AN: I've been revising constantly for my driving theory test, which was on Thursday (I passed!) so most of this was written over Friday and Saturday. Writing for my own, original book has gone back into motion since I began this story (I think it helped cure my writer's block!), so I'm focusing on two stories at the same time.
Apologies if anything comes off as rushed, but I was happy with it so here it is.
Hours later, when Ianto had gone home and the sun had set for the day, Rose and Martha prepared to head back to the TARDIS. She had told her friend to go on ahead; she needed a quick word with Jack.
"Can I convince you?" she asked, smiling at him. "Quick trip with me and Martha?"
He sighed heavily, grinning from ear to ear as he looked about himself. "You know I can never say no to you, Rosie. Just one thing, though." She nodded and watched as he plucked a post-it note from the desk, scribbling something on it quickly.
"What's that?" she asked as he recapped the pen.
With a smug grin, he held it out to her. "Today's date and time. Now you have no excuse for getting me back late."
Jack stepped out of the TARDIS first, into the blustery winds of the world outside. He had observed her piloting with close, watchful eyes and seemed to be thinking of something, though gentle prodding revealed none of his inner thoughts, and Rose didn't want to push, so she let it drop.
"Come on then," she said to Martha, who was staring at the doors Jack had just left from with barely concealed anticipation. "Lets see where we are."
Martha laughed and ran for the outside. Rose followed at a more leisurely pace and a smile broke out on her face at the sound of her friends' pleased exclamations.
"Now, this is what I call a trip!" Jack declared, looking around with a beaming smile. "New York City. Perfect."
Martha span around in a circle and then jolted to a stop. "Is that - oh my God. That's the Statue of Liberty!"
"Well, yeah," Jack said. They both ignored him.
"And there's the Empire State Building!" Martha continued. "I wonder what year it is."
"What year was the building finished?" Rose asked, because it clearly wasn't yet.
"Nineteen Thirty One," Jack said, wandering around in a small circle.
"It's Nineteen Thirty now," Martha said, plucking up a stray newspaper. "First of November." She looked back up at the building. "It's mad, this is. I'll never get used to it."
"Ah, don't worry," Rose said. "I never have either." Then, a grin came to her face. "Fancy a closer look?"
"So, America Nineteen Twenty Nine, the Great Depression hits and the entire country finds itself unemployed." Jack was monologuing as they headed in what they hoped was the right direction. "People from all walks of life are losing their homes and morale is low as ever. In the middle of it all, sits the Empire State Building."
"What a backdrop to depression," Rose muttered. She wondered whether the building had cost the people at all, and then kicked herself for not being more genned up on American history.
"So tell me," Martha said, looking down at the newspaper again. "What's Hooverville?"
Jack glanced over and then launched into a speech about Central Park and the thousands of people who had flocked there upon losing everything. Rose, meanwhile, looked down at what had caught Martha's attention in the first place.
Hooverville Mystery Deepens, read the headline. She frowned and then started in on the article. When she was done, ignoring the prompt to continue reading on page seven, Jack was still talking.
"We're talking hundreds of people at any one time, all taking shelter in -"
"Sorry, Jack," she said, cutting across him. "But I think there might be something we need to look into here." She pointed to the article and Jack, noticing it for the first time, soon agreed.
Hooverville itself wasn't hard to find. Just look for Central Park, or, conversely, look for the gathering of homeless people all crammed in together against the biting night air. The sight, even from a distance, was sickening.
What was worse though, she thought upon approach, was the man in the spats and the sharp business suit, stood before the desperate people of New York and gathering together a group who were willing to go down into the sewers of the city.
"What's the pay?" called a man who appeared to be the leader.
There was the slightest of pauses. "One dollar." Taking advantage of the desperate.
Rose's fists clenched, but the three of them hung back, not sure now was the time to be spotted. A glance at her two companions told her they were equally unhappy, though.
It was only natural, then, that when Diagoras called for volunteers theirs were the first three hands in the air (Martha's after a short delay, but she could hardly be blamed for that). Hooverville's leader followed shortly after, and so did the young man who stood at his side. Five of them.
