Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Mayday, mayday, mayday!

Invented in 1372 by Alfred Mayday, it is a day of Morris dancing, light pole bondage, and the whole of existence being threatened by a renegade Time Lord known only as the Rani. She’s already obliterated The Grumpy One and The Flautist, my favourite King Crimson album, from existence. That’s an unforgivable crime, I Can Feel the Heartbeat of a Killer was a belter!

As if that wasn’t bad enough, she hates me. She even hates children! At least that was what the panto based on my life I saw in some pokey theatre the other week seemed to think. Wasn’t very good, the kids playing John and Gillian weren’t much cop and the scene where I’m about to cave that caveman’s head in with a rock was going on far too long even before the musical number.

Anyway, I have to go now. I think I just spotted that young man who stole my chest hair walking past my window, and I need to find my crossbow. Luckgood, my dears!

Chapter Text

The Rani’s TARDIS had taken a most peculiar shape. The purpose of the ship’s chameleon circuit was to blend into whatever environment it materialised in. Thus, as it gently rotated before the wormhole, suspended in space, it had taken a form loosely resembling a bunch of spare model parts hurriedly pasted together the morning of a deadline.

It was also painted red, because red is a nice colour.

The Rani was never one to have reservations about her choices. If she decided on it, it would happen. The closest thing to ‘regret’ in her eyes was a failed experiment, and that only means having a more nuanced and experienced approach next time. She did not, therefore, feel any sort of regret as she admired the new design she had implemented for her control room. The room was now a jumbled blend of a cathedral and a vibrant 23^rd Century disco: stony gothic architecture lit by fluorescent neon of every imaginable colour, the roof indistinguishable in the echoing, dark distance above the technicolour lightshow at ground level.

It was less functional than the default theme, but she felt it was more befitting of her new methodology of evil scheming. She had a flight of stairs she could dramatically pace down and monologue on, for one thing.

However, she did not care for the feelings the new console room stirred in her. She spent many a dark night in her bedroom, staring mournfully at the mirror, whispering the words “I am not the Master, I am not the Master,” over and over again to herself, until the syllables lost all meaning.

The necessity of another nightly vigil was at the forefront of her mind as she stood on the landing of the TARDIS’ staircase, the time rotor and hexagonal control boards two dozen feet in front of her, and the ornate arches of the inner doors beyond that. As she cackled maniacally and waved her arms in the air, lightning striking the ground around her feet, she felt that she’d be repeating those five words a bit louder and more intensely tonight.

A pair of disembodied heads, engulfed by fluorescent pink energy, each floated around one of her wildly gesticulating hands. It was the kind of image you’d usually only see in one of the more drug-addled, and less good, vintage sci-fi movies, the kind of movie all the good little goths and emo scenesters find under their pillows after a visit from The Tim Burton Fairy.

“Pickled in time, like gherkins in a jar!” cackled the Rani, in exactly the way that an amoral scientist who is only interested in their experiments wouldn’t. “Fated to wander a dismal corner of the universe for twenty years… helpless, paralysed! It’ll drive them insane!”

There was at least one person in the room who wasn’t entirely occupied with a) their megalomaniacal evil schemes and b) loudly ranting about said megalomaniacal evil schemes. He was also desperately trying to hear himself think over the unbearable din of shouted monologues and lightning strikes, as he was occupied with squashing a roundel into the scowling face of the Time Lord janitorial official Under-Cardinal Andeech.

After similarly squishing the face of a Cyberman with futuristic wall upholstery, he flipped his little wavy quiff for maximum flourish as he turned around dramatically.

His name was Cyrian, and as his hairstyle, his need to pose when no-one would notice, and the fact that his outfit seemed to be constructed out of chopped up bin bags and homemade tie-dye curtains would suggest, he was a fresh recruit from the depths of DV Acrol 8. DV Acrol 8 was the hottest nightclub in Galveston, which was a small town just outside Levine Ravine, which was an arid city in Cornwallevon, which was an unremarkable country in the south-south-east of Marmite-Branston, which was one of the larger continents on the distant, mineral-rich planet of Fuckingridiculousname.

The Rani had swept Cyrian up so quickly that his Twink Excellence in Power Bottoming Award, one of DV Acrol 8’s most prestigious honours, had accidentally been thrown in with one of the menagerie of monsters that now lay behind the wall’s many roundels. His mind was set on searching each and every one, no matter how long it took him, until he found it. He’d worked long and hard for it, and it’d be a cold day in hell before he let it rot in a puddle of Rutan slobber or God knows what else it was currently laying in.

That was, of course, seemingly going to have to wait until after his boss’ latest mad scheme. Said mad scheme involving stranding this ‘Doctor’ person in some godforsaken backwater, that is. Not the other, unrelated mad scheme involving the gathering of a rogue’s gallery of clones from various races across time and space, which was an entirely different mad scheme altogether.

“A Cyberman, and a Time Lord from Gallifrey,” he announced to no-one for no discernible reason. It’s not like a) his mistress was unaware of their latest acquisitions, nor b) she was even listening to anything but her own voice anyway. It was merely another of his numerous melodramatic flourishes. “One more specimen is needed: an Earthling. The menagerie is almost complete.”

As expected, the Rani had already bounded down the stairs in order to photogenically prance around the TARDIS console, fiddling with various controls, and generally acting like the interception program hadn’t already been keyed in and executed half an hour ago.

“Time is literally of the essence,” she said, flashing the ship’s exterior lights because rotating the dimmer knob back and forth looked sufficiently theatrical and faux-scientific. “The Doctor’s remaining incarnations are teetering on the edge of a precipice!”

Cyrian was not one to bemoan someone else’s camp histrionics, but he had an award to find and this was just getting self-indulgent now.

“You’re obsessed!” he said, rushing over to shut the scanner’s windscreen wipers off. “Don’t forget what we came here for.”

The Rani made a variety of dismissive snorting noises for a solid 30 seconds. “Earthlings pose no threat to my technology... it’s the Doctor I want out of the way.”

Cyrian pulled the chain to lower and double-check the TARDIS’ irritatingly small monitor. The interception program was almost complete.

Sliding a lever to illuminate the scanner, the dark ceiling suddenly became a dazzling vista of stars and planets, like a gaudily designed planetarium. It was less effectual than a simple screen you could glance at, and it sure as hell didn’t do your spine any good to keep craning your neck upwards to see where you were going, but this was one unnecessary piece of melodrama Cyrian could get behind.

At the centre of the spectacular diorama unfolding above their heads, an unassuming blue box was slowly spinning its way through the cosmos. Cyrian glanced back at the monitor.

“Interception any moment now, Rani,” he proclaimed, pressing his fists against his thighs as he stared up at their target.

“You know,” said the Rani, leaning against the console in a suitably striking pose of her own. “I’m almost sad. I will miss the challenge.”

The Rani and Cyrian shared a look of mutual raised eyebrows. As a result, they ended up completely missing the pivotal moment when a cheap, blurry Photoshop effect smacked into the blue box and sent it careening off course.

It was totally worth it, though.

Chapter Text

The TARDIS had landed directly opposite the ship known as the Cutty Sark. This was ironic, as ‘cutting sark’ was the main reaction people had to the story that was about to unfold. That would be like if the pyramid in the opening scene of Blade Runner was called the Outstandy Visual Achievement Somewhat Hampered By A Comparatively Less Outstanding Storyline And That One Completely Superfluous And Very Clearly Not Consensual Sex Scene Isn’t Helping Matters, or if the ambassadorial transport ship in the opening scenes of The Phantom Menace was called the Worky Our Way Through The Seven Stages Of Grief.

“Oh, to be in China now that November’s here!” the Doctor announced, flinging his arms out. The theatrics were largely in compensation for the fact that he was currently walking past a fence with an English-language advert for a night of punk acts like ‘Prehensile Spinal Fluid’, ‘Vomitous89’, and ‘Megaluthian Slime Skimmer’ at the local underground music venue, said fence was running alongside the Greenwich Royal Naval College, and the Cutty fucking Sark was right next to him. If he insisted he was in China in November loudly and proudly enough, maybe it would somehow become true.

Ace, meanwhile, was having none of it, and waited for an appropriately long gap in the little dance the Doctor was doing as he shouted the word ‘China’ over and over in a variety of comedy accents.

