for magicalskeptic: A trip to the ocean

[rude_not_ginger]

"You wanted an ocean, have I got an ocean for you."

The Doctor darted around the console and scooped his jacket up from where it hung on one of the TARDIS pillars. He absolutely loved this bit. The first trip to an alien world with someone who didn't even believe in other worlds until now. Very little was more exciting.

"Now! We've got breathable atmosphere, low radiation, and a beautiful summer day. The waters of the Greeio Malgoon are purple in the summer, which is when they're the warmest and the safest. I'd have taken you to them in the winter when they're blue, but the water's acid content gets a bit high and ends up spewing out strange creatures with eyes that shoot lasers. Green lasers, they disintegrate you without much warning. Very technicolor world, the Greeo Malgoon."

He shrugged. "Still! In the summer, peak of tourist season, it's the most brilliant place for a visit."

Comments

[rude-not-ginger.livejournal.com]

The Master could be anywhere. He could be. And part of the Doctor doesn't want him to be an illusion. Part of him would rather die than lose the Master again.

He can't dispel it. Inside, he's too desperate for it to be real.

"Just go," he says. "We have to get out of here. Quickly, go, now!"

[magicalskeptic.livejournal.com]

Morgana stiffens, slightly. She's seen inside his head and knows exactly who it is to bring out that tone of desperation.

"The both of us, or just me? You sound uncertain. Whatever is happening they want us to separate. Remember that."

And Morgana is not above using low blows to snap him out of this. "Please do not tell me you would be willing to abandon me for an illusion."

[rude-not-ginger.livejournal.com]

Feisty.

"Leave her alone," the Doctor barks automatically.

You never change. Always playing with Earth girls, the Master says.

No, not the Master, the illusion. It's an illusion. It's not real, no matter how much the Doctor wants it to be.

He opens his eyes, and the Master is gone.

He turns to Morgana and nods to the door. "Quickly."

[magicalskeptic.livejournal.com]

Morgana moves aside to let the Doctor through, and they are back out in the street -- no sirens and no ghosts from the past following them either.

For the second time, it's Morgana who chooses to reach for his hand. She says, without irony or even annoyance at the possibility, "Thank you, Doctor, for not leaving me for your illusion."

Something Morgana will never think about -- if there was ever a flesh and blood choice. Her pride's never going to tolerate it.

[rude-not-ginger.livejournal.com]

"You're far more interesting anyway," he says, just a little flippantly. He reaches back for her hand, only to find she's reaching for his. He gives her a small smile. This can work out, he thinks, the pair of them traveling together.

There's a rumble of thunder and a crash of lightning, strange and alien, above them.

"We need to find the central hub computer," he says.

[magicalskeptic.livejournal.com]

Morgana smiles back with the semi-smile she uses when trying not to feel too enthusiastic about something. "I should hope so," she replies with equal flippancy.

She's back to feeling comfortable with the slight temperature difference between them.

She looks up at the sound of thunder. "Is the rain here purple?" It's as much out of curiosity as it is trying to distinguish if the sounds are real.

They make their way back through the street to the steam, which flickers in front of her, and she squints a little, in an automatic response.

"That building is real, is it not?" She's indicating a small, almost shed sized metal building, whose style is jarring with the rest of the architecture.

[rude-not-ginger.livejournal.com]

"I don't know," the Doctor admits. "But we need to just assume everything is real until we know otherwise."

The steam before them, though, he knows isn't real. He finds himself grinning.

"And they want us to stay away." He squeezes her hand. "I think it's about time we worked on defying what they want properly, don't you?"

[magicalskeptic.livejournal.com]

"The last time I defied them, they locked us in a room filled with --" Morgana stops in mid-sentence and her expression turns to one of disgust, as she thinks back to the room without the door -- or -- at least -- they thought did not have a door.

"Everything was a trick. The cold, the door, all of it was created to try and drive us out, or punish us for going inside." As annoyed as she is at being so thoroughly tricked, it causes her to realize something else. "That is a lot of effort to keep us out of one little girl's room."

When he squeezes her hand, she leans in a little, and says, conspiratorially, "I do believe it is time to defy their rules."

With that, the steam, for her, stops flickering and disappears entirely.

[rude-not-ginger.livejournal.com]

The Doctor closes his eyes and when he reopens them, the steam vanishes, leaving them a clear pathway to the shed. He turns to her and grins.

"I've never been much for rules."

And, in protest, he hears a crumbling sound, followed by the sound of the TARDIS dematerializing in the distance. Things that would frighten him, make him run away.

