All It Takes Is An Adventure
So, James thought to himself, the world is in danger from hostile alien slash cyborg beings, and we’re all sitting around drinking cocoa?
Well, he had to admit, nothing could be more British than that. At least the Americans had the right idea when it came to threats like this, panicking and then planning, preparing themselves for when the time came, but not the British, oh no, whole Keep-Calm-And-Carry-On thing was always taken far too literally in any situation.
So, of course, when the Doctor sprang to his feet with a sudden “Ah! Ah-ha-ha!” as if he had suddenly remembered something, naturally the most famous spy in Britain perked up a bit.
“What?” Hannah asked. (The others were coming to learn that she was the one most likely to say that to the Doctor, being the one who knew him best and everything.)
“I’m an idiot!” the Doctor proclaimed, before dashing back into the Tardis.
The others blinked after him.
“Well, we already knew that,” Sherlock muttered.
Hannah got to her feet and was almost bowled over as the Doctor darted back out again with a great big grin all over his face. “How did we defeat the Cybermen last time, anyone remember?”
“With Hannah’s singing,” Sherlock stated, “blocking their signals, and then overloading them with more emotions than they could handle so they all exploded.”
Harry shuddered. “Nice.”
“Exactly!” The Doctor pointed excitedly at Sherlock. “Should be simple enough to hook up something similar again, of course this time Hannah won’t need to sing, because we know they’re coming, they won’t have time to try and take over human minds because we can anticipate their movements first, jump in and block their own signals. All we need is the right code, and I can find that with a simple computer hack using the Tardis’s universal wide database!”
Since he was talking nineteen to the dozen again, or what felt like faster than the speed of light at any rate, the others only caught about half of what he was saying. After a brief moment, Hannah dared venture a “What?”
The Doctor looked at her as though she had just dribbled down the front of his shirt, and then, muttering something that sounded very much like “Humans!” he walked back into the Tardis.
John grinned as the others, sans Hannah, Sherlock and Loki, looked rather offended by that remark. “He loves humans really.”
“He just has a funny way of showing it,” Hannah agreed.
“Come on, Hannah, I need you!” the Doctor shouted, and she quickly hopped to it.
“Now this I’ve got to see,” Loki muttered as the others followed her into the ship.
“Hold this,” the Doctor was saying to Hannah, handing over a cable. “And that, and that.”
Hannah shook her head, her arms now loaded with various bits of junk the Doctor would, she knew, eventually rig into something useful. “Hey, Doctor, you know what you forgot to mention earlier, don’t you?”
“What did I forget to mention earlier, Hannah?” the Doctor asked, busy fitting two wires together.
“Cybermats,” Hannah replied.
“Oh, yes, the Cybermen pet scouts,” Sherlock remembered, drily.
“Well, you know the drill there, Hannah,” the Doctor replied, before turning to address the others. “Bash them, shoot them, fry them, whatever you can do to stop them from biting you. I need more wires,” he added, before thrusting everything else into Hannah’s arms and jumping into the next room.
“Not the iron, Doctor!” Hannah yelped.
“Oh, come on, Hannah, I need it!”
“No, you don’t!”
“Alright, fine, I’ll use the spare printer instead!” The Doctor stalked past the open doorway with a very grumpy look on his face, muttering to himself about being bossed around in his own Tardis and the others did their best not to laugh as Hannah just rolled her eyes and attempted to hold onto everything he had dumped on her.
“What do Cybermats look like?” Harry asked, quickly, to keep himself from laughing.
“Like large silver weevils,” Hannah replied, trying to show them the measurements with her hands. “About that big, and they move very fast.”
“What happens if they bite you?”
“Well, it’ll hurt a lot,” the Doctor replied, sounding a lot more cheerful as he walked back into the room, holding up some more wires. “Although I did once meet them when they were capable of infecting their victims with a virus that could turn them into a Cyberman by replacing body cells with metal.”
