Fic: Danger Shall Seem Sport (2/7)
Oct. 22nd, 2007 01:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tardis_stowawayTitle: Danger Shall Seem Sport
Author:tardis_stowaway
Rating: PG for a bit of language
Spoilers: Through Doomsday
Disclaimer: Want, can't take, don't have. The BBC owns 'em.
Story Summary: Rose and her alternate universe’s Doctor should really leave the adventure archeology to Indiana Jones. Exploring a ruined temple, they find unfinished business from the Time War that puts them in mortal peril in a basement (of course).
AN: This story is part of my Illyria series. The previous story is "What country, friends, is this?" Both this and WCFIT were originally published on Teaspoon, so the dates of these entries don't reflect the dates of original publication.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2: Traps. In which the Doctor violates the first rule of adventure archeology.
~ ~ ~ ~
Back inside the temple, the Doctor gestured towards the closest side room, whispering, “We need to see what’s in there.” I nodded, my pulse speeding up. We approached slowly. I could hear rustling and scraping from within, whisper-soft but sounding loud in the stillness of the empty temple. The Doctor drew the sonic screwdriver with his free hand. As we drew near, my muscles tensed, ready to flee. The Doctor halted at the threshold and shone the light from the sonic screwdriver into the darkened room.
Instantly the air erupted with ear-splitting shrieks and a tumult of flapping wings. Dozens of creatures with wingspans broader than the Doctor was tall and the scaly hide and long beaks of pterodactyls crowded onto shelves and dangled bat-style from the ceiling of the room. There were none on the floor, because that was entirely covered with guano-coated bones. Most of the bones were small like the hopping lizards we’d seen, but some were much larger, and at least one skull seemed to have come from a humanoid. The beaks were full of wicked teeth, and the beasts’ feet carried talons like curved butchers’ knives. I raised my arms defensively, but they didn’t attack. All the flapping seemed to be an attempt to shield their enormous eyes from the dim light of the sonic screwdriver. They cowered farther back into the room, screeching. The Doctor and I retreated.
“We should be safe enough from those fellows as long as we stay in the main hall, but let’s not be here after dark,” he suggested. I agreed emphatically as the racket gradually died down. We carefully inspected all the other side rooms but found more of the same: nocturnal flying creatures and their piles of bones. If there were any artifacts we couldn’t see them for all the wings and mess, unless you counted the shredded fragments of clothing on a few skeletons.
“There must be a hundred of those things here, and none of them look friendly. Do you know what they are?” I asked.
“Pets of the Ruacmord,” the Doctor replied. “released on almost every planet they visited. They called them curfew enforcers for their habit of devouring anyone within reach after sundown. Can’t stand light, but deadly in the dark. The Ruacmord used them to put the terror back in the nighttime, bring a civilization a step back towards primitives huddled in caves. This lot have probably gone feral.” I nodded, mostly just glad we hadn’t seen anything interesting enough in the rooms to make him decide that we needed to chase the ptero-thingies out for a closer look. All we had left to explore was the front of the temple near the altar table. Now that we were closer, I could see some sort of shiny object sitting on the table. At last, a clue! I started to walk towards it, but the Doctor, a pace or two behind me, abruptly cried out in warning:
“Not another step!”
I froze with one foot in the air and looked down, expecting to see a huge snake or something of the sort. All I saw was more floor.
“Any particular reason why I’m stopping?” I gave the Doctor an irritated look, but stayed balanced on one foot.
“You’re about to step on a trap door. That a good enough reason for you?” he snapped, hurrying up behind me. I looked more closely at the floor, and my breath caught in my throat. The square of stone at my feet had a distinct gap between it and the surrounding tiles. One edge bore two gentle bumps: hinges. Very slowly and carefully, I put my foot down behind me and backed away.
“Thanks,” I told him. He gave me the Why Do I Put Up With Stupid Apes look.
“It’s clear you’ve never raided an abandoned temple of death before. The Ruacmord loved their booby traps as much as any cult.”
