Fact or Fiction
Title: Fact or Fiction
Rating: G
Word Count: 3159
This takes place in an RP-verse, post-Crucible but pre-Gauntlet.
Happy (late) birthday to the wonderful vampydirector! This one's for you ♥.
“You knew that was going to happen,” Oliver accused, a bemused expression on his face that belied his words. He was sitting in a corner of their cell, relaxing against the wall and probably looking far calmer than anyone locked in a dungeon by rather angry aliens should look.
“How could I have known?” the Doctor scoffed, hunched over the cell door as he examined the lock.
“Oh, you could’ve,” Oliver insisted. “I bet the second you saw that ‘factualizer’ thingy, you thought, ‘the minute I say something about it, they’re going to throw me in the dungeon.’ And then you spoke up anyway.”
The Doctor shot him a look accompanied by a noise to signify his disagreement, but he had his sonic screwdriver out now and his specs on and was apparently too busy trying to do something to the bars to bother saying anything more.
Oliver smiled in amusement, deciding to neglect to mention that he would have been disappointed if the Doctor hadn’t spoken up about the destruction of those ancient medieval texts, superstitious though they may have been. He only hoped they could get back to that library before too much of this planet’s priceless history was lost. “So how long’s it gonna take, you think?” he asked.
“Hm?”
“To open the door?”
“That’s...a good question.” The Doctor sighed, turning his screwdriver off and straightening. He stashed his specs in his pocket. “It’s an old-fashioned lock.”
Oliver pulled himself up from his slouch, raising an eyebrow. “What do you mean? Like...too old for the sonic screwdriver?”
The Doctor screwed up his face. “Well, technically...yes.”
His companion gaped. “I don’t believe it!”
When the Doctor turned to him, everything about the man’s posture declared just how affronted he was at that comment. “I didn’t design it planning to go around unlocking the most primitive technology in the universe!”
“And why not?” Oliver asked. “You’re always getting locked in it.”
The Doctor opened his mouth to reply, but stopped.
Oliver grinned, feeling rather triumphant, but then the Doctor’s eyes lit up and his companion realized that he had simply had his train of thought derailed by an idea. So much for rendering the Doctor speechless. “What it is?” Oliver asked.
The Doctor grinned at him, a crafty gleam in his eyes. “Ollie, play along, but don’t say too much. We should be out of here in a jiffy. Oh, and you might want to stand up.”
“Uh...okay.” Oliver pulled himself to his feet. “But play along with wh-” But he didn’t bother to finish his thought as the Doctor had already turned away from him and was shaking the bars of their cell.
“Oi, Grel! We have facts for you! Yes, would you believe, we’ve found some facts in this cell? Well, you might not, but I certainly do, so why not come and hear them, just in case they’re good ones?”
“Doctor! What are-”
But between the Doctor waving a hand to silence him and the sound of approaching footsteps, Oliver sighed and closed his mouth again.
Their cephalopodan guard moved swiftly--seemingly eagerly--until it was standing across from their cell. “What facts?” it asked concisely, learning its squid-y face toward the Doctor.
“First fact,” the Doctor started, the hint of cheeky grin on his face. “I can’t open this door. Additional fact: neither can you.”
“Bad fact!” the Grel cried, leering in at the bars--as much as a squid could leer, at least.
The Doctor waggled a finger at him. “I’ll prove it. Watch.” And he pulled his sonic screwdriver back out of his pocket, pointing it at the lock on the bars and activating it. After about 15 seconds of apparently useless whirring, he turned it off. “See. I can’t open this door.”
“Good fact,” the Grel agreed. “You do not have the capacity to open it.”
“And neither can you,” the Doctor repeated.
Oliver fought back a snicker.
“Bad fact!”
“It is not!” the Doctor protested. “Here you are, and here’s the door. Still closed.” He gestured at it for effect. “So, you can’t open it.”
“Bad fact!” the Grel repeated. “Fact: just because a door is closed does not mean it is impossible to open it.”
The Doctor quirked an eyebrow. “Well, I’ve just proved I can’t open it. So why should you be able to? Because here’s a fact--I’m cleverer than you.”
