Crossover Fic (Part 1/4)
“Smeg,” Lister said, turning around under his duvet and squinting at the lights. “And I was having such a nice dream.”
Rimmer shot out of his bunk and concentrated on switching his apparel from pajamas to uniform. The change was seamless, without any flicker of nakedness. Lister silently noted that he’d gotten better at that.
“Out of bed, Listy! It could be aliens! Have you done a scan, Holly?”
“I tried, but I can’t get past the shields. They can’t be very big aliens, though, Arnold. The ship’s only the size of a telephone box.”
“Sure it isn’t another garbage pod, Hol?” Lister asked as he jumped down from the upper bunk in a dirty t-shirt and boxer shorts. He glanced at Rimmer’s face, hoping to see annoyance, and was rewarded with a frown.
“Surely not, if it has materialized onboard without crashing. Where is it, Holly?”
“Let’s see…on Floor 607. Right near the disco hall.”
“All right. Let’s go take a look.” Lister headed for the door.
“Wait a minute. You’re going to greet our alien friends dressed like that?” Rimmer looked disgusted.
Lister looked down at himself. “Yeah.”
“What if they’re gorgeous alien women? They’ll take one look at you and vomit.”
“Hmm. Yeah, suppose you’re right.” Lister admitted, and then grabbed his leather jacket. “There. Much better. No ladies will be able to resist me now!”
“I doubt they’ll be that alien, Listy.”
They bickered the rest of the way.
“Well now, let’s take a look,” The Doctor announced, swinging open the TARDIS door. “Hmm. Appears to be a mining ship, of Earth origin.”
A tall, red-headed girl exited the TARDIS after him, wearing a very short skirt. “Ugh, who was in charge of decorating? This gray is horrible.” Amelia - now called Amy -- Pond remarked in a disappointed Scottish lilt. Why did they never get to visit Rio in the summertime, or Disneyland at Christmas?
“Ah-ha! I’d place this as 22nd Century design - you can tell by the overwhelming influence of the 1980’s, which was making a comeback at the time. But this air smells older than that…and there’s a trace of...” He sniffed, “Cadmium 2. Oh, dear,” He pulled out his sonic screwdriver and used it to check something in the air. “No, it’s fine, it’s inert now. But that means….”
And the Doctor continued looking around at the ugly gray walls and talking to himself.
A third person emerged from the TARDIS. He was broad-shouldered, confident, and frankly, gorgeous. He wore a World War II era overcoat and an unimpressed look on his face. Captain Jack Harkness took one look around, saw there were no immediate people to meet and seduce, and sighed.
“Well this is nice,” he said sarcastically in an American accent. “I told him we should try out a comfortable, welcoming Pleasure Planet, but no, he has to use the randomizer.”
They both watched the Doctor for a moment, finding untold glee in the readings on his screwdriver from a little robot that had rolled up to greet them.
“A skutter!” he exclaimed, and then tried talking to it.
“Has he always been like this?” Amy asked, looking bemusedly at the sweet, clueless man who was trying to engage a robot in discourse.
“He has always been strange, but he hasn’t always worn a bowtie. That’s new.” He responded.
She laughed.
“Alright Doctor, where are we? And why isn’t it a nice island off the Pacific for once?” Amy asked.
“When you’re old enough to fly the TARDIS, Pond, you can pick destinations. Until then, don’t be a backseat driver.” The Doctor chided.
“How old do I have to be for that?” she asked.
“Hundred and fifty,” the Doctor answered distractedly, looking at a manufacturer’s code on the side of the skutter.
Amy rolled her eyes and leaned against one of the ugly corridor walls.
“Does that mean I get to pilot us next time?” Captain Jack asked the Doctor, wasting a flirtatious smile on the other man’s turned back.
“Did I say a hundred and fifty? I meant five hundred.” The Doctor retorted soundly.
“Spoilsport.” Jack pouted. “I don’t mind. I’ve got all the time in the world.”
