Back to the Doctor

Alien Expectations Part 2

"So your ship can read my mind… and that's how it translates everything I hear?" Marty asked as they walked through the bright marketplace

The Doctor had spent the last five minutes of their walk trying to dumb down the intricacies of the TARDIS and was getting to the point where he was going to accept an even moderate understanding Marty might achieve. The Doctor could tell Marty wasn't simple, but there were some things it always seemed to take longer for humans to understand, especially one who was more interested in music than science.

"Well, sort of – yes, exactly."

"Doc, I don't know if I like the idea of something reading my mind."

"There's no danger in it. Besides, it's the same thing Jennifer is connected to."

If Jennifer was connected to a thing that could read his mind, did that mean she could read his thoughts…?

"Jesus Doc, you really know how to make a situation seem worse."

They had come to the end of the market and a great arch lay in front of them leading to a huge, long hallway. Marty was briefly reminded of Dorothy walking towards the Great Oz.

Did that make him Dorothy?

"You sure this is the way, Doc? Shouldn't there be signs or something? Great Olipstick this way?"

"Oslunctus," the Doctor corrected him, turning down yet another corridor, "and she doesn't exactly advertise."

"And what makes you so sure she's going to see us?"

The Doctor stopped walking. They had come to a large opaque glass door. Or at least, Marty assumed it was a door, but without any sign of a doorknob Marty couldn't be sure.

"I believe you've been expecting me," the Doctor said coolly to the door.

Suddenly the glass parted in the middle and slid apart to a marble atrium where an alien that could have passed for a five-foot-tall human if it weren't for the fact that he was covered in red and yellow spikes smiled at up them.

"Are you he?" The alien looked back and forth expectantly between both of them.

"He who?" Marty asked in confusion.

"The Time Lord."

"Uh…" Marty looked up at the Doctor, who wore a strangely serious expression.

"I have questions for your mistress," the Doctor said.

"Yes, of course, this way my Lord," the creature bowed, then turned and walked into the atrium. Marty and the Doctor followed.

"What, is he serious? Are you some kind of British Lord?"

"I'm not British."

"But, your accent. What is it? Scottish then?"

"Gallifreyan."

"Where's that, Australia?"

The alien halted in front of another glass door, he made a quick motion with his hands and the door opened to a darkened room. Marty was hit with a cloud of incense. The small room was covered in dark drapes and strange glass and metal shapes hung from the ceiling.

At the far wall a figure sat on a large pillow. Marty couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman, because the figure wore a large black hat with a thick veil that hung over its face. In its small, gloved hands it held a long cigarette holder, a brown cigarette burning at its end. When the Oslunctus brought the cigarette up to its face the bottom of the veil was lifted for a moment and Marty was surprised to see a smooth, feminine ivory chin with rosebud lips painted deep red.

"So, you have finally come to me, Doctor," the voice was a woman's, but Marty couldn't figure out if she was old or young. It was a deep soothing voice, but there was something sharp about it. The words were soft, but their meanings seemed to snap at Marty.

"Can you tell me what I want to know?" The Doctor asked.

"We'll be even now, Doctor. Do you really want to cash in your favour now?"

"I'll take the chance."

Her head turned towards Marty, and as she pulled her cigarette away he could just make out her red lips begin to smile at him as the black veil covered her face completely once more.

"It waited for you," she whispered. "On your earth date… October… 26th… You fell out of time and the machine came into it. There it appeared, and there it waited."

"That's the day we first time travelled…" Marty started, but stopped when he saw the Doctor was staring at him with a slightly more intense than usual stare.

"This man you mentioned before, Brown, was that the first time he ever used the flux capacitor he built?"

"Well, yeah," Marty shrugged. "First Einstein, then me, and then Jennifer and the Doc – Doc Brown."

"Hm," said the Doctor.

"Are you saying it's not a coincidence?"

"Well, I'm not saying anything yet."

"Was it?" Marty asked the Oslunctus.

"I do not know. The machine is not of this time. I only see the present. I can only call up the past. I cannot even guess at the future."

"So what can you tell us about the damn thing?" The smell of incense was nauseous and the close quarters of the room was beginning to make him feel uneasy. He just wanted to get out of there already.

She brought up her cigarette again and took a long drag, and as the smoke settled beneath her veil she spoke again.

"That robot was not the first machine of its kind to visit earth."

"Where exactly did it go before? When?"

Her head shook.

"Too long ago. The memory is in a fog… But for one detail. The name it called out. The name of its prey… Emmett Brown."

"What happened to the Doc? Is he all right?" Marty's voice broke as he remembered watching Doc Brown getting gun downed all those weeks ago. He couldn't stand the thought of his friend being in danger again.

