Chapter 30.

The Big DME.

Rose had never seen anything like it. She had been traveling with the Doctor for a while now, and they had never landed in a place like this. He favored the living history, the events as they were happening, all shrouded and danger and wild to behold. But this was obviously a place for tourism. Right out of the TARDIS she pegged ten different alien species in a crowd of hundreds strolling a beautiful, expansive lawn. And beyond them, with architecture like the coliseum of Rome and big neon letters flashing up and down its columns, was the museum. It was spectacular.

"What in the world…?" Grace came out beside her, equally grounded by the sight. She looked a little disoriented by all the activity.

The Doctor came out last, smiling at their reaction. He put an arm over both of their shoulders and beamed at the building. "Ladies, welcome to the Definitive Museum of Earth History, Human Development, and Carbon-Life Physiology, otherwise known as the DME – the Definitive Museum of Earth. We are about a billion-billion miles from Earth's solar system, on UOHP-9. Universal Organization of Histories and Preservation, location 9, that is."

Rose shook herself. "What year is it? Is the Earth still…?"

"Oh, no. Earth has long-since expired. No longer sustains life. It's still out there, of course, and the sun is being held back until the funds run dry – remember that?"

Rose nodded. It was their first date.

"You see, there is a very peculiar race – I say race, but there are really only five of them, hive-mind. Love those. They're called the Curators and they spend their lives gathering information about the universe. They compile it and create museums out of it in order to share it with the masses. This building is dedicated to Earth, and there are others, dedicated to other life-bearing planets, all over the place. Shall we go in?"

The three of them walked on, with the Doctor slightly in the lead. He strode confidently across the lawn, nodding and smiling at aliens as they passed. Rose kept step with Grace, concerned by her expression. She had wide eyes, and suddenly seemed younger than before.

"It's alright." Rose nodded. "Not every trip turns out crazy."

Grace smiled, shrugging. "That's not… It's just… Can you believe all this? I mean, I barely believed it when we went to the past, and that was so simple, but this? There are spaceships landing over there. There are aliens everywhere."

"You'll get used to it, I promise."

Beyond the front steps, they came into a magnificent lobby. It was shaped like the globe, with projections that looked like documentary clips playing on all the walls. The Doctor pointed proudly to a metal pin on his lapel and the alien behind the window waved them on.

"Behold, my friends, the greatest sum of Earth knowledge in the universe." He did a little spin, and then pointed at Grace seriously. "Do not wander off."

She frowned. "What fun is that?"

"I mean it."

Grace glanced at Rose. "Does he sound like he means it?"

Rose liked her mischievous tone. "I don't know. Sounds like he might not mean it."

"I do mean it." He moved his threatening finger between them. "I was afraid of this."

"It's not wandering off if we use the buddy system. You've been here before, but this is our first time, so I call Rose." Grace grabbed Rose by the hand and dragged her away.

XxXxX

The DME was absolutely massive.

It hosted dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of stunning exhibits. Rose found herself walking through tunnels and into rooms, and upstairs, and down into caves, as the museum took them on a complete tour of the history of her home. It was much more involved than she would have imagined. She got lost in it very early, and time passed her by as she was drawn to one babbling scientist, and then another. Gigantic hologram dinosaurs and bloody recreations of the earliest trials and tribulations of mankind were endlessly entertaining.

Grace turned out to be a very strange girl, but also very likeable. She harassed every statue they went by, trying to ride one of the animatronic raptors and then attempting to swing from one of the vines in a display about the world's biomes. Rose thought she might get the two of them arrested, but then she started laughing, and she couldn't stop. Grace was a handful. She was a toddler and a grown up, all wrapped into one – a lot like the Doctor. No wonder he liked her.

She kept up a constant dialogue, polling Rose on everything they saw as if expecting Rose to have been there for every major event in Earth history. She asked strangers what they thought, and entertained children with her antics, and occasionally took the reins and started educating the crowd on the science behind what they were seeing.

