“I had a chance to kill Sylar and I failed. My mission is over.” Hiro said (in Japanese), staring at the fragments of his sword.
“What?”
“Uh, Hiro…”
“Even if the Sword were not broken…”
“How’d you do that?”
“Hiro!”
“We’re still in flight, and that’s still physically impossible!”
“I am not worthy of it.”
“Hiro, we’re not in Mister Isaac’s studio!”
“What?” Hiro looked around at the sort of bronze room, circular, a single path leading off inconclusively; the opposite wall had a pair of doors with foggy square sectional windows. The entire wall sloped upwards, into a dome, and until over halfway up the walls were bronze with hexagons breaking the smoothness. The dome itself was orange and opaquely transparent. About halfway up a narrow walkway was fixed along about half the circumference of the room. The two men sat on a platform, stared at by an Englishman man of about Hiro’s height with a fiercely inquisitive face, wearing a sleek brown suit; from the platform extended strange tree-like pillars, and in the middle of it was a round construct with outward facing controls, from the top of which emerged a green glowing tube. Ando and Hiro stared in amazement, Hiro’s amazement gradually becoming happy.
“You’re speaking Japanese, aren’t you?” the youthful, southern English accent offered with a solid inflection. Ando stood stock still, his eyes wandering inexorably. “Hai… watashitachi ha banana wo tabe naika? Hm?”
“We… speak English.” Ando said, still looking around, after a moment of trying to understand what the Englishman had said about bananas.. “Who are you?”
“Where are we?” Hiro asked slowly, a sense of familiarity beginning to overturn his lack of confidence.
“Who are you is much more important! Not to mention ‘How did you get here?’ and ‘why is that man holding a broken sword?’”
“I am Ando Masahashi. He is Hiro Nakamura. We are from Japan.”
“Well, then, that answers everything, doesn’t it?” the Englishman’s head shifted to the side ponderously but snapped back after a moment to stare at Ando. “20th century Japan, right?”
“Y… What?” Ando’s head snapped to the Englishman at the same time as Hiro’s
“Alright. Tokyo, then! Allons-y!” He dashed to the circular thing in the middle of the room and started pulling levers and flipping switches. He paused and jerked his head towards the bewildered Hiro and Ando.
“By the way, I’m the Doctor.”
“The… Doctor?” Hiro pronounced carefully.
“Now let’s find out how you got here!”
“The Doctor!” Hiro shouted, standing up and tossing his hands into the air, sending the halves of the sword flying to either end of the room. The Doctor ducked just in time to avoid being struck by the sharp part. Hiro’s mad grin melted into embarrassment as the Doctor glared in bemusement at him beneath the whirring of the tube in the center.
“Okay…” the Doctor muttered, adding loudly “No sword throwing if you please!” The Doctor pushed a button in the center of the room and the whole room shook and shifted. Ando yelped and hugged the floor, Hiro screamed gleefully and fell over, and the Doctor hugged the control panel.
After a while, the shaking and shifting stopped. The Doctor let go of the panel and ran for the door as Hiro pushed himself up, still grinning, and watched the Doctor. Ando did not stand. The Doctor threw open the doors and stepped outside. He stepped right back in.
“You’re not from 1945 Hiroshima, right? I didn’t think so. Throw the green switch! Quickly now!” He ran to the far side of the control panel as Hiro stumbled to the nearest side. He looked around frantically (still grinning) and flipped a green switch. A sound somewhere between a drum beat, pots and pans being banged together, and the super-sonic whine of an imploding star began.
“The other green switch!” the Doctor screamed. “Throw it back!”
“Hai!” Hiro reversed the switch and, after another moment of frantic searching, pulled a green lever. The sound ceased and the room began shaking and shifting again. Ando yelped again, and the Doctor and Hiro gripped the control panel. Hiro laughed shrilly until it stopped, at which point the Doctor detached from the panel and stared at him.
