Fic: The Memory Remains (1/2)
Title: The Memory Remains (1/2)
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters: Donna Noble
Summary: It's a crying shame that Donna can't remember the last eighteenth months of her life, especially now that there are alien space eggs growing in the photocopiers.
Rating: G
A/N: Written for the finish-a-thon, and ironically enough being posted unfinished, part two to come in a day or two.
Thing is, I don’t think she ever quite forgot. Great mind like that, some of the details kept bleeding through. - The Doctor, The Unicorn and the Wasp
Contrary to the opinions of people who'd only met her once Donna Noble was not a stupid woman and she did notice that she had eighteen months missing from her memory. Not quickly, mind you, but she did notice.
*
“Mum, who's that bloke on the news?”
“That's the prime minister.”
“I don't remember there being an election.”
“Well, you've never been that interested in politics, have you?”
*
“Dad, who is Donna shouting at?”
“The temp agency.”
“Why?”
“Wait until she gets off the phone and ask her yourself.”
“Donna, why are you abusing the poor receptionist from the temp agency?”
“Because the lunatic woman says that I haven't worked there for over a year and that the last time they did place me I turned up three days late and covered in slime.”
*
“Veena, hiya! Where'd that baby come from? You didn't nick him, did you?”
“That's my son!”
“Blimey, you kept that quiet.”
*
“You haven't been well,” Sylvia said when Donna questioned her about the increasingly obvious gaps in her memory.
“You've been away,” said Wilf.
“You've never been quite right in the head,” was all Nerys had to say when Donna broached the topic over lunchtime gin and tonics.
As far as Donna could tell there were two possible explanations for the gap in her memory. And as the very idea of her being abducted by time travelling aliens and then having her memory of the whole thing erased was ludicrous the obvious answer was that everyone in the whole world apart from Donna and her granddad had gone round the twist.
She decided that what she really needed in this new, madder, world was a job. Ideally with sane people who didn't bang on about how giant pepper pots had tried to destroy the world, but beggars couldn't be choosers.
Donna got herself a new job easily enough, office manager at a firm that did traffic management. It was pretty boring, traffic management being a subject that interested Donna roughly the same amount as the life cycle of the fruit fly (Drosophila Melanogaster or common fruit fly has a life span of thirty days) Blimey, thought Donna as the encyclopaedia Britannica entry for the common fruit fly rattled through her brain. Whatever else she'd done in her missing eighteen months it was beginning to seem like she'd watched a hell of a lot of documentaries.
There were a couple of weird things, like the fact that the entire IT department spend their working days huddled in their office with the lights off refusing to open the door. But Donna supposed all supergeeks were like that.
“Lunch?” Colette, the receptionist who spent as much time as humanly possible away from reception, stopped next to Donna's desk.
“Yeah,” Donna reached down for her handbag and the phone on her desk started ringing.
“Ignore it,” advised Colette who had a pathological hatred of ringing phones. “It's probably them upstairs to say that the photocopier's buggered again.”
“Let's eat,” Donna agreed, “let somebody else be the Xerox fairy around here for once.”
*
In the canteen Donna prodded her limp salad with a plastic fork and tried to remember what stupid magazine she'd read about this diet in. Colette was pouring mayonnaise over the only salad in the canteen more depressing than Donna's in an effort to make it edible.
“Let's ask him to sit with us,” Colette nodded towards a slight man who was trying to disguise the loss of his dark brown hair by spiking up what remained with gel. Donna had never seem him before, he was standing in the middle of the canteen looking lost.
“Nah, I don't go for the lost puppy type.”
“He's got chips.”
“Oi, new boy! Over here.”
“Fraser,” the new arrival introduced himself after her settled at their table.
“I'm Donna,” she leaned over to shake Fraser's hand and snatched up a chip as she pulled back. “And the stroppy cow there is Colette. Give her a chip, might cheer her up.”
“I just started today,” Fraser pushed his plate of chips into the centre of the table for them to share, “in IT.”
“The supergeeks do eat, then. Where are the rest of them?”
“I don't know, they hoofed me out of the office.”
“I wish someone would chuck me out of the office,” Colette said.
“What for?” Donna asked, ignoring her friends whining.
“I told my manager that I thought it was a bit weird not having any computers in the IT department .”
