Doctor Who

Because Your Special

Underwater Baddies

Adric held his twin red popsicles in both hands, licking each in turn. He stared morosely at the happy beach-party from his seat on a rock wall. Fine. If they didn't want him, he didn't want them. After all, it wasn't his fault that Leela and Peri were so…

He chewed the top off one of his popsicles.

"Friends of yours?" A freckled young girl with a plaid bow in her hair that matched the skirt of her school uniform stood in front of him. She smiled, but it was a strained sort of false smile.

"Not anymore." Adric replied sullenly.

"You're not going back?" The girl asked, glancing down at a notepad tucked in the crook of her arm. She looked up. "It could be fun. They look like they are having fun."

"What do you care?"

"Personally?" The girl shifted, hands clasping the notepad behind her back, stance widening. It reminded Adric of a soldier's pose and made the skin at the back of his neck begin to crawl. "I don't care either way."

A jogger stopped between them. He unhooked his earbuds from his ears and turned to stare pointedly at Adric.

"Adric," The girl said flatly, "Meet my brother, Smitty."

Adric dropped his desserts and turned to run. He reached his hands toward the beach and prepared to scream. The Doctor wasn't that far away. He would hear him. He would save him.

Dark. Tight. Adric realized that something had been placed over his head, obscuring his vision and was being pulled tight to restrict his cries for help. Bundled up in the jogger's strong arms, Adric flailed and tried not to panic. He had to be brave. But all he could think of was being held in the Master's power in the darkness.

"Why? Why?" Adric's whisper was muffled.

Why? The girl's voice was telepathic, resounding and oddly reminiscent of the Master's voice. Why tell you? You'll only forget in a few minutes.

Adric wriggled, feeling himself carted away, moved out of sight of the people on the beach. He heard the voice in his head again.

It's a pity we had to do this again. Wiping your mind twice in one day is really an inefficient use of time and resources.

James carefully handed Ace the invisible box, "Careful with that."

"Aye-aye, Professor…Doctor…What shall I call you?"

"I'm the Doctor; just the Doctor."

Turning her attention from her friends, and back to the young couple sunning themselves on the beach, Donna had to smile to herself. Young and in love really could be just as sweet as old and devoted. Someday, she'd find someone and she'd be happy like that. Even if it took her a hundred years…

"Donna," James looked up at her from the boat, "you here?"

"Yeah…"

Donna took a last look at the happy pair. The girl, a blond with oversized sunglasses, had wriggled her way down to lie on a beach towel and was staring thoughtfully out at the ocean. Her boyfriend, a long lanky fellow with a huge grin and spiked hair, was fully dressed in a dark brown suit. Chattering happily, he smeared a huge dollop of sun-block across his nose.

"You'd think he'd get hot in that suit." Donna muttered, sliding down into the boat.

James peeked his head out of the boat to take a look. The curious, suspicious look in his eyes was replaced with something like confusion. "Oh…right then. This is just fantastic."

"What's the matter? James?"

James flipped his scuba-mask over his face, leapt onto the dock and stomped across the sand towards the sunbathing duo. His flippers scooped sand, splashing and scattering it as he moved. The way he was acting, the determination in his otherwise comical stride, made Donna start after him.

"James!"

As Donna approached the oblivious couple, she heard the blond-girl ask, "Can you do my back?" and offer her companion a pink-bottle of sun-block lotion.

"Welllll…" the boyfriend sniffed, rubbing his hands together. He placed a hand on her upper shoulder. "For you, Rose Ty…"

In a spray of sand, James arrived at the edge of the towel. The girl's sunglasses dipped off her nose as she looked up in shock. One hand reached up to rub at the sand that stuck to her poor, sun-block and sweat sticky, face. She shifted to a sitting position, spat to get the sand off her lips and raised an eyebrow at the strange, tall scuba diver in front of her. "You alright, mate?"

