Mayday Mayday Mayday

Amy

The list of famous people the Doctor had met was infinite, and the list of famous people the Doctor had introduced Amy to personally was just as long. Richard Nixon, Winston Churchill, Vincent van Gogh – but now she had well and truly one-upped him. She and Donna had found Amelia Earhart, which was even more exciting than finding a free cocktail bar, deep in the jungles of a desolate Pacific island. She was covered in mud and dirt, had a bandage over a portion of her face, and was a complete mess in every sense of the word. But she had a sword, and nobody could ever truly look like they'd given up when they were carrying a sword. It was quite possibly the single most exciting experience of her life, including marrying Rory and being a professional model. And all the other stuff with the Doctor.

"This is amazing," said Amy.

"How did you get here?" Earhart asked, looking between them, "You don't look like you've flown here – what are you wearing?"

"Me?" Amy asked, "You know, just a bikini, and this towel as a skirt – it's such a hassle having to carry a towel and sun cream. Like, what am I supposed to do? Bring a bag? To the beach?"

"What? You mean like everybody else?" Donna questioned her.

"I'm not going to carry something, it will ruin my look."

"It's already ruined by being hung upside down by a tree."

"But, really," Earhart interrupted, "How did you get here? This is an unchartered island in the middle of the ocean with no signs of human habitation, and I haven't seen any planes or ships. And trust me, I've been watching, trying to achieve radio contact."

"Oh, well, we just sort of, uh…" Amy faltered.

"You know, we just…" Donna mumbled.

"And the, um…"

"There's, you know…"

"We're castaways," said Amy finally, "We just washed up. In a boat."

"You've got a boat?" Earhart asked.

"No, it was a… I've got amnesia," Amy declared, "Who are you?"

"What?" Donna hissed.

"What? No, sorry, I haven't got amnesia."

"How did you get here?" Earhart persisted.

"We came here by mistake," said Donna.

"You didn't get my distress calls? I know you don't look like pilots, but you should never judge a book by its cover. Where would I be if people did that, eh? Chronic sinusitis and I still flew solo across the Atlantic." When she mentioned the sinusitis she indicated the dirty bandage on the side of her face that looked like it had been there for quite some time.

"Damn right you did," said Amy, "I'm named after you – Amelia." She couldn't help it, she was star-struck, and it was the truth. She was named after Amelia Earhart, because she came from a family who enjoyed strong female role models. Earhart, however, was confused by this. "But everybody calls me 'Amy.' And this is Donna."

"How old are you?" Earhart asked, "You look at least twenty-five."

"Twenty-five?" Amy exclaimed, then added to Donna, "Did you hear that? She said I look twenty-five. I can't wait to tell Rory."

"How old are you?" Donna asked her.

"I genuinely don't know. We worked it out once. At least mid-thirties. Maybe even late -thirties. But if Amelia Earhart thinks I'm twenty-five, then I'm twenty-five." She grinned.

"If you're in your late thirties that would make us almost the same age," said Earhart, "So how could you be named after me?"

"Well, I was born in 1989," said Amy, "I feel like we can trust you with this information because, you know…" she looked at Donna for an explanation.

"I'm half the Doctor," she decided, "So I can basically do what I want."

"Exactly," Amy nodded, "She's half an alien. For that reason. We're from the future. Like I said, I was born in 1989, and Donna was-"

"Also born in 1989," Donna interrupted, flicking her hair as though this would somehow make that more believable. Amy stared at her.

"Really."

"Yes."

"Would you swear to that on a Bible?"

"If it came down to it. Same age as Taylor Swift."

"If Taylor Swift was lying about her age," Amy muttered. Donna shushed her very aggressively, and Amy rolled her eyes. They had completely forgotten about the killer plants slithering around through the jungle.

"Sometimes people say Amy and I practically twins," Donna told Earhart.

"Hadn't heard that one," Amy quipped.

"Well, I've heard it."

"Maybe it's early on-set dementia. Or just regular dementia, don't know about the 'early'."

"How could you be twins when she's Scottish?" Earhart asked, looking between them.

"…That's what gives it away," said Donna, "Sometimes even we get confused."

"Yes, the web of lies gets very complicated, I can't hardly keep track of my genealogy sometimes," Amy said dryly.

"Are you going to be straight with me or not? I've been stuck on this island for nearing on three weeks. Now, given all the horrors I've witnessed on this island so far I'm truly inclined to believe that you're from the future, but I'd like a real answer. I've got a sword."

"Too right you've got a sword," Amy said, ogling it. She loved swords, but every time she got her hands on one the Doctor or Rory tried to confiscate it from her. Honestly, you tried to chop potatoes with a sword one time and suddenly you're a 'liability' because you accidentally launched one of them across the room.

