It was a very large hall. From the outside, it would have looked like any old meeting at the relatively new community centre – only up six years. The community centre wasn't the first choice for location – its entire west side was made of glass – but it was better than hiding in some suspicious lair.
Behind the three-storey-high window, a crowd of people were gathering. Two, if not three hundred, young men and women gathered, chatting excitedly to one another. The chatter faded away as a man, in his mid-twenties or thereabouts, approached the front of the room and the microphone.
"Welcome, my friends," he told them warmly. "You should all know why you are here."
The crowd mumbled something that vaguely sounded like agreement, so the young man went on.
"Tomorrow, this New World ends. The invaders will be driven out. All over Melbourne, and several other cities across the country, we will revolt. We will be free."
"We will be free!" the crowd chanted in agreement.
At that moment, the doors were thrust open and in stomped a troop of angry soldiers. None of the rebels had time to make a noise before the soldiers started shooting. Screaming ensued, but it soon died away and all of the previously buzzing crowd lay motionless on the floor. The soldiers, consciences unmoved, stomped away and slammed the door behind them.
One of the crowd, a girl in her late teens, lifted her head slightly. Upon confirming that the soldiers were indeed gone, she slowly pulled herself up and looked at her fellow crowd members.
"Natalie?" she whispered, slowly approaching a girl in the corner. The poor girl, Natalie, was obviously not alive, as her top was soaked in blood and she was curled in a corner.
The girl in her late teens went up to the stage to check on the man there. "Aaron!" she exclaimed, shaking him. "Aaron! They're... gone..."
"Atlanta..." Aaron grunted in pain before dying himself.
The girl, Atlanta, turned around. They couldn't all be dead... one of them had to be alive... one of them...
But they weren't. She was the one who was alive. The only one.
Eighty-two years later, the world was a blank, bleak place. Grey roads met grey footpaths, which met grey buildings, which in turn met grey skies. The once bustling epicentre that had been Melbourne, population 3,100,000 was now reduced to a mere ten thousand, and the abandoned previously-busy streets now paid homage to the scarce humans, clad in grey, and the occasional sign, although most had long been painted over with grey to match the rest of the city. No animal life could be seen or heard very often, but if you waited patiently enough, a grey pigeon might just fly past and steal a remote, almost non-existent scrap of food.
Seemingly to break up the monotony of this world which could have been filmed in black and white and looked nearly the same, a large blue box was thrown up out of nowhere. With no people to turn and look, the two occupants, dressed similarly to break up the grey, stepped out. These were the Doctor and Sarah.
"It's grey," Sarah summarised. "Look, on my first journey after two years I expected something a bit better."
"I can see it's grey," the Doctor replied to the first sentence, after locking the TARDIS. "Don't get into any mischief, K-9!"
"Where are we?"
"I don't know. Maybe we can try a newspaper stand."
In this bleak, miserable, apparently human less world, the Doctor and Sarah took a bit of a walk around a large building to find a river. A miniature island of rubbish floated along it, pausing to hit a long-abandoned boat, then continuing.
"I don't like this place," Sarah complained.
"In our first meeting in eight years I didn't expect you to be your usual complaining self," the Doctor told her almost coldly.
"Well, maybe you'd taken me to a nicer place!" Sarah retorted angrily.
"It could be worse. It could be cold." The Doctor started to descend the steps towards the river, while Sarah opted to stay on the bridge above.
Sarah stared at the abandoned boat, which was half-filled with water, for several minutes. The Doctor seemed intent on trying to poke it with a stick.
"Yarra Boat Tours," Sarah read out from the side of the boat when the quiet finally got to her. "Doctor, is there a city called Yarra on Earth?"
"I don't know," the Doctor replied. "Could be. I know of a city with a Yarra River, though."
Sarah looked around. "Hardly a city. There's no one here."
The Doctor nodded. "I wonder if it's a mission."
"A mission?"
"You know, like when we landed on Karn. And Skaro."
Sarah nodded. "Not those again. The Time Lords always chose desolate planets." She paused. "Only they weren't, of course. Quite the opposite."
The Doctor nodded, and started to climb up the stairs. "Let's look for signs of life, eh?"
"Yes," Sarah sided. "It's starting to make me shiver... and not because of the temperature. It's quite nice, really. For a grey world."
Rounding yet another corner, the Doctor and Sarah found a newspaper stand. The paper was the most grey shade of yellow Sarah would have thought possible, and as the Doctor reached for a paper to find the date, it crumbled between his fingers.
"I don't think it's the date those papers say it is," the Doctor decided. "It's certainly not 2076." Looking inside the stall, he confirmed it with, "these cobwebs have been here years. Decades, maybe."
Sarah nodded. "There's no one we can help, Doctor. There's no one here."
"There's bound to be someone here," the Doctor argued. "Time Lords don't just send people to planets because they think it's funny."
Sarah secretly thought that it was the TARDIS and not the Time Lords, but she thought that if she told the Doctor he'd start arguing with her. But whatever it was about this futuristic Earth, she didn't like it.