"James, what the…" Donna's flipper caught on a bit of rock and she nearly tripped into the boyfriend's lap. Righting herself, she watched as James reached out and took a massive handful of the boyfriend's spikey hair and pulled his head forward. With a rapid, experienced movement, he smashed the man's head backwards into the metal frame of his beach chair.

And then he repeated this process. Twice more.

Horrified, Donna readied a slap to defend the nice couple. But before she released it, James had let go of the man's hair and was glowering at him from behind the feature obscuring scuba-mask.

The Pin-Stripe Boyfriend rubbed at his head, launching himself to his feet with all the grace and speed of an ADHD eight-year-old. "Oi, what was that for?"

"Keep your hands off her." At least, that's what Donna thought the Doctor had said. Between the Doctor's northern accent and scuba-mask, it sounded for all the world like "cabbage ham-mufflers". In fact, by the time she had puzzled out that "cabbage-ham mufflers" couldn't possibly be what he'd meant and that "keep your hands off her" was much more likely, the Doctor was already marching dramatically back to the boat. Or stalking. Still upset but happy his point—whatever it had been—had been made.

Pin-Stripe Boyfriend stared after him in shock, rubbing at the back his neck. "Did you see that, Rose? Oh," He paused, shaking melting sun-block from his fingers, "I have seen many strange things in this world but that has got to be in the top ten. Twenty. Oh top a hundred and twenty."

"Are you all right?" the Blond Girlfriend asked from behind the towel she was using to wipe the sand from her face.

"Ah, take a bit more than a hair-rattling to stop me. Mind you, it did hurt."

Donna began backing away, ashamed and confused. "Yeah. Sorry."

Pin-Stripe Boyfriend looked at her with a cheeky grin. "Oh, hello. Maybe you can answer a question, miss."

"Do I look single?" Donna retorted, flustered.

"…Sorry." Pin-Stripe Boyfriend looked more confused at her tone than abashed, but he plunged on, "But, well…it just that I think your husband just said "cabbage ham-mufflers" to me."

"I think he did, yeah, um…must be the heat. I'd better make sure he gets some water. Again, I'm really sorry." And, her own flippers scooping and displacing sand, Donna rushed back to the dock. "Okay, you stupid martian—"

Examining his sonic screwdriver, as if everything was normal and back to business, the Doctor shouted back. "Alright you idiot Raxicoricalfalipitorian!"

"…what?"

"Trading insults and wrong species game? No? Too bad? I like that game. Makes long boat rides fun. Since we are all missing out on Leela's wedding schemes and Susan's Shakespeare recitations—I thought we could do with a little fun. Still, all's fair in love and war and party-games."

"What on the flipping planet earth are you talking about?"

Ace shrugged. "Don't look at me. I'm just here to drive the boat at unsafe speeds."

"You just…attacked someone back there! Why?" Donna hopped into the boat, not allowing his rambling to dissuade her.

"…I had a really good one too. How about obnoxious, overbearing, loud-mouthed Silurian?" James slammed a toolbox out of his way and plopped down in one of the boat's back seats.

There was a long period of silence, until Ace rubbed the sweat from her forehead and jabbed a thumb at the beach. "Maybe, I should come back…"

"How about vicious Time Lord," Donna said in a low voice, "who unprovokedly attacks strange men on beaches."

"After everything you know, everything you've seen…" James glowered at Donna, "you think that was just "a strange man"? …stupid little ties." His eyes were intensely focused on the couple still sitting on the beach, "I am never wearing a tie in this regeneration. If I put on a tie, feel free to drop me off in a tiny office somewhere and run away with the TARDIS."

"Is that it? The man was wearing a tie and you had to bounce his head off his chair a few dozen times as revenge?" Donna crossed her arms, "That's stupider than when Nerys shaved all her hair off."

James looked at Donna, smiling slightly, "Yeah. Stupid. Stupid jealous old man who has lived too long…" he looked back at the couple, "and…apparently doesn't live much longer. Not like this anyway." Oddly, he tugged on one of his ears. His half-smile became bitter.

