Chapter 7

[So I missed a chapter this week. I was busy. I had no energy for editing.]

Pride had sat down after the trio left, though since the room was filling up with water, that was less comfortable than he'd like. It was too shallow to float in though.

He could make out Lilly in the middle of the room. In the low light, he couldn't really see her expression, but she was pacing, sloshing water everywhere as she went, and talking worriedly to herself. So, guessing emotions was no difficulty.

"This is bad," Lilly said. "This is really bad. I shouldn't have closed the door when we came in." Yes, that had been incredibly stupid. "Do you think Ivan's reached the controls yet?"

"No idea," Pride said with a shrug.

"Then why are you so calm?!"

Pride leaned against the wall and tried to make himself a as comfortable as possible. "We have plenty of time. Besides, the Doctor will solve this."

And he didn't have to do anything. The Doctor was the only person here he even slightly cared about the opinion of, and clearly her expectations were floor level or lower. Which was . . . strange. There was always someone to consider before, usually Father.

"The Doctor will?"

"Yes, she always does. She makes a habit of dropping in on idiots and solving their problems."

Lilly opened her mouth. Then he saw her draw back and take a deep breath. "If this happens often, I'm sure the experience gives you a different perspective, but that does not make us idiots."

"I'm over three hundred years old. Almost everyone is an idiot." He almost specified every human, but he'd traveled with the Doctor before. Other species weren't always much better.

"You know I didn't even believe you on the names, and you want me to believe you about the age?"

"You didn't argue with the names," Pride pointed out.

"It's not worth it. But fine, we'll suppose for a moment the age isn't worth arguing about either. That's not an indication of intelligence. We, are going to drown here."

"We're not. Stop being so hysterical." It was annoying.

"Hysterical? I-you-" Evidently, she did not have a response to that, since she whirled away in a huff.

Ivan walked down the hall. The Doctor followed him, but far enough back he didn't notice. He probably wasn't very observant when he had such a pressing goal in mind. A few more turns. They were making their way to the center of the base. Well, that was a logical place for the main controls.

They turned a corner, and were promptly met with a wall, with very clear transmutation marks.

"What the-?" Ivan said, coming to a stop.

"I was afraid of that."

Ivan spun around. "You! What are you doing here? You're supposed to be looking for Simon."

"Yes, but I thought he might try to stop you. If he knew enough to make himself scarce, he'd know enough to block the door to the controls. So, is there another way in?"

"Yes. There's a door on the other side. We should be able to circle around, though it'll take more time than I'd like."

"I can't let you do that either, I'm afraid."

Both of them turned. Simon was standing further down the hall, far enough they couldn't just charge him.

"You've got some explaining to do!" Ivan snapped, reaching for his hip. He probably had some sort of weapon there.

"Yes, I do," Simon agreed. "So how about you hear me out?"

He took a step back, raising his hands in surrender. Going a little further, he even twisted his wrists, angling his palms away from each other. Now that the Doctor thought about it, he had clapped when doing alchemy. Moving his palms away from each other like he was doing would make it harder to do alchemy that way.

Ivan paused, eyes narrowed suspiciously. "I'm listening."

"That creature in the box, it's the same species as the one that attacked the base. I used my alchemy to contain it when we were first setting up. I thought we could study it while it was locked up."

We? The Doctor seriously doubted he'd been planning to include Ivan until now.

"I'm sorry about Lilly and Pride, but you know Lilly. She wouldn't have approved of caging a creature, and would've just tried to put a stop to any research we could get done. And that creature holds valuable information. They give off some sort of electric energy. We could power the whole world with them! We're already using some of that power for the base."

"At their expense," the Doctor pointed out. "And Lilly and Pride's."

But she had a bad feeling about this. If that creature was powering the base, and Ivan was in charge of the base, he must've already noticed something was wrong.

"Now hold on," Ivan said. Sure enough, he was talking to the Doctor, actually putting his hand out in front of her. She made a face at it. Not his face. The hand. "I'm in charge here. I could spare Lilly and your friend."

"You're not actually considering him, are you?" the Doctor asked.

Besides the torture that would be necessary to use those creatures, the one that had attacked the base had obviously done so because of the one taken prisoner. Keeping multiple ones locked up would be putting a lot of people in danger.

"I've spent years of my life studying the ocean, got assigned to this base for my knowledge, and you want me to ignore the chance to study a new creature when it's staring me right in the face? You must be joking," Ivan said. And with him focused on the Doctor, Simon was free to look just a little too smug about that.

"Ah science," the Doctor said despairingly. "The greatest cause of lesser evils in the universe."

"But not of greatest ills," Ivan said. "Honestly Doctor, I don't see what your problem is. Endless electricity and the chance to study a new creature, and what's the down side? That creature has less freedom? I hardly see why that matters."

"Every life matters!" the Doctor snapped.

She took a step forward. She wasn't entirely sure what she'd been planning to do. Fight them? Seemed unlikely. But it didn't matter. As frequently happened when she tried to be threatening without a plan, something happened. As soon as she moved, Simon clapped his hands together and brought a wall up between them.

The Doctor looked at it. It was thin, so as not to weaken the structure protecting them from the ocean, but it wasn't like some piece of paper she could charge through. She also couldn't take it down herself. She had a pretty good understanding of alchemy, but she couldn't use it.

She looked out of the glass windows around. At least she could see pretty well out those. In one direction, she could even see more of the base, a glass window showing a different tube-like hall, closer to the outside.

Then she realized something. She couldn't explain exactly how she knew. Just a sort of sixth sense guess. She spun around. The creature was at the other window. At first, it looked a bit like a giant leafy sea dragon, only blue. Then it stretched out, taking on more the shape of an eel, and the frills began to glow with some sort of electricity.

It opened its jaw, mouth full of sharp shark-like teeth, and bit into the glass. Water instantly burst into the hall.

Well then. This could admittedly be going better.