FicWad

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The room was dark. There were lights high above her head in the domed ceiling, but they had long since burned out and been forgotten. Black tendrils of ivy crawled over and around each other up the walls, strangling what few bulbs still struggled to work.

Miranda took a step forward, baseball bat in one hand, a heavy sack in the other, her sneakers crunching on the overgrowth. It echoed through the chamber, and she heard several small noises respond from different points in the ivy. She winced. Big, clumsy human feet. No help for it, unfortunately.

PLOIMP!

Miranda jumped. There was water in here. She tiptoed forward to the edge of a round...pond? She leaned over and poked the dark surface. Ripples spread out, disturbing the carpet of algae on the surface, exposing several patches of dark water. Looking closely, she was just barely able to make out moving silhouettes beneath the surface.

PLOIMP!

A large bubble, roiling up from the depths, erupted near the far edge, followed by a dark shape with fins that briefly broke the surface, then disappeared just as quickly. Miranda stepped back from the edge as a precaution. She hoped it was nothing more sinister than carp. Either way, she didn't think her quarry could swim. Now, to locate that rustling...

BEEP BEEP BOP BEEP...

Miranda dropped the sack and fumbled in her pocket for her cell. So much for stealth. "Where are you?" a male voice crackled brusquely through the line, filling the chamber with harsh echoes.

"Close," she snapped back for what had to have been the tenth time in as many minutes.

"But where exactly? Last thing I need is for you to get excited and start smashing something important."

"Well, don't worry, all that's near me right now is the fish pond."

"Pond...? Ah, the swimming pool! Haven't been that way in ages."

Miranda looked at the swampy water in disgust. "Oh, that's vile," she remarked aloud. "Where're you?"

"I'm uh..." his voice trailed off momentarily. "Let's see...glowing bundles of cable, big flashy orb-things all over the floor...a unicycle? When did I ever have a unicycle?" --Miranda rolled her eyes-- "Well, I don't see any of 'em in here. What've you got?"

"Stand by..." she murmured, flipping the phone shut and pocketing it, eyes trained on a rustle in the ivy a few feet to her right. She crouched slowly and picked up her sack and then began creeping towards the movement. Flipping the bat upside down, she clenched the rubber grip tightly as she stalked it. Peering close, her eyes finally began adjusting to the gloom. She saw the gleam of little eyes and pounced.

As the bat hit home, an awful little squeal erupted from the viney overgrowth and several small furry creatures leaped clear and disappeared. "Ah, crap! There's a nest!" she groused, kneeling to pick up the stunned little critter that she'd struck. Stunned or dead, she couldn't tell for sure. She straightened and dropped it into the sack. She set the bat down and pulled out her cell.

"What'd you find?" the male voice asked at the press of a button.

"Oh, found one of 'em, but I think they've got a nest in here now," she commented mildly.

"That's it, Miranda, no more pets!"

"For the eight hundreth time, Doctor, they're not pets!" She shook a loose strand of hair out of her face and composed herself, fighting the irritation that brimmed so close to the surface these days. "I would have neutered them if they were."

"Still, a whole year studying an alien world, and you bring back the rats?"

"Don't start with that! You were a scientist once. You have the choice of spending your limited anthropological time studying diverse and numerous unknown human cultures or the local fauna. I had to prioritize! How was I supposed to know that your funky mood lighting would stimulate their mating drive, causing them to chew through the cages--which I told you were inadequate two weeks ago, I might add--and proliferate over half the TARDIS? Excuuuuse me for not anticipating that!"

"Oy! You're not putting this on me! I never gave you permission to bring them on in the first place! Travel through space and time? Sure. Infest my TARDIS with little crawling disease-pots? No."

"They weren't diseased when I brought them on. Anything they might have now would have had to come from your TARDIS. Anyway, how come is it that the great and powerful Timelord sees an ounce of fur with feet and freaks out? We would've had them by now if you hadn't spooked them."

"You try being locked in a room with plague rats and you'll understand."

Miranda's response was delayed when she realized the voice was coming from the archway instead of the cell phone. She glared at his lanky form, hidden inside that beat-up leather jacket, and put the phone away. "Was that before or after you wrote Hamlet? I keep forgetting," she drawled.

