Chapter 1: What?
Previously, on Doctor Who…
After faking his own death on the shore of Lake Silencio, The Doctor returned to the catacombs of The Silence to replace the head of Dorium before setting out on the next segment of his journey through time. On discovery of The Doctor’s survival, Dorium asks for an explanation…and The Doctor provides.
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“The Teselecta. A Doctor in a Doctor-Suit. Time said I had to be on that beach, so I dressed for the occasion. Barely got singed in that boat.”
“So you're going to do this, let them all think you're dead?”
“It's the only way. Then they can all forget me. I got too big, Dorium, too noisy...time to step back into the shadows.”
“And Doctor Song? In prison all her days?”
“Her days, yes. Her nights... Well, that's between her and me, eh?”
“So many secrets, Doctor. I'll help you keep them, of course...”
“Well, you're not exactly going anywhere, are you?”
“But you're a fool nonetheless. It's all still waiting for you... the fields of Trenzalore, the fall of the Eleventh. And the question!”
“Goodbye, Dorium.”
“The first question! The question that must never be answered, hidden in plain sight. The question you've been running from all your life. Doctor who? Doctor who? Doc... tor... WHO?!!
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With a smirk on his face, The Doctor turned his back to the blue head of Dorium, and without another word, entered the TARDIS. He strode up the entrance ramp towards the console, where he absentmindedly started to flip various levers and switches, not caring what he was doing. Once satisfied with the configuration of the controls on that side, he ran to the other side of the column, where he proceeded to repeat the ritual. After turning a few more knobs, spinning a small sphere, and turning the crank on what looked like an eggbeater, The Doctor reached down and grabbed hold of a hammer, which he used to hit a flashing green light.
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“And away we go!” he shouted, throwing his arms above his head and releasing the tool, causing it to go flying behind him. He listened as a resounding crash indicated that it had broken something. Shrugging, he returned his focus to the panel in front of him, as the TARDIS came to life around him.
The central piston started to pulse with an eerie teal light as it began to move up and down in its glass cylinder, accompanied by the characteristic engine noise that The Doctor had come to love. The entire cabin lurched, as the blue ship jumped into the time vortex, speeding away towards its unknown destination. The TARDIS continued to rock violently, paying no heed to the lack of bumps or friction in space, as it attempted to dislodge as many items from the shelves around the room as it possibly could. Fortunately, The Doctor had secured all of his artifacts, and thus could focus on his own wellbeing. He constantly stumbled around the control room, desperately trying to grab ahold of some sort of solid object. At one point, he got a grip on an orange handle the jutted out from a side panel, but as soon as the time machine tilted the other way, the handle pulled out of the wall and released a small spinning top across the floor.
‘So that’s what that handle did,’ he thought as he stared at the orange piece of plastic in his hand, now completely useless. ‘I better find something else to hold.’
This task was easier thought than done, as it seems that the handle had some sort of grease on it, making his hands slick and unable to grasp anything in the room. On one attempt, he managed to flip the emergency brake lever, disabling it, and rendering the TARDIS silent, but was unable to maintain his grip and continued to stagger about. Eventually, after one particularly massive rock, The Doctor hit his head on one of the railings surrounding the central console, knocking him to the floor, where he rolled off the upper platform and to the deck below. The crazy movements slowly stopped, as the machine came to rest in its destination, just as The Doctor slipped into the black void of unconsciousness.
**********
“Thanks Rarity, this looks perfect.”
“Anytime dear, patching things up is what I do after all.”
“Okay, I won’t forget. Now, how much do I owe you?”
“Owe? Oh no, no, no! I can’t make you pay for just a little patchwork. It was honestly nothing.”
“But it just feels…wrong not to pay.”
“Think of it as a gift for all the times you’ve helped me in the past, okay. Now shoo, I have other work to do, and I’m sure you have a library to look after.”
“Okay, okay. I’m leaving. See you later Rarity!”
“Bye Twilight!”
The purple unicorn mare walked out of the Carousel Boutique and squinted as the bright summer sunlight hit her eyes. Blinking a few times, she focused, and once she got her bearings, trotted off towards the Ponyville market square to pick up some supplies for the library kitchen. Using her magic, she retrieved a list and quill from her saddlebags and held them up in front of her face. She quickly added a check to the box next to “Retrieve scarf from Rarity’s” and looked down at the next item, “Go shopping (see sub list a).” She placed her main list back in her bags and removed a smaller list from the side pocket. This list was specifically for shopping, listing everything that she needed to get by the end of the day; first item, carrots.
Carrot Top was having a very busy market day today, and you could easily tell by the line in front of her stall. It could be seen stretching all the way to Applejack’s stall…which was right next door. While the line may not have been some huge, long, winding monstrosity of a queue, it was still more than Carrot Top was used to having, and she was in a great mood because of it.