Amy didn’t believe for one minute that the man standing in front of her was over a hundred and fifty years old - he looked, at the most, thirty-five. Still, stranger things had happened, she reminded herself. And the Doctor claimed to be nearing a thousand years old. Was she the only one around here who was as old as she looked? Twenty-one and traversing the galaxies with a couple of geriatrics - what a life.
“The Red Dwarf!” The Doctor exclaimed. “Ha! How d’you like that!”
“Surely not the Red Dwarf, Doctor?” Jack asked, his interest piqued.
“The very same! Wow. The lost vessel of the Jupiter Mining Corps. I always wondered what happened to it. And if my guess is right, and they nearly always are, I think a radiation leak was to blame.”
“What’s the Red Dwarf?” Amy asked.
“It was a mining vessel that disappeared in the 22nd Century without a trace, never to be heard from again,” Jack explained. In his time, everyone learned about the mysterious disappearance of the ship in history class. “A lone distress signal, then all of a sudden just, poof, it jumped into hyperdrive. Over a thousand people gone forever. Everyone assumed it had been destroyed or hijacked. It became the stuff of legend.”
“Where is everyone, then?” Amy asked, noting for the first time a tiny heap of white powdery dust further down the hallway.
“Ah. Well, no one could survive a radiation leak that huge.” The Doctor explained, a hint of sadness around his eyes. “And even if they could, all the original crew would be dead by now. I’m surprised there’s electricity on the ship at all by this point.”
“When are we?”
The Doctor checked his screwdriver, and then his watch.
“Roughly…the year 3,002, 288…ish.”
“Blimey.” Amy said, her eyes widening.
“So everyone is dead, and they have been for millennia? Quickest case we’ve ever solved, Doctor. Wonderful.” Jack summed-up happily. “Let’s get back in the TARDIS and punch in some coordinates around, oh, I don’t know, the last moon of Poosh? I hear it’s lovely at Otherstide.”
“There’s something wrong,” the Doctor stated plainly, a thin frown on his face as he waved the sonic screwdriver at a blank screen on the wall. “Maybe the computer is still active…”
And he ignored his companions once again, trying to find a way to bring up the ship’s data logs.
“Of course something’s wrong.” Amy chimed in. “Something’s always amiss, isn’t it, Doctor? And I don’t mind the mysteries, really I don’t, but why can’t we have a nice exotic mystery somewhere pretty? Hmm?”
“Don’t bother,” Jack advised. “He’s already too fixated on this one. We can harass him later, when he’s actually listening.”
“I never listen,” the Doctor retorted, still fiddling with the screen.
A nearly-bald head appeared on the screen with a resounding, “Oi, mate, do you mind?!”
Amy jumped at the sudden appearance of a hovering head on the ancient system, and Jack moved from his casual stance to one where he could quickly reach for his pistol beneath the coat.
“Oh, ever-so sorry,” the Doctor responded, seemingly unfazed. “I was trying to pull up the data logs. Who are you?”
“Who am I, he asks! He appears uninvited on my ship, fiddles with my buttons, doesn’t bother introducing himself, and then has the nerve to ask who I am?”
“It appears so,” the Doctor responded.
The hovering face grinned appreciatively at his cheekiness.
“Holly. Ship’s computer. IQ of 6,000. And who are you, all dressed up and showing off your neck with a spiffy bowtie and rocking a righteous tweed jacket?”
“I’m the Doctor.”
“You could have showed up sooner, mate. Everyone’s already dead. Still, nice to meet you.”
“Amy Pond. Hello,” Amy said tentatively, walking up to the screen beside the Doctor.
“Well hello, love. Haven’t seen one of your kind around here for awhile.”
“Someone Scottish?”
“Nah, someone with tits.”
The Doctor raised his eyebrows and looked away, trying to appear busy with the screwdriver. Amy didn’t have a chance to respond, because Jack stepped up next to introduce himself, walking between his two fellow travelers.
