AUTHOR'S RAMBLINGS: Cute time-traveller girlfriends! Cute time-traveller girlfriends! If I say it enough times, will that make it happen?
"Slow down! Where are you going? There was a really lovely curry place on the road just back there, we've gone past it now! No curry places down here."
"We are going to one, just wait!" Clara shouted behind her, still running.
The Doctor was wheezing along behind Shona: "How does she keep up such a pace?"
"Do you know where she's going?" she asked him.
"Yes, yes, of course I do. But I think she wants to keep it a surprise. Now shut up because I can hardly breathe. God, I wish I had twice as many lungs as you lot instead of twice as many hearts..."
Eventually, thankfully, Clara did slow down. Where she slowed down was a street full of houses, with not a curry place in sight. There was, however, a big blue box.
"Is that a... phone box?" Shona peered up at the thing. "Never seen a phone box looking like that before."
Clara unlocked the door for her. The Doctor gestured at her to "go in, go in!" So Shona went into the funny-looking blue box and-
Whoa.
This was not a curry place. This was bonkers.
"How's there so much room? Is it some kind of dimensional thing?"
"It is exactly some kind of dimensional thing!" said a rather impressed Doctor. Yesss, she knew all those sci-fi movies would pay off someday! "Specifically, Time and Relative Dimensions In Space. TARDIS for short."
"Time?" Shona span around, taking in all the bizarre sciencey controls, the bookcases (weird, wouldn't they have brain download books or something in the future?), the blackboards with equation thingies scribbled all over them, the lights all over the walls, all the way up to the spinning circley things at the top. "So... is this a time machine?"
Clara grinned at her in excitement, then leapt up to the console, joining her friend there: "Doctor, where in the universe do they do the nicest curry?"
"Easy," the Doctor replied. He swung down a lever...
And the whole place vibrated with the roaring sound echoing about. Shona clung to a railing and felt the buzzing feeling within it, like it was alive.
It stopped.
"You going to open it?" asked Clara.
"Is it safe? Don't you have, like, scanners and stuff? To make sure it's alright out there? Is the atmosphere poisonous? Are there, like, Triffids around or something?"
"Triffids went extinct millions of years before your time," the Doctor assured her.
"Alright..." Still a little nervous, especially about the fact that Triffids were apparently a real thing, she nudged open the door.
Shona McCullough set foot on the soil of an alien world.