for galeforcehero and <lj site="livejournal.com" user="willrevile

[rude_not_ginger]

Right, so the Doctor was becoming increasingly aware of how very bad he was at steering. Or, at least, how very bad the TARDIS was at listening to his steering directions. He did say he wanted to go to Corsicroz Minor, but, instead, he found they had landed somewhere else.

"It's Saturday, at least," he said, pulling on his coat. He glanced at the screen on the console, then tossed the coat aside. "Temperature's at a lovely 40 degrees---um, that's around 98 degrees for you two---and the radiation's good, atmosphere's good. Should be quite nice out."

He looked over to his companions, trying for a 'this is an improvement' grin. He was looking forward to Corsicroz, but, really, a new and exciting place? So much better.

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[willrevile.livejournal.com]

"Ninety-eight degrees and you want your jacket?" Jim stretches his arms above his head and scrunches his face up, though he doesn't yawn. It'll be nice to wander around somewhere, not that the TARDIS isn't endlessly exciting. You know, with its toasters and its phones and its endless bickering. (Somehow, he's getting used to the Doctor. Almost fond... in a way.)

All the same, he keeps his own jacket, which is probably even hotter, being leather. You just never know, do you? He doesn't look a damn thing like a Starfleet officer, but he figures that's fine. He isn't Captain Kirk out here, just some guy tagging along with an alien nutjob. At least it's entertaining. He looks over at Dorothy, eyebrows raised. "After you."

[galeforcehero.livejournal.com]

Dorothy looks up from stuffing her own jacket in her knapsack, an old beat-up mil-surp thing she tries to keep on her when she's out and about. It carries the essentials-- flashlights, rope, energy bars, lockpicks. Things that come in handy when the inevitable happens and something goes horribly wrong. It's good that it's just a tiny bit bigger on the inside, considering all the things she overprepares for now.

Since the ice cave incident.

But things are different now, and she's got two uppity male space adventurers to worry about, so she figures it's better to err on the safe side.

"Do we have any idea where we are?" she asks as she fairly skips down the ramp to the TARDIS doors. "Or when? Other than 'Saturday'."

[rude-not-ginger.livejournal.com]

"Nope," the Doctor says, cheerfully. He half-bounces as he stands in front of the door. "Could be the Isles of Parasodia, or the Reefs of the Midtrias cluster. Love the Midtrias cluster, all those blue lights!"

Of course, once he opens up the doors to see, at not too far a distance, is the Sydney Opera house.

"Ah." He sighs, then pats the side of the TARDIS doors. "Bit obsessed with Wales as of late, aren't we?"

[willrevile.livejournal.com]

"You know, that thing looks just like a Cardovian earworm," Jim reflects from behind them, entirely unhelpful. "Is this the part where we skip out and find a convenient newspaper to determine where today's plucky adventure will be?"

Shut up, Jim.

[galeforcehero.livejournal.com]

"What, they don't have Australia in the future?" Dorothy points at it, for Jim's edification. "Sydney Opera House. In Sydney. Australia, Jim, great big ol' island continent on the bottom of the planet." Why does she enjoy patronizing him so much? Maybe she just gets a kick out of telling James T. Kirk he's being a little dim. "Always wanted to come here! Wonder if it's true about the toilets flushing the other way, since we're upside-down."

Dorothy, that doesn't make any sense. Ah, well, she's just glad to be somewhere she can get a beer if she needs one. Grinning, she hops out of the TARDIS, shading her eyes with her hand and peering at their surroundings.

"Still not sure about the date though. If we'd landed in a parking lot, I s'pect that'd give us the decade, at least."

[rude-not-ginger.livejournal.com]

"New South Wales," the Doctor says, grinning madly. "By the heat, I'd say it's early to mid January. And by the cars in the lot, as Dorothy says, we can guess it's around the early 21st century. And by the people---"

That's when he notices it. No people. No people anywhere.

He spins around. "Funny. It's Saturday. Where is everyone?"

[willrevile.livejournal.com]

For a moment, Jim doesn't respond, just giving the building in the not-too-distant-distance a funny look. It's something he didn't recognize because while Australia exists in his time, of course, so many monuments of the 21st century were completely obliterated in the wars that devoured the sixty year span that marked them.

