Setting: 51st century, interstellar cruise ship Hindenburg

Donna, the Doctor, Rose, and Shaun stepped off the TARDIS and onto the Hindenburg, storage section C. It looked like a large, dark pantry, sparsely stocked with boxes of cans labeled "pickled olives" and "dehydrated Orion argathi flakes." Three of the four travelers were dressed up to the nines, Donna in a black sleeveless dress with a plunging neckline, an ostentatious gemstone necklace, and her hair pinned up; Rose in a flirty wine-colored one-shouldered piece she got from the wardrobe room; and Shaun (who was looking distinctly uncomfortable) in a pirate-like embroidered waistcoat with poofy white sleeves that the Doctor insisted was in style this century. The Doctor, of course, was wearing his usual pinstripes.

"It's about time!" Donna exclaimed with a wide smile, sweeping out the door and giving her ample cleavage a quick, subtle adjustment. "Finally, somewhere really posh! I haven't had a chance to dress up since the 1920s."

Rose followed close behind with a mischievous grin. "Oh, I dunno. Venice in 1580? That was pretty swank. All those gowns and little umbrellas."

"Yeah, well, it doesn't count if you spend the whole trip being chased by vampires. Besides, I was just in jeans and trainers."

"I told you, they weren't vampires," the Doctor argued from the storage room door, where he was peering out to make sure the coast was clear. "They were Saturnynians. Vampires aren't real."

"Werewolves are real," pointed out Rose. "Why can't vampires be real?"

"That was a lupine wavelength haemovarifo—you know what? Fine. Yes. Werewolves are real."

Shaun, dragging behind the rest of the group, heard the tail-end of that sentence and winced slightly. He caught up to his wife and muttered anxiously under his breath. "There are gonna be werewolves now? Is every trip like this?"

Donna flashed him a brilliant smile. "Oh, don't worry, dear. This is just a cruise ship. I've been on plenty of trips where nothing attacked us. That spa on Midnight, for example."

"Speak for yourself," the Doctor muttered. "Ah, here we are!" He led them out of a carpeted corridor and up a flight of stairs to view the entrance to the dining hall of the interstellar cruise ship, the Hindenburg.

A wave of well-dressed humans and mostly-humanoid aliens was wandering in from the corridor ahead of them, and the four stowaways slipped surreptitiously into the disorganized crowd without anyone noticing.

"Oh my god," Shaun muttered, staring wide-eyed at a two-headed man in front of him.

"Stop it. That's rude," the Doctor scolded. "Donna, will you keep a leash on him?"

"Oh, isn't it just GORGEOUS?" Donna gushed, ignoring them and pushing through the crowd into the dining hall ahead of the others.

The room was huge, larger than a typical ballroom, and the starboard wall was clear as glass – nothing but windows stretching from the floor up to the ceiling, giving a breathtaking panoramic of the stars outside. A hovering chandelier floated over the middle of the room, illuminating the multitude of circular dining tables covered by burgundy table cloths. Humans, aliens, and human-alien hybrids moved gracefully about the room in expensive formal wear, interspersed by buffet stewards and waiters in crisp white uniforms.

The port side wall was decorated with a floor to ceiling map of the three planetary systems the luxury liner operated in. There was a bar there, which Donna took note of for later, and a long buffet table was set up at the back of the room. Beyond that was a sort of raised dais, about chest high, where a small orchestra was playing a combination of stringed instruments from earth and a few alien wind instruments she had never seen.

The Doctor came up next to her elbow looking pleased as punch. "Looks like dinner's just beginning. Hungry?" He pulled out a chair and plopped down at an empty table.

"Just look at this grand old place!" Donna replied, too busy relishing the details to sit down. "It's like some kind of retro-Hindenburg meets scifi-future-tech-thing! Look! Look over there! Oh my god! That's Plavalaguna!"

"Hmm? Who?"

"There! In the blue dress! Or skin. Can't really tell. She's always in that, in her photos. Not sure if it's part of her body or what. She's wildly famous as a singer."

The Doctor shook his head in disbelief. "Donna, this is the 51st century. How can you possibly know who's famous?"

"What do you think I was doing at that leisure planet all day? Sleeping? I read the tabloids like everybody else, dumbo. Oh, look! That bloke over there with the fur thing round his head is trying to chat her up. Oooh, I bet the paparazzi will love that."