If Diagoras had any misgivings about sending two women down to do this work he never voiced them (which, given the time period they were in, might have been a sign of something sinister in itself). He just took what he could get and led them all off.
The two Hoovervillians watched Rose, Martha and Jack with closed off, guarded expressions but neither spoke until they were down in the sewers, and Diagoras was strolling off back to safety.
Rose had the oddest feeling he was involved in the disappearances. Proving it was the key. Hopefully she would have the time to figure out a plan, as they wandered the sewers of New York looking for this mysterious collapse.
The Hooverville leader, Solomon, took in Jack's coat and a subdued expression overcame his face. "You a military man?" When Jack indicated that this was the case, Solomon shook his head but said nothing. "We've got people from every level of society in Hooverville, Miss Jones," he said. "Doctors, lawyers…" His eyes flicked back to Jack. "Servicemen. Everyone ends up at Hooverville in the end, these days."
"But all these people going missing," Rose said, "I mean, someone must be looking into it! If not the police, aren't there any detectives?"
Solomon's look turned somewhat condescending. "All the detectives are at Hooverville, Miss Tyler. What are they going to do?"
"What is that?" They all jolted to a stop at Jack's voice, ripping through the stale air of the tunnel. He sounded alarmed, and was staring off at something a few feet away.
Rose followed his gaze, and wrinkled her nose. "What the hell?" she muttered, moving towards it. Martha and Jack were hot on her heels. Solomon and Frank hung back, but she hardly blamed them.
"That is - well that's just…" Martha trailed off, lost for words as the three of them gathered around the thing on the floor, crouched low for a good look.
"Looks like a brain," Rose said. "But it can't be…"
"Can't it?" Jack asked with a humourless laugh. "Old Diagoras doesn't exactly come across as the honest type, and men have been going missing. He could be putting people in for all sorts of fates, and it could be happening down here."
"Great," Martha said. "Love a stroll into a lion's den."
Rose was only half paying attention to them, busy searching her pockets for something to safely pick the brain thing up with. She needed to invest in a packet of latex gloves at some point. Plucking out a tissue, she lifted the jelly-like thing from the ground, choking back a gag of disgust when sticky residue was left behind.
"Oh, that is rank," she said. It reminded her of something she had seen before though, so she wanted to get as close a look at it as she could. Bringing it slightly closer to her eye, she saw Martha, out of the corner of her eye, fighting between her natural curiosity and revulsion.
"Remind me not to touch you until after you've washed your hands," Jack said.
"Well there go my plans for tonight," she said, grinning. He met it with one of his own and winked.
"Right," Martha said, rolling her eyes, "anything helpful to add, Jack? Or are you just gonna whine?"
"Okay, hissy mother," he said, holding his hands up before moving in for a closer look too. "Can't say I've ever seen something quite like this before," he muttered.
"I think I have though," Rose said. He looked up to meet her eyes. "No idea where. It's just - vaguely familiar."
He hummed. "Okay. Think on that Rosie. Wonder if I have anything that'll help." He began digging through his coat pockets as from behind, Solomon piped up.
"So what exactly are we looking at there?" he asked.
"Don't look good, does it?" Frank asked with a nervous laugh.
Martha shot them a reassuring smile. "It's probably nothing." Hah. At least she had a great bedside manner.
Jack had pulled out a weird scanner and was holding it up to the brain, just out of sight of the two Hoovervillians. He was reading the results and his frown was deepening by the second. Rose's heart began to sink.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Says the planet of origin was Skaro," he muttered gruffly.
At that, her heart dropped like a stone. "Skaro?" she repeated.
"What's Skaro?" Martha asked, only to go ignored for the moment.
"You're not serious," she said. "Show me."
He did, and she read the results back, beginning to feel sick as she dropped the brain to the floor, where it impacted with a splat. It couldn't be them.
"What does Skaro mean?" Martha asked.
"It means Daleks," Jack said grimly. He tucked the scanner away and got to his feet, turning to Solomon and Frank with an equally grim look on his face. "Fellas, I hate to say it, but we need to get out of here."