Oliver shook his head, knowing that this time the Doctor had to be going too far. No guard could possibly be stupid enough to-
“Bad fact,” the guard hissed. “Speculation, not a fact.” And with a squidy sneer, the Grel reached into its vest and pulled out a large, black, slightly rusted, and rather stereotypically-designed key. Oliver couldn’t help thinking that this species was clearly just as imaginative while designing a time period-appropriate dungeon as it was in its reading preferences. The key gave a squeak as the Grel turned it in the lock. It pulled the door back--just a centimeter or two--and spat triumphantly, “Good fact! I can open the door.” into the Doctor’s face.
The Doctor ignored it and gave the door a solid push, catching the Grel--rather surprisingly, in Oliver’s opinion--off-guard. The door opened, the guard stumbled, and the Doctor bowled him over as he ran out of the cell. “Hurry up, Ollie!”
Oliver didn’t need the reminder. He was already rushing after the Doctor. “Sorry, mate!” he called with a less-than-apologetic grin to the guard as he passed him and followed the Doctor up the stone stairs. “So, that factualizer thing-”
“One problem at a time!” the Doctor called back to him.
“Yeah, but have you worked out how-”
“It’s this way!” The Doctor made a sharp turn to the left. “No, wait, that way...” He changed course.
If Oliver hadn’t been afraid of running out of breath, he would have sighed at the Doctor’s evasiveness. As it was, he hurried to make the same turns before the man got away from him.
“This way!”
After about 10 minutes of following a combination of the Doctor’s retreating back and the Doctor’s retreating voice, Oliver found to his relief that their current path through a drab stone corridor eventually opened into a small library--the same small library with the giant metallic book-destroying contraption that they had been in earlier.
“And here we are,” the Doctor declared. He immediately walked over to the factualizer, kneeling so he could remove the cover on what must have been an operating panel. Out came the sonic screwdriver again, and without further ado, he set to work on the machine’s inner workings.
Oliver watched curiously. “Great! So about stop-”
“Fact: we have found them!”
Two Grel guards, armed with time period inappropriate guns, stormed in through the library’s other entrance. Oliver swore.
Rather than looking alarmed, as one might have expected, the Doctor simply sighed at the intrusion. He straightened and pocketed his screwdriver, then raised his hands as Oliver followed suit.
“Good fact,” the Doctor agreed. “Or have we found you?”
“Bad fact!” the Grel hissed. “We are the ones who have just entered the room. Therefore, we must be the ones who have found you.”
“Oh yes, I guess you’re right. How silly of me! I must have been thinking about too many things at once.” He gave the Grel an apologetic--but cheeky--smile before turning to his companion and remarking conversationally, “Remember what I said about one thing at a time, Ollie? Because otherwise it’s like that movie...which was it? Where the power was failing in the crashed spaceship, and they tried to preserve the minds of some of the passengers locked in cryogenic stasis by loading them all into the mind of-”
Oliver frowned, glancing between the Doctor and the guns and wondering where this could possibly be going. “Daniel Jackson,” he said. “And that wasn’t a movie. That was a TV show.”
“Bad fact!” hissed one of the Grel, brandishing its gun. “Cryogenically preserved bodies cannot have their minds-”
“Ah yes, of course! Stargate!” the Doctor declared, nonplussed. “Wonderful machine, the stargate. Could never work, of course. But the idea is surprisingly sound--using coordinates to lock on a location. It’s the wormhole bit where they got it wrong, but it is a nice effect, isn’t it? That whoosh as you go through the wormhole.” He gestured for effect. “Especially when you match it up with the TV theme--now there’s the way to open a show!”
“Bad facts!” the other Grel echoed. “There is no such device as a stargate.”
“And a wormhole would not-”
But the Doctor ignored the agitated Grel, continuing on as though they weren’t even there. “But about that episode. The whole idea, of course, was that the human mind can only handle and process so much information at once--much like a machine.”
Oliver raised an eyebrow, watching as the Doctor broke out in a sly grin.
The Grel, meanwhile, seemed to have finished explaining the logical fallacies of the Doctor’s description of wormhole usage. One waved its gun angrily at the Doctor, advancing a few steps toward him. “You will move away from the factualizer now.”
The Doctor turned to him, rolling his eyes. “Oh yes, of course. Back to the dungeon with us, is it?” he asked as he obediently backed away from the machine, stepping between Oliver and the two armed guards. “Very mechanical thinking, that. But that’s what the Grel are known for, aren’t they? Just like all their technology.” He winked at Oliver.
