Over time, Jonas had gotten more and more comfortable with the TARDIS. Or maybe the TARDIS had gotten more comfortable with him.
Hard to tell with something that was half-machine, half-magic, and all mystery. What he did know was that doors kept showing up, rooms he hadn't seen before, corridors where blank walls used to be, stairwells that curved at angles you didn't find in polite geometry.
The most fascinating room so far had been the library.
He had stumbled into it by accident while trying to find the laundry chute. What he found instead was an endless maze of shelves—real wooden shelves, not digital projections—stacked with books from across the multiverse. Not just Earth. Not just alternate Earths. But entire galaxies' worth of written knowledge.
Some were in languages he couldn't read. Some were damaged. Some were perfect. Some had titles he recognized but entirely different content inside.
He once found three copies of Pride and Prejudice, all by Jane Austen, all with wildly divergent plots. In one, Elizabeth was an eight-foot giant who needed a new heart, but the heart she needed was within the body of a crazed Terminator cyborg named Brody Switch.
He didn't finish that one. It hit a little too close to home with some of the junk he'd found outside.
There were books on everything—magic, technology, economics, history, philosophy. Whole shelves dedicated to alchemy. Volumes on lightsaber theory. A few on Wandlore. Some books hummed when he touched them. One of them bit him.
He laughed when he found The Monster Book of Monsters. It snapped at him immediately. Fortunately, he vaguely remembered how to get it to behave—stroke the spine. He flipped through it for fun, then shoved it into a thick crate labeled "DO NOT READ WHILE TIRED."
He didn't have time to dive deep into most of them yet. He still wanted to leave. That hadn't changed. But now that he had the TARDIS or a TARDIS, he had hope.
If it couldn't get him off this planet, it could at least give him somewhere decent to live while he figured out how.
One of his side projects—something he'd started before discovering the TARDIS—was designing a kind of survival suit.
It had started as a glorified spacesuit, but over time it had evolved into something weirder. Sci-fi armor, scavenged piece by piece. A helmet he was still working on—big, mirrored, bulky, ugly. But it worked.
The hip computer could interface with some of the tech he found. The tricorder clipped to his belt was a prize he found in Hermione's old junk. The backpack had a mini-replicator at the bottom, emergency tools, and a few casual changes of clothes.
He wasn't a fashion icon, but after years on the surface, most of his wardrobe he had recovered wardrobe from the portal was thousands of mismatched socks. There was another wardrobe, but most of it was for aliens with strange body shapes.
He settled for the least-stiff rags he could find. The TARDIS changed that. One day he stumbled into a clothing chamber, like someone had looted every vintage store in every corner of every galaxy and dumped it here. There were robes and suits, uniforms and armor, and even a full section of pirate gear.
Three times as much women's clothing as men's, though.
Jonas smirked. "Well, I guess we know who did most of the shopping."
Patchwork, the android, was coming along. Slowly.
Jonas had identified another ten parts from among the junk; twenty-four left to go. Cataloging took time. Organizing the endless stream of weirdness was exhausting, and guessing what each piece did was half the battle. That changed when he found the scanner.
It was a blocky, hand-held thing with a single button and a screen that showed guesses more often than answers. But even guesses helped. Sometimes it would blink and say, "60% probability: Sub-neural cooling matrix." Sometimes just, "Maybe food?"
But it gave him a framework. He could sort things faster now. And so he set up three main areas:
Parts Lab – where he stored tech with known or potential use. Mostly components for Patchwork and anything that looked safe enough to experiment with.
The Nightmare Room – filled with dangerous, bizarre, or outright terrifying junk. Anything that hummed wrong, glowed when it shouldn't, or whispered things in a voice like crushed ice. Some of those things Jonas didn't dare store next to each other, in case they decided to start reacting. He kept them separate. Very separate.
His Quarters – now comfortably cluttered. His music box lived there, still playing new songs. So did his walking bread-puncher, who seemed to have taken a liking to sitting on Jonas's pillow.
He kept dreaming of the day Patchwork would be active. Not to keep him company, though that would be nice, but to help him with the things he didn't understand. Patchwork could read schematics, maybe analyze the dangerous tech, maybe even shut down the things Jonas was afraid to touch.
