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Here you go: You'll laugh, you'll cry, you won't believe your eyes . . .

The voyage to Ghehenna, though certainly not uneventful, passed without any difficulties more serious than trying to convince the Doctor that he needed to eat once a day, no matter how much he disliked the packaged rations. He was an instant favorite with the undergraduates. His repertoire of rude drinking songs had made him their hero:
“Oh, Immanuel Kant was a real piss-ant
Who was very rarely stable;
Hiedigger, Hiedigger was a boozy beggar
Who could drink you under the table . . .”
River just shook her head. “Much as I hate to disrupt your philosophy seminar, Doctor, we’ll be making planetfall in about an hour, and I want everyone to watch as Jenkins goes over the space suits one more time.”
“David Hume could out-consume . . . Oh, of course River. Sorry, all, it’ll have to wait.”
The undergrads laughed and mock-grumbled.
“Oh, and Sweetie,” added River, “have you had anything to eat yet today?”
“Um, let’s see, I had a cuppa tea. With sugar.”
“That’s not eating.”
“I can live on tea and biscuits for days,” the Doctor protested. “Do it all the time.”
“Not as part of my team you won’t,” protested River, rummaging through a storage locker. “Here, these curried lentils aren’t too bad, even if they do look like something a cat left on the rug.” She tossed the Doctor a plastic container of food.
He wrinkled his nose. “If you’re trying to encourage my appetite, you aren’t doing a very good job.” A couple of the undergraduates laughed.
“The lentils are OK, Doctor,” said Summer Leiberman, a dark-skinned girl who, like Jenkins, was a vegetarian. “It’s the creamed spinach you have to look out for.”
“Why? Does it have violent tendencies?” the Doctor asked.
They were all still laughing as the rest of the team filed into the crew lounge, Jenkins wearing a baggy white space suit.
“Good afternoon, everyone!” he said cheerfully. “Professor Song has asked me, as technical specialist, to go over the use of atmospheric survival suits again . . .”
River had been wearing a space suit on digs since she was nine; her parents had also been zeno-archaeologists. She tuned Jenkins out and focused on the Doctor, who was sitting with his lentils still unopened in his lap. She caught his eye and mimed eating. He frowned. She shook her head. He is impossible! she thought. Am I his lover or his mother?
With an exaggerated sigh, the Doctor opened the lentils and dipped in a finger for an experimental taste. They must be better than they look, thought River, as the Doctor continued eating. Po Chang, sitting next to the Doctor, stifled a snicker. Juan Gonzales looked to see what Po thought was so funny and snorted. River realized that the undergraduates would never remember what Jenkins was saying about “adjustable mesh density” so long as they were watching the Doctor shovel lentils into his mouth with his fingers. She caught his eye again and mouthed SPOON! He gave her one of his little startled looks, and then rummaged with the container until he found the spoon that had been tucked alongside the meal.
River turned her attention back to Jenkins, who was demonstrating how to insure that the helmet of one’s space suit was correctly locked into place. Summer, sitting behind her, tugged her sleeve. She turned around. Summer pointed at the Doctor, who was proudly holding up a clean plate for River’s inspection. She resisted the urge to find something to throw at him, smiled, and turned back to Jenkins, who was discussing the suits’ com systems.
“Because of the high levels of background radiation on Ghehenna,” said Jenkins, “the telepathic projection circuits, or ‘thought mail,’ as it is most commonly called, will not be functioning, and voice transmissions will only carry a few yards. For this reason, it is absolutely imperative that each of us remain in visual contact with the rest of the dig team at all times . . .”
Summer tugged on River’s sleeve again and then handed her a scrap of paper. On it the Doctor had written: your cabin or mine?
River looked over at him. He gave her a sly grin and loosened his necktie. She rolled her eyes and turned away.
“As we have been told,” said Jenkins, “the winds on Ghehenna begin at sunset and increase in intensity as the night progresses. At their full speed, these winds pick up enough dust, sand, and debris to cut one of these suits to ribbons in minutes, even at maximum density. Therefore, we will begin securing the site each evening 90 minutes before sundown, and return to the ship 30 minutes before dark.”
Summer handed River another scrap of paper. It said: Jenkins will be in the hold, mucking about with the suits. Your cabin or mine? Not like we’ll have a chance on the dig.
He’s right about that, River thought. She looked at the Doctor. He was unbuttoning his waistcoat. She just sighed. I must be out of my mind . . .
At the end of Jenkins’ lecture, he met her in the hatchway of the lounge and slipped an arm around her waist.
“You do know we’ll be coming out of warp in about 20 minutes,” said River softly. “We should be strapped in for landing. It could get bumpy when we decelerate from warp . . .”
“Yes, and if we time things just right . . .” the Doctor whispered in her ear.
“You are incredible!”
“That’s what I’ve been told.”