Oliver’s eyes went wide at that, the pieces beginning to fall into place. “Hey, Doctor!” he quickly interrupted. “What you said about that Stargate episode.” He glanced at the Grel, hoping they would be too busy examining the fact and fiction of their conversation to do anything with those weapons, before plowing on. “It’s lucky most machines have to be fed data instead of just, you know, hearing it.”
“Oh, typically,” the Doctor agreed. “Unless they’ve been reprogrammed to process vocal signals.”
Oliver started to grin. “What, voice recognition? Don’t you know somebody always gets their throat crushed when that’s used? And then there’s the retina scan, where you either scan an unconscious person or go all Minority Report and, you know, start selling eyeballs-”
The Doctor shook his head. “Think outside the box, Ollie!” he chided. “That technology already exists in most of the universe. No, you have to be more creative than that. Take a DeLorean, for example.”
Oliver laughed. “What, driving at 88 miles per hour to activate the flux capacitor? Presto, wormhole--and time travel?”
“Exactly!”
“You will be quiet!” one of the Grel guards hissed. “You will stop giving bad facts!”
“Or what?” the Doctor countered, taking a defiant step toward the guards. “Or do you mean this is this a ‘stitch in time saves nine’ sort of moment?”
“Bad fact!” the other Grel cried. “Time cannot be stitched.”
“No, but it can sort of be sown!” Oliver piped up, trying to draw the attention of the Grel--and their waving guns--back to him. He spoke quickly, attempting to be as distracting as possible. “Well. Really sort of...sort of. I mean, from people’s perspective! Like, you’ve got this machine, the Matrix, and it’s actually trapping all sorts of future humans in it while they live out virtual lives like they’re on 21st century Earth.” He made a series of gestures as he spoke, trying not to think too much about the guns. To his relief, the Grel seemed to be too busy listening to shoot him--so far. “Which isn’t the real time; it’s only the time they think it is because they don’t know they’re in the machine and it’s actually way later than that. Freaky, huh?”
“Bad facts!” the Grel chorused. “No such machine has enslaved the humans.”
“Yeah, it has! Just ask Keanu Reeves.”
“Or Hugo Weaving,” the Doctor agreed cheerfully. “He’s an elf. Elves can be very trustworthy.”
Oliver grinned, his nerves beginning to fade. “As long as you can get past the pointy ears. And, you know, their aloofness, if you’re talking Lord of the Rings.”
“Bad fact!” hissed one of the Grel, pointing its gun at Oliver. “Elves do not exist.”
“Therefore, elves cannot be especially trustworthy,” agreed the other, keeping its gun trained on Oliver.
“Nor can they be aloof.”
“But they are! Just ask your machine.” The Doctor gestured smilingly at the factualizer, which, during their exchange, had begun to spout plumes of smoke.
“Fact: the factualizer has a fault!” one of the Grel gasped.
“Query: where is the fault?” the other asked.
They shared a look, then ran over to the machine. The first knelt beside it, beginning to examine the same access panel that the Doctor had used. “You, prisoner! Explain what you have done to the machine.”
“Me?” the Doctor asked innocently. “Oh, nothing much. It’s a bit like the Matrix, really--using a localized EMP to stop the Sentinels.”
“Bad fact: there has been no EMP!”
“How do you get that?” Oliver broke in.
“It’s experiencing a voltage surge,” the Doctor explained. “Just the sort you get when you combine solar flare activity with a stargate and cause the wormhole to jump to a different point in time.”
The smoke around the machine grew even denser at that, and the Grel at the controls scrambled back as the factualizer began to make a truly horrific whirring. “Fact: the factualizer is beginning to overload!”
“Well, that’s a bad fact for you,” Oliver remarked with a grin. “Really bad. Sorta like going in that solar flare-affected stargate at the wrong time. Because--and here’s a fact--doing that could end up a bit like...well, like a trip in the TARDIS!”
“Oi!” the Doctor interrupted. “My TARDIS is more reliable than a wormhole that overshot its intended destination by-”
The Grel shrieked. “Fact: the factualizer is going to explode!”
“Inference: we must retreat!”
They ran for cover, just as the machine gave an enormous judder and, while Oliver dove for the ground and the Doctor simultaneously half-tackled him, the gigantic factualizer blew to bits.
