Episode One: The Rutans' Fury *part three*

This is the next part. Please comment. :)

We ran down the alley, took one left turn here, a right one there, another right, and a left, and I suddenly found myself gazing up at a large blue box in the shadow of the alleyway. The same police box I had seen years ago, upon first meeting the Doctor. He stood beside me, staring up at it in a respectful manner and grinning profoundly.

"Right," he said, coming out of reverie, clapping his hands together. "This is the TARDIS." He walked over and opened the door.

"But..." I said, cocking my head as he disappeared into the box. "It says 'police box' on the..."

"Are you coming in or not?" the Doctor asked, sticking his head out the door.

"I..." I shuffled over to the front of the police box.

I opened the door and walked in.

And turned right back around, walked out, circled the blue box, hitting each wall as I went, ended up coming back around to the front, and, eyes wide in disbelief, I stomped right back into the 'TARDIS'.

The whole thing pulsed with a pale green light, and a soft hum filled the room, which, by the way, was much too big, much, much, too big to fit inside the three and a half by three and a half foot blue police box. A grated, hexagonal floor spread out in front of me, and in the center of the TARDIS was a panel of buttons, switches and knobs, and even a small hammer dangling by a rope tied to the edge of the control console. The Doctor's coat hung from one of the Y shaped beams that circled the room.

"Bigger on the inside," I said, mostly to myself, staring at the green cylindrical tower which protruded from the middle of the control table.

"Good, very good," commented the Doctor. He was leaning against the panel, still grinning, watching my reaction.

"This is..."

"Magnificent? Alien? Strange? An untidy mess?" he listed, guessing the end of my sentence.

“Yes."

“Right then," he sprang up and ran around to the other side of the hexagon. "We're off to a good start."

"Wait," I said, walking over beside him. "What are you doing?"

"I really don't know actually," the Doctor replied. "Just sort of... make it up as I go along." He hit a button, pulled a lever, and flipped a switch. The green tower burst to life with a jerk, sending me and the Doctor, arms flailing, to the floor. His foot hit my shoulder, and I noticed for the first time that he was wearing a pair of worn out red Converse; not quite what I would pair with the suit and tie he was wearing.

"What was that?" I said, getting back to my feet.

"Pff." The Doctor rolled his eyes. "It does that all the time." He got up, and ran over to the door. “Come on, Lisa Anderson, we are going to infiltrate an alien spaceship.”

“And how,” I said, walking over beside him, “will we do that? We’re in the center of London.”

The Doctor leaned against the wall of the TARDIS and pulled a face. “Look out there,” he said, nodding towards door.

A small smile creeping across my face, I cracked the door open just a bit. “Oh my God!” I slammed the door closed. “One minute we’re in an alley in London, and now we’re in a closet!”

“Closet?” He opened the door again and, sure enough, we were in a closet.

Shelves lined the walls all the way up to the ceiling, cluttered with random tech things that buzzed and beeped. A few other things littered the floor that I couldn’t name.

The Doctor walked out of the TARDIS. “This is definitely not Silurian. They don’t have spaceships and they don’t kill for electricity, so…” He spun around to face me, who was still standing in the shadow of the TARDIS. “Any ideas, Donna— Lisa? Lisa.” His face dropped a millimeter.

“N-no…” I stared up at the blue box. “How’d that happen?”

“Okay, then. We need to figure out where we are…” the Doctor said, ignoring me and trying the door to the closet. “When it came up on the TARDIS that there was an alien spacecraft above Earth, I decided to come have a look. That little silvery box-type-thing was showing me pictures of a Silurian when I found you, and I didn’t believe it because they couldn’t care less for electricity. So, I needed a telly to be sure that the box-type-thing wasn’t shoddy.”

“Box-type-thing?” I asked. “Is that what it’s called?”

“I used your telly and it came up as the same thing, which,” he ushered me out into a long hallway, “still didn’t make sense. I used the TARDIS to teleport us onto this spaceship so we could sort out what’s going on.”

“Teleport…?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Right…. What now?”

