The Symbolic Paradigm & Its Four Main Assumptions:

1.) How people act depends on how they see and value reality.

2.) People learn from others how to see and value reality.

3.) People constantly work to interpret their own behavior and the behavior of others to determine what these behaviors "mean".

4.) When people do not attach the same meanings to the behaviors or perceive reality in the same way, there will be misunderstanding and conflict.

-The Practical Skeptic (6th Edition), Lisa J. McIntyre (2013).

By the time the Doctor had finally opened the mortuary drawer, Gilly Hopkins had long since fallen silent, staring numbly into the claustrophobic darkness. She wasn't scared or upset anymore, just numb. For her it felt like time had passed, but it was almost impossible for her to say how long it had been since she had been trapped in there. It had been both an instant and an eternity, a disconcerting limbo that she never wanted to ever experience again.

But leaving the cold chamber had brought back the pain, and Gilly didn't know which was worse, the agony or the indeterminate state. If the torturing sensation of her nerves being set aflame by the radiation hadn't made her breathless, she would have been shrieking like a banshee. As it was, she could only let out a choked half-whimper as the Doctor immediately threaded an IV into the crook of her arm. He connected it to a fluid bag filled with some unknown solution. He watched the medical cocktail dripped steadily from the bag, down the tube, and into her arm.

The affect was discreet and gradual, but eventually the production of artron energy from the irradiated DNA that was being bombarded by the chronon energy was impeded by the concoction that had taken the Doctor over a month to create, almost seven hundred and forty-one hours of work. With a little less than fifteen hours sleep throughout the whole affair, it was no wonder that the Doctor was absolutely knackered. Unfettered relief nearly overwhelmed the Time Lord as he undid the restraints that bound Gilly against the mat of the gurney.

She was too weak at the moment to get up, so the Doctor wheeled her over to one of the beds that was provided in the sickbay. With a quick movement, she was soon laying on a soft mattress, watching the Time Lord go about cleaning up the mess he had made earlier during the time she had been stored inside of the cold chamber. The sickbay was utterly silent, save for the noise produced by the Doctor straightening the room.

Ultimately, he completed the self-assigned task, but it wasn't done as efficiently or as precisely as the Doctor would have preferred. However, he was too tired to bother worrying about it now. At the moment, he could hardly keep his eyes open. There was only one more thing that needed to be done before he could retire for the next several hours. The Time Lord slowly walked back to the only occupied bed where his patient watched him with a mixture of wariness and resignation. "Sleep well," he told her, his voice hoarse from disuse over the past few weeks. "We'll talk after the both of us rest."

He reached above her, fiddling with an overhead device as she languidly watched him. After he had finished setting the device on number eight, Gilly opened her mouth to ask him something… but ended up forgetting what question she had been about to pose as her awareness floated away from her. Sleep was sudden, her consciousness faded away so rapidly; blown out like a flame from a birthday candle.

When Gilly woke up, she felt sluggish and very, very lazy. Blinking slowly, she gazed up at the ceiling and the device above her, time dragging on by for many long minutes before she decided that she should probably try to get up. Arms little better than limp noodles, the albino slogged out of the bed with a lackluster grace that belied how weak she felt from the excess sleep and the fatigue left over from the echoing aches of the radiation sickness that she had been suffering from. Gilly wondered if she was considered "cured" now. Surely, it couldn't be as easy as that?

When she stumbled out of the bathroom that she had almost blindly discovered, which had been attached to the sickbay, the ex-mortician concluded that her best course of action would be to take her chances and try to find her way out of wherever she was being detained. After grabbing her camera and glasses, her sunhat being oddly absent, she finally left the room. The hallway went in two different directions and, after a short deliberation, Gilly purposely went left instead of right, knowing full well that a majority of people tend to go right when the choice between the two paths is equal.

