The Wish Machine Chapter 2
Olivia walked into the TARDIS kitchen the next morning. The Doctor was going on about what new planets and adventures that could possibly await them today. He seemed far away from the grieving and broken man he had been yesterday, but his eyes said otherwise. They were as dark and silent as the space outside their time-machine. This was the shut-in look he always had when he lost someone. However, when he noticed that he was not alone in the room his expression changed and he beamed at her, eyes full of his usual excitement and lust for adventure.
"Good morning Olivia Michaels! I set the controls on random over the night. I have no idea where the old girl has taken us, really."
"Uh, what?" Olivia had been so busy pondering her best friend's mental health to really hear what he was saying.
"I put the TARDIS controls on random. She has just picked a place in the universe and we'll explore it. Brilliant, don't you think?" The Doctor flashed his usual wide smile, and his eyes glinted with excitement. Olivia smiled. Maybe an adventure could take both their minds off of Donna. They both needed it; she suspected that the Doctor was not as carefree and happy as he wanted her to believe. "Fine, I'll just finish my breakfast and then we'll go."
Olivia had expected a new planet, maybe a meadow with blue grass or a futuristic looking city with flying cars and green skinned people, but not this. The TARDIS had landed in a gigantic storage room. In the middle of the room stood a giant metal cube, covered in blinking lights, and with a lever and a muzzle which looked like one of those old 19th century phones. The machine was a strange sight to say the least. The Doctor had already gone to work scanning the strange alien machine with his sonic screwdriver. She could hear him mutter to himself while working. "No you're not alive, but I sure have never seen anything like you before. Brilliant you are…"
Olivia stayed in the background, letting the Doctor work. For all her love of science fiction novels and good adventures she was just a human former college student who had stumbled upon a man with a blue box. A little over a year ago her homeroom teacher had found a laser screwdriver next to a pyre and used it to turn his students into an army of Cybermen and take over the world. He didn't come that far, because a man in a blue box and his red-headed companion had stopped him with a little help from an unsuspecting student with a taste for adventure, and the rest was, as they say, history.
"Hey what's this?" Olivia bent down to look at a small bronze placard near the muzzle. It was written in some alien language, but with the TARDIS translator, she could read it:
"Whisper here your hearts deepest wish. The wish machine will grant it."
"That does not sound good. It's probably some sort of pocket dimension generator, we should leave." The Doctor had been reading over her shoulder, and he didn't look that excited anymore. She could see the darkness in his eyes that was there every time he thought or spoke about someone he had lost. There was also something else in his eyes, like he longed to speak into that muzzle to have his deepest wish fulfilled. The moment lasted only a second before he turned around and marched into the TARDIS without looking back.
Olivia blinked, surprised. The Doctor not running head-first into a challenge in a new and unknown world? Something was off, very off, she thought. And she had an idea of what it might be, that was why she leaned forward into the alien 19th century phone muzzle and whispered:
"Please give Donna back to us. I'll do anything and I think he will too because he loves her, and I think he is losing his mind without her." Then with a lingering glance back Olivia left the machine behind her, and walked back into the TARDIS.