“When was the last time you had that junk heap in for an MOT, Professor?” she finally got a chance to ask.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Ace!” the Doctor admonished as he wheeled round to face her. “The TARDIS has never had an MOT at all, because it is a very advanced piece of technology! Any human being who would actually be licensed to provide an MOT would not even begin to comprehend the innumerable complexities of a hyper-advanced time-and-space-travelling vehicle from an alien race and would therefore not be able to provide an accurate assessment necessary f-”

Ace was barely paying attention to his deGrasse Tyson-style digression; she was too busy staring up at the admittedly impressive silhouette of the Cutty Sark.

“Great Wall of China? Looks more like the Cutty Sark to me,” said Ace, pointing to the words “Cutty Sark” emblazoned across the ship in large lettering, in one of her trademark displays of insightful observation.

The Doctor, finally shaken from his delusions, looked around carefully for the first time since he arrived. “And not a soul in sight…” he muttered.

Ace had also noticed the distinct lack of an extras budget, and her face suddenly lit up as she put two and two together. With no-one around to stop her, she could actually fulfil a lifelong dream she never thought she would ever get the chance to fulfil. The Endgame Plan with Karra, the letter, and the Prydonian Academy exams she’d need to pass to get the TARDIS needed to carry it out could all wait just a few more minutes; this was an opportunity that would likely never arise again.

As she bounded away to the stern of the great ship, the Doctor took the liberty of fishing a newspaper out of a nearby bin. His face darkened as he noticed the date.

 “1973?” he said ominously, the newspaper dramatically slipping out of his hands back into the bin. “I’d never set the co-ordinates for 1973, the accumulated James Blunt Energy would be too powerful… unless…”

…unless someone, or something, had deliberately taken them off course. That couldn’t be good.

He didn’t get a chance to ponder further, as he’d finally noticed what Ace was doing.

At last, after all these years, it was about to happen. Countless nights as a teenager spent tearfully trying to wish away the void inside, never truly avoiding the painful awareness of the thing she could never do. A lifetime spent waiting for a moment in her life that deep down she knew would never come. So much burning darkness had raged within her for so long at the injustice of never getting to do it… yet here she stood. The impossible moment had arrived. Her fingers trembled, her heart pounded, her breathing ragged and erratic.

Her hand reached out, and with an invigoratingly sudden press of cold steel against her palm, she had done it.

All her life she had waited, and now here, at last, she had finally touched the Cutty Sark Gardens sign.

Catching up to her, the Doctor was somewhat puzzled by the fact that Ace was pressing her fingers to a random plaque on a fence, but was more concerned by the rather unhinged, unblinking stare she was directing at it, and the wild grin that was practically splitting her face in two.

“Ace?” offered the Doctor, walking the last few steps toward her as gently as possible while holding his hands up in a diplomatic fashion. “…what are you doing?”

His attempt to reason through his companion’s strange behaviour was for naught. She just stood there, staring at the sign with her fingertips on a place sign, frozen.

And then a stock footage explosion with that same naff blocky effect they put on Holly in the first series of Red Dwarf pasted over it ate them.

Chapter Text

The sign in front of Ace was no longer her beloved Cutty Sark Gardens sign, but was for some shithole called Albert Square instead, wherever that is.

Before Ace could ask why this travesty had occurred, she noticed that this was not the only thing distinctly out of place. They were now in some kind of street market, on one of those suburban streets that couldn’t decide if it was a super-bourgeois middle-class hive or a total shithole. That was a run-of-the-mill kind of odd; in her many adventures in time and space Ace had experienced far weirder things than random, unexplained teleportation.

What was a distinctly new kind of odd was the fact that the Doctor was suddenly holding a bass guitar, and had also inexplicably transformed into a tall, blonde stranger, who was wearing what appeared to be an outfit constructed entirely out of the very worst swatches from a particularly tacky book of fabric samples.

“’ere, you’re not the Doctor!” said Ace.

“Yes I am, Ace!” said the Sixth Doctor, barely looking up from carefully tuning the guitar. “We seem to have slipped a groove in time!” He punctuated the statement by laying down a smooth funk rhythm track as he examined his surroundings for the first time.

“…where did all these people come from?!” he exclaimed, switching to a more angry, punky sound as he jabbed the neck of the guitar at all the extras that suddenly existed now. “…and where are we?”

As the Doctor continued his jam session, only pausing in confusion as a passing old woman tossed change at him, Ace was already racing towards one of the many stalls along the roadside. It was a clothing stall, and as any butch would do in her situation, Ace made a beeline for the rack of killer jackets.

“’ere, Professor, look at this!” Ace shouted over to the Doctor, who was busy freestyling in an empty corner to a captive audience of cabbages, bananas, and other assorted fruit and veg. There’s probably a joke in here somewhere about the size of the Sixth Doctor’s fanbase.

In calling the Doctor over, she hadn’t paid attention to the coat she had randomly grabbed from the rack. Thus she hadn’t noticed that she was holding what appeared to be a particularly ugly 70’s carpet which had been crudely repurposed as clothing.

The proprietor, one Sanjay Kapoor, immediately put on his best plastic smile, noticing his first chance in months to get that hideous thing off his hands.

“All right, darling?” he said, leaning on the rack in his best attempt at a Del Boy-style sales pitch. “Special discount for you, seeing as it’s nearly Christmas!”

“I didn’t do it!” exclaimed Ace. Both Sanjay and the visibly balding jester in the stupid costume had to double take at each other. “…I mean ‘did I do that?’ ‘You stupid boy’? ‘What ‘chu talkin’ bout’? No wait, was it ‘I don’t believe it’? ‘I will zay zis only wance’ maybe? Or was it-”

As she continued her vain attempts to find her catchphrase, Gita stepped in to tug at Sanjay’s sleeve.

“What do you mean, discount?” she forcefully whispered in that special way where you’re signalling to everyone that you don’t want them to hear what you’re saying, but you’re still loud enough that everyone can hear what you’re saying, but they totally know that you don’t want them to hear, even though you’re deliberately going out of your way to make sure they hear regardless. “This year’s been bad enough as it is without you giving things away!”

“Don’t worry about it, all right?” said Sanjay, barely breaking the charm offensive. He turned back to Ace to sweeten the deal, but Gita saw it coming in time.

“HEY DO YOU LIKE THAT, LOVE?!” she shouted before Sanjay was even done leaning over.

Having started wearing it, and thus finally appreciating the horror that she had just picked up, she answered Gita with a violent shake of the head and pulling the face children make when asked to eat their least favourite vegetable.

“Pfft, totally tasteless!” said the raging hypocrite with the guitar. He paused, and picked up his script from its hiding place under some bananas. With the kind of sigh you only make when all hope is leaving you, he pressed on.

“You should try Hawaiian shirts sometime,” he said in a completely unenthused monotone. “Now that’s fashion.” He made a point of rolling his eyes as exaggeratedly as possible, angrily tossing the script aside whilst making a variety of gagging noises.

Ignoring the clown’s contempt for his material, Gita shrugged at Ace’s contempt for the jacket.

“I tell you, they’re going to be all the rage in 1994!” she insisted in a very Doctor-ish display of contempt for reality.

With the Doctor doing his best Cliffhanger Face, he barely had time to perform the Saved by the Bell ad break riff before the stock explosion ate them again.

***

Unfortunately, not only did the explosion take the Doctor’s guitar, this time it also seemed to glitch, the pale, blocky blur freezing in place and sticking to the Doctor’s head. Thankfully the Doctor was now in his third incarnation, so he could totally pull off a frozen white explosion effect being plastered to his bald scalp.

“What’s happening?” asked both Mel and the audience.

Also, Mel was there. Once again just like the audience, she was visibly nodding off. The Doctor was kind enough to remedy this.

“CHANGE,” he shouted directly into Mel’s face. With a dramatic brush of his cape, he about-faced and started striding down the street. “You, me, everything… as though someone is rooting through my personal time stream.”

“But what on Earth for?!” said Mel, once again mirroring the audience’s reaction to basically everything that had happened thus far.

The Doctor stopped dead in his tracks, images of horribly stilted and unintentionally creepy children’s television from the early 90’s temporarily stunning him. He shook his head and stumbled forward.

“…Earth… yes…” he mumbled, leaning on a nearby fruit stall for support. As his head cleared he glanced up at the old woman running the stall, who was giving him the stink-eye.

“Madam…” he said, straightening up. “What year-”

He was cut off as a particularly tiny ten-year-old raced away from the fruit stand. Whilst most of it had cleared, the Doctor was still having trouble with his mind. He could barely make out the lyrics of the big band musical number the child was singing about keeping one jump ahead of the breadline.

