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Chapter Eight: Unravelled
"No."
"Please."
"No."
"Rose, I'm serious."
"No!" Rose crossed her arms and glared at the Doctor. "I'm not staying in the TARDIS."
"I'm trying to keep you safe," the Doctor begged. "I told you last night, I'm just trying to keep you safe."
"And I'm trying to keep you safe," Rose responded adamantly.
They stood staring at each other across the darkened TARDIS console room, their eyes blazing with determination. Then the Doctor sighed, and nodded. "Okay," he agreed, defeated. He bent down to the metal grating of the floor and pulled up one of the panels. He slid down into the under-floor compartment and hauled out a huge leather suitcase. He flung it open and began searching through the random trinkets and mismatched technology contained within. Rose grinned at his serious face as he pulled out what looked to her like a sieve with an electric handle, a purple Venus fly trap plushie, and a keyboard with chess pieces attached to the keys . A rather annoyed looking seven headed bat flew from within the case, squeaking in annoyance and heading up into the heights of the console.
The Doctor finally beamed in triumph and produced a very odd looking contraption that seemed to be made of tin foil, lollypop sticks and LEDs. Rose stifled a laugh as he proceeded to put it on his head, squashing his hair down flat.
"Um... what's that for?" Rose questioned, trying to keep a straight face.
The Time Lord stared at his human companion as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
"It's an Anti Detection Device." He patted it proudly. "This lovely thing will make my brain un-take-over-able!"
"Un-take-over-able?"
"Yes!"
"Okay..." Rose peered into the suitcase briefly. "Don't I get one?"
The Doctor shook his head, making the tin foil hat rattle ridiculously. "Wouldn't work for you anyway. Time Lord exclusive! Come on!"
They left the TARDIS and made their way across the beach towards the camp. The day had drawn to an end very quickly, and the moon was making its slow ascension to the highest point of the sky. The zenith. Rose's thoughts were drawn back to the two alien children, and the scene of terror in the camp the previous night.
"Do you think it hurts? I mean, when they... take over their minds?"
The Doctor shook his head again. "The brain is completely taken over, meaning that the brain wouldn't be able to send pain signals to the body."
Rose's mind was working furiously. "But then, why did they stay upright? If all the brain's signals had been cut off, shouldn't they have sort of... slumped to the ground?"
The Doctor nodded slowly. "Good point."
He was quiet for a few moments, pondering on what she had said.
"I mean, we could be over-complicating it," Rose continued. "Those kids had manners; they stopped to say 'thank you' before they went off. Maybe they were just being polite, keeping everyone in a dignified position."
The Doctor stopped in his tracks, and turned to stare at her. "What did you say?"
Rose fumbled a bit under his sudden scrutinising gaze. "I-I said they were polite-"
"-No, no, no, you said... you said 'kids'."
Rose started to doubt herself. "Yeah, well I just assumed. They were small like children, just... I don't know. They seemed like children. Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree."
"No, no, I think you're barking up exactly the right tree and exactly the right cat."
Rose frowned at him, confused.
"Never mind." He headed down the beach again at breakneck speed, leaving a rather bewildered Rose Tyler rushing to catch up.
Rebeccah and Joseph were the first to see the two strange visitors heading towards their camp. Joseph burst out laughing at the sight of the Doctor's unorthodox headgear.
"Thanks," the Doctor said, his ego slightly bruised. "You just wait, five hundred years time this'll be standard kit for any high-school kid."
Rebeccah gave the Doctor a look to suggest she was questioning his sanity. Fortunately the Doctor had received so many of these looks in his lifetime that he didn't even notice them now. He headed for the centre of the camp, scanning the tree-line of the forest for any sign of movement. A few of the shipwrecked people tried not to stare at him. Rose went to stand next to him, preparing for the arrival of the glowing aliens.
"Are you ready?" she asked him.
The Doctor tapped his tin foil hat. "Un-take-over-able."
Soon, the two figures appeared through the murky blackness of the trees. As soon as they arrived, the camp exploded into chaos as people screamed and scrambled away. But the two aliens only had eyes for the Doctor.
They appeared to be processing something, quietly contemplating. Then one of them opened its mouth. Rose prepared herself for the voice she remembered, like nails on a chalkboard, but was surprised to hear the Doctor's voice from the previous night being replayed to them.
"Whatever you are doing, I want you to stop."
"Why?" asked the other, in the screeching voice.
The Doctor stared at them. "Excuse me?"
The alien replayed the Doctor's voice again, then asked the same question. "Why?"
The Doctor thought carefully for a moment before speaking very simply. "Because controlling other people like that is wrong."
The aliens contemplated again. "Some species contain within them an inbuilt moral code, holding the independence and free will of the individual as the foremost and highest right."
"Conclusion: controlling individuals without their consent is morally wrong," stated its counterpart.
"Exactly!" the Doctor beamed. "So, no more mind-control?"
The first alien, seemingly the spokesman, addressed the Doctor directly once again. "This individual contains vast amounts of knowledge we are unable to access."
