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justmcshaneAnd a quick note before I continue - this takes place in a slightly divergent timeline, where neither the VNA books or Big Finish audios happened (and neither did the comics or other ranges of books/audios, for that matter). It’s been a pretty long time since Survival, and Ace and the Doctor have just been kind of bumping about the universe for maybe a decade-plus now, righting wrongs, etc. This probably isn’t directly relevant, but I felt it worth mentioning.
three.
“fumé”
4.34 PM
???
Ace entered the TARDIS with a sigh that was half-exhaustion and half-relief. She shrugged off her rucksack and hung it on the hatstand, even as the Professor entered behind her, shutting the door behind him. The console room brightened around them, and the room hummed with life.
“Thoughts?” he asked as he removed his hat.
“Maryland’s a lot more exciting than I thought it would be,” she said. “Also – that murder was definitely a message for you. I mean, two hearts? Two livers? And the extra ribs?”
“Me, or another one of my people,” the Professor agreed absently. “But I agree. With the context...” He looked at the console, made as if to step towards it, and then turned around. “I feel as if I’m forgetting something.”
“Aren’t you always forgetting something?” she asked, grinning, but when she saw the look on his face, she immediately sobered. “...it’s not something important, is it?”
He twirled his umbrella from one hand to another, looking pensive. “Well, considering I can’t remember what it is – it’s rather hard to tell, really.” After another moment of this, he shrugged and quirked a small smile in her direction. “I’m sure I’ll remember it in time. But for now...”
“I was gonna go pull out some books on flower language,” Ace said. “See if we can’t get on top of whatever this bloke’s talking about with the shrubbery.”
“A very good idea,” he agreed. “And I shall run some tests of my own. Miss Katz kindly lent me some samples from the crime scene – there’s plenty of time before tomorrow for research to be done, and I don’t intend to waste a second of it.”
“No rest for the wicked, huh?” Ace said.
“Not while we’re around, no,” he agreed, smiling – and then frowned as something on the console sparked and flickered. The lights all around them briefly dimmed, and then rose back to full power, and then kept on brightening until both of them were wincing and shielding their eyes to avoid being dazzled by the overwhelming intensity of the unnatural glare.
“What’s going on?” Ace asked, stumbling forwards to get a good grip on the edge of the console to steady herself, as the Professor tried to manipulate the dials and switches blindly, apparently without much success.
“Some sort of energy overload,” he called back, and there was a grunt of annoyance, or maybe exertion; followed by the click-click-click of a series of switches being thrown, and then a distant, tinny alarm going off from somewhere deep within the TARDIS. “An outside force – an intruder of some sort –”
She felt her way around so she was right next to him, and said, “all right, so, can we track whoever’s doing it? Reverse the signal?”
“I can hardly do anything if I can’t see,” he exclaimed, and thumped the console sharply with a fist, which seemed to do something. Almost immediately, there was a large explosion, and not the good kind, either. They were thrown back across the console room inelegantly, both hitting the far wall with assorted noises and exclamations of pain.
Ace sat up first, and saw that although the lighting was now back to normal and seeing wasn’t difficult any more; the console was now actually on fire, which was never a good thing.
She staggered to her feet, and went over to the Professor, who was lying near the door, not moving.
“Oi,” she said, shaking his arm, “hey. Professor, get up – I can’t remember where we put the fire extinguisher.”
It took a full thirty seconds of shaking him and prodding him – and in that time the blaze from the centre of the room became more and more acrid and worrying – but he did eventually open his eyes and try to irritably swat her away, which probably meant that he was all right.
“You okay?” she asked, just in case, and added, “also, fire extinguisher?” because that was really getting to be a genuine issue now and she wasn’t entirely sure that he had heard her the first time.
He sat up, frowned, and said something that she couldn’t understand in the least, in a language that was fluting and melodic and that she couldn’t possibly mimic if she tried. She shrugged and shook her head, indicating incomprehension.
There was a beat as they both processed what was going on.
He said something else in the same language – which, she quickly realized, was probably Gallifreyan – and levered himself to his feet with the help of his umbrella. As soon as he was fully upright, he headed over to the hatstand, and pushed it aside to grab the fire extinguisher that was tucked neatly behind it. He tossed it to Ace, who caught it easily, pulled the pin, and started putting out the blaze that had enveloped the console.
“The translation circuit is broken,” he said, although his voice was strange – his accent no longer Scottish, more like a weird neutral intonation that didn’t seem to be from anywhere in particular.
“I figured, yeah.” The console was more-or-less completely extinguished by now, although it was covered in chemical foam. “What can we do?”
“Fix it,” he said succinctly, then something beautiful yet unintelligible, then, “multimeter.”
She sighed, rolled her eyes, and went to find the multimeter, no doubt buried in the small pile of tools that was always heaped at the side of the console. “No chance that we’re going to be able to track them down by tracking the signal, or whatever?”
