The TARDIS landed, and Ronnie was the first out the door. She stepped out into a dingy street, the road made of cobblestone, the buildings made of brick, stone and paneled wood. A horse-drawn carriage rolled past the alleyway the TARDIS had landed in, making shadows in the light of the streetlamps. Ronnie walked out towards the street, followed by the Doctor.
"Where are we?"
"Portland Oregon, 1875. Quite the popular time period for this town, one with quite a history. I thought it would be a nice, easy first trip." The Doctor replied, stretching his bracers with his thumbs. Suddenly, a woman ran past them, dressed in American Victorian eveningwear, screaming to the people strolling down the street.
"He's been taken! They took my husband!"
"So much for an easy trip." Ronnie mumbled into the Doctor's ear, but he didn't reply, for he was already running towards the crying woman.
"Excuse me 'mam, but who took your husband?" The Doctor asked her.
"The men, at the saloon, they dragged him away to the tunnels!" and she broke into sobs.
"I'm sorry, but what tunnels?" Ronnie asked.
"Oh, I forgot." The Doctor smacked his forehead. "This is the time of the Shanghaiing."
"What?"
"You see, traders and businessmen built these tunnels under the city, to transport goods from the river docks to their stores and restaurants faster. But some not-very-nice people got access to these tunnels, and started kidnapping people through these tunnels, selling the men as white slaves to foreign countries, and the women as sex slaves to just about anyone. And since these tunnels connected directly to places like bars, it was very easy to get the drunken men into the tunnels. Of course, in your day, they're boarded up, caved in and became a tourist attraction, but in this decade? Ooh, they're dangerous. Tradesmen don't use it as goods transport anymore."
"Well, that's nice. So what do we do?"
"We try to get the people back, of course!" the Doctor patted the confused woman's shoulder, and took Ronnie's hand. He dragged her off to the direction that the woman was running from, eager to get the woman's husband back.
-.-.-.-
"This was a bad idea." Ronnie mutters, as the Doctor attempts to lift open a large steel bar that keeps the door to the basement of the Edenbeyer Saloon closed. They had just spent the last hour glancing around the bar, looking for Shanghaiers and clues as to where the tunnel was located. They had seen two rugged-looking men emerge from the back room, where Ronnie and the Doctor had immediately dashed to.
She stood, waiting for the Doctor to finish fiddling with the molecular composure of the steel with his sonic screwdriver. She remembered that morning's happenings. It seemed like years ago, well, years in the future, but she had not been awake for more than eight hours. So many things had happened in such a short time.
Then her mind returned to last night's dream. She dreamed of a blue police box, and it's magical world. Now she realized that there really was a blue police box, and the magical world she only dreamed of was real. She remembered dreaming of Time Lords and TARDISes, aliens and war, death and destruction. She had asked the Doctor earlier about visiting his planet, and at that moment, she remembered dreaming about the death of it. She had seen the planet collapse, the death of billions of Time Lords and Ladies, elders and children. Ronnie had never remembered so much of her dreams.
But were they just dreams? Or were they visions of the past? She was a human, who had never seen anything alien in her life. She was boring, a boring girl who grew up in a boring village in England with boring parents who shipped her off to live with her boring grandfather in New York, attended a boring high school until he died (a rather boring death), went back to England for one more boring year of high school with her boring classmates, went to her parent's boring funeral (they died in a car crash) then moved back to New York, attended six boring years at a boring university, getting a boring degree and a boring job.
How had someone so boring and unimportant have such vivid, beautiful dreams?
Then again, the Doctor said that nobody was unimportant. And she believed him–he had that affect on her. She, however, felt a twinge of mistrust towards the Doctor. She didn't know why, she just did. He was too strange. But she was strange, too. She had accepted this world of time travel and aliens all too fast for such a boring person, but she assumed it was because of her dreams. She had always dreamed such strange things.
"Do you have friends?" the Doctor asked her, ripping Ronnie from her thoughts. She thought it such a strange question, to ask if one had friends.
"I have a few mates from work, if that's what you mean. We hang out at the water-cooler, all that good friend stuff."
"No, I mean do you have any long-term friends? People who would miss you, you know."
"Yeah, a couple from my university years. Not family, though. Mum and Dad died just after my high school graduation."
"No friends from grade school?" he continued making small-talk, still sonic-ing the steel bar.
"No, I lived in New York with my grandfather for four years. If I even had friends, they would have lost all contact with me during that time." She shrugged. "Do you have friends?"
"Of course I do."
"Do you see them often?"
The Doctor seemed stunned at this question. "In all truth, I haven't seen a single friend in six or so years."
"Six years? But that's so long a time!
"You forget that I am a thousand and two-hundred and fifty-three years old."
"How have you stayed so young,–"
"Regeneration?" they both said at the same time. The Doctor stopped sonic-ing the steel, and stared up at her. Ronnie herself seemed stunned at her knowledge of the Doctor.
"How did you know that?"