Before they could make it so much as five minutes back down the tunnel, an animalistic squeal ripped the air, bringing their group to a sharp halt.
"What the hell was that?" Solomon asked.
"Hello?" Frank called, voice echoing into the darkness
"Frank," Solomon said warningly, at the same time as Martha shushed him.
"But what if it's one of the folk gone missing?" he asked. "You'd be scared and half mad down here on your own!" After what she had seen so far, Rose wasn't convinced any of the missing people were still alive, but she wasn't going to tell them that. "Heck, we ain't seen no bodies down here. Maybe they just got lost."
"Let's just keep moving, people," Jack said, wariness edging more clearly into his tone.
Another round of squeals echoed around them. "I know I never heard nobody make a sound like that," Solomon said.
"I said, let's go."
"Where's it coming from?" Frank asked, swinging his torch around. "Sounds like there's more than one."
"It doesn't matter because we're getting out of here," Jack said, marching over and taking Frank by the arm.
Despite his spindly build, the young lad was able to yank himself free, glaring at Jack. "Not while there might be people here who need -" He cut himself off, because at that exact moment his torch beam swung over a figure huddled into a corner. They visibly shivered, and any thoughts of Daleks, or of letting Jack have her leave fled Rose's mind.
"Hello?" she called, stepping towards them. "Are you okay?" No answer.
"Rosie," Jack said lowly.
"My name's Rose," she continued, speaking slowly so as not to startle them. "Are you okay? Can you tell me your name?"
"Are you lost?" Frank asked gently, joining her. "Can you understand me? I've been thinking about folk lost down here."
"Careful," she whispered to him, laying a tentative hand on his arm. "They might be violent."
"Heck, who cares?" he asked. "I might be too, if I were lost down here."
"Even so, I wouldn't want anything to - to happen…" She drifted off as the figure looked up, and she saw its face.
It was a pig man.
"Oh, what the hell?" Solomon said behind them, softly, but loudly enough that his voice carried. The pigman winced.
"What are you?" she murmured, quietly enough that only Frank heard her. He shot her a look and edged closer to the strange man.
Solomon's distress rang clear as he asked, "Is that, eh - some kind of carnival mask?"
Rose pursed her lips. "No. No, it's real." Refocusing on the pigman, she softened her features and crouched slightly. "Hello, my name's Rose. I'm here to help. Can you tell me who did this to you?"
"Uh, Rose?" It was Martha, and she sounded too nervous to be ignored. "I think we need to move."
She turned around, and froze at the sight of the herd coming right their way. "Oh. Well that's no good." Swallowing, she backed away from them. The pigmen followed.
"They're following you," Jack said.
"Are they? I never noticed." The pigmen were still advancing. "Okay. Everyone, I think now's the time to run."
Frank had almost been a goner, had it not been for Jack's razor sharp speed, considerable strength, and his slight bias towards, quote, "sweet pieces of ass". He never told Frank this because he didn't want to scare the young man more than he already had been that night, and quite frankly, Rose wished he had treated her with the same consideration when he later regaled to her his tale.
They had barely a moment to rejoice at all of them making it up through the manhole safely however, because a moment later, a gun was being pointed at their heads.
"Alright, then." Her voice was high pitched. "Hands in the air and no funny business. Now tell me, you schmucks, what have you done with Laszlo?"
They all just stood there for a moment. "Who's Laszlo?" Martha finally asked, utterly bewildered.
The woman stared at them long and hard. "Follow me," she said, and considering she had a gun they had very little choice, though Jack looked like he wanted to draw his own They followed her to a nearby dressing room where she began to speak. "Laszlo's my boyfriend. Or was my boyfriend until he disappeared two weeks ago. No letter, no goodbye, no nothing. And I'm not stupid. I know some guys are just pigs but not my Laszlo. I mean, what kind of guy asks you to meet his mother before he vamooses?"
"Listen um…it might just help if you, ya know, put that down," Martha said, eyeing the gun.
"Huh? Oh, sure." She tossed it on the bed, and everyone flinched. "Oh come on, it's not real. It's just a prop. It was either that or a spear."
