AN: I'm gonna start adding the dates that the chapters were posted to the tops; it's really hamstrung me on AO3 trying to add the dates retroactively, so going forward, that's what the underlined date is, and it's more for my own reference.

11th of February, 2024

Moonwyrm

1

The TARDIS doors creaked, and the Doctor stepped out, taking in the alabaster hills and stale air. She breathed it in deeply, the smell of carbon dioxide filtration and hot metal, and tried to hide how it made her grimace.

"Look at this place," she said, hands on her hips. "The kind of thing Walt Disney must have had wet dreams about." The great, silver street shimmered under the glow of the near-perpetual sunlight the Shackleton Crater was bombarded with. Metal walkways everywhere. "Do you see that? Magnets. You come all the way to the moon, and what do you do? Cover it in magnets so that people can't jump too high. That's humans, going all the way to some planet and drowning it in all your little pieces of paraphernalia. You can't just appreciate the beauty of this place without your home comforts."

Clara came up behind her, "Sometimes, I forget that I'm married to a grumpy, old man."

"I've got a point, Coo. You can't deny it."

"A grumpy old man, with a silly accent, and a silly box he takes everywhere full of his own home comforts." Clara kissed her cheek. "Be nice."

"I'm always nice."

Matilda hadn't heard her rambling. She came out of the TARDIS next, Rose close behind her, with an interactive map already pulled up on her wafer-thin, mid-century smartphone. Coming to the LunaDome was Mattie's idea, of course; only a teenager would pick to spend the Easter vacation in the tackiest place known to humankind.

"Alright," she said, glued to her phone. "This is Eagle Square, leading onto the main thoroughfare, so-"

"Maps, schmaps," said the Doctor. "You've got eyes, don't you? Use them. Take in the sights." Mattie glared at her. "C'mon," she went on goading, "We'll make a time traveller of you yet."

"We haven't travelled in time, though," said Mattie. "It's March here, and it's March on Earth." The twenty-eighth, to be exact. A Saturday. The first day of the two-week Easter holiday.

"I preferred it when humans didn't have phones. I've got to start picking people up from the sixties again…" the Doctor mused.

"Whatever," said Mattie, still using the map on her phone.

"I'm serious," said the Doctor, putting an arm around Mattie's shoulders. "If you look around, you never know what kind of landmarks you might find to get your bearings." She turned Mattie so that she was looking behind the TARDIS, and finally, the phone wasn't the most interesting thing in her periphery.

The TARDIS had landed right in front of a monument, an enormous sculpture of the moon, just as silver as everything else, raised on a vast pedestal about thirty feet above them.

"Hideous way to pretend that this place is a continuation of JFK's legacy," said the Doctor. Then she started doing a voice, "'Oh, by the way, in case you've forgotten you're on the moon, we've put a giant model of the moon slap-bang in the middle of our gaudy theme park.' As if we didn't get a good enough look at it on the journey here."

"We didn't get a look at it; the TARDIS doesn't have any windows," said Mattie.

"I know that. But everybody else came here on a regular shuttle, and therefore, spent a thirty-hour journey looking at this little pearl through the windows. And then they get here, and they have this ridiculous thing to take pictures in front of."

"It's no different to going to Disney and walking down Main Street, U.S.A.," said Clara. "It's all simulacra."

"Yeah, okay, Clara; we all know you've read Baudrillard," the Doctor said Clara's name like it was an insult.

"Who's that?" asked Rose, staring up at the shiny moon.

"Postmodernist philosopher," said Clara. "He wrote this stuff about Disneyland, it's… it's not important."

"He couldn't hold down a drink, I'll tell you that for free," said the Doctor. "I suppose I should be grateful it's not a giant, silver boot print. Now that would be a simulacrum – three levels."

"Why are you allowed to reference it and I'm not?" said Clara.

"Because I'm better than you. Anyway!" the Doctor clapped her hands. "Mattie picked the destination, so she gets to pick what we do first. My vote's for the dodgems, though – I've always loved dodgems, even if they are a little, uh, Dalekian, shall we say. As are these metal walkways, incidentally. On Skaro, when they still had their cities, they needed metal to go anywhere."

"Well, let's all hope it doesn't turn out the moon's been invaded by Daleks who have inexplicably decided to open a theme park, shall we?" said Mattie.