“Oh, who cares?” Donna concluded dipping another chip in ketchup. “It's not like you lot ever make yourselves useful anyway.”
*
Donna had barely arrived back at her desk with the other two in tow when the phone started ringing again. It was as if they knew. This time she sighed and picked it up.
“Hello... Yeah... Well, call IT... It's their job... I'll be up in a sec.” Donna hung up the phone with a scowl. “Apparently the printer toner can't be changed without my personal attention. Idiots. I'd better get upstairs.”
“I'll tag along,” Fraser said. “Make myself useful.”
“I'll... go back to my desk and do some work.” Colette did not sound thrilled at the prospect.
Donna and Fraser got up to the posh floor to find everybody milling around looking hopefully at the photocopier as though the toner could be changed by the power of optimistic thoughts. Donna flipped open the front of the copier and reached inside without looking, moving levers and bars.
“What the hell is that!?” Fraser asked, referring to the large electric blue orb that was nestled in the copiers innards making any maintenance very difficult.
Donna looked down to where her arm was looped easily behind the orb without touching it to slide out the toner cartridge. “How should I know,” she sneered. “Does it look like I keep up with the latest developments in photocopier technology?”
*
At quarter to five Donna was staring at a pile of time sheets, her afternoon of photocopier maintenance had meant she had absolutely no chance of getting out of here on time.
“Pub?” Colette asked, popping her head around the door.
On the other hand...
“Fraser's coming too,” Colette carried on, “it's his round.”
*
“Hey, a pub quiz!” Fraser exclaimed almost as soon as they arrived in the lounge bar of the Dog Playing Poker, a pub chosen for no other reason than its geographically convenient location next door to the office. “Fancy it?”
“Nah,” Donna decreed. “I can't stand pub quizzes.” The truth was that Donna had always been quite fond of pub quizzes until that night when she was first going out with Lance when she'd gotten the countries that had a land border with Germany wrong (Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic, Poland. Unless you were talking about the planet Germany...) Actually, now that she came to think about it Lance had been a git and she wasn't at all sorry that he'd moved to Egypt and died from that spider bite.
They made Fraser buy them all drinks to celebrate his first day at his new job.
“How did you find it?” asked Colette in her never ending quest to find someone in the office more miserable than her.
“Well,” Fraser mused over his pint of Guinness. “My line manager didn't want to let me into my office and when I did get in I found no computers and the floor piled high with Xerox manuals that no one can read because they won't turn turn on the lights. And then I met you two.”
“So, it wasn't a total loss,” said Donna raising her gin and tonic menacingly.
“Eh, no, not totally.”
*
The next morning Donna was ignoring the small mountain of paperwork on her desk in favour of going through a box of black pens one by one, she scribbled briefly with each pen before discarding it.
“They still won't let me in the IT office,” said Fraser, who'd chosen to loiter in Donna's office ever since his loitering in the corridors had begun to draw comment from the managers. “Colette says she wishes someone would banish her from her office.”
“She doesn't have an office, she has a desk,” said Donna, dropping another unsatisfactory pen into the bin.
“What are you doing?”
“I'm trying to find the right pen,” another scribble, another Biro dropped in the bin.
“The right pen for what?”
“What are you talking about 'the right pen for what?',” Donna snapped. “It's only a bleeding Biro, you do talk some nonsense.” Just then the phone on Donna's desk rang. “Make yourself useful and answer that.”
Fraser mumbled into the phone then hung up and said, “Steve says you've to go and look and the second floor photocopier.”
Donna sighed. Typical Steve, her immediate boss was a slimy git who couldn't keep his hands to himself and would have looked down Donna's top all the time if only he'd been tall enough. She pocketed the pen she was holding and headed out of her office.
“I'll come with you. If they're not going to let me do any work I might as well learn how to look after the photocopiers.”
“That's the spirit, Sparky.”
“So how come it's always you they get to sort them then?”
“Because they're overpaid idiots and changing a toner cartridge is too much work for their delicate little hands.”
“Ah.”
“And these printers are a bit weird and I've kind of got the knack.”
“Oh, there you are,” said Steve standing on his tip toes to get the best possible look at Donna's chest. “The copier's gubbed.” Donna looked at the screen where the words 'Remove paper jam,' were clearly visible.
