Lost In Time: A Doctor Who Fanfiction

Chapter 62 - Checking Out

When Lyssa opened her eyes, the hotel was gone, replaced by a black room with a lit grid floor. It was empty of decoration, save for an instrument panel against the wall on the far side, and the TARDIS, safely nestled in one corner.

Amy, Rory, Rita, and Gibbis were there, too, blinking in confusion at the sudden change in scenery. Amy and Rita both seemed upset, Gibbis looked visibly distraught, and Rory appeared to be a mixture of both defiance and shame, slowly dropping from a confrontational posture in front of the cowering alien to a more relaxed stance.

The Doctor, however, his hands still on her cheeks, looked almost ecstatic. "I knew you could do it, fairy-girl," he grinned, pulling her in for a triumphant kiss on the forehead before releasing her and spinning around. He lost his smile almost immediately, his arms falling to his sides. "Oh."

Lyssa peered around him, eyes going wide. The beast, something she vaguely remembered as something glorified and praise-worthy, was laying on the floor, visibly weakened and dying. 

"What's wrong with it?" Rita asked hesitantly, staying well away from the creature. "Its pull is gone, and it's obviously dying. What happened?"

"Lyssa severed his food supply," the Doctor answered quietly, not lifting his eyes from the beast. "She sacrificed her faith, and the loss of it was enough to imbalance the system. The sudden reversal of energy was too much, and crashed the system." His voice softened, taking on a sympathetic note. "Gave him the space to die."

"What is it, though?" Amy asked curiously. "Lyssa mentioned it being a Minotaur earlier. Is it like the Minotaurs in the Greek legends? Or an alien? An alien Minotaur?" She shook her head, wrinkling her nose. "And that's not a question I thought I'd be asking when I got up this morning."

"Both, actually," the Doctor agreed, striding over to the instrument panel and pulling up some information, quickly scrolling through it. "Yeah, here we go. Distant cousin of the Nimon. They descend on planets and set themselves up as gods to be worshipped. Which is all well and good until the inhabitants get all secular and advanced enough to build bonkers prisons." He waved a hand around at their surroundings.

"Correction: Prisons in space," Rory corrected him, staring out a small viewing window. "Still bonkers, but... more space."

"So... where are all the guards, then?" Amy asked with a frown, looking around. "If they need people with faith that badly, surely they'd need guards to keep them all here."

The Doctor shrugged. "No need for any. It's all automated. It drifts through space, snatching people with belief systems and converts their faith into food for the creature. Rory wasn't religious or superstitious, so it didn't want him. That's why it kept showing him an exit, but not us. We all had some form of faith that it could use. Not just religious faith, faith in something. Anything."

He began to wave his hands about wildly in the air as he talked, pacing the length of the room.  "Howard believed in conspiracies, external forces controlling the world. Joe had dice cufflinks and a chain with a horseshoe. He was a gambler. Gamblers believe in luck, an intangible force that helps them win or lose." 

He glanced over at the group as he continued his explanation. "Gibbis rejected personal autonomy and is waiting for the next batch of invaders to tell him what to do. They all believe there's something guiding them, about to save them. That's what it replaces. Every time someone was confronted with their most primal fear, they fell back on one of their most fundamental faiths."

"It didn't want just me," Amy realized. "So, you must believe in some god or someone, or they'd have shown you the door, too. So what do Time Lords pray to? Or is it some other kind of faith?" She cocked her head at him curiously. "What do you believe in, Doctor?"