"Wouldn't be the weirdest thing they've done," said the Doctor, leading them all away from the TARDIS and the monument. "Did I ever tell you about the time I was a contestant on Big Brother, almost two hundred thousand years in the future?" And then she launched into one of her tales, this time about Satellite Five and the Gamestation. Normally, Rose would intervene and tell her side of it – she was the one the Daleks had actually abducted and held hostage, after all – but she hung back from the Doctor and Matilda. She had other things on her mind than boring her goddaughter to death with an anecdote about evil Weakest Link.

Clara nudged her, "What's up?"

"Hm?"

"You're a million miles away. Are you doing your demigod, perceiving-spacetime-all-at-once thing?" asked Clara. "Humanity's premiere, lunar theme park not doing it for you?"

"The LunaDome is humanity's only lunar theme park," said Rose. Mattie had been talking all their ears off about it for a fortnight, and how desperate she was to go – go and spend the whole time texting. "But, no, I'm very interested. Basking in all this… silver. It's like being inside a roll of tinfoil. Just what I always hoped I'd spend the school holidays doing."

"What did you spend them doing?"

"Loitering on the estate, I suppose," she said with a sigh. "I bet you were always away, though."

"What's that supposed to mean?" asked Clara.

"That you grew up middle class."

Clara scoffed, "I did not."

"But your parents owned their house. Had a mortgage. That's a world away from a council flat," said Rose. She and Clara kept a steady distance from the Doctor and Mattie, talking quietly.

"Yeah, a mortgage on a house in Blackpool, not London – and it was a council house, it was a Right to Buy that only cost about five quid in the eighties," said Clara. "Dad always hated it, actually, the whole scheme. Thatcher. But mum was pregnant, so, she persuaded him. Sure, though – that was the lap of luxury."

"…Sorry," said Rose.

"We did go away sometimes. Camping, in the Lake District. Communal toilets, no electricity, foxes shagging in the bushes," said Clara.

"I said sorry."

"I'm serious. What's up?" Clara finished chiding her.

"The usual. Feeling aimless. Nobody'll give me a job. And I don't like low gravity much." Without their hideous, magnetic boots, they'd all be leaping all over the place. "It's alright for you; you up and vanish for fifty years, but you've got a vocation. What have I got? I didn't even do A Levels. Only ever worked in shops. Disappeared for half a century, and I'm a manifest. Every single interview I've had so far, all they want to know is what I've done in all that time – and what can I say? 'Travelling.' And there's you with all your degrees."

"I actually left the MAs in folklore and the occult off my CV when I was applying for a teaching job," said Clara. "As for her?" she nodded at the Doctor, "Whole thing's fake, obviously. But you'd never know; she's good at it."

"I've told you, I don't want a fake identity," said Rose. "They should have systems in place for manifests. You're wanted, by the way." The Doctor was waving Clara over to the dodgems, all painted black and white to look, however vaguely, like a retro, NASA space shuttle.

"Time to get bullied on the dodgems," Clara resigned herself to her fate.

It was easy enough for the Doctor to convince Clara and Rose to join her and Mattie on the dodgems as she collected tickets from the clunky robot manning the ride. The line was short, practically non-existent, and Clara's prediction quickly came true. She found herself buffeted around by everybody else on the ride, bumped left to right for what Rose thought was a tremendously fun ten minutes – because she was doing most of the bumping. Mattie enjoyed herself, too, and that was the main thing. The reason they were all there.

"Why does everyone always go after me? What is it about me?" Clara complained, rubbing a spot on her hip where she'd been thrown against the bumper car after they disembarked.

"You've just got one of those faces," said the Doctor. "It's the eyes. They're too big for your head."

"Thanks for that," said Clara.

"I'll tell you what, though; they shouldn't be operating those things here. If the currents in the hooks cause enough of a spark, this artificial atmosphere could combust," said the Doctor. "They never get the air right in these places. Earth-air is supposed to have garnishes. Little dashes of this and that – terrible to breathe in, but it adds to the flavour. The balance is off up here. Too much oxygen makes kindling of us all."

"Great," said Clara, "Now you've got us all thinking about how we're going to imminently burn to death, can we get something to eat? I'm starving."

"Yes! Absolutely. Moon food – that's just what the doctor ordered. By which I mean me."

"Yeah, I got that, funnily enough," said Clara. Mattie already had her map back up to locate the nearest food stand, and under her very strict directions, they headed that way. "I can probably get you a job at the school," Clara kept talking to Rose, "I can at least get an interview, if-"

"No," said Mattie when she heard them. "I'm not having all three of you there."