“Hey, I nearly got ritually sacrificed by the Aztecs in fully functional temples, twice actually–or was one of those the Maya? Plus, I’ve watched all the Indiana Jones movies. That gives me some archaeology adventure credit, but it doesn’t make me magically attuned to cracks in the floor.”
“Indy’s making movies? Good for him. I always told him he had too much charisma for the classroom.” The Doctor knelt down beside the trap door to examine it while I frowned at him. I was used to anecdotes about famous historical people (like his pal Cleo), but film characters? He had to be mocking me. How gullible did he think I was? I decided not to encourage him by responding. The Doctor knocked carefully on the trapdoor with a fist, earning a hollow-sounding thunk, then pried at its edges with his fingers.
“With the hinges on this side, I’m guessing it opens upwards, but it’s too heavy to open by hand,” he said, taking out the sonic screwdriver and running it along the hinges. “It might be meant to let something out, and I doubt it’s anything we want to meet. All sealed tight for now so we don’t get any surprises.”
“So if it opens towards us, does that mean I wouldn’t actually have fallen through if I’d stepped on it?”
He tossed me a quick glare. “That’s not the point.”
Now watching where I stepped very carefully, I noticed a line of finger-width tiles running from the trap door to the side wall, out of place among the huge slabs making most of the floor. I called the Doctor to take a look. Soon he had yanked up a small tile from the edge where it met the trap door, revealing a thick rope running through a groove and down below the trap door. Beside the wall, the rope emerged from a hole in the floor. It ran up the wall and stretched overhead to disappear into the ceiling directly over the trap door.
“Looks like whatever triggers the trap activates machinery in the ceiling. It tightens the rope, these tiles get pulled up, and the trap door gets pulled open,” he reasoned. That puzzle somewhat explained, his attention switched to the object on the altar table. His frown grew deeper, and he beckoned me along.
We tried to keep a watch out for more potential booby traps. As we got close enough to make the object out clearly, however, I could have stepped right over a pit of cobras without really noticing, and I think the Doctor was at least as distracted by the thing on the table. Goosebumps rose on my arms as the sense of trepidation I’d felt upon first entering the temple returned and brought friends. We stopped within arm’s reach of the table. My hand instinctively reached out for the Doctor’s, and he took it.
“Is that…” my question trailed off.
The object was a rectangular box sitting on its small end, about the size of a liter bottle. It was made predominately of polished white stone with gold lining the edges. The white stone was slightly grooved, as if to resemble wood planking. A silver panel took up almost half of the side facing us. The bottom edge of the silver had a small half-circle taken out of it, with a slightly inset piece of black stone making the half-circle resemble an opening. Directly above the silver panel were letters formed by lines of tiny rubies outlined with diamonds. The letters spelled “TICKETS.”
“Yes,” the Doctor said evenly, “it’s the TARDIS.”
The TARDIS. Here, on a planet the Doctor didn’t recognize, in a temple of his enemies that shouldn’t even exist, was about the last place you’d expect to find an elegant miniature TARDIS. It glimmered. It would have been beautiful even without the mystery; with it, the tiny ticket booth was hypnotic. It drew me closer like a will-o’-the-wisp in a swamp. Beside me, the Doctor stared as if his eyes were chained to the model. As if in a trance, he reached out his free hand. Just before his fingers touched it, my own consciousness snapped back.
“Doctor, no!” I cried, an instant too late. He picked up the miniature TARDIS.
I heard a clink from the altar table as the button the model had been sitting on popped up. I heard a clank from somewhere below.
Then the ground dropped out from under me.
I fell, still clutching the Doctor’s hand as he fell beside me. I screamed, which under the circumstances I felt was entirely justified. There were only a few moments of true falling before the wall of the tunnel we fell into came out to meet us, and then we slid. The angle was far too steep and the stone too slick to hope of stopping our descent into darkness. As the tunnel narrowed I slammed up against the wall, jammed beside the Doctor, but he kept sliding. Our hands’ vise grip dragged me after him, tugging me around so I slid head first. We hurtled at dizzying speed, completely blind. The Doctor’s hand was jerked out of mine. An instant later I found out why as the tunnel turned straight down. The space I fell through tightened like a funnel, so as I flailed around I banged and scraped my edges, making me unable to twist out of my belly-flop posture.
