rather than any actual belief that what just happened was as simple as an ordinary earthquake.

"The ground is fixed, though," Dee Dee asserts. "It can't have been an earthquake."

At this point, Ayo has come up to my side, squeezing my shoulder gently before reaching into the pouch in the seat in front of me, handing me a torch. "There are torches behind the seats. Everyone should take a torch."

Jethro, torch in hand, moves toward the front of the cabin. "What's wrong with her?" he asks, and I follow his gaze to the blonde woman from earlier who had been sure the Thing was coming for her. She was sitting on the floor with her back to the rest of them. The seats around her had been ripped up somehow, and I felt a chill run down my spine.

"It's alright, everything's fine now," the Doctor tells her soothingly. "We're all still alive, the walls still intact—it's over."

Something about this scene has me so enthralled that I don't even notice what the others are doing until a blinding white light appear suddenly from the cockpit doors. A terrified shriek comes from my mouth before I could even stop it.

"What was that?!" Val demands, sounding as terrified as I feel.

"What about the driver?" Biff asks.

"The cabin's gone," Ayo says weakly as the Doctor kneels by the panel on the wall.

"It can't be gone, that's ridiculous," Prof—no, this guy is an obtuse idiot, I refuse to call him professor—Hobbes objects.

"Well it's not fucking there, now, is it?" I snark, wincing when I accidentally hit my ankle against the seat in front of me.

"There was nothing there," Ayo continues shakily as if no one else had spoken. "Like it was ripped away."

Biff flashes his torch at the Doctor and asks, "What are you doing?"

"Oh, that's better," the Doctor responds, not really answering the question. "Little bit of light. Molto bene."

The Doctor has pulled out a torch-like thing, an odd whirring sound coming from it as he waves it over the panel.

Sonic something, my mind supplies rather unhelpfully. It doesn't do wood.

Whatever that means.

"Do you even know what you're doing?" Val asks, followed quickly by Biff demanding that the Doctor "leave the wall alone."

"The cabin can't be gone!" Hobbes insists again, my eye twitching in annoyance.

Sighing, I happen to glance at the blonde woman again, noticing how she still hasn't moved from where she sits on the floor.

"Jethro," I call softly to the teen who seems to be watching the woman as well. "Has she moved at all?"

"No, she hasn't," he tells me quietly. "Not even a twitch. I can't even tell if she's breathing."

I feel another chill as I realize that there might be something seriously wrong with the woman. My hand grips the armrest of my seat as I rack my brain for anything that might tell me what's going on. Nothing specific comes to mind, though I do feel the sudden urge to move as far from the woman as possible.

Very, very far.


AN: I tried to post this earlier, but it kept saving weird. Usually, I write the chapters on my phone whenever I have time, then I copy and paste it onto the Doc Manager here on the site from my phone to post, but when I tried it today, it kept saving a bunch of random letters and shit. It looked like some kind of alien language or something. I had to rewrite it directly onto the Doc Manager, word for word. So annoying, especially since this is another long chapter, but whatever.