The Doctor

[Foxglove]

I really hated the insides of this ship. Compared to the Apahanta, this one was as stylish as a concrete block. Pretty brutalist. I rolled to the side on the bed that I had been given on the ship. Maren had left me here alone, saying that she’d check in with the Doctor and see what they were going to do with me.

Even the wall was uninteresting. Sitting up, I stretched my back. Was there something wrong with me again? The Doctor had said that something worried her. I didn’t think she was capable of that emotion, to be honest. Getting off the bed, I headed for the door, wanting to check if it was open. Apparently not. Damn. “Ugh,” I complained, making a beeline for the bathroom instead. There were drawers there, so maybe there was something interesting there. Ten minutes later, I found myself holding a squirt gun. It wasn’t that big, but it was at least colourful. “Aww yiss,” I said as I filled in water from the sink. The question why there was a squirt gun in the first place didn’t really occur to me. Who cared anyway? This was awesome.

“Freeze!” I shouted at the empty room as I kicked open the bathroom door and blindly squirted into the room. One of the tiny rays of water hit the console next to the door and it gave a sizzling sound. “Oops.” Approaching, I appraised the squirt impact. Humming, I saw that the door was now open. Just a tiny bit. But it would do. “Nnnnoice,” I muttered while I holstered my squirt gun in my jeans and tried my best at opening the door with my hands. Surprisingly, it was rather easy to pry it open wide enough so I could slip through. I truly was the strongest one on this ship. Suppressing the urge to gloat, I squeezed outside. My nose grazed past the door and my squirt gun was a little too big, so I rotated it in my pocket slightly.

Looking around on the other side, I saw that I was on a simple corridor. I’d come past here before as Maren and I had entered the ship. There were a lot of crates simply put here and there but at least it was clean. I didn’t see anything moving though. I didn’t really know where to go, too. I hadn’t thought this far ahead. Okay, to the left, there were the airlocks somewhere, so it would be logical to go right. So I did. I tried opening some doors, but they were all locked. I squired at them and their consoles as well but it didn’t work this time. Damn, and I was halfway out of ammo too! I needed to find a squirt gun supply cache!

As I progressed through the ship, I started playing a special agent on a special sneaky mission, hushing from corner to corner, squirt gun at the ready. I came to another cross section and turned left this time, only to scramble back behind the corner as I heard one of the doors open. Peeking around the corner, I saw a blonde man exiting one of the rooms and heading my way. Starting to sweat, I wondered what I should do. If I ran now, he’d hear me. Closing my eyes, I shifted farther away from the corner, hoping that if I held still, he’d not see me from the corner of his eyes in passing. I was in luck. When he passed, he headed straight forward, not sparing a glance to the sides. Even after he’d left my view, though, I still held still until his steps had weren’t audible anymore.

Letting out a breath that I didn’t know I’d held, I wondered why I’d been this agitated in the first place. I was a little girl running around on the ship. We were guests here and I doubted they’d do anything to us. They’d had way too many chances for that already. Peeking around the corner, I confirmed that the blonde man was gone. Looking the other way, I started walking to where he’d been coming from. It was a door just like any other one. I squinted at it. “You won’t open on your own, will you?” I asked the door. It did nothing, as expected. Faster than the cowboys at high noon, I whipped out my squirt gun and squirted at the control console at the side. It did nothing, but I noticed something. “Huh, this is green,” I muttered as I noticed that the light coming from the console was different than from the other ones. I put my finger on the light on the console and started slightly as I got a small chiming sound in response. And just like that, the door opened.

I wasn’t really sure what I had expected. Maybe some weird machinery that I didn’t understand, but definitely not this. Standing in the doorway, I looked at something that looked like the room of a young teenager. The floor actually had a light blue carpet, and the interior was different. The furniture was made of wood. Drawers, closets and a bed seemed to be arranged to give a lot of place in the middle of the room. Sitting there cross-legged was someone who looked slightly out of place for the environment they were in. Long, red hair was obstructing the face of what I presumed was a woman. There was a sketchbook on her lap and she was holding a pen. “Uh,” I sounded, and that seemed to wake the person up. Raising her head, I could see that it belonged to a young woman who gave me a piercing look with her blue eyes, saying nothing. “Sorry, I was just, uh, playing?” I noticed that I was still holding the squirt gun and quickly put it back into my pocket so at least I wouldn’t look completely moronic.

