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A Rintlekk escape pod was the only surviving piece of a Rintlekk ship that was shot down by UNIT over Wasdale Head, falling into the lake and being salvaged by Dorothy McShane. It was controlled by a semi-sentient Squidget. Dorothy referred to it as 'the Pod' until the Thirteenth Doctor identified it as a Rintlekk Emergency Escape Vessel.
Appearance
The ship's fuselage was made of dull grey metal, and appeared to be powered by a small, spherical device that hummed softly, and the engine links were made up of a symbiotic engineer housed inside the propulsion unit that Dorothy McShane dubbed the "Squidget". (PROSE: Template:CS)
History
Whilst she was on a climbing holiday in the Lake District, Sanaul alerted Dorothy McShane to a UFO that UNIT was tracking, sending two planes to shoot it down with Advanced Short Range Air-to-Air Missiles. The mothership had apparently fired it accidentally, but there was a pilot inside who died on impact. The pod was hit by the missiles but used the debris to steer itself into the lake, out of sight of the planes' infrared instrumentation could not detect. It crashed in the lake under Wasdale Head and came to rest on a ledge around ten metres under the surface.
Under the cover of testing a new generation of diving equipment, A Charitable Earth took two days to locate the pod. Dorothy loaded it into the back of a Land Rover and drove it to her workshop on Kirkwood Farm, trying to repair it but having no idea of how it worked or who created it. When she started to dismantle what she assumed to be the links to the engine controls, the Squidget chirruped, leading to her to discover that the links were sentient.
She used the pod to power the lights and equipment of her workshop for several years, as the power source seemed inexhaustiable. (PROSE: At Childhood's End [+]Loading...["At Childhood's End (novel)"])