Stranded in a Lost World

by Fedora

Assessing the Situation

Dappled sunlight hit Derpy’s face, and her eyes fluttered open. She found herself lying on her side in the middle of a hallway beneath a window. She scanned about with her eyes, trying to remember what had happened. She recalled the ship being struck by a torpedo, and the Doctor’s insistence that they get to the brig before the Captain checked on them. Evidently, they hadn’t made it that far.

Looking around, she saw that Lyra and the Doctor were both stirring about, trying to stand up slowly. She tried as well, and upon shifting her legs felt a strong soreness that made her wince. Bit by bit, she was able to stand up entirely.

She was badly bruised from some sort of impact, but otherwise uninjured.

“Doctor?” she said, assisting him up onto all fours, “What happened?”

The Doctor looked out the window before answering her. The sunlight was dappled; something was blocking it partway. The leafy branches of a tree were brushed up not far from the side of the ship and partially blocked the direct sun. He turned to face Derpy once again.

“Oi.... looks like we’ve crash landed on a planet with trees and an oxygen-rich atmosphere. Fantastic luck- we could’ve been left to suffocate in space otherwise.”

Lyra was by this point stretching herself, wincing as she felt the extent of her own bruises. She couldn’t recall the crash, but she could feel it.

“So... we’re on Earth?” she asked, groggily stepping to the Doctor’s side to look out the window herself.

“Possibly,” the Doctor said, “Better find a way to the other crewmembers to see how they’re faring first... and get somepony to unlock that safety door. No sense in holding back a vacuum that’s not even there.”

“Can’t you use that device of yours?” Lyra asked, following the time lord and Derpy as they started walking along the corridor of the crashed ship.

“Nope,” he replied, “That door’s got a deadlock on it. It’d be no use trying to pry it open with the sonic.”

****

The three entered the bridge of the ship to find the equine officers slumped over at their stations in a state of unconsciousness. The Doctor used the sonic screwdriver to check their vital signs. Like Derpy and Lyra, they had suffered bruising from the crash, but had not suffered broken bones or cranial trauma.

“I wonder how they all came to be knocked out like this,” Derpy wondered aloud. The viewscreen at the front of the bridge was cracked and turned off at the moment, and as such it served as a window to the outside and allowed sunlight to pour in.

The outside resembled Earth, if a bit forested and overgrown. The branch of an oak tree rested against the cracked glass, and down toward the front the hull had dug slightly into the dirt. Derpy turned away from the window after a few moments, while Lyra took her spot and looked more closely.

“Here's the problem!” shouted the Doctor, “Tubes! Some kind of tubing to get rid of smoky exhaust was cut- probably by accident. Nonlethal, but it put them right out when it filled the bridge. That’ll make reviving them a piece of cake.”

Lyra peered at the branch of the oak tree on the other side of the glass viewscreen. She could see down toward the dirt a ways below, and small greenish creatures were coming out of burrows and hopping about angrily on the edge of the Poet’s hull.

“Look at those things down there!” she cried, “Are they lizardlike aliens?”

The Doctor joined her, and peered down at the creatures gathered near the edge of the metal. Their skin looked pebbled, and was greenish underneath several layers of dirt. They must have been burrowing critters.

“They look more like featherless green birds to me,” he admitted, “I’m not the best biologist there is... maybe the ship’s computer will tell us.”

He interacted with the science officer’s terminal located on the side of the bridge, which started to make beeping noises. A smaller screen focused in on the creatures and took a snapshot. It then proceeded to search through a database of some sort until it found the closest match.

“What are they, then? Are we on Earth?” Lyra asked. The Doctor stared at the readout and nodded.

Lyra looked at the answer the computer had come up with, and her jaw dropped.

“Orodromeus,” she read, “a burrowing ornithopod dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous era. Late Cretaceous?”

“That’s one hell of an unlikely surprise.” the Doctor said, “This whole ship’s gone back in time.”

“So?” Derpy interjected, “The TARDIS does it all the time.”

“Yeah, but the TARDIS is built for time travel- it’s capable of time travel while this ship isn’t. Shouldn’t, in fact. Perhaps it was an anomaly of some sort... I’d need to talk to the officers and find out what was going on.”

The small Dragon was the first to come round, and though he appeared dazed he was easy to communicate with. Derpy sat by his side and talked while the Doctor and Lyra worked on waking up the rest of the crewmembers. Her task was to ask questions and jog his memory.

“What’s your position on this ship, Cinder?” she asked of the dragon.

“Communications, I think,” he replied, “I’m a royal dragon- we can communicate with the princesses in Canterlot even when separated by light years.”