"We're time travellers," Donna began to explain, "We came here through a portal I made, one in space and time, but we have a ship. A time machine. We were supposed to come here in the future when there's apparently a cocktail bar, but I suppose I was wrong. The thing is… you're a bit of a mystery."

"A mystery?" Earhart asked.

"You're… not supposed to be rescued," Donna confessed to her uneasily. Didn't seem like it was worth their time to try and pull the wool over Amelia Earhart's eyes, especially not when she had such a sharp, threatening sword. Amy was growing increasingly conscious of their dangerous jungle surroundings, however – though hopefully the sword would go some way to protecting them. She was consciously making an effort to try and tap into her premonition power, too, which rarely worked but she would rather do everything possible to try and get a heads up if she were to be snared by a viney assailant again.

"What do you mean…?"

"You're not even meant to be found. It's one of history's great mysteries," said Amy, "'What happened to Amelia Earhart? Why did she vanish over the Pacific?'"

"What about Fred?"

"…Who's Fred?" Donna frowned.

"Fred Noonan, my navigator, a real fly boy, don't they talk about him? That's his legacy? Being forgotten?"

"I, uh… well, where is he now?" Donna asked. Earhart sighed, looking unhappy. The bandage on her face made Amy uneasy because it looked as though it was about to peel off at any moment. Perhaps it would have been more worth her time to go with Rory and Eleven and look for first aid supplies. Should she and Donna ring them? She herself didn't have any medical equipment and wouldn't know the first thing about how to alleviate chronic sinusitis – maybe she should have brought a beach bag, could've brought the ingredients for piña coladas, after all…

"And where did you get the sword from?" she inquired. Earhart glanced between them.

"Listen here," she began, "I consider myself to be pretty swell at telling the applesauce from the goods, but you two bearcats seem like the Real McCoy, so I'll tell you what I know."

"…Sorry, are you being ironic?" Amy asked her.

"Am I what?"

"You know, like… never mind."

"I'll show you where the sword came from," Earhart said, "C'mon, ankle over this way." She indicated the direction by jerking her head, which made the precarious bandage almost fall off. Amy would just love to get out more masking tape and seal it on there properly and could imagine that if her husband were present he'd be losing his mind seeing the dirty, sweaty thing flap about so much. It could hardly be hygienic. But then, it was probably quite difficult to care about hygiene when one had been stranded on a desert island for near on a month.

They set off walking through the jungle, single-file through a pathway previously hacked to pieces by Earhart, presumably while trying to make easier passage across the island. There was less danger of them tripping up at any rate, but the heat was really getting to Amy, along with the lack of any water. Why hadn't she brought water? Why couldn't Donna have checked where they had ended up instead of assuming it was the correct year? It was her portal...

"What happened to you, then?" Amy asked Earhart, both because she was she was genuinely interested and because she wanted a distraction.

"We were attacked, Fred and I," Earhart began to explain, hacking through the plants, "Got confused by the map, thought this might be our destination, flew too low – by the time we realised we were wrong, the fiends were upon us."

"By which you mean…?"

"The plants," Earhart explained, "Hostile, monstrous, all of them. Shot us down with thorns the size of your thumb." Just like the ones which had almost struck Donna, had Amy not pulled her out of the way. "Completely ripped the fuel tank apart, made it into a hayburner; we had to do a crash landing. Lucky the radio still works, it's sending out a distress call on a loop – not that it's done me a jot of good."

"Well, we're here now," said Donna, "We can get you off this island, no problem."

"Yeah, we can take you to a cocktail bar," Amy added. Donna glared at her, but wasn't a crime to be thinking about something relaxing when their situation appeared to be getting increasingly more stressful. Plants shooting down planes? Missing navigators? Swords? What was next?

"Fred and I were on the prowl looking for firewood, when we… it's hard to explain, see."

"Try us," challenged Amy, "Like she said, we're time travellers. You wouldn't believe the things we've seen."

"I've seen those plants from deep in the jungles, Venus Flytraps, capable of digesting meat. The creature at the heart of this island – I call it the Green Beast – it's like that, but colossal." She slashed at a vine which had reared its ugly, green head at her like a serpent about to strike, chopping it into pieces and leaving it to writhe around in the brush. Amy hadn't even noticed that one. Why were her superpowers always so random and useless? She was desperately envious of the others on the TARDIS with cool powers; she was even jealous of Rory's invisibility, despite the fact he never used it.

"Very similar thing happened to us a few months ago in Cardiff," Amy mused.

"Did it?" Donna asked.

"Yeah – you know how Adam Mitchell is always falling over?"

"He's clumsy."

"No, it's his ankle," Amy explained, "He got stung by a big walking plant thing. You know, like in Day of the Triffids. Literally a Triffid. And he can't heal because he's frozen. There was a massive leader-plant in charge of all the little plants, the Doctor and I killed it."