"As a dinner lady or a cleaner or in the office," said Clara, "Not as another teacher. Unless, obviously, you do want to zhuzh up your CV a bit?" She added this to Rose.

"No!" Mattie insisted.

"I think Mattie's right, Coo," said the Doctor. "The last thing she needs is all her schoolfriends suddenly mooning over the most inexplicably hot dinner lady they've ever seen."

"'Inexplicable'?" said Rose. "I'm glad that after all this time, you still like me enough to say I'm inexplicably hot."

"I mean for a dinner lady," said the Doctor. "You'll confuse them all, all the teenagers."

"How will that confuse them?" asked Rose. "Does it confuse you? Is that what you're saying?"

"Yeah, alright," said Mattie, "You all fancy each other, you're constantly having secret three-ways you think I don't know about-"

"Nobody's having any threeways, Matilda," said Clara sternly.

"Give it a rest, is all I'm saying. I don't want all of you hovering around when I'm at school with my friends."

"That's not going to happen," Rose assured her. "Although, I did work as a dinner lady in a school once, for about a week."

"I remember that!" said the Doctor. "You gave me extra chips."

"And you moaned about it."

"They were bad chips, that's why. Covered in Krillitane oil, Matilda," the Doctor told her.

"Yeah, I've heard this one, too. Dad was there."

"Oh, really? Did he tell you about how he screamed like a little girl when a cupboard full of vacuum-packed, dead rats fell on him?" she said.

"Anybody would scream in that situation," said Mattie. "Why are you making fun of my dad? Wasn't stealing his girlfriend enough for you?"

"No, just-"

"Didn't I tell you to be nice?" said Clara.

"I'm always nice, Clara!" the Doctor protested.

"You're being a twat." At that, she scoffed.

"We're all agreed, then?" said Rose loudly, shutting everybody up as they approached a food stand, also manned by a robot. "The Doctor's a twat, and I'm not going to try and get a job as a dinner lady at Mattie's school."

"I don't know if we're all agreed about me being a… one of those," the Doctor grumbled, crossing her arms and shuffling where she stood. But Rose had succeeded in stopping the conversation in its tracks.

The kiosk had only the little robot in it, painted white and gold at some point – but the paint was now chipping away. It creaked when it moved, twisting left and right to mimic looking at a customer, but none of them was ever quite in its eyeline proper. Next to it, on the kiosk exterior, was a big, plastic sign advertising what was for sale. But Rose thought the plastic was odd; old-fashioned for the mid-twenty-first century. There wasn't much on offer, either. Standard French fries, waffle fries, onion rings, and mash on the food side, and juice packs, lactose-free milk packs, and something only called 'green drink' on the other. Most appealing, though, was the Blue Moon Mash, touted as the LunaDome's 'signature dish' on the menu.

"Blue cheese and mashed potato," said Rose, at the front. "Sounds… sticky."

"It's good for low gravity," said the Doctor, "No crumbs, clumps together."

"Stodgy, though," said Rose.

"I wouldn't fancy going on a roller coaster after eating a load of mash and blue cheese…" said Mattie sceptically. In the end, Mattie stuck with the onion rings, maybe the lightest option on the limited menu, and the other three all opted for the blue cheese.

"I didn't know you liked blue cheese," Clara said to Rose when they were served by a big machine in the back, churning out cardboard pots of potato that the humanoid robot only picked up and handed over. The Doctor sonicked the card machine to make it think they'd paid.

"Cheese is cheese," said Rose, scooping out a big globule of cheesy potato with the rubbish, cardboard spoon it came with.

"Words to live by," said the Doctor. "Now, if you're all done making fun of me, how about we mosey on over to the World Lunar Museum?" She pointed it out nearby, another silver, pop-up building like everything else, looking like a space base in a child's drawing. It would be indiscernible from all the other buildings if not for the vivid, neon sign above it saying what it was, with yet another giant, lit-up image of the moon. "They built that thing to trace humanity's journey from 1969 through to today. You know, I actually worked a little on Apollo 11, as a special favour to my friend Dick – that's Dick Nixon, to you. And I say favour; he didn't really know the details of why I was tinkering with the command module…"

She rambled again as they followed her, Rose's teeth getting stuck together by the extraordinarily dense potato. Nobody else was in there. The other guests, few in number as they were given the expense of a holiday in the LunaDome, clearly preferred the thrill rides to a museum.