“Oi, riffraff! Street rat!” the old woman shouted after him, turning to the other old woman beside her. “He’s just nicked an orange!”

Kathy Beale shrugged dispassionately. It had been roughly 40 years since she had stopped giving a shit about anything or anyone.

“Shouldn’t your Martin be looking after the stall?” she said to slyly change the subject.

Pauline sighed. “He’s never here when you want ‘im. I wish my Arthur was still alive…”

She glanced at Kathy, who was pointedly not listening and examining her nails.

“You know, Arthur!” Pauline said much louder, leaning in towards Kathy’s ear. “Arthur Beale! ‘im what died of a brain ‘aemorr‘age in episode one fousand two ‘undred n’ ninety two, first aired twenty first of May nineteen ninty si-”

With Kathy doing nothing but leaning away from her rant, Pauline finally noticed the tall bloke with the afro who was making a series of crucifix gestures at the box of pears.

“Oi, what do you think you’re doing?” she asked, waving her arms in his general direction. “Stop messing the goods about, d’you want to buy something or not?”

“PEARS!” he screamed.

Pauline sighed. Maybe Kathy was on to something with this ‘accept the randomness and futility of existence’ lark.

Meanwhile, Mel was idly examining a rack of trousers.

“I see flares are back in fashion!” she chirped at the sour-faced woman nearby.

“Yeah,” shrugged Kathy again. “Everything from the last century seems to be having a comeback. Boglins, vinyl, Tron, every single cartoon ever made, wealth inequality, flannel shirts, Target novels, the looming threat of nuclear war-”

She hadn’t gotten to the XFL or communism before she was cut off by the Doctor suddenly appearing behind Mel’s shoulder.

“Last century?” he asked.

“What year is this?” asked Mel. The Doctor had to suppress the urge not to insist that she hadn’t said it with enough panache.

“Oh, don’t you start,” said Pauline as she strolled over. “Enough oddballs around here as it is.” She shuddered as she remembered the terrible, terrible reign of Reginald the Comedy Public Masturbator, the one decision in EastEnders’ run both worse and shorter lived than the elevator muzak arrangement of the theme tune.

The Doctor’s time had come. He drew himself up to his full height and puffed out his chest.

“MADAM,” he bellowed. “WHAT YEAR ISTH THISSS?!”

Kathy and Pauline were not impressed by the fireworks display that was suddenly erupting behind the weirdo in the Liberace get-up, nor were they impressed by the sparklers spelling out the words “HE SAID THE LINE! EPIC LOL!” in three hundred foot letters across the sky.

"Two fousand and firrteen!" the pair chanted.

Almost lost amongst the fireworks was yet another terrible Photoshop white flare effect that swallowed the four of them up.

Chapter Text

In the exact same place 40 years earlier, Kathy and Pauline stood at the exact same stall. In a way, Kathy knew she was going to be stuck doing nothing but trading gossip with Pauline on this bloody street corner standing at this bloody stall listening to this bloody radio belting out generic production music imitations of rock music for the rest of her life. It was why she could physically feel her will to care about anything ebbing away as Pauline yammered on in her ear.

Maybe it was the sudden onset of ennui, but it seemed like Pauline had aged suddenly, like she was now twenty years older and wearing a terrible wig to unconvincingly make her look younger.

Thankfully, not caring was liberating.

“Yeah, I can remember exactly where I was when Kennedy was assassinated,” Pauline was saying in a completely naturalistic way that people in the real world talk to each other in. “But don’t tell Arthur, eh? Eh?”

 Kathy was unmoved by both Pauline’s awkward exposition and by the hard nudges Kathy was giving her ribcage.

“How long ago was that, then?” she said in a vain attempt to get Kathy to stop.

Incredibly, it worked. “Well,” Kathy said, the cogs in her head almost audibly whirring. “It’ll be about ten years!”

“No,” she said in the monotone reserved for people trying to sound enthused for someone else’s sake and failing.

“’ere,” said the little boy stood at Kathy’s hip. “’oo was killed while Pauline was off shagging?”

“Ian!” snapped Kathy at popular EastEnders character Ian Beale who was a boy because this was 1973. “Will you behave?!”

Ace, meanwhile, was feeling very strange. She’d already found herself in the body of a shrill redhead with awful tastes in legwear, and now she was looking through the eyes of a different stranger. She felt like a prisoner in her own body, watching someone else pilot her own warped form.

Said warped form was having her shoulder cradled by a scary man in a godawful outfit.

“Who are you?” demanded Susan.

The Sixth Doctor was not helping the bad impression he was giving when he leaned in close, one arm wrapped threateningly around her neck.

“Precisely,” he hissed. “I am the Doctor, whether you like it, or not!”

Though Ace was no longer in the form of Mel, in her Susan form she still retained the ability to mirror the response of the audience to what was just said.

“Pfft, no you’re not!” she scoffed. “You’re nothing like my grandfather.”

Just like every other time he felt hurt, ol’ Sixie resorted to exposition to both change the subject and mask the pain.

“I feel as though I’m being pulled backwards through time, and my companions are being drawn back with me,” he insisted.

Dissatisfied with his evasion and the poor explanation of why random companions were showing up, Susan futilely shouted into the middle distance.

“Ian! Barbara!” When neither of them magically appeared, she groaned and turned back to the creeper to ask for more exposition. “Where are the others?”

His arm already coiled around Susan’s shoulder, it was a cinch to outstretch one arm towards the rest of the street and shout “LONDON NINETEEN SIXTY FIVE” at the top of his lungs. It was less of a cinch to get Susan on board with the needless reference, as she simply stared at him with a mixture of fear, confusion, and contempt - much like someone trying to watch one of the Sixth Doctor’s TV stories.

“Don’t ask,” he answered more resolutely, which by complete coincidence was the exact same response the writers had whenever an actor or crewmember asked any question about the script. “Someone is trying to separate me from the TARDIS, and knows both my affinity for this planet and my hatred for joyless soap operas that conflate wallowing in misery with realism!”

Irritated and frustrated by the prose’s relentless mockery and uninspired fourth-wall chicanery, she wanted out of this scene, and fast. Looking around the street for literally anybody else who would be of more help than this Doctor and finding none, she was nearly in tears. Because, y’know, Susan.

“Where’s Grandfather?!” she said like a lost child. “MY Doctor? The original?!”

“The inrush of time zones is designed to seal us all together,” the Doctor said with the confidence of someone who has no idea what they’re talking about.

Much like the heads of the BBC, the Photoshop filter grew bored of his performance and decided to engulf everything again in the vain hope of an improvement.

***

It achieved more than it could have hoped for, in the form of the woman ambling along the street nattering with Sharon Watts. The costume she was in was just as bad if not worse than the one the Doctor was just in, but the Photoshop filter was just fine with that compromise.

“Well, my skin’s been great since I started using all-over sun block,” said Sharon, flicking her neck to wave the retro 80s bouffant she still stubbornly refused to change about. “I think it’s right it’s the law in 2013, the current year that we are in.”

“Law?!” exclaimed Sarah Jane Smith with a noticeably mocking tone. “Since when?”

She didn’t give Sharon a chance to get an answer, nor did she particularly want one as she noticed the trademark white hair and velvet smoking jacket wading through a crowd in the distance, and raced off to meet it as the trademark Albert Square monorail zoomed by.

It was an impressive feat that the UK’s rail service had replaced all of its locomotives with maglevs. More than a few cynics felt that spending untold millions of pounds on such a scheme achieved little more than ensuring the trains would be late slightly quicker. Stationmasters, meanwhile, resented the sudden loss of wheeled trains, as it meant having to come up with new excuses not to run trains now that “a leaf blew onto the track” was no longer viable.

Sarah Jane did not consider any of the massive socio-political upheaval that must have occurred to arrive at a point where a monorail was headed straight through Albert Square. She merely glanced up at the gleaming bullet train gliding past, considered it for a moment, and returned her gaze towards the tall man she was bounding up to.

“Hi,” she beamed as she closed the last of the distance between them. “I thought you'd be involved somewhere along the line.”

Instead of responding to one of the first instances of genuine charm in this whole sordid affair with some appropriate, affable banter, the Third Doctor simply launched into more dispiriting exposition.

“What we’re seeing here, Sarah,” he began, stiffly staring into the middle distance as he often did when delivering lifeless plot information, “is the work of a genius. An expert in time distortion. A time traveller maybe, and an ingenious operator. A temporal itinerant who possesses vast knowledge-”

“Well then,” Sarah interjected as she snatched the thesaurus out of the Doctor’s hands. “We must get back to the TARDIS!”