He merely produced that horrid, cheeky grin and crunched over the ivy, into the room. "After." He strolled to the water's edge and eyed it curiously. "At least, I think this should be the swimming pool. Could've sworn I'd jettisoned this years ago. Ah well." The large aquatic critter Miranda had spotted earlier made another appearance and another large bubble. The Doctor made a face and stepped back, almost colliding with Miranda, who had strolled up behind him to watch. "Wouldn't stand too close," he advised.

"D'you suppose that thing's a meat-eater?" Miranda wondered aloud, hefting her rodent sack in jest.
The Doctor studied the gently fading ripples, scratching his very short hair. "Dunno." He looked down at her. "Dip a toe, see what happens." Miranda elbowed him in the ribs. "Ow!" the Doctor protested, pretending insult as much as pain.

Anyway, shouldn't we be mouse hunting?" Miranda moved away from the water's edge, noting all the little rustling movements she could see in the ivy on the floor. She hoped they were all caused by nothing more sinister than her rats. There were parts of this TARDIS that she knew not even the Doctor had fully explored.

"Could just seal off this part of the TARDIS and flood it with toxic gas, you know," he remarked off-handedly, following her through the ivy.

"Not a nature lover, eh?" Miranda quipped. "Anyway, all we really need is to pick up a few dozen traps."
The Doctor suddenly pounced into the ivy and when he stood up again, he had one of the critters dangling by its tail. "Nature's fine. Love nature," he insisted quickly. "Outside, that is. Inside, nature's nothing but a pest," he clarified, wagging a disciplinary finger at the little creature. "Aren't you?" Unexpectedly, he tossed it towards Miranda. Thinking fast, she opened her sack and caught the squealing animal before it would have landed in her face.

"You were directing that last comment at the rat, right?" Miranda asked.

The Doctor stopped short and snapped his fingers. "Traps! That's what we need!"

"The TARDIS doesn't have any. I checked the inventory, such as it is. I also searched several of the storerooms."

"Impossible!"

"You think I'm swinging this stupid bat around just for fun?" Miranda groused, following the Doctor's long-legged march out of the room into the greenish light of the corridor, pulling the door shut tightly behind her.

"I'm sure I had a few live traps tucked somewhere. Must've done."

"Oh sure, since the TARDIS is just chock-full of other sensible things, like unicycles and swimming pools."

"Whatever you did on that vacation of yours, it certainly didn't improve your mood any," the Doctor commented mildly.

Miranda's hand automatically clenched the grip of her bat. She knew he was only joking, but it did her residual raw nerves no good to be reminded of the past year. Everything about it had been the exact opposite of relaxing, and she strongly suspected the Doctor knew that much, though hopefully no more. She was so edgy, how could he not have picked up on it? She forced her angry response deep down with the rest of her emotional rubbish and loosened her hold of the bat. "Sorry. You were saying something about having live traps--?"

The rest of her question was jarred from her mind and mouth as the floor pitched sharply and she slammed face-first into the bulkhead. She dropped the rat sack and heard the aluminum bat go clanging down the corridor, then felt her back slam solidly into something that stopped her cold. Head swimming, she sat up from where she'd rebounded onto the floor, her face stinging, and realized she'd lost her glasses.

"C'mon!" the Doctor exclaimed, grabbing her arm to pull her vertical. The floor swayed and shimmied sickeningly, accompanied by a chorus of protesting groans and rattles from within the TARDIS, tossing the Doctor back against the bulkhead and throwing Miranda against his legs. Something small clattered into her lap. Her glasses.

"Did we hit something?" she asked, shoving the slightly bent specs back onto her face.

"Shouldn't have." The Doctor grabbed her arm again and helped her to her feet before sprinting off down the corridor towards the console room.

"Coming!" Miranda hollered after him pointlessly, hurrying as fast as she could in his wake. Unfortunately, after a year on solid planet surface her TARDIS legs were decidedly out of shape and her urgent running was more a drunken stagger. By the time she lurched into the console room, the Doctor was controlled chaos at the hexagonal panels, turning knobs and landing the occasional fist to the controls, but it was working. The TARDIS was once more sailing smoothly. Well, more smoothly than before. But Miranda knew better than to expect it was just passing turbulence.

The frame of the timeship shuddered, unsettling Miranda enough that she grabbed the railing just in case. "Sensible things like seatbelts would help too, you know," she felt fit to remark. The Doctor shot her a look from the other side of the console, so Miranda smirked at him. Briefly, the Doctor flashed his megawatt grin in return before an insistent beeping from another panel drew his attention.

