It was a typical cemetary. Gravestones, a bit of fog and creepy as hell! The blonde would have been scared stiff if it weren't for the Doctor, bouncing with glee in front of her, neutralizing a good portion of the creepiness.
"Something's off here, Rose." The Doctor announced after passing a few gravestones. "Can you feel it?"
She glanced around. "...looks like a cemetary to me." she said flatly. The Doctor rolled his eyes and they walked a bit more. "I'll go look over there." she said, heading down a row of headstones. She stopped almost immediately, a chill running down her spine. "Brr! Did you feel that?" she called to him.
"Feel what?" but a moment later he had chills too. "Whoo! Cold!"
"But... the smell... strange..." Rose noticed when the sensation had subsided.
He nodded. "Kinda..." He cringed. "Why does it make me think of Jack?" he frowned.
They stood there a moment longer, trying to figure out what the smell was, when the chills returned.
"Ugh. I know why." Rose deadpanned. "Bleach. Bleach and Lavender."
The Doctor winced. "Oh. Right. Cleaning day."
They both cringed at the memory.
It had happened back when Jack Harkness had been travelling with them, and the Doctor was still bald with big ears and a leather jacket. They had decided to clean the Tardis. They'd drawn lots. Rose was to scrub down the outside and clean her and Jacks rooms, the Doctor would clean his room, the console room, and activate the auto clean for the other countless rooms, and Jack had gotten bathroom duty. Rose and the Doctor had decided on a break an hour later and went to find Jack. He was dresses in a purple and white maid's dress, scrubbing out a toilet with bleach. His usual scent of lavender soap contrasting sharply with the chemical smell of the bleach.
At the time they'd laughed at how silly he'd looked. Now, in a cemetary, the memory was just disturbing.
"Let's keep going, before I puke." the Doctor announced. Rose nodded and followed close behind.
The Chills had returned a few more times, each as unnerving as before. The Time Lord got tired of it rather quickly and pulled out his Sonic Screwdriver, determined to find out what was causing it.
They walked close together for about ten minutes before another chill got them. As soon as it did, the Sonic bleeped and the Doctor perked up. "Got something!" He waved it around, this way and that, trying to get a fix in what had made it bleep. "That's strange... it's gone!"
Rose looked up at him. "Gone? What's gone?"
"I don't know! It was there, then it dissapeared." He frowned. "It scans like a temporal annomaly but..."
"Do things like that just dissapear?" she questioned, looking at the device as well.
"No... no they don't... they tend to stay put unless..." he stopped and stared into space with a blank look on his face. He did that when he was trying to figure something out.
After a minute of him staring at nothing, he shouted, causing his companion to jump. "YES! ...no... OH! BRILLIANT!"
After checking that her heart was still where it should be, and in proper working order, she asked, "Did you think of something?"
He grinned at her. "Of course!"
She smirked. "Anything helpful?"
He smiled back. "Always! Allons-y!" and he started walking, Rose in tow.
They headed for a large tomb nearby, the Doctor recalibrating the scan every few seconds or so. As they got closer, the Sonic started going berserk, beeping like crazy, then seeming to lose the signal.
"Is it broken?" Rose asked.
"What's wrong with you? You were working fine a second ago..." Rose giggled as the Doctor started talking to his Screwdriver, like he did with the Tardis when it wasn't behaving like it should.
Rose briefly wondered if the Doctor was as sane as he claimed, what with his habit of talking to inanimate objects. Ok so the Tardis was alive and therefore not technically inanimate, but it was close to it most of the time, so she tended to count it as not alive. (Although it reminded her of the opposite on a regular basis.)
The Doctor tapped the thing on his palm a few times, only to have the blue light turn red and start wailing like a siren alarm. "What the hell?" The Doctor shouted and shut it off, staring at it like it had stood up and shook his hand.
Rose peeked over his arm to look at it too. "Umm... it's not s'posed ta do that... is it?" she asked, glancing at his face.
"...no... it's not..." Confusion, excitement, interest, surprise, facination. A number of emotions flitted across his face in what Rose had once referred to as 'Mood Whiplash'. He poked the end with the light and stared at it a moment longer before tucking it in his coat pocket. "Well, I guess we'll hafta look around..." he said with a slight dissapointment in his voice.
Rose giggled. Sometimes traveling with the Doctor was worth it, if only to see how he reacts to stuff. She wasn't dissapointed when, about ten minutes later, she called him away from reading headstones, to the side of the crypt. "Doctor! Come look at this!"
"A ship! There's an alien spacecraft in the middle of an 1867 graveyard!" He was practically bristling with excitement. Rose watched as he poked, prodded, scanned and caressed the ship-in-disguise. "Look Rose! A ship in a graveyard, disguised as a crypt!"
Rose laughed. "Yes it is." She had been the one to find it, after all. "...would you like me to leave you two alone for a moment?" she snickered after a minute or so of watching him rub the concrete wall of the crypt.