“Leave it to me,” Donna glared at Steve's hands as he left, making sure he kept them to himself.
She flipped the photocopier open and crouched down, she blinked against the blue light that orb was emitting, she cocked her head and examined the tendril-like wires that connected the orb to the photocopier mechanism. She reached into her pocket and fingered the Biro she was carrying, she slipped the lid off, then on, then off again.”
“It looks kind of like an egg, doesn't it?” observed Fraser.
“An egg? What, you think the photocopier's about to give birth?” Donna reached past the thing that was definitely not an egg and pulled out the jammed paper. “I've got work to do. If you want someone to pester go and find Colette.”
*
Donna skipped the pub that evening, annoyed that she'd spent her entire day removing paper jams and changing toner, and wasn't the purchasing department just going to have her neck for the amount on toner she was having to order to keep up.
“Hiya,” Donna called, closing the front door behind her.
“How was work?” her mum called from the kitchen.
“I'm a bit worried about the alien space eggs growing in the photocopiers.”
There was a crash and Donna hurried through to the kitchen to find a mug shattered on the floor and Sylvia staring at her with a horrified expression on her face and a dishcloth in her hand. “What did you just say!?”
“I said I haven't missed the start of Coronation Street, have I?”
“No. No, Donna. It's just starting.”
During the adverts Donna suddenly noticed that she was fidgeting with the Biro she'd inadvertently pinched from the office. Taking it apart and putting it back together again. She felt a twinge of satisfaction, Steve couldn't keep his hands to himself and the high point of her life at the moment was being the photocopier angel. But they didn't notice when she nicked their stationery.
*
The next morning at eleven Donna, Colette and Fraser were outside the back of the office so that Colette could smoke a cigarette, Fraser could eat a bacon roll and Donna could poke at the remnants of her purloined Biro with a paperclip.
“What the hell are you doing with that thing?” Colette asked, exhaling smoke.
Donna shrugged defensively. “It's relaxing.” And it was true turning the pen into (Don't be stupid, she wasn't turning the pen into anything, she was just fidgeting, something to do with her hands.) Anyway, it was relaxing.
The reason they were getting away with this gratuitous skiving was that the office had ground to a complete halt because every photocopier, printer and scanner had stopped working completely. If office appliances could go on strike this is what it would look like.
“It's freezing out here,” Donna declared, finishing what she was doing with the pen and discarding the paperclip. “Let's get inside.”
Donna left the other two at reception and headed up to her office, she could hear her phone ringing from the end of the corridor, she was rescued from having to answer it by a red faced Steve rushing up to meet her blathering on about board reports and broken printers. Unfortunately she couldn't pay attention because she was too busy watching Steve's hands and not caring.
“Get an engineer out,” Donna said, because she had to say something to stop Steve talking and that seemed like a safe bet.
“I've told James to call one ten times already,” Steve wailed.
James was the big chief supergeek, the one who'd evicted Fraser from his office. Donna rolled her eyes, these managerial types needed everything done for them. She about turned and headed back down the stairs, on her way past reception she grabbed Fraser by the back of his shirt.
“We're going to talk to your boss, Mush.” Fraser followed Donna obediently. Faced with the prospect of being left behind to ignore the constantly ringing phones Colette followed them.
The IT office was down in the basement, to better allow the supergeeks to hide from natural light. The door was locked, Donna knocked, pushed and twisted the handle to no avail. “James?” she called, “It's Donna, the office manager. There's been a problem with your wages, you're not going to get paid this month.”
As expected the office door creaked open and James peered out. “Donna, the one who orders all the toner. And Fraser. And the girl who doesn't answer the telephones. Hello.”
“Can we come in?” Colette asked. Donna didn't bother with such pleasantries and shouldered her way past James into the office, and immediately stopped in her tracks. The lights were off but the office was lit up by a pulsating glow from the shuddering and groaning photocopier in the corner.
“What have you lot done to that?” Donna demanded, she should have known that this nonsense was due to IT mucking about.
“My masters will soon be born.”
“Ri-ight,” Donna dragged out the word. “I don't know if you've looked at a calender recently, mate, but April fools day isn't for months.”
“Er, Donna,” whispered Colette, standing very close to Donna's back, “look at their necks.”