"Nahhh, no paparazzi here. This is the highest-class interstellar liner there is. The Hindenburg is renowned for its security and privacy. Only the richest and most discreet allowed onboard. It's part of their appeal." He put his hands in his pockets and looked around in a relaxed manner. "Speaking of security," he added after a moment, "The psychic paper won't work here. This is era of the Time Agency. They've already discovered it and it's starting to make the rounds on the more frequented planets. The crew will all have been trained against it."

Donna furrowed her brow, her attention finally torn away from the celebrities. "But it's not like we've got tickets. What if they catch us?"

"Well, I've got more than one trick up my sleeve, don't I? We'll just need to hack the computer system, register ourselves as proper passengers." He pulled the sonic screwdriver out of his pocket and twirled it with a cocky grin. "Any preference for aliases?"

Rose caught up with them, trailing Shaun behind her.

Shaun's head swiveled round at each alien they passed, making all sorts of strange grimaces. He nearly bumped into a six-foot walking wall of sludge by not looking where he was going, and let out a little "Agh!"

The Doctor rolled his eyes and got up to lead the troupe in the direction of one of the passengers' public access computer terminals, which were basically touchscreens set into the walls at regular intervals disguised as antique watercolors.

"Worse than Mickey," he muttered.

Rose elbowed him. "Oi! Mickey got better," she whispered back. "Give him a chance to get used to it."

Meanwhile, Donna was running through aliases she might use. "I can be the duchess of the Ood or something… Oh, maybe an unknown but gloriously wealthy heiress from Messaline. What're you gonna be?" she asked Rose.

Rose was still distracted by the Doctor, and wasn't really listening. "Sorry, wha'? Oh, I'm a dame."

"A dame? What do you want to be a dame for? England's probably not even a proper country anymore. What are the odds they still have dames?"

"No, but I am, though," Rose said, laughing.

"Really, she is," the Doctor chimed in. "I was there, got knighted myself."

"Really? How'd that happen? They knight people for being flouncing big weirdos back then? Or I know! You used your unnatural skinniness to slip into a chimney and rescue the king's daughter's favorite kitten?"

...

Lee McAvoy sat alone at a table in the dining hall except for a humpbacked old insectoid-woman who hadn't said a word all evening. A waiter appeared at his elbow with that polite smile one finds everywhere in hospitality industry, and startled him.

"Good evening, sir, and how is everything going tonight?"

Lee glanced up at him, distracted from the datapad he'd just been reading. "F-f-fine, thanks."

"Is there anything I can request from the kitchen that hasn't made it to the buffet table tonight?"

Lee shook his head. "No, I d, d, d, d, d…" He paused, took a breath, held it, and then breathed out slowly and deliberately. "No, t-thank you," he finished. The waiter gave him a wan little smile and he left to go check on the next table.

Around him, people noisily circled the buffet, filtered in from the halls and carried plates to their tables gorged with entrées and hors d'oeuvres from various planets in this quadrant of the galaxy. Lee knew he should get something too, but first he needed to finish going over the programming for the probe's launch one more time. This kind of trip into the field was far too expensive to redo if human error screwed things up via a typo or a misplaced colon in the code, and living as he did on the pittance of a mid-level research associate at a modest university lab, he couldn't afford to try again if the first launch failed and his grant fell through.

He had just gotten through the second page of code when a familiar voice rang out across the hall, the second interruption in five minutes.

"NO! No way! You are KIDDING me!"

The denial was followed by a warm whooping laugh, and Lee felt his body react automatically. He bolted upright and scanned the faces in the crowd just as he had done every time he thought he heard that voice for the last two years.

When he didn't see the thick red hair he was expecting, he kicked himself for being stupid again. He really had to quit doing that. It was like a tic. Hear Donna; Look for Donna. It was obviously all in his head. It didn't seem to matter that no one else had ever seen or heard of Donna Noble outside of the library's records either before or after the evacuation. He still thought of her all the time.

Two years had passed since he got out of the library, and the trauma specialist had warned him that the psychological effects would be long-lasting. He'd missed a hundred years, after all, trapped in that computer. Everyone he knew from his old life was dead. He'd had to go back to university all over again as a student in his own field, despite having been a researcher with a Ph.D. in radiation and energy physics – science had moved on without him during those hundred years – and it had taken a long time to regain lost ground. Finally, he'd caught up on the new theories and discoveries, renewed his credentials, and got a piddling job as a low-ranking researcher in a university lab which would have been beneath him back in the day.

Now he was finally back to doing some of his own research projects, and he was feeling a lot of pressure to succeed with this probe. It was probably triggering old responses to stress; hence, the reaction to whoever that was who had laughed. He would just focus on launching the probe and collecting as many readings as he could before the plasma inevitably got it, and try to dismiss this old fixation as the delusional fantasy it was.

