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It was a dark, clear night. Above, the stars were shining brightly, formed into clusters that said the people looking up at them were currently located at the coordinates 20-0-8-7-0 by 1-9 from galactic centre. Approximately. If they were using a rather ancient and esoteric unit of measurement considered by some old men shut up in a glass tower to be the pinnacle of measuring existence for the last several uncountable millennia. The people located at coordinates 20-0-8-7-0 by 1-9 from galactic centre were blissfully unaware of anything even remotely approaching galactic and certainly wouldn’t know the first thing about calculating these sorts of coordinates.
At least, for the next few minutes until a light appeared a few metres above the ground. It flashed like the echo of a camera going off, faded and pale, until it began to gain more colour. And noise.
With a wheeze and a groan, the blanket of snow covering an expanse of ground between one pine tree forest and the next suddenly gained a blue box with POLICE written across its front in white. The sound continued for a few moments until the silence of the night resumed. If the silence seemed a bit warier than it had been before, then perhaps whatever was holding its silence was simply erring on the side of caution.
The door to the box labelled POLICE swung open. It opened about halfway and then stopped, impaired in its duty by the sheer amount of snow it tried to move. Someone inside the box pushed at the door again. The snow couldn’t push back, but the door still didn’t move.
A head poked out of the halfway open door. It looked around and pulled itself back inside, followed quickly by a voice.
“Where are we?”
“Christmas.”
“Again?”
“Not that one. There are, approximately, seven thousand, five hundred, and two places in this galaxy known as Christmas. Towns, provinces, countries. This planet.”
“And five others close enough to mix up,” grumbled Ace, poking her head back out. She leaned against the inside of the open door and kicked at the snow, sending up waves of the stuff. The door opened a bit further.
“The lodge should be,” he squinted up at the stars and then turned around. When he had done so twice, he pointed off toward one of the banks of trees. “Just beyond there. No more than a kilometre or so.”
“Better not be,” said Ace, wrapping her jacket tighter around herself.
“This is one of the only places in the universe where the trees are still free-range.”
“Free range?” Ace slogged through the snow faster. “Trees?”
“Yes.”
“Trees aren’t like cows! They don’t move.”
“Are you always looking at them, hmm?”
Ace glanced from side to side. The tree to her left had a blue tinge to it, The one to the left was shorter and fatter. She closed her eyes and counted to ten. When she looked again at the trees, they were still in place. The only thing that had moved was the Doctor and he was nearly out of sight on the non-existent trail ahead.
“Hey! Wait up!”
She hopped in the steps that he had already taken. Her feet were starting to freeze and it didn’t look like there was anything nearby, lodge or otherwise.
Other than the trees, of course.
They trudged up a hill. Concentrating more on where she was placing her feet than what was actually ahead, Ace didn’t notice that the Doctor had stopped in his tracks until she reached where he was standing.
He pointed. “There it is! I hoped it was around here somewhere.”
“Hoped?” Ace’s gaze followed along the Doctor's arm. A little past the bottom of the hill sat a square cabin. It stood some feet off the ground, most likely so that the snow wouldn’t bury it. It looked like it was made of logs. Snow covered the roof, icicles dripped down from its edges, and the windows glowed with warm, yellow light. It looked like the sort of thing that Ace imagined would be found in a ski resort up in the Alps, all perfectly rustic to all appearances so much that it looked almost unnatural.
“Knew,” the Doctor amended. “Come on, Ace, let’s go get warm. And a map.”
“Professor.”
Even the stairs were perfect. There was no creaking beneath their feet or sagging in the steps. They weren’t even slippery. It was starting to creep Ace out a bit. The log cabin probably wasn’t even made of wood. More likely, it was some sort of metal or something else sufficiently futuristic that only looked like wood. And sounded like wood. And, she discovered, as she shut the door behind them, felt like wood.
A dangling strip of silver bells hung over the inside of the door, still jingling from their arrival. The temperature difference between the outside and the inside hit Ace like a sauna. She stomped the snow off of her feet before it could start to melt into her trainers. The lodge itself was small, mostly taken up by the front desk, a selection of chairs, and some shelves.
Behind the desk stood a bored-looking man, the curved end of a candy cane sticking out of his mouth. He barely glanced up at Ace and the Doctor.
Other than him, the lodge held a handful of people. They sat in a loose circle of squashy chairs by an electric fireplace, divested of many layers of winter clothing. They looked human enough, like the man behind the desk, but that wasn’t really any indicator of whether or not they were from Earth. A few of them glanced over at the new arrivals, quick enough to satisfy an uninterested sort of curiosity.
Ace shrugged off her jacket. The only place to put it was already heaped with other coats. She folded it over her elbow and looked around.
