Who: Jo Harvelle & The Doctor When: Tonight! Where: Observation Car Rating: High for character death and language Status: Log, complete Summary: Jo is attacked by the owner of the ring.
It had been several days of no shadows, but people were still dying. Jo was at a loss currently as to who or what the culprit was, and nearly at wit’s end. She’d found no way to actually prevent a death, and so far it seemed the others she knew were having the same trouble. Her mind had begun to play it’s own tricks on her, thanks to her current lack of sleep and the memories that still wanted to overwhelm her.
The sleeplessness was starting to catch up to her, however, to the point that after patrolling a few cars for a while, she had taken a seat in the observation car and was starting to drift off. The view outside was helping to lull her to sleep, and Jo fell into a light doze, her head resting against the window. At first, it was just a faint sound, a soft breath near her ear, that caught her attention, bringing her eyes open slowly. Turning her head, she glanced around, frowning when she didn’t see anyone. Just as she was about to dismiss the sound, there was a small rustling sound, like material moving, and out of instinct she raised her arm.
A curse escaped when she felt a sharp pain in her arm. Glancing down at it, her eyes widened at the sight of blood - not at the fact that she was bleeding, but at the wound itself. Her hand reached down to her jeans and she pulled out her handgun while moving to her feet, staring around the car. It looked empty, but something had cut her. Air movement warned her the second time and she kicked out, then blinked as she heard a grunt and heard the sound of someone falling back. Swiftly moving out into the aisle, she raised the gun while glancing around steadily.
“Who the hell is there?” She didn’t actually expect an answer, so when one came, Jo jumped slightly in surprise and turned in that direction, gun raised. “You should have left the ring alone.” The voice came from her left and she turned in that direction, then let out a sharp cry of distress when she felt a knife stab into her side from the right. Twisting, she aimed a punch in that direction, then staggered over the seats.
The Doctor paced back and forth inside of that personal space he’d elected as his own on the touring car. The tiny compartment was used to house some of the devices he’d been working on to find shadows; however, with the shadows vanishing, and he couldn’t help but notice that their vanishing coincided with Jo’s finding of that ring--which, no doubt, others had put together as well--he’d begun work on pulling up old memories in trying to figure out something to do with a ring. He kept running into Peter Jackson and The Lord of the Rings, but really that wasn’t helping anyone at this point and The Doctor had to focus.
He clapped his hands together, and began to work a solution out in his mind. He’d managed to go ‘underground’ the past few days, letting everyone work on their own theories. He even left Amy and Rory to do their own thing in order to wrap their heads around this odd situation. A situation that, sadly, not even he could muster a true explanation for. The lack of companions sometimes lagged his thinking behind, because he didn’t have anyone to bounce ideas off of; however, in this case, the multitude of theories streaming around made his mind too cluttered to really come up with his own reasoning and he resorted to this--bloody pacing.
Still, he talked to himself; as was custom, often ideas didn’t come to him until he was finished speaking, so therefore he talked, and talked, “Shadows, small and vicious, assumed killers, bodies, victims, dead in ways tiny shadows probably couldn’t kill. Shadows begin to appear more rapidly, longer, but not of their own volition; not intelligent beasts by any means. Tiny shadows, stay longer and longer, ring is found, cracked, vanish. No more shadows, killings keep happening....”
Of course the Doctor was not one to truly believe in magic, but the theory he did come up with was a magnificently powerful device that could create small holograms. Holograms that could harm, but perhaps not to a great degree. Something that could create a distraction! Hiding from the real culprit, the real killer. The question was, who would make such a device--who could? He could, but he wasn’t the killer. Sherlock was brilliant, but it was unlikely with the resources he’d been exposed to. There were others though, oth--
That’s when he heard the shout that came from behind him, and he quickly grabbed up Rose’s cellphone, which he called thingamabob, and rushed out of the door. As he ran he tried to figure out why he heard this scream, was it a different attacker? Why now? No. … No, it made perfect sense. Desperation, their device was found...
The Doctor stormed through the door into the Observation car, with only the moonlight spilling into the room when he noted the struggle going on in front of him. Immediately he raised his Sonic Screwdriver and all the lights flared on, before he pulled out that cell phone and flicked it towards the direction of the struggle. As it flew, he brought up his screwdriver and aimed it at the device and clicked as hard as he could.
The device flickered and then the enhancing ring that Jo’d given him, and the spring, seemed to concentrate the electricity forward. It hit the ground and a quick buzz of electricity struck, “Jo stay on the seats!” The electricity erupted like a taser, and he was able to see the lightning ride up an invisible... object of some sort. He, himself, leaped onto a nearby chair and using his screwdriver, aimed it for one of the hanging lights and fired. The electricity from the lights amped up and merged with the top of the figure’s head, to connect to the stream from the cell phone. Basically completing a circuit.