...

Rose surveyed the room of dinner attendees appraisingly as the Doctor entered their fake IDs into the public access computer with a little sneaky sonicking.

"So this is the 51st century, right? Jack's time?"

"Yeah. Why?" he answered, focused on the computer screen.

"He always called it the 'sexy century,'" she mused. "Everyone's good looking, humans have evolved to have special, ultra-strong pheromones…" she trailed off, watching a fit waiter with geranium red hair glide by with a plate of hors d'oeuvres.

The Doctor looked round quickly at this. Rose looked back at him innocently.

"Wha'? Just curious, is all."

The Doctor turned back to the viewscreen, sulking slightly. "This is more than just the 'sexy century.' Important historical events occurred in this era. Humans abandoned the Earth to another ice age, took to the stars, spread across the galaxy for the first time. The Supreme Alliance of the Eastern State discovered time travel, the Time Agency became a thing, the Filipino Army ended World War VI at the Battle of Reykjavik. Law and order essentially collapsed, leaving a million independent nation-states which battled each other for dominance in various sectors of the galaxy. Magnus Greel, war criminal, killed 100,000 in what became known as the Brisbane Dead Zone."

"Sounds ghastly," Donna observed, sipping at a wine glass she'd somehow acquired.

"These people don't look like they've been in a war," Rose noted.

"Well, no. They wouldn't, would they? The rich and the famous. Kept well out of it. Mind you, it wasn't all bad. This century also saw the founding of some of the galaxy's best universities, significant advances in interstellar technology, and a new open-mindedness in humans with regards to alliances and cultural exchange with alien species. Well, as you said, they did do a lot of crossbreeding, which had something to do with it."

"Crossbreeding?" Shaun looked like he was going to be sick. "You mean like, sex with aliens?"

"Yeah."

"With, like, things, though?! With these… creatures?"

The Doctor looked mildly amused. "He does know I'm an alien, right?" he said to Donna and Rose.

"So why call it the Hindenburg?" Donna wanted to know, reverting back to their earlier topic. "Doesn't seem like that name would be all that good for publicity."

"On the contrary, nothing better!" exclaimed the Doctor with a grand gesture around the room. "Everyone's heard of it. And a flashback to the past? Very popular with this crowd. They all left Earth less than a century ago, remember. They get nostalgic, this lot. Look at the details. The paintings, the red upholstery, the giant map on the wall… It's all very accurate and similar to the original. They're very keen on recreating the classics."

"Oh, that's comforting," said Rose, exchanging looks with Donna.

"It is! Well, obviously they don't want to repeat the whole exploding, burning bit. There's no need to worry. This Hindenburg is a luxury liner for the wealthy, well known as the safest ship ever made. Its safety measures and redundancies are unmatched. In fact, every single safety-related system has at least three backups, and the lifepods do, too, on a smaller scale, of course. No, the second Hindenburg went on to have a long, successful career, and retired to the interstellar shipyard museum with honors after hundreds of years."

"All right, who have you put us in as?" Donna asked.

"See for yourself," the Doctor said, backing up so she could look at the updated passenger registry.

"Huh. Sir Doctor the 10th of the TARDIS colony, and companions. Looks like I'm Lady Donna of the Tempor Travelus fortune," Donna murmured. "Not feeling very imaginative today, are we?"

"I'm… Shaun Temple, manservant," Shaun read aloud. A slow frown crossed his face. "Hey! How come I'm a manservant?"

"Too unusual, traveling without any servants," the Doctor answered blithely. "Don't want to draw attention to ourselves."

"I like the sound of that," Donna said, holding her pert nose up in the air and adjusting her heavy gemstone necklace again. "Heiress to the Tempor Travelus fortune. Grew up on the classiest planets. Attended all the best schools, naturally. Gold-plated ones, I should think."

The lights dimmed slightly and the orchestra finished their piece as a spotlight appeared on the stage, focused on a podium with another small computer terminal set into it. A crewman in uniform, apparently the maître d', jumped up the steps up the side of the podium and stepped smartly up to the lectern. The ambient sound of conversation in the room died down as the guests settled in to listen to the announcements.