Donna looked. Thin, fleshy, blue tendrils extended out from the photocopier connecting to the necks of James and the other two geeks, Nick and Lizzie. Well, that was the most disgusting thing she had even seen.
“James...” Fraser began, making the rookie mistake of trying to appeal to the better nature of a man who had voluntarily wired himself up to a photocopier.
“Be quite!” James ordered, snatching up a torch and pointing it at Fraser and Colette like it was a gun. Raving bloody lunatic
“Don't shine that torch in my eyes,” Colette demanded.
“Sonic torch,” said Jamie.
“Whatever,” sneered Colette, grabbing the torch from James' hand.
“Whatever the joke is,” Donna said, feeling that they were getting a bit off topic, “you've got to give it a rest. Nobody gets it and they're going crazy upstairs.”
“And who are you to tell my masters what to do?”
Donna drew herself up to her full height and tossed her hair over her shoulder, narrowly avoiding taking Fraser's eye out in the process. “Donna Noble, office manager.”
A flash of bright blue rushed along the tendril from the photocopier to James. “Donna Noble?” he said, “You are Donna Noble?”
“Yes, I am. And I'm telling you to knock this off!”
“There's a hole in your mind,” said James.
“Hey, that's from Babylon 5!” Fraser declared.
“Fraser,” Colette elbowed him in the ribs, “be quiet now, be a loser later.”
Not discouraged by the comments from the peanut gallery James carried on. “You know things that you shouldn't and you don't understand any of what you know.”
“I know that you're off your rocker.”
“Yes,” James smiled wanly and the photocopier gave a terrible creak like something was in the process of breaking out. “But that knowledge will not help you when my master arrives.”
“You're right,” Donna said, reaching back and taking the torch from Colette's hand. “I don't know what the hell's going on here, I don't know what's in that photocopier, I don't know what I've been up to this past year. And I don't know how I know this but I'll tell you what I do know,” she reached into her pocket and removed her almost-Biro, “I know what happens when you hold two identical sonic devices together.”
The most awful noise Donna had ever heard filled them room, she took a deep breath and because it seamed like the thing to say shouted, “Run!”
This turned out to be a waste of oxygen as Colette and Fraser were already out the door and halfway up the stairs.
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters: Donna Noble
Summary: It's a crying shame that Donna can't remember the last eighteenth months of her life, especially now that there are alien space eggs growing in the photocopiers.
Rating: G
A/N: Written for the finish-a-thon, and ironically enough being posted unfinished, part two to come in a day or two.
Thing is, I don’t think she ever quite forgot. Great mind like that, some of the details kept bleeding through. - The Doctor, The Unicorn and the Wasp
Contrary to the opinions of people who'd only met her once Donna Noble was not a stupid woman and she did notice that she had eighteen months missing from her memory. Not quickly, mind you, but she did notice.
*
“Mum, who's that bloke on the news?”
“That's the prime minister.”
“I don't remember there being an election.”
“Well, you've never been that interested in politics, have you?”
*
“Dad, who is Donna shouting at?”
“The temp agency.”
“Why?”
“Wait until she gets off the phone and ask her yourself.”
“Donna, why are you abusing the poor receptionist from the temp agency?”
“Because the lunatic woman says that I haven't worked there for over a year and that the last time they did place me I turned up three days late and covered in slime.”
*
“Veena, hiya! Where'd that baby come from? You didn't nick him, did you?”
“That's my son!”
“Blimey, you kept that quiet.”
*
“You haven't been well,” Sylvia said when Donna questioned her about the increasingly obvious gaps in her memory.
“You've been away,” said Wilf.
“You've never been quite right in the head,” was all Nerys had to say when Donna broached the topic over lunchtime gin and tonics.
As far as Donna could tell there were two possible explanations for the gap in her memory. And as the very idea of her being abducted by time travelling aliens and then having her memory of the whole thing erased was ludicrous the obvious answer was that everyone in the whole world apart from Donna and her granddad had gone round the twist.
She decided that what she really needed in this new, madder, world was a job. Ideally with sane people who didn't bang on about how giant pepper pots had tried to destroy the world, but beggars couldn't be choosers.
