Oh, what a place for an outpost! The Doctor scrubbed his face with a red handkerchief, his coat slung over his shoulder and his sleeves rolled up, the heavy heat pressing down and squeezing moisture up from the hardy foliage —- no small wonder this outpost had been abandoned!
But it wasn’t only that fact which drew his curiosity to this planet. People talked about apresence they felt here, something very old, something powerful – an anomaly that altogether defied more thorough explanation – people had gone quite mad simply trying to describe it.
How could the Doctor possibly resist?
But what he hadn’t anticipated was the TARDIS’ extreme aversion to the place – and the ensuing long, hot slog through the low jungle. That was one thing about Rython that certainly lived up to legend – its extremely unstable weather patterns made for difficult land conditions. When it had been an outpost, of course, there’d been no need to traverse its surface on foot.
Question was… Did this anomaly have anything to do with the remains of the outpost itself?
The Doctor paused for a moment, leaning against the husk of a twisted tree to shuck his shoes off with a small groan. How much hotter, exactly, was this place about to get? It was one of those times to be grateful for a respiratory bypass system – he’d stopped bothering to breathe a few miles back, when it’d become like gulping water from a fishbowl.
Something tickled in his mind.
At first, he dismissed it as the beginnings of hallucination and concentrated his efforts on moving forward, moving forward – another step forward, you silly old Doctor! Even now, he knew the conditions would only worsen if he stayed put.
But still, the sensation continued, a presence – the anomaly…? No, no… it was all too familiar for that. In spite of the heat, he felt himself go cold.
The time lords were here! They were here with him, right on this very planet – they had found him. And he had no doubts when it came to what they might do about that.
If he hadn’t been motivated to move forward before, he certainly was now.
As he went, he felt the presence go stronger - - difficult to say, exactly, the direction from which it came, whether it was approaching him or he was approaching it, but he had hardly a choice as the brush grew less dense and the air very quickly began to cool. If he was going to stand any chance of escape, he needed to recover a little first.
Rest would have to wait. Rython’s merciless weather was taking a turn for chills, an icy wind cutting and hissing as it collided with the steaming underbrush. Snow. Wearily, the Doctor wrapped his coat about him, his breath already rising in little clouds.
His mind began to clear with the weather.
Perhaps, he thought, there was a small chance that it wasn’t the time lords after all – but a single time lord. Wilder yet, perhaps it was, in fact, a single Gallifreyan, way out here among the furthest reaches of the universe.
Perhaps it was worth a little looking into.
The cold was really starting to get to her. Any tint of warmth to her was gone as she continued to trudge and stumble through the snow, which was getting more difficult as it piled up. Cold had never affected her like this before - it was certainly drastic. Snow on places like Earth was never so intensely cold to make her start to feel physical pain from the cold - if it was like this on Earth, the humans would have been dead about a hundred degrees warmer. That was her estimate, anyhow, but she’d be the first to admit her knowledge of humans was limited.
As the cold had numbed her body, it started to do something similar to her mind, and she lost focus on the Gallifreyan nearby to her. She focused just on the outpost, whose odd anomaly was enough that she didn’t really have to focus on it to still be able to sense it. Perhaps it would be warmer there. At least she’d be out of the wind, which was cutting through her like a blade through paper. Fingers clawed at her cloak and she tried to go a bit faster, but it was hard to drag herself at any sort of decent speed with the cold numbing her and the wind pushing against her.
Eventually, she reached the outpost, or at least part of it - it appeared to be a series of buildings connected by interior tunnels. She wandered around for a bit with her hand on the concrete, until she was able to locate a door. Romana tried unsuccessfully to pry it open, pulling until she used enough strength to rip it open and cause herself to fall backwards. With great effort, she pulled herself out of the snow, stumbling inside. She was only able to close the door part of the way, leaning against the interior wall and sliding down to the ground.
Romana stayed put and rested for a while, just waiting to regain feeling. She wasn’t sure how long she stayed there like that - just that she got up when she could sense her limbs again. Romana was still unmistakably cold, snow clinging to her hair and clothing without melting, but now she could head closer to the anomaly, which she guessed was likely somewhere in the middle of the outpost. She began through the interconnecting hallways of the outpost, heading in a roundabout way towards the centre.