"Maybe it's a drill," he offers, still thinking about the wars, and having no idea the two people with him are from realities without the horror of Earth-founded eugenics.

[galeforcehero.livejournal.com]

She blinks. "Drill for what? Hurricane? Do they have those in Australia?"

Dorothy squints around. When you're an empath, even a very very low-level one like she is, you have a sense of connection to the living things around you. Right now, she's not getting anything, and it's somewhat itchy. For lack of a better term, her spidey-sense is tingling, and not in a good way.

"Even so..." She walks around to the other side of the TARDIS, where she can see the road better. There's a car in the middle of the street. Not crashed, just... stopped. No one around. Door open. The turn signal is blinking silently.

"Something's not right."

[rude-not-ginger.livejournal.com]

"Drills and hurricanes, you lot really do know how to bring in what you know best, don't you?" The Doctor's snappish tone is, for those who aren't already aware, a defense mechanism against the sudden, stabbing panic of something being wrong.

He darts across the street towards the open car. There's a quiet beep beep of the interior door being open. He looks inside. There's a baby carrier in the back seat, but there's no baby.

"Looks like an oil leak," he says, gesturing to the dark red stain underneath the car. It smells coppery, and that's what automobile oil smells like, isn't it?

[willrevile.livejournal.com]

"Better than bringing something we don't know shit about," Jim observes wryly, and follows the Doctor at a slower pace. Even before he gets terribly close, he knows it's not oil. (He knows very well what antique car oil smells like. That's not it.)

"...Uhuh." Disbelief is plain in his voice, and he glances at Dorothy before walking around to the other side, looking for another car or anything else. He doesn't think this is during a war - if it was the Eugenics War, he thinks there'd be propaganda posters, or government mandates being blared - at least he thinks so, he's not terribly keen on what would have happened in Australia. And he's pretty sure that by World War III, this place would have been leveled.

So it's something else.

"Do you have anything that can scan for life-forms?" he calls over his shoulder.

[galeforcehero.livejournal.com]

"I'm not getting anything," she says in response to Jim, although possibly that's not very clear to her companions. Still, it's the truth.

Dorothy takes her time examining the car (especially the empty baby seat). That puddle is basically self-explanatory, and she for one is not about to go poking around it trying to find the source of all that... stuff. Mostly she's afraid she'll find the baby. Or what's left of it.

"Lack of people's bad enough, but... I mean, listen. I don't hear any birds. We're on the water, there oughta be birds everywhere. Nothing. No animals anywhere."

[rude-not-ginger.livejournal.com]

The Doctor pulls out his sonic and gives the area a quick scan. "No alien lifeforms, either. Just the three of us, and the TARDIS."

He looks back to the water. Still. Perfectly still. No boats, no swimmers, no marine life.

"Maybe we should go back to the TARDIS," the Doctor says, because this is an important thing to suggest. He then begins walking further into town. The shops look deserted, and the televisions only show a buzz of static. He grabs a paper from a bench.

BRUSHFIRES DESTROY BUILDINGS IN NEW MILITARIZED ZONE. He remembers the creation of the militarized zone from the history books, but he can't remember exactly why.

"January 24th!" he says, showing them. "I said so!"

[willrevile.livejournal.com]

Jim is occasionally known to be this side of reckless (you know, sometimes), so it doesn't strike him as odd that the Doctor suggests they get back to the ship and then does the opposite. It's a good suggestion - not one that Jim is going to take, but he's sure he means well.

"Someday you're going to find a planet that doesn't use newspaper," he says, and looks over his shoulder at it. The events don't ring a bell for him, either, but it's so long ago on his timeline that it could have probably said lollipops had come to life and he wouldn't know any better.

[galeforcehero.livejournal.com]

He says this, and he never does it. Ever. Dorothy gives a tiny sigh to this effect, but gives a wary look to Jim, as if to say, be on your guard. Like he needs reminding, but shush, she's a warrior princess, it's sort of her job to be overly cautious. And in case anyone ever deigns to remember, she is like a hundred years older than Jim, so that's two reasons she feels like she's in charge of his welfare.

