The Naked Adventures of Martha Jones

Writer's note: The idea for this chapter was inspired by a line from one of the other Martha Jones stories on this site. It obviously goes in a different direction than that story but hopefully the journey will prove to be an entertaining one.

A long time ago in Roman-occupied Britain, a group of aliens came to Earth and planted a group of artifacts that were designed to make this brave new world they discovered more amenable to both habitation and eventual colonization. Some Roman writers of the time referred to the aliens in question by a Latin term that roughly translates as "the Foreigners" though there are some eccentric scholars in Oxford who argue that a more proper phonetic translation would be "Ferengi," which can't possibly be right.

In any event, most of these artifacts were discovered by the Romans during the reign of Caligula and immediately afterwards brought back to Rome where they proved to be the source of all sorts of interesting rumors, only to be forever vanquished from existence by an early Christian dissident who was said to have risked her life by stealing said artifacts and dumping them into the Tiber. Rumor has it that said Christian never wore clothes again but you know how those Romans like to exaggerate.

In any event, there still remained several such artifacts in British soil. One was located in the city of Coventry where it supposedly influenced a local noblewoman to go on on a famous nude ride on horseback. Another was located at the site of what would one day be the Windmill Theatre, where the performers seemed to have no problems wearing little more than a smile. And yet another was located near a small upper school in London, England, which was attended by a young black woman named Martha Jones. Fortunately, said artifact was soon after uncovered and taken away by a local branch of the Torchwood organization but by then, Ms. Jones had already touched it and was slowly but surely being transformed by it. Luckily for Ms. Jones, the results of this transformation did not become obvious until after her eighteenth birthday but then many scientific experts suspect that the artifacts were deliberately designed to act that way.

In any event, most of the changes that occurred in Ms. Jones' life as a result of that artifact proved to be quite small compared to the change that occurred the day she first saw a certain blue police box...