Well! It has been far too long. I apologize sincerely; hit a rut with this one. But I think I've finally figured out where I'm headed with this story, and while I can't promise consistency with the time between updates, I will tell you there is no way I'm not finishing.
I will warn you that I'm not quite sure what's holding this chapter together. But it's definitely necessary and hopefully you can find some enjoyment in reading it.
Donna hurried out of the room, feeling an almost physical discomfort at the pure venom in Ilseg's eyes. It didn't help that they didn't much resemble human eyes to begin with.
She caught up to the Doctor in the hall and asked breathlessly, "What now?"
"There's no way he speaks for the entire community," he said readily, and she could almost see the gears spinning like mad in his head. "He might be the head of this research facility, or hospital, or whatever this is, but he can't make decisions for the whole of his people."
"So then who can we go to?" Donna asked uncertainly. "Or should we even go to any individual? That might happen again."
"True, and I hesitate to defer to a crowd, but we may have to." He skidded around a corner, and there stood four Cirulians, having a conversation. They looked up, their eyes understandably drawn to two very tall, pink, light-haired aliens marching around in their strange clothes.
But that wasn't all.
"You're the foreigners," one said, blank-faced.
"There were only two of them, right?" another whispered, more audibly than probably intended.
A third finally asked, "How are you both awake?"
The Doctor spread his arms out wide, always one for the theatrical, and announced, "Hello, yes, the one who was fished out of the caves tasteless and nose blind and just plain blind, that was me, and I'm back, not by force, but by mercy." He reached one hand down to slightly pull up the leg of his trousers, and gestured towards his ankle with the other.
It took a moment for the four of them to find what he was pointing at and identify it, but when they did they uttered a collective cry of alarm, flinching back, unconsciously trying to shield themselves from the creature using each other. The Doctor put both his hands out and reassured, "No, no, no, look, it's fine. I'm fine. I can see and hear and feel and an hour ago I couldn't do any of that, I was done, kaput. Yet now I have been re-sensified. How is this possible?"
"It's not," one of them, a female, said uncertainly.
The Doctor looked at her, unimpressed, and Donna couldn't hold back a smile. "I want you to take another look at me, and then try again."
"But… But this is incredible," said another female, staring openly down at the Doctor's ankle, though he had dropped the leg of his trousers and thusly covered the creature. "You were drained and then… refilled? How is that possible?"
"Well I didn't wrestle my senses back, I'll tell you that much," he said earnestly. "I'm not capable of that."
She blinked. "It… gave them back?"
In a short moment he closed the distance between them, displaying, not for the first time, his lack of comprehension of the notion of personal space, and visibly startling her. At the same time he cried, "Absolutely it gave them back! Never before happened, right? Maybe you never even considered it could. But here I am, walking, talking proof that they can be reasoned with. Tell someone—tell everyone! This is the biggest news you're likely ever to hear!" And he took off down the hallway so suddenly and so fast that Donna had to stand there processing it all for a moment before she could begin to chase after him, leaving the Cirulians with eyes full of questions and no real answers at all.
"Okay," she huffed on catching up with him, "you want everyone to know, but what's the endgame? How do you intend to actually convince them of anything? Is there a plan here?"
"Donna, of course I have a plan," he responded, sounding almost offended, as he skidded around a corner.
She was dubious, but she said, only half-expecting an actual answer, "Fine. What's step two then?"
Slowing down for a moment, he said predictably matter-of-factly, "Haven't gotten to step two yet. It's a plan, it's just an incomplete plan."
"Sure," she replied, totally unsurprised, but skidded to a halt that came this close to disaster, as the Doctor had inexplicably stopped in his tracks to stare at something on the wall. Instead of colliding with him full force, she nearly tripped over her own feet trying to shift her momentum so she'd end up next to him, and would have fallen on her head if he hadn't grabbed her shoulder to steady her.
"What the bloody—" she sputtered, and naturally he immediately released her arm to cover her mouth.
She slapped his hand away, and was about to give him a piece of her mind when he said, sounding completely unaware of how close she'd come to smashing him into the wall, "Donna. The caves."
Finally she took a moment to focus on what he was looking at so fixedly: a map of the caverns. An extremely incomplete one, but a map nonetheless, drawn precisely but simply and color-coded by areas of highest danger.
She didn't see what was so special about the map itself, but she had a creeping suspicion about what ideas it might have triggered in him, and she didn't like it one bit. "What about the caves?"
