Avery followed Rose and a man named Clive into his shed. She thought this entire thing was unnecessary, but she wasn't going to stop her sister. "A lot of this stuff's quite sensitive. I couldn't just send it to you. People might intercept it, if you know what I mean." Clive said, "If you dig deep enough and keep a lively mind, this Doctor keeps cropping up all over the place. Political diaries, conspiracy theories, even ghost stories. No first name, no last name, just the Doctor. Always The Doctor. And the title seems to have been passed down from father to son. It appears to be an inheritance. That's your Doctor there, isn't it?" Clive pointed at a computer screen.
Avery and Rose lean closer to the screen. "Yeah." Rose replied.
"I tracked it down to the Washington public archive just last year. The online photo's enhanced, but if we look at the original." Avery leans in to look at the photo. The original is a picture of Kennedy's cortege going through Dallas. The Doctor is just one face in the crowd. She stepped back and allowed Rose to look as Clive continued, "November the 22nd, 1963. The assassination of President Kennedy. You see?"
"It must be his father." Rose says. Meanwhile, Avery hid her slight smirk. She knew the truth of the Doctor. She knew he was alien and probably had a far longer life span than her or her sister.
"Going further back. April 1912. This is a photo of the Daniels family of Southampton, and friend. This was taken the day before they were due to sail off for the New World on the Titanic, and for some unknown reason, they cancelled the trip and survived." Clive handed the photo to Avery to look at before grabbing a sketch, "And here we are. 1883. Another Doctor. And look, the same lineage. It's identical. This one washed up on the coast of Sumatra on the very day Krakatoa exploded. The Doctor is a legend woven throughout history. When disaster comes, he's there. He brings the storm in his wake and he has one constant companion."
"Who's that?" Avery asked, speaking up for the first time since she arrived.
"Death." Clive said seriously, "If the Doctor's back, if you've seen him, Avery, Rose, then one thing's for certain. We're all in danger. If he's singled you two out, if the Doctor's making house calls, then God help you."
"But who is he? Who do you think he is?" Rose questioned.
"I think he's the same man. I think he's immortal. I think he's an alien from another world."
***
"Do you think I should try the hospital? Suki said they had jobs going in the canteen. Is that it then, dishing out chips. I could do A Levels. I don't know. It's all Jimmy Stone's fault. I only left school because of him. Look where he ended up. What do you think?" Rose asked, completely oblivious to her sister's worried face and her boyfriend's very plastic appearance.
"So, where did you meet this Doctor?" Mickey asked.
"I'm sorry, wasn't I talking about me for a second?"
"Because I reckon it started back at the shop, am I right? Was he something to do with that?"
"No."
"Come on."
"Sort of."
"What was he doing there?"
"Rose." Avery tried to warn but was ignored.
Rose said, "I'm not going on about it, Mickey. Really, I'm not, because, I know it sounds daft, but I don't think it's safe. I think he's dangerous."
"But you can trust me, sweetheart. Babe, sugar, babe, sugar. You can tell me anything. Tell me about the Doctor and what he's planning, and I can help you, Rose. Because that's all I really want to do, sweetheart, babe, babe, sugar, sweetheart."
"What're you doing that for?"
"Your champagne." Avery looked towards the voice and grinned when she saw the Doctor.
"We didn't order any champagne." Plastic Mickey dismissed before asking, "Where's the Doctor?"
"Madam, your champagne." The Doctor offered it to Rose.
"It's not ours." Rose told him, without sparing him a glance, "Mickey, what is it? What's wrong?"
"I need to find out how much you know, so where is he?"
"Do you want this champagne?" The Doctor asked Avery, who grinned up at him.
"You know I do." Avery replied, standing up.
Avery took it from him just as Plastic Mickey snapped, "Look, we didn't order it." Plastic Mickey finally looks up to see that the waiter is the Doctor and sees the bottle that is now in Avery's hands, "Ah. Gotcha."
Avery starts shaking the bottle vigorously, grinning as she does so, "Don't mind us. We're just toasting the happy couple."
"On the house!" The Doctor added as Avery releases the cage around the cork and it flies into Plastic Mickey's forehead.
After a few moments, he spits it out, causing Avery to cringe in slight disgust. "Anyway." Plastic Mickey gets up and turns his hand into a chopper. Avery backs away from the table while Rose screams and flees as Plastic Mickey wrecks the table. The Doctor quickly gets Plastic Mickey in a headlock and struggles to pull the head off. Avery rolls her eyes and steps forward, kicking the plastic body in the back, successfully popping the head off as the other customers scream.
Plastic Mickey's head opens his eyes saying, "Don't think that's going to stop me." The body gets up and begins to flail about, wrecking the place further.