“That’s not a reaction I usually get.” the Doctor hurried to Hiro and began looking at him very intently. Hiro did not resist when the Doctor moved his arms around and looked into his eyes, ears, mouth and nose, grunting at random. Hiro’s giggling calmed quickly, and he began grinning madly.
“Mister Doctor. We are from Earth! I have mission to save World. You can help!”
“Save World, eh?” the Doctor said quietly. “That sounds interesting.” Hiro giggled, tickled by the Doctor licking his cheek quickly.
“Did you just lick me?” Hiro asked immediately in Japanese, his giggles turning to puzzlement.
“Ah, one of the genetic aberrations of the 21st century!” the Doctor ignored Hiro. “That probably explains how you got here. What can you do?” A giddy smile returned to Hiro.
“I bend time and space!” he shouted.
“What?”
“Let me show you!” Hero shut his eyes and cringed.
“Nononono!” the Doctor shouted, but the room was already shaking again. The Doctor grabbed him and tried to break his concentration by shaking him. Ando screamed in agony rather than in terror, for the simple reason that his body felt as if it were being torn in more directions than he could count. The Doctor felt the same thing, but had decided that survival was more important than comfort. Hiro felt as if he were pusing on the universe in every possible direction…
Hiro opened his eyes, which filled with terror. “I can’t stop it!” he screamed in Japanese.
“Stop it!” the Doctor yelled over a sudden burst of loud sound quite like that which you would hear if an entire ocean screamed inside an aluminum can.
And then they were gone. With them went the pulling.
When everything had stopped moving, and all the sound had stopped, Ando pulled himself to his feet. His bones, muscles, and nerves had unanimously declared that they would never move again, but his moral concern and intellect vetoed this decision, so as he stood his entire body rebelled against him. The rebellion was quelled momentarily as his eyes relayed the truth of the matter to him.
“Hiro?” he called out into the empty, now poorly lit TARDIS. “The Doctor?”
Three boys, completely identical to one another, gasping a three-note chord, stared at the Chairman’s tower with gaping mouths. They vaguely drifted to the side. They had seen the shadow of a flying saucer crash into the tower on many occasions, but they had never seen a spinning box crash directly through it and then vanish before hitting the ground. They had not seen its earlier appearance, drifting relatively calmly across a roof during a Student Council meeting. The three members in attendance-a blue-haired young boy with a stopwatch, a tall orange-haired girl with a fierce face, and a blonde girl who didn’t seem to like the company of either of them. All three of them completely ignored it; that sort of thing tended to happen during their meetings.
The box was probably in luck that there was not a duel occurring while it drifted symbolically across the arena.
Four doctors-a genius and his assistants-stood in the MRI room. Next to them was a white forty-something male on a gurney. All five were silent, staring at what was left of the MRI machine. The patient eventually broke the silence.
“Did that machine just explode?”
“No,” the genius doctor said. “It imploded explosively.”
“What was that?” the black doctor asked. “I think I saw a big blue phone booth sticking out of it.”
“I know one thing it definitely wasn’t,” the genius muttered. “It wasn’t lupus.” The Australian doctor and the female doctor turned and ran out of the room to fetch help. The black doctor walked to the wall phone and called security. The genius, one Dr. House, looked a the patient.
“Think we should count that as a symptom?”
“Sally, did an old British police box just come crashing through the walls?” Dr. Cox put his hands behind his head and stared at the gaping holes in the walls.
I guess that wasn’t just another fantasy… “Yes, Dr. Cox, I think it did.” J.D. stared at the holes with him.
“You think? That doesn’t really help me, Mary-Sue!”
“I don’t think it would help either way,” pink-scrubed nurse Carla said, her usually sassy attitude quite calm, her voice more accented than usual. “But I can assure you that yes, an old British police box did just come crashing through the walls.”
“I’m going to find some way to blame you for this,” a gruff voice said from behind J.D.
“What? Why?” J.D. turned to look at the Janitor.
“Because I don’t really want to fix it. And I don’t like you.”
