Salvage (audio story)

Salvage was the first story of Volume 12 of Big Finish Productions' Short Trips series. It was written by Max Curtis and featured the Eighth Doctor and Bliss.

Publisher's summary
There's a place where all lost things go. Salvage, a sanctuary where the abandoned and misplaced can be found. In the Time War, more has been lost than ever before. Planets, people, and even whole timelines have been consumed by the fighting. Everyone needs Salvage, but even this haven isn't immune from the effects of the Time War.

Plot
Running, the Doctor and Bliss get to the TARDIS and dematerialise, but the Salvage Train appears in the Time Vortex and crashes into them. They materialise in the last carriage and investigate, finding it full of mundane objects. It reminds Bliss of something from her childhood which she cannot fully recall as the pre-Time War Derilobia is lost, but the Doctor says that he can help.

''Bliss, a young girl, is given a Gossip Stone from the lost and found of Derilobia Spaceport by her grandfather and speaks her secrets into it. When a girl of about the same age as her, Misbah, speaks to her through the stone and asks about her life and Derilobia, Bliss instead tells her of how she wished the boring and grey planet was. Misbah tells her the story of Salvage, where lost things go, and how she lost one of her Gossip Stones in the hope that it would end up there.''

The train is full of still and silent ghosts from different planets, times and backgrounds whom Bliss realises are refugees of the Time War. It never reaches Salvage and keeps creating new carriages for new arrivals, pushing the passengers further and further back and causing them to eventually fade away. The Doctor and Bliss head to the front of the train and finds the driver's compartment empty and that the train is running automatically, eternally looking for salvage. Bliss takes control of it and tries to get to Salvage to recover everything that she lost, crashing it.

Bliss sees that she is on an empty Derilobia and runs home despite the Doctor warning her not to. She attempts to use the Gossip Stone to contact Misbah, whose planet she had learnt whilst in a physics lecture at the Luna University was destroyed long ago. She receives no response. The Doctor joins her and explains that they are in the last moment of Derilobia before it was erased from time and that they do not have long before they will have to leave, so they return to the train as it is filled with the lost things of the planet.

The train uses the psychic energy of the lost things, spare parts from the TARDIS and temporal meta-fluid to allow the refugees to move about the train freely and make plans to renovate the carriages into a home until the Time War ends. The Doctor returns to the TARDIS and, before Bliss joins him, she hands the Gossip Stone to a ghost and asks them to find Misbah.

Characters

 * Eighth Doctor
 * Bliss
 * Bliss's grandfather
 * Misbah

Worldbuilding

 * The Doctor and Bliss visit the Botanical Forgery in the last of the Maniac Cities.
 * Bliss's grandfather brought her a present from the lost and found whenever he returned from the Derilobian Spaceport.
 * Bliss told the secrets that she did not wish to share with Calla, Ryall or her mother with a Gossip Stone given to her by her grandfather.
 * The Doctor has a 16-2500 railcard.
 * Amongst the things that Bliss has lost are:
 * a stuffed penguin which a boy on the bus through it out the window
 * her great-grandmother's ring which she lost down the drain
 * a chequered scarf which she lost whilst celebrating in the street about getting her place at Luna University
 * a box of sand shells she and her grandfather collected
 * Bliss's mother made rugelach.
 * Bliss used a purple pencil case whilst revising.
 * Bliss had posters of films that she had pretended to have seen.

Continuity

 * Derilobia from before the Time War is gone. (AUDIO: The Lords of Terror, State of Bliss)
 * The Doctor recalls trying to bring Bliss home and finding that her home was a pile of rubble. (AUDIO: The Lords of Terror)