"Can I help?" she queried as the TARDIS continued its queasy rocking.

"You are."

"How?"

"By standing clear and not touching anything."

"You're welcome."

The TARDIS gave a particularly rough shake, encouraging Miranda to grip the railing tightly. "What is this?" she groused.

The Doctor flipped a series of switches, paying close attention to their effect, which seemed negligible to Miranda.
"Press the yellow button!" he ordered suddenly from his side of the console.

Miranda jumped down from the catwalk to the console and looked over the mishmash of gadgetry. "Where?"

"Beside the quantiscope!"

"The what-scope? Oh, here!" Glancing underneath the panel, she spotted a large, glowing yellow button. It was the only yellow button she saw, so she smacked it hard with her palm. She didn't know why the Doctor kept trying to explain things to her in terms of Timelord techno babble. Quantiscope? 'Yellow button under the panel' she understood. "Got it!"

"Keep pressing it!" the Doctor jumped to a different panel and gave an instrument a good twist. The shaking and shuddering and rattling of the TARDIS suddenly subsided, as Miranda and the Doctor both stood still and waited. Well, the Doctor stood. Miranda was stuck crouching so she could keep her hand on the button. It reminded Miranda of the three weeks she'd spent on Hurndas, where turbulence was so commonplace from the air foils suspending their landmasses above the molten surface that the entire village would simply stop what they were doing and sit down, calmly waiting out each aftershock.

Hurndas...she hadn't thought about that little trip in quite a while. It had been her first solo trip to an alien planet, what, nearly three years ago by now? So very long ago, it seemed.

Whatever the yellow button was for, it seemed to do the trick. The TARDIS settled down, and the only sound was its usual, ambient humming. And the equine-in-distress wheezing of the time rotor.

"Can I--?"

"Yes, you can let go," the Doctor cut her off confidently. Miranda stood up, seeing the Doctor once again grinning like a satisfied cat.

"That was some turbulence," Miranda remarked, loathe to feel any stupider by asking 'what is it' a third time. "What happened? Some kind of temporal distortion?" she suggested instead, recalling the circumstances around their first meeting.

"Of a kind. We've been pulled out of the vortex by something. The TARDIS is caught," the Doctor looked slightly bemused.

"Caught how? Wouldn't that take a lot of energy?" Miranda asked.

"Massive amounts! Like..." the Doctor gestured her over to the scanner. Miranda rounded the console and joined him at the screen. "...like those produced in a time corridor," he intoned decisively.

"Time corridor. Right," Miranda agreed, making little effort to cover her ignorance (How much did he expect an anthropologist to know about temporal physics?).

"It's like a tunnel in the fabric of the universe, connects two points in space-time."

"Oh, like an Einstein-Rosen bridge! A wormhole," Miranda realized (the one thing she happened to remember out of 'A Brief History of Time').

The Doctor actually looked somewhat impressed. "Sort of, except that this is not a natural phenomenon." He glanced at her suggestively.

"You don't mean..."

He gave her a knowing look.

"Don't even--"

"Aliens!" he announced with entirely too much certainty for Miranda's liking.

She made a show of rolling her eyes and sulking against the console. She was long used to these interruptions, but that didn't make them any less enjoyable. She hated sticking her nose into weird, possibly dangerous situations. Well, perhaps 'hate' was too strong a word. She certainly didn't look forward to them, in any case. "Which aliens?" she asked, knowing he was waiting for the question. When the answer didn't come right away, she looked at the Doctor.

To her surprise, he was eyeing the scanner with a deeply serious expression, the fingers of one hand drumming restlessly on the console.

"You can't get the TARDIS out of it, can you?" Miranda surmised.

"No, we'll have to ride the time stream to its exit vector." He still sounded troubled, but not about that.

"You've done that with the TARDIS before?"

He gave her a look that Miranda immediately recognized, and set about fiddling with the controls again, changing the scanner display several times.

"Do you know where the corridor leads?" she asked inoffensively. "Where are we going?"

"Dunno," he answered simply.

"What? If we're following a specific vector, why can't the TARDIS-?"