“Nice,” John commented, with a shudder.
“Sounds like the Vargas, Doctor,” Hannah pointed out.
“And Vargas are?” James asked.
“Cacti-like plants that can turn their victims into Vargas if they come into contact with the poison in their spines,” the Doctor replied, sticking his tongue out of the side of his mouth as he concentrated on welding two wires together with the sonic screwdriver. “Native only to the planet Skaro, thankfully, so need to worry about them around here.” The two wires he had just put together fizzled and then fell limply apart. “Oh!” The Doctor groaned, throwing them down and throwing his hands up again. “Hannah, why does Time have to be so complicated? We could just travel back and re-use everything then!”
Hannah offered him a sympathetic smile as she put down everything he had just foisted onto her.
“Doctor,” James sighed, “I can believe this ship travels in space. I mean, I’ve seen technology that would baffle the ordinary human. I can even believe it’s bigger on the inside, but until I see it for myself, I honestly can’t believe it travels in time.”
The Doctor grinned.
“No!” Hannah exclaimed, shaking her head. “No, no, no, Doctor, I know that look!”
“What look?”
“That’s your “I’m going to be very clever and show off again” look.”
“I have one of those?”
“Doctor!”
“Hannah,” the Doctor sighed, folding his arms, “which one of us actually owns this Tardis?”
“You mean which one of us actually stole this Tardis?” Hannah countered.
“Borrowed,” the Doctor insisted, with a scowl.
“Figures,” Sherlock muttered.
“Oh, come on, Hannah, it’s just a quick trip, what could happen?” the Doctor added. Hannah immediately began to count on her fingers. “Now what are you doing?”
“Just calculating the amount of times you’ve said that to me, and been wrong,” Hannah replied.
The Doctor rolled his eyes and then shoved the lever on the console that swung the doors shut before pushing the one that immediately flicked the Tardis into life. Harry, James, Merlin and even Loki jumped as the ship made its usual take-off noise of grinding and scraping gears.
“Two minutes, Hannah, that’s all we need,” the Doctor insisted.
Hannah exhaled with obvious irritation, hands on hips, but said nothing.
“Um, where are we going?” Merlin asked, nervously.
“Back in time, Merlin,” the Doctor replied, promptly, “back to way before even you were on this planet.” The Tardis began to scrape and grind again, except this time the others were prepared for it. “Just make sure you stay as close to the Tardis as possible, and you’ll be perfectly safe.”
Sherlock wrinkled his nose. “Doctor, you’re not-?” The Doctor opened the Tardis doors and crossed the floor in three strides to step through them. The others followed, tentatively, and Sherlock finished his sentence with an “Oh, but you have!”
Harry gulped. “Are they...real, Doctor?”
“Would you care to find out?” the Doctor smiled.
“No, thanks.”
“What are they, Doctor?” Merlin asked, as a few of the enormous creatures turned their long necks in their direction, a few of them chomping contentedly on the leaves they had just torn out of the trees, not really bothered by the presence of the eight humans and the large blue box that had just materialised out of nowhere.
“Dinosaurs,” the Doctor replied, folding his arms, “prehistoric creatures that roamed this land before humans did. Impressive, aren’t they?”
“Are they your ancestors?” Loki asked, glancing at Hannah.
Hannah laughed. “I hope not, Loki, some of them only had brains the size of a pea.”
“Well, that might explain a few things,” Loki muttered, shooting a glance at Sherlock.
Sherlock scowled at him. “And I’ll bet your ancestors just crawled out from beneath a rock.”
“Ice, actually,” Loki replied, coolly.
“Alright, you two,” the Doctor chided, lightly. “No, Loki, dinosaurs were here even before human ancestors began to evolve. They were wonderful creatures, though, powerful, intelligent, and then they were all wiped out in a single explosion when the Earth-”
“Collided with something big,” James finished, nodding.