After a short wait, Twilight approached the counter and started to browse the carrots lying on the wooden surface. As was the norm, all of the produce was of exceptional quality, having been grown by an expert gardener, and the librarian had no trouble finding a few carrots that suited her needs. As she was paying for her food though, the happy orange mare running the stand decided to strike up a conversation, and being the friendly unicorn that she was, Twilight couldn’t refuse Carrot Top the attention.
Thanks to the delay at the carrot shop, and a few others in various other places, it was early evening by the time Twilight was able to return to the library, much later than she had originally intended. Fortunately, going shopping had been the last thing on her list for the day, and a late arrival home would not drastically affect her activities for the day. She trotted up to the front door, and without thinking, pushed on the wood. The door did not open, having been locked when she had left that morning.
“Oh, well that was silly of me,” she chuckled, quickly floating the key out of her bag and unlocking the door. As she placed the key back in her pockets, which required she look at where she was placing it, Twilight pushed through the door to the tree and ran smack dab into the side of a great big blue wooden box.
**********
It may have been mere minutes, or it may have been hours since The Doctor had been knocked out, he had absolutely no clue. The only things that he did know were that his head hurt and that the TARDIS had landed. He reached up and grabbed hold of the floor panel of the upper deck, using it to pull his body up and onto his feet. He looked around, and noted that everything appeared to be in its place, meaning that there was no immediate organizational crisis to deal with. Slowly, he worked his way back to the upper platform, where he turned one of the various monitors towards him so that he could see. After hacking at a keyboard for a minute, The Doctor found out that his entire computer system seemed to have been messed up, not even being able to tell him where in the universe he was.
‘Well, maybe that’s a good thing. If I don’t even know where I am, nobody else will either.’
The Doctor quickly made up his mind to stick with this location, wherever it may happen to be, and turned the main computer system off. He followed this by opening a small drawer, which contained a key. He grabbed the key and wandered off down one of the many corridors that branched off of the central hub, looking for the room with all of his file cabinets in it. Eventually, he found the room, and flipped the light switch on the wall to illuminate the storage room. There were thousands of file cabinets, all lined up next to each other in rows. Every single one of them looked exactly the same. Same shape, size, and color; and only he knew which of them his key fit in.
“Ah, this one right here,” he said to himself as he placed the key in the lock and turned, only to find that it was in fact not the correct cabinet.
“Oops, maybe not, it’s actually this one!”
…
“No, not that one either. Maybe this one?”
…
“Arrrgh! How many of these aren’t it?”
**********
“SPIIIIKEEEEE!!!!!!!!” Twilight yelled up the stairs where she knew the young dragon was probably still sorting books. No sooner had she finished her yell than her assistant came jogging around the corner from the room…and proceeded to fall down the stairs, landing face down in front of the irritated librarian.
“What is this blue box doing in the library?” she asked, pointing one hoof at the mysterious box that had found its way into the room at some point during the day.
“I don’t know, I didn’t hear anypony deliver it.”
“So you mean it’s not yours?”
“Nope.”
Intrigued, Twilight turned back to the wooden monstrosity and gave it a closer look. It was made of wood, that much was obvious, but it had been painted a nice blue color. At the top of each side, there was a white panel that read “Police Public Call Box.” On the top, Twilight could make out something that looked like a lantern. As she was observing it, Twilight had been slowly walking around the box, and she eventually got to the final side, which played host to what appeared to be a door.
“Should I open it Spike?”
“I don’t know, don’t you think it might be a prank?”
“I don’t see why anypony would go to this much trouble just for a prank.”
“Well, go ahead then. Open it.”
Tentatively, the librarian reached out a hoof and pressed it against panel. The door did not budge, for the exact same reason her door earlier did not open, it was locked. Unfortunately, this time Twilight did not have the key, and she was about to feel disappointed, until she remembered her unlocking spell. She stepped back from the door and started to focus energy into her horn, causing it to glow with a purple haze. The same haze could be seen surrounding the small keyhole on the side of the box, and after a few seconds of this, a small click was heard.
Again, Twilight pushed her hoof against the door, expecting it to open, but again, the door refused to budge, keeping the curious unicorn out.
“How odd, that spell has never failed me before,” she said aloud, and then amended to herself, “Of course, I’ve never actually used it before.”
“Hey Twi, maybe we should get some sleep, it’s getting sort of late. You can worry about the box in the morning.”
“Spike, I think you’re right. A clear head will definitely do me some good.”
With a course of action decided, the purple pony and her assistant trudged up the stairs to the bedroom, where she collapsed on the bed and fell asleep almost instantly, dreaming of a certain large wooden rectangular object, and what might be inside.
**********
“Aha! Found it!” The Doctor exclaimed as he finally found the drawer that the key belonged to. Opening the drawer, he reached in and grabbed the single item that was lying in the bottom, a compact disk inside a clear plastic case. With the object in his hand, he closed the cabinet and returned to the main control room.