There wasn't any reason to believe that the tall man would have known this psychological fact ahead and planned the layout of this place in accordance to it. Realistically, it was actually quite illogical for her to assume that he would go to such lengths in the first place, that going right would be worse than going left. However, Gilly was grasping at straws, willing to do anything at this point to increase her likelihood of getting out no more scathed than she already was. So she went left.

The young woman had been walking down the halls for quite some time, turning left at each intersection if she couldn't go forward, but hadn't run into either a dead end or a way out. Actually, she could have sworn that she passed that same exact door seven times already. When time number eight happened, Gilly came to a stop and considered the reoccurring door. Curiosity got the best of her and she opened it.

The room was an exact replica of her childhood room.

She shut the door again and wordlessly continued on her way, determinedly ignoring the door, even as it appeared time and time again, taunting her. What sort of sick person would go and…? She couldn't complete the thought, it was too horrible. Has he been stalking me all this time?

Seeing the room here, wherever here was, unsettled the albino, and as she made to pass the door to the room again, she paused, eying it as if it was a feral animal. She opened the door to room again, only to see to her amazement that it had changed slightly. While retaining strong similarities to her old room, it was not the same. Only the door was the exact same as the childhood room, down to the timeworn door knob and strange crack that looked like a two-year-old's attempt at a 'W' that for some reason sent both her mother and grandma snickering and commenting that it would look better on a wall. Gilly had been gravely mistaken. She let out a slightly hysterical laugh, leaning her head against the closed door. Oh, this is too much. I'm going crazy now, she thought.

Unbeknownst to her, the TARDIS had taken from her mind the room that brought her the most comfort. The sentient Time Ship had been unaware that Gilly would react so negatively to seeing an exact copy of the room there. So then she had adjusted the room just enough to where it would be taken as a coincidence, rightly assuming this time for that to be the proper course of action.

Gilly had entered the room this time after opening the door, feeling an urge to see just how far the similarities went between this room and her old one back at her parents'. Both rooms were a light lavender in color with hand-painted silver designs randomly littering the wall here and there, this room had stars and planets instead of leaves and vines. Gilly almost smiled at the memory of her older sister expertly painting the room, how she was told that the only way she could possibly help was to sit in the chair in the middle of the room and watch. Gilly was a dreadful artist.

The bed was a four-poster bed with only a metal bared headboard, at home she had a solid wooden headboard and footboard. There was the small wardrobe that was exactly the same, painted white on the outside, but when she opened it, instead of the plain white she had been expecting, someone had painted the inside of it the same color as her room with more silver stars dotted throughout the empty interior. The huge white bookcase that was in the corner was also completely empty.

For some reason, that disappointed Gilly, as hers had been overrun with her extensive collection of books, all of which were worn from regular use, filled with her notes and thoughts in the margins, dog-eared, and had numerous passages highlighted. She had, quite literally, loved her books to bits. At times, she had to replace a few copies of her books and transcribe the notes and highlights into the new copies before the vigorous reading would start again.

The shelves along the walls of the room still contained a massive shell and rock collection, but the collection contained many pieces that were utterly foreign and unknown to her, appearing almost alien. The picture frames on the walls and on various hard surfaces were also empty, waiting to be filled with pictures. So much unlike her own room, which had all the frames filled with pictures her grandma and mother had taken themselves.

The only thing that was exactly the same, was the small collection of stuffed animals in the corner. Many of the stuffed animals were creatures from Earth, but a few were on recognizable. Since when does a koala have brown fur and six legs? Still, they were all soft and cute to Gilly, which were the only guidelines she went by when deciding if she wanted the plush or not when buying one. Setting down the hexaped koala, her shoes scuffed across the hardwood floors to the window. It only displayed a scene that would be seen in those increasingly uncommon, 2D, science documentaries.

Nowadays, there were dime-a-dozen IMAX theaters with the 3D viewings for movies and documentaries, sometimes a 4D movie would come out and those were always exciting. But her family was strange in the sense that it contained technology that was over fifty years old, practically antiques. Video tapes and old cassette players, even a flip phone. "Can't butt-call someone when you've got a cover on it!" Her grandma, ever the blunt pragmatist, would declare whenever she was pestered into buying an 'iPhone 31 StarBurst' or something else with a touchscreen.