I crashed down right on top of the Doctor. Limbs jabbed into flesh. My face slammed hard against his shoulder, and I felt warm blood flowing from my nose. A loud clang sounded above us, like two large pieces of metal striking together. We began to rise quickly as the surface underneath the Doctor lifted. My stomach at the abrupt change in momentum. As suddenly as the rise began, it halted with a jolt. At last, all was still.
“Ow,” said the Doctor, softly but with great feeling.
“I’ll see your ‘ow’ and raise you an ‘oh fuck,’” I muttered, trying to disentangle an arm and convince it to move enough to do something about the nose bleed. “I’ve got bruises places I never even knew I had.”
“You’re bruised? You had me to pad your fall.”
“Not like you’re terribly cushiony. If your jacket gets bloodstained, it’s your own bony shoulder’s fault.”
“I can get blood out of the leather,” he said with the confidence given by advanced alien laundry technology and too much experience using it on blood, but his next remark sounded concerned. “How badly are you hurt?”
“The blood’s from my nose. It hurts, but it won’t kill me. Otherwise,” I paused, taking a moment to wiggle all my limbs a bit, finally getting a hand up to pinch off my nose, “lots of ouch, but nothing’s broken, except maybe the nose. You?” I felt him shift slightly under me.
“Mostly bruises. I hit the back of my head when I landed, but it takes more than that to get through my thick skull. My right ankle hurts, but I can’t tell how badly it’s injured until I stand up, and I don’t think I’ll test that just yet.” I let my head rest against his chest as an agreement. I ached in an entirely different and much less pleasant way than lying on top of the Doctor might usually have inspired, but his nearness was still comforting. After a few moments the gentle rise and fall of our breathing slowed slightly.
“For the record, I’d like to point out that it was you who ended up setting off the booby trap.” I remarked teasingly.
“Oi! The trapdoor we fell through was invisible compared to the one you tried to step on.” I could hear a bit of a smile in his voice along with the defensiveness.
“If it hadn’t been a trapdoor it would have been a rolling boulder or the whole building collapsing. First rule of adventure archaeology, Doctor: don’t touch the most intriguing object. It’s always a trap.”
“In this case, a very specific trap.” His voice had darkened, reminding me that our predicament was potentially far more than some bruises. “That was no ordinary burglar alarm of death. I need my sonic screwdriver so we can shed some light on this.”
I tried to roll away to let him access the screwdriver, but I didn’t have enough room to get completely off. I met metal bars on both sides, just a few inches wider than his shoulders. I propped myself up on an elbow while he snaked an arm under me and fumbled in his pockets. At last the cool blue light of the sonic screwdriver showed us our surroundings.
We were in an iron cage confining us to an area about the size of a coffin, although the ceiling was fortunately considerably higher, probably enough to stand up. The spaces between the bars of the cage were wide enough to get a limb through but far too small for escape. The feeling of rising after we hit the ground had been no illusion. Ropes drew the cage tight against the ceiling of a stone room. On the floor below, some sort of iron contraption of gears and levers stood beside the dust-free spot where the cage had rested. The room had no door other than the shaft we’d fallen through.
The Doctor was not looking for an escape route. Instead, he was inspecting the model TARDIS, now slightly chipped but miraculously still in his hand. How had he hung onto that? I’d barely hung onto my last meal. He turned it over, running his calloused fingers along it. When he examined the bottom he looked up at me, pupils wide in the dim light.
“Rose,” he said, so casually I knew something had to be wrong, “back in New Jersey where we met, there was a billboard with some words that made you react strangely, like they meant something beyond the obvious. What was that phrase?”
“Bad wolf,” I murmured, feeling as if someone had poured a glass of ice water down my spine.