Ace sighed dramatically and tossed off the few ropes holding the boat to the pier. Sitting down in the "pilots" seat, she turned to the Doctor. "Listen, drama-king, I don't know what your issue is," she paused, "the Professor has his bad-days too, but we could all do with a little less sulking, yeah? This isn't a teen romantic comedy, you know."

"I believe the teenager just called you a sappy little girl, Doctor." Donna's comment was meant as a tease, but as she was still smarting from his last rant at her, it sounded harsher that she'd intended.

"Oi, ginger-head, I am a lot older than I look." Ace replied defensively.

Donna let the comment, the lie, slide by. Instead she focused on her silent Doctor. "Can you just tell me why?"

James shifted in his seat, staring at his long pale hands. When Ace began maneuvering away from the dock, he scuttled forward to stare off the bow of the ship and look for shallow water or rocks until they were deep enough out. For a moment, he turned, looking at the beach again and then glancing down at Donna. Her questioning look. But he just launched into a story about the last time he'd been on this sea he'd been chasing down a rogue sea-serpent that had escaped from some-sort of future zoo.

Donna held to the seat-belt around her waist, eyes scanning the horizon. The Balearic sea was choppy today and it had taken on a grayish color. They still had several hours before it would be too dark to be underwater but Donna hoped it wouldn't rain.

"This good, Buzz?" Ace called out from the pilot-seat of the tiny rented speedboat. Bundled in her oversized jacket, still sporting the black-eye and grinning like the adrenaline-junkie teenager that she was, Ace looked something like a crazed pirate.

"Yeah. Stop here…and don't call me, Buzz." James scolded, looking down at the sensor on the invisible spaceship that sat in his lap.

"Why not?"

"Because then I'll call you Dorothy."

Ace stuck a finger in her mouth, "Gag me."

James grinned, stood and dropped the spaceship into the water with a resounding splash. Donna watched the water bend in a rippling square outline as the transparent box displaced the waves and bobbed in place. A second later, mouthpiece in place and tank on his back, the Doctor dove in backwards.

He surfaced and motioned for Donna to join him.

"Yeah." Donna went through all the checks and procedures that Don had taught her and sat hesitantly on the edge of the boat. Looking at the chilly water, Donna found herself wanting to stall. "James, we just gonna leave Ace here for…however long this takes?"

"I'll be all right. I have my walkman." Ace smiled, nudging a pair of oversized black headphones that hung about her neck. "Good luck."

James lunged forward in the water, managing to haul himself up by his arms to lean over the boat's edge. "Ace, fetch the mobile from Donna's jacket."

"What?"

"In case, you should see something, I hotwired that into the Firespace Six. If you see anything, phone "James Bond"."

Ace snorted. "You want me to phone Sean Connery? Right on!"

James sighed, clinging to the side of the boat. "It's the Firespace Six's number in the address book."

"James Bond?"

"Ace, focus." The Doctor chided, Professor-like, before he dove backwards with a noisy splash. "Donna! Are you coming?"

"In my left pocket." Donna instructed.

Donna watched Ace pat down her jacket. The girl finally pulled out Donna's slim bedazzled mobile (Nerys had gotten bored one Thursday night) and cautiously flipped it open. Ace flashed a beautiful smile in Donna's direction, and shook the cell-phone slightly. "This is wicked."

"Text, play games, but don't use all my minutes."

Ace's eyes widened. "It got games? Like Tetris? Ace!"

"Donna!"

Gathering a final gulp of air, Donna checked everything one more time and, with a prayer, slipped off the boat and into the chilly water. She moved slowly towards the Doctor, feeling more like an overweight walrus than a mermaid.

He gave her a quick thumbs up and plunged underwater. Unlike her, the Doctor was a fairly graceful swimmer but one hand was busy swinging his sonic-screwdriver through the water —almost like he was a demented witch with a magic wand—as he directed the Firespace Six in front of him with sonic commands. Every few minutes, James's screwdriver would flash a pale teal color and he'd stop to check the readings and change their course slightly.

