Fic - Fireflies in New York (1/1, Doctor Who gen fic)
Title: Fireflies in New York
Author: Red Fiona
Fandom: Doctor Who
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters you recognise, the BBC do. No money being made from this.
Characters: Amy Pond, Alien OC
Rating: U rated gen, less peril than the Sarah Jane Adventures
Notes: Written for a meme prompt, but it went off-prompt. Slight spoilers for "Angels Take Manhattan"
Summary: Just because they're stuck in the 1930s and there's no Doctor about, it doesn't mean they're not going to investigate strange goings on.
There were some advantages to having been sent back to the 1930s but in the US, ways it was better than if they'd been sent back in time but stuck in the UK. While she and Rory knew the rough outlines of what would happen, in America they didn't know the details of day-to-day life, so they couldn't put their foot in it by saying something. And when they did make mistakes, it was put down to them being English (Amy had tried to explain that she was Scottish and one day people would listen).
Even so, Amy is reasonably sure that radios in the very early 1940s didn't have remote controls. It wasn't the only small gadget she'd seen recently in their neighbourhood that wasn't quite like what it should be. Something was definitely up.
Amy's incurably curious, she makes a living at it now, writing pulp sci-fi books to allow her to be a journalist the rest of the time, so she investigates.
But it wouldn't do to be a obvious about it. Most of the gadgets she'd seen belonged to the older ladies in the neighbourhood, and they'd never tell her if she asked them directly.
She starts with a list of all the strange items she's seen (and those Rory has seen after she's told him to keep an eye out) and who they belong to.
Amy begins her investigation with Ida, because she knows her best. Ida has a corner flat in the block next to Amy and Rory's, and Amy'd met her often enough going down to the corner store. Amy gets into Ida's flat, bringing a pot pie with her. She'd never thought her cooking, or Scottish cuisine, would encourage people to invite her anywhere, but apparently her food had rarity value. Or people were just being very polite.
Amy makes sure to ask about Ida's grandchildren, and hasn't the youngest grown, and check that she's not bothering the lady too much. She didn't think she was, Ida seemed to like the attention.
The story Ida tells is the same in most of its details to the stories everyone else will tell. She'd been having trouble with some electrical device and had taken it to Mr. Rachsi's shop three blocks down. He'd been very kind and helpful, and wasn't this upgrade swell.
The upgrades always were swell, useful, user-friendly, at least thirty and more often two hundred years too early, technology-wise.
The one thing all the items had in common, other than being small household goods, was that they'd all come from Mr. Rachsi.
Amy had no way of knowing whether Mr. Rachsi was doing all this out of the goodness of his heart, or whether he was seeding the neighbourhood with tech for some nefarious purpose. One way to maybe find out would be to "borrow" something and get Rory to take it apart, but she wasn't sure he could put them back together again and have them work, and she didn't want to deprive people of what were, possible intentions aside, really useful bits and bobs.
The other way, and she could already hear Rory's objections that it was too dangerous, would be to go and speak to Mr. Rachsi himself.
Amy knows she can be a bit bull in a china shop, but she really does think that's the better option. She leaves a note for Rory to say where she's gone, it's probably best not to go together just in case something goes wrong, and Rory is needed to help her get out of whatever trouble she gets into.
The shop itself looks ordinary, blue wooden storefront with the name in cream paint. The electronic goods in the window aren't anything unusual, nothing she wouldn't expect from this here and this now. Nothing like what she'd seen at Ida's, or Mary's, or anyone else's.
Amy went round the back of the shop. Again, it looked completely ordinary, no obvious sign of anything, no tunnels, no extension backing on to something that could be the hidden base for someone trying to take over Earth. Amy had had enough experience of distortion fields to try the obvious things to break them, high pitched sharp noises, closing one eye and rocking backwards and forwards, running backwards and forwards at anything that might have been the edges of a field.
