john_amend_all

Many happy returns to thisbluespirit and femme_slash_fan!

I've written a couple of prompt fills: For femme_slash_fan there's an Ace/Ray piece in the commentfest, here. And for thisbluespirit, I've finally written your last 500-Prompts prompt:

"Ow." Liz Shaw rubbed her aching head, and pushed her tangled hair back. "What happened?"

"As far as I can see," the Brigadier's voice said, "we've been abducted by aliens."

Liz managed to raise her head, and looked around. She was lying on a padded circular pedestal, about seven feet in diameter, the only item of furniture in a roughly square room. The walls, ceiling and floor looked like unpainted aluminium. Glowing roundels in the ceiling gave light, in a drab bluish colour reminiscent of a sunless autumn morning. There was something else odd about the proportions of the room, but she couldn't work out what it was.

The Brigadier was standing in one corner; his uniform looked a little crumpled, but apart from that he seemed to have come through his abduction in good shape. Whereas Liz, glancing at her own clothes, felt she resembled a drunkard who'd staggered home after a night on the tiles.

"Are you sure?" she asked.

"No, but it seems most likely." He looked down at something out of Liz's field of view. "We're in space."

"We are?" Liz sat up. In the floor, quite close to the pedestal she was on, was a dark, star-speckled circle, flush with the surface. The stars were moving, smoothly and remorselessly, always in the same direction.

After a couple of goes, Liz managed to get herself off the pedestal and onto her own feet. She crossed to the circle and looked down, trying to time a single star from one side to the other, and then plunged into the world of mental arithmetic.

"Miss Shaw?" the Brigadier asked.

"Just working out a few things." Liz stood again, and gave the room a more careful study. As she'd half-expected, two of the walls weren't vertical; two leaned inward, making the shape of the room approximately trapezoidal. "Spin gravity."

"Pardon?"

"This is a centrifuge." She looked down at the stars again. "They're spinning this compartment around a central axis to simulate gravity."

The Brigadier nodded. "I've seen the concept in NASA papers. But if we could concentrate on more pressing matters?"

"You mean, who's kidnapped us, and why?" Liz raised her eyebrows. "If it turns out to be little green men I'll find it very difficult to take them seriously."

"This is no laughing matter, Miss Shaw."

Liz shook her head. "Agreed. We've been abducted by a spacefaring race with unknown abilities." She walked slowly along the long axis of the room. "Maybe it's for our connection to UNIT, maybe we were just picked at random." She patted her jacket pockets. "Did they take anything from you?"

"Only my sidearm." The Brigadier searched his own pockets. "Everything else is still here."

"You weren't carrying a rubber ball, by any chance?" Liz looked at his expression. "Never mind. I'll have to make do with what I've got."

She pulled a tube of lip balm from her pocket and removed its plastic lid. Then she repeated her walk along the room, periodically dropping the lid to the floor, and watching it.

"Is there something wrong?" the Brigadier said. He was using, Liz noted, the same tone he would normally use to the Doctor, when the Doctor might be expected to know what was going on.

"Apart from us being imprisoned in an alien spaceship?" Liz scooped up the lid, and reattached it to the tube. "How about us being imprisoned in a mockup of an alien spaceship?"

The Brigadier gave their surroundings another look. "What makes you think that?"

"The gravity. I don't believe this is spin gravity for one moment."

"I can't feel anything wrong with it."

"That's the point. Spin gravity would feel different from normal. Dropped objects wouldn't land where you expected them to." She caught his eye, and her mouth twitched. "Papers have been written on the proper design of urinals for spin gravity."

The Brigadier ignored her last remark. "It's an interesting theory, Miss Shaw. Can you prove it?"

"I can prove it to my satisfaction already." She folded her arms. "But you, I take it, would prefer me to convince you without using differential equations?"

"We've still been abducted. The more we can learn about who's responsible, the better."

Liz indicated the ceiling. "Then I need to get up there. I'd have to stand on your shoulders, I think."