He nods, and starts towards the shed. "There's more illusion here than reality right now."

[magicalskeptic.livejournal.com]

"I am trying to remember that it is the fantastic, not the mundane that our tormentor is using," Thus she's hoping, by that logic, the plain looking metal building in front of them, is completely real.

There's a scream in the distance; it sounds like Gwen, causing Morgana to turn her head quickly to look. It is upsetting to have such things -- personal relationships, fears, and her natural protective instincts, so completely manipulated.

"That was cruel," She comments, without further elaboration. It just makes her more determined to ignore everything, thus she steps slightly ahead and reaches out to open the door to the building as if she expects nothing out of the ordinary.

Except what she gets is a severe shock, so severe, it knocks her off her feet.

[rude-not-ginger.livejournal.com]

"What they did to the people here was cruel, too," the Doctor says.

And suddenly, Morgana is off her feet. The Doctor rushes over to her and puts his hand to her pulse. It's beating, if irregularly. he looks back to the door handle and zaps it with his sonic. Low level electric field. A trap after the traps.

And he let Morgana walk right into it.

"Morgana," he says, panicked. "Morgana!"

[magicalskeptic.livejournal.com]

She doesn't quite lose consciousness, but there is a moment where clarity escapes her for a minute. The feeling -- the shock traveling up her arm, and causing the briefest pain in her chest, makes her cough, a reaction to the momentary tightness.

So watching the Doctor zap the door handle, and calling out to her is as surreal as almost everything else about this trip has been thus far. Slowly she puts her hand to her chest and takes a breath. With an unsteady voice she asks, "Was that real?" She actually hopes it is, as she would hate to think her brain could trick her so severely.

Morgana's giving herself another second or two before she tries to sit up.

[rude-not-ginger.livejournal.com]

He smiles, because she's alive. She's alive and for the best he can tell right now, she's going to survive this mostly intact. The charge must've been low, the psychic projections eating up most of the city's energy.

He releases her wrist and takes her hand instead.

"I have a feeling from here on out most of them will be," he says.

The shed doesn't look large, but he doesn't expect that it's as it seems, either.

[magicalskeptic.livejournal.com]

For half a second, she smiles because he does, still not being entirely with it and all.

Sitting up is not elegantly done. Morgana puts a hand to her chest and winces. Everything is tight, and her heart's rhythm still isn't right. "What was that?" She would like to understand whatever just happened.

She pulls her feet underneath her, and thinks about standing up but thinking is as far as she gets at the moment. "They must want to physically keep us out of there, like with the turret." Perhaps? She hopes she's right, she's just trying to get her thoughts back in order, and her heart to steady.

[rude-not-ginger.livejournal.com]

"Electric shock," the Doctor explains. "Something you lot will figure out in a few hundred years. But I've switched that one off. There'll probably be more traps, though."

Traps and turrets. More ways for Morgana to die. He considers sending her back to the TARDIS, where she'll be safe. But she doesn't want to be coddled, does she? And traveling with him is never safe.

He reaches for the door and gestures for her to step back.

"Just in case."

[magicalskeptic.livejournal.com]

Now unsteadily on her feet, all the Doctor gets for his cautiousness with her is a look akin to and who is going to look out for you? The Doctor may not like it, and Morgana may not admit it, but, of late, he's one of the few people that's earned her stubborn protectiveness. It drives Arthur mad at times, but the Doctor will have to learn to deal with it the way the crown prince did.

So, she takes a step closer, in defiance. "I want to confront whatever is doing this to us as much as you do." Part of how she treats others is always giving another explanation for her behaviour, in case her actual reasoning is unappreciated.

[rude-not-ginger.livejournal.com]

"Yeah, but I don't want us to confront it by getting shot," he says.

A beat.

"You know. Again."

But the entrance to the shed is quiet, no turrets, no traps. Just a dark, open room. It makes the Doctor massively nervous. This shouldn't be so easy. He knows this shouldn't be so easy.

He takes a cautious step inside.

[magicalskeptic.livejournal.com]

He gets another wry look at the getting shot comment. The Doctor's been shot, and Morgana's still a little unsteady due to the shock. They make quite a pair, at the moment.

If the Doctor sees a light behind him, it's from Morgana's sonic. She also not going to tempt fate by saying aloud that perhaps the electrified door was the only obstacle. She doesn't really believe it, anyway.

If the Doctor feels something, it's Morgana's hand gripping onto the sleeve of his jacket, both for contact, and, if she were honest (she won't be) a little bit of comfort.