It was weird, watching the water ripple and reflect slightly over the space-box's invisible surface as the sensor-filled vehicle glided before them. If she hadn't known what it was, and been paying careful attention to its location, she might have missed it entirely. Donna just hoped the owners of the mysterious craft at the bottom of the sea didn't see it at all.

Swimming—a little too fast for her taste—Donna followed James through the gloomy water, moving deeper into the sea. Normally, if she'd been practicing in the gym, she'd have been mentally "gritting her teeth" to get through this. To get through this feeling that the water above her wasn't a glorious glittering liquid canopy but a malevolent force pressing her down into an early grave. Thinking of it made her tremble a little thinking about how many billion gallons floated above her head, but she wasn't a quitter—especially not when they were so close to their answers.

The sand of the ocean's floor swirled about thick gaps and spider-like crinkles of rock and earth. It didn't look normal, that area, the dirt looked churned and burned somehow. Donna thought she could see something darkly ruddy colored distant in one of the deep chasms—lava, perhaps.

Donna stayed in sight of the Doctor but pretended to be a ditzy tourist looking over a small sad-looking school of fish. She dared a glance at James.

He and his invisible "sidekick" darted towards a large cracked sandstone bolder. Charred markings surrounded it. Was it really a meteor of some kind? Donna checked herself, no, not a meteor—a spaceship. James could probably tell just by glancing at the scorch marks whether it had crashed or had a spectacular fiery underwater landing. All Donna concluded that whoever owned the camouflaged spaceship "boulder" hadn't hidden all signs of its existence. He had probably thought the water would hide it well-enough.

The Doctor's sonic screwdriver beamed a vibrant teal and he swam to the Firespace Six. Donna couldn't see his expression because of the goggles and the mouthpiece but she did catch the "thumbs up" gesture for them to rise to the surface. Without any hesitation, Donna rushed to his side and kept pace with him as they left the mysterious "boulder" behind.

Donna surfaced first, and yanked the mouthpiece out, gulping in fresh air. A soft gray pattering of rain splashed her head and dripped down her nose. The faintest golden light streaked the dulling sky, the last remnant of what had probably been a glorious sunset she'd missed. Donna watched a bolt of lightening flicker in the distance.

The Doctor surfaced at her side. The invisible box bobbled in front of him and he put a guiding arm overtop of it. He flashed his sonic a bright blue and waved it as high as he could.

"Did you get any readings?" Donna asked, paddling closer.

James arched his sonic in the air again and then removed his mouthpiece. He looked rather grim and haunted. He opened his mouth but closed it, frowning.

Donna heard the comforting buzzing roar of Ace's motorboat. Within a few seconds, the prow of the boat, then Ace's cheeky grin and yellow plastic-rain smock came into sight. She helped James haul the box aboard and then James and Ace helped Donna into the boat.

"I don't suppose you have a hot water bottle?" Donna asked, beginning to feel the cold at last.

"I think have another one of these raggy fashion-disasters." Ace tossed a small package with another thin "rain-coat" in it at Donna and turned her attention to James. "So did you find the underwater baddies?"

"Drive." He said, hunched over the Firespace Six with his sonic screwdriver. He might have been merely mentally processing information. But Donna had worked in enough offices that were going bankrupt to suspect that he was really trying to reconcile the data with "real life". He knew what that ugly little box said…and he didn't want to believe it.

"Fine. I don't want to be out in this weather anyway. Besides," Ace revved the engine—how she managed that on a cheap rented boat, Donna didn't know—and spun the boat about, "I've gotta get back to the Professor."

"I'm sure he's fine." Donna said conversationally. She slipped on her jacket, ruining it forever most likely, and pulled the tacky rain-coat over top.

"'Course. But it's been at least two hours—he's likely to have found himself in some trouble by now." Ace flashed a wide grin at Donna, "I don't like being left out of an adventure."

Donna smiled back and then inched across the rocking boat to James. She took his arm to steady herself. "All right, sunshine, spill it."