"That's just the problem. It doesn't seem to have an exit. Nor an entrance. Not one the TARDIS can detect, anyway. It looks as though it transects the entire universe! That shouldn't be possible. The amount of power it would take to project an energy barrier across all of space-time--can't be done. Well, I suppose in theory...but where's the point of origin?"

"So we're stuck in a time corridor with no origin and no endpoint? How'd we get in?" Miranda asked, attempting to draw the Doctor out of his private brainstorming session.

"Dunno. There wasn't any trace of it a moment ago, then Wham! Here it is, and here's us stuck in it."
The TARDIS shuddered mildly again, but this time in a way that was quite familiar. The rotor wheezed and went silent. "Did we just land?" Miranda asked anyway.

The Doctor checked the instruments. Then rechecked them. Then knit his brows together.

"What? Where did we land?" Miranda was getting annoyed with this idiotic round of 'Twenty Questions.' As if goading her, the Doctor seemed to ignore her completely and continued to fiddle with the controls in bemusement. Miranda tugged on his jacket sleeve. "Doctor! Where are we?"

The Doctor stopped playing with the levers and switches and drummed his fingertips on the panel. Then he grinned at Miranda, and whirled past her, legging it towards the doors. "Well, let's find out, shall we?" he called back to her.
"But shouldn't we have the TARDIS scan it first? Make sure we can, you know, breathe out there?" Miranda protested, catching him up at the TARDIS doors before he could open them.

"Aw, that would only spoil the satisfaction of finding it out first-hand!" He reached for the knob.

Miranda placed a restraining hand on his sleeve. "Versus the agonizing death throes you'll experience if you can't?"

The Doctor pinched the bridge of his beaked nose in exasperation. "Timid little Miranda! Of course I scanned it first! Just trying to engage your spontaneity. But that's right; you haven't got any. How stupid of me."

"So what did the scanner say? Where are we?" Miranda persisted.

The Doctor produced his sonic screwdriver from his jacket pocket and twirled it. "Dunno," he answered, grinning, popping the door open and stepping out of the TARDIS.

Miranda watched him stride out into what appeared to be a decidedly ordinary countryside. But after no more than a step out of the TARDIS, he suddenly grabbed his head and sank to the grass with a painful moan.

Of course.

"Doctor!" Miranda pulled the TARDIS door shut behind her and intended to go to him, but as soon as she left the deceptive confines of the blue police box, she was overcome by the weirdest sensation she'd ever felt. It was as though everything around her had simply ground to a halt. She saw her foot hang in the air just above the grass, her hand poised, statuesque, towards the Doctor.

She saw the Doctor, just in front of her on his knees, the hem of his leather jacket flared out from movement but frozen, not falling straight, his fingers pressed into the sides of his head but impossibly still. The grass his dark shoes had depressed remained so, a perfect footprint.

Not a single molecule of air seemed to move past Miranda's skin. She felt her hair, pulled into two braids, pulled back off her shoulders when she rushed out of the TARDIS, and still hanging suspended in the air. It was as if she'd been turned to stone. A sentient statue, frozen in a millisecond of time.

Then, in front of her unblinking, unmovable eyes, she saw a fly. An ordinary housefly, small and black. It was flying. She could see each flap of its wings, felt the very slight touch of disturbed air against her face. It passed before her in an eternity, the time between wing flaps stretching on and on. As it passed beyond her fixed realm of vision, Miranda tried to follow it with her eyes. The world swam as first her eyes, then her head, began to change position, tracking the flight of the small insect.

Miranda blinked, and it seemed as though an entire night passed before her lids opened again. When they did, she noticed that the Doctor was now sitting some feet away from where he had fallen, palms pressed against his forehead, mouth twisted in a pained grimace. But he was no longer frozen in place. She could see the wrinkles in his leather jacket changing as he made slight movements.

Maybe that meant she could move, as well. Miranda only intended to set her foot down, completing the step she'd begun that long moment ago, but something went wrong, and her vision became a blur of colors and shapes. She felt weightless, then saw black, her face pressed into a prickly, cool surface. The grass. She'd fallen face-first into the grass.

As if on a delayed circuit, the rest of her body seemed to wake up, and she felt the fall reverberate through her joints, particularly in her wrists. She must have tried to stop herself with her hands. Her palms felt scraped, for that matter. The little bit of pain went a long way towards clearing the fog in her head. She pushed herself up off the grass and stood up. Her movements were jerky, like her muscles were acting one step ahead of her brain. She staggered on the gentle slope.