“Collided with a spaceship,” the Doctor corrected him, “and I should know, I watched it happen.” He turned and smiled smartly at James. “I take it you believe what the Tardis is capable of now?”
“Alright, Doctor, I take it back,” James agreed. “She does travel in time.”
A few of the Brontosaurus suddenly turned their heads instinctively, sniffing the air, and then began to retreat, with Stegosaurus and Triceratops close behind them.
“What’s going on?”Merlin wondered aloud, and then everyone heard the source of the commotion before it emerged from the trees, an enormous T-Rex that stomped forwards, scattering the smaller dinosaurs at its feet, and even before it snapped up a tiny lizard in its jaws, those in the group who had never seen one before, in real life or otherwise, knew instantly that this was not a friendly dinosaur.
“O...k, we should probably leave now,” the Doctor murmured, reaching out to pull open the Tardis door, “she looks hungry.” Hannah, however, instead of running back into the Tardis, took a few steps forwards, leaving the safety of the force field that surrounded the ship. The Doctor had, after all, said “she,” and the last time the pair of them had travelled back to this period in time, along with Sherlock and Molly, she had been chased by and subsequently befriended a Tyrannosaurus Rex following a fight with some vicious Mosasaurus and hungry Raptors. Was this the same T-Rex? “Hannah, come on,” the Doctor commanded, warily.
“Hang on a second,” Hannah murmured, taking another step forwards. The dinosaur had spotted her and looked rather surprised that she wasn’t running away from it. Hesitantly, Hannah reached out a hand as it began to stampede over to her, its feet thudding the ground so hard it was a wonder the vibrations didn’t knock her over. When it was a few feet away from her, it stopped and she could feel its hot breath wash over her as it suddenly roared.
“Not my dinosaur,” she muttered, turning tail and making a run for it. Spurred by the roar, the others quickly leapt into action too and shot into the Tardis one by one. Thankfully for Hannah, in spite of her high-heeled boots, she was able to reach the Tardis shields before the T-Rex could try and snap her up and she threw herself inside as the Doctor quickly set the ship into launch mode and slammed the doors shut behind her.
As the sound of the engines finally faded out, the group let out the breaths that had just been holding in. Hannah got to her feet, leaning against the Tardis console as the others exchanged glances and then, inexplicably, the Doctor began to chuckle, and it wasn’t long before the others were infected with a fit of laughter too, for no real reason other than the fact that they had just been chased by a hungry carnivorous dinosaur and lived to tell the tale. Suddenly, all the tension that had previously been in the air seemed to dissipate, like morning mist or the smoke after a small fire, as the threat of potentially being eaten by a T-Rex now seemed incredibly funny, for no reason whatsoever. Perhaps it was the adrenaline, or perhaps just the rush that came from being that close to death, again, since it was a concept that they were all too familiar with from past experience, but whatever the case, the Doctor, Hannah, Sherlock, John, Loki, Harry, Merlin and James all just stood where they were and laughed as if they had just been watching the funniest Shakespeare comedy ever written.
“You do this all the time?” Merlin managed to say once he had recovered, rubbing his ribs. “I mean...like that?”
He pointed to the doors.
“Run away from danger?” the Doctor grinned. “Well, yes, as a matter of fact, it’s what we’re best at, isn’t it, Hannah?”
Hannah laughed again.
“No, I mean just travel somewhere and do things like that, meet monsters and...stuff?” Merlin finished, lamely, losing his train of thought.
“Pretty much,” Hannah replied.
“Now, where were we?” the Doctor added. “Oh, yes, saving the world from Cybermen...”
The others watched him, amused, as he began to fiddle with the console again. Sometimes it was strange how quickly you could come to trust and respect someone, and sometimes it felt like the most natural thing in the world, to suddenly know that someone you had only just met really did know what they were talking about. And it was like that meeting the Doctor, suddenly in an instant he became the most trustworthy person in the entire universe.
Sometimes all it took was a little adventure...