It took a few moments after the explosion for the dust to clear. When it did, Oliver and the Doctor were both coughing as they got up, brushing themselves down and picking bits of factualizer off their clothes.
“Well, that’s ironic,” Oliver said.
The Doctor raised an eyebrow. “That Earth’s idea of time travel was the last straw?”
Oliver grinned. “No. That the TARDIS’ reliability was.”
The Doctor gaped at him. “My TARDIS is not unreliable!”
“Sure, Doctor. Tell that to the Grel.”
The Doctor scoffed as he moved over to the remains of the machine, whipping out the sonic screwdriver to check them--probably to verify that it was truly destroyed. “It is not!” he protested. “Just how many times have we ended up somewhere...well, maybe you shouldn’t answer that. But how many times-”
“Speaking of the Grel,” Oliver interrupted, still grinning. “Shouldn’t we be getting out of here? I have a feeling those two aren’t just going to run for their lives and then forget about us.”
The Doctor made a face. “Probably not,” he agreed with a sigh, pocketing the screwdriver and straightening. “But.” He gave his companion a severely disapproving look. “I think you’re going to have to find your own ride this time.” And with that, he turned and started off at a run, back into the castle’s corridors.
“What!?” Oliver cried incredulously, taking off after him. “Oh, come on, Doctor, you know I was only taking the mick out of you. The TARDIS isn’t always unreliable. Only most of the time!”
“I hope you like the Middle Ages on Krethellis, Oliver Day! You’ll have a lot of time to get used to it!” came the Doctor’s echoing reply.
Oliver started up a stairway, yelling after him. “That’s not fair! Doesn’t the TARDIS get a say?”
Before the Doctor had a chance to respond, Oliver reached the landing to find that they were back out on the ramparts where they had landed in the first place, the aforementioned blue box thankfully standing where they’d left it--right in the way of the ladder to one of the parapets.
The Doctor gave him a glare when he saw him. “Only if you ask her nicely,” he said shortly as he turned the key in the lock.
Oliver scoffed, following him inside. “I’m always nice to the TARDIS! Aren’t I, TARDIS?” He smiled up at the central column, reaching out to pat the console.
The Doctor made a face. “Flattery will get you nowhere. He thinks you’re unreliable, old girl! Now what would give him an idea like that?”
“Ancient China.”
“That was a long time ago!” the Doctor protested as he patted the console consolingly. “And just think how much more fun that was. Would you really have preferred Ancient Greece? Watching Antigone?”
“Well, there would have been fewer arrows,” Oliver pointed out. “And fewer arrow wounds.”
The Doctor scoffed, waving a hand. But despite his earlier threats, he turned to the controls, beginning to input their next coordinates.
Oliver grinned. “But you do have a point, Doctor. And you know, I’m starting to think we missed a good way to destroy that Grel machine.”
The Doctor quirked an eyebrow, glancing at him. “Oh? And what was wrong with my brilliant plan?”
Oliver put his hands up defensively. “Nothing! ‘Course, I’m going to bring it up every time you give me a hard time about my TV and movie-watching from now on, but there was nothing wrong with it at all.”
The Doctor eyed him. “Of course there wasn’t. And there are still much better things to do with your mind, you know.”
“Oh, I agree!” Oliver said, grinning innocently.
For a moment, that response apparently left the man too surprised to respond. Quite a feat, Oliver couldn’t help thinking--especially where the Doctor was concerned.
“That’s just what I meant,” Oliver continued. “What we should have said to that Grel machine.”
“And that is?” the Doctor pressed, absently flicking a switch to set the time rotor into motion.
Oliver grinned. “That fact is stranger than fiction.”
The Doctor scoffed again. “Oh no, Oliver Day, nothing is stranger than some of the shows you-”
It was at exactly that moment that the TARDIS gave a great shudder and then pitched violently to the right. After a hard landing and an oof from each of them, Oliver abruptly burst out laughing. “‘Course not, Doctor!”
Sparks rained down on them from above, and the Doctor scrambled for the controls. Oliver just shook his head and picked himself up from the ground, ready for whatever facts--or even fiction--were about to come their way next.
“This doesn’t count as unreliability, you know! This is just...oof! Turbulence!”