“Well,” the Doctor said, ruffling his hair, “Now we find the nearest electrical box to see if I can identify what kind of alien ship this is.”

We ran down the hall as quiet as possible, the Doctor muttering all the way, and tapping the walls as he went.

“Aha!” he exclaimed, his sonic screwdriver pointed at an unremarkable spot on the wall. “Here we are…”

And after giving it a short burst of blue energy, the wall popped open, revealing a confused bundle of green wires snaking off to other parts of the spaceship.

“Just what I thought,” said the Doctor, pocketing his sonic screwdriver. “Not Silurian.”

“Didn’t we already figure that out?” I put in. “Do you know what it is?”

“Nope,” he replied. “That’s a part of the adventure.”

I was beginning to enjoy myself with this Doctor person, if he was a person at all.

But my thoughts were interrupted when a terribly wonderful sensation shot through my body. An electric shock. The last thing I saw was the Doctor collapsing beside me.

My head was killing me. I reached my hand up to touch it, and realized that my fingers were sticky with sweat. Opening my eyes, I saw that I was lying on the floor in a room bathed in green light, not unlike the TARDIS, but it lacked the feel of an adventure yet-to-come, and a sense of danger clouded my mind.

I turned my head to the left without pushing my body up. The Doctor lay unconscious on the floor next to me. I heard noises from behind me, but I couldn’t place what they were, but it couldn’t have been human.

“Doctor!” I whispered, grabbing his hand. “Doctor, wake up.”

His eyes jumped open, and he put a finger to his lips. “Sh. Rutans.”

“What?” I asked.

“Rutans are an alien race from the planet Ruta III,” he explained quietly. “They can generate bioelectric shocks and they adapt really well and have been waging a millennia-long war with another race called the Sontarans. They’re also shape shifters, but in their natural form they look like big…. Well, that actually.”

I followed his gaze, which was directed behind me.

“What the hell…”

A large green blob, which looked surprisingly like an overgrown jellyfish, glowed from a few feet away from me under the low ceiling of what I assumed to be the dungeons of the spaceship.

“You will come with us,” the Rutan commanded, in a small, harsh voice.

The Doctor jumped up, pulling me forwards with him. “Okay,” he said, tousling his already spiky hair, “let’s follow the good rooty-root-Rutan, Lisa.”

“What?” I stepped in front of him. “Doctor, so we’re following a big green… blob type-thing to God knows where on an alien spaceship with nothing but a screwdriver to defend ourselves? That’s the plan?”

“Oi!” the Doctor said, drawing it from his pocket. “This screwdriver’s the greatest tool I’ve ever used! But yes, that’s the plan. Got a problem with it?”

“N-no.”

“Right then.” He stepped pass me. “Allons-y.”

The Doctor and I followed the Rutan down a dark passage in silence, but I started to piece together what he had said about this alien species with what was shown on the telly.

The Rutans were shape-shifters, and fed off electricity. Since they didn’t look very menacing, they changed into something that looked rightfully terrifying to scare us humans into surrendering. I just hoped that down on Earth we hadn’t played into the Rutans’ hands. Er, tentacles.

I tapped the Doctor on the shoulder.

“Hm?” he said, inclining his head a bit.

“What do we do when we get to wherever we’re going?” I whispered.

He made like he was going to say something, but was cut off by the Rutan.

“Who are you?” the alien asked, his screeching voice echoing off the walls.

“Oh, you know,” the Doctor replied, rubbing his sneakered foot on the floor, “just a traveler, passing by.”

“And I- I’m Lisa.” I tried to grin, and made a V-sign with my fingers. “We come in peace?”

He softly pushed my hand down. “Don’t… don’t do that. Ever.”

“Your name,” said the Rutan ignoring me.

“Well,” the Doctor glanced at me. “There’s John Smith, Ka Faraq Gatri, Time’s Champion, the Oncoming Storm, but mostly, I’m known as… the Doctor.”

“The Doctor!” wailed the Rutan.

