River had slept well, and perhaps that should have been the first sign that things were very, very wrong.
'Well' did not mean that she had not dreamt - on the contrary, her dream had been more vivid and coherent than any she could remember since arriving at the complex, a thing entire rather than some hideous chimera born of stolen fragments. She had been small, and wild, more beast than girl, a thing of claws and teeth and fangs, sometimes predator sometimes prey, always Other. It was not a nice dream, but it was one she could have lost herself in, and wasn't that the point?
And maybe she had lost herself for a while because this was something, and somewhere, new. Curiouser and curiouser, as she had told the strange man (Doctor: superlative, last remaining, etcetera), and it was a very curious rabbit hole that had a library and a swimming pool at the bottom, curioser still to have the two be the same room.
Maybe she was still dreaming.
She pinched herself, hard. No, not a dream. Tilting her head sideways, as if a different perspective might reveal things unseen like one of those drawings which is simultaneously a witch and a maiden River glanced around, biting her lower lip slightly. Answers were not forthcoming, and...
Who are you? came the shout, and she cringed, and stumbled, her usual confident doe replaced by a wide-eyed fawn finding its feet on icy ground. How did you get in here? And that was the question, wasn't it? How. Why. Where. Too many unknowns, too many variables.
Dr. Matthias would not have been proud of what she did next. Her training should have kicked in, subroutines activating programmes hidden deep in the biological matrix, initialising the conversion from girl to weapon. Should have, but didn't. Instead what came out wasn't quite a scream or a wail but some desperate hybrid of the two. "... Simon?!"
Simon would know what was going on. He always did, even when he didn't, and she could really do with one of his comfortable-but-flawed fictions to wrap around herself like a threadbare but comfortable blanket. Mad she might have been (people kept saying that, and sometimes she believed them) but she was sane enough to know that stranded in a strange room which didn't make sense with a wild-eyed woman was far from the best way to be.