[Twin suns hang in the sky and rocky outcrops cast sharp shadows over the marsh that spreads across the bottom of the basin. Reeds, dark green with red veins, surround still pools. Beneath the murky water are glowing orange globes that pulse faintly. Their diameter is easily six feet across, and, if you're brave enough to touch them, their slippery outer skin is warm.

Eggs, hundreds of thousands of them. An entire species, waiting to be born. Breathtaking if you aren't squeamish about slime.

The Doctor lowers his binoculars and steps back from the edge of the dusty outcropping the TARDIS has parked herself on. He offers them to Clara, pointing out a particularly dense cluster.

This is his favorite bit, getting to see things anew through someone else's eyes.]

They'll come boiling out soon enough. Infants with no sitter. No soldiers, no politicians... no teachers. Just what their predecessors left them.

A hush had fallen over the empty theatre. The lights were down, the stage was empty, the playbills left behind by careless patrons swept up and binned. A lonely thing at night, a theatre, or it should be. Not this one, though.

At night, this one breathed.

It was quiet, on the edge of hearing, a subtle suggestion of a sound that set hair on end and caused the janitors to hurry through their nightly tasks to clock out early and spend the rest of the night in the pub, drinking their nerves away. Haunted, they said, by the ghost of a performer that had died on stage a century ago.

Ghosts were not why the Doctor was using the sonic to unlock the backstage entrance. Not really, anyway. Everyone knows there's no such thing as ghosts, so what was causing all the fuss? Something was undeniably up, the matinee he'd attended previously was enough to convince him of that. There had been something subtly wrong with the performance. A woodenness that might have been attributed to nerves, if not for the fact that it swept through the actors like a wave, or, he suspected, like a signal traveling through a circuit.

The interior was dim, the few points of light serving only to give form to the darkness. Musty air carrying a hint of ancient greasepaint gusted warmly out the open door. The Doctor closed it quietly behind him. He stood still, listening attentively to the creaks and banging pipes of the old building as it settled.

There it was, the breathing. He was not alone.