Nothing happened, except Amy looking silly and scaring one of the neighbourhood stray cats.
Amy knew that not finding any evidence of a hidden base didn't mean there wasn't one, but she checked all the obvious things, either in person, or at the planning office before coming. There was nothing for it but to go in.
The inside of the shop wasn't any more remarkable than the front had been. Even in the there-and-then it looked old fashioned, and none of the items further back in the shop were any more obviously alien than the things in the window.
"Good afternoon to you. Can I help?" Mr. Rachsi, the shop owner, came through the colourful beads that covered the doorway that led from the backroom to the shop itself.
There weren't any obvious tentacles. Nothing to make him stand out at all; curly brown hair, traditional number of eyes, nose and mouth, leather apron, shirt and smart slacks.
That does leave Amy with a bit of a problem. She had no reason for being in a repair shop. She hadn't brought anything with her in case she needed to run away (run light, she'd learned that from the Doctor), Rachsi's work notwithstanding, technology now was all bulky, too bulky to carry easily, so she couldn't even hand anything over to be fixed.
Even if he doesn't have tentacles, and doesn't mean to be threatening, Rachsi was still significantly bigger than her, and these were not good boots for running away in.
"The problem is with ... my toaster. Yes, my toaster."
"What's wrong with it?" Perfectly reasonable question in the circumstances.
"It doesn't toast properly. You know, it's just not ... toasting." Amy's ability to lie is being disturbed by Rachsi moving out from behind his counter and towards her.
"You're a terrible liar, you know." A broad grin broke out on Rachsi's face. Right number of teeth, which ruled out a few more possibilities. "Which of the gadgets clued you in? Mrs. Green's radio? It was, wasn't it? I knew I went too far, but with her hearing, the lady needs the sound quality."
"It was Ida ... Mrs. Schering's remote." Amy realised she'd lost control of the conversation. "Wait, wait, wait, how do you know I know those gadgets are all wrong for when we are?"
"You mean you can't see it? Time travel, it leaves its traces on you. I thought everyone could see that." Rachsi's grin turns into astonishment, when he realised Amy wasn't faking it, she really had no idea what he was talking about. "You're actual standard Terran and only that!" A brief pause before a rather high-pitched, "how?" Amy's had it drilled into her that the interrobang is not a piece of punctuation to be used in serious journalism, but if she were writing this up, which she won't, that's what would be needed to convey the tone of Rachsi's voice. "I mean, by the time tech got as far as time travel, everyone was a little bit alien, and Terrans, they stand out as being one of the few people that can't see time trails, and, not being rude, you're not tall enough to be a Vhlorg, seeing as how you fit in through the door."
Amy nodded, "We have a friend, who brought us here, and we ... we got separated." Which is mostly true and she understands now why the Doctor often used to say 'except not' at the end of sentences.
"So you're stuck here too. Dhauces, I'm sort of Dhauces, mostly, my mother's side of the family, we don't ask to much about Grandad. Anyway, Dhauces, our ships are based on black hole slingshot drives. And you know how easily those go wrong." Amy knows enough by now to know this is when you smile and nod. "Normally, it's not a problem. Fire the ship up and retrace your path and you'll be slingshotted back to where you started from, give or take a few thousand miles, but there seems to be some sort of temporal storm that's blocking me, so I'm stuck until it blows over." Amy felt this would be a bad time to reveal she knew anything about the cause of said temporal storm. "I'd offer to give you a boost when it clears up, but slingshot drives," Rachsi had picked up some very New York gestures while he'd been here.
Still the vagaries of slingshot drives meant that Amy didn't have to come up with an excuse for not taking Rachsi up on his kindly-meant offer.
Later Rachsi explains that time travel leaves a glow on you, it looks like the luminescence of dragonflies. There's a lot later, Amy thinks Rachsi's happy to have someone to talk to where he doesn't have to lie about who he is. He says that's one of the things he likes about New York, you can be vague and everyone assumes it's just because you're from New York which renders everything possible.
