After a hard day of scrying the various badfic worlds (with a break for tea at four; one had to have some standards), he was content to kick back, relax, and engage another wonder of the modern world. His favourite chair was still his favourite chair, the enormous red leather wingback still tinged with Generic Fabric courtesy of its previous home in his billiard room, but the clanking Suetech steam-powered La-Z-Boy was a close second. For one thing, its mildly ferocious riser-recliner action could, with diligent preparation and the application of trigonometry, catapult a smallish coconut or similar object the entire length of the corridor, though he'd had to stop his experiments into optimal flight paths when that poor Time Lord woman with the irascible demeanour had been taken amidships with a ballistic grapefruit.
He cast his gaze at the perpetual calendar on the wall, filled with postcards and wishes of good luck from the garrison of his partner's old base under Cheyenne Mountain (what was left of it, anyway), taking a slurp of his tea, then stared at the date while making a noise like a poorly-maintained tugboat engine.
"Drowning again, are we, your Lordship?" Lola McCandless' mild tone belied the enormous grin she was wearing.
"N-no!" Algie replied after some effort. "It's the twenty-sixth!"
"Yeah, cob. All day - wait. Didn't you say you had something on?"
"Indeed I do! Oh, d*mn it all, Commander, I was so wrapped up in my work it completely escaped my memory. We must make haste to RC 3-Apple-14 immediately!"
"Algie," she said, worry creeping into her voice at the edges as the Earl bustled about and laboured with a large blue-and-grey box, "if the next words out of your mouth are 'I recommend we travel by chair', I will be very-"
"I recommend we travel by chair!"
"-unsurprised. Totally unsurprised. God, you're like a kid with a new toy."
"This will make a very interesting test, though! We should be concentrating so much on screaming that we arrive at our destination in moments!" Algie cranked a few brass levers on the back of the chair and prodded its firebox with a letter opener. "It's glowing blue. Should it be? Can we get it to do it again? Oh, what fun! Would you please be so good as to help me manoeuvre this contraption into the corridor?"
"You're insane," Lola said as she grappled with the La-Z-Boy.
"I cannot help but notice, Commander," Algie replied with a glint in his eye, "that you are still helping me."
"Well, that's because I'm insane too. Used to fight space invaders for a living, cob, and before that I used to - well, never you mind about that."
After a few minutes of shoving and the Earl fussing with a protractor, he pronounced them ready for takeoff and started feeding yet more coal into the chair, which began vibrating in odd ways. Lola sat down and made herself as comfortable as she could, wishing she'd thought to requisition her armour.
"I'm going to switch it to full power!" Algie shouted over the rattletrap clatter of Suvian gears as he took a seat beside the Commander. "Never done that before! Exciting, wouldn't you say?"
"Are you sure this will work?"
"Not even remotely!"
Well, thought Lola as the riser-recliner creaked into position, I have technically heard worse last words.
But before she could respond, there was a terrible, ghastly-
creeeeeeak
"... Huh. Was that i-"
KA-CHOIOIOIOIOIOIOIOIOIOIOINNNNNNNG!
Over the next few seconds, which Lola was convinced were going to be her final few seconds, she still clung onto the large birthday present. As they landed, though, she had to let go before hurtling face first into the door of an RC.
Only a moment later, she got up, with the help of her three partners. "Ow," she said, eloquently.
"Commander, are you quite well?" The various Algies coalesced into a single, worried-looking form. "I failed to calculate for our differences in weight -- arcs of trajectory and so on -- and arrived in time to hear the most appalling crash."
"Ow," she repeated, shaking the stars out of her vision. "The, the thing-"
"The package is secure, as I believe the modern expression has it. Come now, lie still." Algie grabbed a couple of small splinters of Generic Surface from the Commander's crater, picked one, took a small stick from his pocket, tied them together with a single hair from Lola's head (eliciting another brief "Ow" when she remembered to notice), and began to chant, placing the makeshift cross upon her brow. Almost immediately, the wounds began to close, and when Algie completed the spell and keeled over backwards, she was there to catch him.
"You know how to take a lady to a party, you know?" She was smiling when she said it, but then Lola smiled a lot in general.
"I think... I think a chartered ship for the Grand Tour next year, don't you?" Algie struggled to his feet and dusted himself off. "Now then, we await only friend Zeb and dear Miss Aviator. I believe you knocked already."
"Har har. You're so smart, how do we get back?"
Algie's expression trickled from satisfaction to horror. The door took the opportunity to open, and the two spun to face it, looked at each other, and said "Happy birthday!" in perfect unison.
They were just kind of like that.