Pine boughs lined the walls, attached to shields of wood that made them look more like hunting trophies than decorations. Some of them had ribbons attached: gold, silver, bronze. They were pinned in the centre of the boughs. Three shelves separated the remainder of the cabin from the welcome area. She drifted toward them, the snow she hadn’t managed to stomp off her feet falling off in her trail and melting as soon as it touched the floor. For a moment, she thought it would sizzle on contact, like when you splashed water into a frying pan to see if it was hot enough.
She glanced at the shelves. They held net guns. Why would you need any sort of gun to get a Christmas tree? You just needed an axe to cut it down, a couple of people to carry it, and a bit of rope to tie it to the top of the car to get it home.
Ace picked up one of the net guns up and checked its weight.
“We would like a map,” said the Doctor. He sounded like he was making an announcement to a large group of people rather than a mostly-empty cabin-slash-lodge.
The man behind the desk took the candy cane out of his mouth and pointed toward the shelves. It had the look of a shiv that candy canes got when they were sucked on for a long time, at the moment before you decided to bite the end off because it was starting to scrape up your tongue and gums. Ace ducked around the shelves, glancing over nets and packets of rations, until she found a metal display rack holding little plastic rectangles the size of credit cards. She picked one up.
“Four credits thirty,” said the man. He stuck the long end of the candy cane back in his mouth. Ace rounded the shelves, the plastic map in her hand.
The Doctor began rummaging in his pockets. In the course of his search, he pulled out a yo-yo, a tin whistle, a distressingly long length of shiny gold garland, a bishop and a rook, and several currencies other than credits including: a twenty narg note, a double-headed Altairian dollar, a few packets of salt, and a dozen mazumas. Eventually, he found a ten-credit note. The man at the desk looked severely unimpressed.
“Ace, get one of the nano-therms, too.”
“Nano-what?”
“Nano-therms. Red and yellow bottle.”
Ace darted back and grabbed a small, red bottle the height of her thumb. It had bright yellow writing on it and held it up over the shelves so the Doctor could see. “This one?”
“Exactly.”
“Nine credits seventy,” said the man, punctuated by the sound of him biting down on the candy cane.
The Doctor handed him the ten-credit note and began putting things back in his pockets. “Keep the change. Ace?”
“Ready,” she said, sliding her jacket back on, juggling the rattling bottle and plastic rectangle in one hand. “What do I do with it?”
“Take one,” said the Doctor, plucking the plastic rectangle out of her hand. He tapped his thumb at the midpoint and a hologram sprang to life above it.
“What?”
“They’re body temperature regulators. Pill-sized. Nanotech.”
Ace split the bottle open with her thumbnail. Inside, there were small, round red pills. She held one up. “A really, really small heat pack?”
The Doctor turned back to face her and shouldered open the door. “Yes.”
Ace looked at the pill and then shrugged. She tossed it into her mouth and swallowed it down before following the Doctor back outside as he slid his fingers across the plastic and turned it this way and that, clearly looking for something.
The hologram was split into sections, each of them labelled with what looked like Greek letters. When the Doctor made it zoom in on an area, a label popped up. It was all numbers.
They stood on the porch, and Ace pulled her jacket tighter around herself. She wasn’t sure when the pill-sized heat pack would start to work, let alone how it would.
“Hmm. No. No. N -- yes? No. Not that one. Ah. Here we are.” The Doctor held up the plastic rectangle, triumphant. A tiny star floated above the represented trees and grounds, like the “you are here” markings on the map of a large, indoor shopping mall. A dotted trail led from it off into part of the map. It glowed even more brightly for a moment before disappearing all together, leaving behind only an arrow that pointed down a pathway that actually had been shovelled or ploughed.
“That way?”
“That way.”
They were about ten minutes down the path when they came upon a clearing. Three different paths, not including the one they were already on, led away from it. The holographic arrow pointed toward the left-most one. Ace and the Doctor were about to cross the clearing when something moved in the forest near the right-most path. Something that sounded a bit like a wood-chipper churning. Something large. Something fast.
Whatever it was came closer and closer. The Doctor backed up so quickly he tripped over his own feet. Ace bent to help him up and it was then that the tree burst into the clearing.
It moved like something with many tentacles instead of roots, rolling over the snow like something out of a horror film or, if Ace were feeling ungenerous, like some of the more disturbing alien species they had met, the ones that made her want to wipe her hand on her jeans and then scour it with bleach and rubbing alcohol. She let go of the Doctor and he fell back into the snow.