"Hallo, there!" the Doctor greeted the robot at the front desk, another white-and-gold, mechanical puppet that didn't know where to look.

"Welcome to the World Lunar Museum. We hope you are enjoying your stay." It couldn't have sounded more like a robot if it tried. But Rose preferred that to the ominous, lifelike robots people kept trying to build; she still found Nios to be too spooky from time to time.

"You betcha," said the Doctor, chewing. "Now, first things first, do we need tickets to the museum, or is it kosher with our general admission? I assume the latter, but if there's one thing I love, it's those little ticket reels." The robot said nothing. "…Are you just a greetings bot, then? Non-informative? That seems a little odd. Surely, they've got you wired up to some kind of database to answer basic inquiries."

"Program One-Forty-Four is running," said the robot.

"Excuse me?" asked the Doctor.

"There are no spare tickets required for the World Lunar Museum."

"But what was that you said? What's 'program one-forty-four'?"

"I have no information relevant to your request."

"What do you mean? You said it just now. A moment ago."

"I have no information relevant to your request."

The Doctor rolled her eyes, "Great. Glitchy robots. That's the last thing I need. C'mon, then, let's-"

The ground beneath them rumbled, and the Doctor stopped moving.

"Please tell me that's a particularly exciting roller coaster," said Clara.

"Moonquake," said the Doctor, trying to keep her balance. "Hold onto something, that desk!" Wobbling, they did as she said, gripping onto the desk as everything shook violently. "It's absolutely routine! Nothing to worry about – the moon has constant tectonic activity!" The tremors reached an apex and then began to dwindle, rumbling away just as suddenly as they'd arrived. "There, you see? Barely a four on the scale. Now, if we had gone to Anaheim, there might've been a way stronger one, fault lines and all."

"How does the moon have quakes?" asked Mattie. "It doesn't move around like Earth. It's not molten."

"It is if you go deep enough," said the Doctor. "But, you're right otherwise. It shakes for different reasons. Expanding and contracting lunar ice; asteroid impacts; things like that. Nothing to worry about in any case, though. Now, the robots being funny, that's something I'm not happy about. Fun robots I'll take any day, but funny ones?" The Doctor shivered, then shook her head. "Let's just keep going. Maybe I'll poke around in their computers if I can find an access point…"

But predictably, as soon as they entered the museum, the Doctor was distracted. Her attention was caught by an enormous, perfect replica of the Apollo 11 lunar lander on the far side of the room. It was a hangar full of NASA trinkets, preserved up there for anybody with a million pounds to spare to go and peruse – not that any of them did.

"God, the times I had with this thing!" said the Doctor wistfully, approaching the lander. "And there! That's the command module." She pointed out another silver object. "I tried to persuade Michael Collins to let me take it for a spin around the block a few times, but no dice."

"Is it real?" asked Mattie.

"No, no. The real one's in Washington, in the Air and Space Museum. We can go see that later in the week, if you like?" the Doctor offered. "Maybe we'll take Esther along, she's from D.C.; I know she likes going back."

"Won't people recognise her?" asked Mattie.

"Not if she takes her costume off," said the Doctor. "Her whole family lives up here now, on the moon. I'm not sure exactly where. Maybe I'll find out and we can drop by and say hi, meet the rest of the Drummonds. Does anybody have a knife? Something sharp?"

"What do you want something sharp for?" asked Clara. "What are you up to?"

"I've got my keys," said the Doctor after searching her pockets and pulling out a rusty, old keyring, holding the only two keys she carried: the TARDIS key, and the key to the front door of her house in Brighton. Keys in hand, she clambered over the low, metal barrier that kept the exhibits off-limits. It was only a foot high.

"Don't do that, sweetheart," said Clara, "You'll set an alarm off."

"What alarms? I don't hear one," said the Doctor, and she was right. She climbed over the barrier to deface a priceless replica of the Apollo 11 command module, and nothing in the museum even tried to stop them. "I'm just trying to make it a little more accurate to the real thing, that's all."

"In what way?"

"Well, I scratched something into the original one, when I added the finishing touches," she said, hitting it so that the door opened and then leaning inside. "Just above the door here!"

"What was that?" asked Clara. The Doctor didn't answer. She scratched away and then emerged, an enormous grin on her face.

