Somewhere, in another universe, not too different from one we know, there was a woman. There had been legends about her since nearly the dawn of time. The Lonely Goddess, some called her. The Oncoming Storm, said others. If asked, she simply told them to call her the Doctor. Most people would never know she existed. Others would meet her once and remember it forever. Some, if they were lucky, would even travel with her for a time.
She hadn't always looked the way she did at any given time. Once she'd had a scarf more than eighteen feet long, another time she always had a sprig of celery with her, and maybe some time she might have a fondness for bowties.
Once, she had traveled with a boy. Ross Tyler, she could hear herself saying, we have anywhere and anywhen in the universe. Where to next? She had worn leather when they met, and kept her hair cut short, and had been bitter and broken and so very lonely. They found another friend, an ex-Time Agent from the 51st century, who'd flirted with everyone they met. They'd left her behind, though, after something went wrong. She'd changed after that. Not so lonely anymore, with Ross and Jackie with her. Ross stayed, promised his forever to her, but he was gone now. Trapped in another world. She tried for so long to find her way to him, but it could end everything in every universe, or make it so reality had never happened at all. They said goodbye as she destroyed a sun, and that was the end of their story.
Except it wasn't, not quite.
Because one day, while escaping from a family who could find her anywhere and anywhen that ever was, an alarm went off, warning of a crack in the universe just a little to the left of last Monday.
She had a friend with her, Martin Jones. He was almost a doctor himself, but had come with her for a time. He would leave eventually. They all did, in the end.
The Doctor screamed again. To escape from the family of blood, who could find her anywhere and anywhen, she had changed herself. Changed every cell in her body. To escape, she'd become human.
So an alarm went off, but there was nobody to know what it meant. The ship, the TARDIS, was crashing as it landed itself, but with nobody now who knew how to fly it, there was nobody to avoid the crack. To protect itself and the people inside - the two humans inside- it slipped a second above the crack and into another world.
A world the Doctor knew.
No. A world the Doctor had known.
As the ship searched for a place to land, it discovered a mind it knew.
The Doctor hadn't lost all of her memories when she became human, though it was close. The TARDIS created a life for her, and gave her a reason to be where she was.
"Hello, I'm Doctor Jane Tyler. From Torchwood, back in England. They sent me over here, thought maybe you could use a bit of help with all these new meta-humans around. Is that what you're calling them? 'Meta-humans'? I mean, they're not really born with it or anything, are they, they'd said it was nanobots. Bit odd though, I mean, nanites like those shouldn't be around for a good century yet. You know, you look a bit familiar, do I know you?"