AN: If any of you have never been, you can actually walk through the entire Pleasure Beach on Google Maps. Though, the Stratosphere roller coaster is fictional, and I'm taking a LOT of creative liberties with the layout. Also, when you imagine the lizard, imagine Killer Croc, only red. That is, when it's not invisible.

Stratosphere

Clara & Eleven

"Stop, stop, STOP!" Clara yelled. Eleven slammed on the breaks and the DeLorean skidded to a very abrupt halt only a few inches away from the Pleasure Beach gates, its sign dark and switched off at that time of night. She had desperately been trying to pull on her boots while Eleven had been trying to force the car to get to the mystical eighty-eight miles per hour.

"I nearly had it!" he protested.

"Had what!? Our joint funeral when you kill us both!?" she demanded.

"We'd be fine. A car crash would be easy for us to survive."

"I don't mean the car crash, I mean my baby sister when she finds out we wrecked another of her boyfriend's vehicles," Clara said, but Eleven ignored her, already hastening to get out as quickly as possible. She followed suit but immediately tripped over onto the cool ground, still struggling with her damn shoes. "Are you even sure that thing is-" A loud roar echoed from within the theme park somewhere, something visceral and frightening. It made her freeze just as she finally pulled on her boot all the way. The Doctor met her eyes.

"Yes," he answered simply, and then he went to jump the gate while she staggered to her feet in pursuit of him. It was then that Wade Sawyer's cheap old automobile came rattling up behind them. "Look, it's your fiancé," Eleven remarked, and she told him to piss off.

"Don't you dare run off without me – you know if it finds you and I'm not there you don't stand a chance," Clara ordered him, and he jokingly saluted to her as Wade nearly crashed into one of the bollards preventing cars from ordinarily getting so close to the entrance. There was only a small gap big enough to fit a car through, but their DeLorean was blocking the passage for Wade. "Get out of here!" Clara shouted at him. He left the car door hanging open and rushed towards them.

"You're not safe."

"I'm quite alright," she said coolly, "Leave. You don't know what you're dealing with."

"Neither of you know what you're dealing with!" he protested. He'd always been a bit of an idiot; very headstrong, but not in an endearing way.

"Technically, that is true," Eleven said thoughtfully.

"What do you plan to do when you find it?"

"Improvise," he shrugged, "It usually works."

"Just run away from him with me!" Wade continued to plead, "He'll get you killed." Then he tried to take Clara's hands, and in Clara's sudden fit of desperation to get away from him, she felt her whole head swim before she was wrenched through space like a fishhook in her brain and she crashed into the Doctor, having teleported to his side on the other side of the gate. Eleven helped his disorientated wife to stand, her wobbling a little. "What the hell!?" Wade shouted.

"Stay out there," the Doctor ordered, "I mean that!"

Another loud roar resounded from within the theme park, reminding them what they ought to be doing, and he took a woozy Clara's hand to pull her in, still clutching his green-flashing tracker made from an old maritime radio.

"He won't follow us," she mumbled, trying to get her bearings, which was not easy with the Doctor dragging her along in desperate search of a big, invisible lizard-monster.

"Well I hope you're right – if that thing finds him and we're not there to do anything about it, he'll be killed."

"And of course when you say we you mean me. Unless you're planning on talking it out of murder?" she remarked.

"We're a team!" he protested as they passed the large, sheltered carousel. Its ornate horses looked particularly eerie in the middle of the night, the entire place deserted. It was a bit grimmer in the twilight than it was during the day, and rather than just looking empty it looked outright abandoned; desolate, rusty and grimy. "I show you where the alien is, and you…"

"What? What do you want me to do to it?"

"You know – telekinesis it."

"That's literally so vague you might as well have just not said anything," she complained, and then she dropped his hand because she had regained herself enough after her accidental teleportation. Glancing back, she didn't see Wade Sawyer. Good. She might, in that moment, hate him a little bit, but that was a far-cry from being indifferent to whether or not he got himself killed with his own stupidity.