“Thought so,” he said, turning over the model TARDIS so I could see the bottom. I looked, already knowing what I would find carved there. Bad wolf.
Author:
tardis_stowaway Rating: PG for a bit of language
Spoilers: Through Doomsday
Disclaimer: Want, can't take, don't have. The BBC owns 'em.
Story Summary: Rose and her alternate universe’s Doctor should really leave the adventure archeology to Indiana Jones. Exploring a ruined temple, they find unfinished business from the Time War that puts them in mortal peril in a basement (of course).
AN: This story is part of my Illyria series. The previous story is "What country, friends, is this?" Both this and WCFIT were originally published on Teaspoon, so the dates of these entries don't reflect the dates of original publication.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2: Traps. In which the Doctor violates the first rule of adventure archeology.
~ ~ ~ ~
Back inside the temple, the Doctor gestured towards the closest side room, whispering, “We need to see what’s in there.” I nodded, my pulse speeding up. We approached slowly. I could hear rustling and scraping from within, whisper-soft but sounding loud in the stillness of the empty temple. The Doctor drew the sonic screwdriver with his free hand. As we drew near, my muscles tensed, ready to flee. The Doctor halted at the threshold and shone the light from the sonic screwdriver into the darkened room.
Instantly the air erupted with ear-splitting shrieks and a tumult of flapping wings. Dozens of creatures with wingspans broader than the Doctor was tall and the scaly hide and long beaks of pterodactyls crowded onto shelves and dangled bat-style from the ceiling of the room. There were none on the floor, because that was entirely covered with guano-coated bones. Most of the bones were small like the hopping lizards we’d seen, but some were much larger, and at least one skull seemed to have come from a humanoid. The beaks were full of wicked teeth, and the beasts’ feet carried talons like curved butchers’ knives. I raised my arms defensively, but they didn’t attack. All the flapping seemed to be an attempt to shield their enormous eyes from the dim light of the sonic screwdriver. They cowered farther back into the room, screeching. The Doctor and I retreated.
“We should be safe enough from those fellows as long as we stay in the main hall, but let’s not be here after dark,” he suggested. I agreed emphatically as the racket gradually died down. We carefully inspected all the other side rooms but found more of the same: nocturnal flying creatures and their piles of bones. If there were any artifacts we couldn’t see them for all the wings and mess, unless you counted the shredded fragments of clothing on a few skeletons.
“There must be a hundred of those things here, and none of them look friendly. Do you know what they are?” I asked.
“Pets of the Ruacmord,” the Doctor replied. “released on almost every planet they visited. They called them curfew enforcers for their habit of devouring anyone within reach after sundown. Can’t stand light, but deadly in the dark. The Ruacmord used them to put the terror back in the nighttime, bring a civilization a step back towards primitives huddled in caves. This lot have probably gone feral.” I nodded, mostly just glad we hadn’t seen anything interesting enough in the rooms to make him decide that we needed to chase the ptero-thingies out for a closer look. All we had left to explore was the front of the temple near the altar table. Now that we were closer, I could see some sort of shiny object sitting on the table. At last, a clue! I started to walk towards it, but the Doctor, a pace or two behind me, abruptly cried out in warning:
“Not another step!”
I froze with one foot in the air and looked down, expecting to see a huge snake or something of the sort. All I saw was more floor.
“Any particular reason why I’m stopping?” I gave the Doctor an irritated look, but stayed balanced on one foot.
“You’re about to step on a trap door. That a good enough reason for you?” he snapped, hurrying up behind me. I looked more closely at the floor, and my breath caught in my throat. The square of stone at my feet had a distinct gap between it and the surrounding tiles. One edge bore two gentle bumps: hinges. Very slowly and carefully, I put my foot down behind me and backed away.
“Thanks,” I told him. He gave me the Why Do I Put Up With Stupid Apes look.
“It’s clear you’ve never raided an abandoned temple of death before. The Ruacmord loved their booby traps as much as any cult.”
