Disclaimer - I don't own Doctor Who.

Please leave feedback, as I am trying to do something different even if this story is similar in some respects to the other Doctor Who Unbound story I've got featuring a version of the Doctor who meddles in history. In this version, the Doctor as a child found something that said the Time Lords altered history and it shaped his mindset towards time meddling.

In this story, the third Doctor is played by the lovely Katie McGrath since I felt a female Doctor was a good idea, and also because she was able to portray an effortlessly elegant character in Merlin and Dracula. I loved Jon Pertwee's Doctor, but I felt because his incarnation was forced on him by the Time Lords, if he hadn't been caught by his people then there would be someone different.

The Time Meddler.

Suddenly it was over and there was a new Doctor in the console room of the TARDIS, standing in ill-fitting clothes and uncomfortable boots, looking around, blinking with new eyes as new lungs breathed in oxygen after the painful rush of the regeneration. The Doctor gasped and took a few deep breaths, taking in the air into new lungs.

Staggering to the controls, the Doctor reached a hand underneath the console and drew out a mirror. After unfolding the mirror, the Doctor took a look at his new appearance. Looking back was a young woman with wavy dark hair framing a pale face and green eyes. The Doctor looked back at the reflection in disbelief before she smiled at her new appearance.

"Amazing," she grinned at her new body, amazed that she was not only a female but was younger than her previous selves when the TARDIS materialised. Momentarily startled by the sound as her post-regenerated mind began to settle, the Doctor checked the console over. Within moments she was checking the instruments to see what the environment was like. That was important, right? She always did that? The Doctor was sure that she did, and yet she couldn't help but feel that she'd once never truly bothered. In the end the Doctor decided to just shrug her shoulders, and worry about it later; by then the regeneration should be finished but for now, the Doctor decided to ignore it and get used to her new persona.

Once the checks were correct, the Doctor saw that nothing was wrong outside and she opened the doors and stepped out of her TARDIS. The TARDIS had arrived somewhere in London, but it was too dark for her to get an idea where she was. As the Doctor walked around the local area while making sure he was close to her TARDIS, he came upon a newspaper stand, and she studied it closely. She had gotten the date and the place from the readouts in the TARDIS, so she knew he was in 1969, but as she looked at the stand she knew more about what was happening.

The first moon landing was underway, but there was nothing elision the stand that gave him any additional hints about what was happening. The Doctor looked away, looking thoughtfully into space for a moment.

By now her post-regenerated state was cleared up, and by now the Doctor remembered his past.

She was a time meddler. She'd become one after Quences, the family patriarch, drove her insane continually in the hopes of turning her into his own little puppet, eligible to become the Lord President of the High Council of the Time Lords. Frequently the Doctor had taken refuge in the family library. The Doctor grimaced as she remembered her childhood. It was a constant struggle to escape the hell which was Quences' lessons. In the library, she had learnt a great deal, but among the books, presumably forgotten since it had covered in layers of dust. The Doctor would have missed it if she wasn't deliberately trying to read as many volumes as she could there to pass the time in the library. She remembered all of those days she had spent in the library, reading about adventurers like the Corsair and other Time Lords who had taken a look at what lay beyond the Transduction Barriers. Those stories of other worlds had amazed the Doctor and terrified her younger self because of the strangeness of other races but over time that terror disappeared when her younger self fully accepted the fact each of those races was just being themselves.

But then she had found a specific book which changed her life. The book was written by a Time Lord from the time of Rassilon. In the book things in the past where the Time Lords had a completely different philosophy and approach than they did in the present day.

The Time Lords meddled in history. Oh at first, they weren't subtle; the Doctor had the impression their approach was somewhat identical to that of the Monks own approach; visit a time period with a plan involving an event that was important and had important ramifications on history itself, and divert history from there. But the Time Lords had more than a single Mark IV TARDIS (Was the Monk's TARDIS a Mark IV? The Doctor was sure of it, but the post-regeneration mess was still there), they had their power, the Web of Time, and the knowledge of how to manipulate the web and mitigate the effects.

But then the Time Lords became subtle. They started Designing history, altering time in a slightly subtle manner, Designing the lives of people so then they would get involved and make the changes along the established timeline. Something the Doctor had never liked in his lives. She didn't like the thought of interfering with people's lives personally. But reading the book had inspired him and since this was long before he had entered the Academy, and had his brain filled with the views of his people, the Doctor had wondered what it was like to interfere with history. Not drastically since there were fixed events to avoid and what could not be changed, but there were moments where time could be rewritten.

When she had looked into the Untempered Schism, the Doctor had gone mad. But the idea of changing history had remained in the Doctor's mind because she saw herself changing history when she had looked into the Vortex. For a long time the Doctor had been at the Academy, and aside from that mess with Rallon and Millennia, she had done a good job, she felt. In the end, the Doctor had simply disappeared and walked away from the restrictive life on Gallifrey, but that had always been the Doctor's aim; to just leave Gallifrey and travel the universe, see the sights. Meddling in history here and there was only her hobby, but she knew what she was doing. The Doctor broke out of her thoughts when he heard the sound of an engine, and she turned around and spotted on the classic London red double-decker buses. Looking at the lights from the bus, the Doctor could see a small number of Londoners onboard, and judging from what they were doing which was going about their daily lives, she wondered if they knew what was going to happen.

And as she stood there, dressed in the former battered clothes of her previous incarnation, the Doctor decided she was going to stay.

Although the first manned moon landing was a fixed event in human history, the Doctor had no intention of playing games with it.

But she would stay in 1969 for the time being. She would recover from her regeneration, and who knows, perhaps something would turn up.

She had just sensed an opportunity. Actually, make that a number of opportunities...

Just the start, but what do you think?