"Did you used to spend a lot of time here, then? Growing up?" he asked quietly, following the sonar-like radar strapped messily onto his jury-rigged device. Clara thought for a moment, then laughed slightly.

"Eh, sort of. I hate roller coasters, but… god, this is pretty scuzzy come to think of it, but one of my friends worked here so me and some others just used to sort of hang out in here and not go on the rides. It used to be free to get in, and you'd just pay for the individual tickets, but now they charge for both," Clara explained, "I haven't been in here since I moved away when I was eighteen, though. See, look, over there." She stopped him, getting them distracted from the task in hand with her nostalgia, and pointed out the Ghost Train, which had a very large skeleton looming over it – for that added, spooky touch. "She did the Ghost Train, and she sometimes did the Gourmet Burger stand."

"Gourmet?"

"That's just what it's called, I'm not saying theme park burgers are actually gourmet, sweetheart. We used to hang out just over by the hook-a-duck, there was a boy in there who fancied me. He once tried to give me a giant plushie of Sonic the Hedgehog, but the catch was I had to go on a date with him for it, and I didn't want to."

"You? Turning down a date?" he joked, and she scowled, and changed what she had been talking about with a sigh.

"It's weird being here with you, though. My husband. Ten years ago, I never would've thought any of this would-" another loud roar sounded. What it was roaring about, the Doctor hadn't a clue. Perhaps the pain of slowly suffocating on the abundance of nitrogen in the air was making it scream. Or it was just exceptionally angry. "Y'know, there's rumours that the Ghost Train is haunted. And one of the gift shops*."

"Well, we shall have to come back and see if it is," the Doctor said, "You know, Jenny was telling me that Esther can see ghosts. Or she causes them to manifest, or something."

"Oh, great. Let's kidnap Esther and force her onto the Ghost Train, then," Clara said sarcastically, "Maybe she'll be able to speak to all the people who keep dying building that roller coaster, find out if it really is cursed." As they spoke, they found themselves both whispering. It was creepy in there at night, potentially being stalked by an invisible monster. On the lookout for that, and now thinking in the back of her mind about the alleged ghost (though she had never seen anything herself), she kept making shapes out of the shadows, which unnerved her. She could have sworn she saw a flicker of something move on the Wild Mouse as they passed it, but put it down to a trick of the eye. Still, she besotted herself by taking the Doctor's arm – not that he objected.

"You can keep talking, you know," he said quietly, "If it wants to find us it will do so by scent. And besides, we want to find it."

"I just think it's a bit creepy here, that's all," she answered, still talking under her breath. In the darkness, the familiar surroundings of many childhood daytrips and treats were distorted, the shadows making everything surreal and unnatural. In the back of her mind, the craving for a cigarette began to take priority. But a cigarette would certainly give away their position, and despite what the Doctor said, she still felt it was a little uncertain who was the predator and who was the pray in their situation.

"…You don't like roller coasters, then?" he inquired, almost definitely sensing how unnerved she was.

"No. Scared of heights."

"Are you?"

"I… was scared of heights… a lot of things have happened since the last time somebody tried to convince me to ride the Pepsi Max here. It used to terrify me, but I did fall out of an escape pod and get impaled on a branch a few months ago**, so maybe now I'd be alright…" He turned his nose up at this thought, a memory of hers he may have forgotten about. After all, he hadn't been there when she had been impaled. But the next day, when they had reunited, he had worried a lot about the dried blood she was caked in, the tear in her clothes where the branch had penetrated her abdomen.

"What are you still scared of now?" he asked. The silhouette of the Pepsi Max itself was visible on the horizon, the largest roller coaster in the entire place – and as a matter of fact, Clara knew, the tallest roller coaster in the country.

"I don't know – losing Oswin? Losing you?" she said, then paused, "That? Isn't it freaky?" She nodded at a much slower children's ride wearing faces from Alice in Wonderland. The plastic iterations of Tweedledum and Tweedledee stuck to the outside were garish even at the best of times – right then, the whole thing was the stuff of nightmares.