“Captain Jack Harkness, pleasure to meet you.” He gave a winning smile and suggestive tilt of the head.
“Stop it, Jack,” the Doctor said half-heartedly. Trying to curb the other man’s flirting was like trying to keep a cat in heat from meowing lustfully at the window all night long.
“Bloody hell, not another one. Let me just warn you now, Captain Charisma. The hologram is gonna hate you.” Somehow that thought gave Holly an even bigger grin.
Jack looked puzzled, but assumed the computer was probably more than a bit senile after a few million years alone.
“You’ve got a hologram on board?” The Doctor asked.
“Unfortunately,” Holly replied.
“But surely the power drain is sufficient reason to disengage its circuits, unless…is it keeping you company?”
“God no. I can’t stand him. He’s company for one Dave Lister, the last human alive. Ah. And there is that wonderful beacon of humanity now,” Holly said, nodding to the corridor behind them.
They turned.
Before them stood an anal-retentive hologram with a look of abject horror on his face and a smelly-looking dreadlocked man trying to pull down his shirt to cover his boxer shorts as he smiled sheepishly, eyes on Amy.
“What did I tell you, Listy. Trousers. Bet you wish you’d listened now, eh?” The hologram said smugly to the human.
“Well, this is unexpected.” The Doctor said calmly, appraising them.
“But not unwelcome,” Jack added, unabashedly looking Lister up and down with a suggestive grin.
“Doctor!” Amy whispered, leaning over to speak to him. “Please tell me I don’t have to repopulate the species with that…guy.”
“Nonsense, Amelia,” the Doctor said reassuringly. “You barely know each other yet.”
She did not look reassured.
“What say we all sit down for a drink and figure all this out. We can share stories. Maybe we can figure out something…mutually beneficial. Gentlemen?” Jack asked flirtatiously, gliding toward them.
The Doctor and Amy didn’t have a better plan of action, and so for once Jack wasn’t scolded for trying to seduce strangers in their midst.
Rimmer shot out of his bunk and concentrated on switching his apparel from pajamas to uniform. The change was seamless, without any flicker of nakedness. Lister silently noted that he’d gotten better at that.
“Out of bed, Listy! It could be aliens! Have you done a scan, Holly?”
“I tried, but I can’t get past the shields. They can’t be very big aliens, though, Arnold. The ship’s only the size of a telephone box.”
“Sure it isn’t another garbage pod, Hol?” Lister asked as he jumped down from the upper bunk in a dirty t-shirt and boxer shorts. He glanced at Rimmer’s face, hoping to see annoyance, and was rewarded with a frown.
“Surely not, if it has materialized onboard without crashing. Where is it, Holly?”
“Let’s see…on Floor 607. Right near the disco hall.”
“All right. Let’s go take a look.” Lister headed for the door.
“Wait a minute. You’re going to greet our alien friends dressed like that?” Rimmer looked disgusted.
Lister looked down at himself. “Yeah.”
“What if they’re gorgeous alien women? They’ll take one look at you and vomit.”
“Hmm. Yeah, suppose you’re right.” Lister admitted, and then grabbed his leather jacket. “There. Much better. No ladies will be able to resist me now!”
“I doubt they’ll be that alien, Listy.”
They bickered the rest of the way.
“Well now, let’s take a look,” The Doctor announced, swinging open the TARDIS door. “Hmm. Appears to be a mining ship, of Earth origin.”
A tall, red-headed girl exited the TARDIS after him, wearing a very short skirt. “Ugh, who was in charge of decorating? This gray is horrible.” Amelia - now called Amy -- Pond remarked in a disappointed Scottish lilt. Why did they never get to visit Rio in the summertime, or Disneyland at Christmas?
