Alice's POV:
I arrived at work the next morning & made an unsettling discovery.
The door was slightly ajar.
I turned, looking up & down the street, but nothing else seemed out of place. It was just another ordinary morning...but I knew I locked the door last night. I had even given it a little tug to make sure it was secure.
With a feeling of dread in my stomach, I opened the door & slipped inside. All of the tables & chairs had been pushed to the sides of the room, but otherwise everything seemed quiet.
"...Hello?" I called out. I immediately felt silly for doing so. I was often the first one here, since I had a key. It wasn't like I had never been alone here before...
I just had to get a grip, not be so jumpy...
I started walking across the floor to the registers, when I felt my foot catch on something. Suddenly, something fell on top of me, knocking me to the floor. I screamed, trying to fight back, certain that it was that Xolis eel, or the Cronzin, or whatever it was that the Doctor had been talking about, when I realized it was...rope?
I was caught in a net.
"Ah ha! I've got you now!" the Doctor cried, jumping out of his hiding spot. "Now, you're going to tell me why you've come to this planet...Wait, you're not the Cronzin."
"Doctor." I said. "What the hell are you doing here? I know I locked that door last night."
"I'm very good with locks." he said, pulling away the net & helping me to my feet.
"No sign of it, then?"
"No." He sounded disappointed. "It doesn't make sense. It should have come back to the Mark by now..."
"It's not just this one Mark." I said. "I saw it on my flat last night. It's everywhere." I pulled out my phone. "It even has its own hashtag."
"If I could just figure out where it's hiding, then I'd know where to look..." he muttered as he scrolled through the pictures I had found online."I just need to plot the metadata..." He turned to me. "Back in a tic. Just need to check something."
"That's my phone!" I said as he ran off. I hurried after him, pausing only once to survey the mess he had left behind. It could wait.
I followed him, at a distance, a block down the street when I saw him go into an old Police telephone box.
The TARDIS.
Ok, this was a big moment. According to the research, how somebody reacted to the TARDIS could make or break their time spent with the Doctor.
Luckily, there was a formula to it...
I took a deep breath as I approached. Then, I pushed on the door.
Even though I had studied & trained for this assignment, nothing could've truly prepared me for what the inside of the TARDIS was like. Big was an understatement. It was massive.
The Doctor hadn't yet noticed I had followed him, so I allowed myself a little squeak of surprise as I took it all in.
"What are you doing here?" he asked.
"I...You have my phone." I said.
"Oh, right, sorry. Here you go." He tossed it lightly at me, & I caught it. I'd have to trust that the safeguards on it were enough to keep it secure.
"So...uh...this place...it's..."
"Yes?" He seemed to waiting for me to say the right thing.
"It's...bigger...on the inside?" I asked. The Doctor seemed pleased. Good. I had passed that part of the test.
"Yes, it is." he said with a smile.
"But...what is it?"
"It's my ship."
"What kind of ship?" I asked, looking around wide-eyed, taking it all in.
"My TARDIS." he said with a smile. "It stands for Time and Relative Dimensions in Space."
"I drive past this every day to come to work. How have I never noticed this before?"
"Oh, you humans. You're always ignoring what's right under your nose." I hid a smile as a beep came from the console. If the Doctor thought I was human, then my bio damper was doing its job.
"By extracting the location metadata of the pictures, we can find out where they were taken. Plot all those points onto a map, & we should have a center point...there." He pointed to an empty space in the center of the map. "That is where all the points converge."
"What's there?"
"I don't know. Let's go find out." the Doctor said. "But not in the TARDIS, it could be very dangerous if the wrong hands got a hold of it."
"Ok." I said. "I'll drive."
"What is that?" I asked, but the Doctor was already getting out of the car. We were pulled over, behind a shopping center near my neighborhood.
There was a shimmer in the air, almost like when you could see the humidity coming off the pavement on a hot day...but it was nowhere near warm enough for that to happen.
"It's a portal." the Doctor said when I caught up to him.
"A portal...to where?" I asked.
"Good question. Let's find out." He straightened his bow tie. "Geronimo!" He ran towards the portal & disappeared.
I was taken aback. The Doctor was supposed to be one of the most dangerous beings in the entire universe...but he just ran into a strange portal without researching, testing, or otherwise deeming it safe.
Maybe that's why he's dangerous...
I knew one thing for certain. I was going to have to follow him in there.
So I followed his lead.
I ran to the portal & jumped through into the unknown.
Now that Alice has learned more about the Doctor, now it's time for him to learn more about her! Next time, we'll start to get to know Alice a little bit better…or at least, what she's chosen to reveal!
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