Once again whatever machinery ran that brilliant mind of his was practically throwing out sparks, and she could easily imagine smoke leaking out of his ears.
After several seconds, he only looked at her, and grinned.
It was incredibly impressive how many Upper Cirulians he managed to pick up in their frenzied exit from the unfamiliar building. The entire place was buzzing with activity by the time they found the door, and over a dozen of them were trailing behind the two foreigners—hesitant and nervous, yes, but they weren't going anywhere.
The community, as Donna now vaguely remembered from the emotionally distracting journey there, was a sprawling collection of buildings going halfway up a particularly large hill. Only not all of them were exactly buildings. All were made from dirt, and many sported roofs covered in long violet grass—more dug out of the hill than built into it.
It looked like a fascinating little assembly and Donna would have been glad to be exploring it rather than worrying about this, but here she was, running after the Doctor like she did far too often.
She didn't know whether he had asked the creature while speaking to it, or that conversation had somehow given him a stronger link to the cave-dwellers as a whole, or any of the Upper Cirulians had given him directions and she'd missed it, but each footstep he took seemed amazingly sure, and inside twenty minutes of moving through the hills averaging at a jogging pace, he had slowed to a walk and was looking around carefully, face full of focus—on what, she didn't know.
The crowd of Upper Cirulians trailing after them had doubled in size after they'd left the building, and they were not being shy about asking questions, but the Doctor genuinely did not seem to be hearing them. Donna answered the ones she caught as best she could, but she was admittedly not as well-informed as she'd have liked.
Finally, the madman seemed to come out of his own mind, stopped dead, and spun around, expression dead serious. Donna and the Upper Cirulians stopped as well, almost as a single unit, joined in mutual confusion and readiness to hear what on Earth—Cirula, rather—was going on, despite the group of natives easily standing several metres behind Donna.
"Hello inhabitants of Cirula," he began, and though his grave expression remained, he seemed to almost immediately become distracted as he continued, "speakers of Raxian, Hill-dwellers, people of the purple mountains. We are standing almost directly above a rather dense population of what you generically call lauep. Don't panic, because this is why you're here."
Immediately they were looking down, taking involuntary steps back, grasping each other's arms in search of support, murmuring and exclaiming in alarm. Donna chewed on her lower lip as she watched, praying for this to end well, not sure how good the chances were that it would.
"For those of you who may not be completely aware what the fuss is about, Donna and I—ah yes, I'm the Doctor by the way, and this is Donna, hello," and he gestured to her and waved accordingly, while she rolled her eyes. "We were in those caves a matter of hours ago. Not sure how many hours, but less than a day. Not sure how long a day is here though." He scratched his head.
"It's been almost twelve hours," Donna supplied.
"There we go! Twelve hours. And I came out with this," and he grasped the fabric of his trousers and showcased his ankle more dramatically than Donna had been aware was possible. The entire crowd stepped forward to see a bit better, and most of them appeared fascinated and horrified but not shocked, while a few were obviously receiving new information.
"Yes, it took my senses. All of them in fact. But you know what? It gave them back. And at this very second," he shouted suddenly, dropping the leg of his trousers, "this fantastic creature is communicating with the ones below me."
As he continued, the Upper Cirulians visibly became increasingly disturbed and even frightened. "You are in no danger at all, I assure you," the Doctor said urgently, holding both his arms up, palms facing outwards. "And I am going to prove that to you. Donna, you might want to step back a bit."
She blinked. She had been purposefully standing near him to show the natives that she wasn't afraid. They were still giving the two of them a wide berth, but she didn't see why she had to join them in that regard. And so she stayed stubbornly in place, crossing her arms for good measure. "Why?"
"Give it a few seconds, and then I urge you to follow me," the Doctor called, again addressing the small crowd of onlookers. "Of course nobody's forcing you to, but—and I am more than serious when I say this—if you don't, this was all for nothing."
The ground beneath Donna's feet rumbled gently, and involuntarily she staggered back.
Meanwhile, the long grass around the Doctor's legs suddenly fell towards him, and, like he was standing in a jerky lift, his entire body traveled straight down about six inches. He swayed dangerously in place, but his feet were underground by now, and before Donna could register what was happening, in a mighty reverberation accompanied by the alarmed shouting of the Upper Cirulians, the hill swallowed him up.