"Eurgh. Horrifying. Worse than the Ghost Train."

"…What if it's in there?"

"Tracker says it's this way," he steered them in another direction, not towards the Pepsi Max, she was relieved to see. She didn't see the appeal of wanting to feel like you might die – currently, she felt like she might die. In fact, she often felt like she might die. Despite the numerous occasions on which she became dreadfully aware of her own pseudo-mortality, it wasn't a feeling she enjoyed. "I don't suppose you know what's this way?"

"No. I told you, I haven't been here for seven years." After that there was a lapse in their conversation for a minute or so. "Why come to a theme park, though? In the middle of the night? What's it looking for – wouldn't it try to get back to that crashed shuttle?"

"The shuttle's gone, I assume," Eleven shrugged, "The tents were taken down from the beach by the time we finished dinner, the remains must have been taken elsewhere. And not into this poorly fortified tourist attract… ah." He had paused. "This is certainly interesting." He proceeded to fumble in his pockets for his torch – the same one he had thrown to her last night while she had been investigating the downed ship – and switched it on.

"Oh my god," Clara said, staring. He handed her the torch and she kept it trained on what they had spotted – a huge wreckage. Not just any wreckage, in fact, but it was one of the cars from the Flying Machines***, which they were just in front of, torn from its cables and left a mangled mess on the ground. But that wasn't the worst part; the worst part was the semi-liquid, steaming lump of faecal matter splattered across the Flying Machine's white paint. "That thing came in here, tore off one of the plane-things, and shat on it!?" Clara exclaimed, horrified.

"Yes. I think so." The Doctor leant down to get a look. Clara held the torch steady.

"Please don't touch it," she begged him.

"…I wasn't going to touch it…" he grumbled. She still thought he may have been planning on touching it. The main thing, though, was that he didn't. Then he gasped, as though he got a brainwave, and clapped his hands, dropping the tracking device (which was thankfully hanging from his neck by a leather strap, so it didn't break.) "That's it!"

"Can't believe a pile of shit has made you have an epiphany. It reeks, Chin."

"It's so obvious! We were looking at things like they were just coincidences! Those people who were killed today, one of them was the chief designer of the Stratosphere roller coaster. They had the concept drawings in their room, all bloodstained. This lizard monster saw them, and now it's here."

"Why would it be looking for a roller coaster?" she asked him, hastening to follow him as he rushed away from the vandalised Flying Machines, looking desperately around for any signs that might lead them to the Stratosphere coaster, still under construction.

"It's not looking for a roller coaster – it's looking for a spaceship. And I don't know if you've noticed, but those Flying Machines don't actually fly. That's where it is, and we have to find it before it gets angry and defecates in there, as well, because if it can't find a spacecraft I daresay it will rampage around Blackpool until it dies. And this is a prime tourist attraction in the middle of summer, the damage it could do is unthinkable – are you keeping up?" he was talking and walking at the same time, on the brink of breaking into a run.

"Yes," she said, "I wouldn't have married you if I couldn't keep up with you." He smiled.

"That's what I like about you. You never let your little legs hold you back."

"If you ever make another comment about the length of my legs I will do my best to keep the length of my legs out of your line of sight," she said, then she muttered under her breath (but still loud enough for him to easily hear), "Twat."

Lucky for them they stumbled across a map, a big plastic picture sealed behind glass and featuring cartoonish caricatures of all the different attractions. It had a big space on it, marked: Stratosphere! The fastest ship in this zone of the galaxy! Coming soon! It was replacing the Revolution. Good, Clara thought. She'd always hated the Revolution – queuing up a narrow tower for hours just to go on a loop-the-loop twice, once forwards and once backwards. Waste of time.