Rose imagined she had grown up rather sheltered, without the nudges to grow up, but with a mind like a steel trap. She was absorbing information.

When they came to the 1800s, and Rose felt sore all over from being tugged and dragged by Grace for several hours, her companion finally slowed down. Grace walked along a wall of grainy photographs, running her finger over the faces of black slaves in North America. She lingered, and the enthusiasm drained out of her, and she became somber and thoughtful.

Rose tried to pick a familiar face out of the photos, but there were dozens of faces, and they were all filled with the same rough determination. Grace was fixating on one in particular – a woman scowling near the center of the group, her face nearly bisected by a deep black scar, her eyes beady and angry. Below, in the caption, she was identified as Bloody Polly.

"Do you know her?"

Grace swallowed. "I met her, yeah. She was just a little girl."

Rose read over the caption. "This is an image of the Bloody Brigade, an abolitionist organization led by the infamous Bloody Polly. On their march through the Virginian countryside on April 3, 1879, the pictured renegade slaves temporarily overthrew the town of Westfield, killing over a dozen former slave owners in what was believed to be the bloodiest act of retribution after the American Civil War…" Rose looked again at the faces, and then at Grace. "You knew her?"

"She was just a little girl," Grace repeated. She fixated on the picture. "The Doctor said… but I never saw her like this. What happened to her face?"

"It looks like someone cut her."

"No, I mean…" Grace put her hand on the image. "Look. Look how angry she is. Look at that… rage. When I knew her she was just… scared. Helpless. I wish she could have been happy."

Rose put her hand on Grace's shoulder, and pulled her away from the pictures. "Come on. Lots more to see."

She urged her now saddened companion through the exhibits, and glanced back every now and then to keep track of the Doctor. He had been trailing them through the museum, finding his own entertainment, but he looked a little grim here. He saw the same picture Grace did, and looked up to give a sad, serious look at her, but thankfully she was in the middle of talking a small child out of a toy car so she could take a turn on it. Rose intercepted his eyes, and hoped she looked curious enough to warrant an explanation later.

He looked away quickly, almost guiltily, and Rose was forced to wonder what the two of them had done in the past. Were they responsible for that angry woman in the picture?

Hours passed as they wove their way around the museum. Rose worked on distracting Grace for a while, keeping that tinge of sadness away, and when she was finally perky again, the conversation started up. She was easy to talk to. She asked a lot of questions, and listened intently for the answer, even when it seemed she was focused on something else. She always listened. Rose told her about the Earth as she knew it – the celebrities, the jewelry, the heartthrobs – and Grace gave her bits and pieces of the Earth as it was in 2558.

Rose talked about her mum, about her dad, and about the places she had been with the Doctor. From the age of steel to the space age, they talked.

In the modern era, where Rose was from, she relented and started posing for statues. She was here to have fun, after all. Grace pulled the lid off of an ice-cream machine in one of the little break areas and started fiddling with the wires while Rose stood watch, politely informing others that the machine was broken and that they were the repair crew. Grace forced it to spew chocolate ice-cream, got them both a cone, and then announced that it was 'free Earth food day,' and gathered up a crowd of kids to deal with the overflowing machine.

While she had the ice-cream, Grace opened up a little more. She told Rose about her encounter with Polly as a child, and how the dog had come back to life. It was a source of debate between her and the Doctor and she worried that he was angry with her for it.

But other things worried her as well.

"And, you know, I was so sure about what I was saying when I said it. He was being so… black and white. But did you see her face…? I told her that, I gave her that advice, so she could fight back and be happy one day. But she looked miserable. She looked angry. She looked like that was what she had been doing her whole life, and she was never going to stop, not until she died."

Rose leaned against one of the gigantic meteors in the geology exhibit, giving up on walking and trying to lick her ice-cream. "Did she? I mean, did she do it until she died?"