“The other side of the river, I think,” he shrugged, mildly frustrated by the interruption of rational common sense into his droning. “You know, we seem to be flitting around in some sort of 20 year time loop. 1973…”

“1993, 2013!” said Sarah in a futile attempt to hurry him up.

“Yeah, well, time distortion of this nature requires an exact localised focus,” said the Doctor, more than a little huffily.

“But why this street market in London?” asked Sarah Jane. Somewhere deep inside her head, Ace was screaming about being just another question dispenser. After a few moments, she relented, content to just watch and see how stupid this could get.

“This isn’t the focus, Sarah,” the Doctor said vaguely before they were overcome by another flash.

***

Back in her TARDIS, the Rani was fuming.

“Blundering fools!” she spat.

She tossed the copy of the script she was reading aside before returning to her scripted dialogue. “They’re getting too near the truth, release the specimens!”

As each member of her monstrous menagerie broke away from the interior structure of her TARDIS, each one formed a dark, indistinct shape as it flew past the TARDIS window towards its destination. The Rani stepped up to the window to watch and wave with gusto, before noticing a particularly large and irritating bluebottle buzzing past and up into the rafters of the control room.

“Fly, my pretty!” she shouted at Cyrian, jabbing a finger at the insect. “Fly, fly!”

Cyrian sulked as he went to get the fly swatter.

He still hadn’t found his bloody award.

Chapter Text

Ace felt that she should have been more appreciative of what she had when she had it. It was mind-bending enough to feel your own body morph into somebody else, then to be trapped in your own head as a powerless spectator looking out at the unfolding chaos through a stranger’s eyes.

It was something entirely more unpleasant to have that exact feeling, but doubled.

Her mind was screaming, stretched as it was across two bodies now. The visual information of two simultaneous pairs of eyes streaming into her mind at once was like motion sickness multiplied tenfold. It took all of her strength just to keep from succumbing to utter madness, letting the flood of conflicting information overwhelm and overload her like it was so thoroughly threatening to.

Instead, she retreated, shrinking into a corner of her own consciousness. She wasn’t quite letting the racing river sweep her away, but she did let go of her handholds to offer less resistance, metaphorically speaking. She couldn’t shut her eyes; she could do nothing to stop the mental barrage. She could only try to let it flow through and past her, leaving as little impact as possible.

It wasn’t much, but it did let her keep her sanity when doing so seemed impossible. She just had to bide her time, she thought. She held on to one pure, happy thought: The Endgame Plan. It would happen, she knew it. She just had to hang on long enough…

Anyway enough of this genuinely interesting and conceptually terrifying bullshit, there’s fanservice to be had! There was a Cyberman traipsing down Albert Square now, and its gun was going pew-pew-pew! And an Ogron! An Ogron was there! No complications, am I right?!

The Fifth Doctor had no reaction to the fact that his companion was not only transforming into people from his past, but had now split in two as well. You could say that was because he was concentrating on the two monstrous soldiers bearing down on them, or you could attribute that to Five being The Boring One. Which explanation you give more credence to largely boils down to whether you’re a glass-half-full or a glass-half-empty kind of person.

The two halves of Ace had split into Peri and Nyssa. The Nyssa half appeared to be somewhat badly affected by the mental strain and deterioration, as she was speaking entirely in awkward set-ups for clumsy ‘banter’.

“Feeding time at the zoo?” was the non-sequitur that tumbled out of her mouth.

“And the companions went in two by two,” said the Doctor, the single acknowledgement he would make of the quite hideous psychological trauma his friend was going through.

“This isn’t Noah’s Ark, Doctor!” Peri insisted. Deep within her brain, Ace became aware of the external stimuli she was doing her best to block out for a brief moment. Bloody hell, she thought as she remembered her Doctor’s Tysonitus attack earlier on, now I’m doing it.

It only lasted a split-second, as that was all she needed to be nearly overwhelmed by the experience once again. She resumed trying to block everything out, still not accomplishing anything but barely clinging to sanity.

“Well, maybe it is,” the Doctor said. Bloody hell, he thought as he ruminated on what he’d just said, if nothing else I jolly well hope that’s the worst comeback I make today.

“When I say ‘run’, ‘run’,” he said, dramatically pulling on his hat in an attempt to smooth over the botched one-liner. Peri and Nyssa didn’t even have the time to nod in acknowledgement before the Doctor screamed “RUN!” and pelted off, rendering the entire point of ramming in the wrong Doctor’s catchphrase rather pointless.

They raced through the streets, various monsters half-heartedly reaching out for them from their hiding places in various shadowed corners of the street.

“This way!” shouted the Doctor, motioning to what was visibly a dead end.

“No!” said Nyssa, like a shocked mother seeing her child holding a knife.

They finally broke out of the maze of sordid back-alleys back into the main street, where dozens of people were casually going about their business.

Peri, who had already taken the lead, rushed headlong into the throng, grabbing the first person she could get her hands on. Luckily she didn’t grab one of the many, many extras who were not paid to speak, but in fact grabbed Pat Butcher, the popular character from the hit BBC TV series EastEnders.

Her intent was simple enough, warn the random woman that the street was dangerous, and to get away. To that end, she said ‘Look, you’ve got to clear the streets, you’re in terrible danger’.

Unfortunately, due to being both a) frenzied and b) out of breath from rushing around, that was not exactly how it was verbalised.

“LOOK- fuhgehh,” she said. “YOUGOTTACLEARTHESTREETSYOUREINTERRIBLEDANGURRR!”

“What’s your game?!” asked an understandably confused Pat Butcher.

“LOOK- fuhgehh,” Nyssa began, continuing to repeat Peri’s ramble in another result of the psychological overload.

“’Ere,” said Pat, snatching her arm out of Nyssa’s wildly gesticulating hands. “If you start shoving me around, you’ll know about it!”

“It’s no good, they’re in different time zones,” the Doctor guessed. “To them, we’re the strangers!”

The Doctor’s guess was not entirely accurate. Just a few streets over from Albert Square was a decently-sized convention centre, and thus nobody was batting an eye at the completely pedestrian sight of a couple of enthusiastic but clumsy nerds awkwardly waddling through the street in not particularly convincing costumes, as the Ogron and the Cyberman were doing.

Less usual was the sight of several alien creatures, namely a Tractator, a Foamasi, a Vervoid, and the biomechanical Dragon of Svartos, leaning menacingly out of the Queen Vic’s first floor windows.

Peggy Mitchell, the only proprietor of the Vic who was present at the time, was more than happy to let the creatures go upstairs to get some fresh air out of the windows. Why, the bloke in the brightly coloured vagina costume was positively gentlemanly, apologising profusely for his friends’ behaviour and buying several rounds of drinks to make up for the scrapes and scratches the other creatures left behind as they plodded up the stairs earlier. The ones upstairs, they were alright.

It was the one that was downstairs that was a problem. The green woman seemed to have some kind of horrible skin condition, but Peggy didn’t really have a chance to ask about it. The fact that the green woman was suplexing Peggy’s head directly through a table was a more pressing matter.

As the woman screamed “WHERE’S MY WIFE” and repeatedly slammed Peggy’s head into the floor, Peggy wasn’t worried. She was rapidly getting a concussion, but she wasn’t worried. She knew that at any moment, someone would see the bizarre display going on in her upper floor windows and come to her rescue when they rushed in to find out what the bloody hell was going on.

However, out of the few people walking around outside whom actually looked up to notice this thoroughly mind-bending sight, every single one of them decided to take the Kathy Beale approach.

“Have you any idea where we’re going?” asked Peri, who was getting very sick of playing into the stereotype that old Doctor Who consisted of nothing but running up and down a tiny corridor. The fact that said corridor happened to be Albert Square did nothing to change how very tedious this was getting.

“Where’s the TARDIS?” shouted Nyssa, starting to break out of the mental chaos to become kind of a distinct character from Peri, even if it was the baby step of requesting a slightly different piece of exposition from the Doctor.

“Twenty years back and 3 miles away,” he explained. “Come ON!” He snapped the last two words in an overly aggressive manner completely unlike how Five ever acted, outside of the blessedly few times he was written by Steven Moffat.

