While writing this chapter I realized that "Cirulian" is phonetically only one consonant switch away from "Silurian" (Madame Vastra's race, the prehistoric lizards, if you didn't remember). Was anybody ever going to notice and say anything? That is the question... Which I suppose we now will never be able to answer. Oh well. I'll leave it. At least the consonant switch is indeed there and it's not just a transcription difference.
Donna had never seen the Doctor so still.
Really, she'd hardly been aware Time Lords slept. The way he bounced all over the place and ran everywhere he went and never seemed low on energy had led her to the tentative belief that perhaps they didn't at all.
Yet here he was, breathing slow and deep through his partially opened mouth, moving the hair hanging down over his forehead ever so slightly. His fingers twitched every once in a while, but otherwise he was perfectly still. She wondered what it must be like to have a conversation mind-to-mind. She wondered if it was faster or slower than normal oral conversation.
After ten minutes of sitting there holding his limp hand and crying a little to herself, she placed it neatly at his side, wiped her eyes dry, and drew herself up in determination. She would not spend this time idly. She'd learn what she could.
She flagged down a passing Cirulian in the hall and asked it in her best authoritative voice, "Who do I talk to around here if I got questions?"
"That would be Ilseg," the creature said, and Donna couldn't for the life of her identify this one as either male or female.
"Illllseggg," she repeated, drawing it out. "Where is this Ilseg? Is he busy?"
"I don't know, miss," the Cirulian said politely. "I can take you to him. Please follow me."
She cast a glance back at the Time Lord lying near-motionless in the flimsy bed behind her. "I don't… I don't want to leave him."
"I can notify someone to stay with him, if that would comfort you."
The picture of some little blue alien sitting next to her Doctor to serve as the first face he saw on waking up was not exactly what Donna would call a comfort, but she supposed, if it was this or sit around uselessly… Well, she was going to do something of at least minor import with her time.
"That would be nice, thank you," she finally said.
The bracelet on her right wrist changed from soft orange to a sunny yellow at some point during the wait for the supposed expert on the cave-dwellers, signaling the passage of twelve hours and definitely at least eleven since this whole fiasco had begun. Donna sighed as she stared down at the trinket, remembering that intergalactic market and how lovely that visit had been.
She was sitting in a too-small white chair in a hallway outside a meeting involving this Ilseg. It had been only about ten minutes but Donna had already gotten fidgety and morphed into a people watcher in the name of the furthering of knowledge. Or rather Cirulian watcher, she supposed. She'd noticed already that though they had long fingers, they seemed to have small, weak thumbs; their bare feet bore four wide, slightly webbed toes; and the males interestingly seemed to have, on average, slightly longer and more styled hair than the females.
It was a pretty entertaining endeavor, but it was cut short when a Cirulian exited the room outside of which she was sitting, and moments later another one came out and said, "Are you Donna Noble?"
Donna stood up. This one was pretty tall; barely a head shorter than Donna herself. He bore a single short, fat braid on his head, and she could somehow tell his admittedly alien attire was professional.
"Yeah," she responded. "Ilseg?"
"I am he," he said. "I am told you have questions."
She nodded. "Nothing too specific. Just what's up with the thing that is currently suckling at the ankle of my best friend."
He nodded knowingly. "The cave parasites. Often we call them 'lauep.' It is an Old Raxian word meaning 'cave-dwellers.'"
Donna realized that there was a decent chance that "Raxian" was the language they were currently speaking. That she probably had been speaking since they entered Cirulian society. But not before; in the hills and the caves it had all been perfect English. Her brain hurt.
Not for the first time she pictured the TARDIS, the Doctor's faithful blue box, a lone figure among the purple hills, translating from afar, and re-experienced the sheer terror at the thought of having to fly it herself, and the implications that came with that.
"They are found only in the cave system into which you unfortunately entered," Ilseg continued, tracing his long fingers over each other. "How did you come by the caverns in the first place, if I may ask?"
Donna scratched her head, remembering the strangeness of it all for the first time in several hours. With the new strangeness, that had become somewhat irrelevant. "The wall collapsed. We were walking in the hills and we stopped outside what the Doctor thought might be a cave and it just came crashing down."
Ilseg frowned. "Hm. We have records of that happening before, but not in quite some time."
"The Doctor talked like they might have wanted him in particular," she said quietly. "'Cause of his super senses."
"I had been meaning to ask, where are the two of you from?"
"He's from Gallifrey. I'm from Earth."
"Fascinating," Ilseg murmured. "How did you get here?"
"He has ways."
"How far away is that? Intergalactic travelers have mentioned Gallifrey—I cannot say I have ever heard of Earth—but we have no sense of distance."
"Weren't we talking about the creatures?" Donna said, slightly annoyed.
"Yes, quite right, that," he conceded apologetically. "I am sorry. It has been hypothesized that when their numbers are great enough in a specified area, they can create a net of psychic energy so intense they are capable of crude manipulation of matter, and can channel this to strategically destruct cave walls in such a way that leaves victims trapped."
"Appreciate the layman's terms, layman," Donna muttered. "Okay, I guess this could be a universe where that makes sense. You said they're just in this one cave system?"
"That is correct."
"How big is the cave system?"
"Many miles, and we are always discovering new branches, though as far as we know our community is the only one anywhere near it."
"Cool, that was going to be my next question." Donna mused. "How big's this community of yours then?"
