A/N: Novelising TV is an experience, to say the least, I found it tricky in places, though I did have a lot of fun working out where things would be changed slightly. And yeah, I got lazy with chapter titles :P. Hope you enjoy!

Disclaimer: Most of the dialogue was written by the writers of Doctor Who.

"Ah!" exclaimed the Doctor as Ryan followed him out of the TARDIS, their initial parking attempt unsuccessful. Ryan looked around the area for clues as to when they had landed, spotting a poster for a Shayne Ward Greatest Hits tour.

"So near future, yeah?" Ryan deduced. The Doctor sauntered up behind him.

"I had a passing fancy. Only it didn't pass; it stopped."

The Doctor started walking away, hands in his pockets. Ryan gave the posters one last glance, then followed him.

The pair wandered down several streets until they found a cul-de-sac decorated with a banner for the London 2012 Olympics. That answered Ryan's when.

"Thirtieth Olympiad," said the Doctor in a tone of voice that he liked to use when he knew he was being impressive.

"No way!" Ryan exclaimed, taking the Doctor's arm. "Why didn't I think of this? That's great!"

"Only seems like yesterday a few naked Greek blokes were tossing a discus about, wresting with each other in the sand as the crowds stood around baying… no wait a minute, that was Club Med," the Doctor chuckled, giving Ryan a friendly nudge. "Just in time for the opening doo-dah – ceremony – tonight. Thought you'd like that – last one they had in London was dynamite. Wembley, 1948. I loved it so much I went back and watched it all over again."

Ryan stopped listening to the Doctor; a worried-looking man was pinning a poster up on a streetlamp, which already had a couple of similar posters attached to it. As the man hurried off, Ryan left the Doctor's side to read the poster.

"Doctor…" Ryan tried to attract his attention, but he continued rambling about torchbearers and tea parties.

"Doctor!"

He still didn't notice, babbling about cakes with crunchy ball-bearings.

"You should really look at this!" Ryan gestured at the posters. Finally, that had caught his attention. The Doctor walked over to join Ryan, still rambling about ball-bearings. His mood sobered when he saw the array of missing person posters.

"What's taking them do you think? Snatching children from a thoroughly ordinary street like this… and why's it so cold? Something's reducing the temperature?"

"Says they all went missing this week," Ryan pointed out. "Why would a person do something like this?"

"What makes you think it's a person?" the Doctor asked.

They heard a door click and turned to see a woman timidly place a bag of rubbish at the edge of her driveway, before hurrying back inside.

"Whatever it is, it's got the whole street scared to death," Ryan mused. "Doctor, what…" he went to ask, but the Doctor had already run off down the street. Ryan started to follow him, but his attention was caught by a Mini that had stopped and wouldn't start.

"There you go, fifth today," said an exasperated council worker, who had abandoned his van to come help. "That's not natural, is it?"

"Don't know what happened. I had it serviced less than a month ago," explained the man in the car.

"Nah, don't even try and explain it, mate," the council worker replied. "All the cars are doing it and you know what, it's bonkers. Bonkers." He moved around to the back of the car to push it. "Come on, then, pal, I'll help you shift it. Quicker you're on your way, the happier you'll be." He started pushing, grunting with effort. Ryan decided he wasn't just going to stand by idle.

"You want a hand?"

"Yeah, please mate."

Ryan moved next to the council worker at the back of the car, pushing, then the car suddenly started back up, causing the council worker to fall forwards.

"Cheers lads," called the driver.

"Does this happen a lot?" Ryan asked the council worker, who was brushing himself down, trying to regain some dignity after falling.

"Been doing it all week," grumbled the council worker.

"Since those children started going missing?"

"Yeah. Suppose so," he shrugged.

They walked back down the street towards the van.

"Every car cuts out," the council worker explained. "Council are going nuts. I mean, they've given this street the works, renamed it. I've been tarmacking every pothole." He gestured down to the ground. "Look at that, beauty innit," he said proudly. "Yep, and all this is because that Olympic torch comes right down by the end of this close. Just down there," he pointed. "Everything's gotta be perfect, ain't it?"

They approached a scared-looking elderly lady.

"It takes 'em when they're playing," she told them.

"What takes 'em?" asked Ryan.

"Danny, Jane, Dale… snatched in the blink of an eye," she continued.

Suddenly Ryan heard the Doctor - who sounded like he had managed to get himself into trouble. Fuck's sake, thought Ryan. He tells me not to wander off and he goes and does it and pisses off the locals.

"No, I'm not a liar, I'm a police officer. That's what I am," the Doctor tried to explain, waving his hands. "I've got a badge and a, er, a police car. You don't have to get – I can, I can prove it," he said, reaching into his pocket for what was presumably his psychic paper.

