Doctor Who - 02 - The Art of Forgetting

.8. Found and Lost

"Ace? Ace?!"

He came to and abruptly sat up on the moss. The night was still dark and silvery, but three slim creatures had disappeared somewhere. Gold was bending over his him, alarmed expression on his face.

"Blimey, I thought they killed you!"

"Who? Who were they?"

"Faerie," Gold answered. "The elves."

His voice was full of comical disbelief. In any case, it had comical potential, irretrievably squandered by pounding inside Ace's skull.

The boy rubbed his head and groaned quietly. "Elves? What, like Santa's Elves?"

"Not really, no," said Gold.

"They used to be friendly," spoke a voice of a young girl. With effort Ace turned his head and saw her sitting by, on a tuft of moss. Her knees, showing through the holes in her tattered overalls, were scratched and covered in scabs. She had lost a bow on one of her pigtails and her sandy hair fell over her shoulder. She had huge eyes, moist with tears. "The elves. They used to be friendly. Always. The fair folk. The Faerie."

"Where's the other crackpot?" Ace muttered. "Boudicca?"

"You mean Boadicea?" the girl asked.

"I mean the bloody wild woman with her face painted blue," Ace answered.

"She disappeared. Said she had something else to do."

"What do you mean disappeared?"

"She just did." The girl shrugged. "Like me mum. She just vanished, that's all. Said she'd be back. But she didn't come back."

"What's going on here, Gold?" growled Ace.

"We have crossed into another game," answered Gold. "She's escorted us through into a different adventure. She said we should be reasonably safe here, although the 'flipping buffers snuffed it' – her own words – and she'd be back for us once she's taken care of something."

"As far as I'm concerned she may as well stay vanished. Bloody bulldyke!"

"Ace, a kid," whispered Gold.

"Stop whispering," said Ace angrily.

"I'm not a kid," angrily said the girl.

"See, she's not a kid," Ace repeated. "I bet she's a fucking dwarf."

"You are a dwarf!" screamed the girl and punched Ace's shoulder, hard. "F... fudging!"

"Oww, dwarf's attack!" yelled Ace.

"You are her age exactly," Gold shook his head. "You are a bloody ten year old brat! Can't you see what's going on here?"

"No, what?"

"There was some serious malfunction to the Emporium Everdream. We can't leave the adventure. None of us can. The people who managed to do it somehow, and had promised to come back to get the others, never did. The adventures are screwed up completely; you can jump from one to the other; and that should be impossible. And you know what? I'm pretty sure Corrie's mum didn't program kidnaper elves. Just like I didn't program miss Blue Face."

Ace kept quiet for a while, massaging the elbow he had bruised falling down.

"Either you are right, or I suffered a synaptic shock, and you are just my hallucinations, both of you," he muttered finally. "Cause, have you seen that?"

Gold looked over his shoulder at a row of gigantic toadstools; toadstools with chimneys and curtains; toadstools with windows and doors, and little picket fences in front of them. He let out a loud sigh.