“Why’re you so small?” asked Derpy, “Not to be rude... but I thought dragons were big and scary. Are you a baby?”

“Not exactly....” Cinder replied, “I’m only 107, so that’s pretty young for a dragon. No, we stay little unless our greed gets the better of us in general. I’m starting to remember what happened, now.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes!” he said, “It was terrible! We defeated some pirate raiders, but when our ship got too close to the sun’s gravity it started getting sucked in.”

“Which is bad I assume?” Derpy asked. She imagined so; getting too close to the sun would probably melt she ship down or burn it to a crisp she reasoned.

“Yes, very,” continued Cinder, “We couldn’t escape on sublight speed, so we used FTL.”

“FTL?”

“Faster than Light,” explained the dragon, “You can’t travel faster than the speed of light in normal space, so it sort of ‘warps’ the space around you to shift the ship into a kind of super-space where your ship can travel at speeds in excess of lightspeed with ease. Only the problem is we were still stuck.”

The Doctor’s head shot up at that. He had been listening to Cinder’s words carefully, and that last part seemed very troubling. He was an expert in that sort of model of space/time, and while their concepts weren’t entirely accurate he was starting to get an idea of how this had come to pass.

Captain Starstruck blinked, and sat herself up on her side. Her mind was throbbing, and she felt dizzy. An accented voice called out to her and advised her to rest her head while she came to, and she complied.

While she was recovering, she overheard parts of the conversations between ponies. They were back in time now, apparently, and according to the one called the “Doctor” the ship had accidentally created some kind of wound in space/time, and had wound up in the Late Cretaceous.

Her head really began to ache, and she closed her eyes again.

Clover and Brimstone were quicker to recover. Both young and athletically built, they were as quick to come to their senses as Derpy and Lyra had been. The stallion who they had seen earlier as the first officer was still unconscious, and attempts to wake him were so far unsuccessful. Brimstone was therefore the highest ranking officer until the captain had recovered, and she took matters into her own hooves.

“It’s a real coincidence, isn’t it?” she said, pacing in front of the viewscreen, “The moment you three show up, we start having pirates attacking us out of nowhere, and then when we get thrown off course toward the sun? Why are you here, Doctor? Are you a spy/!"

"Oi!" the Doctor replied, "I've got nothing to do with any of that, it was pure happenstance. I'll have you know that-"

"The Doctor's just here because-" Derpy began to angrily interject, but she was cut off by Captain Starstruck as she sat up.

"Alright everypony, that's enough!" the Captain said, "I've heard enough for now."

She faced the Doctor first, addressing him.

"Doctor, I heard you mention time travel. Can you please explain?"

The Doctor paused, backing up from the Captain and licking his lips. He had decided that at this point, keeping who he was and how he travelled a secret was not an option. Them being here in this ship had just ruined the proper timeline: if the Poet didn't launch and everypony on board vanished, one of Equestria's finest pioneers of space exploration and one of her best space captains would never have existed. While not a fixed point in time, he did not want to see all of that dashed to bits. He had to confess a little of who he was.

"I'm a pony called 'The Doctor'," he began. Brimstone interrupted him this time, pressing him with questions.

"Doctor? Doctor Who?"

"No," he continued, "It's just 'the Doctor'. That's all. I've got a time machine in the shape of a blue police box from 20th century Canterlot stored somewhere inside this ship- it travels in time and space. These two ponies are my companions Derpy Hooves and Lyra Heartstrings. We've come all the way from 1999 to see what their future looks like, and we honestly didn't mean to interfere with anything here."

Starstruck blinked, and slowly lowered herself into the Captain's chair.

"As for where we are, I can't pinpoint exactly. I believe we are several million years in your planet's past due to a temporal imbalance. Think of it like ripping a hole in something, and then being dragged into that hole and pushed out the other side. This ship here was dragged into a time vortex completely by accident and wound up here, but it's not the same kind of time vortex like the kind I use. The ship went through something more like an time wound if you will..."

"How are we supposed to get back?" she asked. It was now the Doctor's turn to pace. He had an idea starting to form in his mind, but in order to make any kind of accurate guess as to their best options he would need to use the TARDIS' scanners.

"I need to get to my ship," he replied, "and to do so I'm going to need you to open the blast doors in that hallway that was torn open in the pirate attack. In the meantime, I would try to contact your head engineer and figure out how quickly you can get the ship started again. She needs to be space-worthy for any of this to work."

Starstruck nodded. She understood now that the situation was serious: if they weren't careful or weren't able to get the Poet up into space then everypony was trapped here in the past for the rest of their lives.