“Hey, Jenkins, have you seen the Professor and Doctor Sweetie?” asked Sally, using the name most of the team used for the Doctor when neither he nor Professor Song were around.
Jenkins, who was already strapped into his acceleration chair, said “I think they are in our cabin, trying to disprove a law of physics.”
“Which one?” asked Sally, fastening her own restraints.
“The one which states that two bodies can not occupy the same point in space time simultaneously.”
Sally laughed. “Aren’t they adorable?”
“Adorable?”
“The way they’re so in love. It’s so romantic. They can’t keep their hands off each other! The other day, I was looking for the Professor, to ask her about some of my gear, and I couldn’t find her anywhere. I went down into the hold. Didn’t see or hear anyone there, but, just on a whim, I went up and knocked on the Doctor’s cabinet.”
“What happened?” asked Jenkins.
“Nothing at first, but when I turned to go back to the main deck, the door of the cabinet opened, just a crack, and there was Doctor Sweetie, with no shirt on, putting his head out and saying, ‘Hold on, we’ll be out in a jiffy, luv!’ Can you believe it? In the equipment cabinet!”
“I think you should be staying away from the Doctor’s cabinet,” said Jenkins seriously.
“Yeah, I probably should. But I still think they’re a sweet couple. You think they’ll get married?”
“I am not certain that the Doctor is the marrying sort. But if they do, do you suppose they would appreciate a copy of the Kama Sutra as a gift?”
Sally laughed. “I suspect they already know everything in it!”
Jenkins thought for a moment. “I would not be surprised if the Doctor had written it,” he said, almost to himself.
Before Sally could ask him what he meant, the voice of Sideshow Bob came over the ship’s com system: Ladies, Gentlemen, Undergrads, we are now dropping out of warp.

Just before the Lupine began her descent to the planet Ghehenna, River and the Doctor arrived on deck and made their way to their seats to strap in. River did not look behind her. She suspected the Doctor was exchanging high-fives with Juan and Po, and she really didn’t want to see that. What was I thinking, she wondered, to bring a lover on a dig?
She fastened her restraints and looked out the window. Ghehenna appeared just as she remembered it: a dusty yellow ball, streaked with sluggish brown. Staring at the lifeless world beneath her, she thought, Of course, I couldn’t have kept the Doctor away from here if I’d tried! He’s got more right to be here than any of us. By law, we should be petitioning him for permission to dig . . .
She looked at him. He wasn’t looking out the window, or at her. Instead he kept his eyes on his hands, which he had folded in his lap.
“What’s wrong, Sweetie?” she asked, and immediately felt stupid for asking.
He sighed. “It’s Ghehenna. I haven’t been here since . . . So much has changed. I’ve changed. Everything has changed . . .”
Great Goddess, he must have actually served here! “I . . . Doctor, you don’t have to go out with us, if you don’t want to . . .”
“No. I have to. It’s why I came.”
“To keep tabs on us? If you don’t want us to dig, I’ll cancel the mission, right now . . .”
“No, no,” he said. His face seemed somehow older to River, worn and gray. “Im just, just tired. Tired of running. Tired of carrying all this alone . . .”
River was suddenly reminded of an old exobiologist friend of her father’s, Fred McMurty. He had returned to the University from an expedition to a dying planet circling a red star with one specimen: a bird. McMurty had claimed it was the only one left of its kind. It was male, with beautiful plumage and an exquisite mating song. McMurty had kept it as a pet in a cage in his office. At first it had seemed content enough, and its song had charmed the entire faculty. But as time passed, something had changed. The song lost its inventiveness, became strained, repetitive. The bird stopped sleeping, stopped eating, finally spending its last days in repeating the same call over and over, until one morning McMurty had come in to find the creature lying dead on the floor of its cage. Professor McMurty had speculated the bird had died of a metabolic imbalance, that he had overlooked something crucial when composing its food.
River Song had known better. He had died of loneliness.
Fighting back a tear, she silently placed her hand on the Doctor’s and squeezed. He squeezed back. They held hands until the Lupine had landed.