Amy explains that she's lucky, she's not alone and lost in time, she got stuck with her husband. Rachsi looked up, intrigued, "might explain the flashes of time traces I see sometimes, if there's two of you."
They do, eventually, come back to the gadgets which had lead Amy here in the first place.
"It's not like I'm doing any harm," Rachsi says, defending himself. "And it's not like I can take them away now I'm given them. Mrs. Schering, if she's not got the remote, she's going to walk over to change the radio station, and you know how she is on her feet.
"But what if someone takes them and figures out how they work. It could change history, and technology, and everything."
Rachsi is disturbingly calm about the possibility. "It's not like anyone's going to do that. Who goes through their mother's knick-knacks once they come into their possession."
"Like anyone's going to listen. They'll just assume they're misremembering something, 'cause kids see and say all sorts of crazy things."
Amy's still not sure she can deal with someone being so blasé about that sort of thing, she'd seen the damage it had caused, the pain of knowing you were telling the truth and your options were lying or having all kinds of visits to doctors. "We can't let that happen."
"Oh-kay, we won't let that happen." Apparently, Amy was scary enough to stop Rachsi's complacency, judging by his tone and the way his eyes widened. She hadn't meant to be, but she thinks that medicine in the here and now would be even less sympathetic to any of the neighbourhood grandkids than it had been to her in the future.
They talk some more, stopping when other customers come in.
Amy goes home at the end of the day convinced that the gadgets aren't part of a plan to take over the world.
It becomes a semi-regular thing, her visiting Rachsi at his shop. She does suggest he visit them sometimes, but he doesn't like to leave his ship, stored in the basement, hidden by electric bits and bobs, unattended. She brings Rory along sometimes, and turns a blind eye to any tinkering with medical devices he encourages in Rachsi.
She'll miss Rachsi when he goes when the time storm blows over in five years, even more than the OAPs who get his gadgets will, because it is nice to have someone as well as Rory who she doesn't need to watch herself around as much.
Author: Red Fiona
Fandom: Doctor Who
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters you recognise, the BBC do. No money being made from this.
Characters: Amy Pond, Alien OC
Rating: U rated gen, less peril than the Sarah Jane Adventures
Notes: Written for a meme prompt, but it went off-prompt. Slight spoilers for "Angels Take Manhattan"
Summary: Just because they're stuck in the 1930s and there's no Doctor about, it doesn't mean they're not going to investigate strange goings on.
There were some advantages to having been sent back to the 1930s but in the US, ways it was better than if they'd been sent back in time but stuck in the UK. While she and Rory knew the rough outlines of what would happen, in America they didn't know the details of day-to-day life, so they couldn't put their foot in it by saying something. And when they did make mistakes, it was put down to them being English (Amy had tried to explain that she was Scottish and one day people would listen).
Even so, Amy is reasonably sure that radios in the very early 1940s didn't have remote controls. It wasn't the only small gadget she'd seen recently in their neighbourhood that wasn't quite like what it should be. Something was definitely up.
Amy's incurably curious, she makes a living at it now, writing pulp sci-fi books to allow her to be a journalist the rest of the time, so she investigates.
But it wouldn't do to be a obvious about it. Most of the gadgets she'd seen belonged to the older ladies in the neighbourhood, and they'd never tell her if she asked them directly.
She starts with a list of all the strange items she's seen (and those Rory has seen after she's told him to keep an eye out) and who they belong to.
Amy begins her investigation with Ida, because she knows her best. Ida has a corner flat in the block next to Amy and Rory's, and Amy'd met her often enough going down to the corner store. Amy gets into Ida's flat, bringing a pot pie with her. She'd never thought her cooking, or Scottish cuisine, would encourage people to invite her anywhere, but apparently her food had rarity value. Or people were just being very polite.