As he hurried Nyssa along into a nearby fenced garden, surrounded by a slowly encroaching crowd of very shabby-looking monsters and aliens, he rushed up to Peri, who had her back to him but was clearly in the process of throwing open the far door in the garden fence.

He continued rushing, expecting her to throw open the gate any second now. Any second.

He was still expecting it to happen as he rather uncomfortably ran into her.

The door was locked.

The Doctor reached inside his jacket pocket, his face frozen with horror as he felt nothing inside. He remembered now, the form he was in was one of the ones who thought having a magic wand on hand to fix anything that doesn’t have the safe-word ‘deadlock’ attached to it undermined the drama somewhat.

Bugger. A who’s who of his greatest enemies- well, most of the best en- well, the ragtag grab-bag of whoever could be bothered to show up was closing in, and here he was, being defeated by a poxy padlock.

“You can’t escape, Doctor!” shouted an all-too-familiar voice.

The Rani was now posing in front of the Queen Vic’s bright red doorway. The Doctor gulped as he noticed what she was holding in her hands and waving about in his general direction. He really, really, seriously hoped that that was a gun, and not, as he feared, a sex toy designed for only the most adventurous.

“Say goodbye, Doctors! You’re all going on a long journey… a very long journey!”

The Doctor stared intensely. As this was the Fifth Doctor, an ‘intense’ stare ended up as a ‘blank’ stare. There was a few seconds’ pause, and everyone just sort of stood still. The only sound was the breeze gently ruffling the Sea Devil’s net dress.

Under-Cardinal Andeech was visibly uncomfortable standing at the forefront of the motley group, a staser held daintily in one hand in the way people do when they’ve only ever vaguely heard of guns. In a failed attempt to make the pause less awkward, he coughed.

Everyone, but especially Andeech, all jumped when the silence was suddenly and loudly broken again.

“You can’t escape, Doctor!” repeated the Rani out loud. “Say goodbye, Doctors! You’re all going on a long journey… a very long journey!”

Notthemasternotthemasternotthemaster, repeated the Rani in her head.

Chapter Text

“The Rani,” the Doctor said derisively. An underwhelming villain to lead the underwhelming batch of monsters if ever there- “I take back what I said about an ingenious operator being behind these time jumps!”

The writer of this novel blinked, completely lost for what to do when the actual, scripted dialogue was doing the work of mocking and belittling the sneering caricature that had once been a somewhat interesting villain for her.

“Who else could master-” the Rani said before she realised how she was phrasing it and reconsidered. “Who else could direct such a difficult operation?”

She turned back to admire the dozen or so creatures waiting around for something to do. She waved an arm towards the Vic.

“Back to my TARDIS!” she ordered, having accomplished her master plan of just sort of standing there for a minute or two.

Both halves of Ace, still somewhat synchronous but breaking apart more and more, once again both asked for exposition in slightly different ways.

“What's going on, Doctor?” asked Peri.

“What are you doing?” asked Nyssa.

The spectacle, or lack thereof, of several sad-looking creatures ambling away and into the pub was so utterly inadequate that it was giving him a migraine. As such, he pressed his hands to his forehead and violently rubbed it.

“Why bother trying to summon up you remaining selves?” asked the Rani over one shoulder as she strode towards the pub like the pavement was a catwalk. “I've weakened you!”

The migraine vanished as the Photoshop filter, having had its tea break, returned with gusto and swept the three figures up in its pixelated embrace.

Once it was finished, it had left the Doctor in his third incarnation once again, and had turned one half of Ace into Liz Shaw. The other half seemingly vanished. The Doctor did notice a small black shape zoom out of view, but he didn’t have time to consider what it might have been.

The Rani was just about to climb the step into the Vic when she heard the distinctive noise of the filter. She whirled around, aiming her overdesigned weapon back at the Doctor again.

“I’ve got a few more tricks up my sleeve yet, madam,” the Doctor said, puffing out his chest ready for one of his trademark bon mots. “It’s time for you to start losing!”

After groaning and visibly deflating, he consoled himself with the fact that at least that would definitely be the worst comeback he’d make today.

The Rani pointed a finger at Liz, and shouted “You! Earth female! Come here!” like a member of an incel sub-reddit.

Appropriately, much like the kind of woman who only exists in the minds of incels, Liz Shaw blithely did as she was told even though it went against all of her best interests to do so.

“No Liz, you mustn’t!” insisted the Doctor.

“Leave this to me. I’ll take my chances,” said Liz in an odd monotone that was bizarrely similar to that of an actor who isn’t very invested in their paltry material.

Liz ran towards the Rani, the Rani steeling herself for a fight. She was somewhat taken off guard, then, when Liz decided the best option was to just awkwardly stand next to the Rani, and expect her not to shoot.

By luck, the Rani was confused enough that she didn’t shoot. By the time her sense had returned, it was too late. A horrific, shambling monstrosity was bearing down on her from beyond Liz and her glassy-eyed stare.

It truly was a hideous apparition. Its flesh appeared to be fluid, constantly shifting, and frequently forming multiple mouths with which it screamed across the entire distorted length of its body. The only part of this seemingly mindless, demented beast that kept stationary was the face.

The horrible, horrible face.

A twisted mockery of the human head, it appeared like the face of a teenaged girl and a grizzled man rapidly approaching old age had been twisted and blended into one. Both of the mouths located on its face, each one distended beyond all reason, flapped uselessly and completely out of sync with the guttural noises it was making as it approached.

“WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING,” rumbled Big Mandy. “LEAVE HER ALONE.”

The grotesque swept Liz away from the Rani with a careful swipe of a forelimb. Liz, now completely without a plan now that standing next to the Rani hadn’t borne fruit, ran away down the street.

The Rani, so utterly repelled and petrified of the broiling, screaming mountain of flesh stood before her, simply held up her hands in surrender as the creature shambled away. It kept several of its eyes trained on her until it was a safe distance away.

Both Liz’s confusing attempt at stalling and the appearance of the creature had unwittingly bought just enough time. No sooner had the beast vanished around a corner, the Rani turning her attention back to the Doctor, did a small vehicle race around another corner and come to a quick stop nearby.

The Doctor, who had been hiding behind an ironwork fence in the hope that the parody of flesh wouldn’t notice him, suddenly stood up in surprise. He didn’t know how the Whomobile had managed to break through the inrush of time zones and arrive in front of him. Rather, he didn’t know until the hood popped open, then it made complete sense. While the monster had been interfering with the Rani, he had been wondering what that dark shape was and where the other half of Ace’s physical being had gone. He now knew the answer to both of those questions as well.

His ecstatic grin was immediately wiped from his face as he noticed the Rani heaving her unwieldy gun up to aim at the driver. The Doctor urgently pointed to her.

“Frobisher! Look out!” he called.

He hadn’t even finished getting the words out before he saw that the warning wasn’t needed. Frobisher was well aware, and prepared.

In what was without a doubt the most beautiful and wondrous sight ever beheld by mortal eyes, the emperor penguin leapt onto the bonnet of the Whomobile, trained the customised handgun it held in one flipper on that woman from the later, lesser seasons of Dynasty, and shot the gaudy rectal dilator out of her hands, sending it skimming across the pavement in front of the Queen Vic from EastEnders.

The Rani, already shaken from the screaming hulk a moment ago, was now completely overwhelmed and decided to just cut her losses. She rushed back into the pub, and leapt back into her TARDIS.

She was so determined to get away from the madness that she had spawned that she barely even reacted to the Silurian punching her in the face and yelling something about the Victorians. The Rani had no time nor inclination to pay attention.

Outside, Frobisher had jumped back into the driver’s seat while the Doctor slid over the doorway and pulled the Whomobile’s canopy closed.

“Frobisher, I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you,” said the Doctor as he clipped the canopy closed and the engines began to rev up. “I need to get to the TARDIS, quick as possible!”

Frobisher snapped a flipper to his head in a smart salute. “Roger that, Doctor!” he said as the Whomobile roared off, needing to race down a considerable stretch of Albert Square before it could reach sufficient take-off velocity.

The Doctor was initially worried that the Whomobile speeding down the street was going to alarm the local populace, possibly even cause a major panic.

Fortunately, the sight of a particularly determined-looking penguin driving Worzel Gummidge in an oversized vacuum cleaner attachment with one flipper whilst brandishing a pistol in the other was only slightly less ludicrous than the average soap opera plotline, so the only reaction it garnered was the odd extra diving out of its path as it raced off.

***

The Whomobile zoomed across the sky, gently banking through the London skyline. The Doctor scanned the horizon below him for a worrying few minutes before spotting what he was looking for.