Which, given his propensity to have the crap beaten out of him, is a hell of a thing to be responsible for.

"Maybe there was a virus," she speculates. "Maybe the place was evacuated, abandoned. Might explain the 'Militarized Zone', if there was a state of emergency."

Look at her, attempting to use logic. She ought to know better. "But if that's the case, wouldn't there be signs up or something? Directing people to safety, I mean."

[rude-not-ginger.livejournal.com]

"And the TARDIS would've picked up signs of an airborne contagion," the Doctor says. "No, this was something else. Something bigger."

Somewhere down the street, something tinny and hollow hits the ground with a clang. The Doctor looks up to see something run down an alley. He can't really keep the excited look off of his face as he gives chase.

"Wait!" he calls.

[willrevile.livejournal.com]

There are airborne viruses that are short-lived outside a host, Jim knows, but he figures the Doctor knows that, too. "Disease isn't enough to keep people hidden," he remarks, looking skyward. "Precautions can be taken to move around - there'd have to be some kind of legitimate threat to clear people out like--"

And then there's a noise, and the Doctor is off. Jim does not go for his phaser, valiantly, though the look he shoots Dorothy and the space between them in the TARDIS (just to check) is much more calculating than usual. "He's worse than I am," he mutters, and then moves, not wanting to lose sight of anybody.

[galeforcehero.livejournal.com]

Dorothy's equally as wary, equally as quickly, but she's off like a shot after the Doctor. Lord knows the trouble he gets up to when he's left to his own devices, and if he's going to corner somebody who knows what's happened here, she wants to be there when the questions get asked.

She didn't see the thing very clearly. It looked fairly person-sized, but it was some distance away, moving, and only out of the corner of her eye. They could be chasing a dog or something. Although there's always the possibility that even a dog could give them more information about exactly what's going on.

[rude-not-ginger.livejournal.com]

"Wait!" the Doctor calls. He nearly stumbles into the alley wall, but catches himself. The person, creature, whatever, has already run almost the whole length of the alley.

"How'd he get so far?" he mutters aloud. Now, the Doctor is a lot of things and not all of them are good, but stupid is not one of them. This looks like it could be a trap. Gated fence on the other side, no escape along the walls. Not even a fire escape. By himself, he'd go ahead without a hesitation. But he's not alone this time, and they could get hurt.

He controls his curiosity for another couple of seconds, then darts down the street, past the alley, cutting along the other side of the building to hopefully cut whoever it was off.

[willrevile.livejournal.com]

Jim's sure he could clear that fence, but who knows about the other two. So, it's not human, and it's either not alive (machine? manifestation? projection?), or it's capable of avoiding detection. "It's leading us somewhere," he muses aloud, mostly to himself.

He still follows, but now he's looking up, at the building windows and the rooftops, for movement or reflections, or-- there. He stops, and whatever shadow he saw in a window high above them darts away.

"Hey!" Jim calls after the Doctor, now. "Heads up, we're being watched!"

[galeforcehero.livejournal.com]

Oh something's happened here, alright. The streets Dorothy's shoes pound against as she runs (as silently as she can) are cracked and uneven, as if an earthquake hit just this one single street somehow, as if something from below somehow pushed up through it. As if this all wasn't unsettling enough.

She very nearly skids to a stop at Jim's warning. Watched? She feels nothing. There isn't a single living person aside from herself, the Doctor and Jim for as far as she can sense, and they're being watched. Robots? Some kind of life form she doesn't recognize? That's a very slim chance. And yet.

Seeing the Doctor cut around the building, Dorothy runs blind down the alley, attempting to box the... creature in. There's a tall fence at the end, shut, but she figures she can climb it in less than five seconds, so it's worth giving it a shot, even if the thing bolts. It speaks a lot to her respect for Jim's job description that she just assumes he'll follow her-- tactically, it's the best choice. Unless he can somehow get a vantage point from above, that's where he'll go, she thinks. All assumptions, naturally, but that's how things usually work in the TARDIS. You just need to have faith.