Episode Two: The LEXI Paradigm *part three*

Here's part three. It's almost over, and part four will be pretty short. :) Tell me what you think! Comment please. :) And if you know any other Doctor Who fanfic readers...... well..... spread the word about my blog please...? Thanks!!! (Also, 'aurum' means gold in Latin. Confused? You'll get to it.)

Dr. Lugnar, Miss Watkins, Lexi, and I followed the Doctor down the hallway.

"Wait!" Lugnar shouted just before the Doctor took a left right turn. "We have to go left."

"Why?" the Doctor questioned. "The way out is this way."

But Dr. Lugnar had already started off down in the opposite direction, and we had no choice but to come along with him.

I took Lexi's hand as we ran. She gazed in awe at everything we passed like she had never seen it before. Then I realized that she had probably never been out of her psychic-glass room. It surprised me that even to a genius, a water fountain could be found fascinating.

“Have you ever been outside of your room...?” I asked her.

We kept following Dr. Lugnar as he turned another corner.

“No,” Lexi replied. “And even though I know all about everything here, it still amazes me to experience them in person.”

A few minutes later, Lugnar had led us all to a large metal door at the end of a dimmed hallway.

“Now,” said the Doctor, watching the older scientist try in vain to open the door. “There’s something off about this.”

“What do you mean?” asked Andrea worriedly.

“Lisa! Have you noticed anything unusual?”

I thought a moment, my eyes fixed on Dr. Lugnar, who was now pushing with all his might on the locked door. “We haven’t seen any Judoon,” I realized, looking up at the Doctor, now grinning proudly at me.

“Exactly! Now, why might that be, hm?” This time the Doctor aimed his question at Miss Watkins.

She looked up. “Oh, that’s because the guards wouldn’t have let them through.”

“No, no,” said the Doctor, raising his head in exasperation. “The Judoon have guns that can fry a human in a second.”

Lexi looked quite dismayed at this, squeezing her eyes shut and biting her lip.

“Any ideas?” the Doctor persisted. “Anyone?”

The little girl gasped, opening her eyes and taking a step back, catching her balance. “They’re coming.”

“What?” the Doctor asked.

“She must have hacked into the CCTV waves and seen where they are!” exclaimed Lugnar.

“Yeah I gathered that much.” The Doctor hopped over to the door and drew out his sonic screwdriver. He started sonicing the door with a series of short, then long buzzes of blue energy.

“They’re nearly here!” Lexi squeezed my hand.

“Come on...” urged the Doctor, hitting the door squarely with his palm. “Open sesame!”

The door burst open with a hiss, and we all ran through just as two rhinoceroses rounded the corner, shouting for us to halt.

“Oh my God,” I said, looking around at the cavernous room we had stepped into.

The ceiling was as tall as a cathedral, and extended as long as a warehouse would. Rows and rows of tall glass tanks filled with water towered over our small group of five. I gasped when I realized what was in the swirling cylinders.

“Oh...” said the Doctor, eyes growing wide. “There are lots and lots of Lexies...”

In every one of the huge tanks was a single gilded body, floating in the fluid, hooked up with wires to a computer stuck to a small receptacle covered with buttons and the readings of the other Lexies’ heart rate.

Dr. Lugnar strode quickly over to a large screen and began typing hastily on the keypad.

“What are you doing...?” asked the Doctor, his voice getting lower.

“You said that those aliens were coming to shut us down,” Lugnar stated.

“Never said that.”

“I’m not stupid,” said the scientist. “If they’re coming to shut us down, they might shut down wrong, thus destroying all the data Miss Watkins and I have collected. Even if they destroy what specimens we have now, I am determined to start again.”

The Doctor’s face grew graver as Dr. Lugnar proceeded to power off. “Lugnar...” he warned.

Unnoticed by the rest of us, Lexi had wandered over to the nearest tank. It had a young woman, maybe around twenty years old, suspended in the liquid, her blonde hair floating about her serenely.

