The Girl Who Ran

Chapter 3

I would consider myself a good girl. I don't smoke, drink, or do drugs of any kind. I prefer to remain in control of my senses, and especially in charge of my brain. So as soon as I entered that blue box, I was sure I had been drugged or something. Everything spun around me, and it appeared as if space itself was disobeying basic physics.
I walked around the deep blue prism twice, three times, and took another look inside.
Impossible.
"Well? What do you think?" The Doctor had this silly grin on his face.
"You get used to it after a while," Rose added, looking more than a little amused as she watched me walk in and then around the box for the fourth straight time.
"I don't get it," I said, somewhat stupidly. I walked through the doors once more. A ramp led straight into where the back of the box should have been. Instead, a hexagon surrounded by coral-like supports met my gaze. A large pale blue cylinder stretched up to the top of the vast room, while little half spheres decorated the walls. I turned to face the outside, where the two of them stood. I realized that my jaw was hanging open, and I quickly shut it.
The Doctor waltzed up to the entrance. "Bigger on the inside," he stated simply. "Timelord technology. It manipulates space to fit inside a smaller area. Sort of like when you pack clothes in a bag, and even though there's no way all of them will fit, you just change the arrangement of the clothes, and then there's more space."
I looked around the room once more, the yellows and browns and blues all seeming to glow in anticipation of my arrival.
"So basically I'm being rearranged to fit into a smaller space?"
The Doctor and Rose stepped inside the box. "Yup," they said, almost in unison.
"The TARDIS is a feat of engineering. If only I had the chameleon circuit fixed, it would be fully functional," the Doctor added.
I walked up to the hexagonal panel with load of buttons and dials and whatever else littering it. "What's the TARDIS?" I was tempted to press one of the buttons, but something told me that would be a bad idea.
Rose practically skipped into the room, sitting down on a ledge in one far corner of the room. "Time And Relative Dimensions In Space."
"Sorry, what's that?" I asked.
"TARDIS," she said, gesturing to the large interior. "This is the TARDIS. It stands for 'Time And Relative Dimensions In Space.'"
I looked around the room once again, trying to take everything in. "TARDIS," I breathed to myself. It was a word that seemed familiar and yet so very distant. "So if you're going around fixing all of time and space, why haven't I heard of you before? Why hasn't anyone heard of you before?"
The Doctor smiled, as if he had some sort of secret. "Ever heard of the Greek god Hermes?"
I gawked at him as he rummaged around in a compartment underneath a slice of the hexagonal panelling. "You can't be serious. How were you able to convince an entire people that you were the god Hermes?"
"Well," the Doctor replied, drawing out the word to an almost unbearable length if time. "I'm really not sure. I was just walking into ancient Athens one day, and suddenly a whole crowd thronged me and started shouting the name 'Hermes' and bowing down to me. It really is a mystery." He threw a couple items out of the compartment before giving a triumphant cry of "Ah-ha!"
In his hand was what looked like a metal spaghetti strainer, with all sorts of wires attached to miniature suction cups dangling all over the place. He rushed it over to the other side of the control panel and fiddled around with two of the wires until they stuck onto the panelling. I wandered over to him, looking at the contraption.
"You're going to have to put this on top of your head," he said, motioning to the strainer without even lifting his eyes. His hands flew from one dial to the other, and he pulled a few levers on the other side of the control panel, never stopping for even a moment.
Rose hopped down from her ledge and walked over to me. "It'll be alright," she said, placing her hand on mine. I didn't really like that, her acting like she was so much braver than me. I was shaking a little bit, I suppose, but surely not that much.
"Of course I will be," I stated. I drew my hand rather quickly away from hers and stepped up to the helmet. "So this is going to do what, exactly?" I asked.
The Doctor kept readjusting valves, spinning another dial, the turning it back again. "It'll read your mind, tell the TARDIS where to take us."
"What, this thing is going to sort of get inside my head and help us find my mum?" I was highly skeptical of the spaghetti strainer, and even more worried about something accessing my mind.
"The TARDIS already has a sort of psychic link with you," Rose said. "It sets up a translation matrix as soon as you step inside it, so that you hear everything in your own language and everyone hears you in their own language." She paused and looked at the Doctor, then whispered to me, "For all we know, he could be speaking ancient Mesopotamian."
"Oi, I do hear that, you know! And I do just happen to know a little ancient Mesopotamian." With that he leapt up, and sort of pounced around the hexagon to the other side and began typing away furiously into a keyboard. "Alright, Rachel, I need you to think very carefully about the night your mother disappeared. Pick an image, a picture from your memory of that day, and then put the cap on. Think very clearly, too, don't leave out a single detail of your surroundings. The TARDIS should translate that into a time and location and take us there."
It's ridiculous, I told myself, as I put the metal bowl on my head.
"You might want to find something to grab onto," Rose warned me.
I grabbed onto a nearby railing and began to think. I took the first image that popped into my head and latched onto it. It was so vivid. The color, the sound, even the smell. I fixated my memory on it. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to be transported back to that time. The loud music, the roar of high schoolers chattering, the flashing colors and dancing couples. I took it all in.
Without warning, the entire floor jolted in a direction, and I found myself gripping even harder at the metal bar.
"We're slipping!" The Doctor shouted from across the room. I could hear levers being thrown and dials being twisted around. I was coming back into reality. "No, no, no!"
I dared to open an eye.
The Doctor was practically tripping over himself, flying from one side of the control panel to the other, pressing buttons and switches in random sequences.
"Rachel, I need you to think," he shouted furiously through his teeth, making a sort of huffing noise as he spoke.
I closed my eyes and thought again, envisioning the entire scene. There I was, and there was Spencer. And there was Paul. The faint smell of punch wafted through the air as an annoying pop song blasted through the sound system.
Ouch!
A sensation came over my entire head, as if I were being pinched in multiple areas of my brain at once. The floor continued to lurch in every direction, not helping my head in any way.
"Ouch!" I said, audibly this time.
"We've almost got it!" The Doctor cried, probably still running around. "Keep your mind fixed on that image!"
I did. I fixed my brain, and didn't let the pinching get in the way.
Of course, that was before I blacked out completely.