“There,” he said. “Down there!”

It was only as the Whomobile was coming in to land that they came back into range of the Photoshop filter. It dashed up to meet them, Frobisher managing to pilot the craft out of the filter’s jaws several times. It bought him enough time to bring the Whomobile almost to the ground when the filter finally swallowed the craft.

The Sixth Doctor grasped Bessie’s dashboard as the car landed with a heavy bump on the freshly mown lawn. It careened wildly, but nevertheless came to a stop without throwing him from the car, thanks to the steady hands on the wheel. The Doctor looked up with an expectant smirk, which faded as his eyes met the face of the driver.

“Something the matter, Doctor?” asked Sergeant Benton.

“Not really,” said the Doctor.

“You don’t sound very certain,” said Benton, accompanied by a smirk of his own.

“Well,” said the Doctor, rubbing the back of his neck and coughing softly. “It’s nothing wrong, per se. It was just that I was expecting the Brigadier.”

“Oh, and why would that be?” asked Benton playfully as he slapped Bessie’s driving wheel. “Don’t tell him I said it, but I don’t reckon he could have wrestled this machine under control!”

The Doctor made an extended series of non-committal grunts and whines. “I don’t mean that, I mean that I’ve never met the Brigadier in this form, if you follow my meaning.”

“I’m afraid I don’t, Doctor,” said Benton.

“Well, you know, it would be a nice little thing, to plug that gap and all,” the Doctor said as diplomatically as his sixth self had ever been. “Square that little niggle away, as it were.”

Benton shook his head. “Sounds an awful lot like that’d be shoehorned-in fanwank to me, Doctor.”

The Doctor sighed. “Yes, yes I suppose it would have been.”

With a spry jump he was out of Bessie and ready to head off.

“Alas, we don’t have time for pleasantries. I must find my young friend,” said the Doctor. He then stopped himself, reconsidered, and then motioned to Benton. “Well, the other half of you, and whatnot. I would ask you to send the Brigadier my regards, but, well…” He motioned to Benton again.

“No worries sir,” snickered Benton. “Should I have told him that your dress sense hasn’t improved as well?”

“I shall have you know,” said the Doctor as he narrowed his eyes at Benton. “This is impeccable fashion.”

Benton laughed with a heartiness that only the Welsh can achieve. “If that’s impeccable fashion, then I’m heterose-”

The rest of his retort was lost. The filter had been stayed by the lack of phrases like ‘the companions went in two by two’ and ‘it’s time for you to start losing’ in the dialogue, but there was only so much non-Big Finish Sixth Doctor it could take in one sitting. With a flash that was slightly more reluctant than the others, it swapped Doctor and companion once more.

***

Meanwhile, the Rani’s TARDIS was back at the opening of the wormhole vortex again. As the Rani prowled around the central console, Cyrian was giving his report.

“…and for that reason, the only place in all of time and space we can pick up an Earthling for our purposes is the centre of the Earth time meridian, Greenwich,” he finished. 

“I now have everything I want apart from one Earthling. My menagerie is almost complete,” the Rani said. “Prepare to rematerialise at the centre of the Earth time meridian, Greenwich!”

He was about to point out that he had said the first part in those exact words just after they had captured the Time Lord and the Cyberman, and he had already set the TARDIS on course for Greenwich. He realised it wasn’t worth it, and didn’t do anything but stare glumly at the controls.

“Do as I say!” instructed the Rani.

Rolling his eyes, he adjusted the speed setting on the windscreen wipers and pressed all sorts of buttons to look like he was actually doing something.

In response, the Rani flung her arms up and let loose a loud, long, megalomaniacal laugh. Cyrian kept searching for sufficiently menial controls to push and pull and flip and twist, only partially paying attention to dodging the lightning bolts striking the ground around the Rani.

Chapter Text

“I thought you said you’d locked it?” asked Phil Mitchell.

“I did!” retorted Grant, letting Phil take the lead as he hung back at the door. As he stood guard, he peered into the gloom of the lockup. Whoever unlocked the door could still be in here, so he spoke loudly and clearly to the seemingly unoccupied darkness. “Someone must have broken in,” he said, making the first word sound as accusatory and threatening as possible.

There was no response, no sound, nothing moved. Phil was looking behind and under a nearby desk, Grant searching the room only by glancing around, to keep the entrance blocked in case someone tried to bolt.

His eyes were adjusting to the unlit garage when they fell upon a head of golden blonde hair, almost but not quite hidden behind the little red roadster parked right in front of him.

Grant snapped his fingers, and once Phil had glanced up at him from looking behind some crates, he pointed.

Phil carefully but quickly made his way back, saw what Grant had seen, and the both of them knew that they didn’t need to keep up the subterfuge any longer.

“What’s goin’ on ‘ere?” Grant was more bemused than aggressive.

Phil, less so. “Oi, you! Woss your game?”

Thoroughly rumbled, she stood up and began approaching the Mitchells. She grunted a little too loudly for her liking as she stood. Gallifreyan bureaucracy doesn’t exactly lead to the same physical fitness that running around the cosmos with a renegade and a robot dog does, she thought with a bitter twinge.

“I was looking for the Doctor,” the second Romana said. “If it’s really any of your business.”

While not exactly thrilled to find someone had broken into their lockup, Grant was somewhat relieved. It wasn’t some villain with a grudge or some kid looking for something mobile and reasonably expensive to half-inch, just some confused old bird. She clearly wasn’t here to steal anything, she was wearing a cowl but he would have been able to tell if she was hiding anything under it. Nevertheless, she could go be doddery somewhere else on someone else’s time.

He kept his gaze squarely on her, the same unblinking gaze of a cat coiling its body ready for the pounce. “Well you won’t find him here. He lives at number one Albert Square, over there. I suggest you leave.” Once again, he loaded the last sentence with as much threat as he could, this time accompanying it with a roll of the shoulders and by drawing himself up to full height.

Romana didn’t flinch under his steeled glowering; she barely took notice of his posturing at all.

“Have you seen the Doctor?” she asked.

Phil shot a confused glance at Grant. “Yeah, Doctor Legg is the only doctor round here, love.”

“...doctor who?” asked Romana, leaving before they even had a chance to respond, making the question a bit pointless. Grant and Phil paused for applause at this most hilarious of metatextual jokes.

Having experienced, for the one and only time, the wonder of a scene in which characters from EastEnders and Doctor Who interact in a way that is both engaging and feels true to their respective series, we must now return to the sad cavalcade of lameness and playing into the worst stereotypes of what people think 20^th Century Who was like.

As such, Madame President Romanadvoratrelundar of the Time Lords of Gallifrey was captured by the Master’s somehow even more camp gender-swapped doppelganger by idly walked past the Queen Vic, being lightly grabbed by the wrist, and gently pulled in.

The one witness to this shambolic event: Frank Butcher. The roar of TARDIS engines did not astound or even interest him, as he turned away to speak to no-one in the opposite direction.

 “Well, I’ve seen them thrown out of the Vic,” he said, bug-eyed mugging like he was playing a walk-on part in the hit 90’s movie Ernest Gets Locked Away in a Dreary Backwater of London’s East End. “But, ah… never dragged in!”

***

Several miles away, the Doctor was admiring the mast of the Cutty Sark.

“Quite remarkable,” he said, the closest thing this incarnation had to a catchphrase. “I suppose the most pressing issue would be how I came to be among my more, shall we say, canonical peers, but I cannot avoid admiring fine craftsmanship when I see it, hmm?”

“WHO WAS THAT TERRIBLE WOMAN?!?!” shrieked Victoria at ear-splitting volume.

He lowered his pince-nez glasses. Alas, it would seem he would not be having quite the same calibre of stimulating intellectual banter he would have had with Susan. A terrible shame.

He took in a deep breath, and continued on to the steps down the far side of the Sark, where TARDIS should hopefully be waiting for him.

“Dear, dear, dear,” he muttered darkly to himself. “I should be studying samples and charting time and space, not bounding around like some Megaluthian slimeskimmer.”

Deep within the recesses of Victoria’s perpetually panicked mind, an increasingly fragmented and weakening Ace picked up on a new species she’d never heard of before. It gave her something to cling to, to concentrate on as some meagre distraction from the piercing whirl of sensory input that continued to engulf her. One half of her body had been sedated into unconsciousness, so it was more bearable than before, but the stretching of her mental being across two physical beings was still there, still seemingly moments away from rending her apart.