“Andrea, be ready to shut down,” commanded Dr. Lugnar.

She walked over obediently and started pressing buttons and looking up at the screen’s readings.

“Dr. Lugnar, stop now.” The Doctor glared at the two as they proceeded to ignore him.

“Lisa...” Lexi whispered. “She’s moving...”

I glanced over at Lexi. She was standing under the tall cylindric tank, gazing at the other golden woman. At first I didn’t notice what Lexi meant. But the fingers of the specimen twitched. Her wrist jerked. And soon her whole arm was shaking, a look of deep distress on her perfect face.

“Lugnar, what the hell are you doing?” I demanded.

“I have to shut every tank down individually,” he explained. “That makes it safer, and harder for... other people to destroy our work.”

Suddenly the woman in the tank’s face contorted into shear pain. Her mouth opened pouring bubbles out in a silent scream. Then she went still, and the light eluminating the water turned off.

“What have you done!?” screached Lexi, loosing her cool for the first time I had seen her. She ran over to Dr. Lugnar and began hitting him with her fists and kicking at his shins. “You killed her! You hurt her! Did you not feel her pain? She was screaming and you killed her!”

“Oh...” the Doctor said, realizing something. “You’re overloading their brain with computer waves, overwhelming their consciousness. You’re frying their brain’s nervous system.”

“You make it sound so terrible, Dr. Smith,” growled Lugnar.

What happened next happened so quickly, like a blur.

Lexi heaved herself at Dr. Lugnar and pushed him over onto the large computer. His back hit the keyboard, pressing buttons and flipping switches and the computer’s screen turned red- a warning. Lexi fell backwards onto the floor and screamed. The scream got higher and higher pitched and soon, I had to clamp my hands over my ears. Then the tanks shattered, and I realized the the screeching had broken them because of its high frequency.

"What just happened?" I shouted, aiming my question at the Doctor.

He started quickly typing away on the buzzing computer, ignoring the screams coming from the little girl. "Oh no..."

"What? What's wrong?"

The Doctor turned toward me, his deep brown eyes full of grim worry. "Lisa. The barriers around her brain have been lifted. Lexi has the whole internet flooding her brain."

Lexi's shrieking stopped, and Dr. Lugnar and Andrea slowly pulled their hands away from their ears.

"What's happened?" Andrea asked.

But before anyone could explain, Lexi began to speak, babbling, saying random things.

"Theory of relativity- one-thousand eight-hundred fifty-five point two- bum bum bum bum-" Suddenly, her blue eyes shot to the Doctor, full of fear. "Doctor. You're the Doctor! Doctor Doctor Doctor-" She gasped and grabbed her head. "The light. The dark. Darkness. Weeping weeping weeping... Fear the angels- The walls will crumble and there will be no more--" Lexi screamed, louder than ever, and went still.

The Doctor's look darkened as Lugnar bent down.

"There's a pulse..." Lugnar sighed, and there was a moment of pure silence except from the dripping of water of the tanks that had broken.

I looked around the cavernous room. Golden bodies fallen from the glass containers, now lying on the floor sopping wet. The Doctor was right. There were lots and lots of Lexies. There could be hundreds in this room. Maybe thousands.

Suddenly my thinking was disturbed by a screeching, metallic noise from the door by which we had come in.

"The Judoon!" I cried.

More grating sounds from the door, and then it was vaporized. Yes, vaporized. And standing where the door should have been was a rhino pointing a gun at the four of us . Wearing leather, standing upright, and he began to speak in english.

"Who is the owner of this facility?" he demanded in a harsh voice.

"I am," stated Dr. Lugnar, bravely stepping toward the alien.

"Are you the creator of the Lystrovian-Human hybrid wished to use to defend your solar system?"

Lugnar's face grew red, not daring to look at the Doctor. "Y-yes..."

"Then you will be incinerated." The Judoon raised his gun again, and I saw that there were three more behind him.