Oddly enough, a net came flying out of the shadows next. It whipped through the air, looking like an extremely giant flying squirrel. It took Ace a moment to blink and ascertain that it was, indeed, not an extremely large flying squirrel. One never exactly knew what one was going to get with the Doctor and, given the appearance of the tree moving like no tree should ever move, she wouldn’t put it past this planet to have extremely large flying squirrels. It clipped the tree and the tree.
Well. So that was what the net guns were for.
It shrieked, sounding like a thousand crows crying out as they took flight. Ace took an involuntary step back along the pathway toward the lodge.
“How dare they!” The Doctor had gotten to his feet and dusted himself off. He sounded on the verge of Getting Involved.
They “they” involved turned out to be a trio of yet more humanoid-shaped people. They looked like very cold ninjas, all in black, with their faces covered. One of them held a net gun. All three stared after the runaway tree.
“Damn it!” One of them ripped off their black hat and threw it to the ground in disgust. “You should’ve let me take the shot.”
“Shut up, Scully. The last time you got to take a shot you ended up tangling yourself in the net.”
“You shut up!” Scully whirled on the speaker while the man with the net gun let out a short bark of laughter.
“Exactly what do you think you’re doing?”
All three of the men whirled around this time. They stared at the Doctor and Ace. Ace glanced around. At least there would be plenty of places to hide. She hoped that the men wouldn’t use the net gun on her.
“’Unting trees,” said the one with the net gun, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “What’re you doing? You’ve no gun.”
“You’re not supposed to hunt the trees!”
“How else are you supposed to get them home?” Scully asked. He pulled an oval package out of a bag he carried on his back and handed it to the man with the net gun, who immediately unwrapped it, revealing a net for the net gun.
“You ask them nicely.”
Maybe, if she closed her eyes and opened them again, Ace would wake up on the TARDIS and this would all be a very strange dream caused by Benny’s special eggnog recipe. It wasn’t actually a special recipe, it was more just a bottle of a large bottle of rum sometimes accompanied by custard.
“They’re trees.”
Nope. No rum. No custard. Just a planet where people could hunt sentient trees.
“We paid for our right to ’unt these trees same as you,” said Net Gun Man.
The Doctor looked on verge of apoplexy. All three of the men looked confused.
“Hey,” said Scully. “Why don’t you have a gun?”
“We’re not hunting trees?” Ace said slowly.
“You don’t hunt trees! You offer them payment or a trade so they’ll come in and stand tall over your presents and they’ll gorge themselves on tinsel and lametta until they’ve had enough and leave on Boxing Day!”
A large rumbling noise rose up, very close. Ace whirled around, expecting to see some sort of large machinery. She didn’t really want to think about what else could have made the noise. When it sounded again, it was clear the noise was coming from the opposite direction. She took a step back.
The trees on the other side of Scully and his two friends rustled. They looked a lot larger than they had before Ace had looked behind her, and there was no breeze for them to be rustling in. She slowly took a step back along the path.
Then, one tree poked out of the group, like a child poking their head around the corner to see if they could sneak past without people seeing them.
“Professor?” If anyone ever asked, she would deny that her voice had risen a few pitches. Cybermen were one thing. Daleks were familiar.
Trees?
Tress were not supposed to move at all, much lest roil over the ground en masse, the wood-chipper sound from earlier loud enough to make the ground shake.
“Stay very still," said the Doctor.
“Oh, I will.”
Ace barely blinked as the man with the net gun fired it in a futile attempt to stop whatever the trees were about to do. The advance tree ducked back behind the larger ones, chirping like a bird.
“Suggs,” said Scully, sounding much more uncertain than before. His voice was even higher pitched than Ace's had been.
“Shut up,” said Suggs.
Then, the trees made way for the larger ones. Ace fought the urge to run pell-mell back to the lodge once more as she looked up, and up, and up. Some of the trees had to be millennia old to be that tall. She was fairly certain that some of them were larger around than the lodge had been.
The third of the hunting party let out a squeak. Suggs dropped the net gun and tried to make a break for it.
He didn’t get very far before green descended on him. His screams could be heard as well as the sound of branches creaking. Whatever else the tree was doing to him, it was moving Suggs around.
The other two didn’t get very far either before the group of trees accosted them both. Then, the trees turned to Ace and the Doctor.
“Hello, there!” The Doctor called up, doffing his hat. “I’m the Doctor, and this is Ace. We are very much not involved with those three -- their philosophy towards trees is quite a few branches away from ours.”
Ace winced. This was most definitely not the time for puns. “Professor, don’t taunt the trees.”
The tree from before poked its -- its head? Its point? -- top back out. It made a trilling noise and was answered by a few more.
“I suppose,” the Doctor said. “Hold this, would you?”
