"So," the Doctor said as he ran up to the console. "Here's the question: Why would they pick up a signal for a Binary Modification Device at a high school on Earth?"
"Who are they?" I asked.
"Good question," he replied as he flipped switches and spun dials on the console. "I'm not sure, but considering how many species there are to choose from that's not all that surprising. Not to worry, I always figure it out sooner or later. But they obviously aren't supposed to have a Superhacker. They probably intended to steal it from the ship that crashed around here not long ago…"
"Superhacker?" I interrupted. "As in: it hacks into computers?"
"Well," he drawled out the word before launching into: "It'll do a bit more than just that. You could, in theory, use one to take over the minds of everyone on an entire planet. And seeing as how you humans seem to jump at the opportunity to have your minds taken over…"
I shook my head in disbelief, "You mean to say that the whatcha-mah-callit can hack into minds?"
He gave me a funny look, one that I got a lot when I used a saying like "whatcha-mah-callit", and nodded. "So what do you two know?"
"I know I saw some lights about four months ago when I went out to watch a meteor shower. I've seen some pretty crazy colors in meteors before, but I've never seen ones that went in anything but a straight line and I've certainly never seen one that looked like it actually hit the ground," I said. "That's why I've been on a UFO tangent lately."
"And did those aliens turn up right after that?" the Doctor prompted.
"I think so," I answered and then coming back to something he'd said a little earlier: "How did you know that a ship came down around here recently?"
"Oh, well, the TARDIS picked up on a distress call, an intergalactic SOS, so to speak, but I might have overshot the crash by a tiny bit. Anyway, you must have seen it. Where did you say you thought it crashed?"
"To the northwest of my house, but there were too many trees to be certain of exactly where," I paused, considering. "It might have come down near Edmore, that's west of here. Are you sure you didn't see anything, Jeni? You live out that way, don't you?"
"I told you, I didn't see anything," Jeni said, exasperated. "Let's face it: you're the only one in the whole school, Elisabeth, who would go outside in February to watch a meteor shower."
"Are you sure?" I asked again. It wouldn't have been the first time that Jeni had lied about something interesting happening.
"Well, I might have heard a tree come down in the woods, but I didn't see anything," she retorted.
"Could that have been the ship I saw?" I asked the Doctor. I couldn't help but wonder at what I was saying. I was talking about UFOs as a matter-of-fact and was addressing a time traveler like it was something I did everyday. Evidently near-death experiences made me a little more outgoing.
"Good enough for me," he said and flipped a lever on the TARDIS's round console. "Allons-y!"
The machine made a loud, odd wheezing noise (a cross between metal grating against metal and swooshing) in time with the piston-like objects visible within the semi-translucent glowing column. That lasted a few moments before it abruptly came to stop with a loud thud. The Doctor ran right past Jeni and I in his hurry to get to the door. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out why he'd want to leave a perfectly good spaceship to walk the ten miles from the school to Jeni's house.
"Aren't you coming?" asked the Doctor as he shrugged on a light brown trench coat by the door. Internally, I debated: The Doctor seemed to think that the TARDIS was a pretty safe place to be but, on the other hand, I didn't feel up to being left alone in an alien spaceship/time machine.
"Sure," I said unenthusiastically.
Jeni nodded eagerly. Of course, she was probably overjoyed with the turn of events that this day had taken.
We exited the TARDIS to find that we weren't in the same woods as we'd been in before. I could see Jeni's house from where I stood.
"We moved!" I exclaimed in surprise. "How'd we do that?"
Jeni shook her head and smiled like she'd already figured it out. She patted me on the shoulder and said, "Poor Elisabeth. Freaked out yet?"
"Hmm, I've had an alien pull a gun on me, traveled in a spaceship and discovered that the content of one of my books is not fiction – all in one day. No! I would never be freaked out," I said sarcastically.
The Doctor had produced his sonic screwdriver from the pocket of his coat and was currently pressing its one button. It made a high pitched buzz each time he tapped on it, but this time it didn't seem to cause any damage to anything. He held it up and turned in a slow circle. It buzzed noticeably louder when it was facing deeper into the forest. "It must have come down right over…"
He trailed off and sprinted off into the woods.
I had been starting to calm down, since it was a nice day out (sadly, this meant that I would have a sunburn on every bit of exposed skin) and the woods in bright sunlight had always struck me as a peaceful place to be. However, I wasn't calmed down enough to want to be left alone, so when Jeni began to follow the Doctor, I followed her.
"There can't be a spaceship around here," Jeni complained loudly. (Jeni never really said anything quietly, even when she whispered.) "Or my idiot brother and Kris would have found it by now."
I absentmindedly looked around. There was a clearing up ahead, but on one end of it many of the trees had the tops smashed out of them and others looked as if they had been snapped in half. Even so, the ground in the clearing had no indication of a large ship plowing into the ground at high speed. The only thing unusual about the ground was that it was abnormally flat and level.
"There are a lot of trees with the tops smashed out of them," I noted aloud for Jeni and the Doctor's benefit.
"Where's the crater then?" the Doctor muttered aloud to himself. "It has to be here somewhere."
"Well, there isn't one," Jeni grumbled. "Any idiot can see that."
"Obviously," I agreed as I walked out into the middle of the clearing. I supposed that its size was another thing that was odd about it: it must have been the size of a football field. The leaf litter didn't crunch under my tennis shoes like it should have, either. I turned and started to walk back to where Jeni was standing with her hands in her pockets when I suddenly tripped and fell forward. I managed to keep from smashing face first into the ground, but I would have bet that my hands were going to be a mess.
"What in the…?" I muttered.
My left leg was sunk up to my knee in solid ground!
Author's Note: Again, I thank my reviewers and those who have subscribed to this story. I have to say, I was a bit skeptical of whether or not anyone would find it interesting. And as always, reviews are very, very welcome!