“Oh.”
“Alright, sports fans,” Dr. Kelso came out from behind the gathered interns. “There are sick people in here with much more interesting and profitable holes to stare into.” No one moved, so he barked “Get back to work!” The interns, doctors and nurses gathered around the hall scattered. Only Kelso, Cox and the Janitor stayed to stare at the holes in the walls.
After some time, the Janitor said “I get the feeling this is going to take more than half an hour to fix.”
Sylar wasn’t sure what had knocked him off the roof, but he did know what had caught him before he could catch himself with psycho-kinesis. Well, he didn’t know what it was exactly, but he knew it was shaped a lot like a phone booth. He pulled himself up and began to look at it, but before he could he wasn’t so much standing on it as falling, legs first, with no sign of any kind of box nearby. After a moment of unfamiliar confusion it came to his attention that he still had a large amount of horizontal momentum. This led immediately to the realization that this momentum was carrying him directly towards a very large and very high glass window.
It took him no more than an instant to tilt himself and project a psycho-kinetic force through the window. It shattered, allowing him to soar in. He pushed against the opposite wall and the floor to stabilize himself, and landed upright at the inner edge of the room.
“The boogie man!” a young girl’s voice squeaked a scream.
“Sylar?” an Indian-British voice asked. Sylar slowly turned to see three people he had meant to kill, two holding guns and two with guns held to their heads.
Halfway through replying “Mohinder?” Sylar changed his inflection from inquisitive to threatening.
“This is interesting,” the man wearing glasses said. Two guns shifted targets uncertainly.
“Very interesting,” Sylar replied, unmoving.
Ando gave up on searching the interior of the TARDIS immediately. He had gone down the single corridor and was unable to open any of the side doors. When he reached the end of the corridor he found himself staring at the exact room that he had just left. He immediately decided that searching a non-linear mobile structure was not a viable option for him. Well, he didn’t decide it in so many words. What he actually thought was “this is too weird for me.”
He cautiously approached the double doors with the fogged windows. He examined them carefully for a minute before shutting his eyes and pushing.
Nothing happened. Ando opened his eyes and pushed harder. Still nothing happened. Ando stopped and looked at the doors. He looked behind him as if blushing before pulling on the left door.
He stepped out into blinding sun. He heard the sloshing of the ocean and felt his feet sliding very, very gently in sand. Ahead of him was a mass which, as his vision readjusted, resolved itself into a crowd of a couple dozen people.
“Who are you?” an Arabic man asked loudly. A few seconds later Ando realized that the Arabic man was pointing a pistol directly at him. Ando’s hands shot up into the air.
“The Doctor?” he offered before fainting.
The Doctor and Hiro collapsed on a metallic grating. The Doctor did not bother to look around when he got up, instead starting in on Hiro.
“What did you go and do that for?” he screamed. Hiro rolled over and looked at the Doctor through pain-filled eyes.
“To prove I could do it?” he groaned.
“Do you have any idea what you did?”
“N—“
“You inverted the polarity! Who knows what that did to the TARDIS?! Who knows what it did to us?”
“I am sorry,” Hiro muttered.
“Sorry? You’re sorry? We could be anywhere and anywhen, and you’re sorry! I suppose that makes it alright, doesn’t it? I don’t know if I can even manage to reverse the polarity inversion!” The Doctor paused suddenly, staring at Hiro. Hiro stared back at him. “Where are we, anyway?” he eventually said in a slow, low voice.
“I was wond’rin’ if y’all didn’t know,” a man said in a voice like a smirk. “Seein’ that yer here, y’might as well put up all your hands an’ turn around ver’ slow like.” Hiro looked past the Doctor to see nine people staring at them. Three-a black woman, the man who had spoken, and a fierce looking man in a strange hat-were pointing guns at them, the fierce looking man holding several.
“Uh-oh,” Hiro managed to groan before standing up and raising his hands.
“Uh-oh is right,” River Tam said vaguely.
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