“Whatever you say, Doctor. Whatever you say!”
Rating: G
Word Count: 3159
This takes place in an RP-verse, post-Crucible but pre-Gauntlet.
Happy (late) birthday to the wonderful vampydirector! This one's for you ♥.
“You knew that was going to happen,” Oliver accused, a bemused expression on his face that belied his words. He was sitting in a corner of their cell, relaxing against the wall and probably looking far calmer than anyone locked in a dungeon by rather angry aliens should look.
“How could I have known?” the Doctor scoffed, hunched over the cell door as he examined the lock.
“Oh, you could’ve,” Oliver insisted. “I bet the second you saw that ‘factualizer’ thingy, you thought, ‘the minute I say something about it, they’re going to throw me in the dungeon.’ And then you spoke up anyway.”
The Doctor shot him a look accompanied by a noise to signify his disagreement, but he had his sonic screwdriver out now and his specs on and was apparently too busy trying to do something to the bars to bother saying anything more.
Oliver smiled in amusement, deciding to neglect to mention that he would have been disappointed if the Doctor hadn’t spoken up about the destruction of those ancient medieval texts, superstitious though they may have been. He only hoped they could get back to that library before too much of this planet’s priceless history was lost. “So how long’s it gonna take, you think?” he asked.
“Hm?”
“To open the door?”
“That’s...a good question.” The Doctor sighed, turning his screwdriver off and straightening. He stashed his specs in his pocket. “It’s an old-fashioned lock.”
Oliver pulled himself up from his slouch, raising an eyebrow. “What do you mean? Like...too old for the sonic screwdriver?”
The Doctor screwed up his face. “Well, technically...yes.”
His companion gaped. “I don’t believe it!”
When the Doctor turned to him, everything about the man’s posture declared just how affronted he was at that comment. “I didn’t design it planning to go around unlocking the most primitive technology in the universe!”
“And why not?” Oliver asked. “You’re always getting locked in it.”
The Doctor opened his mouth to reply, but stopped.
Oliver grinned, feeling rather triumphant, but then the Doctor’s eyes lit up and his companion realized that he had simply had his train of thought derailed by an idea. So much for rendering the Doctor speechless. “What it is?” Oliver asked.
The Doctor grinned at him, a crafty gleam in his eyes. “Ollie, play along, but don’t say too much. We should be out of here in a jiffy. Oh, and you might want to stand up.”
“Uh...okay.” Oliver pulled himself to his feet. “But play along with wh-” But he didn’t bother to finish his thought as the Doctor had already turned away from him and was shaking the bars of their cell.
“Oi, Grel! We have facts for you! Yes, would you believe, we’ve found some facts in this cell? Well, you might not, but I certainly do, so why not come and hear them, just in case they’re good ones?”
“Doctor! What are-”
But between the Doctor waving a hand to silence him and the sound of approaching footsteps, Oliver sighed and closed his mouth again.
Their cephalopodan guard moved swiftly--seemingly eagerly--until it was standing across from their cell. “What facts?” it asked concisely, learning its squid-y face toward the Doctor.
“First fact,” the Doctor started, the hint of cheeky grin on his face. “I can’t open this door. Additional fact: neither can you.”
“Bad fact!” the Grel cried, leering in at the bars--as much as a squid could leer, at least.
The Doctor waggled a finger at him. “I’ll prove it. Watch.” And he pulled his sonic screwdriver back out of his pocket, pointing it at the lock on the bars and activating it. After about 15 seconds of apparently useless whirring, he turned it off. “See. I can’t open this door.”
“Good fact,” the Grel agreed. “You do not have the capacity to open it.”
“And neither can you,” the Doctor repeated.
Oliver fought back a snicker.
“Bad fact!”
“It is not!” the Doctor protested. “Here you are, and here’s the door. Still closed.” He gestured at it for effect. “So, you can’t open it.”
“Bad fact!” the Grel repeated. “Fact: just because a door is closed does not mean it is impossible to open it.”
The Doctor quirked an eyebrow. “Well, I’ve just proved I can’t open it. So why should you be able to? Because here’s a fact--I’m cleverer than you.”
