Jasmine was pleased to hear the Doctor singing.

Not because it was particularly tuneful but because it signalled the end of half an hour spent wandering aimlessly around the Tardis' crazed, twisting labyrinth of identical corridors. She was getting to the point where she could still see roundels when she closed her eyes.

Following the sound, she made her way into a capacious chamber she had never seen before, at its centre a jutting hexagonal structure of steel surmounted by a crystal column that rose and fell like a heartbeat, blue-white light burning at its core. A square metal panel had been removed from the console at floor level, and the Doctor's legs were all that was visible as he cheerfully murmured his song:

Every year is the same,
And I feel it again,
I'm a loser, no chance to win,
Leaves start falling,
Come down is calling,
Loneliness starts sinking in,
But
...

"Hello, Jasmine." He broke off, and his hand emerged into view to wave his sonic screwdriver at her amiably. "Sleep well?"

"I got lost in the corridors," she said plaintively, pointing back at the door she had just come through.

"Did you?" For a few moments there was silence except for his continued tinkering. "I did tell you I was going to reset the internal configuration."

"You didn't tell me that meant I was going to get lost in the corridors."

"Oh. No, I suppose not."

He gripped the sides of the hatch and slid himself free of the console. He had taken his coat off to work but was still dressed up in a way of which Jasmine's beloved old Doctor would never have dreamed. His silky blood red shirt, gleaming silver tie pin and ornately embroidered black and gold waistcoat made him look exactly the kind of man her guardian and tutor had always warned her to avoid. His steady dark blue eyes inspected her with interest.

"Oh, you've picked something out at last. Good." He struggled up to his feet, dusting himself off, and took a closer look at her. "Very smart."

Jasmine shifted uncomfortably and looked down at her own outfit. The previous day, reflecting that her fine white dress was beyond help after their struggle with the Klavites, the Doctor had invited her to select whatever she wanted from his wardrobe which, to her astonishment, had been vast. But once she had eliminated everything that was either too short, too tight, too flimsy or all three she had been left with a very restricted range of options. Eventually she had ventured out in a pale blue trouser suit, the jacket a kind of tunic which she was able to button up fastidiously all the way to her throat.

"I don't know..."

The Doctor sighed.

"Jasmine, it completely covers you from wrist to neck to ankle."

This was true. It was hard to explain, but even though the trousers didn't actually show her legs they did admit to their existence. She was used to dresses in which, if you moved stiffly and evenly as you'd been taught, you could convey the illusion that you didn't have legs at all and were in fact rolling around on little wheels.

"Don't you have any proper dresses?" she asked.

The Doctor looked thoughtful as he went to retrieve his coat from the anachronistic antique hat stand in the corner.

"I used to have a formal Victorian type dress. But I think Sarah Jane may have swiped it. She certainly left with a lot more luggage than she had when she arrived."

"I don't like these shoes either," Jasmine persevered. "They were difficult to do up."

He peered over at them while shrugging on a long coat of vaguely military cut, jet black apart from a little gold braid about the cuffs and buttonholes.

"Trainers, good choice. What's the problem? I know you had a sheltered upbringing but I'm fairly sure you were introduced to the concept of shoelaces."

"Normal shoelaces. Not these big wide flat ones. They're strange."

The Doctor shook his head and knelt to replace the panel he had removed from the console.

"I'm sure you'll get used to them," he said, sounding bored with the discussion. "Anyway, they're very practical. You'll be glad of them next time you have to run away from something."

Jasmine's face registered alarm.

"I'm going to be running away from things?"

The Doctor straightened his lean frame to its full height, and linked his thumbs behind his back.

"I'm developing a theory."

"Oh no."

He ignored her and pressed on.

"In the overall fabric of spacetime, in which past and future are the same thing viewed from different perspectives, it's possible that significant events which result from the confluence of numerous disparate factors and whose effects or potential effects ripple out across the universal timelines, may give that time and place a certain cosmic weight, and therefore a distorting effect on the stuff of reality which causes an imprecisely programmed Tardis to gravitate towards them." He mulled this over for a moment and nodded approval of his own idea. "It would explain why there's always something going on wherever I happen to turn up."

Jasmine rolled her eyes skyward with a "tut" and changed the subject.

"So who's this Sarah James?"

The Doctor frowned, his train of thought broken, and looked at her resentfully.

"Who?" He spoke again before she could remind him what they had just been talking about. "Oh. Jane, not James. Long before your time. She travelled around with me for a while."

"Like I am now?"

He paused, and smiled faintly, his eyes becoming momentarily distant.

"In her own unique way, yes."

"So what happened to her?"

"Nothing," he said with a shrug. "She left."

"Why?"

"Oh..." He turned away and began a minute inspection of a line of circular glowing panels on the console. "They all leave me in the end."

Jasmine hesitated, but a moment later she was feeling far more uncomfortable about the uncharacteristic precision with which he was examining the controls.

"What's wrong with the machine anyway?" she asked. "Is it broken?"

He looked up and smiled.

"No, no. Well, not really. Um..." He rested his fingertips thoughtfully on the console top. "To be honest, after leaving it in one place for all those years I should really have spent a day or two checking the systems instead of just flicking the switch and setting off into the vortex like that. Seemed a nice dramatic gesture at the time."

At that instant the central column stopped dead and the light within dimmed to nothing like a snuffed candle.

"What's gone wrong?" asked Jasmine, eyeing the contraption warily. The Doctor checked a readout.

"Nothing. We've landed."