Donna got herself a new job easily enough, office manager at a firm that did traffic management. It was pretty boring, traffic management being a subject that interested Donna roughly the same amount as the life cycle of the fruit fly (Drosophila Melanogaster or common fruit fly has a life span of thirty days) Blimey, thought Donna as the encyclopaedia Britannica entry for the common fruit fly rattled through her brain. Whatever else she'd done in her missing eighteen months it was beginning to seem like she'd watched a hell of a lot of documentaries.
There were a couple of weird things, like the fact that the entire IT department spend their working days huddled in their office with the lights off refusing to open the door. But Donna supposed all supergeeks were like that.
“Lunch?” Colette, the receptionist who spent as much time as humanly possible away from reception, stopped next to Donna's desk.
“Yeah,” Donna reached down for her handbag and the phone on her desk started ringing.
“Ignore it,” advised Colette who had a pathological hatred of ringing phones. “It's probably them upstairs to say that the photocopier's buggered again.”
“Let's eat,” Donna agreed, “let somebody else be the Xerox fairy around here for once.”
*
In the canteen Donna prodded her limp salad with a plastic fork and tried to remember what stupid magazine she'd read about this diet in. Colette was pouring mayonnaise over the only salad in the canteen more depressing than Donna's in an effort to make it edible.
“Let's ask him to sit with us,” Colette nodded towards a slight man who was trying to disguise the loss of his dark brown hair by spiking up what remained with gel. Donna had never seem him before, he was standing in the middle of the canteen looking lost.
“Nah, I don't go for the lost puppy type.”
“He's got chips.”
“Oi, new boy! Over here.”
“Fraser,” the new arrival introduced himself after her settled at their table.
“I'm Donna,” she leaned over to shake Fraser's hand and snatched up a chip as she pulled back. “And the stroppy cow there is Colette. Give her a chip, might cheer her up.”
“I just started today,” Fraser pushed his plate of chips into the centre of the table for them to share, “in IT.”
“The supergeeks do eat, then. Where are the rest of them?”
“I don't know, they hoofed me out of the office.”
“I wish someone would chuck me out of the office,” Colette said.
“What for?” Donna asked, ignoring her friends whining.
“I told my manager that I thought it was a bit weird not having any computers in the IT department .”
“Oh, who cares?” Donna concluded dipping another chip in ketchup. “It's not like you lot ever make yourselves useful anyway.”
*
Donna had barely arrived back at her desk with the other two in tow when the phone started ringing again. It was as if they knew. This time she sighed and picked it up.
“Hello... Yeah... Well, call IT... It's their job... I'll be up in a sec.” Donna hung up the phone with a scowl. “Apparently the printer toner can't be changed without my personal attention. Idiots. I'd better get upstairs.”
“I'll tag along,” Fraser said. “Make myself useful.”
“I'll... go back to my desk and do some work.” Colette did not sound thrilled at the prospect.
Donna and Fraser got up to the posh floor to find everybody milling around looking hopefully at the photocopier as though the toner could be changed by the power of optimistic thoughts. Donna flipped open the front of the copier and reached inside without looking, moving levers and bars.
“What the hell is that!?” Fraser asked, referring to the large electric blue orb that was nestled in the copiers innards making any maintenance very difficult.
Donna looked down to where her arm was looped easily behind the orb without touching it to slide out the toner cartridge. “How should I know,” she sneered. “Does it look like I keep up with the latest developments in photocopier technology?”
*
At quarter to five Donna was staring at a pile of time sheets, her afternoon of photocopier maintenance had meant she had absolutely no chance of getting out of here on time.
“Pub?” Colette asked, popping her head around the door.
On the other hand...
“Fraser's coming too,” Colette carried on, “it's his round.”
*
“Hey, a pub quiz!” Fraser exclaimed almost as soon as they arrived in the lounge bar of the Dog Playing Poker, a pub chosen for no other reason than its geographically convenient location next door to the office. “Fancy it?”
“Nah,” Donna decreed. “I can't stand pub quizzes.” The truth was that Donna had always been quite fond of pub quizzes until that night when she was first going out with Lance when she'd gotten the countries that had a land border with Germany wrong (Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic, Poland. Unless you were talking about the planet Germany...) Actually, now that she came to think about it Lance had been a git and she wasn't at all sorry that he'd moved to Egypt and died from that spider bite.
They made Fraser buy them all drinks to celebrate his first day at his new job.