"I see a fight…" she paused, then shook her head, "but that is all."

"It knows your names," the Doctor said quietly, his eyes deep in thought.

"What does that mean Doc?"

"It's not just a random time traveller hunt. Whoever built these robots knows not only who is a time traveller," the Doctor ran his fingers through his hair as he thought out loud, his voice becoming quicker and higher until his every word rang out with the speed and accuracy of machinegun fire. "They don't just appear somewhere and wait around until they detect a time traveller! They know what times and places these people have travelled too. Which means that every single time traveller out there is in danger. Do you understand what this means Marty!"

He grabbed Marty's shoulder and started shaking the teen.

"Yeah!" Marty pulled away. "It means we gotta find Doc Brown!"

The Doctor barely skipped a beat on the outside, but inside his mind he took a moment to switch gears. He pushed aside all the names that had first come to mind and realized he had the put them behind the only other person they knew for certain had met one of these robots before.

"Yes, of course," the Doctor began to calm down, but he still came off as a professor who had drunk too much coffee. "Where is he?"

"I- I don't know," Marty stammered.

"What?"

"Emmett Brown no longer exists in this time," the Oslunctus whispered.

"That's right, he stayed behind in 1885, but he built another time machine. He's out there somewhere travelling through time with his family."

"1885…" the Doctor ground his teeth and he began to pace in a small circle. "A good pace to start; we can't risk going back on your own timeline to save him, there are too many variables at risk."

"Tell me about it," Marty, of course, knew all too well about the catastrophic effects of going back on one's own timeline.

"What was the exact time you left 1885?"

The date was easy to remember, because he spent a week thinking Doc Brown would die that day, but instead he had saved him and gone back to the future and got his happy ending… or at least he was supposed to have gotten his happy ending.

"September 7th."

"The time Marty, exactly."

"Just about nine in the morning."

"Good, then all we have to do is go back after that specific moment in time."

"But Doc-"

The Oslunctus cleared her throat. It was a surprisingly chime-like noise.

"Doctor," she said sharply.

"Yes?" The Doctor became completely calm again and Marty was astounded at the change.

"I must say, while I enjoy watching your adventures through time, nothing quite compares to the pleasure of seeing you in person. So I have a request."

The Doctor smiled. "Oslunctus, do you like being in debt to me?"

Marty couldn't see if she was smiling, but would have bet anything she was.

"There is something terrible beneath this market. It hides itself from my vision, and only something truly powerful could do that. You must find this thing. You must… take care of it."

"What is he, an inter-galactic exterminator or something?" Marty asked.

The Oslunctus giggled. "Something like that… but an extermination is certainly what I need."

"But we gotta go Doc."

"We have time."

"What? What time? The Doc's in trouble! There's no time!"

"Well, we do have a time machine."

And then it finally hit Marty. He was going to time travel after all. Every atom he was made of seemed to shudder at once. What if he made a mess of things again? What if this time he was finally abandoned in the wrong time? What would happen to Jennifer?

"Celox," the Oslunctus said softly, and the door to the room opened.

The short alien who had ushered them to see her stood there.

"Yes Mistress?" Celox Ieiunium said calmly.

"Velox has been taken."

Celox's eyes bulged out of his skull. "No…" he breathed.

"On his way to work, on the 59th floor. You need the Doctor to follow his trail."

To both Marty and the Doc's shock Celox immediately turned and ran out of the room.

"Wait, Celox!" The Doctor called after him and took off running as well.

"Doc, wait! What about my Doc!"

The Doctor either didn't hear him or simply didn't acknowledge him, either way he was already out the door, leaving Marty suddenly alone on the other side of the universe.

To Be Continued…

(Oddly enough, I was already working on this chapter before I even posted chapter one of Episode One. So if I had so much done why did I take a break between these two episodes? Well production has seriously slowed down, and as of posting this I actually still have another chapter and a half to write for episode two. I said it before, but it's worth saying again: I'm really only doing this for fun and I don't want to force myself to meet crazy deadlines because then I won't enjoy doing this as much… Anyway, let's talk about the Oslunctus! I don't know if I got the spelling of her name right, I don't even know if I got the sex right, the Oslunctus was only mentioned by the Doctor, in the original series, in an off-hand comment. I have no idea if the Oslunctus was meant to appear later in a series but got dropped, or if she appeared in some of the lost episodes from the early-early days, either way I think in creating her I was mostly influenced by Yuuko Ichihara from xxxHolic. Hope you enjoyed my strange interpretation of the seer who, apparently, owes the Doctor "one.")