Rose turns to the fire alarm beside her and hits it, calling, "Everyone out! Out now! Get out! Get out! Get out!"
The Tyler sisters and the Doctor run through the kitchens, the latter carrying the head as the body wrecks the restaurant before following them to the back exit. Once they're out the door, Rose runs down the alley to a gate secured by a padlock while Avery rushes over to the Tardis and the Doctor seals the exit.
"Open the gate! Use that tube thing. Come on!" Rose exclaims as she wrestles with the padlock on the gate.
"Sonic screwdriver." Avery and the Doctor both corrected before looking at the other in surprise.
"Use it!"
"Nah. Tell you what, let's go in here." The Doctor suggests, gesturing to the Tardis. He gently nudges Avery away as she was leaning against the doors before he unlocks the door. He walks inside and Avery walks in right after him. Once she's inside, she can't help but smile as she takes in the Tardis' beauty again.
She hears a door slam behind her and turns to see her sister standing there stunned before running right back out only to come right back in a few moments later "It's going to follow us!" Rose exclaims.
"The assembled hordes of Genghis Khan couldn't get through that door, and believe me, they've tried. Now, shut up a minute." The Doctor tells her. Rose looks around, taking in the vast size of the room before looking at her sister, who is sitting on the jumpseat like this place wasn't completely impossible. "You see, the arm was too simple, but the head's perfect. I can use it to trace the signal back to the original source." The Doctor explained as he plugged the head into the console before asking, "Right. Where do you want to start?"
"Um, the inside's bigger than the outside?" Rose asked, trying to process what she was seeing.
"Yes."
"It's alien."
"Yeah."
"Are you alien?"
"Yes. Is that all right?"
"Yeah."
"It's called the Tardis, this thing." Avery told her.
"T A R D I S." The Doctor continued, "That's Time And Relative Dimension In Space." Rose bursts into tears, causing Avery to get up and rush over to her side, wrapping her arms around her sister comfortingly, "That's okay. Culture shock. Happens to the best of us."
"Did they kill him? Mickey? Did they kill Mickey? Is he dead?" Rose asked.
"Oh. I didn't think of that." The Doctor said.
"He's my boyfriend. You pulled off his head. They copied him and you didn't even think? And now you're just going to let him melt?"
"Melt?" The Doctor asked, turning to look at the head that was now melting where it was attached to the cables, "Oh, no, no, no, no, no!"
"What're you doing?" Rose asked as The Doctor rushed around the console.
"Following the signal. It's fading. Wait a minute, I've got it." The Doctor was saying before something seemed to have gone wrong, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no! Almost there. Almost there. Here we go"
The Tardis lands and the Doctor rushes out the door with Avery not far behind him, both ignoring Rose's calls, "You can't go out there. It's not safe."
"I lost the signal, I got so close." The Doctor said, frustration clear in his voice as Rose exits the Tardis.
"We've moved. Does it fly?" Rose asked.
"Disappears there and reappears here. You wouldn't understand." The Doctor tells her.
"I think I would." Avery speaks up.
The Doctor looks at her for a moment before saying, "I'll explain it to you later." She grinned.
"If we're somewhere else, what about that headless thing? It's still on the loose." Rose said.
"It melted with the head. Are you going to witter on all night?"
"Doctor, don't take your frustration out on her." Avery told him.
"Sorry." He muttered.
"I'll have to tell his gran." The Doctor looked at Rose in confusion and she continued, "Mickey. I'll have to tell his gran he's dead, and you just went and forgot him, again! You were right, you are alien."
"Look, if I did forget some kid called Mickey-"
"Yeah, he's not a kid!"
"-It's because I'm trying to save the life of every stupid ape blundering on top of this planet, all right?"
"All right!"
"Yes, it is!"
"Enough!" Avery exclaimed, "I know tensions are high, but we all need to keep a level head if we're going to stop this world from being destroyed by living plastic, okay." Both the Doctor and Rose shrunk away from the shorter girl, muttering small apologies after seeing the angry look in her eyes.
"If you are an alien, how comes you sound like you're from the North?" Rose asked.
"Lots of planets have a north." The Doctor replied almost defensively.
"What's a police public call box?"
"It's a telephone box from the 1950s." Avery told her with a smile, leaning against the Tardis.
"It's a disguise." The Doctor added with a grin, patting the box fondly.
"Okay." Rose said before asking, "And this, this living plastic. What's it got against us?"
"Nothing. It loves you. You've got such a good planet. Lots of smoke and oil, plenty of toxins and dioxins in the air, perfect. Just what the Nestene Consciousness needs. It's food stock was destroyed in the war, all its protein plants rotted, so Earth, dinner!" The Doctor explained.
