Time Warp: A Doctor Who AU Fanfic

Chapter ii

Kelli sat in her tiny apartment with her mind racing over the events of the past few hours. She had analyzed and over-analyzed her calculations and couldn't see any reason why her fusion formula couldn't work. She'd cried and yelled at her computer, broken her favorite coffee mug and then cried again. She walked into her bathroom and looked into the full length mirror on her door, considering the way she looked. She was nearly 30, wearing black and white knee socks with horizontal stripes, a short denim skirt, an oversized sweatshirt with an obscure cartoon character on it, black cloth fingerless gloves, and a stocking cap. The ends of her black pig-tails exited chaotically from beneath her cap, and her eyeliner was heavy black, as was her lipstick. She did look like a teenager, but she smiled and danced slightly back and forth to a song she invented in her head. If the scientific community wouldn't accept her as she was, then maybe she'd move to San Francisco and upset the computer industry. After all, writing computer code shouldn't be any harder than the mathematics in physics, right? She sat in front of her laptop and began searching for a tutorial on writing a resume; something she had absolutely no clue how to do.

After her ADHD caused her resume tutorial hunt to become a 20 minute session on the finer points of feral horse taming, her phone rang. She glanced down to the smiling face of Thomas Lawson, the endearing but socially inept grad-student who never quite got the point that she wasn't interested. "Hello, Tommy; what do you need?" She said, causing the word need to be somewhat flat."

Kel! Um, hi. Um, Dr. Channing would like to see all of us in the lab," he replied.

She sat straight up and paused the horse video. "All of the grad-students? When? Why?"

"Um, right now. I'm headed over there right now. I have no idea why," came the reply.

"Okay, I'll meet you guys there," she said, ending the call before he asked something stupid, like how her day was going. She slipped into her pink high-tops, grabbed her laptop and headed out the door.

When she arrived at the lab, she saw Dr. Channing, Dr. Ling, and a man in military apparel standing by the whiteboard. After the last grad-student entered the room, Dr. Channing spoke.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he began, "this is Lieutenant Colonel Welling, with NASA. He would like to speak with all of us." The murmurs in the room increased upon the mention of NASA.

Colonel Welling was a tall man with snow-white hair and deep lines on his narrow face. He wore the two-tone light blue fatigues of an Air-Force official, but what caught the eye of most of the students, including Kelli, was his Shuttle Mission Patch on his shoulder. He stepped up to the podium and cleared his throat. "Ladies and gentlemen, early yesterday, a landowner in the neighboring county reported a crater that appeared on his property. However, the crater is empty." He motioned for the lights to be turned down as he brought his laptop's power point up on the whiteboard. "Here, you'll see satellite imagery of the land before the crater, taken at 0936 hours. Here, is the same area with the crater, taken at 0944 hours. Whatever caused this crater managed to disappear within 8 minutes. Since we know of nothing on this planet that can create a mark on the landscape this significant and then completely evaporate, we've decided to turn to investigate this as an extra-terrestrial event. Dr. Channing, we would like you and your students to take whatever equipment to this, ahem, crash site, and see what you can learn. Now, are there any questions?"

"Um, Colonel, Uh...What exactly are we looking for?" Thomas asked.

"Residual radiation, soil analysis, traces of non-indigenous materials. Anything that could give us a clue as to what did this," he replied. "Anyone else?"