"Monochrome" - Part One

Part One

            Alan never knew a gym existed in Candace’s Type-Z TARDIS. There were a lot of places in it he hadn’t explored yet – some of which Candace often talked about and Alan sometimes doubted she’d ever been to. According to her, she was inspired to install a gym in an area she called the “Zero Room” (a tranquil space reserved for Time Lords who need relief from stress or anxiety).

            But Candace had made it into the opposite. Now she used it as a place to exert all the energy she constantly built up in her Time Lord physique. For a woman who physically looked fifty years of age, she had the body of a thirtysomething. It was virtually superhuman.

            That was clear when Alan spotted her during a round of bench-presses.

            She requested him to load on a nerve-wracking four hundred and fifty pounds, which she handled as if it were half as much.

            “What’s it like?” Alan brought himself to ask.

            “What’s what like, honey?” Candace returned in-between breaths.

            “What’s it like being a Time Lord?”

            “Well, for starters, I wasn’t always one. I was once just a normal kid like you, albeit one-half human and the other half Gallifreyan. It wasn’t ‘til I was about your age when I had the Gallifreyan half of my genes enhanced by a guy named Rassilon. Ever since, I’ve felt more and more powerful…like a superhero brought to life.”

            “Sounds pretty legit.”

            Candace racked the four-hundred-pound bar without need of Alan’s assistance. “I’ll admit it has been cool. But I am a little worried about my future in it… specifically the whole ‘regeneration’ thing.”

            “Regeneration? What does that mean?”

            “Something the Doctor said would happen to me one day. He calls it ‘cheating death’ but didn’t specify the whole process. He only said that I won’t be me anymore…that I’ll be someone else.”

            Alan noticed how much the topic unsettled her, so he decided not to press her on about it. Instead, they finished their workout and showered, making their way thereafter back to the control room. Candace had the controls on autopilot as they traversed the infinite dimensional corridor. She successfully dematerialized them out.

            From the viewscreen, they saw that they arrived in a withered cornfield.

            “We’re back on Earth?” Alan observed.

            “One of them perhaps,” Candace elucidated. She walked out into the field with Alan, a wave of nostalgia overwhelming her. “I used to run through a field like this when I was a little girl, back on my family’s Atlanta farm.”

            “You think that might be where we’ve landed?” Alan asked.

            Candace took a deep breath, her bosom expanding. A button from her tight white blouse popped, holding on for as long as it could have. It was now down to one. Alan couldn’t guess why she did it until she told him, “Nope. Not the farm. Smells too desolate to be Atlanta, Georgia.”

            “You can tell where we are by smellin’ the air?!” An impressed Alan exclaimed.

            Candace smiled at him, tapping her nose. “Senses also got enhanced.”

            As they walked further through the cornfield, they were stopped dead in their tracks once they crossed paths with another group of people: two gentlemen (an elderly one and a much younger one) and two women (a teenaged girl and a woman who looked to be the same age as the younger man). In front of them sat a large jack-in-the-box.

            “Undoubtedly, a jack-in-the-box is what it appears to be, Chesterton,” the elderly man told the young one, speaking with a discernable English accent. “Look at the design.”

            “But how could a jack-in-the-box have gotten all the way out here, Grandfather?” the teenaged girl queried, also speaking with an English accent.

            Alan moved his left foot forward and stepped on a twig. It snapped loudly enough to inadvertently draw the group of British individuals’ attention towards him and Candace. “And who might you two be?” the elder gentleman asked.

            “We might ask you the same question,” Candace countered.

            “But I asked first,” the elder argued.

            “Don’t mind him,” the young gentleman spoke up. “We’re just passing through. My name’s Ian.” He gestured to their female associates. “This is Barbara and Susan. And the old grouch here is…”

            “I’m the Doctor,” the elder defiantly intervened in his introduction whilst clasping at the lapels of his coat.

            Candace froze with astonishment upon learning of the elder’s name.

            “You’re…The Doctor?!” she reacted.

            “Yes, I am.” The old man scowled at her. “Have you heard of me?”

            Candace swallowed hard. “Y-You’re something of a legend where I’m from.”

            “Oh? And where might that be?”

            “Galli—” Candace briskly caught herself, nearly on the verge of revealing vital information to a man who (from his perspective) had never seen her before. He was one of the Doctor’s earliest incarnations. Which one exactly, she could not be certain of. She was certain of one thing: he couldn’t find out any more about her.

            “Speak up, woman,” the Doctor urged. “Where are you from? Hmm?”

            Candace shook her head. “It’s not important.” She used the oversized jack-in-the-box as a way of diverging from the topic. “What is important is what this thing is.”

            The Doctor fell for the diversion, bringing his focus back on the box.

            “Yes, my companions and I were just discussing its place of origin,” he stated. “We found it just sitting here in the middle of the field.”

            “It could be as simple as a child leaving it behind,” Barbara presumed.

            “Impossible,” the Doctor refuted. “Look at its size and density. Only a man could’ve brought it this far out in the field for the child to play.”

            “Doctor, could it be that you’re making this issue more complicated than it has to be?” Ian politely disputed with a smirk.

            While the adults debated among themselves, Susan got the yearning to turn the crank on the size of the box. She did so, much to the displeasure of her grandfather. The melody of “Pop Goes the Weasel” played to the speed of which she cranked. “It does work like an ordinary jack-in-the-box, Grandfather,” she said. “I don’t see any reason there was to—AAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!”

            Susan and everyone else received a huge shock – and it wasn’t the fun one related to most jack-in-the-boxes.

            It wasn’t the plastic head of a toy clown on a spring that popped out.

            It was the decapitated head of a human male.