Chapter 4
The nurse had been gone for a few hours but Donna knew she would be coming back and whatever she came back to do would not be a good experience.
She looked about her and saw that the ward, she had been man-handled into, was much bigger than she had first thought and ever seen before with so many beds that ran the length of the room. There seemed to be what looked like a nurse's station every 600 yards. This definitely put the NHS to shame. Well, if she was brutally honest, anything put the virus infested NHS to shame. It seemed to invent more lethal virus's than it was curing.
She tried to get a closer look at a station. It looked like nothing she had ever seen before, even in the TARDIS. It was full of switches and screens which looked more at home at an army base or something. The Doctor would have loved it. Maybe, she thought, there was some kind of communication or information aspect to it that would let her contact the Doctor or failing that, at least tell her where she was.
Before she had a chance to try anything, a nurse with bright purple hair came through the door with what looked like a very painful needle. Luckily, to her relief, she had moved away towards another bed. Donna watched her to make sure she would not be coming back soon. The nurse disappeared around the corner and as Donna saw, there were no other people about so she took her chance.
The panels looked very much like a keyboard she had seen during her many temping jobs but what was different was the fact that there was no letters on the keys. They had been replaced by some kind of symbol. Somehow, to her surprise, she knew what they meant, but how? She then remembered the Doctor saying that it was the TARDIS. He said that the TARDIS generated a telepathic field that translated alien languages inside her head. Wonderful but unnerving, she thought.
She sat in front the screen and began typing, always checking to see if anyone was coming. Finally, she found some sign as to where she was,
VITA HEALTH SERVICE
Brought to you by
BAD WOLF INDUSTRIES
"Well that explains the wards and nurses" she thought.
She pressed a few more buttons and a screen showing a large empty plaza came up, then suddenly a lone man with short brown hair, wearing a brown suit and a long brown coat appeared out of a passage to the side of the plaza. She suddenly remembered the TARDIS in an alley and walking with the Doctor while he talked about how Vita had been a bustling planet who liked to project aspects of other worlds onto their planet. She knew he had said more about it but she wasn't really listening as the phone thing, which had transported her away, caught her eye.
The same guilt that she had felt before came back to haunt her because this was her fault because she didn't listen.
"Doctor?" she exclaimed as she stared at the slim figure on the screen.
She realised she had been too loud in her surprise and she quickly checked about her. No one stirred which was a relief so she turned back to the screen. The figure that was the Doctor was now fiddling with a silvery device in his hand. His sonic screwdriver, she thought. He began to move it about, scanning for something, then suddenly his focus or that of the screwdriver was now pointing towards something else but what that was, Donna didn't know or couldn't see. The Doctor began to move in that direction, until he went out of view.
Donna rushed towards the window above her bed but she couldn't see that much but more importantly, she couldn't see the Doctor.
"Where are you, Doctor?" she whispered.
A voice behind her suddenly spoke, frightening her and making her freeze. She felt like a child that had been caught doing something that she shouldn't.
"What are you doing?"