“Ah-ha! I’d place this as 22nd Century design - you can tell by the overwhelming influence of the 1980’s, which was making a comeback at the time. But this air smells older than that…and there’s a trace of...” He sniffed, “Cadmium 2. Oh, dear,” He pulled out his sonic screwdriver and used it to check something in the air. “No, it’s fine, it’s inert now. But that means….”
And the Doctor continued looking around at the ugly gray walls and talking to himself.
A third person emerged from the TARDIS. He was broad-shouldered, confident, and frankly, gorgeous. He wore a World War II era overcoat and an unimpressed look on his face. Captain Jack Harkness took one look around, saw there were no immediate people to meet and seduce, and sighed.
“Well this is nice,” he said sarcastically in an American accent. “I told him we should try out a comfortable, welcoming Pleasure Planet, but no, he has to use the randomizer.”
They both watched the Doctor for a moment, finding untold glee in the readings on his screwdriver from a little robot that had rolled up to greet them.
“A skutter!” he exclaimed, and then tried talking to it.
“Has he always been like this?” Amy asked, looking bemusedly at the sweet, clueless man who was trying to engage a robot in discourse.
“He has always been strange, but he hasn’t always worn a bowtie. That’s new.” He responded.
She laughed.
“Alright Doctor, where are we? And why isn’t it a nice island off the Pacific for once?” Amy asked.
“When you’re old enough to fly the TARDIS, Pond, you can pick destinations. Until then, don’t be a backseat driver.” The Doctor chided.
“How old do I have to be for that?” she asked.
“Hundred and fifty,” the Doctor answered distractedly, looking at a manufacturer’s code on the side of the skutter.
Amy rolled her eyes and leaned against one of the ugly corridor walls.
“Does that mean I get to pilot us next time?” Captain Jack asked the Doctor, wasting a flirtatious smile on the other man’s turned back.
“Did I say a hundred and fifty? I meant five hundred.” The Doctor retorted soundly.
“Spoilsport.” Jack pouted. “I don’t mind. I’ve got all the time in the world.”
Amy didn’t believe for one minute that the man standing in front of her was over a hundred and fifty years old - he looked, at the most, thirty-five. Still, stranger things had happened, she reminded herself. And the Doctor claimed to be nearing a thousand years old. Was she the only one around here who was as old as she looked? Twenty-one and traversing the galaxies with a couple of geriatrics - what a life.
“The Red Dwarf!” The Doctor exclaimed. “Ha! How d’you like that!”
“Surely not the Red Dwarf, Doctor?” Jack asked, his interest piqued.
“The very same! Wow. The lost vessel of the Jupiter Mining Corps. I always wondered what happened to it. And if my guess is right, and they nearly always are, I think a radiation leak was to blame.”
“What’s the Red Dwarf?” Amy asked.
“It was a mining vessel that disappeared in the 22nd Century without a trace, never to be heard from again,” Jack explained. In his time, everyone learned about the mysterious disappearance of the ship in history class. “A lone distress signal, then all of a sudden just, poof, it jumped into hyperdrive. Over a thousand people gone forever. Everyone assumed it had been destroyed or hijacked. It became the stuff of legend.”
“Where is everyone, then?” Amy asked, noting for the first time a tiny heap of white powdery dust further down the hallway.
“Ah. Well, no one could survive a radiation leak that huge.” The Doctor explained, a hint of sadness around his eyes. “And even if they could, all the original crew would be dead by now. I’m surprised there’s electricity on the ship at all by this point.”
“When are we?”
The Doctor checked his screwdriver, and then his watch.
“Roughly…the year 3,002, 288…ish.”
“Blimey.” Amy said, her eyes widening.
“So everyone is dead, and they have been for millennia? Quickest case we’ve ever solved, Doctor. Wonderful.” Jack summed-up happily. “Let’s get back in the TARDIS and punch in some coordinates around, oh, I don’t know, the last moon of Poosh? I hear it’s lovely at Otherstide.”