Grace shrugged. "I don't wanna to know. I really, really don't wanna to know. Because I know she did. I already know that. But I don't wanna to see it. Because I did that."

"You just said something to her. You didn't make her become a killer."

"I basically told her it was okay to kill people." Grace groaned, taking a big bite out of her ice-cream, seemingly unaffected by its temperature. "And then Henry died. The Doctor said she ran away, but to where? Did she just wander around in the woods?"

"If you hadn't gone there, all of that would have still happened." Rose felt her guilt, and understood it. She had made bad decisions in the past before as well. She still felt guilty.

Grace shrugged. "I guess so."

"And those people might have died, but you and the Doctor saved them, right?"

"I'm still not sure about that. I don't know what happened with the dog. He keeps asking, but I don't know." She took another bite, and then devoured the cone all at once, like she was afraid someone was going to take it from her.

Grace started circling the displayed rocks, staring at them intently, even leaning in to sniff some of them. She circled one of them, sitting proudly on its podium, and then dove for it.

Rose tried to grab her. "What are you doing?"

She licked it.

Rose checked around them for another husky security guard to escape from, but nothing happened. No one seemed to notice her quick sampling of the exhibit. "Are you crazy? What was that? Do you know how many people have run their grimy hands on that rock?"

Grace made a face, popping her tongue. "Oh, yeah. But what're you gonna do, right?"

"How about you don't lick the rock? That's a start."

"I think it's from Earth." Grace patted it. "Salty."

She turned and headed through the next archway, joining with a crowd that filed toward the food court. Rose followed, dumping the remainder of her ice-cream into a trash bin.

The food court was a towering thing, with clusters of aliens everywhere and the smell of some savory, and some disgusting, foods drifting in puffs of smoke toward the vaulted ceiling. She was assaulted immediately by the sound – hundreds of conversations in various languages, all of them trying to translate in her head at the same time. She was grateful when Grace took a seat near the edge, at a table for two.

Rose sat across from her, groaning when her weight was off her feet. She watched Grace, who seemed thoughtful all of the sudden. "You know, the Doctor licks things like that."

Grace crossed her arms. "Do you think he already knows all of this?" She waved around. "I mean, do you think he knows every bit of this?"

"Probably. I wouldn't put it past him." Rose folded her arms, leaning in so she could lower her voice. "But you know what? I think he took us here to show us how smart he is."

"Why would he do that?"

"He likes it when people tell him he's clever."

Grace laughed, and Rose saw a familiar line of thought running through her eyes.

"So what do you think of him so far? Of all of this?"

Grace shrugged. "The Doctor's weird."

Rose snorted. "Yeah, he is."

"I like this a lot. All of this." She smiled, and then frowned. "But I don't think he's going to let me stay much longer."

Rose couldn't help her surprise, and disappointment. "Why not?"

"I don't think he likes the way I think."

"Well, that's no reason to kick you out!" Rose was a little angry, and she sat up to search the crowd for the Doctor, so she could give him a piece of her mind.

Grace snorted. "You don't have to make it a thing. It's okay."

"We're friends, right?"

Grace looked a little confused, but she nodded.

"Right. So we stick together." Rose stood up, patting Grace on the head. "You go on. I'll catch up. I wanna find the Doctor."

"Don't make it a thing," Grace pleaded.

"It's already a thing. Too late. Thing made. Go on, then."

Grace surprised her with a smile. She stood up, stretched dramatically, and nudged her shoulder as she passed. "I never had a friend before, except for him. Is this what it's always like?"

"I hope it is."

When she had gone through to the next set of exhibits, Rose went back the way they had come. She stood in the doorway, waiting until she saw a poof of brown hair bobbing through the crowd. She snatched him out of the procession and dragged him back to the underpopulated geology exhibit, where Grace had licked the rock.

He gave her that innocent, false-prosecution face. "What did I do?"

Rose was fuming, for almost no reason. "Nothing. Yet."

"Grace isn't that bad. I could have switched with you."