"So what do you think happened to Laszlo?" Martha asked gently. Again, the bedside manner, it was good.
"I wish I knew." She sounded close to tears.
"What's your name?" Rose asked suddenly, snapping out of her trance. The woman blinked at her, surprised.
"Tallulah."
"Tallulah," Rose repeated.
"Three Ls and an H."
"…Right. Anyway. We're going to try and find Laszlo, I promise. But there are other people missing too. More disappearing every night. I'd bet it's connected."
"And there are creatures," Solomon cut in. "Such creatures."
"What do you mean creatures?"
Rose and Jack exchanged a glance, and a heavily edited explanation began.
"Jack said Daleks," Martha said a little while later, as all around them showgirls dashed about getting ready for their performance. Rose hadn't seen so many sparkles since Shareen went as a sexy witch for Halloween. "And you said once that they were some of the aliens there at Canary Wharf…"
She smiled flatly. "The bronze pepper pots with whisks for guns."
Martha blanched and asked, "They're what he thinks that brain thing was?"
"The real Daleks are these flesh creatures," she said. "The shells are just that; shells for them to move about in, and, you know…"
"Kill people with."
"Yeah."
"Great."
"Yeah." She saw Solomon moving about in an unsettled manner out of the corner of her eye, and frowned. "Would you mind checking in on Tallulah for me? See if you can find out anything else about this missing boyfriend?"
Martha agreed and left to do just that, and once she was gone, Rose approached the Hooverville leader.
"Everything alright?" she asked.
"I got to get back to Hooverville," he said. "With these creatures on the loose, we got to protect ourselves. Ain't no one else going to help us."
Rose nodded. She wanted these people as far away from the Daleks as possible. "Good luck."
"I hope you know what you're doing, for all our sakes."
"So do I," she muttered as the man left.
Jack came up to her side. "Everything okay?"
"Fine. Solomon's going back to Hooverville. He thinks the people there are in danger, so he's gone to rally them."
"Smart man," he muttered. "But moving on. We might have a bigger problem on our hands than we thought." Before she could ask him what he meant, he had reached into his coat pocket and withdrew the Dalek waste.
"Ugh," she said. "And you complained about me picking it up with a tissue."
He ignored her. "Further scans suggest it's artificial. Genetically engineered."
"Definitely Daleks then," she said. "Who in this time period would be messing around with genetics like this?"
"You might be surprised," he said, not looking very happy. "But still. There's no way it's a coincidence that the Daleks would pop up in old New York and the genetic experiment waste we find not be down to them."
"So the Daleks are running experiments in the sewers in Great Depression New York," Rose muttered. "Lovely."
A voice from behind interrupted them. "Er, excuse me?" It was Frank, still looking very pale but otherwise no worse for wear.
Rose smiled kindly. "You alright? You must be shaken up to hell."
"Oh, I wouldn't say that," he said with a nervous laugh. Then, he looked at Jack, who looked slightly tetchy at having been interrupted. "You saved my life tonight, sir. I wanted to thank you for that."
"Any time," Jack said neutrally. He turned back to the Dalek waste and spoke no more. Rose was surprised by his dismissal but if the young man was offended, he didn't show it.
"And Rose?" Frank glanced around them and said in a low tone, "I don't mean to intrude on other folk's business, but I - I couldn't help overhearing something your military friend said." At her prompting look, he went on. "Something back there, in the tunnel, about that brain thing we found. He said 'planet of origin'. Now what's that all about?"
Before she could answer, an almighty commotion roused them from their quiet corner backstage and they rushed out to find the performers in varying states of distress. Her friend was nowhere to be seen.
"Oh, that face," one of the actresses was moaning as she came back. "I ain't never going to sleep."
Ignoring Frank's flustered exclamations at finding himself in a room filled with pretty girls Rose rushed to Tallulah and asked, "What happened? Where's Martha?"
"I don't know, she ran off stage!"
Her scream echoed through the air, and the group of four reacted instantly, sprinting towards the sound. They found the sewer entrance askew in the back.