He didn't look up from whatever he was doing, but the muscles around his mouth tightened. Finally, with a sigh, he looked at her with a hollow empty look that made Donna almost shiver. "I don't know how and I don't know why…but it's another TARDIS. A type forty—like mine—with so many modifications and upgrades that I haven't the slightest idea what half of it is."

"Time Lords…that's what they do? Fix timelines, right?"

"Donna, it can't be the Time Lords." The doctor stared down at the invisible box, as if willing the sensor data away. "And I might be a mad man in a police-box but the readings don't lie. They aren't "correcting the time-stream"…"

"What?"

"They are amplifying the temporal ripples, boosting your "natural" Doctor attracting qualities…even more than just doubling or tripling it. They've enlarged its range and scope almost a hundred-fold." The Doctor turned suddenly in his seat and took Donna by the arms. His blue eyes met hers. "They aren't fixing it, Donna, they are making it worse."

"But why would they do that? Why would anyone want that?" Donna thought of Halo-Boy's comment, about how the temporal anomalies had gotten so demanding that the first Doctor had been unable to leave Barcelona. With a colder feeling inside than she felt on her chilled outside, Donna began to wonder if this was part of that Dalek trap Bow-tie Boy had been blathering on about.

"Time Lords are sworn to noninterference—that's what makes me a renegade on par with the Master and the Rani in their eyes…" He smiled roguishly, and then grew quiet again, "…meddler, they call me. But never—mostly never—on this scale…" He rose with an explosion of nervous energy to pace the bucking deck, "and never ever without some form of a paradox inhibitor! To risk something of this magnitude without a paradox machine is simply asking for the Reapers to descend en mass!"

"I didn't catch all of that—" understood even less, Donna mentally added, "but I've been thinking…Bow-tie Boy, he said this was a Dalek plot…maybe they stole a Time Lord ship?"

The ship burst forward, causing James to stumble and fall atop of Donna. Donna shoved his scrawny elbow out of her face and rubbed her forehead where he'd bumped her and began scrambling for a hold. "Ace, what do you think you're doing?"

The teen stood at the helm, pouring on as much speed as she could. Her eyes narrowed and her mouth was a thin line. Tawny hair whipping about her face, she shouted above the engines. "We need to get back to the others!"

"I agree." The Doctor shouted back, "I'll see if I can boost the engine. Donna—strap in!"

"You're both mad!" Donna screamed, her tongue bashed against her teeth. Blood streaming down her face, she cinched the seat-belt around her waist and held on. The waves were rising at higher and higher angles and the boat rocked wildly. Trying to hold down her coffee, Donna watched for the shoreline, scanning for their dock. For those that waited for them on the beach. But the dimming light and incoming rain made the shore a dark gray smudge across the water.

The boat lurched, churning through the waves at such high speeds that Donna could feel the wooden floor buckling and shifting beneath her flippered feet. With a little cry of joy, Ace pointed to the dock and steered them in. A moment later, the boat's hull splintered and crushed against the cement pier as James leaped out. He'd removed his flippers, and was racing in his barefeet for the picnic area where they had left the other Doctor and their companions.

"Donna, are you okay?" Ace clambered out of the boat, reaching for Donna's hands and eying her bloodied face.

"Never mind me. Go on! Go find your professor!" Donna spit a mouthful of blood into the sea and rolled ungracefully on the pier, a moment later she was kicking off her flippers and chasing after her friends. Dear God, she prayed, please let them all be safe.

The rain swept past Donna in stinging gray sheets. The droplets fell fast and hard, making it hard for her to see. Stumbling into the sandy area where they'd left the others, Donna grabbed James' arm to keep her upright. "Where are they? Doctor? Where are they?"

"Professor! Professoorrr!" Ace screamed, climbing atop a picnic table, her long hair lashing about her. In her oversized jacket, with her desperate tone, all Donna could think of was a lost little child. Ace put her hand over her eyes, and spun in a slow circle, desperate for some sign of her Doctor. "Professor!"

"They wouldn't have just left…would they?" Donna shivered, clinging to James. "Doctor?"

He didn't answer.