"Does sound remarkably similar to what I've observed on this island," Earhart said, "I suppose it's just as well you came along when you did, despite not being dressed for our activities."

"Yeah, well, I thought I was going to be sunbathing. I've really got start taking a change of clothes out with me," Amy muttered. It would certainly be a plan. "So, you're saying there's a giant monster plant on this island? That's what's trying to kill us? Some mindless weed? Bill & Ben Gone Wild?"

"Oh, no. I daresay it isn't mindless. It spoke to us."

"Well that's definitely different…" Amy muttered, "The one we found didn't talk. Or shoot poison thorns. There's probably multiple different species of monster plants out there in the universe. There's more than one genus of carnivorous plant just on Earth, after all."

"What did the talking plant say to you?" Donna asked Earhart.

"Did it ask you to feed it?" Amy joked.

"You're all about musical theatre today, aren't you?" Donna snapped at her.

"How did you know?" Earhart asked Amy, pausing as she slashed the leaves and branches around them to pieces. "It told us it was desperate for food, and then it… we were collecting firewood, like I said, perhaps scrounging any fruit we may find, and we happened across it. Poor Fred, he didn't stand a chance. The Green Beast has these ghastly teeth, and the smell around it – like rotting meat."

"Hold on, it… ate your navigator?"

"Alive. I've hardly had time to mourn I've been too busy trying to survive, Fred would never forgive me if I were to get myself killed grieving over him. Plenty of time for that once I'm rescued. I suppose it's better people think he and I died at sea, as you say in the future, than he was devoured by this monster from – what did you say? 'Out there in the universe'? What, exactly, does that mean?"

"There's life on other planets, as well as our own," Donna said, "Millions upon billions of intelligent species and inhabited worlds, a lot of them with plants. Lots of them end up on Earth, it has a fragile position in the space-time continuum, multiple rifts in time – sort of like a beacon. Things get pulled here, they wash up here, sometimes they come here on purpose. Lots of them are friendly."

"Don't get all hung up on that, though," Amy interrupted Donna doing her whole 'DoctorDonna' thing, which was an incredibly rare occurrence, a bit like watching an eclipse or a blood moon. "We'll take you to all kinds of places when we leave. We don't just travel in time." Perhaps it was a little presumptuous of her to just go offering places on the TARDIS to strangers, but it was Amelia Earhart, for god's sake – they couldn't really be expected to leave her behind. Besides, she was meant to disappear. Perhaps what that actually meant was that she would join them on the TARDIS. The lure of adventure was certainly potent enough in her that she could spend the rest of her life aboard that ship with the Doctor. Donna didn't object, at least – she was probably thinking the same thing.

"How did you escape from this 'Green Beast'?" Donna tried to get them back on topic.

"Ah – using nothing but my wits," Earhart sighed, "Happened to have a gun on the Electra, a few well-aimed shots kept it at bay. Out of bullets now, of course. I've been spending most of my time sheltered on the beach otherwise, where it's easy to see the vines approaching."

Sunlight glared at them through cracks in the tree trunks and the leaves ahead, illuminating the jungle's gloom and making the sweat on Amy's skin glisten. She was so hot trekking through the tropical forest she was sure she was going to start hallucinating dancing cocktail umbrellas and mojitos, mojitos drenched in as much icy condensation as she was in sticky perspiration… she felt faint just thinking about it, and the bits of sand which touched her foot through her flip flops burned her skin as much as the sunlight. She certainly should have put on a higher factor of sun cream; after all, she was both Scottish and ginger, making her the most prone to sunburn than any other kind of person. A tragedy.

When she glimpsed a jagged shadow just barely blotting out the sun on the horizon, however, her desire for ice-cold refreshment was overcome by the urge to boast.

"Ha!" she exclaimed triumphantly, directly at Donna, pointing at the old, wooden husk Earhart was leading them towards, "I told you there would be pirates!"

AN: Two questions, first of all – who do you prefer and/or think is funnier, Oswin or Sally Sparrow?

Second of all, spoilers incoming: Ten & Rose's stag & hen parties were going to be, at one point, another Prank War. And I know I promised Prank War Three, but I've changed my mind – INSTEAD I'm gonna have it be a scavenger hunt where they have to complete tasks/challenges on a list for points with the bridal party going against the groomsmen (i.e., all the girls + Jack and all the boys + Donna, minus Nios, so the teams will end up being 8 vs 8). So it would be a big help if you guys could suggest crazy stuff to be on the challenge list which, yes, can involve the use of time travel and anything else they have at their disposal, funnier the better. Little to no alcohol involved because at this point maybe half of them can't even get drunk.