Rose laughed, and then struggled to regain her anger. It was slipping away. "Grace thinks you're mad at her. She thinks you're gonna leave her behind."

He frowned, "Why?"

"She says you had a disagreement over that woman in the picture. I know you saw it, too."

He scratched his head – a telltale sign of guilt – and led her further into the corner, near an employee door. "Yeah, Polly. Did she tell you about her?"

"She said she gave her some bad advice."

The Doctor snorted, a little angry, a little frustrated. "I would say it was more than just bad advice. She led her down a new path, one that destroyed a lot of lives."

"How do you know it wasn't the other things that did that? The mist? Her dad getting killed?"

"You didn't hear what she said-"

"I don't care what she said! You don't get to be all mean and huffy because she said something you didn't like!"

"I have a feeling this isn't about me."

"It is!"

"I'm not being mean and huffy. We bickered. It was over quickly. What's really bothering you?"

Rose hated his even, steady tone, but, admittedly, he was right. He was being nice to her. Before Grace had mentioned it, she hadn't even known they had argued. So why was she so worked up? "I suppose I… I just want her to hang around. Nice having another girl to talk to."

"You're mad at me because you want her to stay?"

"Yeah, sort of, I guess."

He laughed, and hugged her. "You are absolutely precious sometimes."

Rose wiggled out of his arms, and laughed at herself. She realized she was being a mother grizzly. She was already protective of Grace. She was fun, and outgoing, and a little destructive, but childlike, and vulnerable somewhere deep down. Rose could sense it. They were the same age, but she triggered every maternal bone in her body. Why was that?

"I know." The Doctor stepped aside to let a pintsized alien come past him.

"But what…?"

"Do you know why baby animals look so cute?" The Doctor put his arm around her, and spoke a little more softly. "It's so sympathetic creatures like us will come around and protective them, should they lose their parents."

"Are you saying Grace is…?"

"A baby animal, for all intents and purposes."

"She's my age."

"She's your age, in human years. But who knows how long her species takes to grow up? It's just a theory, mind you, but you just gave it a little credence with that display."

"Can we pretend that never happened?"

"'Course we can." He scratched his head again, taking a deep breath. "And even if I wanted to take her home, which I don't, I couldn't. We still don't know what she is. I keep wondering… she told you about the dog, right?"

Rose nodded. "She was… vague."

"It came back to life." His voice became low and urgent, underlined with confusion. "It was beyond what I've seen the wish-makers do in the past. If she did that – if she's capable of something like that…" He watched her for a few intense seconds, all the possibilities running through his normally placid brown eyes, and then he shook himself and smiled. "But it might be my imagination running wild. Besides, I like her – most of the time. What do you think of her? You know, aside from the urge to tuck her under your arm and climb a skyscraper?"

"Oh, you're so funny, Doctor."

"I try to be."

"I like her. But we should probably catch up to her before she licks another exhibit."

"She licked something?"

"Yes. Is that important?"

He scratched his cheek. "Well, it's another clue about what species she is, but it's still just a big old blank."

"She tried to ride a tyrannosaurus model earlier, too, if that matters."

He grinned. "No, that's just entertaining."

"It was. She fell off and squished a paper bush." Rose shared a warm smile with him, and something occurred to her. "Doctor, you don't know every species, do you?"

"No, no. There are far too many."

"Maybe she's something new."

"On the contrary, I get the impression she's something very old."

Beside them, the employee door popped open and whacked both of them on the shoulder. Rose dodged out of the way as three burly men in red pinstripe suits came out. They didn't even look up, only passed through to the cafeteria and nudged their way through the crowd.

Rose rubbed her shoulder. "What was their hurry? And what were they wearing? Me and Grace saw like six security guards already and none of them looked like that."

The Doctor caught the door just before it closed, and tapped a sign that read 'authorized personnel only.' He grinned. "I don't know, but something tells me the special bonus exhibits are this way."

Rose laughed. "I think you might be right."