"Geronimo." Clara went a little pink. "There we are. Now it's perfect." She climbed back over the barrier.

"Why were you vandalising Apollo 11 in the first place?" asked Mattie.

"Long story. Involves the Silence."

"Mum and dad never told me about that."

"They weren't there," said the Doctor. "There was this prophecy about the end of the universe, et cetera, et cetera. And it was about me, obviously."

"Everything's always about you," said Rose, bored already. She'd never met the Silence, and hearing about them was always an exercise in patience – largely because although the Doctor, Amy, Rory, and River could talk all day about the fear the Silence invoked, they couldn't remember anything about them.

Mattie's phone buzzed. She almost dropped it in her haste to take it out of her pocket and see what the notification was, and then she laughed quietly to herself, typing a message.

"Tell me something, then, with that big brain of yours," Clara asked the Doctor, taking her arm while they perused the other space-age artefacts. A replica of Sputnik, a small-scale model of a Saturn V rocket, and even a few things Rose knew were ISRO creations – though she didn't know their names.

"What?" said the Doctor.

"Why is it so rare to find a space colony inside a big dome like this?" said Clara.

"Because it's a stupid idea."

"Is it? Why? You get all the atmosphere, you can control the temperature, and you have such a good view of the night sky."

"Obviously, I'm not opposed to the romance of space travel, Coo. But a dome like this is just unreasonable. It costs a fortune, it's a nightmare to build, and it's even harder to keep the conditions inside habitable. Just getting an airtight seal around the base is an engineering miracle that most people wouldn't waste the time or money on."

"Here I thought humans built all their bases out of kits," said Rose, listening to them. "That's what you always told me."

"I don't like the lack of ingenuity the kits necessitate, but things like this are even worse. Sure, I can accept that it's a miracle the thing functions at all without burning us alive underneath the sun like ants under a magnifying glass, but not every miracle is good. Do you know how many underground nuclear reactors they need to run just to create enough energy to cool us down in here?" she said.

"Why build it at all, then?" asked Mattie, putting her phone away.

"Well, it was your idea to come here, Smudge," said the Doctor. "Why don't you tell us what you found in all your research? Maybe you know something I don't."

"I know the Kirby-Ashlakes built it," said Mattie. "They're the family that owns KirbyCorp, that does all the asteroid mining."

"You're halfway there," said the Doctor. "KirbyCorp doesn't do the mining; they built the robotic, mining equipment, and then lease it out to everybody else. They've got a monopoly on that thanks to some very crafty patents filed in the 2020s. But it wasn't them who built it, it was their wayward son – the black sheep of the family, Alvin. This was his dream, after the family bought the land up here for a pittance back in 2047. I've never met him, but they say he lives alone in the hotel penthouse."

"The Apollo," said Mattie, "That's what the hotel's called."

"And that's where he is, supposedly. Or maybe he died years ago, and nobody's found him. This whole place could just be ticking along, completely automated."

"Alright, don't frighten her," said Rose, shaking her head. "You're making up ghosts where there aren't – Christ!" She jumped when a figure she'd assumed was a mannequin moved in the corner. It twitched, just slightly, an eight-foot-tall astronaut.

"Just a dummy," said the Doctor.

"A dummy who saw you vandalising things just now," said Rose, but the astronaut didn't move again. The Doctor approached and read a sign underneath it.

"Says here this big guy is wearing the same spacesuit Neil Armstrong wore when he walked on the moon," she said. "I didn't notice Neil being so tall when I met him, though."

"Creepy," said Rose.

"Sure is. Just like Alvin Kirby-Ashlake, up there in his suite – and probably not dead," she smiled crookedly. "He's only in his forties. Just a hermit, I suppose – I've been a hermit for far longer than that."

"Mm, when you don't have a woman to distract you," said Clara, all of them distancing themselves from the giant astronaut.

"Guy's got a strange reputation, in any case," said the Doctor. "Some say he's a visionary genius, others – me, primarily – think he's a visionary idiot. But I've not had the pleasure of meeting him yet to judge properly. Hey – that could be our next stop!"

"I don't think so," said Clara. "Listening to you debate another despotic CEO about late capitalism sounds very dull. No offence."

"Offence taken!" said the Doctor. "It's rare to see this level of stupidity first-hand. The people on the frontiers have the right idea. Most of them dig underground; that's real protection. You can't rely on the walls of the Shackleton Crater for everything."