"We've had plenty of coppers poking around here and you don't look or sound like any of 'em," accused a middle-aged man, pointing his finger at the Doctor.

"See? Look! I've got a colleague!" the Doctor pointed at Ryan. "Lewis!"

"That kid? He looks less like a copper than you do! How old is he, sixteen?"

Ryan wanted to tell the man he was twenty-one, but it definitely was not the right time.

"Training. New recruit. It was either that, or… mechanic," the Doctor fibbed; Ryan gave him a grateful smile. "So, voila!" the Doctor shoved his psychic paper in the man's face.

"What are you going to do?" asked a woman nervously.

"The police have knocked on every door… no clues, no leads, nothing!" the elderly lady exclaimed.

"Kids run off sometimes, alright? That's what they do," insisted the man.

"I saw it with me own eyes. Dale Hicks in your garden playing with your Tommy and then…" she gestured a small bang with her hands. "Right in front of me. Like he was never there! There's no reason to look any further than this street. It's right here amongst us!"

"Why don't we…" the Doctor began, but was interrupted by a middle-aged woman who had decided to join the conversation.

"Why don't we start with him?" she pointed at the council worker. "There's been all sorts like him in this street, day and night," she sneered.

"Fixing things up for the Olympics!" insisted the council worker. Ryan felt bad for him, he was just doing his job and people were having a jab at him for no real reason.

"Yeah, and taking an awful long time about it!" added the man.

"I'm of the opinion that all we got to do…" the Doctor tried to reason.

"Yeah well, what you just said, that's slander!" argued the council worker.

"I don't care what it is!" the woman argued back.

"I think we need to just…" the Doctor was once again interrupted.

"I want an apology off her!" demanded the council worker.

"Stop picking on him," said the elderly lady.

"Yeah, stop picking on me!"

"And stop pretending to be blind! It's evil!" she interjected.

"I don't believe in evil," said the middle-aged woman, who was reminding Ryan of some of the customers at Henrik's who would treat the shop assistants like second-class citizens.

"Oh no, you just believe in tarmackers with sack loads of kidnapped kiddies in their van!"

"Yeah, yeah, that's not what she's saying," the man said defensively.

"Would you stop ganging up on me?" the council worker cried.

"Feeling guilty, are we?" the middle-aged woman sneered. Ryan had had just about enough of this, and it seemed, so had the Doctor.

"Fingers on lips!" the Doctor snapped, glaring at everyone. One by one, each person in the group hesitantly raised an index finger to their mouth. The Doctor nodded at Ryan, indicating that he needed to join in as well. Ryan obeyed, smirking slightly.

The Doctor spoke calmly. "In the last six days, three of your children have been stolen. Snatched out of thin air, right?"

"Er, can I…?" the elderly lady asked. The Doctor gestured towards her. "Look around you," she pointed around her. "This was a safe street 'til it came-"

Ryan noticed the quiet woman looking shifty, so glanced up at the house she had come out of, and spotted a girl staring at them out of a window, her palm pressed against the glass. The woman noticed him looking, and quietly went back inside.

"-Can you please help us?" pleaded the elderly lady.

The Doctor agreed without hesitation, and their investigation began.

They started in the front garden of the middle-aged man, whose son was the most recent child to disappear. The Doctor was smelling the air, frowning slightly in concentration, trying to catch a sniff of something that might give them some clue as to what had happened.

"You want a hanky?" Ryan quipped.

The Doctor ignored his comment. "Can you smell it?" Ryan inhaled deeply. "What's it remind you of?"

Ryan pondered for a moment. "Sort of… metal?"

This was the right answer; the Doctor nodded and grinned, making a happy noise in his throat. They left the garden, the Doctor giving the man (who had been glaring at them the whole time) a slight wave in thanks.

They walked to the next location where a child had disappeared: a small back alley.

"Danny Edwards cycled in one end but never came out the other," the Doctor recalled. "Whoa, there it goes again!" the Doctor showed his hand to Ryan – the hairs on the back of it standing on end. Ryan sniffed the air again.

"And there's that smell. It's like a um… a burnt fuse plug or something."

"There's a residual energy in the spots where the kids vanished," the Doctor explained. "Whatever it was, it used an awful lot of power to do this."

They walked out of the alley, back onto Dame Kelly Holmes Close.

"Well, aren't you a beautiful boy!" Ryan exclaimed, spotting a ginger tabby cat and bending down to stroke it.

"Thanks, I'm experimenting with back-combing," the Doctor said in a light tone, which quickly dulled. "Oh."

"I used to have one like you," cooed Ryan. He turned to look at the Doctor, who had a disgruntled look on his face. "What?" asked Ryan, except he could tell that the Doctor was somehow jealous of a cat, and it didn't help matters that the cat was ginger.

