"Cool!" Jeni exclaimed, showing little to no concern for my well-being, but that was to be expected from Jeni. "Does that machine give us superpowers?"
"Somehow, Jeni, I doubt that," I grumbled. After the initial shock of seeing my leg disappear into the ground, I had noticed that my foot was resting on what felt remarkably like metal. I stomped once to make sure and was rewarded with a hollow, metallic clang and a sore foot for my effort.
"I think I found something," I said a bit more loudly and then added: "Who knew that my amazing ability to find the only hole in a perfectly flat field would ever come in handy?"
I clamored out of the hole as the Doctor hurried over.
Jeni was doubled over laughing at me and my clumsiness.
I glared at her as I tried to brush nonexistent dirt off my jeans and hands.
In the meantime, the Doctor was examining the invisible hole in the ground with his sonic screwdriver.
"Ah, so we're standing on a ship's force-field and it's constructed a hologram to make it look as if there is nothing wrong with the crash site. A perception filter should have stopped us from noticing any subtle signs that there was something not right with the clearing," he muttered so quickly the words seemed to come out all in one big blur. "About the only way we'd have stumbled across this was to fall into it."
"Lucky me," I said sarcastically.
"Hmm, if I'm right and I normally am…" the Doctor muttered half to himself and half to us. He activated his screwdriver and the ground around us suddenly went from opaque to transparent. We seemed to be standing on thin air.
Below us was a spaceship that stretched from one end of the clearing to the other. It had two large wings and an overall shape that reminded me of, strangely, a fleur de lis. The hull was made out of a metal that reminded of me of chrome, at least in appearance. The nose of the ship was crumpled inward like the hood of a car that had been in a front end collision. The sides of the ship had deep scratches and gouges in it as well as dark streaks where the metal seemed to have been partially melted.
"Oh my -," I began, only to fall silent as I found myself at a complete loss for words.
Evidently, the hole in the force-field was actually the access point to a hatch into the ship. The Doctor hopped down onto it and pointed his screwdriver at the latch.
I grabbed Jeni's arm as she went to go past me. "Jeni… you have a spaceship in your backyard."
"I betcha that it legally belongs to my family," she said with a devious smile. I had the sudden vision of her in a courtroom arguing some fine print detail to a judge in order to keep the ship.
The Doctor had managed to open the hatch and had dropped down into the crashed ship.
Why do I think that going into that ship is a bad idea? I thought. Probably because in every sci-fi film I've ever seen, when the not-so-important characters enter a creepy, crashed spaceship they end up becoming some space monster's meal.
Jeni didn't seem to share my concerns, because she had just dropped down into the ship, too.
Of course, I added, in every horror movie I've ever seen, whenever somebody gets left behind because they think that it's oh-so-safe wherever they're at: that's when the ax-murder or whatever comes creeping up and…
I looked around nervously and all of a sudden the tranquil forest didn't seem nearly as peaceful as it had before. Every tree and every shadow suddenly concealed something menacing that was just waiting for me to become separated from my protectors.
With an apprehensive gulp, I stepped down from the force-field and onto the hull of the ship. The metal was exceptionally slippery, but one did not live within two hundred miles of the forty-fifth parallel and not know how to keep from falling on slick surfaces.
I glanced down into the dark hole that the Doctor and Jeni had disappeared into. There was no ladder to assist in climbing down into the ship. Not being as brave as my friends and certainly being more afraid of heights, I sat down on the hull and slid my legs over the edge of the hatch and into the ship. I grabbed the edge of the hatch in a death grip and lowered myself down as far as I could. At this point I was stuck, I wasn't strong enough to haul myself back up and I still couldn't tell how far it was to the floor of the ship. I hung there for a moment before I screwed up the courage to release my death grip and drop down into the ship.
Author's Note: I hope that this is a suitable cliffhanger. And schwans, not to worry, I'm not going to have the ground eat anyone! (They've already done that in an actual Doctor Who episode, although when I orginally wrote this I had yet to see that episode.)