Amy makes sure to ask about Ida's grandchildren, and hasn't the youngest grown, and check that she's not bothering the lady too much. She didn't think she was, Ida seemed to like the attention.
The story Ida tells is the same in most of its details to the stories everyone else will tell. She'd been having trouble with some electrical device and had taken it to Mr. Rachsi's shop three blocks down. He'd been very kind and helpful, and wasn't this upgrade swell.
The upgrades always were swell, useful, user-friendly, at least thirty and more often two hundred years too early, technology-wise.
The one thing all the items had in common, other than being small household goods, was that they'd all come from Mr. Rachsi.
Amy had no way of knowing whether Mr. Rachsi was doing all this out of the goodness of his heart, or whether he was seeding the neighbourhood with tech for some nefarious purpose. One way to maybe find out would be to "borrow" something and get Rory to take it apart, but she wasn't sure he could put them back together again and have them work, and she didn't want to deprive people of what were, possible intentions aside, really useful bits and bobs.
The other way, and she could already hear Rory's objections that it was too dangerous, would be to go and speak to Mr. Rachsi himself.
Amy knows she can be a bit bull in a china shop, but she really does think that's the better option. She leaves a note for Rory to say where she's gone, it's probably best not to go together just in case something goes wrong, and Rory is needed to help her get out of whatever trouble she gets into.
The shop itself looks ordinary, blue wooden storefront with the name in cream paint. The electronic goods in the window aren't anything unusual, nothing she wouldn't expect from this here and this now. Nothing like what she'd seen at Ida's, or Mary's, or anyone else's.
Amy went round the back of the shop. Again, it looked completely ordinary, no obvious sign of anything, no tunnels, no extension backing on to something that could be the hidden base for someone trying to take over Earth. Amy had had enough experience of distortion fields to try the obvious things to break them, high pitched sharp noises, closing one eye and rocking backwards and forwards, running backwards and forwards at anything that might have been the edges of a field.
Nothing happened, except Amy looking silly and scaring one of the neighbourhood stray cats.
Amy knew that not finding any evidence of a hidden base didn't mean there wasn't one, but she checked all the obvious things, either in person, or at the planning office before coming. There was nothing for it but to go in.
The inside of the shop wasn't any more remarkable than the front had been. Even in the there-and-then it looked old fashioned, and none of the items further back in the shop were any more obviously alien than the things in the window.
"Good afternoon to you. Can I help?" Mr. Rachsi, the shop owner, came through the colourful beads that covered the doorway that led from the backroom to the shop itself.
There weren't any obvious tentacles. Nothing to make him stand out at all; curly brown hair, traditional number of eyes, nose and mouth, leather apron, shirt and smart slacks.
That does leave Amy with a bit of a problem. She had no reason for being in a repair shop. She hadn't brought anything with her in case she needed to run away (run light, she'd learned that from the Doctor), Rachsi's work notwithstanding, technology now was all bulky, too bulky to carry easily, so she couldn't even hand anything over to be fixed.
Even if he doesn't have tentacles, and doesn't mean to be threatening, Rachsi was still significantly bigger than her, and these were not good boots for running away in.
"The problem is with ... my toaster. Yes, my toaster."
"What's wrong with it?" Perfectly reasonable question in the circumstances.
"It doesn't toast properly. You know, it's just not ... toasting." Amy's ability to lie is being disturbed by Rachsi moving out from behind his counter and towards her.
"You're a terrible liar, you know." A broad grin broke out on Rachsi's face. Right number of teeth, which ruled out a few more possibilities. "Which of the gadgets clued you in? Mrs. Green's radio? It was, wasn't it? I knew I went too far, but with her hearing, the lady needs the sound quality."
"It was Ida ... Mrs. Schering's remote." Amy realised she'd lost control of the conversation. "Wait, wait, wait, how do you know I know those gadgets are all wrong for when we are?"