“Professor Song?” called Po from the back of the cabin. “Does anything live on Ghehenna?”
“No, Po, not even viruses. It’s a completely sterile world. Why do you ask?”
“I thought I saw something moving out there.”
“What?” said River and the Doctor simultaneously. The unstrapped their restraints and walked back to where Po was sitting.
“I was looking out the window as we set down,” said the dark-haired young man, “And I thought I saw, I don’t know, movement on the ground. Like rolling rocks or something.”
“Dust devils,” assessed River. “The ground’s covered with anywhere from a third to a full meter of fine dust. We kicked it up as we landed.”
“Oh. Sorry Professor,” said Po. “Didn’t mean to bother you.”
“You didn’t bother me. Remember what I said about stupid questions?”
Po grinned. “Only the ones we don’t ask.”
River turned back to the Doctor, who was standing with an odd, far-away look on his face.
“What’s the matter, Doctor?” she asked.
“Oh, I was just thinking of something I once read:
In his house at R’lyeh dead, Cthulhu waits dreaming . . .”

And the Bruce jokes continue.... smile

Hey, Doctor! Do you know the one about the little goblin? mrgreen

Or maybe "A wizard's staff has a knob on the end"? mrgreen mrgreen

(I'm still in the mountains, don't get on Gaia til after 11pm, and spend most of my time getting the Olympic items for all of my accounts.)

Oh, yeah....



rofl

Na, the first one. rofl

Oh, and because I promised, here's the poem the Doctor left on River's pillow:

With parched lips I stand upon love's brink,
To stand or fall the question I must face.
I yearn to kneel and take that first sweet drink
But fear of loss doth freeze me in my place.
For well I know the risks that lovers take:
The pains when passion's currents run too strong,
The separations cruel that hearts shall break,
And anguish when a love once true is gone.
But strong as burns the warning in my mind,
Stronger yet's the burning of my thirst
When I behold thy face, so fair and kind,
I dare to brave the pain, and loss, and worse,
And I shall do what I have ever done--
Plunge in, tho' in love's River I may drown.
heart heart heart

Lookie: More Story! mrgreen

Half an hour later, the entire team was assembled before the airlock. “All right,” announced River over the com circuit of her spacesuit, “Sundown is in three hours, which will give us only enough time today to walk to the site, give it a general inspection, and return to the ship for decontamination. Question, Juan?” she said to one of the undergrads who was waving a white-gloved hand at her.
“Why did we land so far from the site?”
“To keep from disturbing it. It’s an impact crater, set in the center of what was once a city. To land near it, we’d have to land in it. So we set the ship down outside the city and walk through. Once we figure out a safe route, we’ll be able to use the Rover and cut our travel time. Summer?” she asked another waving hand.
“What do you mean, a safe route?”
“A route through the ruins that is wide enough for the Rover to pass through and stable enough not to collapse under it. Parts of this city were underground, and the old tunnels are likely to collapse without warning. A fellow on the last dig disobeyed my instructions, wandered into the city, fell through a skylight covered by dust, and broke his ankle, arm, and three ribs. Spent the rest of the dig in the medical bay. Lucky he didn’t tear his suit, or he’d’ve been dead before we found him. So stay with the group! Any more questions?”
The Doctor, standing to the rear of the decontamination area with his helmet tucked beneath his arm, waggled his fingers.
“Yes, Doctor?”
“I was thinking,” he began.
Always dangerous, thought River.
“Did you, perhaps, bring the disk-shaped artifact with you from your lab? The one you thought might be a key?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact I did. Are you suggesting I should bring it out to the site?”
“Well, if it’s a key, we might find something it unlocks.”
“Good thinking. Don’t feel like going back for it right now, but tomorrow, before we go out to start gridding, I’ll make certain I have it with me. All right, everyone, helmets on and locked. I’m about to open the airlock.”