The Doctor nodded, his face rather stern once again. "Yes, but that doesn't mean I won't help you. I saw your pod; you've crashed here. Let me help you leave here, help you get home."
Once again, the aliens processed this. "Home: Place of origin."
"Yes," Rose confirmed. "Where's your place of origin?"
"Designation unknown to us."
The Doctor watched them curiously. "Do you know where you are now?"
"Current location: unknown. Distance to 'Home': unknown. Means of returning 'Home': The Zenith."
The two screeching aliens turned to one another, and before the Doctor could reply, they turned and vanished back into the trees.
The Doctor took after them, with Rose several paces behind him. But he stopped as soon as he's started, trying to catch his breath in the darkness of the forest.
Rose caught up a moment later. "Where've they gone?" she asked breathlessly.
The Doctor stared ahead into the blackness. "I know what they are," he said in a faintly sing-song voice.
Back in the TARDIS, the Doctor was rummaging through another leather suitcase. He had abandoned his tin foil hat on the console, and was looking for another device. Rose stood watching him, feeling particularly useless.
"So are you gonna tell me who they are, or am I supposed to guess? 'Cos they're too small to be Slitheen," she tried to joke.
The Doctor looked up at her, and ran a hand over his tired face. "Suppose you were in the TARDIS alone, and it was just like this – nothing working."
Rose looked at the console, and flicked a switch without result. "Yeah, okay?"
"How would you fix it?"
Rose stared at him, bewildered. "I have no idea."
"No, just, think it through. What would you do?"
Rose pondered over the puzzle for a moment, then shrugged her shoulders. "I'd try to find someone who knew all about timey-wimey stuff."
The Doctor nodded encouragingly. "And failing that?"
"It's too dangerous to try trial and error. So I suppose... I'd... go to the library, look through all the books and try to come up with something."
"Bingo!" the Time Lord enthused. "So, I put to you another question. Think of everything that has gone wrong or malfunctioned while we've been here, and what do they provide?"
Rose thought fast. "Energy? The TARDIS energy, the Sonic Screwdriver, the fire in the campsite that first night. All different types of energy?"
The Doctor smiled at her. "Good thinking! But think a little more four-dimensionally. The stories and legends of ships and planes lost to the Bermuda Triangle. Like you said, the TARDIS, and the fire. Time is all messed up here. Space is warped. The mind-control, spouting facts and figures. All these things, in their most basic form provide... information."
Rose's eyes widened in sudden realisation. "They're building a library! They're collecting information!"
The Doctor grinned in proud satisfaction. "You're brilliant, you are! When you referred to them as kids on the beach, that's when it all started falling into place. They are children. Vatarian children."
He beamed at her, as though the rest of the explanation should fall into place. Then he realised she had no idea what he was talking about.
"The Vatarians are magnificent. Such an intelligent race. But they're genetically incapable of imagination, of stringing two ideas together and coming up with something original. It's kind of sad, really: no art, no design or invention. No originality whatsoever. They have to use other species' ideas and inventions to get anywhere."
Rose frowned. "Surely that wouldn't be enough, you know, to survive in space?"
"True. That's why they are fantastic observers. They watch everything. Take in every experience, process it, assimilate the data, and combine it with their knowledge to guide them. Vatarian parents expose their children to thousands of different species and tens of thousands of experiences every year, just to make them capable of fending for themselves."
Rose nodded. "So these... Vatarian kids are absorbing everything that ends up in the Bermuda Triangle, and building on their knowledge."
"I think it's more than that," the Doctor expanded. "I think they must have been here a long time. I think they've made the Triangle to attract everything in the vicinity, absorbing even space and time, in order to find the information they need: how to get home. Of course no one on Earth knows anything particularly helpful about deep space travel in this time."
Rose grinned. "No one except you."
"No one except me! And I have just the thing to fix their pod and get them on their way."
He pulled an old wooden screwdriver from the case and brandished it in the air.
Rose was appalled. "Great big genius Time Lord, saviour of the Human race is going to fix the mysterious space ship with a... screwdriver?"
The Doctor beamed again, and jumped up. He was out of the door and heading towards the trees before Rose had time to laugh at him. She hurried after him, wondering why they always had to run.
The Doctor rushed through the trees in the pitch blackness, having a vague idea of where he was headed. He eventually found the clearing again, with the pod sat pathetically in the mud. Rose arrived just in time to see him lean down to the control panel on the side of the pod.
"Just a twitch here and a tinker there and they'll be flying in no time!"
A circuit blew, and a shrill alarm aired.
The Doctor squirmed. "Oh dear."
The two shiny Vatarian children appeared from the trees, wielding some serious looking weaponry.
The Doctor's hands flew up into the air, and Rose copied, silently questioning why these children had guns.
"I'm trying to help; I can get the Zenith flying again!" the Doctor explained.
"Attempted Sabotage," reasoned one of the children. "Course of action: Destroy the saboteurs."
"Oh dear," the Doctor repeated, lowering his hands and reaching for Rose's.
"Is that all you've got?" Rose hissed.
"Well, under the circumstances, I would suggest... RUN!"