"Doctor, are you alright?" Miranda asked, surprised how slurred her voice sounded.

The Doctor looked like he was in real physical pain, a hand pressed to his chest. "Agh," he groaned. "Time's wrong. Can feel it in every molecule of my being." He crumpled forward onto his elbows and knees, facedown in obvious distress.

The motion left trails in Miranda's eyes, faded ghost images forming and changing to catch up with the action. Miranda tried to blink them away. Like that one time in college she let herself be talked into smoking a joint. But this was frightening. Miranda couldn't imagine what it must be like for the Doctor. Nevertheless, she staggered over and sat down beside him.

"Can I help at all?"

SNAP! CRZZZ!

Miranda felt a heat blast against her back that tickled her neck. The Doctor's head jerked up, and he looked past Miranda, wide-eyed. "No!" he yelled unexpectedly, on his feet, stumbling past her towards the TARDIS.

Or rather, to where the TARDIS had been a moment ago. All that was left was a rapidly dissipating column of smoke. No dust, no debris, no TARDIS. For the first time in a long while, Miranda felt a cold stab of true panic. She looked frantically for the source of whatever it was that had just vaporized her way out, expecting big, nasty aliens with big, nasty guns. Her eyes were adjusting to this place, but all she saw in the drippy countryside was some kind of farmhouse in the distance.

The Doctor stood (a bit unsteadily) in the place where the TARDIS had been, unmoving. Miranda stumbled over and eyed him warily. She'd seen that particular blend of shock and anger on the Doctor's face before, and she was never sure how far she could trust him when he wore it. Like looking down into an active volcano, risking that it won't chose that exact moment to explode.

"Th-they just blew up the TARDIS!" she realized, letting it sink in as the sharp tang of ozone assaulted her nostrils.
She was afraid she might be sick.

"No, it was taken."

Miranda looked at the Doctor and watched as the fury drained from his eyes, leaving emptiness in its place. "Taken?" she repeated, seizing a glimmer of hope.

The Doctor pulled out his sonic screwdriver again and activated it, sweeping the air around them. Here and there, she saw glimmers of green light, like coloured dust motes. "Photon excitation. It was some kind of teleport device. A transmat," he said grimly.

"Well there's a house over there," Miranda pointed sightlessly, not wanting to risk turning her head and taking another dive into the dirt.

The Doctor looked, glanced at Miranda and smiled happily, pocketing the screwdriver and clapping her on the shoulder. "That's the spirit! What say we meet the neighbours? Lead on!"

Miranda forgot how exhausting his mood swings could be.

The Doctor kept his hand on Miranda's shoulder and leaned on her as they started walking towards the house. Miranda was still unsteady on her feet, but evidently the Doctor was a bit worse off. Unsure of herself, Miranda began leading the way down the gentle slope, towards the house.

"What's wrong with this place? Are we drugged?" she asked. The heavy-twitchy sensation hadn't gone away, and in concentrating on where she was putting her feet, she slurred her words badly.

"It's dimensional sensory confusion," the Doctor answered.

"What--?"

"I think we've been pulled into a different temporal dimension."

"How--?"

"I'll explain later."

"Where do you come up with this stuff, Doctor?"

"I get around. Been to a few other dimensions, me."

"You are so full of it." Starting up the next gentle incline, Miranda tripped over an exposed rock and nearly sent the both of them tumbling.

"Oy! Mind your step!" the Doctor groused.

"You wanna drive?"

"Just watch where you're stepping, yeah?"

"I would if I could actually see my feet when I walk!" Miranda composed herself and started walking up the hill more slowly, so her eyes could follow the shifting terrain more easily. "You're just as bad, aren't you?"
"We'll adapt to it eventually. It's already getting easier for you, isn't it?"

"I guess, if feeling drunk is an improvement over feeling high." Miranda's toes suddenly clipped the edge of an asphalt road that lay at the crest of the hill.

"What is it?" the Doctor asked.

"There's a road," Miranda said, keeping her eyes open and unmoving so they could focus. The asphalt was a black, serpentine line that led straight to the hedged gate of the house. It was bigger than she first thought, like a manor. A wooden fence marked the opposite side of the road. "For another dimension it looks awful homey, don't you think?"