"I have these dreams," she admitted, "I've had them for as long as I can remember." Ronnie was about to continue, but was cut off by the sound of the steel door unlocking from the other side.
"Hide!" the Doctor whispered, and pulled her into a dark, narrow corridor. They stayed hidden as two more rather rugged-looking men sauntered out from the tunnel, not bothering to close the door. When they had disappeared up the stairs to the saloon, the Doctor squeezed back out of the thin corridor, pulling Ronnie through the now-open door.
The tunnel was pitch-black, and the Doctor held out his sonic screwdriver to light the way. What they could see in the dark was brick walls, wooden doors, bits of rubble on the ground and rats scurrying up the wooden beams.
Ronnie kept up with the Doctor as they ran, having no idea where they were. She knew they were underground, but she was under the Willamette River for all she knew. The Doctor said that the tunnels never went under the river, but she still wondered.
Once they reached another door, the Doctor tried to open a locked door with his sonic screwdriver.
"Doesn't work." He muttered, repeatedly hitting the metal contraption.
"What do you mean it doesn't work?" Ronnie asked, exasperated from running through the underground tunnels.
"It doesn't do wood!" he shouted, as if he had had to explain that notion far too often.
"Are you kidding me?" Ronnie rolled her eyes. With great strength, she leaned back on her left foot, and kicked down the door with her right.
"You do realize that you have just affected history?" the Doctor complained as she continued forward through the now-archway. "That door was to remain intact until 2789!"
"Oops." Ronnie rolled her eyes sarcastically.
As she was running, her foot sunk into a pile of goo.
"Blech!" She pulled her pink-slime covered shoe back, gagging. The Doctor bent down, scanning it with the sonic screwdriver.
"That's not human, is it?"
"No, its Salvatorian."
"I beg your pardon?"
"The Salvatorian race is pretty humanoid, except they have red skin and fins. They're amphibious, half their population lives underwater due to their planet having only 10% land area."
"So why are they here, and what is that goop that I just stepped in?"
"They must be stealing slaves, like the human shanghaiers. When they want to leave some notification as to where their brothers and sisters should go, they spit out this 'goop' as you like to call it, but really it's just mucus. Human Shanghaiers think nothing of it; they're just grossed out like you are right now. It's the Salvatorians what know what they mean. The more they come across the mucus, the more they know they're going in the right direction.
"So we're dealing with aliens?"
"Yes, and as of right now the human shanghaiers are actually less common. Kidnapping was supposed to stop a couple years ago, so the men we see coming out of the tunnels must be Salvatorians with perception filters."
"Yes, because that makes so much more sense."
"Oi, don't mock me!" The Doctor stood up. "Anyways, we better follow the mucus. Have to stop these Salvatorians once and for all, eh?" he took Ronnie's hand, and the two ran down the tunnels, avoiding the piles of mucus.
They finally emerged from the cold tunnel into the warm night air. Ronnie looked around where they stood; behind them was a tall stone-brick wall with the steel door they'd just emerged from, beneath their feet a wooden dock, the flow of the river making it slowly bounce up and down. In front of them stood a tall, glorious looking wooden ship. But the Doctor raised his sonic at it, and the image of the ship jumped, and dissolved away into the true ship, with a curving metal hull and font glass plate windows.
"That's their whole ship?" Ronnie raised her eyebrow at the tiny thing.
"No, it's just a vessel. When they kidnap as many humans as they can, they'll fly into the earth's orbital field, where the big ship is waiting to take all of them back to Krom-1, a market planet, to be sold as slaves."
"So what, do we break in there and free all the humans?"
"Something like that." The Doctor shrugged. He opened the hull door, to find a main cargo space. Ten humans lay, stacked upon each other, knocked out cold. Ronnie ran towards them, and took the pulse of the nearest woman.
"Her heart rate is speeding up." Ronnie reported.
"That means the knock-out drops they were given are wearing off. Cover your nose, this is going to smell." The Doctor took out a small bottle of green fluid from his jacket, and opened the cap. Even with plugging her nose, Ronne could still smell the gas. The combination of the green fluid and the oxygen in the air made a foul-smelling gas, that started to wake up the men and women in the cargo hold.
"Hey! You!" came a voice from behind them. Ronnie spun around on her heels to see a Salvatorian male, who was now raising a gun at her. On pure instinct, she took hold of the Doctor's sonic screwdriver from his hand, and used it to disable the enemy's weapon. Ronnie rushed forward, and elbowed the alien in the gills on its neck. He dropped to the floor of the ship, coughing.
"Did you have to hit him?" the Doctor complained, as Ronnie knelt down by the Salvatorian. She took the gun from his hands and threw it across the room, as the Doctor directed the ten people out of the vessel. Ronnie was last to leave, until the male Salvatorian grabbed her by the shirtcollar and dragged her down.
"Ronnie!" the Doctor yelled, as the Salvatorian closed the hull door. She struggled against the alien's hold on her, as he forced open her mouth, pouring a few drops of clear liquid down her throat. She heard the Doctor's yells as she slipped into unconsciousness.
