Bus Stop! (comic story)

Bus Stop! was a Tenth Doctor comic strip published in Doctor Who Magazine.

Summary
When the Doctor gets a bus, things start to go wrong...

Plot
A blond young man reads the paper on a double decker bus. He ponders that weirdo types always sit next to him on the bus and how he can avoid them. Someone who turns out to be the Tenth Doctor, wearing a Freeview aerial on his head to confuse the bio-scanner of time assassins from the future, is the next one to bother him. The Doctor asks to use his mobile phone to call 27th century Mars, where Martha Jones is. The man sitting on the bus lends him the mobile phone. He believes the Doctor is a nutter, a sci fi fan who probably lives with his mother.

The cover of the Evening Standard he is reading has a story about the mayor vanishing. A flask the Doctor shows this man has soup in it made from the DNA of the Mayor of London. Time assassins from the future are chasing the soup to extinguish the Mayor's entire lineage. The Doctor makes the phone call to Martha. Detective Inspector Moloch, an alien bodyguard of the Mayor's descendant President Lithops, is with her outside the Science Compound on Mars. They wear helmets and spacesuits.

After the Doctor vanished in a makeshift, poorly constructed time machine made by the President's people, mutated time assassins showed up at the lab so Martha, DI Moloch and President Lithops race outside. The Doctor lures the assassins away from the Mayor by creating a decoy Mayor DNA soup, rewiring a Freeview Box and buying an Oyster card. The Doctor is the only one who can use the machine without becoming as fatally mutated as the assassins. They have to fetch the Doctor.

Lithops says he has a bout of asthma brought on by almost having never existed. Moloch claims that where he goes, the President must go. Two assassins in a Lada follow the bus. Moloch attacks the base and blasts mutant assassins down with his ray guns. One of the time assassins, who are green and sport "cephalapod" beards, is waiting at the Doctor's next bus stop. The female bus driver does not have time for jokes and the mutant is stalled for a bit. Martha reverses the controls on the time machine as Moloch takes care of the mutants — he, at first, thought there was just one, but there were two.

The man on the bus does not see the Doctor vanish. The Doctor tells Lithops that his scientists are just as dangerous as the assassins. They have taken stolen or scavenged items and made a time machine that is a death trap. If anyone travels in it, their genetic code is scrambled, and eventually they will die. The Doctor rigs it to start a terminal overload and when it explodes, the assassins in London will have their connections terminated and they will vanish. As it explodes, Martha and the Doctor head for the TARDIS. One of the assassins sits next to the blond man and asks where the Mayor of London is. He pulls a gun on the man, all unnoticed by the man himself. The time assassin vanishes. The man resolves that he will start riding his bike to work...

Characters

 * Tenth Doctor
 * Martha Jones
 * Man
 * DI Moloch
 * President Lithops
 * Time assassins
 * Bus driver

Worldbuilding

 * The Doctor had to buy an oyster card to get the bus.

Original print details

 * (Publication with page count and closing caption)


 * DWM 385 (9 pages) The End

Continuity
to be added