“How did you find it?” asked Colette in her never ending quest to find someone in the office more miserable than her.
“Well,” Fraser mused over his pint of Guinness. “My line manager didn't want to let me into my office and when I did get in I found no computers and the floor piled high with Xerox manuals that no one can read because they won't turn turn on the lights. And then I met you two.”
“So, it wasn't a total loss,” said Donna raising her gin and tonic menacingly.
“Eh, no, not totally.”
*
The next morning Donna was ignoring the small mountain of paperwork on her desk in favour of going through a box of black pens one by one, she scribbled briefly with each pen before discarding it.
“They still won't let me in the IT office,” said Fraser, who'd chosen to loiter in Donna's office ever since his loitering in the corridors had begun to draw comment from the managers. “Colette says she wishes someone would banish her from her office.”
“She doesn't have an office, she has a desk,” said Donna, dropping another unsatisfactory pen into the bin.
“What are you doing?”
“I'm trying to find the right pen,” another scribble, another Biro dropped in the bin.
“The right pen for what?”
“What are you talking about 'the right pen for what?',” Donna snapped. “It's only a bleeding Biro, you do talk some nonsense.” Just then the phone on Donna's desk rang. “Make yourself useful and answer that.”
Fraser mumbled into the phone then hung up and said, “Steve says you've to go and look and the second floor photocopier.”
Donna sighed. Typical Steve, her immediate boss was a slimy git who couldn't keep his hands to himself and would have looked down Donna's top all the time if only he'd been tall enough. She pocketed the pen she was holding and headed out of her office.
“I'll come with you. If they're not going to let me do any work I might as well learn how to look after the photocopiers.”
“That's the spirit, Sparky.”
“So how come it's always you they get to sort them then?”
“Because they're overpaid idiots and changing a toner cartridge is too much work for their delicate little hands.”
“Ah.”
“And these printers are a bit weird and I've kind of got the knack.”
“Oh, there you are,” said Steve standing on his tip toes to get the best possible look at Donna's chest. “The copier's gubbed.” Donna looked at the screen where the words 'Remove paper jam,' were clearly visible.
“Leave it to me,” Donna glared at Steve's hands as he left, making sure he kept them to himself.
She flipped the photocopier open and crouched down, she blinked against the blue light that orb was emitting, she cocked her head and examined the tendril-like wires that connected the orb to the photocopier mechanism. She reached into her pocket and fingered the Biro she was carrying, she slipped the lid off, then on, then off again.”
“It looks kind of like an egg, doesn't it?” observed Fraser.
“An egg? What, you think the photocopier's about to give birth?” Donna reached past the thing that was definitely not an egg and pulled out the jammed paper. “I've got work to do. If you want someone to pester go and find Colette.”
*
Donna skipped the pub that evening, annoyed that she'd spent her entire day removing paper jams and changing toner, and wasn't the purchasing department just going to have her neck for the amount on toner she was having to order to keep up.
“Hiya,” Donna called, closing the front door behind her.
“How was work?” her mum called from the kitchen.
“I'm a bit worried about the alien space eggs growing in the photocopiers.”
There was a crash and Donna hurried through to the kitchen to find a mug shattered on the floor and Sylvia staring at her with a horrified expression on her face and a dishcloth in her hand. “What did you just say!?”
“I said I haven't missed the start of Coronation Street, have I?”
“No. No, Donna. It's just starting.”
During the adverts Donna suddenly noticed that she was fidgeting with the Biro she'd inadvertently pinched from the office. Taking it apart and putting it back together again. She felt a twinge of satisfaction, Steve couldn't keep his hands to himself and the high point of her life at the moment was being the photocopier angel. But they didn't notice when she nicked their stationery.
*
The next morning at eleven Donna, Colette and Fraser were outside the back of the office so that Colette could smoke a cigarette, Fraser could eat a bacon roll and Donna could poke at the remnants of her purloined Biro with a paperclip.
“What the hell are you doing with that thing?” Colette asked, exhaling smoke.
Donna shrugged defensively. “It's relaxing.” And it was true turning the pen into (Don't be stupid, she wasn't turning the pen into anything, she was just fidgeting, something to do with her hands.) Anyway, it was relaxing.
