A/N: I do not own Doctor Who, but believe me, if I did, things would be totally different. And probably ten times worse. But I would be happy.
Clunk. Whir, whir. Clunk. Whoosh. Groan.
"Come on, old girl, what is the matter?" the Doctor examined the time rotor critically. He slapped the flat of his hand on the panel in front of him. "Come on!"
"Master—"
"Shut up K-9!"
"Affirmative, Master," the patient metal Scottie lowered his head.
The Doctor stroked the glass lightly with his fingertips, lost in thought. A glance at the coordinates confirmed that he was in fact basically where he was aiming for. Late 1100's. French-controlled England. The disturbance he had picked up on his instruments was still there, but it surely was not the cause of his rocky materialization.
No, wait, there was something else. He looked at a chart, tracing a line that was steady and straight until it abruptly went haywire, lurching erratically across the paper before it settled down, but not yet returning to normal. "That's strange. What do you make of this, K-9?" he held the printed paper down to the dog's eye line.
"A massive temporal disturbance on the magnitude of 4.6778 x 10 to the 14239-"
"Yes, yes, I know it was large, but what does it mean?"
K-9 paused as he worked out the calculations. "The transport of a mass of no more than one hundred kilograms through time and space approximately .046 centimeters and 800 years, with a error of + or – 5%…"
The Doctor looked at the dog, thinking. "So, something was just moved across time—"
"From the future, master, it had negative velocity on the y axis--" K-9 corrected.
"Into past, then," the Doctor corrected, not questioning the dog's strange calculations. "And it almost landed in the same position as it started in, just at a different time?"
"Given the movement created by plate tectonics, the mass landed in the same place it started, relative the planet's location in space."
He knitted his eyebrows together. "This mass, it was less than one hundred kilograms… less than 200 pounds, then?"
"Affirmative, Master."
He rocked back, thinking. "Yes, I see. And this is what caused our rough landing, then?"
"Affirmative, as far as I can tell, Master."
Nodding, he stood up. "Well, that is interesting, but that disturbance is passed, and that is not what we are here for. You stay here and watch the TARDIS, I'll go and track this signal we received." He held up a device made entirely out of small lights and wires
"Affirmative."
He locked the door behind him and trudged off, examining the heavily wooded landscape around him.
Timelords have excellent hearing and navigation skills. Unfortunately he was displaying little of either. He was wandering around, lost, when an arrow thunked into the tree, inches above his head. In fact, he felt a lock of his curly hair fall across his stunned face, sheared clean off by the steel point. His bulging eyes caught a man who seemed to materialize out of the undergrowth from nowhere, followed by a second who had another arrow notched in his bow.
Fortunately, along with their unsurpassed hearing and navigational skills, they also are gifted with the ability to talk themselves out of nearly any situation imaginable.
"Oh, hello. I'm the Doctor," he said pleasantly.
The nearer man, taller than his companion, examined the strangely dressed man in front of him. "I do not care who you are," he said, sneering, "you are now the prisoner of my master, Lord Fulbert."
"Oh, is that entirely necessary?" he asked, pained. The two men looked at each other, then as one, they stepped forward and punched the Doctor, one in the face and the other in the gut, knocking him to the ground. A few select blows, and he was unconscious at their feet.
He awoke with a start, mind working feverishly. From the slam of a door behind him, the taste of dirt up his nose and in his mouth, and the way his face and chest ached, he guessed he had been thrown onto the ground. Rolling over and opening his eyes confirmed this, along with some other suspicions he had. He was in a dark, dank place, and shafts of light in the gloom told him that it was a wooden room above ground where he was incarcerated.
However, as his eyes and his mind adjusted, he noticed other things in his prison. Barrels, cages, jars… various rift raft that would be found in a medieval village. A small pile of rags in the corner garnered some interest, but was soon replaced when he noticed a crate for catching fish. "Near the ocean, then," he surmised aloud. A movement at the corner of his eye made him jump to his feet, instantly ready to fight off the large overgrown rats he imagined coming for him. Panic, him? No, never…
A strangled cry of pain resolved any fears of rodent attack. It came from the pile of rags, which he noticed, somewhat belatedly, were stained with something dark. Moving aside a bag of maggoty flour, he groaned, his troubles worsened significantly.
Although how much worse, he could not be sure, since K-9 was not there to do the calculations, and he was way too busy to do so himself.
A young woman was sprawled out on the ground, partially hidden from sight. Her jeans and chucks betrayed her early 21st century origins, and the hands clamped around the shaft of an arrow sticking out of her thigh betrayed her injury.
"Well, one mystery solved," he muttered as he stooped to help the stricken time traveler.