-The Concise Oxford Dictionary, pub 1991, Eighth Edition
What is rose, indeed? Or what is iris?
Our tale, it seems, has taken an unpleasant turn. Naturally, there is no such things as happy endings, merely a stopping of the narrative, but those within continue on. Or so I like to think.
Perhaps, as reassurance that all could be well, I shall relate a story once told to me. An anecdote, if you will. It is set in a place where the Time Lords are not quite dead but one cannot be sure if the Doctor is truly aware of their presence or not. Oh, the Time War still happened, as indeed did a great many other events that you may or may not be familiar with. Such is the way of all things.
On the day when this slight interlude occurred - how I must apologise for these side-trips of mine, but I am not sorry enough to stop them, I'm afraid - on this day, Co-ordinator Vansell, controller of Gallifrey's Celestial Intervention Agency and an old school acquaintance of the Doctor's, was determinedly ignoring the monitor on his desk that showed he had an incoming message.
It would say nothing that he wished to hear, and more bad news could wait. The Lady Rodan's latest report contained enough information to concern him.
Perhaps, he thought, it had been a mistake to accept her request for a transfer. He smiled bitterly. It had been the Doctor who had given the young Time Lord (or Lady, for who are we to judge a choice of name for a species not of our own?) a taste for a more adventurous lifestyle than monitoring traffic control on Gallifrey had offered (and, indeed, how cruel of the Gallifreyans to create such a tedious post in the first place).
That was what had decided it in the end, Vansell could not turn away a victim of the Doctor's, and she had gained excellent grades at the Academy, after all.
No, no, this news had been inevitable. Nobody was truly at fault. They had simply overestimated the Doctor's ingenuity. They were, of course, not the first. But perhaps they could take comfort from the fact that they would most probably be the last.
The Co-ordinator rubbed his temples and closed his eyes. It could wait till morning, he decided. There was a great deal more necessary work to deal with. Shada had been designed as a prison, after all, not a colony world. Though, of course, that is precisely what it had become, after the end of the last great Time War.
Somewhere, somewhen, the Doctor woke up first.
He pulled the headset off and looked around the recreation room, a wide grin on his face. Neither he nor Rose had moved, of course they hadn't, but the experience had been fantastic. Mimicking the five senses in a virtual reality environment was difficult enough, but his own innate sense of time and being had been fooled into thinking they really had been in another world.
Rose sat up, struggling a little with her own headset.
"Wow," she said. "Can we go again?"
"Nah," said the Doctor. "It's one of those couple of times in a lifetime things. Go too often and you get addicted. Start forgetting about real life, and get all wrapped in the VR. People have strapped themselves in and starved to death cause they just couldn't face reality any more."
Way to kill the good mood, thought Rose as she shuddered slightly.
"It was amazing though," she said, letting her thoughts drift back to the space race programme that they had decided upon. "I mean, I knew how to fly the shuttle. I knew what to look out for, when to change course, how far I could push the engines." She looked down at her fingers and flexed the muscles.
"All part of the service," said a new voice. The door to the rec room had opened, and their hostess, Valeria, entered. She was a tall woman dressed in a simple blue gown. Quietly she moved round the machinery, powering it down. "I've the lunch booked that Miss Tyler suggested," she said as she finished her work.
As the door slid shut behind her, the Doctor glanced at Rose. "And where exactly have you booked us lunch?"
They were having ice cream halfway up a mountain, and Rose had just finished scraping her bowl of mint choc-chip clean. She'd learnt that if she didn't eat quickly, then she wouldn't get to finish her meals. It wasn't doing anything for her indigestion, and rushing a dessert was very annoying, especially when the Doctor hadn't yet finished his. She'd have to work on her timing.
She held her spoon up in front of her mouth, eyeing the last tiny sliver of ice-cream for a moment before sticking her tongue out and licking the silver clean. She glanced at the Doctor, and cringed slightly as she noticed that he was chewing the ice cream.
At least he seemed to be relaxing, more or less. It would be nice for there to be more of this, playing tourist rather than hero. Save the heroics for the weekdays, she thought. They both deserved days off.
"Finished?" asked the Doctor, looking up from a bowl that had somehow been almost emptied in the past thirty seconds. "Ready to go?" He seemed quite ready to leap out of his seat and leave the dessert to melt in the sun.
"So how come we have to keep moving all the time?" she asked lightly, and not budging an inch. "How come we never seem to take the time to sit back and…"
"Smell the roses?" asked the Doctor with a grin.
"Ha ha," said Rose. "But we never seem to go anywhere quiet, peaceful, out of the way."
The Doctor raised his eyebrows and licked a blob of vanilla off the back of his spoon. "Not going to see much like that, are you?"
"Yeah, but we always seem to be in such a rush. You never want to hang around once we've finished being heroic. It's all better get back to the TARDIS, better slip away before they start asking questions, even when they know all the important stuff."
The Doctor waved his arms around, in a rather inelegant attempt to indicate their present surroundings.