“Hey, I nearly got ritually sacrificed by the Aztecs in fully functional temples, twice actually–or was one of those the Maya? Plus, I’ve watched all the Indiana Jones movies. That gives me some archaeology adventure credit, but it doesn’t make me magically attuned to cracks in the floor.”
“Indy’s making movies? Good for him. I always told him he had too much charisma for the classroom.” The Doctor knelt down beside the trap door to examine it while I frowned at him. I was used to anecdotes about famous historical people (like his pal Cleo), but film characters? He had to be mocking me. How gullible did he think I was? I decided not to encourage him by responding. The Doctor knocked carefully on the trapdoor with a fist, earning a hollow-sounding thunk, then pried at its edges with his fingers.
“With the hinges on this side, I’m guessing it opens upwards, but it’s too heavy to open by hand,” he said, taking out the sonic screwdriver and running it along the hinges. “It might be meant to let something out, and I doubt it’s anything we want to meet. All sealed tight for now so we don’t get any surprises.”
“So if it opens towards us, does that mean I wouldn’t actually have fallen through if I’d stepped on it?”
He tossed me a quick glare. “That’s not the point.”
Now watching where I stepped very carefully, I noticed a line of finger-width tiles running from the trap door to the side wall, out of place among the huge slabs making most of the floor. I called the Doctor to take a look. Soon he had yanked up a small tile from the edge where it met the trap door, revealing a thick rope running through a groove and down below the trap door. Beside the wall, the rope emerged from a hole in the floor. It ran up the wall and stretched overhead to disappear into the ceiling directly over the trap door.
“Looks like whatever triggers the trap activates machinery in the ceiling. It tightens the rope, these tiles get pulled up, and the trap door gets pulled open,” he reasoned. That puzzle somewhat explained, his attention switched to the object on the altar table. His frown grew deeper, and he beckoned me along.
We tried to keep a watch out for more potential booby traps. As we got close enough to make the object out clearly, however, I could have stepped right over a pit of cobras without really noticing, and I think the Doctor was at least as distracted by the thing on the table. Goosebumps rose on my arms as the sense of trepidation I’d felt upon first entering the temple returned and brought friends. We stopped within arm’s reach of the table. My hand instinctively reached out for the Doctor’s, and he took it.
“Is that…” my question trailed off.
The object was a rectangular box sitting on its small end, about the size of a liter bottle. It was made predominately of polished white stone with gold lining the edges. The white stone was slightly grooved, as if to resemble wood planking. A silver panel took up almost half of the side facing us. The bottom edge of the silver had a small half-circle taken out of it, with a slightly inset piece of black stone making the half-circle resemble an opening. Directly above the silver panel were letters formed by lines of tiny rubies outlined with diamonds. The letters spelled “TICKETS.”
“Yes,” the Doctor said evenly, “it’s the TARDIS.”
The TARDIS. Here, on a planet the Doctor didn’t recognize, in a temple of his enemies that shouldn’t even exist, was about the last place you’d expect to find an elegant miniature TARDIS. It glimmered. It would have been beautiful even without the mystery; with it, the tiny ticket booth was hypnotic. It drew me closer like a will-o’-the-wisp in a swamp. Beside me, the Doctor stared as if his eyes were chained to the model. As if in a trance, he reached out his free hand. Just before his fingers touched it, my own consciousness snapped back.
“Doctor, no!” I cried, an instant too late. He picked up the miniature TARDIS.
I heard a clink from the altar table as the button the model had been sitting on popped up. I heard a clank from somewhere below.
Then the ground dropped out from under me.
I fell, still clutching the Doctor’s hand as he fell beside me. I screamed, which under the circumstances I felt was entirely justified. There were only a few moments of true falling before the wall of the tunnel we fell into came out to meet us, and then we slid. The angle was far too steep and the stone too slick to hope of stopping our descent into darkness. As the tunnel narrowed I slammed up against the wall, jammed beside the Doctor, but he kept sliding. Our hands’ vise grip dragged me after him, tugging me around so I slid head first. We hurtled at dizzying speed, completely blind. The Doctor’s hand was jerked out of mine. An instant later I found out why as the tunnel turned straight down. The space I fell through tightened like a funnel, so as I flailed around I banged and scraped my edges, making me unable to twist out of my belly-flop posture.