"Frontiers?" said Clara. "Next, you'll tell me there are lunar cowboys and lunar gunslingers."

"Maybe someday. I wouldn't want to spoil it all for you."

But Mattie had headed into the next room already, and so they all followed her, done looking at JFK's legacy – as the Doctor had called it earlier. The next room wasn't about NASA, though. Rose was even less familiar with this part of space history, though it excited the Doctor to no end. She freed herself from Clara and bounded over to a huge model of a machine, slowly rotating in the middle of the room.

"Oh, wow! Now, this really takes me back. Or, forwards, I suppose. The Gravitron!"

"That's that weather thing, right?" said Rose.

"Weather thing?" said the Doctor. "It's the Gravitron! It uses the biggest fusion generator humans have ever built to gravitationally manipulate Earth's tides. Commands the seas, controls the weather, stops hurricanes, slows tsunamis – the lives it will have saved by now, and you don't even know what it's called? It's crucial to the human race's continued survival."

"Alright, alright; don't get your knickers in a twist," said Rose. The Doctor rolled her eyes. Mattie had her phone out, texting again, while Clara drifted towards another exhibit, a large diorama.

"What's this one, then?" she asked.

"That's the Giant Leap Base," said the Doctor, "The first true, human lunar colony. As you can see, they weren't stupid enough to build it under an enormous dome. Then again, maybe a dome would have been easier to defend against the Archaeons…"

"The what?" asked Clara, wandering away from the Doctor to see what Matilda was doing.

"Shapeshifting blobs, not important," the Doctor dismissed her. "Me and Susan never even made it to Giant Leap in the end. The Archaeons got in the way, messing around with Earth's evolution with… I don't know, lightning and laser beams. A bad idea – and they tried to take the TARDIS apart."

"What are you looking at?" said Clara loudly, making Matilda jump; she was still buried in her phone. "Pictures of the moon?"

"I'm just talking to my friends," said Mattie defensively. "Aren't I allowed?"

"Of course you are. But here, we came all the way to the moon, and you've barely looked up."

"Because it's an old museum! God, fine, I'll put my phone away…"

"A bit less of the attitude, too," Clara told her off. Rose wanted to intervene and tell Clara it was Mattie's holiday, too, but she didn't. Clara had been the one providing nearly all of Mattie's parenting for the last eight months, and Rose wasn't going to tread on her toes. At least, not when Mattie herself was around to hear them disagreeing.

It turned out that the World Lunar Museum only had those two rooms. Rose thought that they might at least dwell a bit on what the future of the moon might be, but apparently, this was a more traditional museum. It was all about the past and got boring near the end with multiple models dedicated to the intricacies of how the LunaDome had been constructed by the same robots KirbyCorp used to mine its asteroids, in a mere ten years.

"It took a hundred and eighty years to build Notre Dame," said the Doctor on the way out. "This place is not Notre Dame, that's for sure."

"And I bet you scratched 'geronimo' into the bricks there, too," said Clara.

"Of course I did. He was my favourite alpaca."

They dropped their cardboard tubs in the nearest bin – not easy given the gravity – on the way out, and then headed off in another direction. Mattie was, by now, desperate to go on one of the LunaDome's three roller coasters. It was between the park's oldest roller coaster, Apollo's Legacy; the fastest roller coaster in human history so far, Galacta-Go!; or the slightly more family-friendly mine-themed ride, Crater Cart Chaos. Unsurprisingly, Apollo's Legacy won that battle, so that was where Mattie began to lead them. But they didn't reach the roller coaster before the Doctor was distracted again, this time by a huge sign reading 'GATEWAY 2101'.

But it wasn't meant to be.

"Urgh!" the Doctor threw up her arms in frustration, "Closed for maintenance? C'mon! This is the only ride in this whole place that has any imagination behind it!" It was boarded up, taped over, and the sign above was switched off. "The future of the whole LunaDome is behind those doors."

"Why not break in?" said Rose. "It doesn't look like there's anybody here to stop you." They all glanced around, and Rose was right. They hadn't seen a single human being who wasn't a fellow guest the whole time they'd been there. It was just robots, robots that could barely even move from where they were standing.

"I don't want to break into any old buildings, I want to go on the roller coaster," Matilda insisted.

"It's probably dangerous, too," said Clara. "God knows what condition something has to be in here for somebody to turn up and close it down, since apparently, nobody works here."