“Yep. And if there’s one thing you shouldn’t do while the Doctor’s around…” He took my hand and drew out his sonic screwdriver. “Never, never stand the Doctor right directly over a trap door.”

And suddenly, with a buzzing noise from his screwdriver, the Doctor and I fell through the floor, down into the heart of the Rutan spaceship.

“Thanks for the warning.” I stood up and dusted myself off. “Where are we?”

“Not far from where we started off,” said the Doctor, heaving himself up. “Run!”

I looked up and saw the cause of his dismay; The Rutan had begun scaling down through the hole in which we had fallen, shrieking in anger.

“Sounds good to me!” Despite the trouble we were in, I smiled up at the Doctor and we took off running.

“Are we looking for something?” I asked him as we turned a corner, the Rutan falling back behind us.

“The captain,” he replied. “The head honcho, the big kahuna. Hm, Never said that before, and hopefully never will again.”

“But, just saying, wasn’t that thing back there going to take us to him?” I stopped as the Doctor opened a door with his screwdriver. “At least, that’s what happens on the telly in all the movies.”

“Very good, Lisa. Great guess, and that’s probably exactly what he was going to do.”

“Then why didn’t we just go with him?” We started off again. “It’d save all the running.”

“Aw, I like that bit, the running,” the Doctor said. “And what kind of grand entrance would that be? Walk in as prisoners?”

I laughed as he opened another door. This one seemed to take a little while longer to unlock, and I looked behind us. The Rutan was gaining, bright blue lines of electricity zapping around it.

“Doctor! Hurry, it’s catching up!”

“I’m on it,” he said, hitting the door with his hand. It burst open, and we darted it, slamming it behind us.

Our backs pressed against the wall, we slowly took in our surroundings. Four or five Rutans were gazing out onto the Earth from a balcony window that took up a whole wall, and a few more were operating what I took to be the ship’s controls.

“Oh,” the Doctor said, frowning a bit, when the hostile aliens stopped and turned toward us. “Hello.”

“Who are you?” a larger Rutan asked. He was in the center of the room, looking over what the other extra-terrestrials were doing. I assumed he was the ‘big kahuna’.

“Hm, gotten that a lot lately,” muttered the Doctor, who was now striding around the room like he owned the place. “I’m the Doctor, and this is Lisa Anderson.” He nodded in my direction.

“The Doctor?” the Rutan captain said. “You have annihilated the plans of the Sontarans many times, and we thank you.”

“Nah, don’t thank me,” he said. “But I was just wondering, what do you want with little old Earth? It’s not really that significant, in the minds of Rutan Hosts.”

“Oi,” I interjected. “That’s my planet you’re talking about.”

“We need nutriment, Doctor, on our way to this war. Provisions have been reduced to just enough to take over this… insignificant planet.”

“But why Earth?” asked the Doctor, leaning against the large window. “I’m sure there are other planets with electricity.”

“There is not much left, and what we have we will use to take over Earth!” shrieked the Rutan.

“Ooh…” Doctor’s voice got softer. “But what if it doesn’t work? What if you use up that last bit of electricity and your plan fails….”

“It will not!” The Rutan was becoming more and more annoyed with the Doctor’s suggestions of defeat.

“I happen to love this planet,” he continued, becoming more and more serious, “and I have faith in them. Now I’m giving you a choice: you can leave, find electricity somewhere else. Or you can ignore my warning, and end up putting your whole ship in danger. Threatening this planet means threatening me, the last Time Lord of the planet Gallifrey.”

“We will not surrender!”

“Yeah, I thought it’d be something like that.”

Suddenly, a pale blue light illuminated the room.

“Lisa!” the Doctor shouted. “Jump!”

I jumped out of the way just as a bolt of electricity zapped the exact spot where I was standing seconds before.

“I guess we’re back to running, then,” I said as the Doctor caught me.

The Rutans were advancing, and for a moment I thought we were cornered.

“What about falling?” He looked at me and raised an eyebrow, suppressing a grin.

“You’ve got to be joking…”

And to prove his point, he pointed his sonic screwdriver at the floor we were standing on, and we fell.