"How do you mean?" the Doctor asked.

Miranda stepped onto the road and immediately felt surer of herself. The Doctor could only trip after her, still grimacing a bit, as if he were forced to look into full sunlight.

A cold breeze caused Miranda to shiver involuntarily. What a dreary day it was, wherever they were. "Very English countryside, what with the fields and fence and such," Miranda commented.

"How is that 'homey'?"

He had a point there. Miranda was an American city-dweller herself, and her comrade was a vagabond alien who lived in an ancient time ship. "Never mind. I just hope somebody's home and knows where the TARDIS went."
"And is willing to say so without a lot of undue running round and proclamations of 'you'll never get out alive, ha ha,' right?"

"Yeah, that too. Though with you involved I'm sure as hell not holding my breath."

"That's the spirit! Stand ready for anything!"

"Spirit? Resignation's more like it."

By the time they had reached the shade trees bordering the road in front of the gate, Miranda had adjusted to the strange effects of the environment, and as long as she was conscious of her movements and thought them through, she could manage almost normally.

"Looks like oak trees. Where are we?" she wondered aloud. The place looked very, very Earthbound. "Doctor, these other temporal dimensions, do they exist all the time, like, overlaid on the four dimensions we're used to, or is it like in theoretical physics, with micro dimensions and inner space and all that? I mean, this place looks like Earth. Did the TARDIS just happen to slip us into a higher temporal plane or something?"

The Doctor spared a moment from his grimacing to stare at her in bewilderment. "Where did all that come from?"
"What? Can't a girl brush up on her quantum physics now and then?"

For some reason, the Doctor didn't find seem to find that very amusing. "Just ring the bell, would you?"

"Now who's the grouch?" Miranda muttered, shoving off the Doctor's hand and thoughtlessly heading alone towards the gate. "Wait a minute!" She stopped and walked back to the Doctor. "Why am I approaching the door of a possibly booby-trapped, evil manor house all by myself? We're ringing that bell together!" She grabbed the Doctor's hand and forced him to follow her to the gate.

"You almost did it," the Doctor jibed.

"I'm not thinking clearly. Temporal confusion or whatever."

"Admit it!"

"No."

"Come on, you know it's true."

"I don't know what you're talking about, Doctor."

"You're brave, Miranda. If you'd stop thinking yourself in circles--"

"I do not! I analyze the situation, weigh all the risks, consider my options..."

"And run screaming into the TARDIS like a--"

"Only that one time, and I don't see a bell."

"No, neither do I." The Doctor stepped around her and examined the weathered iron bars and crumbly brickwork. He wrapped his long fingers around one of the bars. The gate swung inward with a well-oiled squeak. No explosives were triggered, no alarms went off and no nasty aliens or space Nazis appeared at the top of the brick wall to arrest them. Yet.

The Doctor looked at Miranda and shrugged. She shrugged back noncommittally. He pushed the gate open all the way and stepped inside the yard. Miranda waited a bit longer until she was confident there were no security measures waiting to kill him, and followed. A brick walkway connected the gate to the main door. The house looked old, with peeling paint and cracked windowsills, but still maintained vestiges of faded grandeur.

"Looks like an old plantation house. Antebellum, you know?" Miranda observed.

"Let's see who's home." The Doctor headed up the walk towards the front door at a brisk, confident jaunt-until a large quantity of dirt and rocks fell onto his head from the adjacent shade tree. The Doctor dropped to his knees and shielded his head and Miranda jumped back, startled. She looked up at the tree, but it was large and had thick foliage that looked almost black in the overcast weather, hiding whatever trap the Doctor had sprung.

She saw a flash of movement at the periphery of her vision and she looked down in time to see a figure in a shabby overcoat and absurdly large hat peeking out from the corner of the house. Miranda made eye contact, but before she could call out to him, the figure flashed a huge, toothy grin and vanished around the side of the manor. She heard the Doctor spitting dirt and fussing, drawing her attention back to the problem at hand.

"Are you alright?" she asked. She looked up into the tree once more, and then stepped beneath it, behind the Doctor. The debris appeared to have been mostly dirt clods, twigs and small pebbles. Nothing terribly dangerous, not at the short distance it had fallen.