"Maybe we should hop back in the TARDIS, rewind time a few years, to the grand opening. Then we can go into the Gateway," said the Doctor. "I've heard a lot of good things about the dioramas they've got hidden in there."

"I'll sneak in with you later," said Rose, to placate her. "These two can stay outside."

"At least one of you still has a backbone," said the Doctor. Mattie and Clara won out, though. They left Gateway 2101 and, finally, found Apollo's Legacy, a great, groaning contraption in the most north-westerly section of the LunaDome – which was very small.

This ride actually did have a line, a few dozen people in front of them and a sign saying they had a wait time of fifteen minutes. Not too bad. Rose couldn't say she was happy to be roped into going on a roller coaster after eating no small amount of mashed potato and cheese, though.

"What a beauty," said the Doctor, marvelling at it. "The first thrill ride ever built on another celestial body in this start system. Well, by humans – don't ever let it be said that the Silurians didn't know how to have fun. And I bet they had stuff like this on Mondas, before it… well, nothing nice happened, that's for sure. I wonder if the Ice Warriors ever built a theme park on Mars… The non-stop warfare was probably thrilling enough."

"Why don't you go to Mars and see?" said Mattie.

"I'm not in the mood to deal with Ice Warriors at the moment," said the Doctor. "Then again, when am I ever?"

"Forget Mars," said Rose. "We should go to Venus. I love those spas."

"Ooh, yeah," said Clara, "I could really go for a spa day, actually."

"A spa day?" said the Doctor. "You two enjoy that. Maybe when you're done getting mud baths, you can do something else fun – like go to bingo or pick out coffins."

"I wouldn't be against going down the bingo one of these days," said Rose.

"Eurgh, listen to you both," the Doctor shook her head. "I've got to stop marrying humans. That's a piece of advice for you, Matts. Don't marry a human."

"Yeah, sure," said Mattie, on her phone, not listening. She looked at the screen very seriously, her brow furrowed.

"Everything okay?" Clara asked her.

"Rubio's got a sprained ankle, won't be playing for Tottenham for the rest of the season," she said. "But he's had twenty-six assists, he's one of the top midfielders in the league. What if there were twenty-six more assists that he could have had if he hadn't sprained his ankle? That means our goal difference is in the toilet because we have nobody good to replace him with. And then…"

"What? Don't stop now, I was really interested in the goals and the, uh, toilet," said Clara, not convincing anybody. It didn't matter, though. The ground was shaking again.

"Do you feel that?" said Mattie, putting her phone in her pocket and grabbing the barrier.

"Another moonquake," said the Doctor, "A lot more intense than the last one, and-" Above them, the roller coaster creaked. "Uh-oh."

"Doesn't sound good," said Rose. They stared. As the train went around the track and the ground shook, Rose saw a bolt come loose, shot out with so much force that it sailed through the air like a bullet; the lack of gravity and air resistance meant it would keep spinning for far longer than on Earth.

"Everybody out of the way! Get away from it, go, go!" the Doctor shouted, pushing through everybody else in line to get to the front.

"Go, Matilda," said Clara.

"What!? No chance! I'd rather stay here with the woman who can make a telekinetic forcefield than get in the way of those screws," said Mattie. She had a point. Clara looked at Rose for some help, but Rose was resigned.

The roller coaster buckled. The Doctor was at the front of the line, shouting at the little robot in the phoney ticket booth.

"You need to shut this ride down! There are people on there, they're in danger!"

"Program One-Forty-Four is running," said the robot.

"This again! What does that mean? What's the program?" The Doctor lost her balance, wobbling a little as the ground rumbled and rumbled. And there they were, below the tallest structure the whole LunaDome had. At least, other than the dome itself… Rose looked up. What if the quakes made it crack?

"This environment is unsuitable. Program One-Forty-Four is running." The Doctor took out her sonic screwdriver and scanned it as the roller coaster heaved and hoed.

"We should do something," said Clara.

"What do you suggest?" asked Rose, watching the roller coaster. "I can probably catch the cars if they come off the track, but-"

"Why don't you freeze time and rescue everybody?" said Clara, "You can do that, can't you?"

"I don't think that's what's supposed to happen," said Rose, watching the scene unfold. People ran around them, screaming, struggling with the magnetic boots. Mattie conspicuously stepped behind Clara, while the Doctor was now hitting the acrylic of the ticket booth window.