"You mean you can't see it? Time travel, it leaves its traces on you. I thought everyone could see that." Rachsi's grin turns into astonishment, when he realised Amy wasn't faking it, she really had no idea what he was talking about. "You're actual standard Terran and only that!" A brief pause before a rather high-pitched, "how?" Amy's had it drilled into her that the interrobang is not a piece of punctuation to be used in serious journalism, but if she were writing this up, which she won't, that's what would be needed to convey the tone of Rachsi's voice. "I mean, by the time tech got as far as time travel, everyone was a little bit alien, and Terrans, they stand out as being one of the few people that can't see time trails, and, not being rude, you're not tall enough to be a Vhlorg, seeing as how you fit in through the door."
Amy nodded, "We have a friend, who brought us here, and we ... we got separated." Which is mostly true and she understands now why the Doctor often used to say 'except not' at the end of sentences.
"So you're stuck here too. Dhauces, I'm sort of Dhauces, mostly, my mother's side of the family, we don't ask to much about Grandad. Anyway, Dhauces, our ships are based on black hole slingshot drives. And you know how easily those go wrong." Amy knows enough by now to know this is when you smile and nod. "Normally, it's not a problem. Fire the ship up and retrace your path and you'll be slingshotted back to where you started from, give or take a few thousand miles, but there seems to be some sort of temporal storm that's blocking me, so I'm stuck until it blows over." Amy felt this would be a bad time to reveal she knew anything about the cause of said temporal storm. "I'd offer to give you a boost when it clears up, but slingshot drives," Rachsi had picked up some very New York gestures while he'd been here.
Still the vagaries of slingshot drives meant that Amy didn't have to come up with an excuse for not taking Rachsi up on his kindly-meant offer.
Later Rachsi explains that time travel leaves a glow on you, it looks like the luminescence of dragonflies. There's a lot later, Amy thinks Rachsi's happy to have someone to talk to where he doesn't have to lie about who he is. He says that's one of the things he likes about New York, you can be vague and everyone assumes it's just because you're from New York which renders everything possible.
Amy explains that she's lucky, she's not alone and lost in time, she got stuck with her husband. Rachsi looked up, intrigued, "might explain the flashes of time traces I see sometimes, if there's two of you."
They do, eventually, come back to the gadgets which had lead Amy here in the first place.
"It's not like I'm doing any harm," Rachsi says, defending himself. "And it's not like I can take them away now I'm given them. Mrs. Schering, if she's not got the remote, she's going to walk over to change the radio station, and you know how she is on her feet.
"But what if someone takes them and figures out how they work. It could change history, and technology, and everything."
Rachsi is disturbingly calm about the possibility. "It's not like anyone's going to do that. Who goes through their mother's knick-knacks once they come into their possession."
"Like anyone's going to listen. They'll just assume they're misremembering something, 'cause kids see and say all sorts of crazy things."
Amy's still not sure she can deal with someone being so blasé about that sort of thing, she'd seen the damage it had caused, the pain of knowing you were telling the truth and your options were lying or having all kinds of visits to doctors. "We can't let that happen."
"Oh-kay, we won't let that happen." Apparently, Amy was scary enough to stop Rachsi's complacency, judging by his tone and the way his eyes widened. She hadn't meant to be, but she thinks that medicine in the here and now would be even less sympathetic to any of the neighbourhood grandkids than it had been to her in the future.
They talk some more, stopping when other customers come in.
Amy goes home at the end of the day convinced that the gadgets aren't part of a plan to take over the world.
It becomes a semi-regular thing, her visiting Rachsi at his shop. She does suggest he visit them sometimes, but he doesn't like to leave his ship, stored in the basement, hidden by electric bits and bobs, unattended. She brings Rory along sometimes, and turns a blind eye to any tinkering with medical devices he encourages in Rachsi.
She'll miss Rachsi when he goes when the time storm blows over in five years, even more than the OAPs who get his gadgets will, because it is nice to have someone as well as Rory who she doesn't need to watch herself around as much.