The trees tossed noises back and forth among themselves as Ace grappled with the umbrella, not taking her eyes off of the mobile forest. If nothing else, the nano-therm pill was working. Her feet weren’t feeling like they were about to fall off from the cold anymore.
“I,” said the Doctor, pausing dramatically.
In Ace’s opinion, most of his pauses were dramatic.
“I have an offering,” he said loudly, not quite shouting. He pulled something shiny out of his pocket, something that kept going for awhile like a magician's string of handkerchiefs.
The length of tinsel that he had pulled out in the lodge during his search for credits.
The advance tree unbent itself and moved forward. It reached out a root and touched the gold garland before shaking itself free of snow and trilling loudly.
“Hang on,” said Ace. “Is that the one they were hunting?”
“I believe so.”
A louder, deeper trill came in return.
The advance tree moved a bit more forward and bent over the Doctor, grabbing the tinsel with its branches instead of its roots and pulling it inward in the same way the larger trees had done to the hunters. This time, there were no wood-chipper noises.
The tree, clearly happy with the tinsel, trilled again. Longer this time, with different pitches.
I’m assigning emotions to a tree, Ace thought, a little bit dazed.
“You would? Splendid!” said the Doctor. “And your name?”
The tree trilled.
“Ace, I would like you to meet Trevor. She’s agreed to come with us for the next forty-eight hours.”
There was nothing Ace could say to that, so she didn’t even try. She mutely followed the Doctor and Trevor the tree along the pathway as they talked in trills and words.
The next morning, when she woke, Ace could smell cinnamon and warm bread. She picked up the present wrapped with too much tape that she had hidden under her bed and followed the smell through the hallways of the TARDIS until she reached the library. Near the fireplace stood the tree, sentinel over a pile of presents. The garlands and lametta hung on Trevor’s branches were slowly disappearing inward like someone slurping up spaghetti.
Trevor noticed Ace and let out a trill of recognition.
“Finally!” The Doctor stepped out from behind Trevor. “I thought you’d never wake up.”
“Yeah, we humans are like that. Always sleeping.”
“Come here, sit down.” Ace let herself be led by the shoulders to the chair nearest the fire.
Trevor delicately lifted one root. The present she held was a cylinder wrapped in white, with little red question marks all over it. Trevor rustled, all the bells and balls jingling. Ace settled the package on her lap and handed the Doctor his present. He settled on the floor near Trevor, who swiped a branch over his head. Ace laughed at the sight of pine needles in his hair, at which point he picked up a handful of shining confetti from somewhere and threw it at her.
“Augh!” She tried to duck, but that only made it get in her hair. She felt pine branches scraping her own head then, and glanced up to find herself enclosed by green and brown. “Doctor!”
“I didn’t think Trevor would eat confetti.” He sounded genuinely surprised.
Ace managed to get some on her hand before a different branch swiped over her palm. “Did you make it out of the tinsel?”
There came a long pause, in which Ace’s nose was suffused with the smell of pine and it felt like her hair was being tugged at by a very gentle vacuum. The bells decorating Trevor tinkled delicately.
“It might be made out of the same thing,” said the Doctor finally.
“Why do you even have confetti?”
“Well, the idea was to have something that could fire gold particles somewhat larger than those of the glitter gun and I needed something to test it with that wouldn’t be harmful and -- ”
Ace stopped listening and ripped the wrapping paper off of her present to reveal something very canon-shaped. She shrugged out of Trevor enough so that she could see it properly. It looked like a very streamlined rocket launcher without a rocket.
“Trevor, stop it,” she said, elbowing the tree. Carefully, Ace leaned back and aimed the cannon up at nothing in particular.
“Oh, Ace, please d -- ”
She pressed the button. What had to be at least two fistfuls of metallic confetti burst out of the cannon’s end, arced toward the ceiling and then fell, landing mostly on the Doctor. Sensing the new deposit of shiny material, Trevor moved disturbingly quickly back toward the Doctor, who ducked and tried to brush as much of it off of his head as possible.
“I love it!” Ace said, hugging her new confetti-cannon-slash-anti-Cyberman-weapon.
“Well, that’s good,” said the Doctor, muffled by Trevor’s feasting. He let out a very loud sigh, which made Ace laugh once more.
Trevor let out a burbling sound that might have been the tree laughing before abandoning the Doctor to chase confetti across the library floor.
The Doctor smiled up at her, hair even more mussed. “Merry Christmas, Ace.”
“Merry Christmas, Doctor.”
Trevor trilled happily.
Ace shifted in her seat. Some confetti still fell down from her hair when she moved. “We’re not going to walk out of the TARDIS the middle of a field of killer snowmen next are we?”
“There are such thing as killer snowmen, Ace,” said the Doctor. “Now, open the rest of your presents.”