Like that shrink ray.
He did not want to accidentally become the size of a hydrogen atom.
Jonas kept exploring the TARDIS. That was its own project.
Sometimes new rooms appeared while he was walking. Sometimes rooms vanished. Once he found a hallway where the doors were on the ceiling.
There was an entire zoo wing, clearly meant to house exotic creatures. Empty now, but filled with lush, artificial biomes, viewing galleries, and control crystals with unreadable symbols. He didn't know why it existed. Or why it had prison cells. Maybe Hermione and the others had expected trouble. Or maybe they had plans he couldn't begin to guess.
One of the weirder discoveries was a food court. Like a mall. Abandoned. But the layout was unmistakable: counters, food stalls, tables, chairs bolted to the floor. Signs advertising alien cuisine and strange symbols.
It was potentially operational; some of the stalls powered on when he walked by. It was a new favorite. He liked to go there to read. He even found working stoves. Finally, food that wasn't replicated...well, he still needed to replicate the ingredients. Still, cooking was fun.
And bathrooms. So many bathrooms.
"Whoever built this place believed in plumbing," Jonas muttered. "God bless them." He was a person who believed in "When you gotta go, you GOTTA go!"
He'd found files in the library—Hermione's notes—about how she'd grown the TARDIS. Something to do with a gallery of TARDIS seeds, genetics mixed with magic, fused with alien tech, and then activated by a Time Turner.
Jonas didn't get all the details. But it explained why the place felt alive.
He remembered that episode of Doctor Who—"The Doctor's Wife"—where the TARDIS became a woman and talked to the Doctor. That episode had messed with his head. But now… now it made a weird kind of sense.
Sometimes, the TARDIS helped.
Sometimes, it led him places.
One time, a hidden panel slid open on its own, revealing a brand-new hallway. At the end of it: an arcade. Right next to the food court. Real retro stuff. He played a few rounds of multiversal Space Invaders and got a high score.
Then the machine printed him a sock.
The TARDIS had a sense of humor.
Late at night, when everything was still, Jonas would sit on his bunk and stare up at the ceiling. He'd think about the Time Turner. About the Eye of Harmony. About the day he'd finally leave.
Would it work? Would he explode? Would he end up in deep space, screaming through a black hole?
He didn't know.
But some nights, when he was full of hope—or loneliness—he'd dream of visiting other worlds.
Sailing with Luffy. Brawling in Gotham. Grabbing shawarma with the Avengers. Flying with Goku. Playing wizard chess with Ron.
He'd seen so many of those stories as fiction once.
But now?
Now the stories might be real. The TARDIS wasn't just a machine. It was a bridge.
A bridge to anywhere.
If he could get it working.
It started with a glint in the distance.
Jonas had ventured beyond his usual perimeter—past the familiar landmarks, past the cracked plains and the twisted metal sculptures that dotted the landscape like gravestones. He wasn't looking for anything in particular. Just walking. Thinking. Sometimes the TARDIS seemed to push him to explore.
Today, it had felt like a nudge.
He crested a ridge of reddish rock and spotted something reflecting the twin suns. Not a shimmer-like tech, but something... duller. Old. Metallic, but baked under years of alien dust.
He slid down the slope, careful not to trip on the loose stone. His boots crunched as he approached the rise. He squinted.
It was a ship.
A full ship.
Half-buried, but unmistakable.
He stared at the saucer shape, the familiar hull curves, and the faded insignia.
Jupiter 2.
His mouth went dry. "No way."
The front end had crumpled inward. The blast marks along the left hull suggested a hard landing—or maybe an attack. Panels were peeled open like tin, exposing scorched corridors. The ramp was buried in the sand, but Jonas found a jagged tear in the side and climbed through.
The inside was worse.
Charred wires dangled like vines. Ash coated the control panels. Gravity plating flickered underfoot, cycling between working and broken. He passed twisted chairs, cracked cryo pods, and walls scorched black.
And then he found them.
The graves.