The outer lock opened to a rush of wind-borne dust. The team exited two by two, all of them hushed by the spectacle rising before them: the skeleton of a once-mighty city, shattered towers and twisted bridges jutting from the pale sand of the ground to the equally bleak sky. The same yellow-gray tint colored the entire landscape, from the dust rising around their feet to the clouds roiling overhead. River glanced back, picking the Doctor from the undergraduates clustered around him by his height. She could make out his face behind the visor of his helmet. His lips were set and his eyes hard. This has got to be killing him, she thought, but I’ll be damned if I make it worse by saying anything to him. She hit the com button on her cuff and said, “Folks, I suggest we put at least a partial tint on our visors–the radiation’s no better for our eyes than the rest of us.”
“Not too dark,” came the Doctor’s voice, transmitted from the rear of the crowd. Everyone turned to look at him. “Ah, I just like being able to see everyone’s faces.”
A few of the undergrads chuckled, but it was a dry, graveyard sound.
“Sun isn’t getting any higher,” said River. “Let’s go.”
She and RayQuan led the party into the silent, dust-shrouded streets of the wrecked city. A few soft beeps from behind her let River know that some of the party were engaging in private conversation. Let ‘em talk, she figured. This place would give anyone the creeps. Don’t want anyone having a panic attack on me.
Someone came up behind her and touched her elbow. Hoping it was the Doctor, River turned, and was dissappointed to see the lumpish form of Bob from the History department, digicam in hand.
“Any words on this historic occasion, Professor Song?” he asked, thrusting the camera into her visor.
“Yes. Get that thing out of my face and watch where you’re going, before you break your neck.” She indicated a sheer drop-off into a pit of twisted metal only a few feet away.
Bob backed off.
The beeps behind River increased in frequency. He must be lecturing, she thought. She hit her com button again. “Hey, if that’s such an interesting conversation back there, mind sharing with the rest of us?” she asked.
“Sorry Professor,” replied Sally’s voice. “The Doctor asked me and Jenkins about the last dig, and we were telling him about it.”
“Eeek!” a young woman suddenly cried.
“Who was that?” asked River, halting and turning.
“Oh, that was me,” said Megan apologetically. “I stopped to look into a doorway, and there was a Dalek looking back at me! Well, parts of one, anyway.”
The Doctor spoke before River did. “Don’t lag behind,” he said. “And don’t wander off. This place is far too dangerous.”
“The Doctor’s right,” said River. “I can not stress enough . . . Bob? Professor Reynolds?”
The historian was clambering over a pile of rubble and Dalek parts. “Professor Reynolds, turn on your com-system and come here right now!”
RayQuan went after the errant academic and tapped his shoulder, then indicated the switch for his com.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Bob. “Didn’t know I’d switched it off. Professor Song, I thought I saw movement, there along the exposed section of that building there. Where the interior is open to the air. I was trying to film it.”
“You’ll see a lot of movement, particularly this time of day, as the winds start to pick up. Dust and debris, nothing more,” said River. “This planet’s deader than a maths major’s love life.”

After an hour of picking through the rubble of the old city, the party arrived at the edge of the chosen dig site: a huge, bare, empty crater in the midst of the ruins. A shorter, broader spacesuited figure approached River, brandishing a scanner. “Professor,” said Jenkins, “the tachyon readings are consistent with the last dig.”
“Not a fluke, then,” she said. “Not we they thought they would be.” She turned to face the party. “Well, here it is, people. Our own little piece of Hell.”

biggrin
And it only took me a day to find it here! xp

-is very happy-

There was no sign left of the previous excavation; the winds of Ghehenna had erased all traces of Professor Song’s previous expedition. The team spent a rather discouraging hour shuffling through the meter-thick dust of the site, River occasionally pausing to show a larger piece of the unusual glass fragments of the debris field to the others. The Doctor was uncharacteristically silent, a fact that River couldn’t help but notice. No one protested when she declared it was time to return to the Lupine, and they all trooped back through the dead city in a somber mood.
Once on board, the team was required to sit in the decontamination area for three quarters of an hour, until the automatic systems had purged the outsides of their suits of residual radiation. The undergrads had begun chattering brightly as soon as the airlock had closed, full of enthusiasm for the work they’d begin the next morning and speculating on the possible artifacts they might discover. Soon, everyone but the Doctor and River had joined the conversation. He was sitting across from her, and she smiled, softly, when she caught his eyes. He gave her a rueful half-grin in return.
“Bowling shoes,” he suddenly interjected into the conversation.
“I beg your pardon?” asked Kitty Kincaide, who had been expressing a hope to find the remains of the craft’s medical bay.
“Why not bowling shoes?” asked the Doctor. “They were time travelers, intergalactic tourists. No telling what kind of stuff they picked up: cheap novels, or pink plastic flamingos, or those flimsy rain-apron things with a place’s name on them they sell you when you’ve forgotten your umbrella.”
The conversation immediately shifted to a contest to see who could come up with the most improbable thing one might find inside a time machine. Luckilly the decontam cycle was over by the time things had degenerated enough for Po to suggest “Ghengis Khan’s sweaty jock strap.”