Carefully, he removed the disk from its case and inserted it into the tray that he had originally gotten the key out of. Pushing it back in, he listened as the cd started to spin with a quiet whirrrr, waiting for the auto-run to pop up on his screen. After about a minute of waiting, he smacked himself on the head as he muttered something about Windows being stupid and disabling auto-run. He quickly opened the program manually, and without even reading the instructions, began typing a long, complicated code that went on for a couple hundred characters.
He pressed enter, and then slammed his face into the keyboard when a box popped up on the screen that said, “There is an error in the confirmation code, Please try again.”
Pressing enter again, The Doctor watched as the entire code was erased from the screen, and then he set to work typing it again.
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A little over an hour later, The Doctor finally succeeded in typing the code correctly, and he was finally able to progress to the next window. Clicking a dropdown box, he selected an entry that said “3 Years”, and then clicked next. On the final screen were two buttons, one said “Yes”, and the other “No.” Above the buttons was a single phrase, “Are you certain?”
With a sniff, The Doctor whispered a goodbye to the TARDIS, feeling a sadness begin to well up from the self-induced loss of his one true love. Before he could change his mind though, he clicked the button marked yes, and then stepped away from the console as a large message in red appeared on all of the screens in the room.
TARDIS DEACTIVATING:
THREE YEARS
Without a sound, all of the controls, screens, railings, platforms, and various other objects in the room started to disappear, eventually leaving The Doctor standing inside of a barren wooden police box.
He leaned over and picked up the single object left on the floor, a small metal key, which he placed into his coat pocket before opening the door and stepping out into an unknown world.
**********
Twilight slowly opened her eyes and yawned, using the backs of her hooves to rub her eyes. She blinked a few times as she adjusted to the bright sunlight shining through her window and into the bedroom. She squinted through the glare to read the clock on the wall, but finding it impossible to read the clock in her current position, she begrudgingly crawled out of the bed. With the sun no longer rendering her blind, the purple mare once again looked at where the clock should have been, only to find she was looking at a blank wall. Confused, Twilight turned around and looked at the wall on the other side of her bed, and saw her clock there, right beside the window where it had always been. She spun around once again, and realized that the light that had woken her up was actually not sunlight, but light from the main library that was shining through her cracked bedroom door.
“I swear I turned all the lights off before I went to bed,” she said to nopony in particular. She cast a quick glance at Spike’s bed and found it to be empty, making it obvious that the young dragon had most likely woken up with an urge for a midnight snack.
“Oh for the love of Celestia, that dragon can never get enough to eat.” Twilight opened the door the rest of the way and began to trot downstairs, making sure that she didn’t make too much noise so that she could catch her assistant by surprise. At the bottom of the stairs, she found that the light was in fact coming from the kitchen, so she very carefully tip-hooved over to the doorway and prepared to teleport directly to the other side of the wall.
Picturing the kitchen in her head, Twilight began the preparations for a very short range teleport. It was a simple spell, and she pulled it off without a hitch, materializing in the kitchen without a sound. She looked at the table, where she was expecting Spike to be sitting with a plateful of gems, to find a tall creature with two legs and a bow tie, eating out of a bowl filled with nuts and greens. Twilight found it impossible to speak as she stared at the alien sitting in her kitchen, simply standing there watching it chew as it stared back at her in an uninterested manner. After a minute of awkward silence for the unicorn, she finally found her voice, stammering out a “H-h-hello.”
The alien put down the pecan that he was holding in his strange five limbed appendage, and replied.
“Hello, I’m The Doctor.”
Chapter Written by DJ Leftwing
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Season 7 or Season 6 spoilers?
i did enjoy the silence. putting this in my read later list.
I liked the story, but I'm kinda wondering why the doctor isn't surprised to see a talking horse, and why he's eating her food without permission.
im the doctor
1220574 I read it, the end of Season 6.
It is a quite good story, so far. I look forward to reading more.
1220574
That would be season 6 and before spoilers, seeing as we planned the story before season 7 started.
Why disable the TARDIS?
Ooh, this looks interesting. I NEED MORE!
1220618
The Doctor is a time traveling alien with two hearts and the ability to change his entire body. He's talked to cyborgs, ghosts, minotaurs, clones of himself, and the real himself. Why the hell would a talking horse surprise him?
1221336
Wouldn't he at least look around for potential dangers instead of just sitting down and eating?
1221381
Not based on when Matt Smith first took over.
Crash land TARDIS in unknown section of England, knowing that every time in the past he's landed there something bad has happened, and the first thing he does.... tries to figure out what he likes to eat.
I felt a sadness at the idea of shutting down the TARDIS for so long, and a think The Doctor would say goodbye to her at least.
Hmmm I like where this is going!
1224672
A very good point on the goodbye thing, I believe I will add that now. Thank you.