Doctor And Assistant (Chap. 9)
Chapter Nine: The Bloody Ball: Part One
/the Doctor\\
"A... masquerade? What's that?" Derpy asked.
"You wear masks, I think," Scarlet said, walking to them.
"What are YOU doing here?!" Derpy yelled.
"Derpy, calm down. Scarlet and I talked last night. She helped me get you back into the TARDIS. I know what I'm doing; she'll also be traveling with us," the Doctor said cooly.
Derpy watched Scarlet unsurely, but finally nodded. "Fine. Anyways, masquerade?"
"But did you actually get an invite?" Scarlet asked.
"Surprisingly, yes," the Doctor answered.
"How'd they get the TARDIS's address right?" Derpy asked.
"That's the question of the hour, now ain't it? Someone even called her this morning!"
"But you said only one person knew the number?" his assistant asked. "How is this possible?"
"I don't know," the Doctor shrugged. "It's a thing. Respect the thing."
Derpy snickered.
"Actually, it's just weird," Scarlet muttered.
"But weird is good. Right?"
"Well, yeah, but we can't do something blind now can we?" Scarlet shot back.
"Not entirely. I say we go. I mean, who knows? This could be a break from all of the recent dangers we've been experiencing, right, girls?"
"I guess," Derpy shrugged, watching Scarlet carefully and looking at the Doctor at the same time.
/1 Hour Later\\
The Doctor chuckled at his assistant. "You put it on backwards."
"Hey, this is my first time, ya know. Can you help? This party was YOUR idea, anyways."
Derpy's glittering red dress that she had retrieved from the TARDIS closet looked absolutely beautiful on her, but the Doctor wouldn't let himself tell her. She walked towards him and he took off her mask.
Derpy's features shown elegantly. He found himself lost in her eyes and her clueless expression. The TARDIS cheered him on encouragingly, but he remembered why he hadn't told her earlier and cleared his throat.
"Right, um... your mask. See, you'll need to look through these, so they'll go over your eyes. This stick is how you hold it to your face," he explained, adjusting the sparkling white mask.
Once it was on Derpy, she smiled weakly and asked "how do I look?"
"Absolutely beaut-" he cut himself off, a new smile covering their frowns.
"Right," she muttered, crossing her arms and staring at the ground. "Scarlet, are you almost done?"
"Girls, I've been done for a while now," Scarlet smiled, walking to them in a light blue dress.
"Scarlet, I hope you know, I'm a guy, not a girl," the Doctor said. Derpy snickered.
"Please, even with your voice dropping, Doctor, you sound a bit too high-pitched for a guy," Scarlet pointed out.
The Doctor scoffed. "Everyone's a critic," he muttered. "Hey, Derpy, still got that phone I gave you?" he asked as an excuse for Derpy to exit the room.
"In my bedroom, yeah. Why?" she answered.
"May or may not need it. Can you bring it just in case we get split up?" was his excuse.
Derpy nodded at his request, walking out of the main control room and into the bed hall. The Doctor pulled Scarlet aside.
"What was that about?!" he asked.
"What, I'm not allowed to make a few jokes?"
"Jus... Just... Try not to say thing like that to embarrass me. Especially not in front of Derpy."
"Oh yeah! Forgot about whatcha said yesterday about–"
"I got it, Doct-..." Derpy paused, surveying the scene in front of her. "...what?"
"God," Scarlet grumbled. "Yeah, Doc. I get the gist of what you said. Now get off of my wrist."
The Doctor, out of shock, felt his hand go limp. Scarlet shook it off and walked to the doors.
"Come on, you love-birds," she teased.
"Doctor, why is everyone saying things like that? Aren't we just friends?" Derpy asked, trying to play it off.
"I... I have no clue," he murmured quietly, pulling his mask over his face and following the girls out. He shut the door behind him and his eyes automatically widened.
The Doctor sniffed the air a few times. "Do you two smell that?" he asked cautiously.
"Smell what?" the girls asked in a unison.
"Something sticky... and a hint of metal? It's almost like its copper... Blood." The words fell out of his mouth before he could stop himself.
"Blood?!" Derpy gasped.
"Hey, calm down," Scarlet said. "It isn't like there is a lot of it. (She paused.) Right, Doc?"
"Maybe," he muttered, "it's hard to tell right now."
"Celestia help us," Derpy sighed. "Let's get this over with."
The Doctor nodded apologetically, locked the TARDIS, took one of each companion's hands, and began walking.