The next morning, River brought the pendant, as she’d come to think of it, to the crew lounge for the morning briefing. As the rest of the party finished their breakfasts, she went over the agenda for the day: using the Rover, they’d return to the site and begin mapping a grid to guide the excavation. Once she’d finished, she pulled the pendant from the pocket of her coveralls.
“Doctor, you asked for me to bring this along,” River said. “Do you have an idea as to what we’re going to do with it?”
“Ah, Professor,” he said, setting down a cup of tea, “if you wouldn’t mind handing it over to me. Just for a moment.”
“Not at all.” She gave the disk to RayQuan, who passed it to Po, who handed it to the Doctor, who flipped it over in his hands and pulled out his glasses.
“Now, I have a computer, in my, er, cabinet,” the Doctor began, peering at the back of the disk, “which is dedicated to brute-force language translation. According to my work, the lettering here on the back of this object identifies it as ‘the Great Seal of Rassilon’ . . .”
“What’s a rassilon?” asked Megan.
“I hope that’s what we’re here to find out,” said River quickly, hoping to spare the Doctor an awkward moment. Part of her still wished he’d just go on and tell her and her people everything, let her go over his TARDIS bit by bit and then put it on display for the whole galaxy to see, but she respected his privacy. She suspected, too, that he respected her intelligence enough to want her to draw her own conclusions from her own work, and not have it spoon-fed to her. And after all, where was the fun if the mysteries were all solved?
The Doctor had taken a small device, a little larger than a pen, from one of his pockets and was pointing it at the seal disk.
“What’re you doing?” River asked, hoping he wasn’t going to damage her artifact, even if he did have more claim to it than she did. “What’s that thing you’ve got?”
“It’s a multiphasic oscilating vibrational probe,” he said, “although I prefer to call it my sonic screwdriver.”
“Your sonic screwdriver,” she repeated. Sounds like a mixed drink, she thought. Or something rude . . .
Juan, Po, and Jenkins stifled snickers. Obviously, they thought it was rude, too.
“If I can find the right frequency,” said the Doctor, “I might be able to . . .” Suddenly the seal in his hands began emitting faint but regular pulses of light. “Switch it on,” he finished. He passed it back up the table to River, who took it with an emotion akin to reverence.
“If it’s active,” the Doctor continued, “then any other intact systems buried at the dig site may react to it, and begin giving off signals of their own. Make it easier for us to find . . .”
He paused in mid-sentence as a faint gonging sound reverberated up through the deckplates beneath their feet. “Uh-oh,” he said.
“What’s that?” asked River.
“Er, some of the equipment in my cabinet must be responding to the signal that thing’s giving off. Let me just go switch it off . . .” He left the lounge. As he passed her, River heard him mutter “day late and a Dalek short . . .”
She sent the rest of the team to suit up while she waited for the Doctor to return. When he did, she asked, “Not that I want to pry, but what just happened and is it dangerous?”
“Oh, no, no, that was just the Cloister Bell. A glorified panic button. Seems the Seal was set to give off a distress signal. The TARDIS was trying to tell me to respond, and I had to go down and tell her that we’re rather too late to help.”
He’s talking about that ship like it’s alive . . . River thought, frowning.
“She is alive, you know,” said the Doctor.
“Wha . . . Can you read my mind?” asked River.
“No, of course not, well, not without your consent, anyway,” said the Doctor. “No, I just saw the look on your face, the look that said ‘poor old b*****d’s gone potty, he’s talking to a machine.’ But she is alive, and intelligent, if not much of a conversationalist. Her consciousness is, um, how to put this, not like ours. We exist in the moment. She, well, she’s aware of the moment, but she’s more . . . Everywhere. All the time. Non-linear. Does that make any sense?”
“For the mind of a time machine, I suppose so. Do you think it’s at all possible we’ll find anything left of the, um, consciousness of this craft?”
“No. Not after an explosion big enough to leave that crater. And even if the ship were intact, it wouldn’t survive without a crew, not for a thousand years. We’re linked, you see. It’s a symbiotic relationship, involving genetic engineering on both sides, our brains and the craft. We designed the ships, you see, but we also re-designed ourselves to work with them.”
“That . . . that is the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard,” said River. She gave the Doctor a wry look. “And we won’t find anything out there to prove it.”
“We might. We might find some intact data nodes, although . . .” He paused. “I might not be able to let you have the information. We had very strict laws about allowing other species access to our technology, and although I’m the only one left to enforce them, old habits die hard . . .”
“As far as I’m concerned, Doctor,” said River, “this is a burial site and you are next-of-kin. You have absolute, final say as to what is done with anything we find here.”
“What would the rest of the team say? If they disagreed with me?”
“I hope it won’t come to that, but I am in charge here. And Jenkins will certainly back us up.” She smiled. “Guess those LINDA people might be good for something after all.”