“All right! All right, all right, all right -”
“Everything’s fine. Nobody needs to open the door. Nobody needs to open any door, much less this one.” So much so, in fact, that the Doctor stood there with both hands raised in defense of it. "If everyone could just calm dow–“
"Who are you, telling us to calm down?! That’s an alien spaceship! We’ve been abducted! God - Bill, we’re never going to see Sarah again - I don’t -” the woman’s outrage quickly faded out to quiet, but angry, sobbing. Bill, her partner, held her gently, muttering quiet reminders to “Breathe, Charlie,” but now that she had said what everyone else was thinking (after all, alien abduction was not an everyday event for them, regardless of how at ease this man - the 'Doctor’ - seemed to be) there were stirrings of unease in the crowd. Opening the doors seemed like the only logical solution - it was the exact door they’d used to enter the cafe, so they should be able to use it to exit. At least some of the members of the room had realised that this was not how spatial relations worked, but mass hysteria was nonetheless a powerful force.
Someone grabbed the Doctor’s shoulder, to shove past him, towards the door.
"All right - all right, yes, but listen to me –”
“Why should we?” the man who’d shoved him demanded, and undid the latch -
“That door leads outside!"
Some people, he was sure, put this together. Some people glanced out the windows and saw the expanse of endless space, and knew precisely what the Doctor’s concern was. Some people said, “Dave-” and started forward, warning. Not this man. With the latch undone he threw the door open and stood little chance against the immediate gust of wind: Dave was sucked into empty space so suddenly it was difficult to see it happen, though this might have also been because with the door flung open wide the rest of the room was scrambling to get a hold of anything solid. Charlie was screaming. The door, which opened outward, had been pulled entirely off its hinges and was now floating amongst the stars beside Dave’s corpse: the Doctor had one very vivid glimpse of this as he dragged his way across the wall to one of the great glass walls at the side of the room, which now separated the cafe from the winding, hexagonal hallways of the ship they’d found themselves in.
It had been his intention to wait before messing about with their technology (sometimes people just abducted the wrong room: it was more common than you’d think, honestly, and he didn’t want to offend them), but now he tugged the sonic out with abandon and struggled to aim it as it whined. There on the wall was a User Interface, and it was their only way out.
“What is your query?” the box asked, calmly, registering the request. Charlie continued screaming.
“SHIELDS!”
He did spare it a frustrated eyeroll. “Who on a space-ship wants a seal? NO! SHIELDS!”
“Did you say, shields?”
“Yes! Yes, I said shields, yes!”
“For safety reasons, you will need administrator access to disable -”
“Resetting shields. Thank you for flying with -” but the Doctor didn’t get to hear which interstellar spaceship they were flying with, because at once the room’s pressure equalised: at once, everything was still, and he dropped to the ground. The cafe’s seats clattered down with him.
The room was silent.
It was cause for concern.
“Charlie?” the second the Doctor hit the ground, he was back up again. Nobody else had been sucked out - he checked this first, actually, darting to the door to peer out into space and see only Dave there, and the runaway door. Everyone else was still inside. So why - “Charlie?” he asked again, louder, and turned round. The room was empty. Neither Charlie nor Bill responded, but this was no longer his concern. The number of people in the cafe, which had previously been a crowd, had dwindled to one: him. How…?
He was about to turn right around, too, except from the corner of his eye he spotted the shoe. There, hiding under the cafe’s counter (a good place to be, actually, to avoid being sucked out: he was impressed), was the second person present in the room. The Doctor squatted to meet them slowly, to give them plenty of warning he was on the approach. Had they been a part of the crowd?
“Hello,” he tried, in English. Without the TARDIS (back on Earth) to automatically translate for him, he was doing it manually and taking a guess at the right language. “Are you - ”
“Is everyone okay?!” someone yelled, in not-English at all. The Doctor popped his head over the desk and found a harried-looking man in a very uncomfortable-looking suit pacing the length of the glass wall, searching desperately for survivors. “I don’t know what happened, I don’t - “
The Doctor raised a hand, to indicate his presence. “We’re okay,” he said, and matched the language readily (it was a strange assortment of bloops and clicking noises), “Two of us here, but some of our passengers have disappeared. Was that you?”
Then, quickly, “Are you hurt?” in English again, to the person under the desk.
There was a smash as the strangely dressed man broke through the glass (no other way in), but the Doctor didn’t even look up. His focus was on this person, now. “What’s your name?”
pixelskylines
dailybridgerton
tangentwithtanner
prguitarman
germansingergirl