She was surprised to find that the Stratosphere was – or was going to be – a partially-indoor roller coaster. When they arrived they were faced with a big, silver husk, very shiny and reflective, trying to look space-age. It kind of worked, and the big sign with the name on was pretty enticing with its Star Wars-derived font and flashy blue colours. It looked very good, aside from the yellow crime scene tape sealing off the exit; a result of those deaths Eleven had read about in the paper, presumably. The tracker was beeping wildly. It was not completely indoors, though, because he could see the beginnings of an ascent creeping out of a crevice in one side of the structure, black tracks sticking into the night sky before abruptly coming to a stop some forty metres above the ground. The foundations around them were all laid, and she could tell by the groundwork that the track would curve around while outside before returning within.

"Definitely in there," Eleven said, standing at the entrance with the tape cordoning it off, looking from the doorway to the tracker to his wife.

"Well come on, then, before it gets pissed off and massacres half of Lancashire," Clara went in first, holding the torch for both of them, while Eleven switched off the volume on the tracking device so that it would stop with its loud, incessant bleeping. She hadn't realised how annoying it had been until her ears weren't being subjected to it anymore.

They crept into the dark, 'cursed' ride together, Clara clutching her hands around the torch and the Doctor with his eyes glued to the tracker. Unbeknownst to him, she was doing her best to create a barrier around them telekinetically, that they might be kept safe from a surprise attack from the invisible lizard monster. The Doctor jumped the queue barriers within – her phasing through them with ease – until they got to the ride itself, with the rocket-like cars all tethered to together and sitting complacently on the tracks.

A loud, high-pitched noise pierced the air. Trying to clutch her hands to her ears she nearly dropped the torch, and the sound morphed into a crackly roar of alien frustration. It wasn't in the room with them, this beast, but it had apparently inadvertently activated the PA system within the Stratosphere.

"I think it's trying to switch on the ride – where do you suppose the control booth is?" he inquired, and she pointed at a metal panel next to the ride with a couple of buttons on it, simply marked with words like Start and Emergency Stop. "No, no, not that. That's just for the roller coaster. This is indoors, it can't all be darkness, there must be other things going on."

"Space is mostly darkness," Clara pointed out, but he wasn't having that. The lizard was still making noises over the speakers. The Doctor wanted to know where the booth with the microphone in it was. At least, while it was making such a racket in an isolated area, it couldn't be sneaking up on them.

"Come on," he said, and surprised her by jumping down into the dip carved out for the tracks, "This thing is set to open in just a month, it must be nearly completed by now. I suppose all that's left to do is set the tracks down, and they're all built somewhere else and just moved here." She followed carefully, having to walk single-file behind him so that they fit alongside the metal tracks.

It was freezing inside the ride. The track curved upwards, but not very high, and took a veering left turn above them. They walked underneath it in an area covered in luminescent paint to look like stars, everything glowing faintly. The track was black and nearly as invisible as what they were after, Clara still trying to make a forcefield to protect them.

And then there was a very odd noise which scared the living crap out of Clara Oswald. It was kind of a muffled thudding followed by a very human-sounding grunt. She shrieked and the pair of them whirled around to see-

"Wade!?" she exclaimed. Wade it was, of course, who else would it be, now sprawled out on the ground? She realised what had happened. He had run into her barrier and knocked himself down. She felt the barrier fade and debated whether or not to help him to his feet, but in the end she was too angry to be courteous. "What the hell are you doing!? The thing is in here! You can hear it over the speakers!" They still could, as well, its heavy breathing and hissing.

"I'm a police officer, you can't make me leave," he argued.

"Oh, let him risk his own neck, we've done enough to try and save it for him," the Doctor commented, displeased by Sawyer's constantly following them around. He was like a cockroach; they just couldn't get rid of him, no matter how hard they tried. Clara shook her head and listened to Eleven.