/Derpy\\
Looking around, the place was beautiful. Sparkling white floors, light-maroon-and-light-pink striped walls with a cherry wood border on the tops bottoms and middles, and a large black curtain where music and talking was coming from. People had their masks on, walking past the three travelers nonchalantly and chatting over who they thought was who and irrelevant topics.
"Why doesn't anyone notice it, Doctor?" Scarlet asked.
"I'm a Time Lord. I pick up on things like this faster than anyone else. Plus, this is a HUMAN masquerade party. We're the only anomalies here that my sonic screwdriver knows of," he explained in a shushed voice.
"I hope we're the only ones," Derpy added under her breath.
"If it is a body, don't you think someone dead or currently dying would, I don't know, attract a lot of people or something?" Scarlet pointed out.
The Doctor pushed open a pair of doors you'd see in the emergency wing of a hospital. "It all depends on how the body is found and how important he or she was."
Scarlet nodded understandingly. "Can you tell anything ABOUT the blood? Like, gender of who or what it came from, or maybe how it was spilled? DNA?"
"Um..." the Doctor sniffed the air again. "I don't know that. But your mental inferences are definitely right; someone has died." Derpy's grip on the Doctor's hand tightened. He looked at her with a concerned expression. "Are you scared?" he asked her. She kept a straight face, walking forwards and matching his pace silently.
The Doctor bowed his head quickly, staring at his hand, pursing his lips, widening his eyes, and stopping his walk in one second flat. He remained silent.
"Doctor?" Derpy asked concernedly, placing a reassuring hand on her back.
Scarlet snapped her fingers once in front of his face. "Yo, Doctor boy!" she yelled. Six more snaps. "Can you come back to Earth instead of space?"
He looked at his hand, then Derpy, then Scarlet, and now at his hand again.
"Are you so terrified you're trembling?" Scarlet asked.
"No... No, I'm... I'm not," he whispered. "Derpy, come closer."
She turned herself so she was directly in front of him. "Yes, Doctor?"
"Feel my hand."
"Excuse me?" she asked, shocked at his request.
"Jus... Just do it," he said quietly.
So Derpy took his hand, laying it carefully atop her own, and realized it was... shaking? It felt like his hand was having a seizure, but you couldn't see it moving.
"Doctor?" she asked. "What does this mean?"
"Something... new," he responded, pulling his hand away and studying it closely again.
'It's never like this. Something new is here, something different. Something we haven't seen before...' Derpy said to herself in her head, most likely mimicking the Doctor's thoughts.
"Doctor, your hand shaking; what does that mean? Is it like when a baby kicks? No way, you're pregnant, aren't you, Doc?" Scarlet teased. Derpy tried her hardest not to laugh.
"Scarlet, I am a man, not a woman!" the Doctor said. "I obviously don't know where you're getting this from." He opened a pair of doors. Inside was something that made him scream in an extremely high-pitched octave. He slammed the door shut, covering his mouth with a hand, and spun around, shocked at the pitch.
"So... what'll you name it?" Scarlet asked after a pause.
/the Doctor\\
He'd seen an entirely black mask with realistic blood smothering some of it. But the scariest thing: it was attached to a bodiless head.
"Who here doesn't like seeing decapitated heads and bloodied masks?" he asked in a try to be nonchalant.
Derpy frowned. "I can toughen up."
"I don't want to force you into anything you don't want to do," the Doctor frowned, running a guilty hand through his hair and leaning against the wall.
She smiled. "Thank you for the concern, Doctor, but I'm capable of making my own decisions."
Scarlet watched the Doctor intensely. "If you're a female, Doctor, shouldn't we call you 'the Nurse'?"
The Doctor glared at her. "I am NOT a girl!" he whined.
"Sure about that?" Scarlet laughed.
"Uh, yeah, duh! I think I would know, don't you think?" he shot back.
Derpy couldn't hide her giggling and it soon became infectious. They all laughed for several seconds before they realized they were in the midst of a crime scene.
"Right," the Doctor grimaced. "Time to investigate. Brace yourselves."
Author's Note:
Figure I'd place some humor in this chapter. So, what do you guys think of Scarlet so far? Again, I love her, haha!
Sorry for the chapter not to be uploaded yesterday. Extremely busy! I might not upload one tomorrow, either, see, I'm working on the next chapter (10) currently, and it isn't finished. Sorry, again!
Things are about to get real mysterious in Chapter 10, though. I'll leave you all with that.
— GothicPegasister