“There’s something wrong,” the Doctor stated plainly, a thin frown on his face as he waved the sonic screwdriver at a blank screen on the wall. “Maybe the computer is still active…”
And he ignored his companions once again, trying to find a way to bring up the ship’s data logs.
“Of course something’s wrong.” Amy chimed in. “Something’s always amiss, isn’t it, Doctor? And I don’t mind the mysteries, really I don’t, but why can’t we have a nice exotic mystery somewhere pretty? Hmm?”
“Don’t bother,” Jack advised. “He’s already too fixated on this one. We can harass him later, when he’s actually listening.”
“I never listen,” the Doctor retorted, still fiddling with the screen.
A nearly-bald head appeared on the screen with a resounding, “Oi, mate, do you mind?!”
Amy jumped at the sudden appearance of a hovering head on the ancient system, and Jack moved from his casual stance to one where he could quickly reach for his pistol beneath the coat.
“Oh, ever-so sorry,” the Doctor responded, seemingly unfazed. “I was trying to pull up the data logs. Who are you?”
“Who am I, he asks! He appears uninvited on my ship, fiddles with my buttons, doesn’t bother introducing himself, and then has the nerve to ask who I am?”
“It appears so,” the Doctor responded.
The hovering face grinned appreciatively at his cheekiness.
“Holly. Ship’s computer. IQ of 6,000. And who are you, all dressed up and showing off your neck with a spiffy bowtie and rocking a righteous tweed jacket?”
“I’m the Doctor.”
“You could have showed up sooner, mate. Everyone’s already dead. Still, nice to meet you.”
“Amy Pond. Hello,” Amy said tentatively, walking up to the screen beside the Doctor.
“Well hello, love. Haven’t seen one of your kind around here for awhile.”
“Someone Scottish?”
“Nah, someone with tits.”
The Doctor raised his eyebrows and looked away, trying to appear busy with the screwdriver. Amy didn’t have a chance to respond, because Jack stepped up next to introduce himself, walking between his two fellow travelers.
“Captain Jack Harkness, pleasure to meet you.” He gave a winning smile and suggestive tilt of the head.
“Stop it, Jack,” the Doctor said half-heartedly. Trying to curb the other man’s flirting was like trying to keep a cat in heat from meowing lustfully at the window all night long.
“Bloody hell, not another one. Let me just warn you now, Captain Charisma. The hologram is gonna hate you.” Somehow that thought gave Holly an even bigger grin.
Jack looked puzzled, but assumed the computer was probably more than a bit senile after a few million years alone.
“You’ve got a hologram on board?” The Doctor asked.
“Unfortunately,” Holly replied.
“But surely the power drain is sufficient reason to disengage its circuits, unless…is it keeping you company?”
“God no. I can’t stand him. He’s company for one Dave Lister, the last human alive. Ah. And there is that wonderful beacon of humanity now,” Holly said, nodding to the corridor behind them.
They turned.
Before them stood an anal-retentive hologram with a look of abject horror on his face and a smelly-looking dreadlocked man trying to pull down his shirt to cover his boxer shorts as he smiled sheepishly, eyes on Amy.
“What did I tell you, Listy. Trousers. Bet you wish you’d listened now, eh?” The hologram said smugly to the human.
“Well, this is unexpected.” The Doctor said calmly, appraising them.
“But not unwelcome,” Jack added, unabashedly looking Lister up and down with a suggestive grin.
“Doctor!” Amy whispered, leaning over to speak to him. “Please tell me I don’t have to repopulate the species with that…guy.”
“Nonsense, Amelia,” the Doctor said reassuringly. “You barely know each other yet.”
She did not look reassured.
“What say we all sit down for a drink and figure all this out. We can share stories. Maybe we can figure out something…mutually beneficial. Gentlemen?” Jack asked flirtatiously, gliding toward them.
The Doctor and Amy didn’t have a better plan of action, and so for once Jack wasn’t scolded for trying to seduce strangers in their midst.