A second later, they were all completely stupefied by every single light in the whole ride coming on, and the walls appeared to begin to move like they were travelling through space very quickly. Though of course they were not. It made her head hurt, though. And then voices announcing that they were about to 'blast off' to head towards a 'fierce space battle' and become the 'heroes of this light-cycle' and some other galactic mumbo-jumbo started to play. These voices were quickly stifled by the loudest roar from the lizard-beast yet, abruptly cut off and replaced by buzzing feedback. Then the feedback died, and the sounds of the alien died with it.

"It's broken the speakers," the Doctor said. He hurried on, Clara following him and Wade following her, to leave the vertigo-inducing tunnel covered in stars. They entered a large hall, planets painted in the same phosphorescent manner on the ceiling and the walls, big, fake UFOs hanging from the ceiling coated in loud, neon lights. The room was drowning in strobe, and it reminded Clara vividly of a rave.

"God, I feel like I'm on drugs just being in here," Clara commented, staring around.

"How did you know to come here? You don't have a tracking device as well, do you?" Eleven interrogated Wade, still leading them quickly through the ride. This room really was enormous, a lot bigger than it looked from outside, the tracks of the roller coaster heading at least thirty feet into the air before shooting out of a hole in the wall at the far end. A hole which, she knew, led to the outside. It would veer around and come back into a different room.

"It's an alien. This is the space coaster," Wade said simply. Eleven narrowed his eyes.

"Can't believe you figured it out before the Doctor," Clara was amused by this, "But you still shouldn't have come here."

"This is nothing like a real space battle, though," Eleven declared pompously.

"Oh, because you're always in space battles, aren't you?" Clara quipped.

"I am!"

"Name the last space battle you were in," she put to him. He struggled for a few seconds. In the end, he didn't to think of an answer, because they were interrupted. Again.

A huge mass of apparent nothingness ripped through one of the walls, tearing the MDF apart and leaving a big dark hole in its wake, petrifying the lot of them where they stood (Wade screamed.)

"Oh, shit," Clara said. Looking at this alien was like trying to see when your vision was impaired by a migraine, squinting to focus on a big blot of fuzzy shape that just wouldn't stay still. That was the only way to describe this camouflaged monster, imprints of glowing stars and spaceships rippling across its scales. All she could really discern about it was that it was about nine feet tall, and furious.

"Uh-oh."

"What do we do!?" Wade panicked.

"This." Eleven grabbed the torch out of Clara's hands and threw it at the lizard, hitting it right in the face. He knew he got it in the face because it promptly stopped disguising itself, revealing a huge, crocodile-looking fiend with a gaping jaw and shiny, yellow eyes to clash with its red skin. It roared.

"What was that supposed to do!?" Clara demanded.

"I got it to appear!"

"You just pissed it off!"

"You two are meant to be 'experts'!" Wade yelled at the both of them, and they shut up. "What do we do now!"

"Runaway. Runaway!" Eleven grabbed Clara's hand and turned. The thing gave pursuit, dropping to all fours and scrambling after them. Clara threw a blast of telekinesis, but she didn't do a lot more than startle it. In her panic, she clung to the Doctor's arm tightly enough that she could pull the both of them to relative safety. It hurt, and made her woozy again, but at least her teleportation was good for something. The world slipped away for a brief second until they were thrown down in the middle of the empty area of the Stratosphere meant for queuing, black wisps curling off the both of them.

"What just happened!?"

"Teleport, don't worry," she assured him, getting to her feet. She realised she had never teleported the Doctor before. She hadn't even known she could teleport two people at once until her fight with Rose.

They didn't have much respite, though. As soon as Wade, probably with no idea what was going on, more scared than he'd ever been in his short life, appeared out of the warp tunnel, the big, red lizard was in hot pursuit. Wade hurried to clamber up to get out of the track ditch and away from the roller coaster. The Doctor was distracted trying to get to the little control panel that made the Stratosphere stop and go.

Wade got onto the higher level where Clara and Eleven were, and turned around to face the creature which towered above him. He was frozen in its reptilian gaze, and it lifted its arm with its huge claws to swipe at him.