He waited until two of the lights above the man burned out and the cell phone died out, before hopping onto the ground, the electricity fizzling out.
When she heard someone else enter, Jo was about to call out and warn them, when the lights came on. She was blinded for a moment and took a kick in a knee as a result, then turned back to the source, blinking her eyes. Whatever the Doctor was doing barely had time to register, but she didn’t question him when he said for her to stay on the seats. Shifting her gun to her left hand, her right pressed hard against her side as she waited until he seemed to be done with his device, and Jo lifted the gun. Narrowing her eyes, she took into account the strikes at her and where she had seen the freaky lightning touch down, took aim, and fired.
For years, Jo had proven herself to be an excellent marksman, and this time, even without fully seeing what she was aiming at, her aim proved true. The gun went off and a split second later she saw the bullet shift it’s direction mid-air, then land in the far wall, blood trailing after it. Before her eyes, a man slowly appeared, staring at her, then fell to the floor. Letting out a breath, Jo shook her head, then leaned against a row of seats, shaking her head.
“I..I don’t recognize him.” But the ring must have been his. It had to have been his. She just hoped that who or whatever he was, the bullet kept him down. When he didn’t move, Jo slipped the gun into her jeans, then glanced down at herself. For a moment, she froze, struck by a memory of the last time she had an injury similar to this. Blood dripping from between her fingers and down her arm from the first cut disappeared for a moment and was replaced with another image, the one hours before her death, of her bleeding out through an Ace bandage.
Abruptly, Jo pushed the memory out of her thoughts and looked over at the Doctor. “Think it’s done?”
He nodded, staring at the dead man on the ground, and felt little in the way of remorse for someone who killed a child, “I don’t recognize him either. I figure he was somehow using the ring to create shadows, which served as a distraction and object for us to focus our attention and thought processes on; while he was the one going on doing the killings. I figured as much when you said you had the ring and it cracked, and subsequently the shadows vanished.”
He sighed, “Unfortunately, I didn’t think of it until now, and more people died because of it. Still, no more deaths now!” He offered as best a smile as he could, clapping his hands together as he looked at her and then furrowed his brows. Watching her a moment, he moved towards her, “Jo, you’re hurt bad.”
He pulled out the screwdriver, and quickly scanned her to see how fatal the wounds were, before looking back to her, “We need to get you to a doctor, not The Doctor, because I’m him, and while I can perform most medical emergencies with ease, there’s not a lot in the way of product here. Quickly, I think Watson has the appropriate equipment.”
He was already looking around and then grabbed a curtain to tear it off and begin ripping it in order to create a bandage of some sort, pushing it towards her, “Hold this against your wound while I get help. You probably should sit and rest.”
j”I thought that it was a distraction, after the end of the shadows, but...no one knew who owned the ring.” When he said she was hurt, Jo glanced downwards, then shook her head. “I’ll live.” A faint chuckle escaped at that, because oh, the irony of that statement. But she nodded her agreement, glad he mentioned John over the other doctors. She’d become friends with Watson and Sherlock, and didn’t mind him patching her up.
“Thanks.” She took the curtain-bandage from him and lifted her hand for a second to press it tightly against the tear in her clothes where blood still leaked. Gingerly, she sat on one of the rows, then shifted so that she was stretched out on her left side so that John would have room to get to her wound when he got there.
“Text him through the network. And you should let everyone else know...that the guy is dead.” And this was one death that Jo was perfectly okay with, particularly thanks to the fact that he had been the cause of children dying. She felt some satisfaction that she’d managed to take him out, and resolved again to melt down the guy’s ring when they arrived in New York.
The Doctor felt no sadness at this death, this was one that was necessary, that had to happen. This wasn’t some misunderstanding, it was the true nature of this beastly person and that only saddened him that this man fell off that deep end at some point. Still, he immediately turned and brought up his sonic screwdriver, he telepathically controlled it to send a text to Doctor Watson, letting him know that the killer had been caught, and that Jo needed medical attention immediately with more materials than The Doctor had on him at that moment.
Immediately he spun and faced the young woman, “I’ve escaped wounds like that too, doesn’t mean I like to. We’d be all for the better if we knew you were alright Jo, that much is clear. Watson’ll be here soon. So... how do you feel? You just caught the killer, and you’re on a train with Sherlock Holmes and myself.”
He smirked proudly, before looking down to Rose’s cellphone. It was essentially demolished now, “I suppose I’ll be getting her a new one when we get to New York then.”
“Right now I feel like I’ve been stabbed,” she replied before rolling her eyes. Honestly, she was too tired to really care who was on the train currently. All she knew right now was that, hopefully, the murders would stop now and that if they did find some way to send people back where they came from, she wanted certain assurances before she went back. Having spent the last couple of months alive, Jo wanted to stay that way, no matter what.