"Any way of stopping it?" Avery inquired, stepping closer to her other two companions.
The Doctor holds up a tube of blue liquid, "Anti-plastic."
"Anti-plastic?" Avery asked, reaching for it.
"Anti-plastic." He replied, handing it to her to look at, "But first I've got to find it. How can you hide something that big in a city this small?"
"Hold on. Hide what?" Rose asked.
"Probably some kind of transmitter." Avery began, handing the tube of Anti-plastic back to the Doctor, "Sounds like this 'Nestene Consciousness' is controlling every single piece of plastic, so it probably needs a transmitter to boost the signal." Both Rose and the Doctor looked at Avery as if they couldn't believe her, "What?"
"Has anyone ever told you that you're absolutely brilliant?" The Doctor asked her.
"I tell her that all the time." Rose told him.
"I'm really not." Avery told them, "I just put the pieces together."
"And, she always responds like this." Rose continued before returning to the subject at hand and asking, "What's it look like?"
"Like a transmitter. Round and massive, slap bang in the middle of London." He begins to walk as he talks, "A huge circular metal structure like a dish, like a wheel. Radial. Close to where we're standing. Must be completely invisible." Avery shares a glance with her sister before staring at the London Eye that was right behind him, "What?" He turns to look where the sisters are staring before turning back, "What?" He repeats what he did before, "What is it? What?"
Avery sighs and raises a brow, causing him to turn around a third time. He finally catches on to what the sisters are looking at, "Oh." He turns around again before turning back with a grin, "Fantastic!"
***
"Think of it, plastic all over the world, every artificial thing waiting to come alive. The shop window dummies, the phones, the wires, the cables" The Doctor tells them as they stand beneath the London Eye
"The breast implants." Rose adds, causing Avery to roll her eyes
"Still, we've found the transmitter. The Consciousness must be somewhere underneath."
Avery runs over to a parapet and sees a large manhole entrance at the bottom of the steps, "What about down here?"
The Doctor and Rose run over to where she's looking, the former telling her, "Looks good to me."
They run down and the Doctor opens up the hatch. There is a red light inside. The Doctor climbs down the short ladder first into a brick-built area with lots of chains and Avery follows, then Rose. From there they go through a door and down a flight of steps into a multi-level chamber.
"The Nestene Consciousness." The Doctor says, pointing down at the vat, "That's it, inside the vat. A living plastic creature."
"Well, then. Tip in your anti-plastic and let's go." Rose told him.
Avery looked at her sister with wide eyes, "We can't just kill it. It's a living creature. We have to give it a chance."
The Doctor nodded. "Avery's right." He continues down the catwalk overlooking the seething vat, "I seek audience with the Nestene Consciousness under peaceful contract according to convention 15 of the Shadow Proclamation." The Consciousness in the vat flexes, "Thank you. If I might have permission to approach?"
Avery looks around before spotting Mickey a few levels down. "Rose, look!" She points at Mickey.
"Oh, God!" Rose gasps, rushing over to Mickey and making the Doctor roll his eyes.
Avery follows after Rose, smacking the Doctor's arm as she went, saying, "Don't be rude."
"Mickey, it's me! It's okay. It's all right." Rose said as she reached him, Avery and the Doctor not far behind.
"That thing down there, the liquid. Rose, it can talk!" Mickey told her.
"You're stinking." Rose told him before turning to the Doctor, "Doctor, they kept him alive."
"Yeah, that was always a possibility." The Doctor said.
Avery nodded in understanding, "Makes sense. Keep him alive to maintain the copy."
"You knew that and you never said?" Rose questioned the Doctor.
"Can we keep the domestics outside, thank you?" The Doctor replied before continuing downwards.
"Stay with Mickey." Avery told Rose as she moved to look over the railing at the Doctor.
"Am I addressing the Consciousness?" The Doctor asked. The liquid gurgled and flexed, "Thank you. If I might observe, you infiltrated this civilization by means of warp shunt technology. So, may I suggest, with the greatest respect, that you shunt off? "A sort of face forms in the vat of plastic, flexing and growling, "Oh, don't give me that. It's an invasion, plain and simple. Don't talk about constitutional rights." It roared and splashed about, "I am talking!" The Consciousness went quiet, "This planet is just starting. These stupid little people have only just learnt how to walk, but they're capable of so much more. I'm asking you on their behalf. Please, just go."
"Doctor!" Avery called upon seeing a pair of shop dummies grab the Doctor.