Nevertheless, it bolstered her to return to thoughts of The Endgame Plan, to add one new step to the end:

• Return to the Prydonian Academy once this short vacation with the Professor was over
• Pass the exams to become a full-fledged Time Lord with TARDIS privileges
• Get whatever the Time Lords’ equivalent to a driving license was
• Write a letter explaining what was going to happen, and what Karra needed to do to avoid it
• Travel back in time to make sure the letter reaches a pre-transformation Karra
• Hijack a Justice Department Vehicle
• Disguise it as Karra and send it to 1989 Perivale to ‘die’
• With the real Karra in tow, head out into the wild, untamed yonder of the cosmos
• Form a two-woman punk band with her new catgirl girlfriend
• Name said band Megaluthian Slimeskimmer

It would all come to pass, she promised herself. Just hold on, all she had to do was just hold on…

“It’s the Rani,” the Cushing Doctor was patiently explaining to Victoria. “She was the one who masterminded all this disorder in the space-time continuum. Now, her control is beginning to break down, and I fear we have little time to act before she regains that control.”

Having finished his wary descent of the worryingly rickety gangplank down to ground level, he was able to glance up and around for the first time. A pleasingly reassuring sight met him: it was stood exactly where he left it.

“Ah, good, TARDIS is still here,” he announced, calling back up to the woman still gingerly stepping down the gangplank. “Come along, Victoria!”

He threw open the doors, and set to work at the controls. It took a little longer than it should have, as he was still acclimating to the unfamiliar layout of this version of TARDIS.

Victoria, meanwhile, was eyeing the door leading further into the TARDIS. Maybe it was some latent influence from Ace, maybe it was being a little sick of writers treating her like a screaming doormat, maybe it was something else entirely, perhaps even a combination of the above. For whatever reason, after glancing quickly back to check that the Doctor was thoroughly engrossed in the controls, she slipped away.

Something was niggling at her. Some repressed memory, an ancestral memory almost. It had to be a result of all these minds being forced into one form, one of them had to know something that was sticking out. A shred of information that had caught on the splintered shards of her mind, and was now tantalisingly whipping about in the wind, as it were.

Then it hit. She knew what had drawn her in. She rushed down the labyrinthine corridors, hoping against hope that he hadn’t been moved. He’d been mothballed in a room near the primary control room. This was good, as it meant Victoria didn’t have far to run. On the other, it was still a considerably long run, as it was only relatively close to the primary control room, in comparison to the unimaginable size of the TARDIS’ interior. It also meant that there was considerably more risk of the room having been damaged or otherwise interfered with during some previous adventure than it would have if it had been in some forgotten corner on the far side of the TARDIS that hadn’t been disturbed in centuries.

She couldn’t consider that possibility, he had to be there. If nothing else today, let this be the one bit of luck she got.

Panting deep gulps of air as she finally reached the room she was looking for, she threw open the door. Her eyes lit up as they found the box with MARK IV written in large bold font across one side.

It was the last thing she saw before she was blinded once again by the engulfing light of the Photoshop effect.

Chapter Text

“The Rani’s TARDIS,” intoned an ethereal, disembodied voice. The Seventh Doctor glanced up and around, confused by both the unknown voice that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, and by the insistent shushing noise that followed it.

One problem at a time, he thought.

He had landed the TARDIS near the Greenwich Observatory, and there indeed was the Rani’s TARDIS. It was now disguised as a nondescript stone pyramid atop a large plinth, and had landed mere moments after the Doctor had stepped out of his TARDIS.

“Doctor!” A middle-aged woman in a particularly galling Pocahontas get-up was running out from behind the Rani’s TARDIS and towards him. It took him a second to realise that was supposed to be Leela. Always a new depth to sink to, apparently.

“I see she let you go,” he said.

For no discernible reason, he didn’t say as he wasn’t going to tempt fate by saying that out loud.

“Not before she cloned me though, she’s got a menagerie of clones in there!” said Leela, the first time in history those specific words from the English language had been arranged in that order.

“She's attempting to transfer a massive time tunnel…” the Doctor paused, his brain trying and failing to come up with technobabble that could sufficiently and succinctly wrap this mess up and give us all sweet, merciful release at last. Finding none, he just went with “through the Greenwich Meridian.”

“She has a computer in there with genetic codes and brain prints of every living creature in the entire cosmos,” insisted Leela. Presumably she meant ‘every species of creature’ not literally every individual creature, but the Doctor got what she meant anyway and it really didn’t matter in the grand scheme of everything wrong with what was going on.

“With it, evolution is hers to control!” the Doctor said. For some reason, the Doctor mentally added. It was not the first time he had thought that today.

Leela politely nodded and said “yes,” even though she had no clue how that was supposed to work either.

Suddenly, the Doctor’s eyes lit up. The right bit of plot contrivance to end this charade had finally come to mind. It was a long shot, but in his many centuries of adventures, when was the plan to save the day ever not a long shot?

“Except…” he began, a finger pressed to his lip as his mind raced. “…what form were you in when she cloned you? Now think, it’s very important.”

“Romana,” said Leela.

“A Time Lady!” he exclaimed. “That means there are two time brains in the Rani’s computer!”

Ace couldn’t hold on much longer. She could feel herself breaking apart like a melting iceberg swept up in a hurricane. She just had to keep together a little bit longer, she told herself.

We’ll call the first album Two Time Brains In Her Computer. We’ll call the first album Two Time Brains In Her Computer. We’ll call the first album Two Time Brains In Her Computer…

***

An indescribable amount of distance away, the events were playing out for the amusement of two men. In the centre of a misty black orb, the Doctor’s voice was slightly warped by the Palantír.

“That means there are two time brains in the Rani’s computer!” came the voice, flooding the room whilst also being barely louder than a whisper.

Radagast the Brown nudged his compatriot’s shoulder violently enough to almost send the weed flying from Gandalf’s pipe.

“It’ll overload,” said Radagast. Had he lived in another time, another world, he would have been the type of person who sits in a movie theatre loudly explaining what’s going on throughout an entire movie.

“Fool of a Maia!” Gandalf snapped, angrily elbowing him back. “They’ll have heard that!”

***

The Doctor was distracted by the voices again, and in the brief moment when he turned away from the TARDIS doors, they opened.

Someone cleared their throat. The Doctor and Leela turned to face the stranger standing in the TARDIS doorway. She was dressed in the kind of outfit that was at once completely period-specific and also completely non-descript, in that way only early 2000s fashion could be. She was also visibly uncomfortable and out of place; she kicked at the asphalt with one of her bright white sneakers that were almost engulfed by her baggy jeans.

“Look, I’m not entirely sure about all this outer space stuff,” Alison Cheney began. “But I think I’m supposed to bring you this dog? Not sure why, but he seemed very keen about that.”

“Ah-ha!” exclaimed the Doctor at the second new arrival trundling out of the TARDIS. “I knew I could rely on you! What a good boy!”

“Affirmative, master!” replied K9 Mark IV, with a proud tilt of the head and a happy whirring of ears.

***

Having set off the blurry white filtered mess one last time, the Rani’s TARDIS was back in the form of a red space station floating above the vortex again. No, it was still in the form of a stone sculpture at the Greenwich Observatory, wasn’t it? Or were the space station and the Rani’s TARDIS different craft? All the scenes taking place aboard the space station were in the same set as the regular TARDIS, so were the station and the sculpture two different TARDISes? Or was the space station just a space station and the Rani was controlling it remotely from her TARDIS? In which case, how come the Cyberman and Andeech were aboard the TARDIS instead of on board the space station where they should be if that’s where the menagerie was located? Or, was the menagerie stored in her TARDIS, and the space station was just a conduit to do with generating the vortex? It would seem like there wasn’t a space station and the two forms seen were just the chameleon circuit at work, in which case how were Cyrian and the Rani monitoring the vortex at this moment?

Wait, hang on, it just occurred to me that I don’t give a shit.

Cyrian said some bullshit about there being thirty seconds left until a thing happened, the Rani said “excellent” like the fourth-rate Mr Burns she had devolved into, whatever, moving on.

***

Ace couldn’t believe it. It was almost more overwhelming than being overwhelmed by sensory overload, in a way. With a snap, it was just… gone. No more hearing with two sets of ears. No more seeing through two sets of eyes. No more wracking nausea from getting two conflicting senses of inner ear balance.

Not even the horrendous feeling of lacking any control of her body remained.

It was gone. All of it. In an instant.