Six mounds. Carefully arranged. Marked with scrap metal.
Jonas knelt, brushing dust away. One was labeled with makeshift engraving: John R. Another said Will. A smaller one: Penny.
His chest tightened. More dead heroes. More dead people, he reminded himself.
He kept moving.
The lab was a wreck, but among the shattered glass and melted equipment, something stood intact: a hulking metal frame, half-crushed under debris. Its head was scorched, its limbs missing—but the cylindrical chest unit and bubble dome were unmistakable.
The Robot.
Jonas whispered, "Danger, Will Robinson..."
It was beyond repair.
But that didn't mean useless.
He scanned the internals—what was left of them—and smiled. There were still viable power converters inside. And the speech modulator unit, miraculously, was whole. The logic processors were gone, likely fried in whatever explosion had killed the ship, but a few of the servos were salvageable.
He climbed deeper into the wreck, flashlight cutting through the dark.
That's when he found Smith.
Or what was left of him.
He was sitting in the ship's medical bay. Slumped in a chair. His face was half gone, replaced with metal plating and something like a mixture of steampunk and Borg. One eye was dark. The other glowed dim red.
Jonas backed up instinctively.
Half of Smith's torso had been replaced with cybernetics—experimental stuff. Not Earth-made. Not even Lost in Space tech. The outer shell was pitted and blackened, but still humming faintly.
"Okay," Jonas muttered. "That's not ominous."
He reached for the scanner.
The red eye flared.
Jonas dove to the side as a bolt of plasma scorched past his head.
Smith was still alive.
Sort of.
The next minutes were a blur.
Jonas scrambled behind a console as Smith stood—or tried to. One of his legs malfunctioned, dragging behind him. Sparks flew. His voice box crackled.
"In...truder. Unauthorized... scavenger. Human... must... be... preserved."
Jonas flinched. "That's not how I remember you, Smith."
The cyborg raised a metal hand. Fingers telescoped open into a built-in plasma cutter.
Jonas ducked and bolted for the hallway.
He needed cover. He needed a weapon.
And now he was being hunted in the husk of Jupiter 2 by a cybernetic ghost from a dead show.
The worst part?
He still wanted those parts.
Jonas spun and sprinted back the way he came, diving over a fallen beam and ducking past a shattered console. He reached the husk of the old Robot, slid to his knees, and jammed his hand into the internal panel he'd already opened.
Smith followed, relentless.
Jonas yanked the power cell free.
He whirled just as the plasma blade slashed at his faceplate.
The shield gave out.
The suit sizzled and sparked—one shoulder exploded outward, launching metal shrapnel. Jonas screamed, tumbling back with the cell still clutched to his chest.
Smith stepped forward, blade raised.
Jonas did the only thing he could think of.
He threw the power cell.
The impact sparked blue light—then BOOM.
The cell overloaded. A blast of heat and sound rolled down the corridor. Jonas was flung backward, suit in tatters, helmet cracked. The ship shook violently as smoke filled the air.
And Smith?
Scattered.
His torso clanged against a wall. The head rolled past Jonas, eye flickering once… then going dark.
Jonas lay there, coughing, half-blind from the smoke, ribs screaming. The suit was wrecked—melted and torn—but it had done its job.
He was alive.
Barely.
He crawled over to what remained of Smith and stared.
He still needed those parts.
The next hours were a haze of pain and focus.
Jonas scavenged everything he could—power conduits, gyroscopic stabilizers, the cognitive sync relay. From Smith, he pried out the micro-fusion coupler and an advanced subdermal control thread. He even took the eye, though it gave him the creeps.
He salvaged parts from the Robot's husk, too. The torso casing. Servo tracks. Even a small backup power core still pulsing faintly.
When he was done, he marked the graves again, placing a bent metal scrap shaped like a rose on each one. He wasn't sure why. Just felt right.
Then he limped back to the TARDIS.
He collapsed inside, setting the parts down with trembling hands.
Patchwork — the half-built droid waiting for completion — stood silently in the workshop.
Jonas looked at it and gave a tired grin.
"Good news, buddy. I got you some new parts. You'll be finished in a flash."