"That hardly seems practical."

"I'm not getting up there any other way, am I?" Liz pulled off her shoes, and climbed onto the pedestal. "Ready when you are."

Reluctantly, the Brigadier took up his position beside the pedestal. Liz put one foot on his shoulder, held out her hands to try and improve her balance, tried to step up, and landed on her back with a thump.

The Brigadier spun round and bent over her. "Are you all right?"

"Just winded." Liz sat up again. "At least this thing's padded. I suppose we'll just have to keep trying until I don't fall off."

"Might I suggest a more gradual approach?" He crouched down, bringing his shoulders level with the edge of the pedestal.

"I suppose so." Liz cautiously edged onto his shoulders. "If I'd known we were going to be doing this, I'd definitely have worn trousers today."

"Quite," was the only remark he made, though she got the feeling he'd have liked to say much more.

Slowly, first the Brigadier and then Liz rose from their crouching positions, bringing Liz within reach of the ceiling and its enigmatic glowing discs. She reached up, bracing herself against the ceiling with one hand while pressing the other to the disc. It rotated easily; after a quarter turn, it was definitely loose in its mountings. Another half-turn and it was almost free, held in place only by some sort of hidden catch. Still limited to only one hand, she tried to tease it past the obstruction, to no avail.

"Any luck up there?" the Brigadier asked politely.

"Not yet. Give me a moment." Liz considered the situation. Perhaps, where subtlety wasn't working, brute force would. She pushed her fingers into the gap between the disc and its mounting, as far as they would go, then took a deep breath and repeated the process with her other hand. Gripping the edges of the disc as hard as she could, she jumped backwards off the Brigadier's shoulders, landing once again in an ungainly heap on the pedestal. As she fell, she heard the crack of breaking plastic and the fizzle of electricity, and saw the lights flicker.

With the light fitting still clutched in her hand, she sat up once more.

"This isn't anything alien," she said, turning it over in her hands. "Red and black wires, bayonet fitting on the bulb... this was made close to home." She slid the frosted disc out of the fitting and took a closer look at the bulb behind it. "This even says 'Made in Birmingham.'"

"Quite." The Brigadier sat on the pedestal beside her. "All this has been staged for our benefit."

"Any idea why?" She glanced across at him, feeling the conversation moving from scientific certainty to the murky depths of human malice. And in that field, he was unquestionably the more experienced of them.

"Disorientate us. Make us underestimate them." He sounded quite unruffled, as if this was all standard UNIT procedure. Perhaps it was. "See if we let out any secrets of value. Film us, perhaps, in case we did anything they could blackmail us for."

"You're saying they built a fake spaceship and locked us up together in the hope that there'd be... hanky-panky?" Liz shook her head. "And they seriously expected it to work?"

"I've known government agencies to come up with less plausible ideas." The Brigadier paused at the sound of approaching footsteps. "Do you know, I think someone's found us."

Liz realised she was clutching his arm. "Who?"

"No idea. But I think we'll find out, soon enough."

The footsteps seemed to be just on the other side of one of the sloping walls. They paused; then, with a clang, a section of the wall fell to the floor. Liz and the Brigadier had jumped to their feet as it fell; behind it, a UNIT captain, pistol at the ready, could be seen, with footsoldiers behind him.

"You say this is a Torchwood site?" the Brigadier asked, as their rescuers led them out of the false spaceship, and through the corridors of what looked like an abandoned stately home.

"That's right, sir," Captain Munro said.

"Thought as much. Just the sort of people to come up with a cockeyed plan like that."

"Plan, sir?"

"Stick the two of us in a room and hope they got something to justify kidnapping us in the first place. Was the room being filmed, by the way?"

Munro nodded. "It was, sir. We've secured the film."

"It'll be a very boring watch," Liz said. "If Torchwood or anyone else want me to disgrace myself, they'll have to do better than that."

The Brigadier shot her an amused glance. "One can but hope, Miss Shaw."