"Supposed to-!? You're unbelievable sometimes!" said Clara. The shaking got worse and worse and worse, a stronger quake than Rose ever thought she'd feel on the moon. The Doctor panicked, unable to get into the booth to shut off the ride. The inevitable happened. A part of the track collapsed and the carriage, full of passengers, careened off the side, propelled by the lack of gravity just like the bolts. It flew through the air, and then… it stopped.

Rose observed. The shaking was paused, and nobody else moved. All those people's fates were intertwined with something, on a lethal collision course for another ride called Blaster Boon – a laser shooting range. Something was fluctuating, but it wasn't a powerful will. It was cosmic randomness she was wrestling with. Flux was good, though. Schrödinger's roller coaster: they were all dead and alive until Rose made the decision.

Of course, Clara was right. One by one, she rescued them. She didn't even have to move, only think, bringing their strands of fate towards her, as a new epicentre of destiny and divine machinations. She didn't like doing things like this because it turned her into a fixed point for too long – stopped her from being a malleable vessel for the time vortex for a while. But it had to be done. She couldn't let people get hurt.

People were rescued, but the carriage was still rocketing through the air when time resumed, and the ground was violently trembling. Now it was up to Clara, who threw out her arms and caught the thing while it sailed over their heads – before it could crash into the shooting gallery. The rumbling beneath began to subside as Clara, using all the telekinesis at her disposal, slowed and guided the derailed carriage down to the ground. It clunked down on the magnetic walkway and Clara breathed deeply, leaning forward with her hands on her knees.

Everything calmed down and the confused theme park attendees who'd been about to die in quite a horrible way tried to piece together what had happened.

"One moment we were there, and the next, I'm standing here," said a man, rubbing his head, confused.

"The Lightning Girl," said Rose. "Reckon she turned up, did her thing. Teleported you all to safety."

"Why let Esther take the credit?" asked Clara quietly as the Doctor pushed through the crowds to get back to them, checking Mattie first to make sure she was alright, and then moving on to Clara. "I don't think Esther can teleport anybody other than herself."

"She wants to be a superhero and I don't," Rose shrugged.

"Do you have a nosebleed? Let me look at you," said the Doctor, hands all over Clara's face, much to her dismay.

"No. I'm fine."

"I don't like this," said the Doctor. "I don't like these moonquakes and I don't like the way those robots behave every time one of them happens. Since when do tectonics affect the computers like that?"

"What do you want to do, then?" Clara asked her. "Find a computer? Ask it about Program One-Forty-Four?"

"If it's happening here and causing so much damage, it'll be happening in other places, too. And if there's anybody who can tell us about things going bump in the night in the moon's underground, it's the miners on that frontier I've been telling you so much about." Satisfied that Clara wasn't about to have a brain haemorrhage, the Doctor released her. "If we weren't here, those people would have died. Thank you, both of you – I couldn't do a thing."

"You want to leave the theme park and go mining?" asked Mattie.

"I want Clara and I to leave the theme park and go mining," said the Doctor. "You two can stay here. Keep having fun. Eat potatoes, visit the gift shop – but don't go on the rides. I'd steer clear of those until we get all this resolved."

Clara sighed, "I can't even have one holiday, can I?"

"Of course you can. We'll just be spending some of it in a lunar mine talking to some real people – no hokey robots." Clara clenched her jaw, but she could never say no to the Doctor for long.

"Alright, fine, we'll do it your way. But, just – here." She fished around in the bag she'd brought and drew out her sonic screwdriver, holding it out to Rose. "Take this. Just in case."

"When're you going to let me have a sonic screwdriver?" asked Mattie.

"Not yet," said Clara, the same thing they'd been telling her for decades.

"I've never got all the settings down on these things, you know," said Rose, examining the screwdriver. Green and gold; it had always looked too big for Clara.

"Telepathic circuits," said the Doctor. "You only need to point and think."

"If you say so."

"Be careful, though," said Clara. "Don't accidentally crush it with your… strength."

"I'll try not to," said Rose sarcastically.

"And if it gets too dangerous, promise me you'll take Mattie back to Earth."

"Always," said Rose.

"I'll be fine," said Mattie.

The Doctor cleared her throat and took Clara's hand. "C'mon, Coo. Let's you and I go back to the TARDIS. It's time to pay a visit to Whiterock and have a few words with the boys from Aether – before this place collapses."