"Roughly fifteen hundred."
"And how often does one of you lot fall prey to the… cave-dwellers?"
"On average, yearly. Sometimes three will go missing inside a month and all will be well for nearly half a decade, sometimes it happens invariably every winter. They have been plaguing the community ever since we began here centuries ago. But most of us are too afraid to take the fight to the source. The few who have tried have had very limited success."
Donna wrinkled her brow incredulously. "So you just lie down and roll over?"
Ilseg looked confused. "We do nothing of the kind."
She curbed the urge to roll her eyes. "Exactly. You do nothing."
He shook his head. "Regrettably, you are correct. All we can do is keep close tabs on all our members and send fully and carefully clad search parties into the caves when one goes missing. Not too deep, though. But, if those who have been victimized still retain their hearing and can respond to calls, they can be found and saved."
"And by saved," Donna said, "you mean you rip those things off their skin so they get to keep whatever's left of their senses."
"It actually requires a minor surgery to remove them safely, but…" He nodded somberly. "Yes, that is effectively what I mean."
Donna massaged her temples. "And how's your success rate for even finding them?"
After a moment of silence she looked up. "Somber" was no longer quite strong enough a word to describe the Cirulian's expression. "Grave" probably worked better here. "In my three decades of researching this tragedy," he said, "we have found as many in time to save their hearing and touch. One whose only… whose only touch was saved, and many who… were still alive only in the strictest sense."
Donna blinked, picturing a team of Cirulians, going mad with worry for their missing friend, finding that friend twitching vaguely on the stony ground, unresponsive to any and all attempts at communication.
The image of the floorbound Cirulian flickered, unbidden, to that of a glassy-eyed, limp-wristed, open-mouthed Doctor, and Donna quickly pinched the loose skin on her arm, shaking her head to remove the picture from it.
"You left them comatose?" she asked.
"We brought them all back to the community, and the wealthy kept their family members fed and healthy in case we should ever find a cure, but… Most were allowed to pass. There was nothing left for them."
Donna's hands curled into fists of their own accord. She stared in horror at the smaller creature standing in front of her. He shifted uncomfortably, and she whispered, "You let them die?"
"They were already effectively dead," he said, sounding puzzled at her sudden intensity.
"They could think! They couldn't communicate, but their minds were still very much alive! They were completely helpless and you murdered them?"
"The lauep murdered them," he asserted, obviously truly bewildered by this point, but there was an edge to his voice now that hadn't been there before.
Donna gritted her teeth, forcing herself to calm down. This society wasn't as advanced as the one she came from… Perhaps they were still in their Dark Ages… That didn't make this any less horrifying. Admittedly, it was a difficult situation, but…
I am proud to be a 21st century Earthling, she thought but did not say in front of the creature who probably didn't know about time travel or even alternate calendar systems.
"Well," she said after a time, transitioning to the matter at hand, "the Doctor's not dead. He's alive and kicking in there."
"He does have a sixth sense, I am told," Ilseg agreed. "Something the lauep left behind."
"He's coming back in full force," Donna emphasized calmly. "Maybe if you're lucky he'll even save your community from this."
Ilseg raised an eyebrow (or rather the skin where he would have had an eyebrow, as Donna realized he, along with probably all Cirulians, was lacking in this regard). "If he does recover, I should be very interested to speak with him."
"If," Donna laughed, and Ilseg gave her another prolonged, vaguely confused look, but the word rattled around her brain, refusing to let her ignore the reality of uncertainty.
"Will that be all?" Ilseg asked.
Donna returned to the Doctor's side to relieve the Cirulian currently watching over him (a female who seemed to be falling asleep when Donna entered), ask a few passing Cirulians some more questions as they came to her (not that any individual had many answers, which was hardly surprising if Ilseg was to be believed), and request some water at some point (though Cirulian water sure tasted wonky).
She spent a lot of time staring at the thing on the Doctor's ankle. It had downgraded from constant wriggling to twitching once every few minutes now. She tried to picture holding any kind of intelligent conversation with it. The imaginary conversation quickly devolved into her squashing it underneath her shoe. She gave up trying to imagine.
If he wasn't going to wake up… When was she supposed to know that? What was she even waiting for? The best case scenario would be the Doctor waking up very soon wearing that cheeky grin of his, completely re-sensified and armed with all the creatures' secrets, ready to go eradicate them. Worst case was… he never woke up? Or he woke up and soon made it clear that he still had no way of absorbing information from the world around him, and she'd have to load him onto the hopefully cooperative and helpful TARDIS and search the stars for a way to fix him.
Actually, she quickly realized, of course that would be preferable to him never waking up. He just had to stay alive. And they could get through this.
Of course, as the time dragged on, and Donna came back to the question of whether mental conversations went more slowly or more quickly than regular ones, she started punching the numbers on how likely that was to happen. On the one hand, he was the Doctor. On the other, he wasn't looking very Doctor-ish right now.
Her hand had been resting in his and her eyes had been trained mindlessly on the tiny dark enemy on his ankle for who knew how long when she felt a slight pressure in her hand and her eyes snapped up.
As far as his eyes, they were wide open, crystal clear, and fixed so specifically and intentionally on hers there was no way it was an accident. The cheeky grin was as present as it had ever been, and he asked, obviously very pleased with himself, "Did you miss me?"