"Damn it," Rose hissed. "They've got her. We've gotta get after her!" She zipped up her jacket, dashed to the sewer cover and pulled it back with the help of Jack. Frank hovered in the back, seemingly unsure of what to do.
"Where are you going?" Tallulah demanded.
"To find her," she said. The Daleks wouldn't have a single other victory, not under her watch.
"But who's taken her? What're you doing?"
Rose ignored her, climbing down the ladder to the sewers below. Above, she heard Frank trying to force out a stammered explanation and then -
"Oh, no way," Jack said. "You are not coming."
"Hey, Handsome Jack Flash, I don't care if you are a military man, you ain't bossing me around!"
Well they had found Laszlo, and he had agreed to take them to the place Martha was being held. The relief she had felt at seeing her friend unharmed was near palpable. In worse news, a Dalek hadn't been far away.
It rolled in all of a sudden and Rose had to bite back a growl as firey molasses roared through her veins.
"Oh, what the hell?" Frank breathed, looking appalled.
"Sil-ence," it ordered, as Laszlo cowered back from it in a corner. "Sil-ence."
Jack looked like he wanted to make some sarcastic remark at that, but miraculously managed to keep his mouth shut.
"You will form a line. Move. Move." Rose couldn't move. At the sight of it, she could barely think.
"Just do what it says, everyone, okay?" Martha called. Her voice held a slight tremble, and the sound of it cleared Rose's head; there was more at stake here than her. She needed to keep it together. "Just obey."
"The female is wise. Ob-ey."
Another Dalek rounded the corner and she hissed under her breath. How many of them were there?
"What is the stat-us of the Fi-nal Ex-per-iment?"
"The Da-lek-anium is in place," the first Dalek reported. "The en-er-gy con-duc-tor is now com-plete."
"Then I will ex-tract pris-on-ers for sel-ec-tion."
One of the pigmen dragged an elderly man forwards. "In-tell-igence scan, in-it-iate. Read-ing brain waves. Low int-ell-igence."
"You calling me stupid?"
"Sil-ence! This one will be-come a pig slave. Next."
The scene was horrifying, and as Rose watched the pigmen drag the struggling man away, she had to fight to keep her last dinner down.
"They're divided into two groups," Laszlo explained. "High intelligence and low intelligence. The low intelligence are taken to become pig slaves like me."
"Well that's not fair," Tallulah protested. "You're the smartest guy I ever dated."
"What about the others?" Rose asked. "The high intelligence ones?"
"They're taken to the laboratory."
"What for?"
"I don't know," he said. "The masters only call it the Final Experiment."
"That certainly don't sound good," Frank said, trying to quell his nerves as a Dalek approached.
Rose shrank back slightly, unsure of whether it should see her face. Was there any chance it might recognise her?
Frank had been scanned and the Dalek declared, "Su-per-ior int-ell-igence." And then just like that, it was Martha's turn. "Int-ell-igence scan, in-it-iate. Su-per-ior int-ell-igence. This one will be-come part of the Fi-nal Exp-er-iment."
"You can't just experiment on people!" Martha protested. "It's inhuman!"
"We are not hu-man. Pris-on-ers of high int-ell-igence will be ta-ken to the trans-genic lab-ora-tory."
Well that didn't sound good.
Indeed it wasn't. Marched up in silence to the laboratory and faced with a Dalek encased in black - which gave her a start, because it almost seemed as if these were the same Daleks as those from Canary Wharf - the group watched in horror as the aliens prepared for the Final Experiment.
"You will bear wit-ness," one of them screeched, and Rose tensed again as smoke began to pour from the black Dalek's casing.
It rose up into the drafters of the room and the smell of burning rubber almost made her gag - until it stopped, and a hissing noise began.
And then the Dalek casing began to open, and something almost human crawled out.
"What is it?" Martha asked. Rose didn't answer. Couldn't answer.
The humanoid creature did the job for her. "I - am - a human - Dalek," it said in a voice reminiscent of a human's, but with the same jilted trappings of a Dalek voice box. "I - am - your future."