"Vertebrates and invertebrates," he began, "Welcome, all, to dinner. As it is the third evening of our excursion across the Ariadne planetary system, we've arranged a buffet of local delicacies from Ariadne's third outermost populated orbital body, the Gratten Moon, in addition to our standard faire. Special requests may be directed to the buffet stewards. Wine and other consumable spirits will be served until 8:00, at which point dinner will end and our bar will open. You are invited to sample the amenities at our gym and entertainment suites at any time. Please see a porter to be provided with recreational gear suited to your particular species."

He cleared his throat and tapped the touchscreen in the lectern a few times before continuing with a well-practiced smile. "This evening, we have a rare treat in store for everyone, viewable out the starboard windows. As you may be aware, this cruise normally follows a direct route from Insignion Station to Gratten Major, but every seven years, that path conflicts with the orbit of Ariadne's largest gas giant, K'ribb-dees, which is famed for its elegant rings, its lovely rainbow aura, and its natural plasmic pyrotechnics."

Off to Donna's left, a fellow passenger with blue skin and a glittery pirate jacket leaned over and whispered to a walking tree. "That's not all it's famed for," he said in a low voice. "The planet's quarantined. Get too close and bzzt! Plasma bursts. Every time."

The maître d's light voice continued on over the top of the whisperers. "The mysterious K'ribb-dees gives off a large amount of exotic radiation, radiation that frequently sparks X-class plasma bursts, the hottest and most violent type of superheated plasma in the known universe – very deadly, but also very beautiful. The Hindenburg will tonight be making a scenic detour around the planet – staying well within government issued safety parameters, of course – and we'll be able to get quite a good view of the aura and rings. At our closest point at perigee, which will occur at 8:00 sharp, a scientific delegate from the University of Aquarii will launch a probe from this ship into the atmosphere of the planet, and the probe's entry into the atmosphere will trigger a rare reactive plasma event. The captain advises guests that the best viewing locations in the ship will be the dining hall, via the starboard windows, and, for the not-so-faint-at-heart, the ballroom on the top deck, which is encompassed on all sides by a seamless dome of crystal clear transparent aluminium. You'll feel you could dance right off the ship and into the stars." The man gave the audience a beatific smile and a slight bow.

"And now," he said, turning with a gesture to the starboard windows, "we'll be turning into our detour route, and the planet will come into view on the starboard side of the ship."

The audience, including team TARDIS, waited patiently for the turn and the planet. There was a funny clunk that echoed up through the floor, and the lights flickered. A small wave of "oh!" and other murmurs of surprise passed through the crowd, but then the lights stabilized and nothing else happened. The maître d' stood there a minute or two more with his hand still out. A sheen of sweat started to appear on his brow.

A couple of crewmen standing on the floor next to the dais frowned, turned away and muttered quietly into their earpieces, and one of them left the room through the corridor marked 'employees only.' The other leapt up to the dais, and whispered something to the maître d'.

The Doctor, closely followed by Rose, scooted up closer to the dais to hear their conversation and caught the tail end of the maître d's quietly hissed response.

"What do you mean, rebooting? I've got five hundred people here waiting for a view."

The crewman whispered to him again, and the maître d's reaction was louder than he meant it to be.

"Then turn the bloody ship manually! That's what back-up systems are for!"

The crewman saluted and swung himself back down off the dais before heading out the door after his shipmate. The maître d' glared after him for a moment, then turned abruptly back to the audience, and smiled brightly.

"There will in fact be a short delay. I invite you all to sample the local delicacies while we wait. The orchestra will be playing Gershwin on the ballroom floor from 9:00 to 12:00. Please enjoy your dinner."

With that, he fled off the stage and down the corridor after the crewmen who had passed him the message.

"That's kind of weird," Rose mused.

Shaun nodded, eyes popping out of his head as he stared at the humanoid off to Donna's left. "You can say that again!"

"Not the blue man, you twit," Donna said, tugging his shirtsleeve affectionately. "The fact that the crew is acting funny."

The Doctor gazed after the maître d' with his usual nose for trouble, and pondered the possibilities. Rose, smiling cheekily with her tongue against her upper teeth, watched him out of the corner of her eye.

"S'pose we'll have to investigate, Sarge?"

He glanced back and grinned. "I dunno, Lewis. Could be nothing."

"Could be hideous engine monsters, too."

"Better find out, just to be sure."

"Engine monsters?" Shaun echoed, not sure whether this was an actual thing.

Donna tossed her head. "Right, better go talk to the employees to get the full scoop. Just make us more important in your computer there so they don't shrug us off like regular people." She waved her hand at the computer terminal.

A few quick whirs of the sonic screwdriver later, the four of them headed out of the dining hall down the back corridor in the direction the stewards had gone.