Oliver shook his head, knowing that this time the Doctor had to be going too far. No guard could possibly be stupid enough to-
“Bad fact,” the guard hissed. “Speculation, not a fact.” And with a squidy sneer, the Grel reached into its vest and pulled out a large, black, slightly rusted, and rather stereotypically-designed key. Oliver couldn’t help thinking that this species was clearly just as imaginative while designing a time period-appropriate dungeon as it was in its reading preferences. The key gave a squeak as the Grel turned it in the lock. It pulled the door back--just a centimeter or two--and spat triumphantly, “Good fact! I can open the door.” into the Doctor’s face.
The Doctor ignored it and gave the door a solid push, catching the Grel--rather surprisingly, in Oliver’s opinion--off-guard. The door opened, the guard stumbled, and the Doctor bowled him over as he ran out of the cell. “Hurry up, Ollie!”
Oliver didn’t need the reminder. He was already rushing after the Doctor. “Sorry, mate!” he called with a less-than-apologetic grin to the guard as he passed him and followed the Doctor up the stone stairs. “So, that factualizer thing-”
“One problem at a time!” the Doctor called back to him.
“Yeah, but have you worked out how-”
“It’s this way!” The Doctor made a sharp turn to the left. “No, wait, that way...” He changed course.
If Oliver hadn’t been afraid of running out of breath, he would have sighed at the Doctor’s evasiveness. As it was, he hurried to make the same turns before the man got away from him.
“This way!”
After about 10 minutes of following a combination of the Doctor’s retreating back and the Doctor’s retreating voice, Oliver found to his relief that their current path through a drab stone corridor eventually opened into a small library--the same small library with the giant metallic book-destroying contraption that they had been in earlier.
“And here we are,” the Doctor declared. He immediately walked over to the factualizer, kneeling so he could remove the cover on what must have been an operating panel. Out came the sonic screwdriver again, and without further ado, he set to work on the machine’s inner workings.
Oliver watched curiously. “Great! So about stop-”
“Fact: we have found them!”
Two Grel guards, armed with time period inappropriate guns, stormed in through the library’s other entrance. Oliver swore.
Rather than looking alarmed, as one might have expected, the Doctor simply sighed at the intrusion. He straightened and pocketed his screwdriver, then raised his hands as Oliver followed suit.
“Good fact,” the Doctor agreed. “Or have we found you?”
“Bad fact!” the Grel hissed. “We are the ones who have just entered the room. Therefore, we must be the ones who have found you.”
“Oh yes, I guess you’re right. How silly of me! I must have been thinking about too many things at once.” He gave the Grel an apologetic--but cheeky--smile before turning to his companion and remarking conversationally, “Remember what I said about one thing at a time, Ollie? Because otherwise it’s like that movie...which was it? Where the power was failing in the crashed spaceship, and they tried to preserve the minds of some of the passengers locked in cryogenic stasis by loading them all into the mind of-”
Oliver frowned, glancing between the Doctor and the guns and wondering where this could possibly be going. “Daniel Jackson,” he said. “And that wasn’t a movie. That was a TV show.”
“Bad fact!” hissed one of the Grel, brandishing its gun. “Cryogenically preserved bodies cannot have their minds-”
“Ah yes, of course! Stargate!” the Doctor declared, nonplussed. “Wonderful machine, the stargate. Could never work, of course. But the idea is surprisingly sound--using coordinates to lock on a location. It’s the wormhole bit where they got it wrong, but it is a nice effect, isn’t it? That whoosh as you go through the wormhole.” He gestured for effect. “Especially when you match it up with the TV theme--now there’s the way to open a show!”
“Bad facts!” the other Grel echoed. “There is no such device as a stargate.”
“And a wormhole would not-”
But the Doctor ignored the agitated Grel, continuing on as though they weren’t even there. “But about that episode. The whole idea, of course, was that the human mind can only handle and process so much information at once--much like a machine.”
Oliver raised an eyebrow, watching as the Doctor broke out in a sly grin.
The Grel, meanwhile, seemed to have finished explaining the logical fallacies of the Doctor’s description of wormhole usage. One waved its gun angrily at the Doctor, advancing a few steps toward him. “You will move away from the factualizer now.”
The Doctor turned to him, rolling his eyes. “Oh yes, of course. Back to the dungeon with us, is it?” he asked as he obediently backed away from the machine, stepping between Oliver and the two armed guards. “Very mechanical thinking, that. But that’s what the Grel are known for, aren’t they? Just like all their technology.” He winked at Oliver.