Viewing the wondrous and almost hypnotic scene a little longer through the window, Gilly was vaguely reminded of Tumblr or Instagram, old sites from her grandma's generation that ended to be spammed with created images like the one before her. The last post she had seen was something about the Moon hatching or some nonsense. First it was made of green cheese, then it's a man, and now it's an egg? What will we come up with next? Gilly pondered absently before leaving the view and realizing that she was still no closer to escaping. She was hopelessly lost in what appeared to be in the same series of hallways, no matter which direction she took.

The ex-mortician stood in the middle of her room a bit helplessly, mind blank for what she should do next. Life was not like a video game. She wouldn't be getting any hints from a floating, blue fairy anytime soon. So, she waited, assuming that her captor would find her one way or another, and took a seat at the desk and chair combo that rested on a worn rug. Gilly fiddled with her camera, going through the pictures that she had already taken. One of the blurry and out of focus ones made the young woman purse her lips in a bitter yet resigned manner. She had taken that photo by accident when one of the sheep had bitten her after she had attempted to pet it and got too close. Her leg gave a weak throb at the memory.

The sound of footsteps snapped her out of her reverie, and Gilly looked up to see the Doctor enter the room, looking very well rested and decidedly more cheerful. "Hello!" He exclaimed with a grin. "How did you sleep?"

"Like the dead," the ex-mortician responded with no small amount of dark humor.

The man scrunched up his face at her joke before scolding, "You would've been dead if I hadn't intervened."

"That hardly makes you August or September," came the dry retort. At his blank expression to her reference, she shook her head. "Never mind, they're characters from an old series my mother adored. But thank you for curing me, I guess."

The Doctor winced, running a hand through his hair in a nervous manner as he avoided looking at the human in front of him by letting his eyes scan the room. "You aren't cured," he informed her emotionlessly, stating a fact. "The dose of the liquidized aɬʒonpoɾnow gɛɾos ɛθldɑɹɪ is only temporarily preventing further poisoning."

"Ack izh own…Coosh geh… ehthl…" Gilly struggled to pronounce the name of the medicine that was given in another language.

"aɬʒonpoɾnow gɛɾos ɛθldɑɹɪ," the Doctor obligingly repeated, his voice sounding almost musical in the liquid, chiming language. It sounded ethereal, rather like what Gilly pictured elvish sounded like from that nearly-a-century-old trilogy that she had in her room. She knew that there was no chance in hell that she would be able to correctly pronounce those lyrical syllables, even if her life depended on it. Still, Gilly silently vowed to herself that she would practice in private and would, one day, make the words sound passable.

Presently, however, she didn't dare make a second attempt, knowing she would mangle it. The Doctor seemed to realize this as well, for he said, "The closest translation would be 'renders radiation useless'. Which is, admittedly, more of a description than a name. It basically operates as an artificial anti-radiation immune system. As long as the compound is in your body, it combats the processes of the irradiation of your DNA from the chronon energy and prevents the eventual formation of artron energy. So, I s'pose you could call it a sort of anti-radiation mediation. A dose will have to be taken daily, but not to worry, I have it in pill form so you won't need to have it administered intravenously except in dire circumstances where you'll need its high-immediate benefits."

The tall man in front of Gilly had her convinced that he really was a doctor at this point. It would have been extremely difficult, even for her, to keep up such a pretense if there really wasn't a medical degree or two involved. Besides of which, that foreign term was too beautiful and natural to be made up anyway. The young woman relaxed, comforted by the almost familiar situation of going to a medical practitioner and getting a medical prescription. So all I need is some pills? That's not so bad…

She had apparently spoken her thoughts aloud if his pensive expression was any indicator. "Weeell," he drew out the word reflectively. "You'll also need periodic examinations and the occasional energy extraction. The level of artron exudate will have to be maintained at a safe amount and continuously observed."