"Look around, Rose, it's a beautiful day, a beautiful view, admittedly on an artificial tourist world, but still... You're not looking too bad yourself, and there's no sign of anyone in any sort of danger except over-indulging on this delicious ice-cream." He planted another spoonful in his mouth and closed his eyes in contentment.
Rose planted her elbows on the table and rested her head in her hands. "I bet there's gold inside the mountain, and there's a dragon guarding it, and someone's sacrificing a good-looking prince to the dragon and we have to go help the spunky princess who's after the gold, but can't really be bothered with the pretty boy, so we have to convince her that true love is more important than money and every one lives happily ever after. Even the dragon, who realises burning people isn't very nice."
The Doctor opened his eyes. "Close…but no. We're just going to sit here. Enjoy the ice-cream. Then head back to the TARDIS."
"Aha!" said Rose triumphantly. "You see, we have to leave, we can't hang around and just… mingle. So tell me why." She folded her arms. "And I'm not leaving this table until you do."
The Doctor put down his spoon. "If you wanted to stay in one place, you should have stayed on Earth. With Rickey."
"I'm not talking about settling down. Just sitting around for awhile. Relaxing. Doing nothing."
"Boring."
"What? Cause there's no adrenaline rush for a couple of days? You could always go abseiling or something," she said, with a nod at the mountain.
"Can't," he told her. "Heights give me vertigo."
"Really?" asked Rose, her eyes suddenly alight.
"Came as a bit of a surprise to me too."
"Let's go then."
"The TARDIS?"
"No," she said, nodding at the mountain. "Let's go up there, and let's abseil down."
He blinked and stared at her for a long moment. "Now, Rose…"
"Come on!" she insisted. "You get to scare me every day with your 'let's see what interesting way can I find to get us killed' game. All I'm asking for is one little abseil."
He looked up at the mountain. "But it's really, really high."
"That's right."
"And it's a really, really long way down once we're up there."
"That's right."
"They might not let us up?" he said hopefully.
"Since when has a no entry sign been a problem for you?" she asked.
"And we don't have any equipment."
She swung around, and held both his hands, half comforting, half teasing. "Oh, that's alright," she said, smiling. "I checked with Valeria before the VR thing. They've people at the top doing abseils down all day long."
The Doctor forced a grin. "Oh, fantastic," he said through gritted teeth as Rose practically skipped ahead.
"As long as the weather holds," she called back over her shoulder.
The Doctor looked heavenwards to a perfect sapphire blue sky. "Miracle please?" he said, as he remembered the weather control satellites in orbit.
Oh, how happy they are, how free! A delight, to be sure.
But let us now return to what remained of the Time Lords, and their work. It was the Lady Rodan that we were most interested in. Here she was, busy in the medical laboratories. Fussing. Worrying. How emotional she had become for one of this exalted species.
A few minutes later, Vansell joined her and didn't bother to conceal his bad mood in the least. "Well?" he snapped and Rodan paid not the slightest bit of attention to his temper.
"The inhibitions we've inserted aren't holding," she told him. "I've got a team working on another non-Earth destination, but it's going to take-"
"-time." Vansell sighed. "Can't we slow it down relative to us?"
"Already done. But the further we take it, the greater the risk of him noticing."
"Well, we can't risk that. All this effort put in to perfecting an Earth, and he wants to go travel the universe again. Hasn't he caused enough trouble? Doesn't he think it might be appropriate to stay out of other people's affairs for a while?"
Rodan smiled, and it was a smile of sadness. "Apparently not."
"But this tourist-world was sufficient?"
"Yes. But then he'd expect a certain artificialness to it. The Rose avatar is attempting to convince him to stay as long as possible. To give us time to design a new destination."
"Very well, if there are any significant changes, you must alert me at once." He stood over the still body of the Doctor, eyes closed, breath regular and his body encased in a complex network of neural circuitry. "A death sentence would have been so much easier," he sighed.
Rodan watched him go, returning to her duties and casting just the occasional glance at Shada's only remaining prisoner.
Oh, fanciful, perhaps, and such a narrative cheat - "It was only a dream, dear reader, do not fret!" - but an idea that, perhaps, when first encountered contains enough truth to unsettle one a little.
There is, after all, no way for you to step outside that corporeal body of yours to gain empirical evidence that, yes, the universe is just as you believe it to be. But let us just assume that it is and continue on, faith in your own senses secure as ever it was.
Ah, now we must return to the Doctor's plight. He has found his beloved Rose, but not quite in time to save her from the cyberisation process. I shall spare you the medical details, but suffice to say it is not pleasant to watch or to participate in.
He has made it back to the car, as has the heroic Ancelyn, prepared to sacrifice all on the word of the man who he knows but does not recognise. Together they race back to the resistance's headquarters, and the Doctor can only hope that, once there, he can find some way to save Rose.
But what of our other companion? What of Jack?
He is still in London, but, ahhh, what progress he has made! How useful a little knowledge is, and, oh, how very dangerous. There is a change in the mood here, and I do believe that the scent is one of hope.