The Doctor spat several times and flapped his jacket vigorously, spraying dirt from its creases in all directions. Miranda timidly brushed a few dead leaves off of his head, trying to be helpful. The Doctor stood up and ran both hands over his hair rapidly. "What was that about?" he wondered aloud, looking up into the tree curiously. She watched him look over the tree quickly, and then pick up a broken piece of twine lying by his foot.
Only then did Miranda notice that the twine hung down the trunk of the tree, wound around a metal staple in the ground that looked like it came from a croquet set, and stretched across the walkway where it was tied to another metal staple. The Doctor had evidently tripped it with his foot. The Doctor stared at the frayed end in his hand in such complete astonishment that Miranda had the sudden urge to laugh at him. "Simple elegance," she remarked instead.

"How could I have missed a tripwire?" the Doctor exclaimed, obviously paying Miranda no mind, "I know why, because nobody uses tripwires. It's antiquated. Naff, even. Why would someone...?"

The Doctor continued his rambling, but Miranda ignored him. That weirdo in the hat was back, watching them from the corner of the house again. "Doctor?" Miranda tried to get his attention subtly, but he was long gone on his speculative rant. The strange man once again made eye contact with her, but instead of fleeing, this time he beckoned to her with one finger. Miranda pointed to herself questioningly, making sure she understood him. The man nodded, baring his teeth again, in a big grin not completely unlike the Doctor's; that is to say, he looked slightly mad. Miranda glanced at the Doctor, but he was on the other side of the tree:

"...I suppose it has a certain charm to it, but if you're going to set such an obvious trap, why not do it right and make sure it gets the job done? This is just poor workmanship..."

Time to be brave, Miranda decided, leaving the brick walk and approaching the man at the side of the house. He waved encouragingly. Puzzled by his coy behaviour, Miranda waved back. She stepped over a flowerbed and was about to say something to the man, when the ground gave way beneath her sneakers.

She barely had time to get out a decent yelp of surprise before she landed on the bottom and had the wind knocked out of her. She felt sticks and damp wads of grass fall on her from above, but she was too busy struggling for breath to worry about it. Through teary eyes and smudged glasses, she saw the strange man staring down at her from the top of the hole. As if from under water, she heard an unfamiliar voice yell something, and the man scampered away.
At last, the swelling knot in her chest began to recede and Miranda almost choked on a desperate gasp, inhaling dirt and grass. Rolling onto her side in the cramped hole, she coughed.

"Are you alright?" a slightly nasal tenor inquired from above.

Miranda wiped grime from her face and glasses and saw another unfamiliar man standing at the edge of the hole, light brown curls brushing the shoulders of his prim, brown jacket as he leaned down.

"Yeah, I think so," Miranda wheezed, climbing to her feet. The hole was deeper than the quick fall had suggested. Standing up, she could just grab the top edge with her fingertips, not enough leverage to get out on her own.

"Here, take my hand," the man offered.

"Thanks," Miranda accepted. She grabbed both of his forearms and struggled unsuccessfully to find purchase for her feet, to climb out. But whoever had crafted the pit had done so with archaeological precision. The wall was perfectly straight and smooth. She felt a bit guilty that her rescuer ended up pulling her out of the hole by her arms with sheer strength. He fell backwards onto the grass with an undignified grunt of effort, taking Miranda with him. For a moment she was disinclined to move off of him, still breathless and feeling as though her arms were out of socket.

"Am I interrupting something?" the Doctor inquired mildly from somewhere nearby.

Miranda scrambled off of her rescuer and brushed off her shorts and tee shirt. "What? No! I was just-here, let me help." She stopped mid-explanation to offer a hand to her rescuer, who gratefully took it in order to get up from the grass. "Thanks," she said to him.

"No problem." The man casually dusted off his Victorian dress coat and smiled pleasantly. Miranda finally acknowledged the Doctor. "I fell. He-"

The Doctor's expression stopped her cold. He was staring fixedly at the other man in utter disbelief. Miranda turned back to the genial stranger. He seemed neither put off nor surprised by the Doctor's wordless reaction. He regarded Miranda again. "You're unharmed, I trust, Miss...?"

"Miranda. Not Miss Miranda, that's my first name. Just call me Miranda," she stammered somewhat stupidly, disarmed by his unexpected chivalry.

"Miranda. A pleasure. I," the stranger addressed them significantly, "am the Doctor."