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If forced to choose which of the two corals on Jack's desk was the alien, nobody could be blamed for guessing wrong. One was dry, pale, seemingly dead. No hint could be seen of the cosmic intelligence that, barely a millennium from now, would have all space and time as its playground. The other looked like a bunch of fluorescent grapes – shockingly green, purple, blue – pulsating gently in a little aquarium.
"Hey, baby," Jack cooed to the baby TARDIS. "I got you a friend." With delicate fingers, he picked it up and brought it close to the tank. "This is Ricordea florida. Florida, this is TARDIS."
He waggled the TARDIS coral and said in a squeaky voice, "How do you do, Florida?"
"Very well, thank you," he answered himself in a squawky voice, then frowned; that voice sounded too Dalek-y for a nice young coral. He tried a lower pitch. "Hellloooo."
He leaned in and, as if telling a bedtime story, said, "When TARDIS grows up, she's going to fly us far away. But –" he hesitated, then sighed, "– that's going to take a while. So I hope you two get along, because we're going to be here a long time."
A cough startled Jack. He turned to see Gwen standing in the doorway.
"Everything all right, Jack?" Then she saw the new aquarium and came in to peer at the brilliant colours and go "ooh!" when the polyps wiggled. Jack beamed like a proud father.
Gwen looked up at him with an indulgent smile. "Your other coral get lonely, then?"
She certainly was quick on the uptake, Jack thought, even though she thought she was joking. "You know how it is," he said, flashing his most charming grin. "New in town, need a friend to show you around..."
Gwen leaned her head on his shoulder. "That's what friends are for, Jack. To help you put down roots."
Jack looked over her head at the two creatures on his desk, one rooted to the ground, the other fated to fly, and said, "Yeah..."