“Later,” was the short response. “Fixing this is... priority. It’s a priority.” He grimaced, and then said something in Gallifreyan that she was nearly certain was a curse word judging by the intensity of its pronounciation. She noted it down for later use, mentally, and passed him the multimeter. “Hold this,” he said, thrusting several wires into her hands, and he worked in silence for a moment while she did so.
“You sound weird,” she told him frankly.
He paused to look up at her, and smiled, although it was a bit strained. “So do you,” he said, and then, “hammer.”
Still holding the wires in one hand, she ducked down and felt around through the toolbox until she found the most hammer-like object there. She pulled it out and slid it across the ground to him. He nodded, snatched it up, and brought it down sharply and suddenly against the base of the console. Ace actually jumped back at the sudden noise and the flash of light that exploded all around them – not quite as intense as before, and considerably shorter in duration.
“Why,” she demanded, blinking away dark spots as the light faded.
He held up a finger, the universal gesture for just a moment, and clicked two cables into place before reaching out to take the wires from her. “Duct tape,” he said.
She hunted through her rucksack for a second or two, and came up with a half-used roll of multipurpose electrical tape. She tossed it in his direction; he caught it. “Best I can do,” she said. “I can probably find some in the labs –”
“No. This will –” he began, and twisted something off from the console before taking the wires she had been holding, hooking them up with another set of wires dangling from the console. There was another spark, although this time it was only in her head and just made her wince slightly.
“That should hold,“ said the Professor, sounding back to normal, which was a very good thing – hearing him speak with anything but a Scottish accent was nothing short of uncanny. He sat back, and closed his eyes briefly, puffing out a slight sigh of relief. After a second, Ace joined him on the ground, pulling her knees up to her chest. “All right. We done?”
“For now, hopefully.” He sounded sort of tired – not exhausted, but definitely not at his best.
She nodded. “So what just happened?”
“The psychic circuits are damaged,” he said, staring grimly at the broken-off component in his hands. “And I don’t currently have the means to fix them.”
Ace frowned. “And that means?”
“Potentially nothing. Possibly everything.”
She was unimpressed. “All right – and one more time, without the cryptic remarks?”
He gave a small, rueful smile, and then said, “I’m sorry – force of habit. What I mean to say was; without the psychic circuits fully functional, we’ll be defenceless against certain avenues of attack.”
“Like psychic invasion, you mean?”
“Precisely.” He frowned. “Be careful. It’s far too early in the game for anybody to be tipping their hand quite yet. So we can only assume that there’s going to be far worse to come.”
“Right,” said Ace, “cool. Brill. Wonderful.” She tried to remember what had been happening before the unexpected interruption. “Uh flower language. I’m going to go work on that.”
“Yes,” he agreed, pushing himself up from the ground. “I very much suspect that there’s no time to lose.”
The room felt colder now, somehow, although everything was most likely back to normal already.
“Right, well,” said Ace, standing up wanting to get things back on track. “See you later, then.”
He nodded, and began hunting for the samples.
“That dinner party’s after this?” she said, pausing in the doorway.
“That was the plan,” he said, “tomorrow night, linearly speaking.”
She sighed. “Should be a nice break, I guess. You know from all this.”
“Mm. I am looking forward to it.” He shot her a tight, but genuine smile. “Do remember to get some rest.”
“You know, I was about to tell you the same thing,” she said.
His smile relaxed a bit, and then he said, “perhaps we should coordinate, then. Do you have any preferences for dinner?”
She ran a hand through her hair, which was messy and falling out of its previously-tight ponytail. “Mm not really. Do whatever, I guess.”
“‘Whatever’,” he said solemnly. “All right. Noted.”
Ace leaned on the doorframe. “Research. Dinner. Bed. Life never gets boring ‘round here, does it?”
“See you in an hour,” said the Professor with a small, exhausted laugh, and that was that.
It would be the last pleasant dinner they would have for quite a while.
9:34 PM
Elsewhere –
– a monster stood in the middle of a forest, half-blending with the trees and darkness. Its eyes were blank; its expression vacant. A terrible, horrible crime was to be committed by it, and very soon. But that time hadn’t arrived yet, and so it simply waited, the cold night wind ruffling its hair.
Somewhere in the distance, dogs were barking.
And at precisely the same moment, not too far away from there at all – cosmically speaking – opera was playing softly in one of the most well-kept kitchens in the world.
Doctor Hannibal Lecter picked up his often-consulted catalogue of business cards, neatly arranged and sorted for convenience's sake. He began to thumb through them, occasionally pausing to remove one and set it carefully aside.
When he had accumulated enough of these cards, he nodded to himself, and picked up a knife from the countertop –
The opera singer in the recording was pleading for her child not to forget her – to commit her face to memory forever.
– Hannibal smiled, and – although absolutely nobody at all could have made the connection – his smile was entirely too similar to the creature in the wood’s own to be comfortable, or, indeed, coincidence.
Soon it would be time for supper.