"No no no no no!" said the Doctor, getting in front of Lugnar and holding his hands up. "Wait... just a moment." He turned to Lugnar. "Lystrovian. From the planet Lystrovia-Aurum."

"I... I didn't know," he stammered. "Really, I didn't."

"Then how did you find Lystrovian cells to make a hybrid?"

Lugnar paused, and took a deep breath. "The dead body of a golden-skinned woman was brought to me by a team of scientists. They said they'd found it lying in the middle of nowhere in Scotland, and I became excited. I knew it was alien, nothing of this Earth, so I began to study it. Before long, I realized that I couldn't just let this wonderful thing decompose and be forgotten. So I started to work. I took cell samples and began making a hybrid, part... Lystrovian, as you call it, and part human. It was a success, and I was able to grow some more quickly. I then got the idea of putting a computer chip in their brain, strong enough to pick up waves from outer space. Lexi was the first one; smart, strong, and the perfect weapon to defend our galaxy."

The Doctor's face was stony as he looked at the little gold girl lying at his feet, between him and the Judoon. He looked up suddenly, and began talking to the Judoon. "Now, Judoon. Article twenty-seven of the Shadow Proclamation states that 'An individual will be put to trial for a crime known and understood by that individual. Ignorance is not to be punished.' This man here had no idea what he was dealing with, therefore... ignorant. Ignorant of what he had really created."

The Judoon stood still, impassive, but thinking. He hesitated, and put his vaporizing-gun back in its holster, but his hand (hand-type-thing...) was still hovering over it. The alien turned toward the others of his kind and shouted, "Back to the ship. Withdraw." And with that, the rhino-aliens retreated back down the hall and out of site.

The Lystrovian-Humans began to wake up, confused, wet, and not a little bit scared. Andrea and I helped them by giving them white hospital clothes and towels to dry off. We answered their questions, too.

What's going on?

Who are you?

What is going to happen to us?

Who am I?

Andrea explained to me that since they had been grown quickly in the bio-tanks without knowledge of the outside world (unlike Lexi, who had been cared for like a normal child her whole life), they would not know about anything until they could access the internet.

"But that's never going to happen," stated the Doctor, who was standing near by, leaning against the dead remains of the large computer.

"What do you mean?" asked Andrea, eyes narrowing.

"When Lexi pushed Dr. Lugnar back against the computer, she accidentally triggered the computer chips to lock down, turning themselves off. That's what was hurting her so bad; why she was screaming. The internet had poured into her brain before it shut off."

"Then what do we do?" Andrea cried. "They don't know who or what or where they are, and the can't learn about it unless the chip in their head enables them to--"

"A school," I said, hardly thinking. "You can't make more, you're computer's destroyed. Turn this place into a school for the Lystrovian-Humans, with you and Lugnar and Lexi as the teachers."

Andrea frowned, thinking about what I said.

"Lisa," said the Doctor. "You. Are brilliant."

I smiled at him and sighed.

"We should talk to Lugnar about it first," stated Andrea.

"Talk to me about what?" the scientist asked, walking up behind her. He was holding Lexi's hand, but she broke loose and staggered over to me.

"Hello Lisa," she said, hugging me.

"Hi, Lexi." I hugged her back. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. I can't get the internet, but I'm still a genius."

I laughed and hugged her tighter and looked up at the Doctor. From the look in his eyes, I knew it was time to leave. I let go of Lexi and crouched down so I was level with her piercing blue eyes. "Lexi... I..."

"I know, Lisa..." she said, smiley understandingly. "I know what you are." She turned to the Doctor. "You too, Doctor."

For some reason, this sent chills up my spine. It might have been that she said 'what' instead of 'who', but before I could place it, the Doctor took my hand.

"We really should be going," he said to Lugnar and Andrea. "Really." He scratched his head. "You'll figure it out, Lugnar. Just do the right thing."

"Will I see you again..." Lexi said slowly.

"Maybe," I answered, smiling and narrowing my eyes. "You know what I am. Kind of a crazy life, I could end up anywhere."

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.