Then again, maybe not. Still, Gilly would rather have whatever treatment this Doctor was suggesting than being dead. She liked living, thank you very much. Unfortunately, this treatment gave the impression of it being intensive, and it worried her about what possible options she might have. "So, what type of doctor would I have to see back in the States, or are all of your colleagues only on this side of the hemisphere? Would my insurance cover it, or would I have to pay out of pocket? What are my chances of survival with this treatment you're suggesting? Is it indefinite? Do I—"

"Just – Just hold on a tic," the Doctor begged her off, beginning to look troubled. "I think you're getting the wrong idea."

"You are a doctor, aren't you?"

"Well, yes, but—"

"Then what's the problem?" Gilly interrupted, annoyed. "You said you were a doctor, and you just prescribed my treatment. Now that I'm well enough and not in any immediate danger of keeling over, I can go home with the medication and resume treatment at a local hospital or specialized facility or something." A strained silence blanketed the room between the two of them.

"…It's not as easy as that," he finally managed, walking over to take a seat on the bed and leaning forward. They were nearly eye-to-eye now, and Gilly had the strangest impression that he had committed an action similar to that of an adult crouching down to become eye-level with a child. It probably didn't help that he was beginning to speak to her slowly and simply, "My name is 'the Doctor'. I'm a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey, and I travel through time and space in my ship, the TARDIS, which we're in right now. Chronon energy—"

Gilly snorted, finally snapping out of her state of shock. "You're alien?"

"Yes… Does that bother you?"

"Not half as much as the idea that the man responsible for the fact that I'm still breathing is completely off his rocker."

"Oi," the Doctor yelped, offended. "Am not!"

"Aliens? Space ships? Time machines?" With each word, her voice became more incredulous. Skeptically, the albino crossed her arms, dismissing, "Yeah, right."

The Time Lord began to grow irritated. "I'm telling the truth. Why are you acting like that?"

"Because everything you've said in the last couple of minutes is completely ludicrous. The idea of you being an alien and the two of us being on your space ship… Calling that far-fetched is an understatement, but time travel? That's crazy. You're crazy. It's not possible."

"Yes, it is," the Doctor retorted. "I've done it more times than all the days you've been alive. It's really very simple and most definitely possible, especially if you're me."

Gilly scoffed, "Oh yeah?" She smirked before leaning forward and challenging him, "Prove it."

A/N: Yes, before you ask, the language the Doctor spoke in is Gallifreyan, specifically the version of Gallifreyan developed by the staff of 'The Gallifreyan Conlang Project.' Conlang meaning a constructed language. They built (and are still building) the grammar and the vocabulary from scratch until it's a working language that people can have conversations in. Actually, it is a working language. Crude, but passable. The dialect they're developing is the most prominent one in the TV series is called Circular Gallifreyan.

Really, it's the only one of it's kind, and it serves the purpose needed in this story. Be expecting many reappearances and different words.

aɬʒonpoɾnow gɛɾos ɛθldɑɹɪ

Translation: renders radiation useless. [Lit.: renders useless energy discharge]

Pronunciation (as far as I can tell): ack-jeon-poor-now... koosh-geh-rose... eth-ul-dah-ri

(The "jeon" almost sounds like "shawn" or the first syllable of the French name "jean". The "ri" at the end is pronounced like you're going to say "rip" but the 'p' is silent.)

Okay, that this point it should be obvious, this fact about Gilly's background. This chapter has so many hints stuffed into that one paragraph alone when she's in her room, it's I like I've thrown a brick at your face. I'll even give you a pointed question: What year is Gilly from?

Well, for the adventure, I doubt you'll recognize it. It's titled under 'The Eyeless' by Lance Parkin. It's cannon for 'Doctor Who', so don't worry your little heads. The timeline is set right after 'Journey's End' but before 'The Next Doctor'.

Oh, and the six-legged koala that Gilly mentioned is called a Flubble. They exist in 'Doctor Who' cannon.