There was a steady THRUM-THRUM emanating from the planet’s surface.
It was like some strong mental signal, or heartbeat. The ponies kept having to fight it for what seemed like the premises of their brain. Lyra said, “On a scariness scale of one through ten, this is a ten, with ten being really scary."
“Unnerving, but we can’t let it control us,” the Doctor said. He began to hum a cheerful tune, then glanced over his shoulder at Lyra and Bon-Bon. “What; aren’t you two going to ignore it?”
A facehoof was in order. “Shouldn’t we just leave?” Bon-Bon said.
The Doctor’s expression saddened. For a split second Bon-Bon thought she saw years of sadness in his eyes, but he interrupted her. “Look, in all my eight hundred years of living, I thought you Equestrians had a sense of when a burial is in order.”
With the open ground proving to be fruitless, the Doctor and his company sought the advice of a native. “You haven’t seen anything falling around here, have you?” (Lyra noted that he was rather taking it lightly; when she asked the Doctor, he explained that you couldn’t exactly tell him Oh, my friend just fell out of the sky and died. Have you seen him?)
The native kept walking. No response.
The Doctor repeated the question, this time with: “Blackish-brown jacket, night-sky blue eyes.”
The native kept walking. He looked just like an ordinary pony, which helped with the culture shock to Lyra and Bon-Bon. They could see something off about him, though, something really off.
“Doctor?” Lyra said. She’d fitted too many shirts and jackets on ponies who visited the shops not to know that ponies’ hearts beat. This native’s heart was moving about as much as a rock moves in regular old summer weather.
The outside THRUM-THRUM kept on going.
“It’s okay, I’m a doctor, I can help,” the Doctor said.
No response.
“Right, then.” The Doctor wheeled around to face his companions. He grabbed the native in a neck hug. “We need to find out what stopped Beatie here’s heart—and what’s keeping him going. You lot game?”
A puzzled and bewildered expression was apparently how they took the word yes on the Doctor’s home planet. “Come along then!”
They ducked into the nearest building. Another odd quirk from his alma mater planet? Perhaps.
The basement of said building had a lot of spacecraft in it. The Doctor picked a part of one up.
“Interstellar radiation emitter? Rubbish! Though I can’t blame them, it’s the latest model of the time…Horizontal Sontaran detector? Never worked! The microemulator for intergalactic transport? Outdated—“
“You may say so, pony of war…Doctor…”
A yellow-, brittle-hooved figure drew the Doctor’s attention. The most noticeable feature was under the round eyes, a variety of different ‘roots’, with a large taproot in the center. That was all the threesome got to see before three other pairs of hooves closed over their mouths and pulled them into the shadows.
Their captors were, respectively, a freckle-faced, curly-maned stallion that could only be described as a nerd, a dark young mare, and a nervous-looking stallion with remarkably pointy ears. The mare was about to say something when the Doctor sprang to his hooves, whispering furiously, “What are you doing?!” Lyra and Bon-Bon’s gazes echoed him.
“Oh, you’ll want to stay away from him,” the curly one said, referring to the figure. “No good, he is.”
“What—that’s an Ood. They’re fairly harmless, as long as you don’t provoke ‘em,” the Doctor said with the air of an expert.
“End the world, he will,” interjected the curly one.
“Stop talking nonsense,” the mare said. “Anyway, harmless creatures don’t enslave ponykind. Name’s Reeda. This is Hoofie, and that’s Pointy.” Reeda pointed to Hoofie, the curly one, and Pointy, the pointy-eared one.
“I’m the Doctor—“ the Doctor said.
“Just the Doctor?” Reeda asked confusedly.
“—that’s Lyra, and that’s Bon-Bon. Why do you ponies always get hung up on the Doctor? It’s not hard to say.”
“Pointy?” Lyra asked. Pointy waved.
After that, they stayed out of sight of the Ood. One day or another, though, being bumped into was inevitable. Not even a week later, they were at a standoff.
“You have evaded me, Doctor…”
Hoofie and Pointy shrank behind the Doctor, who said nervously: “Yes, about that…” In a low mutter, he said, “This fellow certainly wants to get to business.”
The Ood repeated his earlier statement, obviously in no hurry. The Doctor grinned, saying: “You want to know why, don’t you? Look at me, so clever right now.”
Lyra and Bon-Bon looked at the other three, who had explained earlier what had happened. To be concise, everything was going just perfectly in their planet until almost everypony had been found vanished. The next thing Hoofie, Pointy, and Reeda knew, everything was going just perfectly. Except for the part where everypony got turned into a zombie. Besides that the ‘zombies’ took orders from the Ood, they didn’t know much else.
The Doctor continued. “Ha! Perception filters off, please and thank you.” The Doctor pointed his sonic screwdriver at the Ood, who seemed to fall right apart. “The Ood,” the Doctor said, “are personally much nicer to me.”
In its place was a humming (or rather, THRUM-THRUMing machine.) Malice was painted on its side.
“Yes! Thank you, that’s Malice. Malice, world. World, malice.” The Doctor spoke with the air of an infant who has just solved their first multiplication problem, very excitedly.
“Reeda, Hoofie, Pointy; what happened on your planet was this. Some time ago, someone thought it would be a good idea to make your race do its bidding. Well, they built this, and you know what that THRUMing is? That registers as a distress signal for any ship that comes by this planet. It sucks ‘em in and never lets ‘em out. Works on cars, too. Ever notice a lot of cars coming this way?” Reeda nodded.
“What happened to the chap who built it?” said Pointy.
“He was the first victim,” the Doctor said solemnly.
“Machine—Ood—gone—sonic,” Hoofie stuttered. “Amazing!”
“What?” the Doctor deadpanned.
Meanwhile, back in the TARDIS, an explanation of the Doctor was in order.