Oliver’s eyes went wide at that, the pieces beginning to fall into place. “Hey, Doctor!” he quickly interrupted. “What you said about that Stargate episode.” He glanced at the Grel, hoping they would be too busy examining the fact and fiction of their conversation to do anything with those weapons, before plowing on. “It’s lucky most machines have to be fed data instead of just, you know, hearing it.”
“Oh, typically,” the Doctor agreed. “Unless they’ve been reprogrammed to process vocal signals.”
Oliver started to grin. “What, voice recognition? Don’t you know somebody always gets their throat crushed when that’s used? And then there’s the retina scan, where you either scan an unconscious person or go all Minority Report and, you know, start selling eyeballs-”
The Doctor shook his head. “Think outside the box, Ollie!” he chided. “That technology already exists in most of the universe. No, you have to be more creative than that. Take a DeLorean, for example.”
Oliver laughed. “What, driving at 88 miles per hour to activate the flux capacitor? Presto, wormhole--and time travel?”
“Exactly!”
“You will be quiet!” one of the Grel guards hissed. “You will stop giving bad facts!”
“Or what?” the Doctor countered, taking a defiant step toward the guards. “Or do you mean this is this a ‘stitch in time saves nine’ sort of moment?”
“Bad fact!” the other Grel cried. “Time cannot be stitched.”
“No, but it can sort of be sown!” Oliver piped up, trying to draw the attention of the Grel--and their waving guns--back to him. He spoke quickly, attempting to be as distracting as possible. “Well. Really sort of...sort of. I mean, from people’s perspective! Like, you’ve got this machine, the Matrix, and it’s actually trapping all sorts of future humans in it while they live out virtual lives like they’re on 21st century Earth.” He made a series of gestures as he spoke, trying not to think too much about the guns. To his relief, the Grel seemed to be too busy listening to shoot him--so far. “Which isn’t the real time; it’s only the time they think it is because they don’t know they’re in the machine and it’s actually way later than that. Freaky, huh?”
“Bad facts!” the Grel chorused. “No such machine has enslaved the humans.”
“Yeah, it has! Just ask Keanu Reeves.”
“Or Hugo Weaving,” the Doctor agreed cheerfully. “He’s an elf. Elves can be very trustworthy.”
Oliver grinned, his nerves beginning to fade. “As long as you can get past the pointy ears. And, you know, their aloofness, if you’re talking Lord of the Rings.”
“Bad fact!” hissed one of the Grel, pointing its gun at Oliver. “Elves do not exist.”
“Therefore, elves cannot be especially trustworthy,” agreed the other, keeping its gun trained on Oliver.
“Nor can they be aloof.”
“But they are! Just ask your machine.” The Doctor gestured smilingly at the factualizer, which, during their exchange, had begun to spout plumes of smoke.
“Fact: the factualizer has a fault!” one of the Grel gasped.
“Query: where is the fault?” the other asked.
They shared a look, then ran over to the machine. The first knelt beside it, beginning to examine the same access panel that the Doctor had used. “You, prisoner! Explain what you have done to the machine.”
“Me?” the Doctor asked innocently. “Oh, nothing much. It’s a bit like the Matrix, really--using a localized EMP to stop the Sentinels.”
“Bad fact: there has been no EMP!”
“How do you get that?” Oliver broke in.
“It’s experiencing a voltage surge,” the Doctor explained. “Just the sort you get when you combine solar flare activity with a stargate and cause the wormhole to jump to a different point in time.”
The smoke around the machine grew even denser at that, and the Grel at the controls scrambled back as the factualizer began to make a truly horrific whirring. “Fact: the factualizer is beginning to overload!”
“Well, that’s a bad fact for you,” Oliver remarked with a grin. “Really bad. Sorta like going in that solar flare-affected stargate at the wrong time. Because--and here’s a fact--doing that could end up a bit like...well, like a trip in the TARDIS!”
“Oi!” the Doctor interrupted. “My TARDIS is more reliable than a wormhole that overshot its intended destination by-”
The Grel shrieked. “Fact: the factualizer is going to explode!”
“Inference: we must retreat!”
They ran for cover, just as the machine gave an enormous judder and, while Oliver dove for the ground and the Doctor simultaneously half-tackled him, the gigantic factualizer blew to bits.