She was back in her own body, and she was in full command of all her faculties.

Unimaginably relieved, she turned to the Doctor, tears welling in her eyes.

“Profe-” was all she managed before a cheap prop was shoved in her face.

“Hold this,” said a completely disinterested Doctor.

“Twenty-five seconds, master,” said K9, his eye probe deep in the recesses of a meaningless pile of assorted electronics.

“I’m trying to overload the Rani’s computer,” the Doctor explained to a displeasingly distracted Ace, who seemed to be concerned mostly with staring at her own flexing hands and weeping. “Enhance the power of the time tunnel to pull her TARDIS in and not me!”

The Doctor knew full well that having more than one Gallifreyan Time Lord copied into the computer was more than sufficient to overload it, but he had laid out several piles of scientific-looking equipment all over the Observatory’s lawn anyway. Dragged out the machine that went ‘ping’ and everything.

After all, he was totally taking an active role in stopping the Rani’s plan, not just letting it unravel itself due to her own mistake. Just like how he was making this grand performance in what was totally China in November.

“I assume it’s not as easy as it sounds,” said Ace, her voice shaking as she felt the light breeze blow across her face. Not someone else’s face, not two faces at once, just hers.

“Of course not!” said the Doctor. “I must try and free my other incarnations…”

“Twenty seconds!” said K9, as the Doctor pressed his fingers to his forehead.

“Join me,” he said, almost drowned out by the obnoxious ringing sound that marked the opening of communication between a Time Lord’s various selves.

“We must pull free,” said Three, in pleasing harmony.

“We must succeed,” said Five, because he really liked that one episode of Freakazoid, I guess.

“Precisely,” grunted Six, annoyed that he hadn’t gotten a proper line.

“Say what now?” asked some stock footage of a confused old Fourth Doctor cosplayer.

“You’re making me giddy!” shouted Two as his disembodied head spun wildly.

“Piss slop buggering me!” slurred One.

“UKTV people: this is who we are,” said Eight, reading the wrong script.

“The bloody movie one got a look in but I didn’t? No, not the bloke from Hornblower! The one from all those horror movies,” indignantly insisted the War Doctor.

“The paper’s slightly psychic,” said a very low quality mp3 file of Nine’s voice.

“I don’t wanna record a line,” whined Ten.

After a long pause, Eleven said “…fuck, I’ve run out of hats my catchphrase doesn’t work anymore Nick I-” before being cut off.

“See, it’s funny because I used to play Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It, and that’s a humorous juxtaposition to the Doctor,” said Twelve.

“All thirteen!” whooped Thirteen with a Sandra Bullock-esque snort-laugh. “Or, wait, no, is it fourteen? It’d be fifteen if we include th-”

***

The Rani’s TARDIS, as sick of this shit as the audience was, decided to take matters into its own hands, and exploded.

“No!” shouted the Rani.

“Yes!” shouted Cyrian, who had just liberated a thankfully undamaged award from the mouth of the Stigorax that had just bounded into the control room.

As the Rani’s TARDIS sunk uncontrollably into the vortex, two bright pink lights shot out of the receding vessel like corks out of a violently shaken bottle of champagne.

Chapter Text

It was over with a flash, and suddenly his legs popped back into existence. They were unprepared to take his weight as suddenly as they were expected to. The First Doctor stumbled, grasping at the hat stand to keep himself upright. He rubbed the crown of his head, trying to stem the painful throbbing. He glanced around, the TARDIS control room veering in and out of focus.

“My dear, you seem quite unwell, hm? I would offer you some tea, but ah, as you’re currently indisposed, well, you know,” came a voice.

“What?” said the Doctor, craning his head around to try and find the voice’s source. “Which said that? Speak out!”

A figure came out of the blurry light in front of him. As his vision adjusted, the Doctor’s face turned from irritated confusion to horrified alarm.

“You!” said the Doctor. “No, it cannot be! Get away from me, do you hear?!”

The man grasped his lapels, affixing the Doctor with a patronising side-eyed glance.

“My dear Dodo, you seem even more befuddled and emotionally overwrought than women usually are! Which is quite something, considering the low standards of you inferior, stupid creatures!” said The First Doctor As Imagined By Steven Moffat.

The Real First Doctor grasped his chest and took a step back from the hideous impostor, but it did little to quell the sickening nausea that gripped his stomach.

He turned away to look at literally anything else, hoping that the next thing he would see would be the thing to help him get a foothold on the situation. It was a tactic he had learned many years ago: when all is going to hell around you and you feel yourself totally overwhelmed, find one thing to concentrate on, clear your mind of all else, and then when your head is a little clearer, you can think your way out of whatever mess you’re in.

Unfortunately, what he ended up looking at was a mirror. He did not see his own reflection staring back at him, but instead saw a young, dark-haired girl dressed like a chimney sweep character in a surrealist 60’s head-trip movie.

“…oh dear,” he said.

On any other day, he would have been more startled by the sudden appearance of the words ‘Executive Producer DONALD P. BELLISARIO’ floating in the air in front of him, but on this day it was distinctly low on the list of things that should worry him at that moment.

***

With another flash, the Second Doctor stirred beneath the heavy bedding. As if waking from a long sleep, he let out a low moan of discomfort.

The silhouette sat beside the bed rested a reassuring hand on the Doctor’s shoulder.

“You just relax, now,” it said. “You’ve been trapped in there for what feels like eight hours.”

“I had this… horrible nightmare…” the Doctor mumbled, his voice still low and hoarse. “I dreamed I was… a mannequin’s head… and I just kept floating around and around… in some… awful 3D gimmick that didn’t quite work…”

“Well, you’re safe now,” said the silhouette. “Back in good old Season 6B.”

The Doctor’s eyes snapped open. “Season 6B?!” The lights clicked on, and the Doctor bolted upright.

“Of course!” said Perry Conway, moving over to the far side of the room to draw the curtains closed. With a practiced flourish, he swept a pair of sunglasses out of his pocket and onto his face one-handed. “Where else would you be? Now get your skates on Doc, you’re on in five!”

***

Meanwhile, in the original story that was merely failing to provide weak anniversary fanservice instead of the novelisation that simply inserted overly referential asides and namedropped fanwank for the sake of easy brownie points with the audience, the Doctor was piling up electronics in Ace’s hands.

“K9, I very specifically asked you to let me know when the explosion was imminent!” he pouted, balancing the heating element from an old kettle, a slightly melted Jamma arcade board for Double Dragon, and an Amiga 1200 atop the pile of junk Ace was trying to keep steady as she followed behind him. “I was going to tell you to activate the converter just before it happened!”

“Master,” K9 patiently began to explain. “I did not see the relevance in carrying out that order. There was and is no converter to activate. That is, unless you were referring to the step-down voltage converter, in which case, I could not have activated it as requested, as it is not connected to anything.”

The Doctor was beginning to recall why he had stopped bothering with K9s many years prior. Ah well, he'd soon be mothballed again until one of his companions needed a replacement for theirs, at least. Thwarted by K9’s lack of flair when it comes to pointless displays of significance to the plot, he simply turned back to the pile of junk that was now hiding Ace’s head.

“Yes, perhaps the theatrics were a tad unnecessary. It was all the Rani’s doing in the end. Hoisted by her own peTARDIS, you might say!”

A boo came loud and clear from the sky, as did an egg that splattered as it hit the Doctor’s shoulder.

“How did you even get- oh never mind, I’m too high to bother…” said a voice that sounded eerily like Ian McKellen’s for some reason.

“Anyway,” the Doctor continued, mopping the egg off with his handkerchief. “There were two time brains in her computer, and I used it to propel her into the trap set for me. Even though I said that the computer overloading was the problem earlier. Don’t think about that, it was all my doing.”

Ace wasn’t even listening, she was barely even aware of the massive great pile of electric tat that weighed down her hands. She’d need at least a few hours to recover from her harrowing experience, a few days even.

Luckily, when time travel’s involved, there was never any rush. Her summer vacation could end whenever she felt like returning to the Academy, and while she was going to take her sweet time to go back, she was already feeling antsy to get back to work. The Plan could wait, sure, but she couldn’t.

The Doctor, unfazed by Ace’s contemplative silence, continued yammering anyway.

“So, now all my other selves are free,” he said. “Certainly I- I mean we, are difficult to get rid of!”

For the first time, Ace was listening, and she was smiling. ‘We Are Difficult To Get Rid Of’.

Great name for a lead-off single.