"No, I'm not really a cat person," grumbled the Doctor, half-heartedly. "Once you've been threatened by one in a nun's wimple, it kind of takes the joy out of it."

The cat walked towards a cardboard box, seemingly bored of Ryan's affections.

Ryan followed after it. "Come here, puss. What d'you wanna go in there for?" The cat disappeared into the cardboard box and Ryan heard a faint meow. He looked inside the box – it was completely empty. Ryan called the Doctor, who was staring across the street, bored of the cat. He jogged over to where Ryan was crouched.

"Whoa! Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!" the Doctor exclaimed. He picked up the box and turned it around in his hands. "Ion residue, blimey! That takes some doing. Just to snatch a living organism out of space-time. This baby is just like 'I'm havin' some of that!' I'm impressed." He tossed the box back onto the grass.

"So the cat's been transported," Ryan deduced.

"It can harness huge reserves of ionic power. We need to find the source of that power." The Doctor looked around. "Find the source and you will find… whatever has taken to stealing children and fluffy animals. See what you can see." He playfully hit Ryan on the shoulder. "Keep 'em peeled, Lewis." Ryan gave him a firm nod.

Not really sure where to start, Ryan headed aimlessly down another street. He suddenly heard a loud thud and a clattering from behind a garage door. Ryan carefully approached the door.

"Is that you puss cat? You trapped?" Ryan asked, not entirely sure why he had, it wasn't as if the cat would be able to reply. Ryan put an ear to the door, jumping away almost immediately as he heard another loud bang come from within the garage. Ryan told himself he wasn't going to open it, but his curiosity got the better of him, and so he twisted the handle and lifted the door, peeking underneath it once the door was high enough.

Suddenly, a black, twisting, buzzing mass flew out, causing Ryan to fall on his back in surprise. He covered his face, trying to protect himself from the angry buzzing thing.

"Stay still!" he heard the Doctor shout, followed by the distinctive buzzing of his sonic screwdriver. The angry buzzing thing stopped doing its angry buzzing and shrank down to a fraction of its size, falling straight into Ryan's hands. Ryan heard him running over, and he jumped in front of Ryan.

"Okey-dokey?" the Doctor asked, before holding out his hands and pulling Ryan to his feet.

"Yeah, cheers," Ryan responded, breathless.

"No probs." He pulled Ryan into a hug, as Ryan threw his arms around the Doctor's neck. They separated quickly, but the Doctor's hand briefly lingered at Ryan's side, before poking the not-so angry buzzing thing in Ryan's palm.

"I'll give you a fiver if you can tell me what the hell it is, cos I haven't got the foggiest."

"Well, I can tell you you've just killed it," answered Ryan, still catching his breath.

"It was never living. It's animated by energy. The same energy that's snatching people." The Doctor tossed it in his hand like a cricket ball. "That is so dinky! The go-anywhere creature. Fits in your pocket. Makes friends. Impresses your boss. Breaks the ice at parties." Ryan laughed, and he walked back to the TARDIS with the Doctor.

"Oh, hi ho, here we go. Let's have a look," said the Doctor. Ryan stared at the rotating symbols on the monitor, which fused into one with a beep. "Get out of here," the Doctor scoffed.

"What's it say?" Ryan asked, circular Gallifreyan seemed to be one of a few languages that the TARDIS didn't translate. The Doctor didn't answer, instead pulling a pencil out of his jacket and using the rubber on the end of it to make part of the ball disappear. "It is! It's graphite! Basically the same material as an HB pencil…" Ryan looked at the Doctor in shock.

"I was attacked by a pencil scribble!?"

"A scribble creature," the Doctor corrected, "brought into being with ionic energy. Whatever we're dealing with, it can create things as well as take them. But why make a scribble creature?"

"Maybe it was a mistake… I mean, you scribble over something when you want to get rid of it, like a um, like a drawing. Like a… a child's drawing…" Ryan trailed off as the Doctor turned to look at him. "You said it was in the street."

"Probably."

"The girl!"

"Of course!" shouted the Doctor. "What girl?"

"Something about her gave me the creeps, even her own mum looked scared of her." The Doctor leaned forward, his interest piqued.

"Are you deducting?" he asked flirtatiously.

Ryan turned sideways, looking at him over his shoulder. "I think I am," he flirted back.

They continued their Inspector Morse-inspired roleplay.

"Copper's hunch?"

"Permission to follow it up, Sarge?"

A/N: Seems this will be a long one, definitely at least 2 more chapters. Thank you for reading, please leave any feedback if you have any, and I'll be updating again in the next few days, hopefully.