The dim light lands on a console, not that Morgana knows what that is. In actuality, it's a couple of levers and a few buttons on a small shelf that's been built into the walls. She swings the light around to see if she can spot something else of interest.

[rude-not-ginger.livejournal.com]

"Oh, no."

It's about the time that he steps into the main room that he realizes exactly what they're up against. More monitors, this time with pictures of the same rooms from the board room and a long series of code.

"Psychic code," the Doctor says. "Built to try to scare away the tourists. Probably the same code they used during winter to protect their harvests. But moving it to the summertime, that didn't work out, did it? The code got greedy, it got clever. It took over. But why?"

A monitor in the middle of the room flickered to life. A frightened looking man with bright blue skin sat at a desk. It flickered with the power on the screens.

"If anyone has seen our daughter. Please. Please, help us. We think---" the screen flickered again "---and if it is the G.M. Secure Program, we will---"

[magicalskeptic.livejournal.com]

Morgana is convinced that everything the Doctor just said is simply a series of words strung together. "I do not understand." Morgana hates not understanding, but whatever this science is, it is far above her, as she stares, uncomprehendingly at the code on the screen.

The shock at seeing a man whose skin is blue, is quickly overtaken by something much more universal. "Sir, I believe we know where your daughter is." It might sound ridiculous but 1) Morgana's never come in contact with a recorded message like that. All of the communication elsewhere was always live. 2) Hearing the desperation, she wants to alleviate it, even if it is the worst possible news.

Both of those things also overshadow any comment on him being such a vibrant blue.

[rude-not-ginger.livejournal.com]

The Doctor didn't connect the man to the little girl at first, but Morgana's statement makes sense. The girl in the walls, the one hiding from the things she was afraid of.

"No, no, it's a recording," the Doctor says, patiently. "A visual copy of something he said once a long time ago." He points to the room behind the man, where the tables each have an adult sitting in them.

"Look where he is, Morgana. Look at the room."

[magicalskeptic.livejournal.com]

Stepping a bit closer to the screen, Morgana recognizes the room now. "It's the hall, the one we were in earlier." Cue another realization. "All those people are dead."

And one more, "I asked where the servants were. He is one." The dynamic is obvious -- the people at the table, versus the man standing -- all signs of servitude. "And whatever it is they were doing to scare away the people killed his little girl."

There's a deep ache in Morgana's stomach in sympathy. It's something she's seen before, refused to shy away from -- the parents who lose a child due to a harsh winter, or sickness, which is all too common in Camelot but there is also a much more sinister reason to lose one's child. Morgana's just made the connection, "Over a year ago, the king executed a man -- my age, for sorcery. His mother came back and tried to kill Arthur in vengeance."

She looks back to the man on the screen and wonders how far he would go to find his child.

[rude-not-ginger.livejournal.com]

"And when they couldn't find her---" The Doctor tapped one of the keys and another display appeared.

"We're turning it off. Turning off the syste---" It shuttered and jerked. "T-T-Turning off the system. We can't have this happen, not to another family, not to---"

There was a scream, and the sound of gunfire. Then the screen went dark.

"This machine decided to fight back. Decided to take over the city." He shook his head. "It only did what it thought it needed to in order to protect itself."

[magicalskeptic.livejournal.com]

While Morgana cannot understand the code, or most of the technology that is in the room, she can understand what she just witnessed on the screen, and, in truth, she feels a bit of relief that the father in question was not involved with the rest of the horrors.

"The machine? A machine is protecting itself that would mean it is alive, would it not? It is not like your ship," The logistics escape her but Morgana's realized, and not only from the Doctor waxing poetic about the TARDIS, but because of something, some feeling she had when she first went inside.

So, to Morgana a machine, if she learned anything from elsewhere, simply needs one thing. "Can we turn it off from here?" She looks around the shed, shining the light from her might-be-a-screwdriver on the console, as if it will somehow illuminate the off switch.

[rude-not-ginger.livejournal.com]

"Not quite," the Doctor explains. "This does everything based on a program. A written piece of code. If you tug on a string it may look like it's pulling something, but it's only doing it because you told it to. They programmed this to protect itself, scare people, and keep out intruders. And it did its job far too well."

He nods, and points to a large, red button on the side of the machine.

"Just press that and it'll---"

Without warning, the Doctor hears a click, and the floor suddenly drops out. He grips onto the side of the machine and reaches out a hand to try to catch Morgana.