"Wade!" Clara yelled, and managed, again, to conjure up the desperate strength to teleport. Why was it she could only do it at will when it was a life-or-death situation? She could never teleport into the bathroom in the middle of the night when she needed the toilet?

Clara slammed into Wade and pushed him out of the way just as the creature swung its arm and punched its scaly gauntlet straight through her gut. Phasing through walls and phasing through an alien lizard fist were two vastly different sensations – the latter of which not at all pleasant. Wade Sawyer gawked at this sight, until Clara threw the creature back with a huge amount of telekinesis into the back wall.

"OI!" Eleven yelled at it. He was clambering into the cars of the roller coaster itself, "Come over here you ugly thing!" It turned to face him, "Not that close, you've got a face only a mother could love, if that. And you stink. Stinkiest thing I've ever smelt." The Doctor loudly insulting it drew its attention away from Clara and Wade. He had left his tracker on the ground next to the controls, and met Clara's eyes while beckoning to the creature. He was drawing something very slowly out of his jacket pocket. As soon as the reptile mounted the front-most car of the Stratosphere, Clara saw the Doctor had pulled out his screwdriver, "Turn on the ride!" he shouted at her, throwing the sonic, which she barely managed to catch in her fingertips.

"You can't turn it on!" Wade objected, "It's dangerous!"

"I trust the Doctor," she said, hurrying over to the console and extending the sonic's claw while Eleven acted like a lion tamer to the advancing lizard.

"What? You think he knows what he's doing?"

"I'm not sure I'd go that far."

"BRAVE SPACE CADETS! PREPARE FOR BLAST-OFF!" the sounds shouted out of the console in front of her. It was the tannoy that was broken, not the pre-recorded tapes and sound effects. Jerkily, the incomplete Stratosphere began to move.

Eleven was not strapped in. He was in the last car of the ride; the lizard was at the head.

"You want to go to space? Well this is how you get there. I'm a pilot. I'll fly you, if you keep me alive," he said, "After you crashed that last one." The lizard hissed. He didn't understand it, nor did he know if it understood him, but he was going to try and speak to it anyway.

"ENGAGING HYPERDRIVE!" the voice echoed around them. The coaster shot off into oblivion, the stars painted onto the walls dizzying him greatly. It didn't help that he was trying to ride the thing while standing up with no safety equipment of any sort. The lizard was confused as well, but the Doctor had a plan. A very precise plan which wouldn't work unless Clara was very fast and very clever and used to how reckless he was.

The thing rocketed around a sharp turn and he almost fell off, but he knew that if he were to jump while he was still able to easily brush off the fall, the lizard would just follow him and maul him horrifically. So he had to stay on, as they shot through the fluorescent room with its planets and strobing spaceships and toy aliens on the ground, heading towards the little opening at the back, through which he could see the moon outside. He had his eyes on that, the reptile followed his gaze and turned around to see. When it turned, the Doctor prepared to jump. He didn't even bother to look down as the ride blasted out of the opening, lizard-first. At the last possible second, gravity sucking the cars down to the ground outside, he leapt from the tracks of the Stratosphere, dozens of feet in the air, to be caught in the arms of his tiny wife. If it weren't for telekinesis, he would have squished her.

Outside there was a pained, roaring noise, accompanied by some very loud crashing and (eurgh) squelching. Him with his arms around Clara's neck, her still holding him quite safely, they both looked in that general direction, but heard nothing more of the creature. Then he met her eyes.

"You idiot," she said, and then she kissed him for a few seconds.

"Call me pathetic, but this is considerably emasculating, being held by you, since you are so short and usually weak," he said, "I'm supposed to be a bloke." She pretended to be offended, but did put him down. Wade Sawyer stared at them. And then he fainted.

*The Ghost Train at Blackpool IS allegedly haunted – and you won't believe this, but the ghost is supposedly called "Cloggy the Dick Hunter" (and no I did not make that up.) It also happens to be the first ever Ghost Train ride in the world

**chapter 326

***The Flying Machines are, in fact, the oldest ride in the park