The woman gave no answer, simply staring. “Uhm, are you well?” I asked confusedly, slightly unsettled by the demeanour of that person. Had I done something wrong? However, as I stood there, more and more details of the room came into view for me. There were board games on the shelves and the drawers probably contained clothes? Involuntarily, I made a step into the room. My boredom had brought me so far as to consider playing a board game, how about that? Noticing that I was still being watched, I stopped. The door slid shut behind me. “Uh,” I intoned eloquently. “I’ll just, uh, take a look there okay?” Still no answer. It started to irritate me. Still, no answer meant no denial, so I figured that I was golden in going ahead. Turning away, I began sifting through the games that were assorted on the shelves. Some of them were pretty generic. I even spotted a rubrics cube. However, some of this was pretty eldritch and I had no idea what to do with these. Just to check, I opened one of the drawers and found clothes there, as expected. Boring.

Rummaging through things that didn’t belong to me, I kind of lost track of time. There were a lot of interesting things that I could occupy myself with, so it was rather easy. Since my attention had been this devoted, I started as I felt someone standing behind me, and snapped my head back around to see who it was. In doing so, I smacked the side of my head against the chins of the red haired woman, who gave a half-yelp in response. “Shit, sorry!” I exclaimed, holding up my hands as I had no idea if that woman even spoke my language.

Rubbing her chin, she looked at me with something like annoyance. “Look, you shouldn’t sneak up to me like that.”

Now this close, I could see that there didn’t appear to be anything wrong with the woman physically. She seemed to also eye me down intensely before narrowing her eyes. She returned to where she had put the sketchbook before and began leafing through it before showing me one of the drawings.

Confused, I looked first at her, then at the sketchbook and then back at the woman. She seemed to want me to look at the picture and so I sighed and did so. “Uhm,” I intoned as I couldn’t discern what I was supposed to see there. I could tell that the woman wasn’t bad at drawing, but I had no idea what was depicted. It was a simple pencil drawing of a room with a kind of bubbly tube and there were wires everywhere. Someone was standing in front of the tube and looking up at it. The wavy hair reminded me of the woman in front of me, although the depiction seemed smaller. I tilted my head slightly. “Is that you?” I asked, then pointing at the person in the drawing, then at the woman in front of me.

That seemed to do the trick, as she gestured from me to the tube, then at the person in the picture, then back at herself. Then she drew a circle in the air, pointed at the clock hanging above the door of the room we were standing in, then at herself, then at the tube again. It made my head reel. “Sorry, but I don’t really understand what you’re saying.” I focused on the picture again. There seemed to be something in the tube, suspended. It wasn’t much more than a smudge on the page. I looked up at her and tried my best to look questioning since words didn’t seem to work. The woman sighed and closed the sketchbook. “So, yeah,” I replied, mulling the encounter over before coming to the conclusion that this woman was probably like one of the special children I had once seen at the orphanage. She probably just wanted to show me how well she could draw. That was good, right? That means she liked me. “Want to play something?” I thought for a moment before pulling out a deck of simply playing cards.

To visualize what I was asking, I held out the cards in front of me and pointed at the woman, then at myself, then at the cards. The woman seemed to understand and nodded. I figured we could just sit down in the centre of the room. The carpet was pretty nice, after all.

Before we could sit down, though, the door opened and the Doctor stepped in. “Dinah,” she stated, looking at me sitting on the ground with the deck of cards while the red woman was still standing. “You shouldn’t run around like that. A lot of the rooms here still haven’t been cleaned up. What if you’d run into one of these?”

For a moment, my heart had sunk so much that I could’ve sworn it was somewhere in my left leg, but hearing as the Doctor wasn’t yelling at me, I figured she wasn’t buttmad. “Uhm,” was all I really managed to bring out.

The Doctor gestured for me. “Please come. We need to get to your check up.” Nodding dumbly, I slowly stood up and made a step towards the door, leaving the playing cards on the ground. The red woman was simply standing there, looking at me. I couldn’t see much more of her, however, before we’d left the room and her behind.

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