He turned and looked at her, then said with a totally straight face; "Yes, if you'd come back in an hour or so, we should be finished by then." and kept on rubbing it.
Rose collapsed, laughing hysterically at him.
He smirked and looked fondly at the wall, then gave it a good lick.
...or he would have. But something was off. All the hairs on his neck were standing up and it felt like he had to sneeze. "Rose? Could you come here a second?"
His voice was serious, killing her laughter in her throat. "What is it?"
He took her hand and laid it gently on the stone. She giggled nervously and fought the urge to pull her hand away. "That is so weird." Every single one of the tiny blonde hairs on her hand were sticking straight up. "It feels like static from a clothes dryer."
"Yeah, only about a million times stronger." As they sat there, the Doctor's mind was racing. He knew what it was; somewhere in his mind, he knew. The problem was finding that part of his brain and dragging the information out of it. Usually it required a minute or so of whacking himself in the head... "PHASING!" he suddenly shouted, jumping up.
"Deaf now..." deadpanned the blonde, who was being very melodramatic about popping her ear.
"Oh. Sorry." Reaching down, he took her other hand and pulled her to her feet. When he was sure she was ok, he returned to his bouncy, overly excited state. "But, phasing!"
"Phasing?" parroted Rose. The word sounded familliar, but with the Doctor, she sometimes couldn't tell. He had a habit of rambling about things that had no bearing on the current situation. Perhaps she'd heard it during one of his tangents?
"Yeah!" The blank look he was getting from his companion told him that she wasn't tracking. "Phasing... like..." Mentally grasping, he searched frantically for anything to get her on the same page as him. "Like... Jack on cleaning day."
The girl shivered and rubbed her arms. "I thought we'd agreed that that was too creepy to mention while in a cemetary?"
"Well, yeah; but do you remember why I thought it was so funny?"
She was getting that 'one-of-us-is-thick' feeling again... "Because he looked rediculous?"
The obvious. He should have known. "Aside from that."
She took a moment to ponder this. "Umm... something to do with the smell?" Her expression was one of hope and confusion. Confused about the question, but hoping she'd given a good answer.
"YES! Because, until that moment, I'd thought that the only way to create that... admittedly nauseating scent... was to use a phasing device!" The Doctor, unable to contain his enthusiasm, was gesturing wildly and bouncing in place slightly.
Rose crossed her arms and raised one eyebrow. Her thinking was, maybe if she mimicked his habits, particularly the ones he used when deep in thought, then she could get her mind to go in the same direction. "So it's not ghosts; it's phasing... somethings?"
"Yep! Phasing somethings!" he said with a grin, as if it were a phrase you'd say everyday.
A pause. "And phasing iiiiis..."
Tossing aside the mental image of smacking some sense into the girl, the Doctor tried to explain in a way she could understand. "It basically means that, while not ghosts, they do have the same interactive properties to anyone observing them outside of the..." A blank stare. Those were the glazed over eyes of a student who was bored to tears by their lecturing professor. He paced a minute in thought, then tried a more direct approach. "The Gelth. They could interact with us if they wanted to, but we were helpless to even touch them. We knew they were there, but that's about as far as it went."
Rose nodded. "Yeah, they could fly through people and make dead bodies move."
He nodded. "Same basic idea. They are invisible to us and we can't touch them, but they, whoever 'they' are, have the ability to either pass through us harmlessly, or suck us dry."
"So what can we do about it? It's not like there's a tear in space here that we can just close up, like the one in Cardiff, is there?" Great. Just what she needed. A transylvanian Canary Wharf.
"Nah. Not likely. They only have the same interactive proper... the same basic abilities as the Gelth; that doesn't make them dimention-hopping energy creatures."
"So, not Gelth."
"No."
"Then what?"
More pacing. "Well... strictly speaking... taking into account the location and barometric pressure of the region... and correcting for the latitudinal orientation... if I had to be completely honest..."
"You've no clue, have you?" she bluntly interrupted. Rose was fiddling with her hair and biting the tip of her tongue with a bemused look on her face. It was rare, but she enjoyed the moments when the Doctor didn't know something.
"None whatsoever." shrugged the Time Lord.
She nodded in that 'thought so' way that so often made the Doctor feel he was just a bit thick.
In an effort to convince, mostly himself, that he was not thick, he quickly added, "BUT! I do know how they're doing it, or at least I've a basic idea, so now it's just a matter of getting their attention!" Lacing his arm with hers, they began to walk out of the cemetary and back to town.
"So how are you planning on getting their attention?" she pondered aloud. "Crop circles?"
He stopped walking for a moment and looked at her with his patented 'Rose-are-you-being-serious-or-just-messing-with-me' look. Fortunately, he was pretty sure she was just messing with him. "Only if you want to start up the whole 'alien conspiracy theory' about a hundred years early."
Rose laughed and tugged him on.