The reason they were getting away with this gratuitous skiving was that the office had ground to a complete halt because every photocopier, printer and scanner had stopped working completely. If office appliances could go on strike this is what it would look like.
“It's freezing out here,” Donna declared, finishing what she was doing with the pen and discarding the paperclip. “Let's get inside.”
Donna left the other two at reception and headed up to her office, she could hear her phone ringing from the end of the corridor, she was rescued from having to answer it by a red faced Steve rushing up to meet her blathering on about board reports and broken printers. Unfortunately she couldn't pay attention because she was too busy watching Steve's hands and not caring.
“Get an engineer out,” Donna said, because she had to say something to stop Steve talking and that seemed like a safe bet.
“I've told James to call one ten times already,” Steve wailed.
James was the big chief supergeek, the one who'd evicted Fraser from his office. Donna rolled her eyes, these managerial types needed everything done for them. She about turned and headed back down the stairs, on her way past reception she grabbed Fraser by the back of his shirt.
“We're going to talk to your boss, Mush.” Fraser followed Donna obediently. Faced with the prospect of being left behind to ignore the constantly ringing phones Colette followed them.
The IT office was down in the basement, to better allow the supergeeks to hide from natural light. The door was locked, Donna knocked, pushed and twisted the handle to no avail. “James?” she called, “It's Donna, the office manager. There's been a problem with your wages, you're not going to get paid this month.”
As expected the office door creaked open and James peered out. “Donna, the one who orders all the toner. And Fraser. And the girl who doesn't answer the telephones. Hello.”
“Can we come in?” Colette asked. Donna didn't bother with such pleasantries and shouldered her way past James into the office, and immediately stopped in her tracks. The lights were off but the office was lit up by a pulsating glow from the shuddering and groaning photocopier in the corner.
“What have you lot done to that?” Donna demanded, she should have known that this nonsense was due to IT mucking about.
“My masters will soon be born.”
“Ri-ight,” Donna dragged out the word. “I don't know if you've looked at a calender recently, mate, but April fools day isn't for months.”
“Er, Donna,” whispered Colette, standing very close to Donna's back, “look at their necks.”
Donna looked. Thin, fleshy, blue tendrils extended out from the photocopier connecting to the necks of James and the other two geeks, Nick and Lizzie. Well, that was the most disgusting thing she had even seen.
“James...” Fraser began, making the rookie mistake of trying to appeal to the better nature of a man who had voluntarily wired himself up to a photocopier.
“Be quite!” James ordered, snatching up a torch and pointing it at Fraser and Colette like it was a gun. Raving bloody lunatic
“Don't shine that torch in my eyes,” Colette demanded.
“Sonic torch,” said Jamie.
“Whatever,” sneered Colette, grabbing the torch from James' hand.
“Whatever the joke is,” Donna said, feeling that they were getting a bit off topic, “you've got to give it a rest. Nobody gets it and they're going crazy upstairs.”
“And who are you to tell my masters what to do?”
Donna drew herself up to her full height and tossed her hair over her shoulder, narrowly avoiding taking Fraser's eye out in the process. “Donna Noble, office manager.”
A flash of bright blue rushed along the tendril from the photocopier to James. “Donna Noble?” he said, “You are Donna Noble?”
“Yes, I am. And I'm telling you to knock this off!”
“There's a hole in your mind,” said James.
“Hey, that's from Babylon 5!” Fraser declared.
“Fraser,” Colette elbowed him in the ribs, “be quiet now, be a loser later.”
Not discouraged by the comments from the peanut gallery James carried on. “You know things that you shouldn't and you don't understand any of what you know.”
“I know that you're off your rocker.”
“Yes,” James smiled wanly and the photocopier gave a terrible creak like something was in the process of breaking out. “But that knowledge will not help you when my master arrives.”
“You're right,” Donna said, reaching back and taking the torch from Colette's hand. “I don't know what the hell's going on here, I don't know what's in that photocopier, I don't know what I've been up to this past year. And I don't know how I know this but I'll tell you what I do know,” she reached into her pocket and removed her almost-Biro, “I know what happens when you hold two identical sonic devices together.”
The most awful noise Donna had ever heard filled them room, she took a deep breath and because it seamed like the thing to say shouted, “Run!”
This turned out to be a waste of oxygen as Colette and Fraser were already out the door and halfway up the stairs.