It took a few moments after the explosion for the dust to clear. When it did, Oliver and the Doctor were both coughing as they got up, brushing themselves down and picking bits of factualizer off their clothes.
“Well, that’s ironic,” Oliver said.
The Doctor raised an eyebrow. “That Earth’s idea of time travel was the last straw?”
Oliver grinned. “No. That the TARDIS’ reliability was.”
The Doctor gaped at him. “My TARDIS is not unreliable!”
“Sure, Doctor. Tell that to the Grel.”
The Doctor scoffed as he moved over to the remains of the machine, whipping out the sonic screwdriver to check them--probably to verify that it was truly destroyed. “It is not!” he protested. “Just how many times have we ended up somewhere...well, maybe you shouldn’t answer that. But how many times-”
“Speaking of the Grel,” Oliver interrupted, still grinning. “Shouldn’t we be getting out of here? I have a feeling those two aren’t just going to run for their lives and then forget about us.”
The Doctor made a face. “Probably not,” he agreed with a sigh, pocketing the screwdriver and straightening. “But.” He gave his companion a severely disapproving look. “I think you’re going to have to find your own ride this time.” And with that, he turned and started off at a run, back into the castle’s corridors.
“What!?” Oliver cried incredulously, taking off after him. “Oh, come on, Doctor, you know I was only taking the mick out of you. The TARDIS isn’t always unreliable. Only most of the time!”
“I hope you like the Middle Ages on Krethellis, Oliver Day! You’ll have a lot of time to get used to it!” came the Doctor’s echoing reply.
Oliver started up a stairway, yelling after him. “That’s not fair! Doesn’t the TARDIS get a say?”
Before the Doctor had a chance to respond, Oliver reached the landing to find that they were back out on the ramparts where they had landed in the first place, the aforementioned blue box thankfully standing where they’d left it--right in the way of the ladder to one of the parapets.
The Doctor gave him a glare when he saw him. “Only if you ask her nicely,” he said shortly as he turned the key in the lock.
Oliver scoffed, following him inside. “I’m always nice to the TARDIS! Aren’t I, TARDIS?” He smiled up at the central column, reaching out to pat the console.
The Doctor made a face. “Flattery will get you nowhere. He thinks you’re unreliable, old girl! Now what would give him an idea like that?”
“Ancient China.”
“That was a long time ago!” the Doctor protested as he patted the console consolingly. “And just think how much more fun that was. Would you really have preferred Ancient Greece? Watching Antigone?”
“Well, there would have been fewer arrows,” Oliver pointed out. “And fewer arrow wounds.”
The Doctor scoffed, waving a hand. But despite his earlier threats, he turned to the controls, beginning to input their next coordinates.
Oliver grinned. “But you do have a point, Doctor. And you know, I’m starting to think we missed a good way to destroy that Grel machine.”
The Doctor quirked an eyebrow, glancing at him. “Oh? And what was wrong with my brilliant plan?”
Oliver put his hands up defensively. “Nothing! ‘Course, I’m going to bring it up every time you give me a hard time about my TV and movie-watching from now on, but there was nothing wrong with it at all.”
The Doctor eyed him. “Of course there wasn’t. And there are still much better things to do with your mind, you know.”
“Oh, I agree!” Oliver said, grinning innocently.
For a moment, that response apparently left the man too surprised to respond. Quite a feat, Oliver couldn’t help thinking--especially where the Doctor was concerned.
“That’s just what I meant,” Oliver continued. “What we should have said to that Grel machine.”
“And that is?” the Doctor pressed, absently flicking a switch to set the time rotor into motion.
Oliver grinned. “That fact is stranger than fiction.”
The Doctor scoffed again. “Oh no, Oliver Day, nothing is stranger than some of the shows you-”
It was at exactly that moment that the TARDIS gave a great shudder and then pitched violently to the right. After a hard landing and an oof from each of them, Oliver abruptly burst out laughing. “‘Course not, Doctor!”
Sparks rained down on them from above, and the Doctor scrambled for the controls. Oliver just shook his head and picked himself up from the ground, ready for whatever facts--or even fiction--were about to come their way next.
“This doesn’t count as unreliability, you know! This is just...oof! Turbulence!”
“Whatever you say, Doctor. Whatever you say!”