-.-.-.-
A bright, white light shone into her eyes, making them water. She blinked repeatedly, and tried to sit up. Ronnie found her arms and legs bound to a cold, metal table. Looking around her, she saw more Salvatorians in surgical gear. Ronnie lifted her head, to see her button-up shirt had been completely unbuttoned, and small sensor cables stuck on her bare chest. She tried to scream, or do something to divert their attention from what ever they were doing to her chest, but her throat was dry and her mouth gagged. She thrashed, still strapped to the table. One of the Salvatorians buckled another restraint, but this time over her neck and forehead. She could not see or understand why they were monitoring her chest; all she knew was that her breasts were exposed, leaving her feeling completely uncomfortable in front of all these aliens.
The lights in the room suddenly turned off, and the Salvatorians mumbled to each other, concerned. Emergency power lights came on, and a voice came on over the speakers:
"Hell–ooo Salvatorains! Normally I would leave you in peace but you have taken too many humans for me to simply ignore you. I've already transported all your slaves from the cargo hold back to their homes, where they belong."
Ronnie smiled inwardly at the voice of the Doctor. She tried to cry out, to tell him where she was, but the gag around her mouth kept her voice from flowing.
"You also seem to have taken a good friend of mine, and I want her back. If she is unharmed, then you might just leave this galaxy alive." His voice deepened, a dark, angry tone sending fear even into Ronnie's heart.
The Salvatorians who were in the room with Ronnie filed out, one by one. She kicked and thrashed at her restraints. Her eyes darted around the room, looking for anything that could possibly help her. But she was too well tied down, and her chest suddenly started hurting, as if the anesthesia kept any pain at bay.
Her eyes landed on a slim, small figure in the corner of the room. She appeared to be a young Salvatorian, eyes filled with concern and curiosity. The young alien girl stepped forward, slowly, towards Ronnie.
Ronnie trembled in fear, afraid of what this young girl would do to her. Her red-skinned hands reached down to Ronnie's leg restraints, and pulled them loose. She quickly did the same with the arms, until all of Ronnie's restraints were untied. She elbowed the alien in the gut, sending her back against the wall, pinning her there.
"Why did your people kidnap me?" Ronnie growled.
The young alien gasped for air, "They wanted to know if it was true…I am just an assistant…do not harm me please!" and with that, Ronnie let go of the girl, letting her fall to the floor. She ran out of the room, to go find the Doctor.
It was until she had come across the front of the ship did she realize that she was now in space, orbiting nineteenth-century Earth. Great, big windows surrounded what appeared to be a control bay, now empty of all people. She watched as escape pods flew away from the ship and Earth, leaving the current solar system.
The lights came back on, and in the reflection of the windows, Ronnie saw on her still-bare chest a long, recently stitched-up scar, circling around her right breast. Upon seeing the cut line, she gasped in pain, clutching her burning scars. Ronnie screamed in pain, as she sunk to the floor.
Two strong hands pulled her up, and she looked at the face of the Doctor. Her pain drowned out his words that he spoke, as he lifted her up, and ran from the control room, carrying her to the TARDIS, which was located in a maintenance room. He carried her into the TARDIS medical bay, and laid her on one of the tables.
"Calm down, it'll all be okay." His words tried to soothe her. A light from above scanned her, and the Doctor looked at the monitor next to the table she lay on. He sighed in relief, and pulled out the poorly stitched stitches. He professionally cleaned the incisions, and re-stitched them perfectly.
"What…what did they do to me?" Ronnie managed to speak.
"Nothing, they just cut you open for a look. Nothing is missing, and nothing is new. You are 100% human, everything is fine."
"But Doctor…they were monitoring my chest…why would they do that?"
"I have no idea." His face was filled with rage and concern. "They'll find a nice surprise on each of their escape pods, that's for sure." He muttered darkly. Ronnie wondered what the 'surprise' was, until she remembered his words on the intercom.
"If she is unharmed, you might just leave this galaxy alive."
Then Ronnie knew. She was harmed, and even though the Doctor didn't know it, he planed for each of their deaths anyways. Even the young girl who helped her free was going to die.
-.-.-.-
Twelve Earth-hours later, Ronnie woke up in the medical bay, and made her way out to the console room. She watches silently as the Doctor gripped the console, knuckles white in fury. She could not see his face behind his mop of hair that fell down in front of his eyes as his head was bent downwards.
"Doctor?" Ronnie muttered. She had an orange blanket wrapped around her shoulders, and she wrapped it tighter around her body. He looked up, sadness and fury behind his face.
"I'm so sorry, Ronnie. I never wanted you to get hurt, not now, not ever."
Ronnie walked up the steps to him, and still holding onto the corners of the blanket, wrapped her arms around the Doctor. He stifled a sob.
"Nobody plans for these things. I'm fine, I'm not dead."
"If you want to leave, I can understand."
"Why would I leave you?" She murmured softly.
Ooh, nobody touches the Doctor's companions!
Review?