I crashed down right on top of the Doctor. Limbs jabbed into flesh. My face slammed hard against his shoulder, and I felt warm blood flowing from my nose. A loud clang sounded above us, like two large pieces of metal striking together. We began to rise quickly as the surface underneath the Doctor lifted. My stomach at the abrupt change in momentum. As suddenly as the rise began, it halted with a jolt. At last, all was still.
“Ow,” said the Doctor, softly but with great feeling.
“I’ll see your ‘ow’ and raise you an ‘oh fuck,’” I muttered, trying to disentangle an arm and convince it to move enough to do something about the nose bleed. “I’ve got bruises places I never even knew I had.”
“You’re bruised? You had me to pad your fall.”
“Not like you’re terribly cushiony. If your jacket gets bloodstained, it’s your own bony shoulder’s fault.”
“I can get blood out of the leather,” he said with the confidence given by advanced alien laundry technology and too much experience using it on blood, but his next remark sounded concerned. “How badly are you hurt?”
“The blood’s from my nose. It hurts, but it won’t kill me. Otherwise,” I paused, taking a moment to wiggle all my limbs a bit, finally getting a hand up to pinch off my nose, “lots of ouch, but nothing’s broken, except maybe the nose. You?” I felt him shift slightly under me.
“Mostly bruises. I hit the back of my head when I landed, but it takes more than that to get through my thick skull. My right ankle hurts, but I can’t tell how badly it’s injured until I stand up, and I don’t think I’ll test that just yet.” I let my head rest against his chest as an agreement. I ached in an entirely different and much less pleasant way than lying on top of the Doctor might usually have inspired, but his nearness was still comforting. After a few moments the gentle rise and fall of our breathing slowed slightly.
“For the record, I’d like to point out that it was you who ended up setting off the booby trap.” I remarked teasingly.
“Oi! The trapdoor we fell through was invisible compared to the one you tried to step on.” I could hear a bit of a smile in his voice along with the defensiveness.
“If it hadn’t been a trapdoor it would have been a rolling boulder or the whole building collapsing. First rule of adventure archaeology, Doctor: don’t touch the most intriguing object. It’s always a trap.”
“In this case, a very specific trap.” His voice had darkened, reminding me that our predicament was potentially far more than some bruises. “That was no ordinary burglar alarm of death. I need my sonic screwdriver so we can shed some light on this.”
I tried to roll away to let him access the screwdriver, but I didn’t have enough room to get completely off. I met metal bars on both sides, just a few inches wider than his shoulders. I propped myself up on an elbow while he snaked an arm under me and fumbled in his pockets. At last the cool blue light of the sonic screwdriver showed us our surroundings.
We were in an iron cage confining us to an area about the size of a coffin, although the ceiling was fortunately considerably higher, probably enough to stand up. The spaces between the bars of the cage were wide enough to get a limb through but far too small for escape. The feeling of rising after we hit the ground had been no illusion. Ropes drew the cage tight against the ceiling of a stone room. On the floor below, some sort of iron contraption of gears and levers stood beside the dust-free spot where the cage had rested. The room had no door other than the shaft we’d fallen through.
The Doctor was not looking for an escape route. Instead, he was inspecting the model TARDIS, now slightly chipped but miraculously still in his hand. How had he hung onto that? I’d barely hung onto my last meal. He turned it over, running his calloused fingers along it. When he examined the bottom he looked up at me, pupils wide in the dim light.
“Rose,” he said, so casually I knew something had to be wrong, “back in New Jersey where we met, there was a billboard with some words that made you react strangely, like they meant something beyond the obvious. What was that phrase?”
“Bad wolf,” I murmured, feeling as if someone had poured a glass of ice water down my spine.
“Thought so,” he said, turning over the model TARDIS so I could see the bottom. I looked, already knowing what I would find carved there. Bad wolf.