All Inclusive

The door is open.

He's been airing out the TARDIS ever since his little run in with the sprites from Gallavespia Five, who have an awful tendency to absorb the odours of anywhere they travel and being that they had just wandered into a sulphurus pit before the Doctor had rescued them from their plight, well then, the TARDIS is certainly due for an airing. He's steered her for the Nexus, thinking that there's no better place than a pocket bubble universe to do a bit of spring cleaning.

(Which, he does mean literally in some cases because with the infinite possibilities of the TARDIS, he has accumulated an actual room of springs and really, he ought to just get rid of them, but nostalgia, eh?)

Coughing as he unearths from the library, the Doctor waves a rag in front of his face to shed the last of that awful smell, noticing a strange shadow by the front of the doors. At least, he does hope it's a person and not just a shadow, or Neverland has been getting loose all over again and he has told Peter that he simply can't let his shadow whisk about willy-nilly. There are rules, after all (even if the Doctor has never followed them in his life).

Cleaning off a few of his tools and setting them on the TARDIS console, he wanders towards the stairs, bounding down them with a clunk-thomp-crash when his boots hit the grated landing and he claps his hands together with excitement.

"I'd offer you the full tour," he informs his visitor, who is just out of sight, "but it can take several hundred millenia."

"You know, I warrant that the Ponds would say this was a bad idea," the Doctor reasons, hand stroking along the scaly exterior of the newest friend, "I imagine most of my erstwhile companions would, but you're not a harm, are you! Walk through a door, find a triceratops, eh? Where's the harm in that?" he says, though he's definitely being kept there by his interest more than he is the deluded belief that he's safe.

People don't simply turn up at their now-regular luxury hotel and wander through one of the guest doors to find massive doors welcoming you to Jurassic Park. Now, true, the Doctor has witnessed dinosaurs on a spaceship and dinosaurs in England and yes, so there have been plenty of times that he's seen dinosaurs, but never in a park, and certainly not one popularized by 90's filmography.

So, yes, one might call that a bit strange.

He's here wondering at the mechanics of it all, but that's not to diminish the sheer wonder of finding a triceratops eating its way through a large amount of weeds that don't belong anywhere near the same cretaceous period as this large, lumbering beauty. It doesn't take a sonic screwdriver or a well-tested Time Lord's mind to know that fact. He'd steered the old man away from the plants with a little dazzle of a light show, which has left him here with no TARDIS, a Jeep, and no real plan of what he's doing.

"Right," he admits, "that's a bad plan, rubbish plan, who thought that one up?" he says, hearing the distant hunting call of predators on the wind. They might be trapped behind barbed wire and electric fences, but bad things tend to happen when you put dangerous things behind bars. Look at him, for instance.

This might be the convenient time to start walking back to where there might be some doors. Curiosity is fine and all, but only until you're jaws-deep in a dinosaur's mouth and that never really was on his to-do list. "No reason to leave you here," he says brightly to the triceratops. "Come along, then!" he beckons to his newest companion as they begin their trek back to the visitor's centre, evenly paced so as to not give the other dinosaurs the inclination that his two hearts could be beating anything but at the normal rate of things.

There's a room here for everyone, Doctor.

Even him.

There's always the problem and the peril and the chance that one of their adventures takes them to somewhere dangerous. These days, it's practically written in the small print. Here, though, an inescapable hotel with terrible fears in each of the rooms where one is personalized for you like a very painful nightmare version of an individualized jammy dodger, well, that's not the usual fare.

Still, what's usual? He'll find a way out. He'll save the day for Amy's sake, for Rory's, for the others. It's just that as he's walking down the hall, there's a room. Right in front of him, a room numbered eleven and calling out to him. His feet are moving before he can even consciously make the decision and oh, that's clever, that's something he'd like to better understand when he isn't feeling the constant pull towards a simple little hotel room door. Monsters and devils can wait when there's a mysterious door involved. It pulls you. It calls to you in whispered voices. It wants you and who's the Doctor to ever deny?

It's a simple gold-polished handle. It's a painted door. It's room number eleven and it will contain the very worst of his fears. Geronimo. There's no hesitation when he opens the door to find out what's waiting for him, what could possibly frighten the Doctor so terribly that he brings on a monster, and finds...

Chicken.

There's chicken on spits turning around and around in a rotisserie and a kitchen surrounding them. He steps in and there's chicken. He steps back and he's back in the 1980's earth-styled hotel with supposedly no escape. Behind door number eleven, there's chicken. Casting a glance over his shoulder, he carefully hangs a 'do not disturb' sign on the door and follows the smell of barbeque wafting before him to explore why his worst fear appears to be the kitchen in yet another hotel.

Or maybe it's what Rita means about the halls changing. Maybe he's been banished to the bottom and has to work his way back up to the top. The Doctor whips out his sonic screwdriver and approaches the spinning chickens with severe suspicion, scanning them for alien life or maybe hidden nightmares? The trouble is, the scans reveal that they're chickens. Normal earth chickens.

Oh, and they're also quite tasty, according to the readings.

"And here I am surrounded by chickens with Casanova nowhere to be found. Typical," he remarks under his breath, thinking that'd be more than a debt repaid with one of these tasty things.