One takes the vial of anti-plastic from his pocket. "That was just insurance. I wasn't going to use it." The Consciousness roared, "I was not attacking you. I'm here to help. I'm not your enemy. I swear, I'm not." It roared again, "What do you mean?" A door slides back to reveal the Tardis, causing Avery's eyes to widen, "No. Oh, no. Honestly, no." It growled, "Yes, that's my ship." It roared, "That's not true. I should know, I was there. I fought in the war. It wasn't my fault." It roared again, "I couldn't save your world! I couldn't save any of them!"
"What's it doing?!" Avery called.
"It's the Tardis! The Nestene's identified its superior technology. It's terrified. It's going to the final phase. It's starting the invasion! Get out, Avery! Take Rose and just leg it now!"
Avery barely spared her sister a glance as Rose called their mum. She watched the Doctor fight against the dummies and The Consciousness starts throwing energy bolts around. "It's the activation signal. It's transmitting!" The Doctor tells them.
"It's the end of the world." Rose mutters.
Avery watches as the plastic in the vat got extremely agitated. "Get out, Avery! Just get out! Run!" The Doctor called.
"The stairs have gone!" Rose calls. The Autons try to push the Doctor into the vat. Meanwhile, Rose, Avery, and Mickey run to the Tardis, "I haven't got the key!"
"We're going to die!" Mickey exclaimed.
"Not if I have anything to say about it." Avery tells them, pushing past to get to the door. She brushes her fingers over the wood gently, "Please, pretty lady, open your doors for us." The Tardis doors swing open, more than willing to do anything Her Excellency asked of her. Avery grinned, "Thank you." She breathed before pushing Rose and Mickey inside, "I'm going to save the Doctor." She slammed the door shut. Rose and Mickey rush over to the console to watch on the monitor that the Tardis had turned on.
Avery looked around, running through the chamber for an idea, when she spotted a chain and a rope. She picks up an axe that was conveniently placed nearby and chopped at a chain. Once it was released, she took a firm hold and ran, swinging off the side of the catwalk. She kicks one of the Autons, causing it to lose its balance enough for the Doctor to throw it into the vat, before kicking the other that was holding the tube of anti-plastic into the cat as well. The tube broke open, spilling into the Consciousness and turning it blue while it screamed.
"Avery!" The Doctor exclaimed as he caught her as she swung back. He held her by the waist tightly and shared a grin as he told her, "Now we're in trouble." They run up to the Tardis as explosions begin to happen around them. Avery pushed past and rushed right through the Tardis' doors, the Doctor right behind her.
***
While Mickey and Rose exited the Tardis as soon as it had landed, The Doctor and Avery lingered by the door. "Nestene Consciousness? Easy." The Doctor said.
Avery rolled her eyes. "You were useless in there." She told him, pushing past to go stand with her sister and Mickey, "You'd be dead if it wasn't for me."
"Yes, I would. Thank you." Avery smiled which caused the Doctor to smile, "Right then, I'll be off, unless, er, I don't know, you two could come with me. This box isn't just a London hopper, you know. It goes anywhere in the universe free of charge."
"Don't." Mickey told them, pointing at the Doctor, "He's an alien. He's a thing."
"He's not invited."
"Mickey, don't be rude." Avery told her sister's boyfriend.
"What do you think? You could stay here, fill your life with work and food and sleep, or you could go... anywhere." The Doctor was telling them.
"Is it always this dangerous?" Rose asked.
"Yeah."
Mickey sat up and wrapped his arms around Rose, pressing his head into her side, "Yeah, I can't. I've um, I've got to go and find my mum and someone's got to look after this stupid lump, so."
He turned to look at Avery, who gave him a soft smile, "I've already had my little trip with you. I'm content with that."
"Okay. See you around." He told them, however, his eyes never left Avery. Blue met silver before he turned around and entered the Tardis, closing the door behind him. Moments pass before the Tardis dematerializes.
"Come on, let's go." Rose said, helping Mickey stand up, "Come on. Come on."
The three of them begin to walk away when the Tardis materializes again. The Doctor pokes his head out saying, "By the way, did I mention it also travels in time?"
"Thanks." Rose says as she turns to Mickey.
"Thanks for what?"
"Exactly." Rose kisses Mickey on the cheek and runs into the Tardis.
The Doctor pokes his head out again and look at Avery, "You coming, too?"
Avery merely smirked and replied, "Ask me again the next time you see me and I might just say yes." The Doctor smiled and went back inside the Tardis. Moments pass and the Tardis is gone. Avery turned to Mickey, saying, "Come on, let's get you home."
As they begin to walk, Mickey asks, "Is she going to be okay?"
Avery smiles, "Of course she will. She's with the Doctor."